Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As Uncle Egg About this episode Prodigal Podcaster Anna Ptaszynski returns! She joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss whistling bombs, wifi cars and wild oats.
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
Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish
Transcript 11,890 words · 6 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
0:01 Speaker 01 Stop the podcast.
0:02 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
0:05 Speaker 01 That's right. So, everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?
0:15 Speaker 00 Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.
0:22 Speaker 01 Progressive offers customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
0:27 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, and baby gates of insurance.
0:32 Speaker 01 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
0:35 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. On with the show.
0:41 Speaker 02 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down, rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.
1:21 Speaker 01 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinsky. And once again, we have gathered round 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 looky, looky, it's Anna Tashinsky.
1:48 Speaker 00 My fact this week is that wild oats sow themselves.
1:55 Speaker 00 Yeah, so basically, they're plants that look a bit like oats, and they have seeds at the top of them that come in a little cluster that's called a panicle. But they don't panic. They very calmly have two spikes sticking out of them called awns. And they look a bit like very long, hairy legs. And basically, when the seeds come off, they go onto the ground, and when they dry out, they twist one way. And when they get moist, they twist another. So as the moisture goes up and down, they twist back and forth. And it reminded me a bit of one of those moves you used to do in the gym, where you lie on your back and splay your legs out and roll around.
2:29 Speaker 01 You're not allowed back in that gym anymore.
2:32 Speaker 03 We just sort of did the bleep test and stuff at my school.
2:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, our teacher was sacked actually, but they sort of, it makes them sort of crawl around and then they'll find a crevice. Eventually they'll fall into a crevice. And once they've fallen into a crevice, this motion makes them drill down into it. So they literally bury themselves.
2:50 Speaker 01 It's the closest thing you'll see to something that's not sentient being absolutely sentient. It just looks like it's got a mind.
2:57 Speaker 04 Let's not get into your sentient of trees stuff.
2:58 Speaker 01 I think it's alive, guys. I think it's alive.
3:01 Speaker 04 No, honestly, it is alive.
3:02 Speaker 01 Well, there we go. James agrees. What about you two?
3:06 Speaker 04 Wild oats, are they the ancestors of the oats that we eat?
3:10 Speaker 00 We think so, although there seems to be some disagreement, but I think they are, yes. Although the oats that we eat, the cultivated oats have lost these horns because they're bred out. So the seeds can get much bigger.
3:18 Speaker 04 And wild oats are, I think, a weed.
3:21 Speaker 00 Yes.
3:21 Speaker 04 Right. And they're quite annoying because they can plant themselves.
3:25 Speaker 00 Yeah.
3:25 Speaker 04 So the idea of sowing wild oats is something that you would never need to do it because they do it themselves, but also you wouldn't want to do it because it gets in the way of all your normal plants. So sowing wild oats became a phrase that meant just doing something pointless and stupid.
3:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
3:41 Speaker 00 Oh.
3:42 Speaker 01 So go out and have fun in a promiscuous, sexual way because you're not going to marry these people. But go out and do that and then find the person you're going to marry.
3:49 Speaker 04 Yeah. So it was not originally sexual as well. It was just people having fun and messing around and stuff. And actually, an interesting thing that I found is that the word haver, which I've only ever heard in the song, "I'm Going to Walk 500 Miles" by Proclaimers. You know, if I haver, then I know I'm going to haver with you or whatever it is.
4:10 Speaker 01 Okay.
4:10 Speaker 04 That, the word haver means oats and havoring means sort of messing around, not doing anything properly. And it's the same origin as this wild oats.
4:19 Speaker 01 Oh, my God. So that means that we have a new sentence person to add to my list. Nigel Havers. Oh yeah.
4:27 Speaker 03 That's a thrill. Anna, I've been updating the list.
4:29 Speaker 00 Oh, have you? I was gonna say, it's been a long time.
4:31 Speaker 04 Anna, there's a new list.
4:33 Speaker 03 Don't worry, we'll get on to the new list.
4:36 Speaker 00 I'm okay. I think it ended up meaning something immoral really early, though, because by the turn of the 17th century, so from the late 16th century, wild oats, plural weirdly, was a term for a dissolute and immoral man. So you'd say, he's a bit of a wild oats.
4:52 Speaker 04 Yeah, the earliest use is by someone called Thomas Beacon from the 16th century. And he talks about certain light brains and wild oats. And he's talking about stupid people, basically, or idiots. And he also coined the terms bucketful, epicureism, omnisufficient, seventeenthly, unbearded, and worstest.
5:15 Speaker 03 Honestly, I think, I think bucketful is the, is the big hitter for me of that list.
5:19 Speaker 00 I just love worstest.
5:21 Speaker 03 I think worstest is definitely the worstest.
5:26 Speaker 03 So there are four kinds of wild oats, right?
5:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:28 Speaker 03 Uh, they're all avenna, avenna something, avenna sativa, avenna Byzantine, avenna strigos. Uh, those, those last two are mostly just to feed animals. But there's a fourth kind, avenna abyssinica, which I read is only partly domesticated.
5:43 Speaker 00 Ooh, that's a bit disobedient.
5:45 Speaker 03 I don't really know what it means, but I just like it so much.
5:48 Speaker 00 Of course, according to some people, they are still only animal feed. Or according to Samuel Johnson 300 years ago, who famously said, he described the oat, the normal oat, as a grain which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland appears to support the people.
6:05 Speaker 03 That's not one of his good ones.
6:07 Speaker 04 Well, I think it is. It's one of his most famous ones, isn't it? And he later wrote to Boswell, his friend, he wrote, I meant to vex them about that particular thing. And he did it on purpose to wind the Scots up.
6:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So annoying. But they were, they were a big Scottish thing, weren't they? They thrived in the Scottish climate and all of that. And they were grown in huge quantities.
6:27 Speaker 01 Brought over by the Romans, right? So they weren't, they weren't there until the Romans got there. And then the climate was just so perfect, um, because it was wet, sunny, it was long day, short day. It just perfectly suited it. And yeah, that sort of became the thing of what Scottish people were brought up on.
6:42 Speaker 03 And saved Britain during the war, to a certain extent.
6:46 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
6:46 Speaker 03 Second World War, you know, the obviously big deal of cutting off food supplies and cutting off Atlantic food convoys and things like that. And oats became a really big deal. They were. Um, you know, they substituted a lot of the wheat that you then couldn't get, couldn't get back then. White bread was illegal.
7:01 Speaker 04 Was it?
7:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
7:03 Speaker 04 Did you have to eat oat bread? Cause that's quite different to wheat bread, isn't it?
7:06 Speaker 03 I can't remember what the
7:07 Speaker 00 Surely porridge.
7:08 Speaker 03 The oats were used for, there was a thing called the national loaf, which was just very, I think very, very good for you bread, but obviously not very delicious.
7:16 Speaker 00 Although it sounds like a sort of Reform Party good, piece of Reform Party merchandise.
7:22 Speaker 03 National loaf. There's bros, which is a kind of porridge that you don't cook. It's just cold water and oatmeal together.
7:30 Speaker 04 We should start, we should start like a bros podcast.
7:34 Speaker 03 That's such a good idea. It's porridge.
7:36 Speaker 04 It's a lot of jock seeded porridge.
7:40 Speaker 03 Ah, such bad timing, Anna. You just came back.
