The Origin of Weird: The Cobra Effect

Welcome And The Weird Setup

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Oh, hey there.

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Oh, hey there.

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I'm Kate.

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I'm Bradley.

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And this is the Hysteria Feels, The Origin of Weird.

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Welcome.

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Yes, and welcome. How are you?

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I am well. How are you today?

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Doing pretty good.

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Excellent, excellent.

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So our origin of Weird today um takes place in the 1800s.

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Okay.

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Okay.

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19th century.

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Yes. And we're going to say that you're a British official who is stationed.

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Wait, wait. Um you're implying that I'm not?

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You are stationed in Delhi, India.

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Oh, I feel like I would die there with the heat.

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And you are actually in a stuffy office. You're sweating through your heavy wool uniform.

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Oh my God. You know me well enough. Could you imagine me in this time frame wearing the guard the garments they had to wear for their military dress? Like I think 99% of it was a fucking wool.

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Yeah.

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Because it was abundant and whatever. Yeah. And so on. That's

Delhi, Heat, And Cobra Panic

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stuff. Oh my god. I would just be dripping. I am glad I was born in the time of air conditioning.

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Yeah.

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Unfortunately, the house we bought, no air conditioning. My car, just decide not to have air conditioning. Fucking hell.

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So as a um a British official, you are trying your absolute best to run a massive empire.

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Well, I mean, clearly, look at me.

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But there is a massive blockade in your way.

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Is it the people of India?

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I mean, no, it's the Indian Cobra.

SPEAKER_00 1:59

Oh, why did I'm just gonna say this once. Fuck you. So if anyone most people don't know, I hate fucking snakes.

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So does uh Nathan.

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I think they're an abomination to this world.

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Um worse than spiders?

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Yeah. Spiders have legs, they walk around. I get it. They fucking just slither. Slither. I just I don't like snakes. I'm like Indiana Jones of the History Buffons world.

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I've referenced him later.

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Oh, there you go.

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Okay, so these Indian cobras are absolutely everywhere. They're in backyard gardens, they're hiding under your porches and basically turning everything into an Indiana Jones adventure.

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In India.

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In India. So for the British, it wasn't like dangerous or anything, but it was embarrassing. Why?

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Why was it embarrassing?

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Because they are trying to run claim on this country.

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Yeah.

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And they can't clear up the snakes, you know, in the yards, right? So for centuries, Delhi was like this grand, wealthy powerhouse.

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They should have called St. Patrick.

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Why?

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He got all out of Ireland.

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All the snakes?

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Yeah.

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Didn't he?

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Yeah.

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I don't know anything about that.

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There used to be a lakefront

British Rule And Why Delhi Matters

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brewery of beer called Snake Chaser, which came out during that time for St. Patrick's Day and all that. Cool. Anyways.

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So by the early 1800s, the empire had fractured, leaving a massive power vacuum. So seeing a business opportunity, a private, corporate, mega monopoly called the British East India Company came in with its own private army, defeated the local rulers, and turned this legendary emperor into like a powerless puppet. So following the massive bloody Indian rebellion in 1857, the British government stepped in, kicked the corporation out, and took direct colonial control of the country.

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Gotcha. So interesting.

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Even though their official capital was far away in Calcutta, the British knew that in the um minds of the people, Delhi controlled India.

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Oh really?

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So they set up shop in the historic city, determined to project basically Brit British order. Sure. Only to find that they were infested with cobras.

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And how poisonous were these cobras?

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You know, I didn't look into the poison. Let me look into it now.

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Are you? Because I assume that the majority of um cobras are poisonous.

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I already knew that answer, too. They're poisonous. Well I already knew that answer. It's written in my freaking notes that I read three hours ago.

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Okay. Carry on.

The Cobra Bounty Plan

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So the government decided that they needed a fix, obviously.

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Yeah.

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Instead of sending out an army or hiring a ton of full-time snake hunters, they decided to let the free market handle it. They put a bounty on on cobras.

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Cobra heads like bring bring in the severed head of a cobra. You get basically you get a nickel.

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Yeah, bring in a dead five pence. Yeah, bring in a dead cobra cob cobra, prove that you got rid of the threat, and you'll walk away with some money.

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Oh, okay.

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So on paper, it sounded like a win-win. The city gets safer, locals make some extra money, and everyone is happy. So what could possibly go wrong?

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I'm guessing lots of things.

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For the few first few weeks, the plan was Decent. Yeah, it was pretty perfect.

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Pretty perfect.

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People started hunting. Um, dead snakes were piling up at government offices, and officials were happily handing out cash, thinking they were geniuses, but they forgot one basic rule of human behavior. When you offer a cash reward for a specific metric, yeah, people stop caring about the actual goal and start figuring out how to gain the system.

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Yeah. So what did they do to trick try to trick the system here?

Breeding Cobras For Profit

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Well, a few clever locals looked at the bounty um program and they did a little math. Going out into the actual jungle to hunt wild cobras was dangerous and took forever.

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Yeah.

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But what if they didn't have to hunt them after all? What if you bred them?

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Oh fuck.

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They realized that the cash bounty the British were paying for one dead cobra was higher than the actual cost of feeding and raising a cobra from an egg.

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So that they would get profit.

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Almost overnight, this backyard industry was born.

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Oh my god, so gross.

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People across Delhi stopped hunting wild snakes and started building makeshift cobra farms in their basements and backyards.

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That is so gross.

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They were incubating eggs and raising thousands of babies just long enough to turn them in for a paycheck.

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So, was there a rule on the age or anything? Or it's just a snake?

