People Were Terrified of Tomatoes for 200 Years (Are You Sh!#ing Me?)

For 200 years, Europeans and early Americans were convinced tomatoes were deadly. They called them "poison apples" and wouldn't touch them. Turns out the tomato was innocent the entire time — and the real culprit is a lot more embarrassing.

In this episode of Are You Shitting Me?, host Brett breaks down the bizarre true history behind the tomato poisoning myth - and nobody ever stopped to ask why. Along the way, Italy built an entire cuisine around tomato sauce and pizza while everyone else treated the same fruit like a biological weapon.

It's a story about food history, class bias, and poisoning all colliding to frame one very innocent fruit for two centuries.

Grab a beer and find out: are you shitting me?

🍅 In this episode:

Why tomatoes were called "poison apples" in Europe and early America

The real reason wealthy tomato-eaters got sick (it wasn't the tomato)

and why poor communities ate tomatoes safely the whole time

New episodes of Are You Shitting Me? drop regularly — weird history, strange science, and "wait, that's actually true?" facts, one beer at a time.

🔗 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2SrYmUdiCM5PWOCNonDqIW

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Finland has 5.5 million people, 188,000 lakes, five months of darkness, January temperatures around 20°F... and somehow it's been ranked the happiest country on Earth for nine straight years running. Not Switzerland. Not Denmark. Finland.

In this episode of Are You Shitting Me?, host Brett digs into what's actually going on in Finland: a country with more saunas than cars (3.3 million saunas for 5.5 million people), lawmakers who conduct official government business in saunas, an education system that skips standardized testing until age 18 and still produces some of the highest-scoring students in the world, and a national concept called "sisu" — a gut-level, refuse-to-quit resilience that once held off a Soviet invasion force ten times Finland's size.

It's a deep dive into lakes, saunas, sisu, short school days, and why the happiest country on Earth might be doing almost everything the opposite of how everyone else does it.

Grab a beer and find out: are you shitting me?

🇫🇮 In this episode:

• Why Finland has been ranked the happiest country on Earth for 9 years straight
• The Finnish concept of "sisu" and how it held off a Soviet invasion
• Why Finland has more saunas than cars — and why lawmakers use them for business
• How Finland's low-testing, low-homework education system outperforms the world
• Where Santa Claus actually (officially) lives

New episodes of Are You Shitting Me? drop regularly — weird history, strange science, and "wait, that's actually true?" facts, one beer at a time.

🔗 Listen here: https://open.spotify.com/show/2SrYmUdiCM5PWOCNonDqIW

#AreYouShittingMe #Finland #HappiestCountry #Sisu #Sauna #FinlandFacts #WeirdFacts #DidYouKnow #TrueFacts #HistoryPodcast #ScienceFacts #TravelFacts

What do greed, bad business decisions, a terrible movie tie-in, and a New Mexico landfill have in common?

The Video Game Crash of 1983.

In this episode of Are You Sh!#ing Me?, Brett dives into one of the biggest business disasters in entertainment history. Atari was printing money, arcades were packed, and video games seemed unstoppable. Then the industry collapsed almost overnight.

Discover how a flood of low-quality games, too many competing consoles, and the infamous E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial video game helped wipe out nearly 97% of the North American gaming market. Learn why millions of unsold Atari cartridges ended up buried in the New Mexico desert and how Nintendo used the industry's biggest failure to build a gaming empire.

It's a story filled with corporate arrogance, rushed deadlines, spectacular mistakes, and one of the greatest comebacks in pop culture history.

Grab a beer and join Brett for another edition of Something I Learned While Avoiding Real Responsibilities.

Are you sh!#ing me? Nope. This one actually happened.

Cheers!

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