7:42 Speaker 00 No, really sad not to be involved in that, but it wouldn't make sense with it.
7:47 Speaker 01 Uh, oats had a, had a renaissance since the nineties, hasn't it? Sort of appears everywhere in different things. Now oat milk particularly. That was invented in the nineties. I thought we had that for a very long time. Um, Ricard Ost, O S T E, which is almost an anagram of oats. Um, he's a Swedish scientist and as well as inventing it, he is a professor at Lund University, where we will be going very soon to be doing our live show.
8:13 Speaker 03 Is he still trading? Is he?
8:14 Speaker 01 He's still there, so we could meet him, but he only, he only spends 20% of his time there at the university. So hopefully we landed that 20%.
8:23 Speaker 03 He's doing one, he's doing one day a week. I think is what you mean.
8:27 Speaker 01 His official biography says he only spends 20% of his time.
8:31 Speaker 03 That's a translation thing.
8:32 Speaker 04 Wait a minute though, because there's seven days in a week.
8:34 Speaker 03 That's a good point. So he must do, I suppose, 1.4.
8:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, 1.4 days.
8:40 Speaker 01 So hopefully we're there on the 1.4 day. We'll see.
8:43 Speaker 03 That's brilliant.
8:43 Speaker 01 Yeah.
8:44 Speaker 03 I didn't actually know how they made oat milk. It's just because I've never thought about it. We always have some in the house, but I thought it was just, gosh, they're dry. I mean, I suppose there is moisture in there if they're.
8:52 Speaker 00 If you zoom in, there's those tiny udders hanging off each grain.
8:56 Speaker 03 But they mix it with water. Of course they do.
8:58 Speaker 04 Do they?
8:58 Speaker 03 Yeah. And they make it into a kind of suspension of water.
9:00 Speaker 04 So they make it into, well, porridge, right?
9:02 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:02 Speaker 04 Watery porridge. And then they take out the oats.
9:05 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yeah. I suppose that's it. Yeah. Yeah. But that's, that's how they do it.
9:08 Speaker 00 It sounds gross when you say it like that. And I bet it wouldn't work if I did it, but I quite like it.
9:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's really good.
9:12 Speaker 00 Yeah.
9:13 Speaker 03 I, I looked up cereal bars. I got a bit distracted.
9:15 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
9:16 Speaker 01 Okay.
9:16 Speaker 03 Just on when things were invented, Danny was surprised that oat milk was a, was a nineties invention. Uh, the first cereal bar, any guesses?
9:25 Speaker 04 Okay, uh, 20,000 B.C.
9:28 Speaker 03 Okay.
9:29 Speaker 01 Later, later.
9:30 Speaker 04 They found some in a cave in South Africa.
9:33 Speaker 03 They found the rapper.
9:37 Speaker 03 So I will say, I don't know if it's surprising enough to justify a quiz.
9:41 Speaker 00 I think it would be more surprising if it was very late, because cereal bar could just be you drop some honey on two bits of grain, couldn't it?
9:46 Speaker 04 I mean, is it, is it the 80s, Andy?
9:49 Speaker 03 It's 1981.
9:53 Speaker 00 That's actually amazing.
9:54 Speaker 03 That is surprising.
9:54 Speaker 00 I'm amazed.
9:55 Speaker 03 It is late, isn't it? It's later than I thought.
9:57 Speaker 01 That's late.
9:58 Speaker 00 I'm astonished.
9:58 Speaker 03 It was called Cereal Crunchy, and that means, of course, that David Niven or Muddy Waters could both have enjoyed a cereal.
10:05 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
10:06 Speaker 01 Oh my god. There's too much to catch Anna up on.
10:09 Speaker 00 Is this a new bit?
10:11 Speaker 04 It's actually the very new bit, in fact. A two-week-old baby would be old enough to remember when Andy invented this new bit.
10:18 Speaker 00 Right, okay.
10:19 Speaker 04 And speaking of cereal, they used to be called Cheerios.
10:23 Speaker 03 Oh.
10:23 Speaker 00 Did they?
10:24 Speaker 04 But Quaker Oats owned the idea of having oats in cereal, so they had to remove the T and call themselves Cheerios instead.
10:30 Speaker 00 Oh, wow, really? Is that why Ready Brek? Which I've never understood what that is, but it doesn't have oats in it, in the title.
10:37 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
10:38 Speaker 00 Surely that's also porridge?
10:39 Speaker 03 Is it oats?
10:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's porridge.
10:42 Speaker 00 Don't actually have it.
10:43 Speaker 03 Have the Quaker lot trademarked oats as a foodstuff?
10:46 Speaker 04 Largely speaking, they have. Now, I think probably if your thing is made out of oats, then it would be hard to argue that you can't call it oats. But obviously in one or two cases, they have pushed it.
10:58 Speaker 03 Like Scott's Porridge Oats.
11:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:00 Speaker 03 My preferred, my preferred brand. Uh, it's just called, that's called oats, that's allowed.
11:04 Speaker 04 It could be like, that's in the UK, for instance, whereas Cheerios would have been in America, where of course, um, Quaker Oats began. And also not made by Quakers.
11:13 Speaker 00 Not even blooming Quakers?
11:14 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:15 Speaker 00 Can't believe that. I think the Quakers need to sue them. They just made up the name Quaker because it sounds really, ironically, honest and full of integrity.
11:22 Speaker 04 They didn't, they didn't make up the name.
11:24 Speaker 00 They, sorry, they didn't invent the word Quaker.
11:27 Speaker 04 Apparently one of them read an encyclopedia article on Quakers and thought, oh, they sound great, I'm gonna call my cereal after them.
11:33 Speaker 03 You wouldn't do it these days, I think.
11:35 Speaker 04 No?
11:35 Speaker 03 Just pick a religion and, uh...
11:40 Speaker 04 Scientologist flakes.
11:43 Speaker 03 There was a company called Early Bird who got sued because they named one of their products Haulin Oats, H A U L I N.
11:50 Speaker 01 That's good.
11:51 Speaker 03 And they got sued by Hall and Oats, the band.
11:53 Speaker 01 Daryl Hall.
11:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:55 Speaker 01 I think that's reasonable. I do think that's reasonable.
11:56 Speaker 04 I think that's fair enough because they've obviously taken their name.
11:59 Speaker 03 Yeah. Rolled oats.
12:00 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
12:01 Speaker 03 And steel cut oats. Any preps?
12:04 Speaker 04 If I was to see them both on the shelf.
12:06 Speaker 03 Yep.
12:06 Speaker 04 And I wanted to get some very special oats because Andy's coming around to stay over.
12:10 Speaker 03 Yep.
12:10 Speaker 04 And I know that he loves his oats and I want to get him something special. I would go for the rolled oats because I feel like it's more done by a caveman with a big stone and rolled it over to make it work.
12:21 Speaker 03 Interesting.
12:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:22 Speaker 03 Well, actually, steel cut are the least processed. They've just been sliced around a bit. The rolled ones have been steamed a bit, I think, and rolled into a flake. So if you want to go with classic, the hardest possible one to cook, you want steel cut oats, which is what, which is what I use. Oats are very good for one medical condition and you have to get into a big bath full of oats to cure it.
12:45 Speaker 00 Oh, I know because we had it recently. Chicken pox.
12:49 Speaker 03 Oh, no.
