No Such Thing As Tibetan Traitors

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss Churchill, Clowns and Christopher Columbus. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 cheap charity, a Carnival Cruise vacation, gift cards from DoorDash and Best Buy. You'll then play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  No purchase necessary. 50 US and DC age 18 plus. See playatmcd.com for rules and playatmcd.com/amoe for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chess card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.

• 0:30Speaker 02

  Hi, everybody. Andy and Dan here, and we have an announcement to make before the show begins.

• 0:34Dan Schreiber?

  That's right. In just a few weeks, I, Dan, will be on tour around the UK with my first solo live show in over a decade.

• 0:43Speaker 04

  Sounds amazing.

• 0:44Dan Schreiber?

  Well, it's gonna be great. It's called This Changes Everything. It is an hour and 20 minutes.

• 0:49Speaker 04

  It's not 20.

• 0:50Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, there's an interval between the first 20, then you get an hour, and it's gonna be packed with all of the stuff that I love. You know, all the weird stories. I've got amazing facts, weird red string theories, anecdotes about my life and your life, Andy.

• 1:03Speaker 04

  About me?

• 1:04Dan Schreiber?

  A lot about you in the show.

• 1:06Speaker 04

  Loads of personal stuff.

• 1:07Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 1:07Speaker 04

  So I'm gonna be there.

• 1:08Dan Schreiber?

  You're gonna be there. I'd love for all of you listening to be there as well. If you like fish, I promise you, you're gonna love this. It's packed with facts. It's packed with jokes. October 11th is when the tour kicks off. I'm in Edinburgh, then the 12th, I'm in Newcastle, 16th in Birmingham, 17th in Cardiff, and then just go to thischangeseverything.co.uk to find out all about November, because I'll be going across the rest of the UK then.

• 1:29Speaker 04

  It's gonna be wonderful, guys. If you like anything you've heard on this show over the last 12 years, you're gonna like this show. You get to hang out with Dan.

• 1:36Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, and I will be hanging out after the show, by the way.

• 1:38Speaker 04

  Dan promises.

• 1:39Dan Schreiber?

  And it's like 20 quid. It's 20 quid, guys. Come along.

• 1:42Speaker 02

  We're all getting our tickets, the other three of us. It's gonna be terrific fun. Go to thischangeseverything.co.uk.

• 1:48Speaker 04

  Just think, 2015, that's when things started going wrong in this country. When you stopped touring.

• 1:52Dan Schreiber?

  There you go. Let's fix the UK, everyone. 100 seater room at a time. Okay, on with the podcast.

• 1:59Speaker 04

  On with the show.

• 2:14Dan 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 Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Tashinsky and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

• 2:38Speaker 05

  My fact this week is that paramedics in Japan have asked people to stop rearranging their shoes when they take them off at the door.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  How are they rearranging them? Is it in size order or all the lefts and then all the right?

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Because that's how we do it in our house, yeah?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  That's what I've heard. That's good.

• 2:58Speaker 05

  It's for convenience, usually. So this was an Instagram video that was put out by the fire department in the city of Kanazawa. And they were saying that, of course, in Japan, you take your shoes off at the door, basically everywhere you go, if you're going to someone's house. And the polite thing to do is to rearrange people's shoes so that when they're leaving, they can put them on easily. So you'd rearrange people's shoes so that they're facing outwards, so that you could almost just walk out of the door and just step outwards without even looking down.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  Sounds nice.

• 3:28Dan Schreiber?

  It sounds nice.

• 3:29Speaker 04

  Lovely.

• 3:29Dan Schreiber?

  It sounds perfect.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  It sounds clever. If I'm a paramedic and I'm taking someone out on a stretcher, I want to be able to step into my shoes and walk out the door.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  But what way? Are your feet facing?

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Not if you're the one who's walking backwards on the stretcher.

• 3:39Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, is that the reason?

• 3:41Speaker 05

  That's the reason. And they arrange their shoes, as they show in this video, very specifically, so that when they are carrying a stretcher out, one of them steps in sideways, one of them might be going backwards. And then, you know, that polite bloody do-gooder whose husband's just collapsed upstairs starts rearranging the shoes.

• 3:57Dan Schreiber?

  They can lose 30 seconds if they come out and someone's rearranged their shoes.

• 4:00Speaker 04

  30 seconds here or there.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Wait, that's hard to tell, right? Yeah. Okay, it's very sensible. I've visited Japan once or twice, and the shoe thing is, you know, it's really real. And normally, there's a lowered bit where you leave your shoes, and then you step up into the room, which I just think is so nice.

• 4:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, the genkun.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, yeah. Have you, James, because you've been as well? Did you experience toilet slippers? Love those. Love those.

• 4:24Dan Schreiber?

  I love the idea of them. I've never been to Japan, so I've never had the whole slipper situation.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  You get to someone's house, you're going for dinner or whatever. You leave your shoes, you put on your house slippers that they've provided for you.

• 4:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 4:34Speaker 02

  Then you need to go to the loo. So you go to the loo, you step out of your house slippers into the toilet slippers.

• 4:40Speaker 04

  The ones you're allowed to pee on.

• 4:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 4:45Dan Schreiber?

  I just call those my shoes.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  And then you go to the loo and you change out of your toilet slippers into your house slippers, and then eventually out of your house slippers into your shoes.

• 4:52Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, can I ask you a question then? Because you both have experienced it. Anna, have you been to Japan?

• 4:55Speaker 05

  I have not.

• 4:56Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, we've all got different sized feet. Does every house have the equivalent of bowling shoes at a bowling alley?

• 5:02Speaker 02

  No, there's a counter and someone takes your measurements, and there's one of those little machines you stick your foot in.

• 5:07Speaker 04

  And they spray some weird stuff in them to get rid of your verrucas or whatever.

• 5:10Dan Schreiber?

  That's what I assume, yeah.

• 5:11Speaker 04

  No, like, they're more like flip-flops that one size fits all a little bit.

• 5:15Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Because you're not walking far inside the loo.

• 5:18Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 5:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:19Speaker 05

  And we have a range of slippers for guests in our house. And the thing is, the good thing is, Dan, that humans don't have a giant range of foot sizes. So it's not like some people's feet are 2 centimeters and some people's feet are a meter long. In the end, if you've got, for women, sizes 5 and 6 covered, and for men, sizes 10 and 11, you've bought enough, and that's what we have.

• 5:37Dan Schreiber?

  What if a clown's coming to stay?

• 5:40Speaker 05

  We never invite them around for that reason.

• 5:42Dan Schreiber?

  There's one other interesting thing about the toilet slippers, and I wonder if you both experienced this, is if you're staying in a dorm situation where the bathroom is outside, a lot of Japanese toilets, they don't actually have locks on them, from what I've read. And the slippers act as a lock, because when you're walking towards them, when you see the house slippers outside, you know someone's inside, and so not to rattle the door.

• 6:02Speaker 04

  That's clever.

• 6:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, so that's your way of saying this is occupied.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm sorry to say that I only stayed in places that had their own toilet, so.

• 6:10Speaker 05

  You didn't use many outdoor toilets.

• 6:12Speaker 04

  I know, I know, I'm a bit hoity-toity these days.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Apparently, a big faux pas is when you get back to the dinner table and everyone looks at your feet and you realise you've left your toilet slippers on.

• 6:23Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's bad.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  That is embarrassing. Very cringe.

• 6:26Speaker 05

  Well, speaking of locked doors, I'm surprised that Japan doesn't have more of a security problem, because all of their doors, as you guys maybe noticed, all of their front doors open outwards. And that's because if you opened inwards, you'd knock all the shoes in the indoor porch out of place. But that must be a problem, because I was looking at some locksmith's websites, and the reason our doors open inwards is so that you can have the hinge on the inside. Otherwise, you can just take the hinge off and remove the door and get into the house.

