No Such Thing As Lithuanian Soap Ornaments

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Portuguese politics, Indian indexing and Japanese johns. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:12Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tushinsky and Andrew Hunter-Murray. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is James.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  Okay, my fact this week is that Antonio Salazar was deposed as dictator of Portugal in 1968. But until his death, two years later, everyone tricked him into thinking he was still leader.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  This is unbelievable. I can't believe we've never read about it before. It's the greatest story ever.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  It's incredible. It's basically the Truman Show.

• 1:00Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  If Truman was a dictator.

• 1:03Dan Schreiber?

  And that's the problem. It's the high stakes of his power and position. You know, I could imagine that if maybe for the last 10 years, you guys have been recording extra episodes with me and I'm not really on this show anymore and I've just got a feed that I believe that I'm on.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  You know what? The other day I was in, I've mentioned this farmer's market a few times now on the show, but I was in a farmer's market and we were ready to leave, me and my wife, my daughter. And I said, oh, I'll go and get my daughter's scooter. So I went to get it. And then when I came back, my daughter and my wife weren't there anymore. And they'd actually gone to buy some flowers, but for a moment I thought, what if I've imagined having a wife and a daughter? And I'm just a weird guy who wanders around farmer's markets with a scooter.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  Do you never have that?

• 1:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have that a lot. Yes. I've lost people and thought my whole family don't exist, actually. I'm just an orphan.

• 1:52Dan Schreiber?

  I'm still trying to work out how I'm not married to your wife and have your daughter.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  You're actually the dictator of Portugal at the moment.

• 1:59Dan Schreiber?

  I had barely heard of Salazar. I mean, I just, I wasn't very well versed in Portuguese history. I knew that the whole Iberian Peninsula, I knew that Spain had had Franco, but Salazar was a bit of a close book to me.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. So he was in charge for a long time and a lot of people thought he was a really terrible dictator. A lot of people thought, as far as dictators are concerned, he wasn't that bad.

• 2:21Speaker 02

  Definitely in the dictator stakes, I would say. He's almost top.

• 2:24Dan Schreiber?

  Here comes Anna.

• 2:25Speaker 02

  Top. Name me a better one.

• 2:27Dan Schreiber?

  Name a dictator you won't go into bat for. That's all I'm saying.

• 2:31Speaker 01

  When the Telegraph ran his obituary, they called him a benevolent autocrat. In fact, he himself said that he ruled with as much authority as necessary and as much liberty as possible. But he did have secret police.

• 2:44Dan Schreiber?

  Lots of denunciations and the paramilitary group for 7 to 14 year olds, all of this. So it was, but it wasn't, he sort of kept a bit clear of Hitler and Mussolini during that period.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  He was technically neutral during the war, but he let the British use the Azores, or the Allies, I should say, use the Azores, which were Portuguese. So that was kind of on our side. But really, when you read about it, it tended to be that him and the rest of the Portuguese just kind of backed whoever was winning at the time. And there was ambassadors in Portugal from Germany and Britain. And whenever Germany was doing quite well in the war, a lot of Portuguese politicians would turn up to their garden parties. And then when Britain were doing well, they'd go to their garden parties and you could kind of gauge who was doing well in the war by that.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  Really?

• 3:32Speaker 01

  Because that's like roughly first three years, last three years is how that divides.

• 3:36Speaker 02

  And who did the best garden parties?

• 3:39Dan Schreiber?

  But that's, I guess that's why you don't know him, Andy, is because he wasn't this ostentatious character who we would see on the news, who you could almost talk about on this podcast so easily by having crazy amounts of money thrown around for his.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  He didn't rename Portugal Salazaria or he didn't say Thursday is now called Antonio or whatever.

• 3:56Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  And he wasn't corrupt, but can we talk about the fact that he faked his own, his own death was unfaked, the opposite of that?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Very well put, Anna.

• 4:07Speaker 01

  So he had an accident and he went into a coma and we don't know exactly what happened with the accident. It could be that he fell off a chair, which is what most people say. Some people say that he fell in the bath. And another version is he was trying to sit down to let the caropitus treat his feet when he slipped off the chair and banged his head. But whatever happened, he went into a coma. And everyone that expects that he's probably not going to come out of the coma. And so they bring in a new leader and then like the best sitcom scenario you've ever heard, he suddenly recovers complete lucidity. And so then everyone's like, well, what are we going to do? Because he thinks he's leader. We can't really bring him back. We didn't, we were kind of, we think he's run his course a little bit, actually.

• 4:49Dan Schreiber?

  We've told everyone he's dead.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  And so what happened was they kept him in his house, kind of almost under house arrest. And people would go and visit him from his cabinet and say, what shall we do, sir? And he'd tell them and they'd just ignore him. So good.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  It's crazy. Did you read about the newspaper? They printed a fake version of the newspaper every day for him, which had removed all of the references to his successor. And I'm obsessed with the newspaper bit because I'm just wondering how much of it was fake? Like, did they do a fake crossword every day where it was, you know, current dictator of Portugal, you, sir, or whatever?

• 5:24Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, you'd really have to scan that nothing made it through.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, horoscopes. I mean, all of it. So they, you know, every edition removed references to Caetano, who was the new one. And he just thought he was still in charge for two years, was it, until he died?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  And they, and it's quite confusing as to exactly why they did it, rather than telling the truth. Because he wasn't totally mad, but this is another weird thing is that the global press knew about it. Like everyone knew this was happening. So Time Magazine wrote an article in 1969, which was saying the president of Portugal, who was a different person, mostly nominal thing. The president arrived at one point in Salazar's offices and said he was going to break the news to him. This is according to Donna Maria, who was his housekeeper who looked after him. So the president came and was like, I'm going to tell him, I have to tell him. And he went in with the firm intention of telling the truth, but he just couldn't find the words.

• 6:12Dan Schreiber?

  You don't want to be the one.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  He don't want to be the bad guy. Yeah.

• 6:15Speaker 03

  And you think you're delusional and have you arrested or something?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  You can have whoever you want's arrested because then as soon as you walk out of the room, you're not arrested anymore.

• 6:25Dan Schreiber?

  Well, then that is actually really fun, just having him like go like, you're going to die by puppies or something. And they bring the puppies in and they show you and you're scared and you're playing along. And then you all walk out and high five each other going.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  He bought it. He bought it.

• 6:38Dan Schreiber?

  I think it's all down to his housekeeper, Donna Maria. She was the one who just basically became in charge of him, therefore in charge of consulting with every major military person who came in, making sure the newspapers didn't get to him. It was her world to look after. It's extraordinary.

• 6:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was a fascinating character, wasn't she? Because she was his housekeeper for 50 years. And she started out completely literate peasant. And by the end, she taught herself to read so well that she managed all of his finances. She managed his correspondence, all the staff, things like that. And she was his confidant. He never married. He seemed like kind of a lonely person. There was a quote from him, which was something like, I think it was Caetano actually who took over from him, who had a meeting with him once and referred to him as a friend in the chat. And he said.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  This sounds very familiar, Andy. Colleague, I hope you know.

