No Such Thing As Alfred Hedgehog

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss fufu, Yakity-Yak and perplexing painkillers. 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 Is A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  My fact is, half of China watches TV dramas that are one minute long. These are things called microdramas. And I hadn't really heard about them until I read an article saying they're all going out of business. So I feel like these have arrived and they're now leaving. It's taken me to notice that.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  It's really weird to research something you've never heard of and then just see that they're one of the most ubiquitous things in the world.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  What else are we missing? It's like, there might be new large mammals that I have never heard of before, like huge mammals, you know what I mean?

• 1:05Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  In fact, for all of us, there will be a largest animal that we've never heard of, right? It won't all be the same animal.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Never heard of.

• 1:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, like, there are millions of animals, right? So there will be a largest one that you don't know about.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Actually, there's quite a lot of like, quite weird bovines and deer that live in various parts of the world that you won't have heard of.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  Have an example.

• 1:24Speaker 03

  They won't be exciting. There's not going to be a big cat that is just bigger than a lion. It actually turns out.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  I found out about a kind of Mexican dog the other day.

• 1:33Speaker 02

  Chihuahua.

• 1:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:37Speaker 01

  But that's the, so if anyone could be bigger than a chihuahua.

• 1:42Dan Schreiber?

  But that's, that's easy because they're not in the news all the time. I'm surprised, if you think pop stars, I hadn't heard of Macklemore, who's in the news right now. I just hadn't heard of him. I just don't listen to radio at the moment, you know?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  Well, he was on the radio at least 10 years ago. Probably more like 15 years ago.

• 1:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59Speaker 03

  I've never heard of him either, but as you know, that's no sign of anything.

• 2:02Dan Schreiber?

  We're not saying that Macklemore's the largest animal you've never heard of.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  He's a big guy. When he wears that big coat thing, he's enormous.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  He looks like a bit of charismatic mega fauna, actually.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  He looks like a yak.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does.

• 2:12Dan Schreiber?

  Here the Macklemore walks through the tundra.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  Yaklemore, more like.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  He's definitely bigger than the Mackles.

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Lovely. So microdramas are...

• 2:24Speaker 03

  These are, yeah, can't believe we've never heard of them. It makes me feel like we might be out of touch and every listener will be going, wow, I watch this all the time.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  Well, we're not in China. That's the thing. So they're big in China, Southeast Asia, Japan, they're not as big in the West. They've been tried over here a couple of times, but they haven't made a huge breakthrough yet. And basically, they're dramas where there might be 50 or 100 episodes in a series, but they're only one or two minutes long. They're tiny. And the business model is, get people watching on their phones, film 100 episodes, there's a cliffhanger every 60 seconds. So the plots are, like, the plots are quite out there. And you get the first five or 10 for free, and then they start walloping you, but you have to know by that point, you have to find out how it's going to end. It might be the most expensive way of consuming incredibly, often low quality.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  No, don't say that.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Melodrama.

• 3:14Speaker 03

  Don't say low quality, Andy. I've watched a bunch of these and I think they are fine art. They're absolutely hilarious and it does make you wonder if this is the downfall of humanity doing this. I don't know if you guys watched, I watched a few of the Chinese ones which have subtitles, which are very amusing. And then The Guardian did an article about them, of course, a few years ago, and it name checked Loving My Brother's Best Friend as one of the English language ones that was hoping to make it big. So did any of you guys watch that?

• 3:40Dan Schreiber?

  No.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  This one is meant to be like, this is going to be a proper drama that people in the West are going to enjoy. The two characters in it are naked within the first minute, which is such an impressive achievement.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  After 59 seconds, I reckon, surely. Or just at 59 seconds, they start to take off their tops.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  It is like that.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, we said about how much it costs. I think this was in The Economist, but it might have been The Guardian, but they said that you basically pay more to watch Tricked Into Having My Ex-Husband's Baby than you would pay to watch, you know, The Odyssey in IMAX.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  By the end of it, once you've added up all the different amounts, which is...

• 4:18Speaker 01

  It's very, I mean, it's, yeah, it's very clever, the micropayment thing.

• 4:21Dan Schreiber?

  Well, in 2024, they worked out that it generated 6.9 billion American dollars, right? And in America, it was 8.7 billion for the cinema box office. So it was encroaching on that. It's a big business.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  And they trick you, don't they? When you go on these apps, you buy credits, but you don't buy it each time. You buy like 100,000 credits for 500 quid or whatever it is. And then it says, do you want the next one for 724 credits?

• 4:49Speaker 01

  So you've got no idea what you're...

• 4:51Speaker 02

  And then suddenly all your credits have gone and they still haven't got their tops off.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  It's the longest one I've found. You guys might have found a longer one than this. This one is on Pocket FM, just to give the, the boys and girls at Pocket FM a bit of a shout out. It's called My Vampire System. I think this one's audio only, but it is 4,192 episodes long.

• 5:15Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  If you do all the, like, I think there are some side quests and extra bits and all of that.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, how many episodes have we had? And our episodes are an hour long. If you add all of the side quests.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  We've gone a much longer than them, yeah.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  We should have charged people 20p per episode of Fish, but, because you might pay several hundred dollars just to listen to the whole of My Vampire System.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  But do you really think that people are going to pay like 50p when Andy says, hey, guys, I've got a great idea for a new cop drama? And that's our cliffhanger. Do you reckon people are going to click on that?

• 5:45Speaker 01

  The thing is, you pay to skip. Sorry, I didn't make it yet. The show is free, but you can pay to get me to the end of this bit.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  That, now, that is a good business model, yeah.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  So your interjections are the equivalent of adverts on any, anything else?

• 5:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're adverts for things that don't exist.

• 5:59Speaker 03

  People will say, oh, do you skip the Andys?

• 6:02Speaker 03

  Do you know, I actually quite enjoy the Andys sometimes.

• 6:04Speaker 02

  That's what people said to me when I visited South America.

• 6:10Dan Schreiber?

  There are big Western actors, because this is, this is massive in Asia, but as you said, Andy, it sort of did make its way over. There's one guy called Joseph Purcell. He was in movies called The Bad Boy Wants Me, Club of Desire, Falling For My Bodyguard. He's big online, but you may not have heard of him. He's Miley Cyrus's stepbrother. He's super famous, but he's not really done any major TV or anything but online.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  Is Billy Ray Cyrus his father?

• 6:35Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, he's not.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  What do we mean super famous?

• 6:39Dan Schreiber?

  Well, I think, okay, if you...

• 6:41Speaker 03

  Write in if you haven't heard of him.

• 6:45Dan Schreiber?

  What if you're, okay, yeah, it's hard.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I think in fairness, like, the way that the world is now is people can be very, very, very famous in a subgenre. Like, for instance, podcasters. And you can walk down the street and no one has any idea who you are, but then a lot of people do know who you are, but they're all spread around the world.

• 7:01Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, or pop music. If Macklemore came in right now, I honestly would be like, I'm sorry, sir, we're recording.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  How did you get into the building?

• 7:11Speaker 02

  To be fair, everyone working here is much younger than us and they would all know who Macklemore was.

• 7:15Dan Schreiber?

