Welcome to Interesting If True, the podcast that Chex all the boxes! @11:30 I'm your host this week, Aaron, and with me are: I'm Shea, and this week I learned that if you bump into someone you haven’t seen in 7 or more years, every cell has been replaced and they are someone new. You don’t have to say hello. Chex Shredded Ralston off your list So. Korn flakes were made to stop you jerking off. Sleepy Time tea was made by eugenicists. And Chex Mix, it turns out, was created by a racist health food nutter who walked like a centaur. Webster Edgerly was a health food nut before, health, food, and nuts were really understood, much less used together. He was a bigoted, would-be actor who moved to Hopewell in the late 1800s to create a utopian society based on his own understanding of hygiene, eugenics, and magnets. Edgerly first arrived in New Jersey. The year was 1898 and had arrived to save the world from the horrors of being a fat, gross, minority. Perhaps apropos then that he would — as an amateur actor — first appear on stage as Christopher Columbus. A role which he insisted on playing while walking only on the balls of his feet. The theater people assumed it was because he was an ass. He said it was because keeping all your weight on your toes would avoid “leakage of vital forces.” But in reality, it was because he was an ass. Fortunately, he wasn’t a full-time actor. That was just a hobby. His real passion lay in writing under the pen name Edmund Shaftesbury. He wrote 82 pseudoscientific, and often overtly racist and horrible, advice books on life, sex, and one's ability to become Magento! Also a bunch of “the kids these days,” and “damn modernity” stuff that would have made the Luddites blush. Also, being a cult leader. That was probably the one that paid the best. Cause if you’re the cult’s leader, you get all the money and everyone else gets whatever you say they do. It’s a pretty solid system if you’re at the top — I imagine he got that advice from long-time patron and fan, Queen Victoria. She’s also probably where he got his advice on sex: once every eight days. The end. Or vice versa. There’s not a lot of info on how freaky deeky the Queen of England is. He also had this thing where you’re not supposed to walk in straight lines. Because of demons or some other stupid, Jersey-water induced, nonsense. Upon arrival in Jersey, he created The Ralston Health Club. Which was less of a destination as it is a mindset. His mindset. He named it Ralston by using the letters of his mother’s name, Rhoda Lucinda Stone, and later retrofitted it to become an acronym for Regime, Activity, Light, Strength, Temperation, Oxygen, and Nature—all things Edgerly valued. While the official motto of the Ralston Club was "Perfect Health," Edgerly said its purpose was "To Establish a New Race." So… welcome, again, to your snack eugenics moment. So if you wanted to join the nearly million people who fell down this idiots’ well, you’ll want to read his advice books like Artistic Deep Breathing or Sexual Magnetism. Written under the name Edmund Shaftenbury, the books offered all his fantastic wisdom, like, if you’re a young man you should bang GILFs. And if you’re an old man, like he is, you should marry women at least 20 years your junior, as he did. He also wrote advice for improving your day-to-day life, like spinning a marble around your head to make yourself more magnetic. I guess at this point I should say that “magnetism” was his pet term for life...