12:50 Speaker 00 Oh, well.
12:50 Speaker 03 Okay, so there are two, there are two conditions. That can be cured by oats. I was talking about sunburn.
12:55 Speaker 04 Really?
12:56 Speaker 00 Must be the same kind of soothing skin thing.
12:58 Speaker 03 Apparently you make a nice, cool bath.
12:59 Speaker 04 Yeah.
13:00 Speaker 03 Drop a load of oats in it and then you get in. So you basically are the porridge.
13:05 Speaker 01 Interesting.
13:05 Speaker 03 That's pretty cool.
13:06 Speaker 04 No, you're like the little blob of jam.
13:08 Speaker 03 You're the blob of jam, for sure.
13:10 Speaker 04 That's it.
13:10 Speaker 01 You're not the oats, yeah.
13:12 Speaker 04 That's really interesting. Do you know that in Scotland, they would make oatmeal poultices for minor boils? So what you would do is you would get the oatmeal and you would put some butter in it and you would boil it up and then you would cool it and then you would put it against your boils. And if the boils were really difficult, then you would use urine instead of butter.
13:34 Speaker 03 Oh, no, I think it's fine. I think actually it's not that bad, doctor. I think it's fine. I think, I think I'll have the oats, please.
13:40 Speaker 04 They're also good, apparently, for curing your own warts. And what you had to do was take 81 stems of oats, bind them into nine bundles of nine and hide them under a stone. And as the stems rotted, your warts would disappear.
13:55 Speaker 03 Did people just have a lot more warts and boils back in the day?
13:59 Speaker 04 I feel like, yeah, because we had cured them all by doing this oats thing.
14:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, I just feel like there are many more boil cures that are older than.
14:07 Speaker 00 Yeah, you're right.
14:08 Speaker 03 Yeah. Do we, has anyone here ever had a boil?
14:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
14:11 Speaker 00 Oh, really?
14:12 Speaker 03 I think I had one on tour with all of us on the top of my butt, remember?
14:16 Speaker 04 Was that the one where you came around to my room and poured oats into my bath?
14:23 Speaker 04 Yeah, I've, I've had warts on my feet.
14:26 Speaker 00 Yeah, same. As a kid, you get warts, don't you?
14:29 Speaker 04 Yeah.
14:29 Speaker 03 Not sure I've ever had a wart.
14:31 Speaker 04 Really?
14:32 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:32 Speaker 04 Okay, podcast at qi.com if you want to give Andy warts.
14:41 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
14:42 Speaker 03 Stop the podcast.
14:43 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
14:46 Speaker 03 That's right. So everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?
14:56 Speaker 00 Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.
15:03 Speaker 03 Progressive offers customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
15:08 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks and baby gates of insurance.
15:13 Speaker 03 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
15:16 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. On with the show.
15:23 Speaker 02 ChatGPT for teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically and grow their skills. ChatGPT for teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.com slash parents to learn more.
15:52 Speaker 03 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.
15:55 Speaker 04 Okay, my fact this week is that the world's first electric internet connected SUV car, which was designed to help you easily locate parking spots and petrol stations, was Chinese and called the wrong way.
16:09 Speaker 03 Very. Beautiful.
16:11 Speaker 04 Beautiful. So I've just been to China.
16:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:15 Speaker 04 And I got a car to pick us up from the airport and it was on an app. And when we arrived there, I looked at the app and it said to look out for wrong way. And I thought it was like a joke name that the driver had given himself or something. So I Googled it and it turns out that Rover, the car manufacturer, I think went bust in the UK. But then a Chinese company bought the technology, but not the name.
16:40 Speaker 03 And they.
16:40 Speaker 04 They made a new name that was kind of a transliterated version of Rover.
16:45 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:46 Speaker 04 Royal Airway. But if you pronounce it in Pinyin, then you say it wrong way. It sounds almost exactly the same as wrong way in English.
16:53 Speaker 03 Wrong way.
16:54 Speaker 00 Brilliant.
16:54 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's so just further context on the name thing. My Chinese name, which I grew up with in Hong Kong is Xiebo. Xiebo is Schreiber. Xie and bo. So, but it doesn't really work because it's Uncle Egg. When you put those two words together.
17:10 Speaker 03 You.
17:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, my Chinese name is Uncle Egg.
17:12 Speaker 03 That's kind of cute.
17:13 Speaker 00 Wow.
17:13 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that was always just caused embarrassment.
17:16 Speaker 04 Shave your head.
17:17 Speaker 03 Hmm.
17:17 Speaker 04 I think you could.
17:18 Speaker 03 It's a good reason to.
17:19 Speaker 04 You could definitely pull off an Uncle Egg.
17:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:22 Speaker 00 And your beard, because eggs aren't hairy on the bottom, are they?
17:24 Speaker 04 It could be like an egg coming out of the chicken.
17:26 Speaker 01 Oh, I could be an emerging.
17:28 Speaker 00 Oh, yes.
17:29 Speaker 01 Egg. That is nice.
17:30 Speaker 03 Stick a little feather on your face and some bird poo on the other side.
17:35 Speaker 01 And what's really useful about Pinyin is you would use the alphabet that we use in English. But Mandarin has four tones as well. And so if you say a word, often if you just had P I N G, ping, you wouldn't know if it's ping, ping, ping, ping. So that that's what it gives you on top of each word. It gives you the guidance of the the arrow, as it were.
17:54 Speaker 04 I think what's interesting with that is like, because Chinese is like non alphabetic, they're always approximate, I think.
18:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
18:00 Speaker 04 That's fair to say. That's why you get sort of like a word which is Uncle Egg. But actually, you can translate those two syllables to something which doesn't say Uncle Egg. It might say.
18:11 Speaker 03 Disgusting pervert.
18:12 Speaker 04 I was gonna say, excellent podcaster, but.
18:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, yeah, yeah. Well, there are four tones.
18:17 Speaker 04 There are four tones.
18:19 Speaker 01 And that's why satire in China is actually really good and really subtle because you are able to make fun of political characters via the use of pinyin and Chinese characters because of the multiple meanings.
18:32 Speaker 03 And when the government arrest you, do they get to say, I don't like your tone, young man?
18:35 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's good.
18:36 Speaker 03 Can I check your fact, James?
18:37 Speaker 04 Yeah.
18:37 Speaker 03 You said this was the world's first electric internet-connected SUV car.
18:40 Speaker 04 According to their website.
18:42 Speaker 03 So why are you using it to locate petrol stations?
18:45 Speaker 04 Ah, well, where do you wash your car?
18:50 Speaker 03 Good point. I pay the local kids a fiver and then.
18:55 Speaker 04 That's a good point, actually. I do go to petrol stations to buy food.
18:59 Speaker 03 Flowers for your wife?
19:00 Speaker 04 Flowers for my wife.
19:01 Speaker 01 It's all the best stuff there, isn't it?
19:03 Speaker 04 Screen wash, Ginstas pasnes. I also go there to wash my car and often there are charging points in petrol stations, but that's a very good point.
19:13 Speaker 03 It was just me being flippant, really. I'm really sorry.
19:15 Speaker 00 No, I think we shouldn't be calling them petrol stations. You should call them wife flower stations or something. We can't let petrol keep having dominance over language.
19:24 Speaker 01 It might be an interesting reason. It's something that is going on in China with electric cars, which is replaceable batteries as opposed to charging your existing battery.