  Absolutely. That's why he's here. He's been invited by them.

• 7:19Speaker 01

  Can I give you a few of my fave titles?

• 7:20Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:21Speaker 01

  Because these are, I mean, they're good.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  I Actually Had A Flash Marriage With An Abstinent Male God.

• 7:27Speaker 02

  What's a flash marriage? Is it where loads of people turn up to the marriage at once?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  That's it. Yes. You end up married to 250 people. My Blind Husband Is A Billionaire.

• 7:37Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  Okay, all right, that's fair enough.

• 7:38Dan Schreiber?

  What's that doing? What's that title trying to get you in with?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  I think there are a lot of secret billionaires in these things.

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are.

• 7:45Speaker 01

  My CEO's Baby Daddy Is The Merchant Of Death.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought you were going to say Merchant Of Venice. That would have been good.

• 7:54Speaker 01

  That's a great idea. Shylock's Complicated Domestic Arrangements.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  What is the deal with the titles? It is like they're just owning the fact that they're shit. Like, I went, go on real short. That's an English language one where you can watch them if you want. Spoiled By My Four Sea Monster Husbands.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  I think that's good.

• 8:11Dan Schreiber?

  I think the, the draw of it is not dissimilar to Mills and Boone. And also, there was a big publishing boom a while ago. And when I say big, it made people very rich. Do you remember Bigfoot's Bitch and all those?

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Through you.

• 8:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, but all those weird monster erotica, they got massive online. It's just this quick hit of romance. And in Mills and Boone, they kept saying you had to change it from millionaire to billionaire. And now there's trillionaire within Mills and Boone. Yeah, you just want a richer and richer man.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  The fact that there's only been one trillionaire in world history, and thankfully at time of recording, he's no longer a trillionaire. But when you say, I met my trillionaire husband, surely he can sue the only trillionaire in history, because he knows it must be referring to him.

• 8:55Dan Schreiber?

  He, he writes the books.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  That's how he became a trillionaire.

• 8:59Dan Schreiber?

  That's how he's rich. Hello.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  And so the big story in microdramas now is they're all going out of business. Or no, they're not going out of business, but AI is taking over.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, everyone's being fired.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Everyone's being fired, apart from the card pullers. And the card pullers, they use prompts and they keep putting prompts into AI. And then they get a scene and then they go, is this going to fit in one of our stories? If not, they get rid of it and put another prompt in. And they keep doing that until they get a prompt that they think is good enough to fit into the narrative.

• 9:29Speaker 01

  Right. Add another sea monster husband.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  And then the problem is now that AI is able to do their job, so they're being kicked out as well. These card pushers are not being able to do the job anyway. So not only is this thing we haven't heard of, it's also been taken over by AI. And also the people who have taken over have been taken over by AI themselves.

• 9:52Dan Schreiber?

  Wow. And that, that vertical drama vein of AI is insane, because not only is it all just generated on its own, but there's versions where you tell the prompt where you want the story to go next and it generates in front of you. So you are the director. And there's even ones where I've read you can put your own face onto the lead character and be the hero of this AI adventure.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Well, you don't have to be the hero. Like, if you have a very low self-esteem, you might accidentally make yourself like the...

• 10:22Speaker 03

  The fifth sea monster.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  The rejected sea monster. That's a good, I'm sorry, that's a good spin off from that.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Rejected trillionaire sea monster is my boss.

• 10:32Dan Schreiber?

  Let's back on AI for one sec. This is obviously taking over all industries in various different ways. And did anyone see the TV show that went out on Channel 4 as part of Dispatches? So this is their major investigation arm of Channel 4. And they released a show last year called Will AI Take My Job? And went around to all various different industries and showed how it was hip. So was the media, you know, but it was also music, fashion, law, supermarkets. And it was a pretty amazing documentary. It got really well received. The ending of it ends with the presenter going, AI is going to touch everyone's lives in the next few years. Call centre workers, customer service agents, maybe even TV presenters like me, because I'm not real.

• 11:16Dan Schreiber?

  In a British TV first, I am an AI presenter and the entire show was presented by AI.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:22Dan Schreiber?

  And you don't get that reveal right till the end, just to show you how scary and far it has come.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Could you tell when the presenter was walking around, did they have all the fingers and did they?

• 11:32Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I don't know. Actually, I think that I didn't think they were leaving clues in. She was called Aisha, A.I. Shah. So they were seeding little things in there.

• 11:41Speaker 03

  I gotta say, and this just goes to show how AI just doesn't have that creative zing. Saw that ending coming as soon as you started the anecdote.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  That's how Dan tells them.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Dan's telling, you're right. He gives the reveal away. Did anyone?

• 11:57Dan Schreiber?

  I am AI, Anna.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  That does not surprise me.

• 12:01Speaker 02

  The I bit's pretty surprising.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  You're a very early one though, aren't you?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Artificial idiot.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Did anyone read about Tattle TV? Which is the British microdrama platform.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  It sounds brilliant.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  It's gonna be terrific.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  Again, owning up to what it is, I think it is terrific. One of the things is they've turned Hitchcock's The Lodger, which was one of Hitchcock's first films made in 1927.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Sorry, you keep saying Hitchcock.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  I heard Hedgehog.

• 12:29Speaker 03

  I'm trying to make this child friendly, so I don't want to say the word cock.

• 12:33Speaker 02

  Well, it sounded more like Hedgehog.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  Alfred Hedgehog.

• 12:37Dan Schreiber?

  Very child friendly.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  I mean, that is a kid's book rated to be read, isn't it?

• 12:41Speaker 01

  That's so good.

• 12:41Dan Schreiber?

  Right, okay, no one, don't put this out.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Alfred Hedgehog?

• 12:46Speaker 01

  Psy cow.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Brilliant. Oh my God, we have something here, guys.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  Vertical cow.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Hang on.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  Rear wind cow.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  But it's just farting cows.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  North by North cow?

• 13:08Speaker 02

  You see, sometimes the creativity needs that AI input.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Bring on the AI. Jesus.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  You were saying that.

• 13:20Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, thanks. So it wasn't Alfred Hedgehog. This was Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 drama, The Lodger, silent film, The Lodger, A Story of the London Fog, and it's been remade for the two-minute-long vertical format. And I did, I read the reviews of it, there aren't that many, but one of them says, "First time I've seen Hitchcock in vertical format."

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:44Speaker 03

  No shit.

• 13:47Speaker 02

  They should have done vertigo, vertical, shouldn't they?

• 13:50Speaker 03

  They should have done that. Yeah, and that's probably why it hasn't taken off. Yeah. Anyway, you can watch the whole film on YouTube and if you want, you can pause it every two minutes to recreate the experience.

• 14:04Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the inventor of the chattering teeth and Kerplunk, as well as 800 other joke toys, is still inventing new products at age 105.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  That's so cool.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:21Dan Schreiber?

  This is Eddie Goldfarb. At time of recording, he is 105 years old and the man cannot stop producing toys. The chattering teeth, we all know it. It's the little wind-up teeth that chatter across your table. He did the giant bubble gun, which is a gun where you put in the liquid that comes out as giant bubbles as you shoot it. Shark Attack, do you remember that? Where, okay, it's a plastic shark and you've got to push its teeth in one at a time and then it will slam down on your hand when one of them goes down. I had that as a kid.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Oh, that's great.