• 7:30Speaker 02

  But she'll really going to emphasise with this. So Salazar said angrily, friendship is completely irrelevant to this conversation. And then he paused and sadly said, I can't have friends. I am nobody's friend. So this was really his.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  I'm coming around to this guy.

• 7:46Dan Schreiber?

  That is weird, isn't it?

• 7:48Speaker 01

  The thing about no relationships, we think they probably did have one or two relationships, but the state media liked to put him as if he was like this celibate monk-like.

• 7:57Dan Schreiber?

  This is such classic dictator stuff, isn't it? I mean, Hitler was the same thing. Eva Braun was not announced because it was like, oh no, Hitler's sort of given himself up to the German people. He's married to the nation, all this. It's always the way with dictators. They're always boffing on the side.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  I don't think he was boffing that. I think he was too boring to boff.

• 8:12Dan Schreiber?

  Really? He definitely boffed with his biographer. There was a married woman who came over. But yeah, yeah, she wrote a book about him and that's one of the only instances where they said that absolutely was the case, that they had a boss time.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  That's, I'm glad that you specified that one because I did read a lot by his biographer, Tom Gallagher, who's a middle-aged Scottish man. Golly, no wonder we were so positive about him.

• 8:34Dan Schreiber?

  Him coming to power is very interesting because he did the classic thing of, he had a position in the government and then he resigned in high dungeon over something. And everyone was like, oh no, Salazar, come back. You're too great. We miss you. You know, it's very clever. So he'd been in the, he'd been a minister of finance and then three years later he was prime minister.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they kind of brought him in from nowhere, didn't they? He was just like, he worked in a university as like a finance lecturer or something. And then there was a big sort of coup d'etat and they're like, well, we need a finance guy. And he'd obviously been involved a little bit, but they were like, let's bring him in. So he'd never been a politician until then.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, quite rare you get lecturers becoming dictators. I don't know.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:12Speaker 01

  Well, they're usually dentists and stuff.

• 9:14Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, it's always incredibly boring.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Who's it? Bernie Macamidoff?

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Bernie Macamidoff. And Assad was an optometrist, wasn't he?

• 9:22Dan Schreiber?

  Wasn't an optician if it's an optometrist.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  So sorry. I didn't mean to insult him.

• 9:26Dan Schreiber?

  Your head's coming off.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  He was, by all accounts, extremely smart. And I think everyone says of him, whether you're...

• 9:38Speaker 03

  And by Anna's account, he was handsome, dreamy.

• 9:41Speaker 01

  He had lovely eyes.

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Oh, dreamy Salazar.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  I do some boffin. I am not saying I am a fan. I'm saying that all people, whether they're pro or against that, he wasn't really into the crazed power. He didn't have the ego. He didn't want all these big statues about him. He didn't want loads of biographies. He didn't like speaking in public. He was like a reluctant dictator who was sort of austere and was like, oh, God, everyone else is too stupid to run this country, so I will. Which is weird because he didn't run it particularly well, given the state it was in.

• 10:11Dan Schreiber?

  I think something more was going on with him because it wasn't just that stuff. It was the way he led his day to day life. So he paid for his own stuff, like his meals and stuff. He obviously did that. When he came back from hospital, the suitcase that came back was the same suitcase that 60 years ago he had as a student as he went into university. He hadn't updated his suitcases.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was insanely frugal.

• 10:31Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, exactly. It's just something interesting going on when you've got a dictator who lives like he's almost a hermit.

• 10:36Speaker 01

  Apparently he didn't turn his heating on in the winter. I mean, he's in Portugal, so that helps. He used to like work with a rug around him and then put his overcoat over the rug to keep warm. But again, like a lot of these stories, I do think they come through the window of state media. So him being very frugal when the country has not got much money and you need your people to be frugal. Obviously, it's a very convenient story to tell.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  Although I believe he didn't have enough money to pay, almost to pay for his funeral at the end because he was so, you know. He was a dickhead. I just want to clarify. Had a secret police chased after.

• 11:11Speaker 03

  Absolutely stitched up our next Portugal tour, Anna. Can I just say?

• 11:14Speaker 01

  I think he's still thought of quite fondly in Portugal, I think, actually. Because he was voted the greatest Portuguese person in 2007.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Do you remember they did this thing where every country did the 100 greatest Britons?

• 11:26Dan Schreiber?

  I remember that 100 Britons one. King Arthur was voted as one of the greatest Britons.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, but wasn't it Isambro Kingdom Brunel who won it?

• 11:35Speaker 03

  Churchill won.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Oh, did he?

• 11:37Dan Schreiber?

  Brunel was in the top 10, I think. Yeah, they made, I think, a separate hour long documentary about each of the top 10 candidates before the final vote. It was a really big thing. Yeah, it's often just who was in charge during the war is.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Well, there is a lot of that. I think the Salazar one, he won 41% of the vote. But there was a separate poll done around that time that found that he only got 11% of the vote with one poll and 6.6% of the vote with another poll. So a few polls done. And so what it looks like is it was a bit, it was telephone voting. So it looks like people did a lot of phone calls, maybe. I'm not saying it was rigged like so much as people using up a lot of phone credit.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Eurovision style.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  I think there might have been a bit of that.

• 12:18Dan Schreiber?

  You say Eurovision? That's so bizarre because of course the Portuguese autocracy eventually collapsed. And the signal for the revolution to begin was that year's Eurovision song. Was it? I think it was the Carnation Revolution. It was in 1974. You know, this guy, Caetano, had been in charge for a few years, who took over from Salazar. And they wanted to, the various army officers were saying, look, this is ridiculous. There were lots of colonial wars which Portugal was fighting. You know, they were fighting resistance movements in their African or maybe their South American territories. So there was a big thing saying that lots of people are dying. Can we just stop this? This is crazy. So anyway, the signal to begin was a song. What was it called? A Depoio do Adeus? I'm sure I've pronounced that wrong, but that's what Portuguese opposition figures picked.

• 13:01Dan Schreiber?

  And two weeks before it had been the Eurovision song and it had done really badly. It got almost null point.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  I think that's, that was necessary that it did really badly because you had to hear it on the radio and know it was time to attack. But if it was Waterloo and it was on the radio every 10 minutes, then what are you going to do?

• 13:18Dan Schreiber?

  Very good point.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Wait, so did everyone have their Walkmans in one hand and their swords in the other? How's that working?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  Well, I guess it's national radio, right? Not many radio stations. It's not like Spotify where you can play whatever you want. In those days, it was like pretty limited what you would play on the radio.

• 13:34Speaker 03

  Oh, sorry, it's just an advert. Hang on, I'll find out if we're doing the revolution in 30 seconds. I'm going to do two adverts. I should have got premium.

• 13:40Dan Schreiber?