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Nope, a snake.

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A cobra, whatever.

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Yeah.

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You turn it in, you get paid. It's not like, well, that's just a six-month-old one.

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No. So in total, from the moment two mature snakes mate, because they have to be a certain mature maturity.

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Of course.

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Um, to the day that the babies hatch, it takes about three to three point five months.

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Oh, that long.

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I don't think that's long at all.

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Well, I guess if you start staggering them, it's like, all right, we got ten being born this month, ten being born next month. Yeah. Do you have an amount that they were paid? No. That sucks.

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So months go by and the British Treasury starts looking at the numbers. The Cobra Bounty Fund isn't going down. It's skyrocketing. So they're writing massive checks weeks after week after week. And at first the bureaucrats were thrilled, like, we're geniuses.

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This is we're getting shit done.

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And but eventually they were they've noticed that they were pilling, paying to kill tens of thousands of cobras, but the streets were still completely crawling with them.

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That's so gross.

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So finally, an official decided to check out what was happening on the ground. He walked away from his stuffy office and he couldn't believe his eyes. There were no brave hunters tracking these beasts in the wild.

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Yeah.

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There were just rows and rows of clay pots packed with thousands of intentionally bred copras. Gross. The government finally realized that they weren't getting rid of the snakes. They were funding them.

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Yeah,

Bounty Ends And Snakes Released

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that's so weird.

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So panicked and totally embarrassed, the government did exactly what you would expect them to do. Stop it. They shut the whole operation down immediately. Yep. They announced that effective today, they would no longer pay a single cent for a dead cobra. The officials probably thought that was the end of it.

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No.

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But they forgot to think about what happens to an industry when its only customer disappears.

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Yeah, because they're just gonna let them out into the wild because they don't want them anymore.

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All over the city, cobra be uh breeders looked at their thousands of snakes. They weren't a gold mine anymore. They were just dangerous and a liability and expensive because you're still raising them.

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Why wouldn't you kill them though? Why would you just let them go?

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Well, they didn't just sit there and take the financial hit. They did the easiest and cheapest thing that they could think of. They opened the cages, tipped over the pots, and let them all go. Yep. So suddenly thousands of perfectly healthy uh captive bred cobras flooded directly into the streets and neighborhoods of Delhi.

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That's so gross. I'm just picturing like the ground moving. Oh gross. It's just like in the Indiana Jones and Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they're looking

Defining The Cobra Effect

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down into the temple where they find the Ark, and it's like the ground's moving. It's like fucking gross.

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So when the dust settled, the whole bounty program was an absolute disaster. Well, yeah. I mean the government spent a fortune, and the end result was a cobra population that was way bigger and more dangerous than when they first started. The whole mess is why economists and policymakers still use the term the Cobra effect. It's what happens when your solution to a problem accidentally makes that exact problem way worse because of bad incentives. So it's like when a company rewards software engineers based on how many bugs they fix. So the engineers start secretly writing glitchy code just so they can fix it later for a bonus.

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Right, no, for sure.

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Yeah. So the British didn't fail because they didn't try or didn't have the money they failed because they assumed a complex problem could be solved with a cash reward.

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Nope.

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So at the end of the day, people were still incredibly c clever. It gave them an incentive. They've always found the easiest way to

Modern Cheating And Political Anger

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get paid, even if if it means breeding a house full of venomous snakes.

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See, that's the thing. People are gonna always cheat the system. They are. I mean, look at all the fraud that they're finding within our country's government. I mean, and it's not even people who should be here, potentially. So that's weird. Or like all the politicians who insider trade, but that's okay. Yeah, like that doesn't make any fucking sense to me.

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They sent Martha Stewart to jail for that.

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Yeah. So why don't they get to go? Because they're protected, because they're in the government. It's so dumb. It's like if I if I got an insider tip and one did that and they found out, I'd be in prison.

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Yeah.

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But they're cool, they just get rich.

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Yep.

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You know, they make a small salary, which is way more than most of us make, and yet they uh become millionaires. So fuck off. And it's not just one side, it's both sides. No, it's both sides.

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But so yeah, that's the Cobra effect. Isn't that weird?

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That's fucking weird and gross.

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And don't you want to watch Indiana Jones now? Or watch how about the new Anaconda movie with Jack Black?

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I

Snake Movies And Pop Culture

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did did you watch that?

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I did.

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What did you think of it? I forgot that. I I know you said you watched it, but I forgot I don't remember if I asked you what you thought of it.

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I would give it a B plus. Oh, okay.

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I mean, I like Jack Black and Paul Rudd, so yeah, it's interesting.

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There was one very much a laugh out loud moment, and the rest were just kind of kind of chucklewardly, like but yeah, I also like Jack Black and Paul Rudd. Yeah, they're those those two are great. They bring back a couple of the original actors from the first Anaconda.

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Right. Because isn't the premise they were um they got the rights to it or something like that, right? Yeah. Um, no, I mean, yeah, I want to see that someday, but fucking snakes are gross.

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They are. I've never seen snakes on a plane either.

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Um yeah, we'll leave that alone. Gross. Sick and tired of these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking plane. Welp.

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I suppose.

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All right, buffoons. That's it for today's episode.

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Buckle up because we've

Where To Find Us Next

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got another historical adventure waiting for you next time. Feeling hungry for more buffoonery? Or maybe you have a burning question or a wild historical theory for us to explore?

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Hit us up on social media. We're History Buffoons Podcast on YouTube, X, Instagram, and Facebook. You can also email us at history buffoonspodcast at gmail.com. We are Bradley and Kate, music by Corey Akers.

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