• 14:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Does he, now that he's 105, does he actually use the chattering teeth? Himself?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Oh my God, he said this in an interview. It's so funny. He said he didn't really realise people have false teeth. And he said when he was aged 100, now, of course, I do know people have false teeth because I have them. Yeah.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  And when it gets cold in the winter, he must like chatter his teeth and sort of hark back to a simpler age.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  Well, I'd hope he's, I'd hope he's comfortable in the, with the winter, wherever he is. I think he's in California, so it's quite temperate there.

• 15:22Dan Schreiber?

  He's in a retirement home. He's got a 3D printer where he prints out all of his new ideas.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  It might get cold sometimes, you know. I know it's California, but you know, you get used to a certain heat and then even when it goes a bit colder, you might chatter your teeth maybe.

• 15:35Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, yes. Okay, yes.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Maybe he's got a fever or something.

• 15:40Speaker 02

  Do they have sharks in California?

• 15:41Speaker 01

  Probably off the coast, they do, yeah.

• 15:43Speaker 02

  So when he's pushing the teeth in those sharks, maybe he harks back to simpler times.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  Simpler times. But he got really screwed on the false teeth. He got paid $900. And the guy he had sort of gone into business with sold it to someone else for $2,500. And then it went on to make millions, I imagine, you know, so he sold the rights outright rather than keeping a percentage or whatever.

• 16:05Dan Schreiber?

  Well, he was new in the game at that point. This was before he had his big idea. So he was born 1921. I mean, it's amazing, you know, he was, he was born Adolf. He was born at a time where that was a good name to have. He's the only other Adolf I know outside of Harpo Marx who had to change his name. I'm sure there are other famous ones, of course there will be.

• 16:22Speaker 02

  Harpo Marx, Adolf.

• 16:23Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Chico, Krupchoe, Zepo and Adolf. It's funny.

• 16:30Dan Schreiber?

  And before he got into being a toy maker, he was involved with the Navy during World War II, inventing radar systems to help them fight against the Japanese.

• 16:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically the submarines couldn't find the Japanese planes because the Japanese planes were going too close to the surface because they'd realised that the American radar didn't work there. And so he came up with a new system that allowed the radar to work at very low altitude, which allowed them to see the planes.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  Really? So ironic. So the closer the planes got to the surface of the water, the lesser submarines could see them. Like if someone's got a gun up really close to you, you can't sort of shoot.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Good point. If a gun's within 10 centimetres, you actually don't know they've got one. It's in your blind spot.

• 17:08Speaker 02

  It might sometimes get cold in those submarines.

• 17:10Speaker 01

  Oh, his teeth would have been chattering. Maybe with fear as the Japanese planes came into you. He was on the submarine, he was on with the USS Batfish, which once sank three Japanese submarines in four days, which I think is a PB for the US Navy. Yeah, so he was inventing stuff at sea.

• 17:25Dan Schreiber?

  But that's where he started. You're right. Batfish, the submarine is where he started, had these ideas. And then he goes and sells his first product to a man called Irving Fishlove. Fish is big in his life, yeah. And now he's on our podcast.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 17:41Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Whoa. Other toy inventions?

• 17:44Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  The Frisbee.

• 17:46Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 17:47Speaker 03

  Originally pies. And it was a huge company, Frisbee Pie Company in Connecticut in the 1940s, was selling 200,000 pies a day, which is a lot of pies.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  So I, that's crazy that Frisbee meant a pie.

• 18:00Speaker 03

  Frisbee was a kind, it was a maker of pies.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  It was a brand, yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  And the students at Yale, because only really smart people could come up with this idea, when they bought the pies, they realised that if you threw the tins, they flew quite well. And so evolved eventually the Frisbee, a toy company, WAMO, saw people doing this. And they actually had been presented with something called the Pluto Platter, which was the first name for a Frisbee, but they thought, well, kids are already calling something like this a Frisbee. So they slightly tweaked the spelling so they didn't get sued by the pie company.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  It was never that the pie company then turned its trays into Frisbees. It was another company kind of copied their design and just named it after them.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, just changed the I to an E.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  I feel like even with the I to an E, you should be able to sue.

• 18:45Dan Schreiber?

  I know, right? It feels very close. Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  You should have a word. Yeah. They did try to rejuvenate the pie company in 2017, I guess, thinking they'd missed out on the toy. Yeah. Maybe there's a small portion of people in Connecticut who only know the Frisbee as a pie.

• 18:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I think they're quite collector's items, those tins now, because it wasn't, it wasn't that they were generic. They said Frisbee on them as well. So you can get them online as the originals.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  You know the guy we were talking about who Goldfarb sold his thing to, his chattering teeth?

• 19:11Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Irving?

• 19:12Dan Schreiber?

  Irving Fishlove.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  Fishlove is a huge deal in toy world.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 19:16Speaker 01

  As an inventor and entrepreneur, he is the man behind the fake rubber vomit.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Is he?

• 19:22Speaker 01

  Which is a big deal.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah, the rubber vomit.

• 19:24Dan Schreiber?

  Fake barf, which is, you just see it on the ground.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  That might help.

• 19:29Speaker 03

  What is this vomit word?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  You know, barf.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Oh, right.

• 19:32Dan Schreiber?

  Barf.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  You on page now?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Thank God you hear that.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  I'm afraid, like, if you can think of anything that it might possibly be, that's what it is.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, okay, so it's just a common toy that, maybe I've always thought it was real vomit when I've seen it, so I didn't know it existed.

• 19:48Speaker 01

  Maybe it's not so much a toy as a gag gift.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Or a thing you'd get in a practical joke shop.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Probably not a gag gift, I would say.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Really? No.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  I don't think you would give it to someone. You would put it on the floor and pretend that it's just happened.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Well, it depends on the occasion, doesn't it? It's probably not good for a wedding.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  I believe the 27th wedding anniversary is the barf anniversary.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  So the incredible thing about it, I just started reading about the fake vomit. So Irving Fishlove would use it himself sometimes because he thought it was so funny that he would take his, I just love this for his poor kids, he would take his teenage children to really nice restaurants and then you start hacking and coughing away and then you go, ah, and then there'd be this fake vomit on the floor. And the waiters would go, oh my goodness, I'm so sorry, sir. And then he'd be laughing his head off. Just in terms of pure parental embarrassment, I think that might be one of the most embarrassing things your dad could do.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Unless he also invented the fake poo.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Fake shit, Anna, just in case.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  But it's still made to the state of fake vomit, it's very successful, and it's handmade, I love this.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  They get the mix, which is just bits of plastic and styrofoam and sort of soupy stuff. And then they ladle it out like a little pancake, so everyone is individual.

• 21:06Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 21:06Speaker 02

  And it takes a full day to dry.

• 21:08Speaker 03

  That will be the last ever industry that AI manages to take over.

• 21:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:13Dan Schreiber?

  It is, I saw a photo of them, they have on like a giant tray almost, 500 of them, and they look like little cookies if you're at a distance. And they lay them out in the sun to dry. And apparently, much like Coca-Cola or KFC, there is a secret ingredient that no one knows, and they are protecting.