  You've got to get the latest Spotify coup list. There's another time that he undied, using your very nicely chosen words, Anna, which was, there was a bomb that should have killed him. Did you read about this?

• 13:51Speaker 02

  No.

• 13:52Dan Schreiber?

  So he was a guy who did the same thing at the same time on Sundays, which was he would drive into his car park spot and go to his local church to do mass. And it was always the same routine. So if you wanted to kill him, it was right there for the taking and someone did take this chance. It was a group of anarchist militants and they buried a bomb underneath where he was parking his car. And the bomb successfully went off, but because of the different sewers that were down there where they'd placed this bomb, by a matter of centimeters, it meant the explosion went down the wrong funnel.

• 14:21Speaker 01

  But the priest was on the toilet at the time and the water shot up his anus.

• 14:34Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the lead singer of the Motown group, The Four Tops, was once put into a straitjacket by doctors because he was thought to be delusional after telling them that he was the lead singer of The Four Tops. This was Alexander Morris, who was in hospital because he was having difficulty breathing. He had chest pains and he informed a nurse and a security guard that he was a member of The Four Tops. And for some reason this raised an alarm and they thought this guy's delusional. We need to get him looked at immediately. So they put him in a straitjacket. He is complaining the whole time going, I promise I am.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  Well, that's what you would say, isn't it? If you were the leader of The Four Tops.

• 15:13Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Also, I presume that it's just they had him put in the straitjacket. It's a bit boastful, isn't it? Just saying, you know, I'm the lead singer of The Four Tops. Did you know? It's not relevant to your medical condition, unless you've got a gig to get to, I suppose.

• 15:24Speaker 02

  Do you think they did it for arrogance? God, can they do that? They could put you away for being cocky.

• 15:28Speaker 03

  I don't know.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Probably they didn't do that in fact because actually it was quite a serious thing and he sued.

• 15:33Dan Schreiber?

  He did sue and he, the reason he said it was he had security concerns. So he thought stalking fans were nearby that could get to him in this vulnerable state. So he eventually had to show them a YouTube video of him singing. And then the nurse was like, oh, God, it is him.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Oh, so this was recently then?

• 15:46Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:47Speaker 03

  I assume this was in the 70s or something.

• 15:48Dan Schreiber?

  No, this is in 2024, I think it happened.

• 15:50Speaker 01

  I think his wife turned up, right? And then it was his wife who said, look, this is him at the Grammys.

• 15:55Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:56Dan Schreiber?

  And he did sue and he sued for a good amount, something in the tens of thousands, which was much better than what they originally gave him, which was a $25 gift card to a local superstore. They thought that would deal with it.

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Sorry, just to say, the case has been dismissed with prejudice in 2025. We don't know exactly what that means because it wasn't in the press. I haven't found in the press anything that says what happened, but I found this in the court records. I think it probably means as they settled, but it might not mean that.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  What's dismissed with prejudice? Sounds like we're dismissing it, but it is because we have prejudice against this kind of person.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  I think he was, I think he was saying that the racial profiling at the hospital was a problem. And that's part of the reason he was put into the straitjacket.

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to confirm, with prejudice means that he can't re-sue them for the same thing. That means that the case is closed.

• 16:45Speaker 02

  Prejudged.

• 16:46Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. But there might be a reason why they thought that he was telling a lie, Alexander Morris. And that is because The Four Tops is one of those groups where they had four original members that were the same for a very long time. And then they swapped in and out.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  It's sugar babes.

• 17:00Dan Schreiber?

  Deaths and so on. Yeah, and it's now a sort of travelling Motown band that has links to the original band, but it's now just got random members. So he, he took a stint as the lead singer, but if you missed that seven year period or however long it was, you wouldn't know it was him.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  So Motown?

• 17:17Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Which is a beloved music. Is it a genre? No, it's a label, isn't it? Not a genre.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  It's a label, yeah.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  I feel like it's a label that became a genre, unlike anything else.

• 17:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, to an extent it did. It sort of dominated a territory for a very long time.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  But then I think if you played something that was, sounds like Motown, but wasn't technically Motown, you'd get people writing to you saying, oh, that's technically not Motown. That was Tamla or something.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Interesting, yes. I think you're right. But the main figure in the Motown label was Berry Gordy.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  He lived in Detroit. He had been all sorts of things. He was still quite young when he founded the label. He'd been a boxer and he'd been a soldier and he'd had a jazz shop, which had failed. So he took a good job at a car factory.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  But all the time he wanted to be a songwriter and he was by all accounts a pretty good songwriter, but much better at knowing what wouldn't, wouldn't be a hit.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:08Speaker 03

  And so then he founded this label.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  The thing about him working in the car factory is important because for two reasons. Number one, it was in Detroit, which is known as Mototown, and that's where Motown comes from. But secondly, he took the idea of the production line, which he got from the car factory and then put that into making records. So it was like, you do this, you do that, you do this, you do that. Eventually we get a record and we do that a million different times and we're going to be millionaires. And it worked.

• 18:36Speaker 02

  It did and I loved his analogy, which was that just like in his car factory where he worked, the body of a car enters at the start. And then it goes through all these processes on the production line and it emerges a full brilliant car. You get a nobody from off the streets who enters at the start and then you put it, put them through his music factory. And then they come out a huge star with like in-house producers, writers, like all the funding, the studios. It was Simon Cowell.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  He got some pushback. He said when he was interviewed about it about 10 years ago, he said, my family said, that's stupid. Those are cars. You can't do that with human beings. And he said, well, it's the same thing. He's still alive, Berry Gordy.

• 19:15Dan Schreiber?

  He is still alive.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  96.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, incredible.

• 19:17Dan Schreiber?

  And it's sort of, it's quite interesting, like, because it is a bit different to Simon Cowell in that the people who became the stars. So you had The Temptations, you had Stevie Wonder when he was a kid, you had Marvin.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Gay and they all used to perform on each other's albums in various different roles. So you'll find Marvin Gaye as the drummer on someone else's hit song. And they used to tour together as well, slightly to protect each other. So the four tops in the mid 60s went on tour with The Temptations. And this is when, if you were going around, there were a lot of white supremacists who really didn't want you performing. So they all carried guns on them. What? Yeah, yeah, purely for protection because they, they were getting chased out of towns and they were getting shot at. So when The Temptations were on stage, the four tops would be standing in front, looking out for anyone trying to jump the stage. And then when they got off and performed, The Temptations would act as the security line on them as well. You can't just fire into a crowd of audience. Absolutely. And this is.

• 20:12Speaker 03

  But you are allowed to carry guns in America. So it's just, they were carrying guns. Didn't Elvis do this? Didn't Elvis have an ankle gun? Supposedly in case anyone tried to fire him, he thought, well, I can fire back.

• 20:22Speaker 01

  How his lower half was wiggling all the time.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  Maybe that's why, maybe the gun was going off all the time and he was just dancing around.