• 6:54Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 6:55Speaker 05

  So I don't know how Japan does it. There's a lot of chat about them having burglar-proof hinges, but.

• 7:00Speaker 04

  You go to a lot of the places, and it's like the walls are made of paper, anyway. It's like, you don't really matter about the door. You could just walk through the wall quite a lot of the time.

• 7:09Speaker 05

  Those are human-shaped holes.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:11Speaker 02

  Can I just have a little guess?

• 7:13Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  As to whether everyone here is a shoes-on or shoes-off-in-the-house person?

• 7:18Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  Anna just said their house is shoes-off, which you could have knocked me down with a feather. I'm staggered.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  I would have thought you were absolutely a shoes-on.

• 7:25Speaker 05

  Did I? I think I was talking about people generally.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Other people come around, they have to put slippers on, but you wear shoes on.

• 7:31Speaker 05

  Muddy boots, yeah. I put on the muddy boots as I walk in.

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Okay. I would say Dan is a shoe-on household person.

• 7:37Speaker 05

  Yeah. But he lives near the beach, and so that does risk getting even dirtier.

• 7:41Speaker 04

  Are you gonna tell us?

• 7:43Dan Schreiber?

  I know I reveal a lot about myself on this show, but this really feels quite personal information. I'm sorry. So I'm gonna plead the fifth on this one.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Go back to mentioning your sperm count.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Are you gonna have a guess on me?

• 7:57Speaker 02

  Shoes on, no doubt.

• 7:58Speaker 04

  Shoes on.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:59Speaker 04

  I am naturally a shoes-on person, but due to my wife being a shoes-off person, we are now shoes-off people.

• 8:06Speaker 05

  I would have said exactly that. I had that answer in my mind.

• 8:09Speaker 04

  Nice. It is a Russian thing, like shoes off, for sure, yeah.

• 8:13Dan Schreiber?

  Nice.

• 8:14Speaker 04

  I think quite often you can tell countries that have a lot of snow and stuff, or people traditionally would have had dirty shoes. It's more common, I think.

• 8:23Speaker 05

  Although, I would say it's way more common now than it was 20 years ago here. Much more common. This is just anecdotally, but everyone I know, pretty much, I'd take my shoes off in their house now. Whereas when I was a kid, if anyone had asked my mother to take her shoes off before walking in, she would have slammed the door in their face, and that's the end of the friendship.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  Would she slam it inwards or outwards?

• 8:42Speaker 04

  She would have taken the hinges off and whacked them over the head with the door.

• 8:47Speaker 05

  A strong woman. Your shoe's off, obviously. You're all clothes off, aren't you?

• 8:52Speaker 02

  You can't be too careful.

• 8:54Speaker 04

  I'm just gonna put on my toilet suit.

• 8:58Dan Schreiber?

  It's shoes on, clothes off. It's a weird, weird dinner parties at Andy's. Just back to your headline fact very quickly. A lot of people made the point, listen, if it's a paramedic coming in, I think maybe just keep the shoes on and get inside, right? Like, why are you losing time at all taking your shoes off? But there is precedence in Japan of people being hit as a result of coming in as a paramedic and not taking their shoe off.

• 9:21Speaker 04

  As in hit in the face because they've still got their shoes on?

• 9:24Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah. So there was a case in 2017, there was a 66-year-old man who complained of a pain in his leg. Paramedics came over, the guy didn't take his shoes off. He said, "What the hell are you doing?" Punched him in the face.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Then some more paramedics came in to get him. They didn't take their shoes off. And in the end, you've just got a pile of paramedics.

• 9:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I think they both got taken to hospital in the same ambulance and he got in big trouble. But he did have a sign saying, "No shoes in house" and he took it seriously. So.

• 9:50Speaker 05

  There you go.

• 9:51Dan Schreiber?

  Maybe, maybe that's why they do it.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  That's very funny. Japan is quite particular in lots of ways. It's obviously a very, very mannered society with lots of different layers of politeness. And shoes are a big thing. I wonder if you guys remember, there was a thing that might have got into a book of the year. We used to write the books of the year about all the interesting stuff. And in 2018, there was a huge cultural ding dong. When the then and current Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu served the Japanese Prime Minister, who was then Shinzo Abe. Do you remember this? Dessert in a shoe.

• 10:25Speaker 05

  Oh, yes. I do remember this.

• 10:27Speaker 02

  This was a huge faux pas. Not the worst thing Netanyahu's done, but it is a deeply insulting thing to do, basically.

• 10:33Speaker 04

  Was it a pastry mistranslation?

• 10:36Speaker 02

  I don't follow.

• 10:37Speaker 05

  Oh, true.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Very good. Sorry, that joke was actually, it was too good for me to laugh.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  It was a chocolate praline pudding and he served it in two pairs of men's brogues. And there's a picture of Shinzo Abe sitting there looking at this pudding in a shoe and thinking, this, in my culture, this is the most insulting thing you could do.

• 10:58Speaker 05

  But wait, I, sorry, can I just say that if I were served a pudding in a shoe, I would find it slightly odd? I don't think, it's not the kind of thing where you'd say to Shinzo Abe, "Oh, in the rest of the world, we always do this."

• 11:10Speaker 02

  Well, it's such a good point. I think it was a very posh chef who had been hired for the occasion.

• 11:14Speaker 04

  And what, run out of plates?

• 11:18Dan Schreiber?

  We spent all the money on the chef. We didn't have any crockery budget. What are we gonna do?

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Don't worry, I've got it.

• 11:26Speaker 04

  One thing that I associate Japan etiquette with is cleaning football stadiums. Have you seen this? It happened in the most recent World Cup, but it's happened for a while now.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  I think you've seen it, yeah.

• 11:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, so whenever Japan plays any football match, after the game, the fans always clean up the stadium after themselves. And they get a lot of plaudits from everyone else around the world saying, "Isn't that polite?" But in the Japanese press, they're not so happy about it because apparently Japanese men have one of the worst rankings in the world for doing household chores. So a lot of the newspapers, when they show these pictures of these guys cleaning up the stadiums, they're like, "Well, why aren't you cleaning your house?"

• 12:04Speaker 05

  I'm already burning with rage on behalf of the Japanese women opening that newspaper. Oh, you'll do it at the football, will you?

• 12:10Speaker 02

  When you're trying to impress the Belarusian fans, you do apparently know where a litter picker is. That's crazy. Yeah, that is crazy. That is so annoying.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, wow. I was reading a book of etiquette from Japan, but from 1911. And it was really interesting because it was actually very similar to what our etiquette might dictate with a few, well, a few quite revealing things that just shows police change. Like, one rule was that it is extremely rude to send a caller away when you're at home. As in someone who knocks on the door, that kind of caller. But some people decide whether they shall be at home or not only after they've heard the caller's name.

• 12:45Speaker 04

  Oh, that's good. Wink. So did they have to, when they ring the doorbell, did they have to say, "Andy calling"?

• 12:51Speaker 05

  I think you must have to, because yeah, you have given the game away, haven't you, when you say, "Who is it"?

• 12:57Speaker 02

  Well, obviously the answer is I put on a fake voice and I say, "It's Dan calling" and everyone, "Oh, come in, come in."

• 13:02Speaker 04

  Their jokes go, "Knock, knock. Who's there? Dan, I'm not home."

• 13:09Speaker 04

  There is a thing at the moment called nuikatsu, which is you get a cuddly toy and you take it with you to restaurants. And you sit on a chair next to you in the restaurant and it's common in Japan, or relatively common in Japan, I think. And the idea is you dress them up and then you take a photo of them. And what it means is you can have a photo of your food and your cuddly toy in the restaurant, which shows you were there, but you don't have to be in the photo. So like, let's say you worried about online security or whatever. You can't, it's like, almost like your alter ego.

• 13:45Dan Schreiber?