• 21:32Speaker 02

  It's carrots, it's carrots, isn't it?

• 21:36Speaker 03

  It's selfish, really, you know, give it away to the world like Tim Berners-Lee, if you've cracked something like that.

• 21:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Do you know what else is different for everyone, toy-wise? Jenga.

• 21:48Dan Schreiber?

  As in the individually cut?

• 21:51Speaker 03

  Every block is different and has to be for it to work.

• 21:54Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 21:55Speaker 03

  And there are various Reddit threads about people who've tried to make their own Jenga and failed because they assume that they all need to be the same. So it's so you can slide them out more easily, it makes so much sense, right? When you play Jenga, some of them can slip out. If you just cut Jenga completely evenly and equally, they'll all get stuck together and you won't be able to force any out. Lots of people saying, I don't know what I've done wrong, I've just cut a Jenga set out of my own block of wood. People saying, you've got to sand it down unevenly.

• 22:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  So there are craftsmen in the Jenga factory who, you know, like old Italian carpenters who are like delicately taking.

• 22:27Speaker 02

  They're called the Jenga boys.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  Oh my gosh.

• 22:30Dan Schreiber?

  And they hire one person to walk around occasionally, just bump into them and nudge the little bit of precision out of place.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Wasn't Jenga, I thought it was based on like an African game and invented by a woman from Oxford or something. Cause I remember she came to the QI club, I think.

• 22:46Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yes, yes.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  Well, remember, she's called Lesley Scott, and yeah, she grew up in Ghana and it was called, and kujenga means building in Swahili. But the amazing thing about her is, I think we've also mentioned her husband. So she was just this woman who played this as a kid with her brother and then decided this is going to make me a fortune.

• 23:02Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Speaker 03

  And it did. And she's married to this guy called Fritz Volrath, who's a spider and silkworm professor at Oxford University.

• 23:10Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  And he's invented ballistic knickers, which out of spider silk, it inspired products, among other things, which protect you from bombs.

• 23:18Speaker 02

  I think that guy came to the QI club as well, I feel like that.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  It feels like you invited one and you said, there's a plus one here.

• 23:25Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  So whoever it was brought the spouse.

• 23:27Dan Schreiber?

  We definitely met Lesley.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:28Dan Schreiber?

  We've had drinks with her, yeah, at the club back in the day.

• 23:32Speaker 03

  What a fun couple.

• 23:33Speaker 02

  Ballistic knickers.

• 23:34Dan Schreiber?

  Knickers.

• 23:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Good nickname.

• 23:36Dan Schreiber?

  Who's shooting directly at your knickers?

• 23:40Speaker 02

  Of course, she was a big film star in the 1950s, people knew her as Ballistic Knickers.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  They're for landmines, okay?

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Yep, much less funny, but yeah, much more serious.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Classic Anna fact.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  You've got to finish on the down to appreciate the ups.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  We mentioned earlier how this guy Adolf Goldfarb, Adolf E. Goldfarb.

• 24:05Dan Schreiber?

  Eddie Goldfarb.

• 24:07Speaker 02

  The Gold, the Goldfarb, he didn't get his money for his Yakity yak teeth, right? Someone else who didn't get the money for something they invented was a woman called Kay Zufall. She was a person who saw that people were using Play-Doh to clean their wallpaper and thought, you could use that, you could give that to kids and they can make stuff out of it. There was basically this company called Cotol Products. Because people had houses that had coal fires, their wallpaper used to get quite dirty. And they came up with this product that you could press onto the wall and it would take the coal off it and clean your wallpaper. Then coal kind of became less popular, natural gas came in to warm people's houses.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  And also washable wallpaper was invented, and so they didn't know what to do, they were losing all of their money. And this woman came in and said, well, why don't you turn it into a toy? And she never made any money out of Play-Doh, which was sold for millions and millions afterwards. But she was allowed an unlimited supply of Play-Doh for the rest of her life.

• 25:08Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  It's insulting at that point, yeah.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  So Kay, did you go, did you go and negotiate for some more dough? Well, yes.

• 25:18Dan Schreiber?

  I do fancy the idea of being a toy maker, because you just have an idea and you can sell it to someone if it's good and original enough. Like Eddie Goldfarb, 800 of these ideas, it's pretty astonishing.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:29Dan Schreiber?

  And there's like supposedly the arcade basketball system, the ball comes down and you shoot it, that was Eddie Goldfarb.

• 25:35Speaker 02

  Really?

• 25:35Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, he had this one invention, which was, it was a drink that you sipped, and as you sipped, it turned around, a merry-go-round that was in a dome at the top of a cup for kids.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  As you drink, the merry-go-round goes round.

• 25:46Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly, yeah, it's forcing it up.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Oh, I see, the force of you drinking makes it go round, right?

• 25:52Speaker 01

  So nice.

• 25:53Dan Schreiber?

  And also, this is how good Eddie Goldfarb was at ideas, when his son was born in 1953, he didn't have much money. And when they're in the hospital, they couldn't pay the hospital bill, so at night.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  So he forged money.

• 26:05Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, he came up with Monopoly.

• 26:10Dan Schreiber?

  He, he came up with an idea that night, left the hospital, sold it to a toy making manufacturer, came back with the cash and paid for his son's hospital bill. That's how much his brain was.

• 26:21Speaker 02

  That, that sounds like he's lazy and he only does it when he really needs to. It sounds like if he's that good, then he could have done it every day for the nine months leading up to the birth.

• 26:31Dan Schreiber?

  You're kind of right, because 800 is a lot, but when you're 105, is that impressive, really? Actually, when you consider it?

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Well, you want to be a toy inventor, and how many of you have invented so far?

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Dan, I think you could do it.

• 26:44Dan Schreiber?

  Thank you.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  I think you could do it, and I think you could win one of the biggest prizes in toy making, which is called the Idiot Award. Genuinely, the international designer and inventor of toys. It's so good.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  Lovely.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  There's a UK Toy Inventors Dinner, which does sound like a fun place to be.

• 27:00Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 27:00Speaker 03

  Or would they be quite tedious after a while? You know, you just want to have a boring chat about the weather and they keep putting whoopee cushions on your seat.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  There's a lot of fake bath, I think, tucked around.

• 27:10Dan Schreiber?

  Eddie's won the Idiot Award, of course. Yeah, he's also won the witty, winning inventor toy of the year. That feels forced.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  A bit forced.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  It does, yeah, whereas idiot came very naturally.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Hula hoops, they were insanely popular when they were invented. So they were invented in 1958, that year, 120 million hula hoops were sold in America alone.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  No.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  The population was only 180 million, most people have them. And they had no idea, the toy company who had a hula hoop had no idea what to turn it into at first. So they came from Australia and Australians used to use these bamboo rings to exercise with.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  Really? I thought they must have come from Hawaii where hula comes from.