• 20:30Speaker 01

  The four tops would, they would record, you know, 20 different songs in a day that were all written by different people. And then loads of other artists would all sing the same song as well. And then Berry Gordy's team would say, well, this version by these people is the best one, so we're going to use that one. And they would do it in that way. So, um, the, the most famous song, which is Reach Out, I'll Be There. They didn't really want it to be released because it was a bit sort of outre for them. It was like, he's shouting quite a lot in it, the lead singer, and it's just, it's a bit weird. It's a bit different from the other stuff they had. And they were like, yeah, we don't really think you should put this out as a single, but Berry Gordy's like, no, trust me, people are going to love this. And sure enough, they did. And it was absolutely massive.

• 21:11Speaker 01

  But actually Berry Gordy wasn't the main person eventually who had that big ear for a hit. There was someone called Billie Jean Brown and she was, um, assistant to Berry Gordy's sister. And she really knew what was good and she would be the one who would pick them out.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. She sounds like she was a real dragon. Berry set up this whole quality control department and she headed it. And she would have a meeting every week, nine AM sharp. And Smokey Robinson, like greatest Motown writer ever, some people would say, said that like even he, if he arrived at nine oh one, the doors shut. And she's like, come back next week with your songs for me.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  Um, Billie Jean, what was her name, Billie Jean?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Uh, Billie Jean Brown.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  She wasn't by any chance Billie Jean, was she? Of the song Billie Jean?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Uh, I don't know if she was or wasn't, but I don't think so.

• 21:53Speaker 03

  So Michael Jackson, um, was with Motown for a bit? Yeah, with Jackson 5. He started there. Right. Did you guys find, um, or traverse the website Motown Junkies in the course of your research?

• 22:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 22:02Speaker 03

  Oh my God. This is incredible. It's a website. Motown Junkies, an unofficial guide to every Motown single ever released. And it's one guy who is reviewing every A-side and B-side in chronological order that Motown ever released. And it's so good. So I just wanted to tell you a line from the website. New reviews appear every couple of days. Think of it as an unauthorized track by track companion to the magnificent, the complete Motown singles, CD box sets and beyond with marks out of 10. I'm not Paul Nixon.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  I'm being a party. You know what? Until then I didn't think he was. And now of all the people in the world who I think might be Paul Nixon, he's number one on my list.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  That's all I'm going to take away from this. Oh yeah, the Motown junkie guy, Paul Nixon.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Paul Nixon is a music journalist and this, the, the guy who owns Motown Junkies has the username Nixon, but it's not Paul Nixon.

• 23:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  I just sort of make that so clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay.

• 23:05Speaker 02

  The lady doth protest.

• 23:07Speaker 03

  Um, but anyway, there's just a list of amazing band names and song names. The Chuckalucks, The Headliners, who tragically failed to attract an audience and didn't last at all. Oh, really? Yeah. Shorty Long, have a guess for why he got his name?

• 23:19Speaker 01

  He was a medium height.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  He was five one.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  So what was long, whoa, what was long about him?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Just his surname.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  Which ironically is quite short.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Diana Ross, big deal, Supremes.

• 23:37Speaker 03

  Huge deal.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  She had a son who she called Ross.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  Ross Ross?

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Ross Ross.

• 23:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  And I believe he actually, weirdly, all her other children had the surname Ross, but he doesn't seem to have the surname Ross. Maybe that's why.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Berry Gordy had children called Berry, Terry, Kerry and Sherry.

• 23:53Speaker 03

  Stop.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  The audacity. No Mary, the obvious opener.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Well, they all end in E double R Y. So I guess you could save money somehow. Like when you're, when you're putting the names in there and school jumpers, you only have to change one of the letters.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  That is so good.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Or the letters on the door of their bedroom.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  So he had eight kids in all, Berry Gordy, uh, and they all worked in the music industry in some way. Uh, his eldest child Hazel married Jermaine Jackson. And another child Kennedy, who's known as Rockwell, sang Somebody's Watching Me. You know, that one that's got Michael Jackson in the background, I think.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Uh, and his youngest child Stefan is known as Redfoo and was the co-founder of LMFAO.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  Who did Party Rock Anthem and I'm Sexy, Yeah, And I Know It.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Uh, and that was co-founded with him and his nephew. So that's Berry's grandson, Sky Blue. So the family is still going.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Family's still going.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Well, it was such a family enterprise, like you say, wasn't it? Like he hired like his sisters, his brothers, his dad, who was apparently a legend, who like all the most famous Motown acts got together to sing a song about his dad, Berry Senior. Weirdly, his dad's name was Berry Junior, but because he became Berry Gordon III's father, he then became known as Berry Senior. Um, his father was Berry, but the only relation who wasn't, there were a lot of Berrys around. It was Berry, Berry and Berry.

• 25:23Speaker 01

  What was the song they sang him? Thank you Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry, Berry much.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Um, one of the only relations who didn't go into the music industry became president. So the great grandfather, who actually wasn't called Berry, the first one not to be called Berry, slept with one of his enslaved people, woman. And that gave rise to the Berry family and then slept with his legal wife, which gave rise to Jimmy Carter, three generations later.

• 25:47Speaker 03

  Crumbs.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  Crumbs indeed.

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Wow. Can I tell you one more thing about Detroit? We're totally just researching a bit because, um, it's Motown, it's Motor City. So the reason it's Motor City is largely, I'd say, down to Henry Ford. Who based his factories there and his companies.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  And in the mid 20th century, one in six working Americans was involved in the car industry. One in six. That's stunning. Directly or indirectly, I mean, feedstock and like the parts and all this stuff. But, um, Henry Ford, uh, you know, has things in Detroit and it was a massive city. It was a very multi-racial city because people came from all over. They came from England and Scotland. They came from the, you know, the heartlands of America, all over. So it was very mixed, uh, nationally and ethnically. And he had this ceremony, which I, I don't know if you guys remember, we may have mentioned it before, where he would Americanize anyone who was from another country. And the ceremony was you would, uh, walk into a massive melting pot.

• 26:47Speaker 03

  And there are photos, it is a literal melting pot in your national dress and you would come out a homogenous American. Like they had an actual pot.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  And this was seen as a really good thing at the time, you know, this is one of the ideas of America is that doesn't matter where you come from, you're American now.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  You know, when you get citizenship in the UK, you get the invite to the ceremony and the mayor of Hackney sort of gives you a scroll or something.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Or equivalent.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Or wherever you are. It's not always Hackney, but like, um, on the invitation, it says you're allowed to wear national dress. And what that means is if you're from Ethiopia, you can wear a traditional Ethiopian dress. But when my wife got citizenship, she read it as you're allowed to cosplay as a British person. So she wore a bowler hat and a pinstripe suit and a black umbrella.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  That is so cool.

• 27:33Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Stunning. That's amazing. She turned up, well, why do you need citizenship? We're already clearly British.