  It's like an avatar.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Like an avatar.

• 13:46Speaker 02

  Witness protection. You're worried about the Yakuza.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  It could be. You never know. But it's been banned in quite a lot of restaurants for etiquette reasons. Can you guess any reason?

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Might get gravy on it.

• 13:59Speaker 04

  Well, not really, though.

• 14:01Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 14:02Speaker 04

  But almost.

• 14:03Dan Schreiber?

  Takes up a seat. Annoying.

• 14:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it takes up space. Because if you're in a restaurant, which is not like private tables, most of them in Japan are, but sometimes you might have like counter service. It would be taking up one of the seats. But also, if you make a little dish for the toy, then you have to clean the dishes and all that kind of stuff. So it's a bit of extra work for the people.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Where old do people order crockery? Do they order like doll-sized crockery for their toy?

• 14:25Speaker 04

  Well, they'll put a little bit of food for the teddy so that they can have a photo with it and stuff.

• 14:29Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I guess the main reason not to would be that it's incredibly annoying for everyone else.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Well, it's not doing any harm.

• 14:35Dan Schreiber?

  It's quite nice if, if you are going into these spaces where it's, you know, one seat and someone sits next to you. It's a slightly nice way of just going, "I'd like a bit of steak, please."

• 14:43Speaker 04

  Because Dan normally puts his bag there.

• 14:46Speaker 05

  You draw a face on it, though, don't you?

• 14:49Speaker 04

  And the other reason is hygiene, because you're carrying the plushies outdoors. You might be taking a photo of it next to the Tokyo Tower or something. So it's been somewhere dirty and then you're putting it on tables and stuff.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  But you've been outdoors. You've been next to the Tokyo Tower, has it?

• 15:01Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. I actually leave my plushie outside the toilet and then I take out my piss plushie.

• 15:07Dan Schreiber?

  And that goes in with me.

• 15:09Speaker 04

  That's a very unusual nickname for your penis.

• 15:13Speaker 04

  It's small and soft and squishy.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  It's got a face on it.

• 15:26Dan Schreiber?

  Stop the podcast.

• 15:28Speaker 05

  Stop the podcast.

• 15:29Dan Schreiber?

  Hey, everyone. This week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Babbel. Anna, how many languages do you speak?

• 15:36Speaker 05

  Um, half a language, I would say.

• 15:38Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, but have you ever thought of learning 14 different languages?

• 15:43Speaker 05

  Um, that sounds like a bit much. How on earth could I go about it?

• 15:47Dan Schreiber?

  It's a thing called Babbel. This is an app that you can download onto your phone that allows you to learn up to 14 different languages with incredible ways of teaching you. Not the old school, just repeating what a teacher says, but you can do it through playing games. There's real-time feedback, keeps you motivated with personal learning plans, and it's curated by amazing language experts worldwide.

• 16:09Speaker 05

  Yes, that's right. It doesn't go for like cheap gimmicky stuff, like a lot of other language apps that really try to gamify it, but you don't learn anything. But it does make it really fun. And I lied before, I do speak half of English, but I am also loving learning Polish on Babbel. It's great. It simulates proper conversations. It gives you real-world examples of what you might want to say. Not the old dusty examples you might have had in your textbooks.

• 16:32Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly. And even if you're going overseas and you want to learn the basics so that you can come across as cultured and cool, then all you need to do is get this now. And you can do that by getting a limited special offer through us. Because if you go to babbel, that's B-A-B-B-E-L dot com forward slash fish, you are gonna get 60% off your subscription.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  That is right. Get 60% off at babbel dot com slash fish. That's your ticket to being cultured and cool. Rules and restrictions may apply. On with the show.

• 17:04Dan Schreiber?

  On with the podcast.

• 17:10Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

• 17:14Speaker 04

  Okay, my fact this week is that according to one theory, Christopher Columbus only existed for six years before he discovered the Americas.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Yes, this is my kind of fact.

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 17:28Speaker 04

  So obviously people were living in America for a long time, but this is the first European contact, or was it? Maybe the Norwegians got there. Let's not get into all that kind of stuff. We're talking about Christopher Columbus, 1492. And there is a theory that he was not really Christopher Columbus. He was a guy called Pedro Alvarez de Sutomayor, who was a very kind of important Spanish noble who disappeared around 1486. And at the same time, Columbus came into the historical record for the first time. We don't really have any history for him before then.

• 18:07Speaker 04

  And there's a lot of circumstantial evidence about it because, like, Columbus's texts, anything that he wrote, has this kind of Galician sort of, there's like a lot of words and phrases in there that are more associated with the Spanish areas. And he was given a coat of arms by the King of Spain, which incorporates some sort of golden bands that are part of the heraldry of this guy who disappeared. And there has been some recent studies where they dug up some relatives of this guy Sotomayor and did some genetic analysis and found that they were maybe direct ancestor of Christopher Columbus's family.

• 18:48Speaker 04

  That work has not been peer reviewed and I would say that the majority of people in the historical community do not agree with any of this stuff. But it is a relatively out-there theory.

• 18:58Dan Schreiber?

  I think it sounds sound. Case.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Close.

• 19:00Speaker 05

  To be honest, you persuaded me.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  It's because people, I guess the counter argument is, I suppose, oh, people, historical records are quite slim. So someone disappearing and someone else appearing around the same time is not the open and shut thing.

• 19:12Speaker 04

  Actually, weirdly, a bit like Shakespeare, we know more about Columbus than almost anyone else who was alive in that time.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 19:19Speaker 04

  The, the other side of the argument is Columbus said he was from Genoa.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Well, he would say, he would say that, wouldn't he?

• 19:25Speaker 04

  In his will, he said he was from Genoa. But then that document was shown in court a bit after he died. And some people say that maybe they fabricated it. Lots of people called him Genoese in his lifetime. A biography of his son said that he came from Genoese aristocracy. Now, we don't think he's from the aristocracy, but we think he's from Genoa.

• 19:46Speaker 05

  But I'm not buying any of that.

• 19:48Speaker 04

  No?

• 19:48Speaker 05

  No, because obviously he's got a reason to have abandoned who he formerly was. So he's lied about all of that stuff, hasn't he?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  He's done the paper trail. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  It's weird that I'm the one who gave this fact, but I'm the one arguing against it. But I think it's, it is a bit on the dodgy side, but who knows?

• 20:04Dan Schreiber?

  There's a similarity, you mentioned Shakespeare, where his name also just changes all the time. Columbus's name, you know, he'd be Christopherus de Colombo, you know, as, as one of the versions of his name. So he's muddying it himself. All people just liked having different names depending on their mood.

• 20:20Speaker 04

  I think it was just those different spellings and stuff, right?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  Yeah. Fun fact about Columbus.

• 20:24Speaker 04

  Go on.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Because there might be some less fun facts later on. I think it's important to have the case for the defence first. Um, his father owned a cheese stand, apparently.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Did he?

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and, and young, young Christopher worked at the cheese stand every now and again as, as a nipper.

• 20:40Speaker 05

  Good on him, having a little Saturday job in your teens. It's a good work ethic and that paid off, didn't it?

• 20:46Speaker 02

  Paid off in the end. But the weird thing was, his brother Bartholomew ran a cartography workshop, which I find very interesting, given that Columbus is associated with one of the most famous screw ups of a measurement on a map in recorded history.

• 21:00Speaker 05

  This is, he got very lucky, didn't he, Columbus? Because basically, everything that he thought was wrong about the world, he miscalculated the size of the earth by about fourfold, if you're talking about circumference. So he estimated a distance of 2,400 nautical miles to get to the Far East, which is where he thought he was going, famously. The actual distance is 10,600 nautical miles, if there was no Americas in the way. So that would have been an issue. There was no ship that could have carried enough supplies. No one could have got there. But it worked out, didn't it? Because he bumped into America.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  No one knew the size of the earth from the time of Ptolemy?