• 27:49Speaker 03

  They did not, weirdly. They came from Australia and then this guy in Australia, who knew someone at an American toy company, went and brought him a hula hoop and said, here you go. Guy who works at WAMO, see what you can do with this. And the vice principal of WAMO was just like, it just sat in our research office for months and months, because we were like, what do we do with this? He said, we put it on pegs, we rolled it down the street, what the hell? And then another Australian came by the office, was like, oh, you got a hula hoop? And they said, yeah, what the hell do we do with it? And the Aussie said, I'm too embarrassed to show you, come, come outside and just one of you can come and I'll show you. I'll show you in the private privacy of the pavement.

• 28:28Dan Schreiber?

  They're probably thinking, oh god, it's a cock ring, isn't it? That's, this is, wow.

• 28:38Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

• 28:42Speaker 03

  My fact this week is that nobody knows why paracetamol works.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 28:49Speaker 03

  It's just weird, isn't it?

• 28:50Speaker 02

  I can't believe it.

• 28:51Speaker 03

  It just, just works, just don't ask questions.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  There are boffins out there, they must have.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Have they not asked the boffins at fun.com?

• 28:59Speaker 03

  They've forgotten to ask all the toymakers, maybe they can figure it out.

• 29:04Speaker 03

  They're next door, don't confuse them. Yeah, I find this amazing, so we know very much how other painkillers work. Ibuprofen and aspirin block this enzyme called the COX enzyme. So they are indeed COX blockers, but paracetamol does seem to do something to the COX enzymes, but it doesn't stop any signals getting to the brain. Someone else said that it seems to activate cannabinoid receptors, so that maybe reduces the subjective experience of pain. It activates a capsaicin receptor, and you know, sometimes people rub capsaicin on things, even though chili also makes you feel pain as a handy nose, so.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Well, they always say with capsaicin, they always say, oh, we've just discovered this hottest chili in the world, which is hot enough to kill 200 people with one suck. And then they go, but it might be used to stop people from getting pain in the future, don't they? They always say that.

• 29:56Speaker 03

  They do, they do, I'm going to try paracetamol first. But yeah, we just really don't know why.

• 30:02Dan Schreiber?

  Is it possible that this is the most insane placebo that no one has called out?

• 30:07Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Well, I don't think it works, so.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Well, it doesn't work on everyone.

• 30:11Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  It only works on some.

• 30:12Dan Schreiber?

  It's not so.

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't work on everyone.

• 30:14Speaker 03

  On most people, right?

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Actually, quite a lot of people it doesn't work on, and that's one reason that a lot of doctors are starting to think maybe we shouldn't be giving it to people. Because it has side effects in small cases, like it can cause internal bleeding and it can cause different things if you take too much of it. And for some people, it just doesn't work. And so those people for whom it doesn't work might start taking more and more of it because it's not working. And they're the ones who might be susceptible to the side effects.

• 30:40Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Can we talk about the guy who first synthesized it? We think he was the first to synthesize it, there may have been one French chemist earlier, but this guy was Harmon Northrop Morse, great name.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  So good.

• 30:53Speaker 01

  Two great names, three actually, Harmon, I want to first do no harm on.

• 30:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  So he came up with it in 1878, synthesized it, but then he had a colleague called Joseph von Mering, who claimed that maybe it might do some damage. And there were a couple of other painkillers on the market at the time, and those were chosen over paracetamol. And for the next 70 years, nobody took paracetamol, until the 50s, when a couple of other teams tried it and found that the other medicines, the ones that had been chosen, were not terribly good for you. And in fact, they were basically converted into paracetamol inside you. Those were just sort of pro drugs. You took those, in your body, they turn into paracetamol, and then that does actually give you the benefit of the pain relief.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Von Mering found it in people's urine who had taken one of those other drugs. I think that's right. So he, people have been taking this other drug, and then he was going through their piss for some reason.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Going through their piss.

• 31:55Dan Schreiber?

  In the piss bin.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Not sure exactly why he was doing that. I guess he probably had some reason. But then I think he found paracetamol in people who'd taken it. And the other one that were taking was called phenacetin.

• 32:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  And phenacetin, I think, caused some problems. Turned you blue, didn't it? It turned you blue.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  It did. So there was like a precursor to paracetamol, which turns you blue because it stops oxygen being able to combine with your hemoglobin.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  Sounds bad.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  But really quickly after this, they managed to create something very similar that didn't do that. But everyone was like, oh, I think it might have the blue thing still.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  How blue did you go?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  Just, you know, like you're really cold.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  Like a Smurf.

• 32:30Dan Schreiber?

  Like Smurf level.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Well, again.

• 32:34Speaker 01

  The Smurfs actually had just taken this drug, that's the thing.

• 32:37Speaker 02

  Same with that guy from I465, that song.

• 32:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Blue Dabba D.

• 32:41Dan Schreiber?

  Blue Dabba D and the Blue Man Group. Are they just all on that medicine?

• 32:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  So warning about phenacetin.

• 32:47Dan Schreiber?

  You do feel like Eddie Goldfarb could do something with that to turn that into a Halloween thing that you'd have, you know?

• 32:53Speaker 02

  What's actually happening here is Dan is testing out one of his new toy ideas. And when we didn't really respond to it, I think he's going to go back to the drawing board.

• 33:02Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, it's cool. I've got other ideas. I've got other ideas.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  So guys, so guys at WAMO, I've got this great idea. We give people this medicine, which may or may not be really bad for them.

• 33:13Dan Schreiber?

  We're not sure.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  But they turn blue.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  But with the right packaging, move it from the chemistry aisle to the toy aisle, you've got something there.

• 33:22Speaker 01

  Paracetamol.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  It's another accidental invention as well, another favourite. One of the times that it was discovered, this was in the 1880s, again, and then it was sort of undiscovered, were two people, Khan and Hep, who, they had a patient, they were doctors, they had a patient with intestinal worms, and they actually ordered some napthaline, which is what mothballs are made of.

• 33:44Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 33:44Speaker 03

  So they basically ordered mothballs from the chemist.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  I'm afraid you've got mothballs. Is it like tennis elbow? Brilliant.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah. So they all.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Your stand-up is just telling a joke and then saying brilliant straight after it.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Don't rumble me 12 years in.

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Mothballs is where your testicles just flatter towards any nearby light source. It's very painful.

• 34:10Dan Schreiber?

  Through your clothes, isn't it?

• 34:15Speaker 03

  So no, it wasn't that. Um.

• 34:18Speaker 02

  It is an old joke, that, isn't it? It's like, my clothes are getting eaten. Have you tried mothballs? Well, I tried, but I couldn't get the little legs out.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Now say brilliant.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, there we go.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, made it better. So mothballs.

• 34:37Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, come on, we can do this.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, we can. They ordered mothballs to cure intestinal worms, and the chemist sent them the wrong thing. The chemist accidentally sent them acetanilide, which is kind of like paracetamol. And it didn't get rid of the intestinal worm, but it did bring down his fever. So they said, oh, great stuff. And they went back to the chemist to be like, so you gave us those mothballs? Wow. And the chemist went, do you know what? I've just checked the packets and I sent you completely the wrong thing.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Right. Paracetamol could be useful, I think, in a children's birthday party. Riddle me this.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  Okay. Children are very loud. They shout a lot. Afterwards, you'll have a headache.

• 35:15Dan Schreiber?

  James's party bags are really questionable, aren't they?