19:33 Speaker 03 You just drive over the marks and then the machine does the rest. And it's especially useful for big, heavy trucks. We're obviously putting in a load of electricity, even at very fast rates, would take a while, but a battery swap, three minutes.
19:45 Speaker 04 That's how the first electric cars were. Someone would come, take out your battery and put a new one in it. And the reason was, it was kind of based on old stagecoaches and stuff where you would take your horses and you would swap your horses over. And so it was just the obvious thing to do.
19:57 Speaker 00 Whereas now we plug the horses in, obviously.
20:01 Speaker 04 But also, like, they're gonna get rid of mobile phone integrated batteries, aren't they? That was in the news last week.
20:06 Speaker 00 Oh, yeah?
20:07 Speaker 04 Yeah. In the EU at least, I think. They're gonna make it so whenever you buy a new phone, the battery has to be replaceable. You don't just have to get rid of it as soon as the battery goes.
20:16 Speaker 01 That's quite good.
20:17 Speaker 00 That's much better, yeah. They are the world leaders, aren't they, in electric cars now, China? Sixty-five percent of electric cars are sold by China because partly because they had massive subsidies. So they have ended up with these electric car graveyards because electric car tech has come on so fast. So, you know, in the early 2010s, I think there was huge investment in the subsidies. Hundreds of companies start making them. And then the year later, everyone says, well, I don't want an electric car that can only drive 20 miles because there's a new one that can drive 50. And so there are these giant car parks with thousands of cars in them.
20:49 Speaker 03 Wow.
20:49 Speaker 04 So they made last year 31 million cars in China. How many do you think Britain made?
20:57 Speaker 03 Uh, I'll say 1 million. I'm backing Britain.
21:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, well, you slightly overestimated it. 700,000.
21:04 Speaker 03 Wow.
21:05 Speaker 04 Uh, and Mexico, Indonesia and Turkey made more than us last year, as well as the Czech Republic. Uh, and the big hitters like Germany, India and Japan.
21:16 Speaker 03 Right, but it's so China's journey to this is so recent, isn't it? It's fascinating and it's not entirely because of, but a hugely influential person behind it was a guy called Wang Gang. So he's China's Minister of Science and Tech. And he was, he got that job in 2007. But he had been a teenager in the Cultural Revolution, really horrible time for all concerned. Went through that and then after it ended, after Mao died, he went to university, studied internal combustion engines, worked at Audi and China bought a load of Audis for, you know, if you get a top government job, you get a really nice government car, which would have been a Western car like an Audi at the time. And he noticed every time he went home, wow, you know, we're using more and more oil in China.
22:01 Speaker 03 And oh, yeah, the pollution's getting worse and worse. Wonder if there's anything we could do to change that? And, um, and just pitched it to the then minister. And then last year, they, they sold about 8 million electric cars, plus 5 million hybrids. Like it's, they've just completely overtaken the rest of the world. Yeah.
22:18 Speaker 00 China is also world leader in car carriers or ro-ros.
22:24 Speaker 04 I think that's for a boat, isn't it? Row, row your boat.
22:27 Speaker 00 Row, row your boat. Row row stands for roll on, roll off. And they are car carrying boats, so they are more convenient than low lows, which are lift on lift offs for boats carrying any kind of cargo that doesn't have wheels, because you drive cars on and off them.
22:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, you get row, row ferries, didn't you?
22:45 Speaker 00 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And China's about to build the world's biggest one, which is going to carry, any guesses on how many cars?
22:52 Speaker 04 Oh, it'll be a lot. 10,000?
22:57 Speaker 00 Yeah, that's a good guess, actually.
22:58 Speaker 04 That's a lot.
22:59 Speaker 00 12,800.
23:00 Speaker 04 You're kidding?
23:01 Speaker 00 Pretty good, right?
23:02 Speaker 04 That's a lot. Can I ask, can I ask one more question just on this?
23:04 Speaker 00 Uh huh.
23:05 Speaker 04 China has just built a new snooker building where you can go and play snooker. How many snooker tables do you reckon there are in this building? No, I heard this on TV this week.
23:16 Speaker 01 Because China is the other centre of world snooker apart from Sheffield, right? It's like Sheffield and China.
23:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
23:21 Speaker 01 Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go big as a, as an opening, I'm gonna say 100,000.
23:28 Speaker 00 Okay.
23:29 Speaker 01 One for every 50,000 checkers boards that's currently in existence.
23:34 Speaker 00 I'm gonna bring it, bring it back to reality and say 1,000.
23:39 Speaker 04 Is exactly the right answer.
23:40 Speaker 00 Oh my god, yes.
23:43 Speaker 04 1,000 snooker tables in the same room.
23:45 Speaker 01 It doesn't sound as much now that I dropped my bomb on that.
23:49 Speaker 04 It's your guess, don't worry.
23:50 Speaker 01 100,000. Well, it's just because 12,800 is far more than I thought could fit into. I left a 20p on one of these tables to show I was up next.
24:03 Speaker 00 Can I just?
24:04 Speaker 04 Can you finish that? Are you finishing that?
24:06 Speaker 00 I haven't finished on row rows, but also the stevedores, which is cool because you rarely get to use that word. Stevedores being people who pack and unpack ships. Dozens will work on a ship at once. They have a huge car park full of the cars that need to get on the ship. Let's say 40 stevedores, jump in 40 cars, zoom really, really fast because they've got to get 13,000 cars on this ship. Drive up the ramp one after the other, pin them down, and then they will jump on a minibus, get back there, and then speed the other cars up. It's so cool.
24:34 Speaker 01 That's really, that's way, but I recently got the ferry from Dover to Calais and it was a very different experience. There were no stevedores as far as I could see. When we came back into Dover, we got stuck for an hour because it had to reverse out and say, sorry, the ship's not long enough to reach the port. They do this trip every day.
24:52 Speaker 03 It's not long enough.
24:53 Speaker 01 We had to re-park it in a different parking spot.
24:56 Speaker 03 That's amazing. The whole scale of this stuff in China is just nuts, isn't it? So we have just had the Beijing Motor Show, which has pretty much overtaken any other motor show in the world. You know, it used to be Detroit or whatever. It's now Beijing. So in one of the halls of the Beijing Motor Show recently, one of the halls had more electric cars, like models, than are for sale in the whole USA. And there were 17 halls at the Beijing Motor Show.
25:22 Speaker 04 Everything's just huge in China.
25:23 Speaker 01 In China, this was my memory of it. Apparently it's still the case. Seat belts are really hated by Chinese drivers and they often don't do it. But they get a lot of trouble if they get pulled over by the police. So one way around it was this company started releasing T-shirts that were white T-shirts with a seatbelt pattern over the shirts. And that became a massive craze. And police had to pull over more people than usual to see if it was the shirt or an actual seatbelt. And the problem is, is most cars these days have the noise that goes off, the alarm, if you've not got your seatbelt on. So there was a big craze of sort of blingified seatbelt buckles without the strap on it that you put in to confuse the car into thinking that the seatbelt was in. But you would get like Pokemon versions or you would get Snoopy or Winnie the Pooh.
26:07 Speaker 04 Because that is annoying when you have a bag and you put it on the passenger seat and then your car for the next five hours says, you're not wearing the seatbelt.