• 21:36Speaker 05

  That's what's so weird, yeah.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  The third century B.C. Oh, sorry, Eretostenes calculated the size of the earth and pretty much nailed it.

• 21:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  And then nearly 2,000 years later, Columbus says, I think I can improve on this, and just gets it wrong.

• 21:48Dan Schreiber?

  Were we sure he, like, were they sure he nailed it?

• 21:51Speaker 04

  I think, I think everyone accepted, because the way that he did it, if memory serves, is it was like shadows in different places and the...

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, the distance between the two and the sun, yeah, and the sun of, so like, that's an incredible piece of masterwork in the third century B.C. And for Columbus, like Columbus is the equivalent of a tinfoil hat person these days. He says, actually, the, he's like a flat, he's like a flat-earther these days.

• 22:13Dan Schreiber?

  But he kind of was, Andy, because he wrote a book of prophecies and he was largely guided by God. He thought we were living in apocalyptic times. He thought there was only about 150 years left after his mission.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  In fairness to the people who were living in America at the time, they were living in apocalyptic times.

• 22:29Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, absolutely. But he thought he was driven by God. So it almost didn't matter whether he got calculations or whatever wrong, because he had this belief that he was on a mission directly given to him by God. He thought this will lead me to the right spot.

• 22:42Speaker 05

  Yeah. And to be fair, I think a lot of people did think he was a loon. And actually, at the time he suggested it, he approached various people, saying, look, I'm going to sail to China or Japan, or what would become China or Japan. And he went to the King of Portugal, said, can I do it? The King of Portugal said, I think the earth's way bigger than you've calculated. He said, no, no, no, honestly. And he went to Queen Isabella. She said, no, mate, it's way bigger than you've calculated. And then I think just as an advisor went to, it was Queen Isabella and Ferdinand, wasn't it, of Spain, and said, you know what, I think you should try out this Columbus crazy theory. And so it was just random that they went back and said, okay, some guy says it's not way bigger.

• 23:15Speaker 04

  Imagine when he came back and they would have been like, oh shit, are we all wrong?

• 23:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, he did. When he arrived in Hispaniola, he thought he was in Japan. But that's because there was a lot of shoes outside. Now, and then when they landed a bit later in South America, around the Orinoco River in Venezuela, I think they might have thought, maybe this is a different continent at that stage. But he also thought that he might have been in the Garden of Eden.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Because there was an idea that the earth was, it had a bulge that was shaped like a woman's breast, and it contained the Garden of Eden, exactly where the nipple would be.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:55Speaker 04

  Because it was closer to heaven.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Horn, horn dog cartographers.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 24:00Dan Schreiber?

  The war map.

• 24:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. But he never made it to current, uh, USA, current North America, did he? He got to central and Caribbean.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  And a little bit of South America.

• 24:12Speaker 02

  A little bit of South America. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he never, he never got to North America.

• 24:15Speaker 05

  Got to Cuba and made people, because I think maybe rumor was starting to spread about the whole new continent thing. And they got to Cuba and he again thought this was part of the continent. And he made his crew swear that it wasn't an island. Because I think they were saying, this looks a bit like an island to me. And, you know, he's determined about his ideas. And he said they'd have their tongues cut out if they said that it might be an island. So...

• 24:38Speaker 02

  You can see the other side from here. It's just, no?

• 24:41Speaker 05

  I'll gouge your eyes out if you say that kind of thing. You know, you've got to be careful around Christopher. He was...

• 24:46Speaker 04

  He was a twat.

• 24:47Speaker 05

  He was.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  There is no doubt about that. He was, at one stage, they were arrested, him and his brothers, weren't they, for abusing the new colonists.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  Basically taken in chains back to Spain, and then given to the king and queen, saying, what do you want to do with this reprobate? And they said, well, he is bringing us quite a lot of gold.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  Really?

• 25:06Speaker 04

  Or maybe it wasn't gold, but he was bringing a lot of stuff back. And they were like, all right, fine. We'll let you off.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Because I suspect you have to be doing some pretty bad stuff to attract the attention of the authorities in the New World back then.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  It's gone quite far. And there's, obviously, his, his record has been reassessed in recent years. Statue of him was torn down in Baltimore several years ago, which I think has just been re-erected in the White House grounds.

• 25:29Speaker 05

  Jolly good.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Donald Trump, Donald Trump has put it back up, saying Columbus was the original American hero and one of the most, I mean, he wasn't American, and one of the most gallant and visionary men ever to walk the face of the earth.

• 25:40Speaker 04

  I've got a statue of Edward Colston I can sell him.

• 25:47Speaker 05

  Do you know, so many people died as a result of him arriving, that the earth's temperature changed. And I'm, I am, I want to say now, I'm not suggesting this as a strategy to cope with climate change, but...

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I don't think anyone thought you were saying that.

• 26:02Speaker 05

  So 56 million indigenous people were killed across the Americas by 1600. So...

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Generally by disease, right?

• 26:09Speaker 05

  Well, the thing is, so it's the Columbian exchange, which I always think is such an unaggressive term for it. But generally by disease, but that's a bit of a misconception because a shedload were murdered as well at the start. So Columbus did go and he murdered thousands of people. But yes, and then lots, of course, by disease. So 56 million people, 10% of the global population, so many that it meant a lot of rewilding of the Amazon.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  So that meant, you know, people have been farming the Amazon a lot, taking a lot of trees down. Suddenly, loads of trees grew, lots of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere, cooled the earth, created the Little Ice Age. We think it's a very popular scientific theory. It's a bit controversial. Some people don't know, but...

• 26:49Speaker 04

  Created the Little Ice Age, which then made spruce trees grow more densely, which then gave us stradivarius violence.

• 26:56Speaker 02

  And there's your upside. Right.

• 26:59Speaker 04

  There we go. Which actually sound exactly the same as other islands.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:05Speaker 05

  We got hammocks from the Americas.

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Did we? I thought they might have come from like the Pacific Islands.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  I believe the idea of hammocks came to Europe from, yeah, from this landing, got to South America, Central America, and realised lots of people using hammocks. And it was actually really revolutionary on ships. And it was quite a common cause of death before that, because you'd be stacked three bunks high, and people used to fall off in the waves. And you'd die falling out of bed, which is an embarrassing way to go.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  So you'd fall off the actual boat?

• 27:36Speaker 05

  Off the bunk.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  And die?

• 27:38Speaker 05

  Does seem unlikely. Now I see it.

• 27:40Speaker 02

  Rocking around in the high seas, you're two metres up, and you hit a wave and you come off.

• 27:45Speaker 04

  I still think...

• 27:45Speaker 02

  You've left the window open. Can we just get a breeze in? It's so warm with all of us in here. No, but if you thought, also, it's not luxurious thick shag pal carpet. It's onto bare planks, I imagine.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  And your bones are weakened by scurvy, of course.

• 28:01Speaker 04

  It just seems very unlikely. And it seems if people were dying from falling off the top bunk, you might just have two bunks. I think, guys, what we shouldn't have done is that all thousand people on this ship are sleeping in one bunk bed with a thousand stories. I think that was a mistake.

• 28:18Speaker 05

  Look, now I say it, it does seem weird that so many people died from falling off top bunks. But hammocks solved this problem, because of course you don't fall out of a hammock. It swings with you and you've got those sides that natural material that naturally come up around you. So very hard to tip someone out. I don't know if you've ever tried. But it's harder to tip someone out of a hammock than to push them out of a bed. But yeah, they definitely were introduced after he sailed to the Americas. And it does seem like a weird idea to have three-story bunk beds on a, on a boat. Maybe people more broke their, broke their wrists. I can send you, I'll send you the source. You can put it in and have people taking the piss. It does feel weird.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  It feels like sailors have been murdering each other, putting them in the top bunk, chucking them out and saying, oh no, another bunk bed, Dan. Oh, it's such a shame that guy who owed me five shillings has died.