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Call pull all round.

• 35:22Dan Schreiber?

  You should have a paracetamol, a fake shit.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Before the party, so when you're getting the party ready.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. So what do you need? Do you need balloons? You need?

• 35:33Speaker 02

  Keep going down that track.

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Pin the tail on the donkey.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Keep going down the balloon track.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Do you need balloons? You need to buy the balloons.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  Does it give you more breath?

• 35:40Speaker 02

  It doesn't give you more breath, but it increases your risk-taking behaviour. So they did an experiment where they gave some people paracetamol and some people didn't. And then they did something called the balloon test. And in the balloon test, you keep blowing up a balloon until you think, this is the time I have to stop because if I don't stop now, it's going to explode. And the people who took the paracetamol would blow it bigger than the people who didn't take it because they're less risk averse.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  When you go to a kid's party, do you really judge it if the balloons aren't big enough?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  I think kids do. Like when I've blown up, if I've blown up balloons for my daughter and her friend, and one of them gets a bigger balloon than the other, that's the end of the day.

• 36:19Speaker 03

  Really good point. Does it mean more explode in your face, though?

• 36:23Speaker 02

  It does.

• 36:23Speaker 03

  It does, but worth it for the big balloons.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  By the time you take the paracetamol, you can't feel it anyway.

• 36:28Dan Schreiber?

  So you're saying we're more brave generally with paracetamol in us than not?

• 36:32Speaker 02

  Exactly. Reduced anxiety, more risk-taking behaviour.

• 36:35Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 36:36Speaker 03

  It does seem to have this amazing emotional effect, doesn't it? Which lots of little studies have shown, so scientists aren't totally sure yet. But, I mean, it's coming up a lot. And a reduction of empathy, people are quite worried about.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  And I liked it. There was another study where the title was, anxious about life and afraid of death, paracetamol may do the trick. Which is nice because we all fall into that category, right? And this was a study that made some people watch a David Lynch series called Rabbits and other people not.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  And then they made both sets assign fines to certain crimes that they'd seen. And if they'd taken paracetamol, they were more lenient with the fines. Incredibly confusing study setup.

• 37:17Speaker 01

  Very weird.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  So they gave. It almost seems like the movie is.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  Irrelevant.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  Irrelevant.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yes, but yet they're saying that we're trying to induce this terror of death and this existential fear. So we're going to give you paracetamol, make you watch rabbits, and then see how lenient you are on the fines, like whether you've got this existential fear that makes you harsher.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  But the other thing about David Lynch movies is they're completely impossible to understand.

• 37:36Dan Schreiber?

  I, I'm sorry, I actually think you're mixing up the directors. I think it was David Leitch, who is part of the Alfred Hedgehog world of directors.

• 37:46Speaker 03

  So much less cute.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Steven Spielcow.

• 37:53Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 37:58Speaker 01

  Um, this is, that is interesting. And if you, if your partner has a headache and you're worried you might get a sympathy headache because you're a very empathetic person.

• 38:06Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:07Speaker 01

  You should take paracetamol. So, so, because it, it can dull your ability to feel pain.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  What are you on about? If your partner gets a headache, you go, when you're going to your wife, shall we have sex? She's like, oh no, I've got a headache. You're like, yeah, me too, me too.

• 38:21Dan Schreiber?

  I'm so run down. I think I need a holiday on my own. Do you know what? I'll take that for you, actually. That's probably going to fix it.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  The idea is it dulls your ability to feel pain in others. You know, we're talking about feeling sympathetic pain, which some people do. Paracetamol apparently tamps that down.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  So if you've only got one left in the packet and your wife has a headache, what are you going to say?

• 38:41Speaker 01

  It should be for me. We don't want this catching. Can I quickly tell you about the largest aspirin transfer in history? This is so exciting because it's friend of the podcast, the Treaty of Versailles. Do you know about this? Bayer, the drug company, German, owned the patent for aspirin. And as part of the reparations for the First World War, they had to give over the trademark to Britain, France and Russia between them. And they also had to give a quarter of all aspirin to the Allies.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  No way.

• 39:14Speaker 01

  A quarter of all aspirin made was just given to the, the allied powers. Isn't that weird?

• 39:19Speaker 02

  Actually, just on the war, on, well, another war, only because I'm just looking through my notes now. Do you remember, Anna, you mentioned about the two students who thought they were giving napthaline to someone but gave them this other precursor to paracetamol?

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:35Speaker 02

  Their professor, who organised the experiment, was called Adolf Kusmel, one of the only Adolfs I've heard of outside of Hitler.

• 39:45Dan Schreiber?

  And Harpo.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  And Goldfarb.

• 39:47Dan Schreiber?

  And Goldfarb.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  It's actually in the top 10 boys' names this year, so.

• 39:53Dan Schreiber?

  I do, I checked my phone to make sure I wasn't making this up. But if you, when we were naming my first son, Wilf, when we were looking for names, I have a book at home, which is Boys' Names, and Adolf is a suggestion in there.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Is it a comprehensive list of names, if you like? Has it got thousands in there?

• 40:07Speaker 02

  Thousand and one names.

• 40:08Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, for boys. I'm just surprised that it's still in there as an option for any.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  Was it published in like 1919? Or?

• 40:16Dan Schreiber?

  No, it was a modern book. It was a modern book.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  Do you reckon they had a thousand and one? And they're like, oh, we should get rid of Adolf. They're like, yeah, but we can't think of any more. We're going to have to change the name of the book.

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Do they have notes next to it? You know, when you have the meanings of names? Do they have, you know, this, the origin of this is it means away from harm. P.S. Sometimes associated with.

• 40:37Speaker 02

  They should do that, shouldn't they, in those baby name books? And they should also put things that it can rhyme with that people might say in the playground.

• 40:44Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, exactly. They should, like when you go to a.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Quite a good one for that because you can't rhyme too much with Adolf as in.

• 40:50Dan Schreiber?

  Adolf, yeah.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  There aren't very many natural rhymes for that. So in fact, it's quite a good name to call your son, yes, in playground terms.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:57Speaker 01

  There's no way anyone will find a way of bullying.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  It's actually amazing that Hitler got so angry later in life when he probably wasn't bullied at school.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:10Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

• 41:14Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that in order to prepare the national dish of Ghana, you need to vigorously pound your fufu for at least 20 minutes.

• 41:23Speaker 01

  You don't know, since you sent this fact around to the four of us, James, how often I've said to my wife, I suppose you care to prepare the national dish of Ghana.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Sorry, I've got a headache. Yeah, me too, me too.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  It's a brilliant chat up line.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  I'm so sorry. I mean, it's very childish, but.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Sometimes you seem like you're the mature one of the show and then sometimes you send this around and you think, he's a child.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  I am mature and age only.

• 41:50Speaker 01

  Pound your fufu.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  So I was reading the Oxford Companion to Food about yams for the Y series of QI.

• 41:57Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  And in that book, which is a very venerable book about encyclopedia of food, it does say to make fufu, the boiled yam must be vigorously pounded for 20 minutes. And I just read that and thought, well, we definitely have to run that. I'm not certain we'll get it on to QI, so I thought we might have to do it on here instead.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  But James, you can't blame the book unless it put a smiley winky face after that. The book is just telling you the fact. It's you that suggested that it's very funny. I'm not blaming the Oxford Companion.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Are you saying it's not funny, Anna, the idea of vigorously pounding your fufu for 20 minutes?