26:16 Speaker 00 You're a baby, same thing. Take care, so just do the seatbelt up behind you. Problem solved.
26:21 Speaker 04 My grandmother used to just hold it across her. Wouldn't plug it in. She would just pull it out and then hold it across her.
26:30 Speaker 00 Because she was a generation that were against it on principle, right?
26:32 Speaker 04 Well, there was like a theory, wasn't there? Like if you're in a crash, you don't want to wear a seatbelt because you want to be flung away from the wreckage.
26:40 Speaker 03 A car's just crashed, I want to be as far away from it as possible.
26:45 Speaker 04 In 1907, there was a Peking to Paris race, which was a big deal for cars in China at the time. But the Chinese suspected that all the racers were spies because they were mostly Europeans who had come over. And some of these cars, they had like the mudguards on the car. They were specially arranged so you could take them off and you could use them as planks whenever you needed to drive over a swamp.
27:07 Speaker 00 Oh, cool.
27:09 Speaker 04 And in Kazan in Russia, because it had to go through Russia, two youths fled in terror when they saw the car because they'd never seen one before. And in Nizhny Novgorod, one of the cars frightened the horse and the locals started throwing stones at the drivers because they were like, oh, you've come over here frightening our horses. The winner was a guy called Prince Scipione Borgesi, and he was so far ahead of all the other cars. He was 17 days ahead at one point that he attended four days of celebration in Moscow halfway through the race, and he still won by a week.
27:44 Speaker 03 Man, that's really funny.
27:46 Speaker 00 The first sort of car was in China.
27:48 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
27:50 Speaker 00 Yeah, made in China, 1680s, car number one.
27:54 Speaker 03 No, hang on, come on.
27:55 Speaker 00 Car number one, 1680s, car number two, 1890s or something. But yeah, this was made by a Flemish Jesuit missionary. So it was a nice merging of east and west back then, a guy called Ferdinand Verbiest. It was Qing dynasty and he invented a car which was steam powered with coal powering it, which is pretty amazing.
28:13 Speaker 04 Sorry, 1680?
28:15 Speaker 00 Correct. Didn't even really have steam powered stuff then.
28:17 Speaker 01 Who would have been Andy alive to experience this?
28:22 Speaker 03 Oh, what a good question. Well, not Oliver or Richard Cromwell, sadly, of course.
28:28 Speaker 04 This Verbiest guy, did he drive, run, travel?
28:32 Speaker 00 I see what you're doing because of the name. Yeah.
28:34 Speaker 04 He was the Verbiest guy.
28:36 Speaker 00 Yeah, very good. The only problem with...
28:41 Speaker 03 That's not the worstest joke you'll ever do.
28:46 Speaker 00 He, it was 65 centimetres long and it was actually a toy for the emperor. But it still works. You could, and you could squeeze into that. If you're desperate, you can squeeze into a 65 centimetre.
28:56 Speaker 01 How fast would it?
28:58 Speaker 04 It's just a run around and it's good for parking.
29:02 Speaker 00 It didn't say how fast it went, but it could go for an hour before it needed more coal. And he's interesting because he's the only Westerner ever to have received an honorary name after death in China. So if you've done something impressive in China, the emperor would give you a name after you died. And the emperor really liked him because he did other cool stuff. And so he was called Chin Min, which means diligent and clever.
29:23 Speaker 04 Very nice.
29:25 Speaker 03 Can I tell you one of my other Chinese electric car heroes? Wang Chuanfu. So he's the head of BYD.
29:31 Speaker 01 Oh, and they're the biggies. There's one other, but they're, yeah.
29:34 Speaker 03 They, again, they used to make batteries for mobile phones and then they got via that into bigger batteries and then thought, you know what, cars. He once showed investors, he was at a meeting with, you know, Warren Buffett.
29:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:45 Speaker 03 Who was at Berkshire Hathaway, his huge investment firm. BYD, in their very early days, were trying to get investment for, from Warren Buffett. And at an investor meeting, Wang Chuanfu once showed investors how clean and safe his batteries were by drinking from a glass of battery fluid in front of him.
30:06 Speaker 01 What?
30:06 Speaker 03 He said, look, this stuff is great.
30:08 Speaker 00 Wait, but that, I don't need it to be drinkable.
30:11 Speaker 03 I know, I know. Yes, it's unclear what point he was making, actually.
30:15 Speaker 04 Is it not highly acidic, battery fluid?
30:17 Speaker 03 I guess his stuff was not.
30:19 Speaker 00 Right. He didn't drop down dead as part of the PR stunt.
30:22 Speaker 03 Oh, sorry. I forgot to say he dropped down dead as part of the PR. But he got the deal.
30:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, very impressive.
30:33 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the reason a World War II bomb whistled as it fell from the sky is because it had a big whistle on it.
30:47 Speaker 04 Is this a specific bomb we're talking about, or is it all the bomb?
30:50 Speaker 01 It wouldn't have been every single bomb, absolutely, that's right. But these are German bombs. And the idea was, it was an intimidation tactic.
30:58 Speaker 04 Like the Blitz ones?
30:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah, yeah, it would have been those, because a lot of the memories of people during the Blitz talk about the whistling sound of the bomb as it came down. And the Germans decided that they wanted to use this as a tactic, so they literally attached a whistle-like device to the fins of the bomb, so that as it came down, it created that sound.
31:19 Speaker 00 Whereas when we now go
31:22 Speaker 00 we think, oh, that's just the sound of a bomb. But actually, it's not, it's the sound of a whistle.
31:25 Speaker 04 I actually think it's the sound of something falling. Like, in my head, it's like Wile E. Coyote makes that sound, right?
31:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
31:31 Speaker 04 When it's falling. So I just thought it was, like, actually, I never really thought about it, and if I did think about it, I would know it was wrong. But I kind of just thought, oh, things that fall just go like that.
31:40 Speaker 00 Yeah, but that would have come from the bombs, right? Yeah.
31:42 Speaker 01 Because the sound gets is getting deeper, yeah?
31:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
31:45 Speaker 01 But as we know, from the Doppler effect, if there's a police siren driving past you or something, it will get higher as it approached you, and then deeper as it went further away again.
31:55 Speaker 03 It's because movies have tricked us.
31:56 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
31:58 Speaker 03 The whistle that you hear in the movies is the perspective of the pilot, not the person on the ground.
32:02 Speaker 01 We should do
32:04 Speaker 00 I've started doing that since I read since I read, since I like read, read this and was like, oh, yeah, of course. You know, with kids, when you feed them, you go as an aeroplane. What I've started doing
32:17 Speaker 00 as it descends into his mouth.
32:19 Speaker 01 It's interesting, because it was used as a sort of intimidation tactic. I read an account by a guy called Harold Trautén, who in 1941, he was, he was a young boy, and he remembers being in his kitchen, and he, he hears the noise of the bomb coming down. And so they immediately jumped under the table, because many tables had cages underneath them as a bomb protection device. Turns out, it was the neighbour's kettle whistling, and that's how sensitive everyone was at the time, specifically to that sound.
32:44 Speaker 03 There was loads of it around in the war.
32:46 Speaker 00 Bombs?
32:47 Speaker 01 Loads of bombs.
32:49 Speaker 03 Yeah. No, loads of noise being used to a certain extent psychologically.
32:53 Speaker 04 Throughout all of history.