• 29:03Speaker 04

  Captain, should we make him more of the plank? No, let's put him in the top bunk.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  Something else that Columbus did on Jamaica, which was ingenious and twatish. So, true to his form, this is in 1504. It was his fourth transatlantic voyage and he was stranded with his men in Jamaica. At first, the Jamaican natives, who had lived there at the time, had helped them out with food and stuff in exchange for various trinkets, but they ended up getting a bit bored of the little bits of decoration that Columbus's people were giving them, so they stopped giving them food. They were running out. Fortunately, Columbus had astronomical tables and these were things that showed you what the stars were gonna do. And so he knew that a lunar eclipse was coming up on February 29th.

• 29:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 29:51Speaker 05

  So you can see why he thought God was on his side, right? God's been like, you know what, I'll give you that lunar eclipse, Columbus, you'll know it's coming. So he checked his table and then he went out to the locals and he said, look, I'm sorry you've stopped giving us food. God's really angry about that, my God, the real one. And he said he's gonna darken the moon.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  I'm so annoyed with myself, because we just had a solar eclipse, right?

• 30:12Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  And what I did was, I told my daughter it was gonna happen and we made some eclipse stuff and I got her really excited about it and we watched it. What I could have done is not told her it was gonna happen and then pretended that some magical unicorn did it or something.

• 30:28Dan Schreiber?

  She pretended you were God to cajole good behaviour out of her. That's what we're saying.

• 30:34Speaker 05

  She could be eating her peas now.

• 30:36Speaker 04

  If you don't eat your peas, I'm gonna make the sun disappear.

• 30:41Speaker 05

  Seems disproportionate, Dad. I've saved my power for this moment.

• 30:51Dan Schreiber?

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

• 30:55Speaker 02

  My fact is, when Churchill met Stalin and complimented him on his goldfish, Stalin offered to have them killed for Churchill's breakfast.

• 31:04Dan Schreiber?

  This is just a fun story.

• 31:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:06Speaker 05

  How awkward.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Very awkward, yeah. This is a lovely little detail from a book called Allies at War by Tim Booverie, which is about diplomatic relations in the war and all the summits that happened. There were so many conferences between Churchill and Stalin and the US presidents, Roosevelt and then Truman, after Roosevelt died. And they were deciding what the deal was and how the world was going to look and the shape of Europe and the idea of the United Nations, all of this stuff. So there was Tehran and there was Yalta and Potsdam. And goldfish were a bit of a feature of the Yalta Conference, certainly. So there was a huge amount of buggery, bugging taking place.

• 31:48Dan Schreiber?

  I definitely have different research.

• 31:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Bugging, people were bugging each other. What, you know, how do you guys describe that?

• 31:55Speaker 04

  No, no, you're right, sorry. They did do a lot of that to Eastern Europe, I would say, but...

• 32:01Speaker 02

  So, everyone was being bugged all the time, because this was, Yalta was taking place on the Black Sea and Potsdam in Germany. But the Black Sea one, which was, you know, the Stalin-hosted one, as it were, Yalta. At one point, a British official called Charles Portal, he says, oh, what a lovely, nice fish tank. Shame it doesn't have any fish in it. He's making this remark offhand to a colleague of his in English. The next day, it's full of goldfish.

• 32:22Speaker 05

  Really?

• 32:22Speaker 02

  So it's clearly, there was a lot of funny business going on behind the scenes.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  Like, quite often, I would say that they would do that to show you that you are being bugged.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's what I would have thought.

• 32:34Speaker 04

  A lot of that happened in the Soviet Union.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  I think that's how they interpreted it, isn't it? Like, I read one exchange or one letter of the cameraman saying, you know, they clearly wanted us to feel a little bit watched. And this was...

• 32:45Speaker 02

  Right. Because if you want to gain secret information, then it's a bad thing to do. As in, if you're genuinely trying to listen to the English as they're talking.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  Well, then they might not look for the other bugs.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Oh, that's good.

• 32:57Speaker 04

  It's like the second rotten fish in the car radiator.

• 33:01Speaker 02

  Yes, but that's also...

• 33:03Speaker 05

  Sorry? I've never let you be a passenger in my car.

• 33:07Speaker 04

  You put two rotten fish in someone's radiator and the car smells of fish and they find the fish and they go, ah, got it. But then there's still another one there rotting away.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  And crucially, you've labelled the fish one and three.

• 33:22Dan Schreiber?

  But no, so one of the points of that is, is that the idea would be you debug it. You have your security detail go in, debug the entire room. But they would always say, but we won't have got everything. So they still did know that they were bugged. It was a kind of weird game of chess, where do they know, are they aware? And the Americans and English said, yes, we were aware, even after debugging, that we were being bugged. So they would then put out false information out loud in their rooms.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  No one knows what was going on at any point, basically.

• 33:49Speaker 05

  This is why it basically achieved nothing. There was another excellent instance of a similar thing. The official American cameraman, who was there to take photos of it, he remembered that when FDR first arrived at Yalta, he stepped in and he said, as was his habit, because it was late afternoon, he made a picture of dry martinis and as he passed a glass to Stalin, he apologetically said that a good martini really should have a twist of lemon. And then the cameraman said, at 6am the following morning, when I came into the entrance hall, I was astonished to find a huge lemon tree. I counted some 200 pieces of fruit on it, which is a weird thing for him to have done.

• 34:26Dan Schreiber?

  In a pot or in the ground, was it just suddenly in the ground?

• 34:29Speaker 05

  I think it was in a pot.

• 34:30Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, yeah, that makes more sense.

• 34:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, because he'd had it flown in from Georgia, apparently.

• 34:34Dan Schreiber?

  That's very cool.

• 34:35Speaker 05

  Efficient.

• 34:36Dan Schreiber?

  So Stalin and Churchill, this is one of their later meetings, but they first met in 1942. So America sent over a representative called Harriman. Churchill went hisself. And weirdly, we know the exact things that were being said, because when they were on the plane on the way over together, the plane was so noisy, they couldn't hear each other, and so they had to write everything on notes. We still have those notes in the Library of Congress. Yeah, not only for their trip there, but their trip back as well.

• 35:04Speaker 05

  Did they not sit them next to each other?

• 35:06Dan Schreiber?

  It was so noisy, it was just so noisy on this old-school bomber plane that they were on, that they just couldn't hear each other. So we do have the handwriting.

• 35:12Speaker 05

  Oh, God, I honestly thought you meant, like, that other passengers were having such loud conversations.

• 35:18Speaker 04

  Pass this over to the guy with the moustache.

• 35:23Speaker 05

  Right, yes, no, the engines, that does make it worse.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  Because if you're Churchill and the American representative, you could probably have some sway, even on like a Ryanair flight or whatever.

• 35:32Speaker 05

  Should have booked first class.

• 35:33Speaker 04

  That's the thing with Ryanair, you have to pay extra to sit next to your friends.

• 35:36Dan Schreiber?

  There was a war on.

• 35:39Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, but so they got there and Churchill, when he went to the first function, where he first met Stalin on that trip, he came in in one of his onesies, as opposed to looking a bit more, you know, in a suit or whatever.

• 35:52Speaker 05

  One of our earliest facts, Churchill often wore onesies.

• 35:54Dan Schreiber?

  It was exactly like a onesie, but it was his kind of...

• 35:57Speaker 04

  Well, it looked like, it's like a boiler suit.

• 35:58Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly, yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  It didn't have a teddy bear on it. When you say a onesie, it's like...

• 36:03Dan Schreiber?