• 42:31Speaker 03

  I'm saying the author of the Oxford Companion to Food not be accused of finding it funny.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Is it Alan Davidson?

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Alan Davidson.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  He's brilliant.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  He is a brilliant writer and I always read that book with a slight wink anyway. Cause I think he's such a great writer.

• 42:45Speaker 01

  It's so good.

• 42:45Speaker 03

  They are amazing.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  They are amazing articles. But yeah, the, um, the other thing that I found is that you use a fufu pestle to make it. So it's like, um, you know, like a mortar and pestle that you might have in your house. It's like that, but the, the sticky bit is three feet in length. Uh, and the bowly bit is obviously a bit wider than a normal mortar and pestle.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  So you put it on the floor, don't you? I mean, which makes sense in a lot of contexts, maybe in Ghana, but like here, it's strange to put your pestle on the floor.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, you wouldn't do that unless you were a borrower in this country. But this is to make fufu and fufu is not the official national dish of Ghana because they don't have one, but widely considered amongst Ghana's people to be so. And it is also across the whole of Africa, really.

• 43:30Speaker 03

  West, West Africa. Yeah. Yeah. Like so Ghana, Nigeria.

• 43:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  My friend did say that, um, she makes it a lot and said that it's a massive workout. And also she said, and she's Nigerian, but it is very widely eaten Nigeria as well. She said, you often need to throw out the pot after you've made it because it's super sticky.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  What?

• 43:49Speaker 03

  So I don't know how many of us are, I'll get, I'll follow up. I don't know how many pots she's going through on a monthly basis, but yeah.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  So fufu is the end product. That's the pounded boiled yam.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Or it could be various different things as well. It's not always just yam. Sometimes it's cassava and sometimes it's something else.

• 44:09Dan Schreiber?

  Right. I read that when you eat it, you would go in with your hands and rip off a bit of it. And you put it in your mouth and you just swallow it down, much like an oyster maybe, or a paracetamol pill.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  And you often, um, speaking to someone who's saying he, his family always throws it in the air, which I think is common, like you throw it and you roll it into a ball, you toss it in the air and then you catch it. Quite fun. We should start doing that more with food and a bit like pancakes, I suppose. Um, and then you make a little hole in it with your thumb so you can scoop up soup and eat it. But yeah, swallowing it down. So you, and they're quite big, the bits that you have. So don't chew.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  So yams.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Now these are not sweet potatoes and I think in the USA, there's a bit of lexical confusion. But I've got to say, I did think a yam was one thing and like, how wrong was I?

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Oh, there are so many yams.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  There are 870 odd species of yam, many toxic, many edible.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 45:04Speaker 01

  So.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Take your chances.

• 45:06Speaker 01

  I think that's very interesting. Um, yeah. And lots of non actual yams get referred to as yams.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  It just gets used to refer to quite a lot of starchy tubers.

• 45:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So in America, it is sweet potato they're talking about when they say yams.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  But they're not botanically yams.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  That's not the yam species. Exactly. Yeah.

• 45:22Speaker 03

  No.

• 45:23Speaker 01

  But in lots of African languages, the word for to eat is basically the same as yam, just to indicate how significant a staple crop it is and has been historically for loads of people.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Millions of people. Yeah.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  I actually bizarrely just read Things Fall Apart, um, which is a seminal piece of African literature written in the 50s, but set in Nigeria in the late 19th century. And yams are the king. So the main character in Things Fall Apart, Okonkwo, is like, it's a male crop. Women can go near cocoa yams and cassava, but yams are the male crop because you have to know so much about the soil to be able to get it right. And you have to constantly kind of be pruning it properly. And you have the big yam festival where you always give the biggest yam to the god that you're worshipping. And they talked about a really strange tribe where everything is upside down. And it's the men who pound fufu for their wives.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Right. Lot of yam festivals around across Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire as well. And Ghana, obviously, as we've mentioned. So in Cote d'Ivoire, I read this. Sometimes a funeral or burial will have to be delayed until the yam festival is over. Cause that takes priority, way more important.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  It's kind of understandable, isn't it? If it's your main source of calories.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I suppose so.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  You're probably gonna have to do your harvesting before anything else happens.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  You'd think you could knock off a half an hour, have the funeral, the burial, then back to harvesting fufu.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  Maybe.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  Dig, dig the hole to harvest, put the person in the hole.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, perfect. They're about the same weight, a really big yam.

• 46:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  Really big yam. But the people who are good at digging have to do one or the other, really.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Oh, I see what you mean. Oh, okay. That's very logical. Sorry, Derek's family, but we can't bury him because we're digging up yam.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  Have you seen the yam barns?

• 47:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  So you harvest all your yams and then they can last for, you know, eight, nine months. But you have to store them and aerate them properly and they build barns out of yams. I was watching a YouTube video called the largest yam barn in the world where a guy is showing you around his yam barns. It's like a shop. So people are coming and this woman's like, and what's this? And he's like, this is more yams. And then he walks down a corridor and the whole, all the walls are made of yam. And she's like, and what's this one? He's like, yeah, yeah, it's more yams. Yeah. And the whole thing just looks identical yams to me. She's going, and this one? He's like, yeah, it's more yams.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Is this yam jenga that people play?

• 47:46Speaker 03

  It's yam jenga. Yes.

• 47:49Speaker 02

  That's cool. They have those in the Trobriand Islands as well, which is near Papua New Guinea. They're yam houses, but you don't put your own yams in. You would only put yams that someone else has given to you into your yam house. Because the Trobriand culture is more like people giving things to each other. Like you wouldn't eat your own stuff that you found. You would give that to someone else. They would give it to you. And it sort of makes the society more cohesive.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Well, as long as you've grown good yams. I'd feel a bit embarrassed if I found a really bad yam or someone was giving me terrific yams. If you're moving into a house, do you sort of scope out the neighbors and see how their yam plot looks?

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I suppose you would.

• 48:29Speaker 03

  Have to, wouldn't you?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  Because you want, you don't want, you know, some, to move in next to someone useless.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  That's like, instead of looking up the good schools in the area, that's what they do in the Trobriand Islands.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, the good yam guides. You are growing your yams privately. No, just going to use state yams. Yeah, yeah.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  In the Trobriand Islands, the yam harvest is so important that everyone would get involved. And then at the end of it, you would have a big old party, which usually had lots of either sex or warfare.

• 48:56Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, how did you decide? Was that like stone?

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Like scissors.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  Flip a yam, flip a yam. Yeah. Uh, and so when colonialists and missionaries all came in and saw this was happening and didn't think much of it, they brought cricket. And so now what often happens is they do the yam festival. And then after that, they have a massive cricket match. And it's one of these sort of cricket matches, which has like 50 people on each side and loads of dancing and parades and all that kind of stuff.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  Sounds nice.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  And also cricket bat would be quite good for pounding your fufu, wouldn't it?