32:54 Speaker 01 All of history.
32:54 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, you're right. So the, but the, the Stuka plane, which was the Junkers 87, JU 87, they had little fan-like whistling devices put on, because they were dive bombing planes. So the idea is you dive down as close as possible to The target, release the bombs when you're really close so they land accurately and then you fly off again. But they were fitted with special devices which made them scream. And it was a very terrifying sound to hear, the scream of this Stuker plane. But it did slow them down a bit by about fifteen miles an hour. So they took them off eventually because it made them easier to shoot down.
33:25 Speaker 04 Well, like, do you remember the Night Witches who we've mentioned before? The Soviet female pilots and they were in really old rickety planes because they gave them like the wooden planes. But they couldn't go very high, but they were very noisy because they were old. And they used sound because it would just disrupt people's sleep. You were on edge all the time or also like you would have to use anti-aircraft stuff in the middle of the night so no one could get any sleep. So it's kind of a psychological thing in that way that you disrupt. I think it's called harassing fire, it's known as.
33:59 Speaker 04 You deliberately do something just to harass people and not necessarily to bomb them.
34:03 Speaker 00 Well, the famous example in Second World War that our grandparents always used to talk about was the doodlebugs, wasn't it? The doodlebug was basically a German drone, essentially.
34:11 Speaker 03 Is that the V1?
34:12 Speaker 00 Yes, the V1, which it would be fired and it was sort of like powered by a pooh, pooh, pooh, pooh sort of jet as it went through the air. And it was programmed to stop at a certain point. And the famous thing about the doodlebug, which everyone always remembers, is that when its engine was programmed to cut out, that was when it plummets out of the air. So you hear that pooh, pooh, pooh. And then a sudden silence, which actually a friend of mine in the village, Laurie, is in his early nineties and he still remembers whenever you heard that silence. You know, you probably don't have time to save yourself at that point.
34:42 Speaker 04 Well, he must be very happy to live next door to someone with a young child. Never any silence.
34:49 Speaker 03 The V2, which was the successor rocket, you don't, you don't have that psychological nightmare of hearing it and then cut out because it's going so fast that you don't hear it. You just hear a big bang.
35:00 Speaker 04 Right.
35:00 Speaker 03 Well, if you hear the big bang, you know you haven't been killed by it.
35:04 Speaker 00 That's a good point. Relief.
35:05 Speaker 03 I mean, they're both, they're both bad.
35:07 Speaker 04 But not as bad as the Big Bang Theory.
35:12 Speaker 03 If you hear that, you know, oh no.
35:16 Speaker 00 You long for some. Silence.
35:18 Speaker 04 Um. Here's a interesting whistling bomb. Um. In nineteen sixty five, the attack squadron twenty five, the American squadron, toilet bombed Vietnam. So they wanted to mark the fact that they dropped six million pounds of ordnance on the country, and they did it by taking an old toilet, taking it up on the plane and then dropping it out. Uh. And because of the holes in the toilet or something, it just whistled all the way down.
35:44 Speaker 03 Right.
35:44 Speaker 00 And that's to commemorate how much they've dropped on.
35:47 Speaker 04 It's just like soldiers, you know.
35:49 Speaker 00 Soldiers being soldiers.
35:50 Speaker 04 Soldiers being soldiers, yeah. Uh. But actually, previously in the Korean War, there was a kitchen sink bomb that was dropped on Korea, uh, because someone had said, we've dropped everything on them except the kitchen sink. And so they deliberately just got a kitchen sink and dropped it down as well.
36:05 Speaker 03 Gosh, you've got to make your own fun, haven't you, in war? Guess your sense of humour changes a bit, doesn't it?
36:10 Speaker 00 Yeah. I like this real nonchalance in an article I read from Time Magazine in nineteen forty. Cause so it's, it's, um, September nineteen forty, this is written, so middle of the Battle of Britain. Um. And it said, last week, while screaming bombs were falling on London, C. Martin Wilbrook, curator at Chicago's Museum of Natural History, called attention to the exhibit of Chinese whistling arrows and used the blitz as a way to segue into ancient Chinese whistling arrows.
36:37 Speaker 03 Nice.
36:37 Speaker 00 But these were the precursor. So these were arrows that were hollow on the inside. And so they whistled as they flew and they were to frighten people. And the Emperor, Manchu Emperor, used them to scare people off the streets when he was walking through. So they couldn't harm people, the ones that he used.
36:53 Speaker 01 How interesting. Genghis Khan used those as well.
36:56 Speaker 00 Yeah.
36:56 Speaker 01 That was a biggie. Uh. Yeah. And that was more so used as an intimidation tactic prior to a siege. So if the noise and the confusion, it'd scare horses. If you had all these arrows and this noise coming. So it would cause chaos amongst the enemy and then you make your strike.
37:11 Speaker 04 That was kind of like one of the earliest things in war, wasn't it, to scare the horses? That's why you would use, you're scaring the opponents as well. But scaring the horses was a really big deal. And then people started using elephants in warfare and noise is really good against elephants because elephants are like really weirdly skittish about loud noises.
37:30 Speaker 03 Hey.
37:30 Speaker 04 Yeah, they really are.
37:31 Speaker 03 Perhaps I too am an elephant.
37:34 Speaker 04 So they get annoyed.
37:35 Speaker 03 Don't show us that part of Tric again, I think.
37:39 Speaker 04 They have very sensitive hearing elephants. So Alexander the Great learned that a good thing to do when battling against people who had elephants was to get a load of pigs and trumpets, make the pigs squeal and blow the trumpets and then the elephants would run away.
37:55 Speaker 00 I know, you know, if you're one of his cavalrymen and he's, do you want a pig or a trumpet to carry on your horse? Like when he's run out of trumpets, you've drawn the short straw, haven't you?
38:04 Speaker 03 But if everyone's going hungry, you can't eat the trumpet.
38:06 Speaker 00 Good point.
38:07 Speaker 03 So it's, yeah, it's make the blessings. Yeah. Is that just because elephants have got really big ears? That their hearing is so good?
38:12 Speaker 04 Uh, I think some of the hearing goes through their feet as well. This now, I think they just don't like vibrations.
38:18 Speaker 03 Yeah.
38:19 Speaker 04 I think, I don't know, because they don't like bees either, do they? Like because of the buzzing of the bees?
38:23 Speaker 00 Yeah, they hate bees.
38:24 Speaker 03 Not the stings, the buzz.
38:25 Speaker 04 Yeah.
38:26 Speaker 00 And mice.
38:27 Speaker 03 Is that true? I thought.
38:28 Speaker 00 No, it's cartoons.
38:29 Speaker 03 Yeah, but we're dealing with whistling bombs falling. So, you know, I did find tv tropes.com, which advised me on the whistling bombs thing.
38:37 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
38:38 Speaker 03 Said, please remember, if you should ever find yourself in an area often bombarded from the sky, that not all projectiles make such a sound. If you are informed something deadly may land nearby, you should duck or take cover, even if you don't hear the whistle. I think if you're taking your advice, if you're in a bombardment situation and you're reading your on tv tropes.com.
38:56 Speaker 04 Well, look, I could, I tried to speak to the buffins at fun.com.
39:02 Speaker 04 I think these days it's like the buzz of a drone, isn't it?
39:05 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, yes.
39:07 Speaker 04 You're in trouble.