  Well, he had it plushy with him. But yeah, and he confused a lot of the public as well, because they were hoping that what the Americans and the English were gonna do was a second front to help them out. And Churchill did his classic V sign for peace, but everyone interpreted that as second front. They thought, oh, yes, that's what's gonna happen. And that's not why they were there. And Churchill hated that meeting, where he was wearing his onesie, went home, yelled in his room that this was terrible, they heard it over the microphones that were bugging the room. And so he got invited then to go visit Stalin in his personal house. And they got drunk until 3 in the morning and that's where things got better.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  They got absolutely wankered, didn't they, that day? Him and Stalin and Molotov.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  Got really, really drunk.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  With his cocktail?

• 36:50Speaker 04

  We know that Churchill was drinking red wine and not as much as Stalin wanted him to drink, because Stalin wanted him to get absolutely shitfaced. But Churchill started feeling it a little bit and thought, okay, I'm gonna go on to the red wine now.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  That's interesting, because Stalin was having his glass refilled with water. I think when everyone else was being refilled with vodka. Because Stalin wanted to stay in a bit more control of the situation.

• 37:10Dan Schreiber?

  Clever.

• 37:10Speaker 05

  I think we said before that Churchill did the Stalin trick as well, right? Where he'd weaken his drinks as well, so it seemed like he was drinking more. So they were both secretly probably just drinking tap water all night. They're all sober.

• 37:22Speaker 04

  Then in 1943, so this one was in Moscow, you're talking about, Dan. So then the next year, they met in Tehran and Churchill presented Stalin with a special sword, the sword of Stalingrad, because Stalingrad had just happened and he got this sword commissioned. It was made in Sheffield and it was supposed to be a gift from the king to say congratulations or well done the citizens of Stalingrad for managing to get through that. Stalin picked up the sword, held it from the sheath, the wrong way around, the sword then just fell to the ground. And so that was a big faux pas. But it wasn't the worst thing that happened in the war.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  No.

• 38:00Speaker 04

  Or indeed the worst thing associated with Stalingrad.

• 38:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, but it doesn't make it to the top 100 list of bad things.

• 38:07Speaker 04

  It's number 100. It's the one that gets, you know, in the Channel 5 show, when it's got 100 worst things to happen. It's the one at the start that gets people sucked in.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Is it like those I remember the 80s shows? I remember Stalingrad.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  It's just got like Rufus Hound talking over some VT.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  Yalta was, the Yalta Conference was not, Yalta was not doing well at the time, right? It was apparently pretty grim, the surroundings. So when they flew in, this is February 1945, the route was to fly to the airfield in Yalta and then to drive for eight hours past bombed buildings and rotted animal carcasses. Like, it was really tough there. But when they got there, things were much more pleasant. Caviar constantly. So one American officer estimated that during the week of the Yalta Conference, he ate 12 pounds of caviar.

• 38:59Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 05

  They all hated it, though.

• 39:01Dan Schreiber?

  It's too much, yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 05

  That's what they, I read multiple accounts of people being like, it's a nightmare. It's literally a bowl of caviar before every single meal. You don't want it that much.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Before every meal, no, not a whole bowl either.

• 39:12Speaker 04

  It is easy to get hold of in Russia, in fairness.

• 39:15Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  USSR, like, in the supermarkets, they'll have a caviar aisle. Yeah, yeah.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  And they didn't even mix up the menu. They served them the same breakfast, lunch and dinner every single day for eight days, I think it was. I know, it's not, again, it's not the worst thing that happened in the war.

• 39:30Dan Schreiber?

  No, but you would get to day and go, fuck it, yeah.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  We're down to 97 now in the top 100.

• 39:37Speaker 05

  Lamb roast again. And there were mixed opinions about the venue. Churchill did say, if we had spent 10 years on research, we could not have found a worse place to stay.

• 39:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Apparently, there was a shortage of toilets in Yalta.

• 39:50Speaker 05

  A big shortage of toilets.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:51Speaker 05

  And you didn't even have to take your shoes off, so they were filthy.

• 39:55Speaker 04

  So I read this, one of our researchers, Gabriel, posted this on our top boards because we're doing the Y series of QI at the moment. But apparently, at one stage, Stalin was trying to find a toilet, couldn't find one. There was one right near him, but Churchill was in it, it was too busy. So he went down the corridor, found another toilet finally. But because his security had lost sight of him at that moment, they thought that the US had tried to kidnap him.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  Really?

• 40:19Speaker 04

  And so there was a big sort of like farce moment where everyone's running around going, where's Stalin? And everyone in Yalta is looking for him.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  But then it was just in the bog.

• 40:27Speaker 02

  He's just in the loo.

• 40:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  So good.

• 40:28Speaker 05

  And do you think that was a power play by Churchill, trying to get Stalin to shit himself?

• 40:31Speaker 04

  Oh, I hadn't thought of it that way.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  You know, the old, how long are you gonna be?

• 40:36Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 40:36Speaker 05

  Just a couple more minutes. Could have been. Because there were, there were multiple people forced to share rooms, which you don't expect. Apparently, eight US generals had to share a room, 16 colonels had to share another room, and 40 middle ranking officers.

• 40:51Speaker 04

  Oh, my god, please don't tell me it was bump banter.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Not all of them came back.

• 41:00Dan Schreiber?

  There's a separate, it's very sad, in the war cemetery, there's a bit where the grave stones are on top of each other.

• 41:10Dan Schreiber?

  The, Andy, you said Churchill loved his goldfish. He really loved his fish. At Chartwell, he used to keep thousands of fish.

• 41:19Speaker 02

  Which is his home in?

• 41:21Dan Schreiber?

  Apologies, yeah, he has a, he has a home that you can go and visit. I have visited, I assume a few of you have as well. And, have you not? Oh, Andy, I know you have.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  I've been four times.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  But do they have a lot of Hitler memorabilia there?

• 41:33Dan Schreiber?

  Why do you think I'm going?

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's great, it's really nice.

• 41:37Speaker 04

  Where is it?

• 41:38Speaker 02

  It's in Kent.

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  South east of London.

• 41:40Dan Schreiber?

  It's, if you're interested in Churchill, it's a very interesting place to go, because it was his former home, and all of his furniture is still there, his paintings are on the wall, it's, you know, if you want to see that side.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Because he painted, because he painted a lot.

• 41:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, he was an artist himself. And he had this big pond full of fish, and this is how important they were to him. He used to import superior maggots over by rail from Yorkshire to feed them.

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Excuse me, is anyone sitting there, yes, my pet maggots sitting there?

• 42:09Dan Schreiber?

  That's how he referred to them, he said they were aristocratic maggots.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 42:12Speaker 05

  So if the train was delayed, did it arrive and there's just a load of flies?

• 42:19Speaker 02

  Did you guys read about Operation Unthinkable?

• 42:22Dan Schreiber?

  Nope.

• 42:22Speaker 02

  This is a very interesting plan at the end of the war. So Churchill had a bit of form, he had sent troops to fight the Bolsheviks, as they were, in 1919. So that's probably why the first meeting with Stalin was a bit awkward, because Churchill had literally sent a force to say, you know, I would rather you were not in charge of Russia. But in 1945, the idea was come up with Operation Unthinkable, which is, the war is about to end, it's been six years of total war, chunks of the world are completely devastated, everyone's life has been touched, let's invade Russia. And the plan was, within eight weeks of the war ending, we're going to invade Russia.

• 42:54Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Problem, of course, we're quite short of numbers compared with the Russian army, which is absolutely enormous now.

• 42:58Speaker 04

  And also, no one in history has ever been able to invade Russia since Genghis Khan.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  We've got a case in point right now of a guy with the biggest army ever, a nutter, who's just failed to do it. So, but don't worry, our plan is, we'll rearm the German army and the SS, and they'll be bang up for it. And that's well with the numbers. This was the brainchild of a brigadier called Geoffrey Thompson, because there was a fear that the Soviets would just keep going until they got to Western Europe, basically. Literally, anyone at any senior military level who read this plan said, I'm not sure about this.