• 27:45Speaker 03

  Okay. It is time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is the number of people conducting the Indian census is bigger than the number of people in Lithuania. Wow. So not. So. Not even people answering the census, it's the people going. The number of people answering the census is everybody. That would just be the fact that India is bigger than Lithuania in population terms. And India is bigger than Lithuania, both geographically and in population terms. No, this is the number of people.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  And GDP.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  In what sense is Lithuania bigger than India though?

• 28:18Speaker 03

  Oh, there'll be something like exports of small, um, carved, uh, soap ornaments or whatever. There'll be something in which Lithuania is crushing India. They probably don't even have more Lithuanians. India probably has more based on population size.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  I'm not sure that there's a massive expat community of Lithuanians.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Podcasts at QI.com, please write in.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  But actually what I was thinking is all the people conducting the Indian census, like they do that once every 10 years, right? What are they doing for the other nine years? They could go to Lithuania and do the census there. Each person counts one person.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  That's a really nice idea.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  That's great. It's like a pen pal system.

• 28:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. And of course, I mean, we could have it the other way around. Everyone in Lithuania could do the Indian census, but everyone in Lithuania would have to go.

• 29:04Speaker 02

  Who's going to make tiny soap part of this?

• 29:07Speaker 03

  And it would be a disaster as well because they don't speak many of the local languages. Like, it would be, that would be chaos.

• 29:12Speaker 02

  It would be terrible.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  But India is having a census and that census has happened every 10 years normally. But this one is going to be mega because it's been delayed by, I think, five years due to COVID. And there are 1.4 billion people in India and there are 3 million people who've been hired. And it's often teachers or civil servants who are, you know, they've got time off over the summer, maybe. Or they've, you know, they've kind of been dragooned into it. And it's going to be a biggie. It's going to be very exciting.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Is it going to be exciting? I think a census is, you've got a tick box.

• 29:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  But is it exciting?

• 29:43Speaker 03

  No, but there's something different about this particular Indian one, which is really interesting, which is there are, I think it might be 33 questions on it. But they're going to be studying one thing in particular, which hasn't been, that's not the interesting thing. Don't make a sarcastic noise, okay?

• 29:59Speaker 01

  No, I see why you're so excited. Oh my God.

• 30:01Speaker 03

  The interesting thing that they're doing, this hasn't been done since 1931, is they're going to ask a question about caste and the caste system. And basically you need to judge the extent of the caste system and how it's impacted people's lives.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And just to say that the caste system is like a very, very, very complicated version of our caste system, basically.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. And there are castes and there are sub-castes and there are clans and there are surnames. So they did try in 2011 to study caste, but it was a disaster because they mixed all of those different kind of categories up. They got 4.6 million separate castes out of it. Not helpful, like not useful data to get.

• 30:39Speaker 02

  Well, because they didn't categorize them properly and do the subcategories, I see.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  They basically gave people an open box to write in, whatever they wanted to write in. So, you know, it's really important to have that because the caste system is basically like an old Brahman network in many ways. And it's these days, it's much more about connections, but you need to be able to study it in order to move on from it.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  So when's this happening?

• 30:59Speaker 03

  It's happening over the course of several months. It's a long, it's a long process.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Like in 2026?

• 31:04Speaker 03

  Six and seven.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's going to be happening.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  It's weird that they got the caste system question wrong because I happened to be reading a handbook given out to enumerators in the 1890 Indian census. And they were very good at it.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  So it just happened to me and then we did this math on.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  It was so lucky. Yeah. I was just in the middle of it and Andy suggested this.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  It's pretty long, so.

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Woke your husband up. Hey, you'll never guess, this bedtime reading is going to come in use for after all.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  I don't need to tell you all these facts anymore about the gender of everyone in Bombay in 1889.

• 31:40Speaker 01

  Wake up, another bloody caste. When's it gonna end? 33 questions.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  So.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  So this is a handbook for who?

• 31:54Speaker 02

  It's a handbook for the enumerators of the 1890 Indian census. And so I'm sure a lot of people will have read it, but for those who haven't.

• 32:01Speaker 03

  So, sorry, if I could be serious for a moment, was this British administrators conducting the census because of the imperial times?

• 32:10Speaker 02

  Yes, British administrators and obviously Indians mostly conducting it, but under the instruction of the Brits.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  So you're reading the English version just to clarify.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  No, I read it. So I had to learn Hindi first as well, which was surreal. But I'd heard it was best in the original language.

• 32:26Speaker 03

  You miss a lot of the new ones.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  You could never really appreciate the 1890 guidelines for enumerators.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  But I'll give it to you in the English. The categories that they listed, it's a real letdown now. Religion, sect of religion, caste, subdivision of caste, subdivision of that. And then the only other questions they asked were age, are you married, language? And then a column at the end, which says, are you insane, deaf mute from birth, totally blind or a leper? NB, do not enter if you're only blind in one eye or if you have become deaf and dumb since birth or if you only suffer from white leprosy. And they're the only categories. And so are they still in? Are they one of the 33?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  I am not insane. I am the lead singer of the four tops.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Sat right next to you. I am not Paul Nixon.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Oh, so the questions this year are going to include things about, you know, what electricity access do you have? What kind of clean water access do you have? Do you have access to a toilet? And what kind of, you know, is it indoor, outdoor, like that kind of stuff to gauge poverty? What is your main cereal? That's going to be an exciting one. Yeah.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  It's not Cocoa Puffs, Dan. It's like ice on ice.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  Well, this, yeah, this is exciting.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  One thing that they're going to have an issue with is the Andaman Islands. The Sentinelis people who live on North Sentinel Island. If you go anywhere near them, they fire bows and arrows at you. And so no one has been on this island from the West for many, many, many years.

• 34:02Speaker 02

  And whenever they do, don't they get killed straight away?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  They do.

• 34:05Speaker 02

  A couple of idiots have been, haven't they?

• 34:06Speaker 01

  Couple of idiots have been and been like, I think one idiot went and managed to escape, but then was immediately arrested. But it's part of India. So how do you count those people if whenever you go near them, they're going to shoot bows and arrows at you?

• 34:20Speaker 03

  Count the arrows.

• 34:22Speaker 01

  Like the British archers, Agincourt could fire three arrows at once.

• 34:27Speaker 03

  Really good, really good point.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  So maybe count them and divide by three. I don't know, whatever. So what they've done is in the past, they've basically gone around the island on a boat and counted the number of people on the beach.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  And then sometimes estimated from that, and then sometimes just literally gone, well, there were 39 people on the beach. So let's just say it's 39.

• 34:48Speaker 02

  Because probably if you're on a little island, you spend all your time on the beach, don't you? So it's probably all of them.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  We just don't know. And then they're talking about using drones for this current one. But the problem is like, do you remember the big tsunami in whenever that was, 2004? There was helicopters went over to make sure these guys were okay and they fired arrows at the helicopters as well. So they just don't like people going anywhere near them.