39:08 Speaker 03 We do get to hear a close example of a whistling bomb in London these days. When would you have heard that? On nights of celebration, on bonfire night? Fireworks. The whistling sound, it's a manufactured sound that's attached to it. And so like all these things, like the toilet has a hole in it, has holes. It's not even by holes. It's a chemical mix. It's called whistle mix. And whistle mix, yeah. Potassium benzoate is used.
39:36 Speaker 04 I gotta start a tribute act of little mix called whistle mix. We just play very high pitched.
39:44 Speaker 00 For dogs.
39:45 Speaker 03 That's insane.
39:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
39:46 Speaker 03 And is it the fireworks? It's because they're going further away.
39:49 Speaker 04 It's because they're going away.
39:50 Speaker 03 They're doing the right thing.
39:51 Speaker 04 They're doing the right way around.
39:54 Speaker 03 They're begging lots of physics. Thanks fireworks. My favourite bomb disposal person, as there were on bombs.
40:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:01 Speaker 03 Have you heard of Peter Gurney? He was this massive hero of bomb disposal. And obviously, people who do bomb disposal are unbelievably brave.
40:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
40:09 Speaker 03 Particularly when you're dealing with bombs that, for example, have been planted, whether it's a car bomb, like a second world war bomb, or a bomb that's been fired and then not gone off. They're all kind of made in a factory, right? So you know roughly how to do them. People have known how to defuse particular bombs.
40:24 Speaker 04 Can I just say, Andy, I actually think the people who defuse those are quite brave as well.
40:29 Speaker 03 Okay, well. Yeah, I guess. That's true. But the really brave people.
40:37 Speaker 03 No, when you're like, if it's like an IRA bomb or something, which has just been made by an enthusiastic amateur.
40:42 Speaker 04 What's that TV show where that woman goes around defusing bombs?
40:45 Speaker 03 Oh, I don't know.
40:46 Speaker 04 Oh, it's Trigger Point.
40:47 Speaker 03 Fictional.
40:47 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
40:48 Speaker 03 Oh, nice.
40:49 Speaker 04 No, it's a real TV show.
40:54 Speaker 03 So Peter Gurney did this. He defused thousands of bombs over his career. It was in Berlin and Egypt and Libya. But he just had to walk towards them, you know, knowing nothing about the structure. And then like seeing what was there and that because they have tricks on them.
41:07 Speaker 01 So what would you use? Intuition? Well, like, how could you possibly use any logic for an unlogical thing?
41:12 Speaker 03 Lots of experience or like if one part of it is removed, then that'll trigger another bit and you have to work it out. So he would often use medical scalpels, a ball of string, garden secateurs and fish hooks. And then this moment happened in 1991 in February. Some shells were fired at 10 Downing Street and one and more in the middle of town. One landed in the garden of 10 Downing Street. Hugely dangerous. He has to walk towards it, but the buildings around there are really tall, so he has no radio signal.
41:40 Speaker 04 It's his stature era.
41:41 Speaker 03 Uh, John Major, it would have been. Um, so he has to straddle this bomb, right? And he, what he's armed with is a twig and a spanner that he's borrowed from the prime minister's boiler. Okay. Why does he bring his equipment? I guess, I don't know why he didn't have it with him, but he, it was an immediate urgent thing. He didn't have time to go and get it. It's just landed in 10 Downing Street.
42:03 Speaker 01 Bet that happens to him all the time.
42:07 Speaker 04 I'm Prime Minister, have you got any secateurs? No, but I've got this spanner from my boiler.
42:12 Speaker 03 And my lucky twig.
42:14 Speaker 01 So he was sitting astride the bomb, and this is from his obituary. By the way, he died last year, aged 93. He survives this. He was conscious of an intense heat through his fire resistant trousers. As he, so he remembered to put his fire resistant trousers on. I don't know why he doesn't have his kit. But.
42:34 Speaker 04 Prime Minister, do you have any clothing that I could use?
42:38 Speaker 01 I do have these fire resistant trousers. But as he put it in his autobiography, braver men walk away. He suddenly realised that if he didn't do something quickly, he would never again sing anything other than soprano. So he has to hop off the bomb, scoop up some snow from a nearby snowdrift, because it's February, shove it down his trousers. Wow. Then get back on the bomb. And he manages it. He diffuses it.
43:00 Speaker 04 Wow.
43:01 Speaker 01 Incredible. And like I say, he lived to the age of 93 and he died last year.
43:04 Speaker 04 Bravo.
43:05 Speaker 00 I can't believe he needed to be straddling it rather than just next to it.
43:08 Speaker 01 Uh.
43:09 Speaker 00 Because that's, I mean, he'll refuse that excuse with me in this.
43:14 Speaker 04 That was also John Major's excuse with Edwina Curry.
43:20 Speaker 01 Well, I've got one other old ancient whistling noise to intimidate. It's the Aztec death whistle. Have you heard of that?
43:28 Speaker 04 Yeah.
43:29 Speaker 01 Yeah, so in the 1990s, they were doing some excavations in New Mexico when they found this boy who was in a temple underground, um, dead. Holding.
43:38 Speaker 00 A long time ago, right?
43:40 Speaker 01 A long time ago.
43:41 Speaker 00 A long time ago, dead.
43:43 Speaker 01 So expected, like, not, not.
43:45 Speaker 04 We're too late.
43:48 Speaker 01 Not the surprising bit, okay. So he was holding in, in one of his hands, this object that no one had really seen before, and it was called the Aztec death whistle from then on. And you would blow into it and it would make a noise that sounded like a wind that everyone thought maybe it was used for rituals when wind wasn't available. And they're not sure whether or not, there's lots of theories, but might have been used in the warfield to intimidate people. And so I happened to know someone who owns a modern death whistle, Aztec death whistle. And so I reached out to them to give us a sample. So this is a friend of the podcast. So here we go.
44:27 Speaker 05 Bit of Death Whistle there for you by Reece Darby.
44:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, so thank you Reece.
44:32 Speaker 04 But knowing Reece, that could have been just him screaming.
44:34 Speaker 01 I do have questions if that was just him.
44:38 Speaker 04 But I've read about those death whistles and I think we might have done it on QI or we might have thought about doing it on QI that probably the modern ones are bigger and they're deliberately made to make screaming noises and the original ones, like you say, have more windy bass.
44:55 Speaker 01 More wind bass. Yeah, I think that's, I think, and some people are trying to push that they were used on the battlefield. But again, we've got so little info about it, but it was found in this temple. But that scream is a very realistic, sounds like a woman wailing. Um, yeah.
45:09 Speaker 04 I mean, it sounded like Reece Darby wailing.
45:12 Speaker 01 I'll check with them.
45:13 Speaker 00 Sounds like Reece Darby wailing after he's sat on a hot bomb.
45:21 Speaker 00 Stop the podcast.
45:22 Speaker 03 Stop the podcast.
45:24 Speaker 00 Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.
45:27 Speaker 03 That's right. So everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?
45:37 Speaker 00 Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.
45:44 Speaker 03 Progressive offers customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.
45:49 Speaker 00 They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks and baby gates of insurance.
45:54 Speaker 03 Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.
45:57 Speaker 00 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. On with the show.
46:03 Speaker 02 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default and parental controls offer families additional options like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.
46:33 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. That is Andy.