• 43:29Speaker 04

  I'm not sure you even need to have been in the military to know that that's a shit idea.

• 43:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 43:33Speaker 05

  But he was commissioned to do, like, he was a person, a serious person was commissioned, he wasn't just a loopy.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  He wasn't just a loopy person, the line is that he had 10 ideas a day, only one of them was any good, and he didn't know which one. It was the, was the pitch that was made about Churchill, which in many ways is my, I feel like Churchill's on this show.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  Still wasting, aren't we?

• 43:55Speaker 04

  No, no, guys, hear me out, hear me out, invading Russia cop.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  On Churchill, something I didn't know about Potsdam, Potsdam, bit confusing for Stalin because Roosevelt has died two months after Yalta, so he's been replaced by Truman, fine. But also, I hadn't realised that the British election happened in the middle of Potsdam. So Churchill had to fly home and be replaced by Atlee halfway through.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Really?

• 44:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  During the summit?

• 44:23Speaker 05

  Quirrrrrd, yeah, and Stalin was there saying, Stalin said to Churchill, A, he said to Churchill, of course you're gonna win, you're the war leader. And also, he understandably said to some of Churchill's advisers, well, presumably, your leader will rig this anyway, so it's not a thing. And they were like, no, honestly, this election thing, we do it. And he was astonished when a different Prime Minister came.

• 44:43Dan Schreiber?

  It's like when a movie recaps a main character, but everyone else is the same, and you just have to just accept it and keep watching the movie.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Muppet Potsdam.

• 44:54Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, keep going.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Okay. I guess who's the only real person in it? Because you've got to have one.

• 44:59Speaker 04

  Stalin's the one who's, like, Churchill gets kicked out by Atlee, and Truman comes in instead of Roosevelt, so Stalin's the one person who's always the same.

• 45:07Speaker 02

  So it's got to be human Joseph Stalin.

• 45:09Speaker 04

  So it's human Joseph Stalin. And then it's like Miss Piggy for Churchill.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, but she'll have to be replaced by Atlee Kermit, and then Truman, Sam the Eagle, I guess.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  I suppose so, yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. Okay.

• 45:22Speaker 05

  I'm sure this does work, because I haven't seen The Muppets, I'm just not getting the genius.

• 45:33Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that most circus clowns are part yak.

• 45:41Speaker 02

  Which part?

• 45:42Dan Schreiber?

  That's a good question.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  Oh, is it the plushy?

• 45:45Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, so when you see the wig of a clown, quite often, that is entirely made of yak hair. And I read about this, by the way, in a book that I was reading recently called Dame Edna Everidge by John Larre. And they were talking about how when Dame Edna Everidge is getting onto stage, Barry Humphries is changing into the costume, that the wigs would come on, and the person who makes the wig is saying, this is entirely made of yak hair, because it is the best kind of hair for if you are doing any kind of stage performance, particularly if you were a clown, and you get pied, and you get all sorts of the.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  Because in the natural environment, yaks get pied quite a lot, don't they?

• 46:21Dan Schreiber?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 46:23Speaker 05

  A lot of marrings grow in Mongolia.

• 46:27Dan Schreiber?

  That surprised me, the, the wigs were made from yaks.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  I just, the extent to which you managed to plunder your 20th century comedians' biographies for facts for this show was so impressive.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  It is.

• 46:37Dan Schreiber?

  I'm really annoyed that I didn't get to my Bob Hope book in the last fact, when Khrushchev came to America and caused a scandal.

• 46:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, really cool.

• 46:44Dan Schreiber?

  Really cool. And I was reading about one guy in particular called Joe Rappasada, who lived in New York, and he had a wig shop in Times Square. And basically, he was Mr. Clown Wig Man. He would make all the wigs, and they used to import all of the yak hair from Tibet. They would have someone who was dedicated to treating it, washing it, the dyeing of it to the right clown hair colour. And it's not even just clowns, major productions still to this day in the West End, in movies, they all use yak hair. Yeah, so Cats, the original Broadway show of Cats, that was all yak hair.

• 47:17Speaker 04

  What? They weren't cat heads? Oh, my god.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  I know. I presume this guy, Joe Rappasada, who was there in the 1990s on Times Square, I presume that that business has been pushed out these days.

• 47:28Speaker 04

  By a vape shop or something.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it feels like that's quite a hard premises to keep, like, no one's going to Times Square for a wig these days.

• 47:34Speaker 05

  If it's a showbiz thing, feels like the kind of, actually, kind of hipster showbiz thing you might have in.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess, I just.

• 47:40Dan Schreiber?

  But they did the wigs for all Hollywood movies, and did the wigs for.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  I just assumed that, like.

• 47:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, but like in central London, in one of the best spots in central London, there's a big umbrella shop that Noel buys umbrellas from.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  That's a good point. Yeah, but that is, the spies have somewhere to meet, you know.

• 47:54Speaker 04

  I think, like, some of these places, they might have, like, thousand-year leases that they can.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  Historical leases.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  I was thinking it would all be Eminem world by now in Times Square.

• 48:04Dan Schreiber?

  I think it's in a building in Times Square, I don't think it's a shop front.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  That's what I assumed.

• 48:08Dan Schreiber?

  I don't think it's that. But it is, again, yeah, so it's used in Broadway, it's used in many places. I found one account of The Rock, Dwayne Johnson, talking about his role as Hercules in a 2014 movie. And the chin hair, that was yak testicle hair specifically.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 48:23Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, that they had as his hair. This is what he says in the interview.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Why? It's just.

• 48:27Speaker 04

  Is it better?

• 48:27Dan Schreiber?

  Better hair.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  But the testicle hair in particular, was it a goatee?

• 48:32Speaker 04

  Yakky.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Yakky, yeah, yeah, thank you.

• 48:34Speaker 05

  Testicle hair feels like it's usually not very good quality in humans, so maybe they have different.

• 48:39Speaker 02

  Dare you? Dare you?

• 48:42Speaker 05

  I'm so sorry.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  There's no such thing as bad quality testicle hair, only testicle hair that hasn't been treated right.

• 48:46Speaker 05

  No, good point, it's really good.

• 48:48Speaker 02

  If you get split ends down there.

• 48:50Speaker 05

  Well, you've got to stop straightening it, Andy.

• 48:54Speaker 04

  It feels like something you might have just said in an interview.

• 48:57Dan Schreiber?

  I don't, yeah, yeah, maybe he was elaborating, but they used the belly hair of yaks a lot as well.

• 49:01Speaker 04

  So they use the belly hair because yaks have the longest hair in nature, I think. And it's really useful because especially the Tianzhu white yak has got very long white belly hair. So, once you shave that off, you can dye it in any colour you want. And they've been using it for many, many years. They used it for barrister wigs. And like you say, been used in loads of movies. A lot of the rings, they used it.

• 49:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, there's actually, in The Hobbit, they used it for the dwarfs, except one. So quite a fun thing you're doing, if you don't love The Hobbit itself, is try and spot the dwarf who has real human hair for hair, rather than yak hair. Because Peter King, who was doing the costume, said that he mostly needed them to have really thick, dense hair, and it's got that really thick density, where you don't need to have too much of it. And human hair is too silky and doesn't have that texture. But one of the dwarfs, who was, I think, the lead dwarf, has human hair.

• 49:55Speaker 04

  I see. The reason it needs to be like that, apparently, is like a perspective thing. Because you've got normal, heighted humans who have to be like small people. It looks better if their hair's really, really bulky and really sort of big and fluffy.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  Oh, it makes them look shorter because their hair's wider. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah.

• 50:11Dan Schreiber?