• 35:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  And definitely they won't like drones. So it's just a bad idea all round. Just leave them alone.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Leave them be.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  Doesn't feel like you need to know, does it? You're not really taxing them. You don't particularly need to know what cereal they're eating. Yeah.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  No, but yeah, I suppose, yeah. They might need to, you might need to know how many people are there. So you know what support. But I guess if you're not supporting them, they're keeping themselves to themselves.

• 35:31Speaker 01

  But that's the whole point of a census, right? Well, there's a few different points, but one of them is you work out what people need. And that's one big problem with censuses are often over counted or under counted. You might not give the right support to a community because they're not replying to the census or vice versa. So in the last American census in 2020, there was loads of political stuff going on. But ethnic minority groups were not responding to the census as much, so they were under counted. And it was the first one you could do online. And so more affluent people were responding to it more. And so it meant that you got this really distorted thing where you didn't think there were so many poor people. And you did think there are a lot more rich people and it meant that their resources were going to the wrong places.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Oh, right. They also have a problem with census data in China. So for example, one census showed that there was 1.334 billion people. But actually estimates are as high as 1.5 billion people. And the reason is people are avoiding the census either as illegal migrants or the one child policy. So you will be fined something like 20,000 pounds if you admit that actually I did have a child under that time.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Oh no.

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Hang on, you're saying there are more Chinese people than we think?

• 36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm saying there are fewer.

• 36:50Speaker 02

  Oh, well, fight it out.

• 36:51Speaker 03

  Okay. Because there is a claim that 100 million Chinese people don't exist. The demographic stats are lower than the officials in local government stats. And that might be officials in local governments having an incentive to say, there are loads more people here because it means you get more resources from the state, that kind of thing. And actually, it's a slightly maverick theory, but I think it's, it seems pretty possible. So maybe it cancels out.

• 37:16Dan Schreiber?

  When you're dealing with countries as big a population size as India or China, and as you're saying, Andy, this is going to go over months. What happens with the rate of death and birth that means your census is in any way accurate? Or does it level out sort of?

• 37:29Speaker 02

  I think the statisticians are figuring that out, aren't they? Yeah.

• 37:32Speaker 01

  There's a lot of people smarter than us dealing with this kind of thing.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  I actually, I happen to be reading.

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, here we go.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Speaking of statisticians, the Office for National Statistics methodology section on how they do the census.

• 37:47Speaker 03

  Sometimes the 1890 stuff gets a bit too exciting, doesn't it? And you want somebody to calm down before bed.

• 37:52Dan Schreiber?

  That's the toilet book, isn't it?

• 37:56Speaker 02

  It's the Office for National Statistics that do the census usually. So they're in charge of it. And I just came across a bullet point in their methodology for census taking, which said, "We've made methodological adjustments to the data for children aged naught to two years. This is because people often forget to add their babies to their census return." And I looked it up and it's across countries and it's a much bigger effect than you think. So in Australia, America and the UK, about 5% of naught to two or naught to three year olds are not counted.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  Is that wishful thinking of very tired parents?

• 38:27Speaker 02

  It's gotta be, right? I mean, we don't know. We just, people just forget to say, yes, and my newborn baby.

• 38:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  To the extent, and in Australia, they put a note on the ONS press release saying, "Please do remember to count any newborn children in your household."

• 38:41Speaker 03

  So I was looking up some jobs from the 1921 census. So there was getter, brackets, someone who gets things.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Oh, okay, yeah.

• 38:50Speaker 03

  Knobber, removes head of fish with a knife by hand. Odd boy, rabbit destroyer, assistant bottomer, very funny. But then I thought, look, what do I like? I thought I'd go to the S listing. There are 10 different sausage related jobs in the census.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 39:06Speaker 01

  Oh, great.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Sausage casemaker, sausage casings cleaner, sausage casings dresser, sausage filler, sausage linker, sausage maker, sausage meat mincer, sausage skin cleaner, sausage skin dresser, sausage skin maker.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  So wait a minute, you had sausage skin dresser and another kind of sausage dresser, didn't you? Sausage case dresser.

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Sausage case dresser and sausage skin dresser. Possibly people are filling in slightly.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  I feel like we have a caste issue here, don't we? Where people have just been given a box and they can write what they want.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  I just like the idea of the sausage factory, which has all of these people in strictly demarcated lines of work. It did read like they were each standing next to each other on the production line. Save a line in the budget by sacking one of the sausage cases dressers. No, you're absolutely right.

• 39:55Speaker 02

  In 2022, there was a question on the census that asked, can you speak Scots? And it became apparent that Scottish people weren't entirely sure if what they spoke was Scots or if it was just weird English. That's basically what Scottish people said.

• 40:10Speaker 03

  Scottish English.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, the thing, the truth is with Scots is an English person who's never read Scots in their life can read a paragraph of Scots and get the gist of it quite easily.

• 40:20Speaker 02

  It's exactly, you can sort of get the gist, exactly. So there's a great website now called I can, A Y E can, which basically says, "Listen to people on this site speaking Scots and it will help you decide if you can understand it, if you're a Scots speaker, whether this is your main language."

• 40:33Speaker 01

  It should have been called I can, because can is Scots for knowledge.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  They can't even speak Scots for God's sake. The people who made the website. Anyway, it sounds great because it sounds beautiful, doesn't it?

• 40:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 40:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're going, you're going for yes, cool.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  It would have been a very brave podcaster to say no to that.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna.

• 41:03Speaker 02

  My fact this week is that Japan's biggest toilet maker is an essential part of the computer chip industry. This is weird, but it's Toto and they make toilets, not the band, the toilet maker, and they.

• 41:17Speaker 03

  I hear the drains down in Africa.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  That's very good.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Nice, thank you. So Toto, known for washlets. Those posse lose that spray warm water on your bottom and then they give you a bottom dry and then they've got some cleansing stuff.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  The best thing, the best things in the world.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Do you think they're the best things in the world?

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Oh, I've got a theory about why you in particular might say they're the best things in the world.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 41:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Do you want to save it or you want to tell me now?

• 41:41Speaker 03

  I'll just say now, I'm sure we'll talk more about lose later, but the reason Toto became so good, became industry leaders, is because they started out researching everyone's bottoms and they started researching the golden angle, the angle at which you should be sprayed. And, and they did their first research on golf courses.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  Did they?

• 42:03Speaker 03

  So they, you know, they've been aiming for your, your custom, James.

• 42:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's what they do. You may or may not love them, but 40% of their profits come from making electrostatic chucks. So as far as I understand it, all the circuitry in a computer chip, like the bit that stores all the data and does all the important stuff, is printed on a silicon wafer, a really, really thin, like a quarter of a millimetre thick bit of wafer. Each circle of wafer is then put into the chip. But when you're printing the circuitry onto that wafer, you need to hold it really still in place. But you don't want to use like a tiny little clamp because that takes up space on the wafer that you want to print the circuit onto.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  So a chuck is this amazing disc of material that uses like electrostatic forces to suck the wafer onto itself, hold it perfectly still so you can print the circuitry on it and Toto make these tiny, tiny chucks.