• 49:27Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 49:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. Ages ago, we mentioned yams and the fact that there is a suggestion that if you want to have twins, you should eat a lot of yams. And there's a town in Nigeria where supposedly it's the highest rate of twin births in the world. And they even have a sign saying that as you go in. But the flip side of that is the first contraceptive pill that was developed, which was never commercially used, but it was developed, was made using Mexican yams. So this was a, this is a doctor in Mexico City in the 1940s. He used the yams to thicken the mucus of the cervix to stop the sperm from reaching the egg. So that's exactly what it did. But he couldn't work out how to commercialize it.

• 50:08Speaker 02

  You can't just put it up your fufu, can you?

• 50:12Dan Schreiber?

  It's recommended. Yeah. Then someone else got there first, but he managed it. Yeah.

• 50:17Speaker 03

  So cool.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  And you mentioned lots of different types of yam, the cheeky yam they quite like.

• 50:24Speaker 02

  This is one that you get in Australia, also known as the air potato. Uh, and it's cheeky because it's toxic unless you prepare it correctly.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  That is cheeky.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  I don't think it's like death toxic. I think it's like barf toxic. Unless you have too much of it presumably, but you slice it into, yeah, you slice it into tiny slices and you run it underwater. Uh, and the traditional way to prepare it is by slicing it with a kangaroo's shoulder blade.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Blimey.

• 50:53Dan Schreiber?

  Maybe, maybe that's the secret ingredient in the fake barf. Someone just lobs in a couple of those yams.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  A couple of cheeky yams.

• 50:59Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  Do you have to pound the fufu to detoxify it? Is it that it can be harmful if you don't prepare it properly?

• 51:07Speaker 02

  The ones, these ones in West Africa, I think it's just to get the right consistency on it.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Cassava, which is often also what's used to make fufu, is toxic. A lot of cassava is toxic and to different levels. So bitter cassava is toxic. So I, I'm just impressed that people confidently cook with it all the time, um, which they do. Because some of it you have to leave to soak for, you know, a day, two days to make sure you detoxify it. Otherwise you get cyanide and you're poisoned.

• 51:34Speaker 02

  I always thought it was mad that you can buy cassava in the UK.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Where most people probably wouldn't know how to prepare it.

• 51:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:41Speaker 02

  Like, I always think that's crazy.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  And you can buy it in its toxic form is what we're saying.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know, but I only learned that it was toxic a few years ago and then saw it at the shop and thought, is that wise?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  But they sell raw chicken in shops, don't they? And I have that every day and I'm fine.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  I found a claim that they can be 45 feet long, which I just think must be absolutely copper bottomed rubbish.

• 52:04Speaker 03

  A yam?

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:05Speaker 03

  You, they must mean four to five feet.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  I think there was a decimal place, a decimal point, let's see, I think, because, and then the weights, you get some pretty, I was trying to find, you know, you know, researching these facts, like biggest yam, oldest yam.

• 52:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Second World War yam.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  The oldest yam, because we do on this show talk about the oldest ham quite a lot.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. Old friend of the podcast.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  Well, I found a few different claims. One claim, which was printed in New Scientist, which is a very reputable publication, right? In 2001, they printed a claim that the elephant's foot yam.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Which is a variety found in South East Asia, can weigh up to 300 kilos.

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  And again, I'm a little bit skeptical, because I just think that's an awful lot.

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Not.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Some of them can be over 100 kilos, which is quite enough, you know?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  300 kilos must be not far off what the four of us together weigh.

• 53:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:04Speaker 02

  For one yam.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  For one yam.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  Feels a bit toppy.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. How would you, I mean, you need a huge frying pan, don't you? How are you cooking that?

• 53:11Speaker 02

  Well, you might cut it into smaller pieces.

• 53:14Speaker 03

  That's a good point.

• 53:15Speaker 01

  All right, chef. Anthony Bourdain over here's lowering us with his technique.

• 53:21Speaker 02

  The calendar in Fiji, five of the 11 months are named after things you can do with a yam.

• 53:28Speaker 01

  Are they in the picture as well?

• 53:31Speaker 03

  This is in the naughty calendar section.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Do you do those things in those months?

• 53:37Speaker 02

  Yes, you do. So it's like clearing the land for planting yams and the month when young yam plants are ready to be tied with reeds to get the vines to grow upwards.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  Eury. But it's basically, that's the traditional calendar, of course. It's not the one that everyone hangs up on the wall. But apparently in Fiji, you deliberately plant your yams in very bad soil because there's a belief that it's like a sporting vegetable and it'll grow better if you give it a challenge.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  That's terrific.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Weird idea.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Oh, weird.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  I think that's a nice idea, though.

• 54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's really cool.

• 54:14Speaker 03

  October, maybe.

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Really good.

• 54:17Speaker 02

  Really good.

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Really good.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Can I say one last thing about Ghana, because we might not be in these parts again for another while? So nearly 4% of Ghana is covered by the world's largest artificial lake, right?

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  That's largest by area, not by volume, of course. But it's a huge amount of it. I mean, it's 3,000 square miles more than, it's a big artificial lake. Right. It's used for hydroelectricity and it is called Lake Volta. Now, why do you think it's called Lake Volta?

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Well, the Volta River is in Ghana, right? Isn't it named after the river?

• 54:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's named after the river. I was hoping someone would say it's named after Count Alessandro Volta, who of course was the electricity pioneer, because it's a hydroelectric lake.

• 54:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I see.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  But James, with his excellent knowledge of rivers, has absolutely torpedoed this one.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  To be fair, that's quite, it would have been quite a stretch to get Alessandro Volta, I reckon.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  I'm just impressed that you got the River Volta.

• 55:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, maybe.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  There are no wrong answers in this quiz.

• 55:16Speaker 02

  It's a great quiz. Well, you were hoping that it was a thing that sounds like it's named after a person, but it's actually named after, so it's a reverse.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 55:25Speaker 02

  Second book.

• 55:25Speaker 01

  I'm already working on the second book.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  They're trying to trick us.

• 55:28Speaker 01

  Very nice.

• 55:33Dan 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 podcast, we're all online. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram, Andy at AndrewHunterM, James?

• 55:46Speaker 02

  NoSuchThing is James Harkin.

• 55:48Dan Schreiber?

  And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna, where do they go?

• 55:51Speaker 03

  At NoSuchThing on Instagram or podcast at qi.com for email.

• 55:54Dan Schreiber?

  That's right. Podcast at qi.com is the most important destination for you if you want to be part of the show. And you've got two options. One is if you send us in a great fact, we're going to pick those out and bring them to our bonus Monday show, which is called Little Fish. We love reading out your facts, do send them in. Or if you've got some extra information, if we've said something in the show you want to tell us more about, an experience you've had, maybe you grow yams, tell us and we will bring that. To drop us a line, which is our bonus secret show, you've got to be a member of our secret club, which is called Club Fish. And you can get to that by going to patreon.com/clubfish. We have a lot of extras there, it's a really fun place, so join the club now. Otherwise, just come back next week, because we are going to be back with another show.

• 56:36Dan Schreiber?

  Thank you as ever to Ling Li, Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the larger Fishbuster gang, and we'll see you next week. Goodbye.