  Interesting.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  And they said, this guy, Peter King, he got his yak hair from England, even though I guess they were filming in New Zealand. But he said that they bought all the yak hair that was in England at the time. So there was no yak hair for anyone else.

• 50:24Dan Schreiber?

  That's why The Rock had to sit with bowl hair on his face, when he was making Hercules.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Sixty to eighty kilograms of the stuff they used for a lot of the rings.

• 50:32Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 50:32Speaker 02

  So many yaks' worth of hair. So I don't, I'm presuming that they're sourcing it from domesticated yaks.

• 50:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Because there are two species of yak, aren't there? There's the wild, which there aren't terribly many of them, maybe not even 10,000 of those left. And then there are the domesticated, which are actually doing a lot better. Because there are, there are some millions of those, I believe.

• 50:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. So. It'll be the domesticated ones for sure.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  You trim it and then it grows back? I'm guessing you don't have to kill the yak?

• 50:57Speaker 04

  No, you don't.

• 50:59Speaker 05

  Every time you go to the hairdresser, you're quivering in terror.

• 51:03Speaker 05

  You still don't have to kill me for this one, do you? And it's just a cotton blow dryer.

• 51:10Speaker 05

  Why do you think communism coming to China was bad for Santa Clauses in America?

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Okay. Is it something to do with yak hair?

• 51:21Speaker 05

  It's actually completely unrelated. It's just something I've wanted to say. It is to do with yak hair.

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Okay, so like, Santa Clauses need hair.

• 51:28Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 05

  Very good.

• 51:29Speaker 04

  Need fake beards and stuff like that.

• 51:31Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're there.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  But I'm not sure what the communism part of it is gonna be, though.

• 51:36Speaker 05

  So, 1940s, you're absolutely right. The export of, it's actually yak tails they used for Santa Claus's beards in American shopping malls. They were just becoming a huge thing, very easy to curl. Then, 1951, China annexed Tibet, and it was also going communist. And so America put a big old trade embargo on, said it wasn't going to import Chinese goods anymore. So Santa beards suddenly rocketed in price because you couldn't get them anymore. And India exported some to America and claimed that they'd come from Bhutan or whatever. But in the end, I think Santa beards became about 100 times more expensive.

• 52:10Speaker 04

  Well, luckily, the US have never put trade sanctions on other countries that made everything miles more expensive for no real reason.

• 52:17Speaker 05

  They learned their lesson from Father Christmas gate.

• 52:20Speaker 04

  In Tibet, you might put a lot of yak hair in your bra. This is very common. The black yak hair tent that they use is called a bra. In some Tibetan dialects.

• 52:33Dan Schreiber?

  Oh my god. That's the scabbiest fact I've ever heard.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  But it's apparently a really good tent. It's a really cool tent in the summer and a really hot tent in the winter.

• 52:46Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, perfect.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  Because the yak hair blocks the wind and the snow. But in the summer, the fabric expands, makes it waterproof when it's wet and allows ventilation when it's dry. Because it's like the perfect thing to make your house out of. If you haven't decided that you want to live in a Wattle and Dorb house. Or a cave or whatever we decided in that recent show. Then you can get yourself a yak hair tent. Do you know that when you're walking in Tibet, there is a thing called the mountainside rule? And that means that if a yak comes past you in the other direction, you always stand next to the mountain, as opposed to next to the massive vertical drop.

• 53:24Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 02

  In case it pushes you off?

• 53:27Speaker 04

  In case it pushes you off. Now, you might say, well, that makes just common sense that you would do that. But the reason that you're supposed to do it is because the guides will tell you at least that yaks are vindictive bastards and that they'll deliberately knock you off the cliff. If they ever get the chance.

• 53:44Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 53:45Speaker 05

  Right. God, and here we were, thinking they worshipped these creatures.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  I think probably they just say that to get the tourists to be safe.

• 53:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 53:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 02

  It does make sense. It makes so much more sense than saying, stand on the very edge of the cliff while the yak passes on the inside.

• 53:58Dan Schreiber?

  And if they fall off, they'll probably survive because the amount of amazing wool on the side. Like, push, push a yak off a bunk bed, it's fine. That dude's doing fine.

• 54:09Speaker 05

  I was reading a bit about the laws of Tibetan hunting, because hunting yak is a big thing, you know, and eating yak, obviously. And these are sort of historic laws, but they're really interesting and they're very strict. So the share of yak that you get when you kill it was really dictated. So you'd have the strangers' share, for instance, in a lot of Tibetan groups. And that meant that if you killed a yak and you were entitled to some of it, and then your tribe was entitled to some of it, if some strangers came over the hill at that moment, not involved in the hunt at all, the rules were that you had to allot a stranger's share and that had to be the most generous.

• 54:43Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 54:44Speaker 05

  You've got to give the good bits away.

• 54:46Dan Schreiber?

  That's exactly how I would live my life if I was there. Hiding, sneaking around, waiting till one was done, popping over, going, hey, Brian, what's?

• 54:56Speaker 04

  No, no, that's not the best one. No, no, no.

• 55:00Speaker 04

  Give me that testicle. I can see it.

• 55:04Speaker 05

  You dickhead. You're really the Columbus of Tibet in your fictional life. They also had a randomised sharing thing where if you're in a group, so let's say you're in a hunting group of eight, you kill a yak, you have to divide it into eight piles. And then everyone has a pile that they guard. One person walks away from the circle. It's kind of like wink murder or something. You know, when you select the person who's going to be the murderer.

• 55:30Speaker 04

  Like The Traitors.

• 55:31Speaker 05

  Oh, yes, it's like The Traitors.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  For something that's on TV right now.

• 55:34Speaker 05

  This is Tibetan Traitors. There you go, for people who watch TV.

• 55:38Dan Schreiber?

  Wait, so what happens?

• 55:39Speaker 05

  So you stand in a circle, you are each in front of one big pile of meat. And then to make it fair who gets which pile, one person walks away from the circle, closes their eyes. All the other people number themselves, one to eight, one to seven, and the last to eight. But then the person who closes their eyes comes back and they say which pile of meat is number one.

• 55:59Dan Schreiber?

  Brilliant. And they don't know what number they are either.

• 56:01Speaker 05

  They don't know what number they are. And so then the number one has to go around to that pile and everyone rotates accordingly. So you end up in front of a pile of meat that you could never have guessed.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  I'll be honest, that's not really like Traitors.

• 56:14Dan Schreiber?

  Claudia Winkleman has just killed a yak.

• 56:24Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you very 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. I'm on at Shreiberland on Instagram. James?

• 56:36Speaker 04

  And No Such Thing Is James Harkin on Instagram.

• 56:38Dan Schreiber?

  Andy?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  At Andrew Hunter M.

• 56:40Dan Schreiber?

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

• 56:43Speaker 05

  You can go to Instagram to at No Such Thing or email podcast at qi.com.

• 56:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, that's right. And if you do email podcast at qi.com, you can send us two things that will actually be used on future episodes. So if you send in any bonus information, if you want to correct anything that we've said, if you've had an experience you think we should know about to do with the things we've spoken about, send it in and Andy will pick them out and bring them to drop us a line, which is our bonus secret show. Secret, as in you can only get access to it if you're a member of Club Fish, and that's on Patreon. So go to patreon.com/clubfish and you can get access to that, as well as XL episodes. And there's a bunch of other stuff there. Or if you send us an interesting fact, Andy will pick that out and bring it to our bonus Monday show, which is called Little Fish.

• 57:30Dan Schreiber?

  And Little Fish is where we put down our facts and we just read out the best of yours. We love doing that. So do send your stuff in or check out nosuchthingasafish.com, because we do have live gigs occasionally that pop up on there. We've got all our previous episodes. That's the hub to go to. Okay, that's it. Thank you very much for listening. Thank you, as ever, to Liang Li and Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the larger Fishbuster team. And we're going to be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.