• 42:59Speaker 01

  When they were invented, did a load of humans lose their jobs who were pre, like people who are really good at Jenga and they could hold things really, really still. Then suddenly they weren't needed anymore.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  Amazing at those, did you ever play those steady hand things where you have to take a ring across? Yeah, sadly.

• 43:15Speaker 01

  Now you just see them at fairgrounds, don't you? Just playing those steady hand games and they're like, oh, I used to be important in the microchip industry, you know?

• 43:23Speaker 03

  They can hold out a cup for loose change incredibly still.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  And the reason being is these things are made of porcelain.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Partly made of porcelain, yes.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  And obviously who makes porcelain? A toilet company.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Toilets, there you go. And porcelain is very non-conductive, so it's not going to cause shorting. It's not going to make the electric charge run away from it, but it can pull heat away from the wafer because it will conduct the heat. So anyway, it's just the perfect material to make these chucks and to make toilets and it pulls the heat away from your bottom.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  It's useful as well that they're non-conducting porcelain toilets, isn't it? Because imagine if every time you went to the toilet in a carpeted house and you had one of those electric shocks that you get.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Do you know what I mean?

• 44:05Speaker 03

  Oh, I certainly do, yeah, yeah. Was it a Financial Times story that you sent around, Anna, as the source for this?

• 44:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:12Speaker 03

  Because I, did you guys read the story? It ended with this amazing sentence. "Toto is not the first ostensibly non-tech company in Japan that has become part of the AI boom. Ajinomoto, better known for soup stocks, uses resin derived from its expertise in umami flavourings to make insulation material between chips and motherboards."

• 44:35Speaker 01

  So good.

• 44:35Speaker 03

  Mad.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  I think what happened was around 2020, the government started this idea where they were trying to get people to, if you had a company, you should go into techno stuff. And they basically gave people money to go from making ramen into making chips or whatever.

• 44:54Speaker 03

  Making ram.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Very good. And in fact, I read an FT article about this. They found that a lot of seafood companies had gone from fish to chips.

• 45:03Speaker 03

  Oh. My, my shoe company, well, not my shoe company, I wish, but I heard a pair of shoes by the company.

• 45:11Speaker 01

  Murray Brokes.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Murray Brokes. For the quality gentleman.

• 45:20Speaker 02

  You now make leather wafers onto which circuitry is printed.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Sorry, there, there's a firm called All Bird and I had a pair of shoes by them. And they were sort of a, I think they were kind of, apparently they were quite bro, tech bro-y shoes, which I was not aware of, I just thought they were kind of woolen sneakers, which I quite liked. But they recently announced, yeah, we're going to be doing AI from now on. And everyone said, what? But basically they just said, yeah, we're going to be new bird AI from now on. We've lost massive amounts of money making shoes and we seem to be completely doomed. So now we're going to acquire graphics processing units. And their share price went up 600%.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  And the shoes now walk out of your cupboard and put themselves on you, don't they?

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Lovely, lovely, because they're AI. They're AI shoes. I've been sacked from my own job, I put in my shoes there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Actually, relatedly, on Japan and AI, I was reading an article about why so many of these companies do these switches in Japan. And another of the reasons was, according to this guy who's called David Dai, who's a Japanese analyst at a semiconductor company, so he's really looked into why people do this. He said, "In Japan, you've got much more of a zen long-term approach generally and a lot of companies really, really embody that. They've never been so short-term capitalist driven, which make them quite good for this, but also very slow to respond to demand." And an example of this is that in the UK, 32% of workers are now using AI. In the US, 50% of workers are. In Japan, only 8% of workers use AI at the moment.

• 46:43Speaker 02

  And he was saying, "This is because there's this, you know, like caution, conservative, let's just stick with what we were doing."

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  So maybe they'll turn out to be the only ones who survive.

• 46:53Speaker 01

  Another part of the world that does this kind of pivoting quite nicely is South Korea. For instance, Samsung, they started in 1938 and they were selling groceries and dried fish and noodles and stuff. And now they sell electronics and all sorts of stuff like that. But this is due to something called chaebol. And it's a Korean idea where you, it's a family business and you have your main family business that the people in charge of your family are like concentrating on. But everyone else can kind of do their own thing, but you're under one big umbrella of the family. And so it means that your kids can do risky things, but it doesn't really matter because you have the overarching family business that's always going to carry on.

• 47:37Speaker 03

  So like useless cousin Derek can still fit into the family business and he can still be making his little soap ornaments, for example, but AI now, so you know, yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 02

  Wait, how many family free riders can you have before you're like, I need to have one grandchild who's doing something?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  I guess the hope is that your dried fish company is still going to carry on no matter what.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  And then maybe crazy cousin Derek, who's actually making very nice TVs, says, oh, you know what? Mine's doing all right now, so I can take over. And then he becomes the new umbrella.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  That's really good. That's very clever. Because in the UK, it feels a bit more haphazard, I think. I don't think we have that attitude. So case in point, Walls, what do they make?

• 48:16Speaker 02

  Ice cream.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  With a gun to your head, right, ice cream. Yeah. Okay, and what else do they make? There's another gun to your head.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  Walls, sausages.

• 48:21Speaker 03

  Sausages, sausages and ice cream.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Why? Is it because you only eat ice cream in the summer and sausages in the winter?

• 48:28Speaker 03

  Did you cheat, cheat and research this in advance?

• 48:30Speaker 01

  No, I didn't.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Thomas Wall saw his staff working terribly hard of the year flogging sausages. And then when the weather changed, he had to sack everybody.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Was there like one really perfect Goldilocks day of the year where you would get a 99 with a sausage in it?

• 48:45Speaker 01

  I think I half do remember this fact, and I think he might have had like a refrigeration unit or something that he could start using for ice cream, maybe.

• 48:51Speaker 03

  That's so clever. Yeah, yeah. So basically, that's it. It's an ultimate pivot based on your existing resources.

• 48:58Speaker 02

  And then...

• 48:59Speaker 03

  Having to sack all your staff half the year, every year.

• 49:02Speaker 02

  Oh, even the sausage casing maker and the sausage skin maker as well.

• 49:07Speaker 03

  The sausage linker and the sausage filler.

• 49:09Dan Schreiber?

  Pivots are great. I do love pivots. I found a great one, which is in 1882, the Plymouth Iron Windmill Company, who made windmills, ran a promotion whereby if you bought a windmill, they bundled it with a free BB gun that they also made. And the BB gun proved so successful that they rebranded as the Daisy Outdoor Products Company, and they now exclusively sell air guns. And they were one of the biggest BB gun manufacturers.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Sorry, can I ask, how many windmills were they selling? Because it feels to me like a windmill is a very high value commodity, that you might only sell one or two of them in a year.

• 49:48Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  And to sell a BB gun with every single one is not that many BB guns.

• 49:52Dan Schreiber?

  I don't know the windmill craze of 1882 in Michigan, America, but it might have been huge.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  They used to be tiny. Windmills did used to be much smaller.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I didn't realise the date and the... Yeah. So in America, they used to have those kind of metal tripods, didn't they?

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. And almost only like five metres high. They were really little. They wouldn't run much power. Yeah.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  And it's definitely not the ones on a wooden stick with the plastic bits that spin around in the wind. You put it in the garden.

• 50:17Dan Schreiber?

  It could be.

• 50:18Speaker 03

  Because a windmill could be good for target practice with a BB gun. That would be really fun, which I imagine why they bundled them together.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Must be.

• 50:25Speaker 03

  What is a BB?

• 50:26Speaker 01

  Ball bearing gun.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  There we go. On we plow.

• 50:31Speaker 03

  Can I tell you a listener fact that got sent in exactly on this topic? This is from Ron Liebach. Thank you so much, Ron. You were going to be in The Little Fish, but I bumped you up.

• 50:40Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 50:40Dan Schreiber?

  Always a new thing, promotion to the main show.

• 50:43Speaker 03

  From the inbox to, you know, glory. So Ron writes in about the Nintendo company. Now, I think you guys might know, because we may even have mentioned before, Nintendo was founded in 1889 as Nintendo Copai. They made playing cards, right? Anyway, they were founded in 1889. Vincent Van Gogh, he says, died in 1890, which begs the question, did Vincent Van Gogh play Nintendo?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 51:06Speaker 03

  And actually, between 1640 and 1854, the Netherlands were Japan's sole trading partner with Europe.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  I heard that he did play Pokemon Van Gogh.

• 51:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:17Dan Schreiber?

  Oh my god.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  Stunning.

• 51:19Dan Schreiber?

  Well, he did, but he did have an obsession with Japanese art, Van Gogh. And you look in a bunch of his paintings and there's, he's painted a Japanese painting in the background.

• 51:27Speaker 01

  There is a painting of him with a bandaged deer, I think. And it's got a picture of Mount Fuji in the background.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  This is it. So he got obsessed with this kind of woodblock print towards the end of the 1880s. There is a chance that maybe he played with Nintendo Hanafuda playing cards.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  So are we saying that maybe he ended it all because he couldn't beat Wiz Pig?

• 51:48Speaker 03

  I don't know what that means.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  I think beating the Wiz Pig probably is a bit of a euphemism.

• 51:55Dan Schreiber?

  That's so disgusting.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Oh no, don't ruin my childhood.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  We mentioned very briefly the Toto Company and the experiments they did on golfers. Well, it was quite buggy, this original toilet that kind of squirted water at you. When they were practising at the very start, quite often people ended up with red hot water fired directly at their anus. But they did get finally to what Andy called the golden angle, in fact, what they called the golden angle. So it was 43 degrees, which was the exact angle that would wash your anus. And they would also have a 53 degree spurt at the front for washing female genitalia. And that was what they said was the big sort

• 52:43Speaker 01

  of breakthrough that made them really popular. Because they tried it out in America and people weren't really up for it at all. And then they went to Japan and they were like, people were like, yeah, we do like this.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, these things really took off in Japan. But still, people are a bit funny talking about it. And they took off partly because they have a suite of anti-embarrassment devices, like you press a button and it makes a flushing noise to cover any embarrassment and all of this.

• 53:06Speaker 02

  Can I ask, when you say you've got the embarrassment flush, that's a flush to cover up the sound of you pooing, is it?

• 53:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 02

  Because I think, what I find embarrassing...

• 53:14Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  When you do, I don't think this is overshared.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  When you're reading out loud the 1890s Indian census.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  In cost of coffee toilets.

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Ears snoring coming from the next Q and Q.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  Look, you know when you have to do a flush and it doesn't work, so you have a big pause and you have to do a second flush? I find it very embarrassing because people outside will know. If I haven't emerged very soon after the first flush...

• 53:37Speaker 01

  You've had to do a double flusher.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  They're gonna know. And I would imagine this embarrassment flush actually is gonna make people assume that.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  I suppose people will know that there's just stuff going on in there.

• 53:46Dan Schreiber?

  But psychologically, they know that.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  It's just now they know if three flushes come out at once, then that's when you've done a really big one.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:52Dan Schreiber?

  Give it five minutes.

• 53:53Speaker 02

  Everyone's always counting the flushes, guys.

• 53:55Dan Schreiber?

  We should wrap up in a sec, guys.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  I have one bit of toilet innovation, which I read on my feed literally this morning. So it's new news. And that is scientists who have created a mosquito toilet.

• 54:09Speaker 02

  So sweet.

• 54:11Speaker 01

  It's a 3D printed funnel, which is coated with a super hydrophobic material. So when the mosquito does a poo on it, it kind of just goes down into a collection jar. And they use it to analyse the faeces and they can find what viruses are in the mosquito. And we're finding new viruses in mosquitoes that we didn't know about before because of these tiny mosquito toilets.

• 54:37Speaker 03

  How do you persuade it to use a toilet? They're not house trained.

• 54:41Speaker 01

  That's the big problem, I think.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  You start off with nappies and then you get pull-ups.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  What's my job? I fit nappies onto mosquitoes. I used to work holding electrostatic trucks very, very still.

• 54:59Speaker 01

  And then I teamed up with a guy who used to work as a sausage case manufacturer.

• 55:12Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this show, we're all online. You can find us there. I'm on at Shreiberland on Instagram. James?

• 55:25Speaker 01

  Come and join me on LinkedIn. It's my real name, James Harkin, and lots of people are adding me and doing nothing with it. So come and join me.

• 55:32Dan Schreiber?

  Nice, Andy.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  I'm on Instagram at AndrewHunterM.

• 55:35Dan Schreiber?

  Yep. And Anna?

• 55:36Speaker 02

  You can email podcast at qi.com or go to Instagram at no such thing.

• 55:40Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. And if you want to send us something that you would like read out on the show, podcast at qi.com is the most important one. If you want to send us some extra information, you know, are you two reading the old Indian census? Perhaps you want to invest in Murray Broggs, write into us. We will bring all that information to our bonus show, which is called Drop Us A Line. And that is part of Club Fish, which is on patreon.com/clubfish. We have lots of tiers. There's Excel episodes. So if you heard this episode and you wanted more of this episode, well, there's a longer version there. We do online quizzes. There's a bunch of great stuff. Check that out. Or if you've got a brilliant fact that you would love for us to read out, we have a whole separate show for that called Little Fish, where we put down our facts and we read the best of yours. So check that out as well.

• 56:25Dan Schreiber?

  Otherwise, come back next week because we're going to be back with another episode. Thank you as ever to our team, Liang Li, Ethan Ruporelia, as well as the larger Fishbuster crew. And we'll see you again next time. Goodbye.