46:37 Speaker 03 My fact is, flatworms sometimes grow heads at both ends by mistake.
46:43 Speaker 00 How do we know they're doing it by mistake?
46:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:46 Speaker 03 Would you do it on purpose?
46:51 Speaker 01 A party trick, yeah?
46:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, they do, they normally grow them the right way around and occasionally things go wrong.
46:57 Speaker 00 I see.
46:58 Speaker 03 That's why we think it's by mistake.
47:00 Speaker 00 Okay.
47:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, scientists haven't done the requisite interviews to find out if this is just like a fun thing for them. So, right, flatworms, right? These are, for anyone who's not familiar, these are just, I mean, as they sound, they're flatworms. They're not your fancy posh ringed worms.
47:14 Speaker 04 They're not even related to earthworms, really, are they?
47:17 Speaker 03 No.
47:17 Speaker 04 Like, things that you get in your garden.
47:19 Speaker 03 They're just completely different. These are just, like, useless little flatworms.
47:23 Speaker 00 What?
47:24 Speaker 01 Oh, no.
47:25 Speaker 03 Okay, well, we've got a disagreement of opinion about them, but I think...
47:28 Speaker 00 They're only flat at the edges, like toasties, like those jaffles. That's what they remind me of.
47:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they're very ancient life forms, obviously, and there are loads of different species of them. Some of them breed by just separating themselves in two. These are the ones that, if you cut the head off, they grow another head. Or if you cut it in two, it becomes two worms. Or if you cut off a tiny bit, it grows a whole new one from that. So imagine if I, right now, grew a head in, like, roughly where my stomach is.
47:57 Speaker 04 Yeah.
47:57 Speaker 03 And then, everything above that head grows a new pair of legs from there.
48:01 Speaker 04 Does the head look exactly the same as yours?
48:03 Speaker 03 Yes.
48:04 Speaker 04 Or does it look like a brother?
48:06 Speaker 03 I think it's a cloning thing. So it's a new Andy's head in the middle of my stomach.
48:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
48:10 Speaker 03 And then from above that, I just grow new legs and hips and everything. And then that Andy has my legs already.
48:16 Speaker 04 Why's it got the same name? I would give it a different name. Because that's going to get confusing. Even if it's Andy 2, that's better than Andy.
48:22 Speaker 03 Okay, yeah, sorry. So Andy 2 gets my old legs.
48:25 Speaker 04 Right.
48:25 Speaker 01 Does Andy 1 and Andy 2 communicate with each other? Do they...
48:28 Speaker 03 We're not friends, we're not friends, but, yeah, we're colleagues.
48:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, I mean, that's as close as you get to a friend, isn't it, really? Look, I know, I know you grew out of my body. I just don't think we're quite there yet.
48:43 Speaker 03 So that's, that's how the flatworms do it.
48:46 Speaker 00 Well, I don't, I didn't understand that explanation, even though it was really good. So you're saying grows up your tummy and then he, he keeps your original legs, but some new legs grow higher up your body.
48:56 Speaker 03 Yeah, I, old Andy, me, I grow new legs.
49:00 Speaker 00 Okay, okay.
49:00 Speaker 03 And he gets my legs and he grows a new head, right?
49:03 Speaker 04 Lucky him, because you have very long legs. Where you keep a lot of your height.
49:07 Speaker 03 It certainly is. I've got a real job growing another pair of legs as long and, and listen as those, but.
49:14 Speaker 00 No one said listen, but okay.
49:17 Speaker 03 And sometimes these flatworms get it wrong, right?
49:20 Speaker 04 Oh dear.
49:21 Speaker 03 They will, they will grow a second head. This is quite confusing. They grow a second head halfway up them, facing the right way, but then at the bottom of the top half, so my old Andy, right? Me, I accidentally grow another head after separating off. So I, Andy, am now ahead at this end and ahead at the other end as well.
49:38 Speaker 01 Is, is your new bottom head, is that facing upside down or the right way up?
49:44 Speaker 04 Are you like the king of clubs?
49:45 Speaker 03 Yeah. Yes, yes.
49:48 Speaker 01 Right.
49:48 Speaker 03 Facing the wrong way.
49:49 Speaker 00 And you've got no legs now, right? Or do you also still grow the legs?
49:52 Speaker 03 Well, I'm a worm with this, so it doesn't matter.
49:55 Speaker 01 But you've got to move.
49:57 Speaker 00 You just said you grow new, if it goes right, you grow new legs.
50:00 Speaker 03 That was the analogy I was.
50:01 Speaker 00 But actually, good point. Worms don't have legs. Hang on.
50:05 Speaker 04 In this whole analogy, whenever Andy says legs, you have to imagine it's the tail of a worm.
50:10 Speaker 03 I don't, I don't think I could have made it any clearer than I have done.
50:14 Speaker 01 I think you're right.
50:15 Speaker 04 So let's imagine Andy one and Andy two, okay? Andy one has now got two heads and has no tail.
50:23 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:24 Speaker 04 How are you gonna poo?
50:26 Speaker 03 Don't know.
50:26 Speaker 04 You don't know?
50:29 Speaker 00 Haven't thought this through, have you?
50:31 Speaker 03 We've consulted with each other and neither of us know. And that's why I said by mistake in my original fact, because I do think this is a dingo. Do you know, James?
50:39 Speaker 04 I do know.
50:39 Speaker 03 How am I gonna poo?
50:41 Speaker 04 Well, the lucky thing is that flatworms poo and eat in the same hole. That's not lucky for most of your life, but in this specific instance where you have two heads, it doesn't matter so much because you can poo out of your mouth.
50:54 Speaker 03 But surely, I'm sorry, this is now getting a bit gross, but if I've got a head at either end, aren't things heading the other way towards Andy too? I'm not going to have to poo out anything he's been eating, nor he me.
51:08 Speaker 04 You would eat it and poo it out of your face and then Andy too will eat it and poo it out of his face.
51:14 Speaker 03 Okay, that's fine. Well, that's fine.
51:16 Speaker 01 You'd have to come to a compromise if it was that other version, wouldn't you? You'd take turns in eating and then being the anus for the meal, wouldn't you?
51:23 Speaker 00 Oh, I thought like no curries or something.
51:25 Speaker 03 Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you don't want to be a date and then suddenly you're just pooing out of your mouth.
51:31 Speaker 04 I don't think I'm going on many dates.
51:35 Speaker 02 Let me tell you about my lissome legs, for God's sake.
51:41 Speaker 03 Over there, there's Andy with two sets of legs upside down. He's surrounded by women.
51:48 Speaker 00 The thing about the heads coming off and the new heads coming is the new heads have the same memories and we don't understand that. So they tested this with planarian flatworms, a kind of flatworm. They trained them up on a half on a rough surface, half on a smooth surface. And then they got them to find food all on a rough surface. And the ones who've been trained on a rough surface darted to the food because they like travelling on it. The ones who've been raised on the smooth surface were like, oh, what's this rough surface? Anyway, then they cut all the heads off. And then when the new heads came back, the heads that had been raised on the rough surface remembered to be chill about the rough surface. It's like a really complicated way of showing they have memories. I don't know why they didn't just ask, you know, do you remember nine 11 or whatever? But that's
52:33 Speaker 00 how they did it. And they remember their upbringing, even though it's a different head.
52:37 Speaker 04 It's wild. They do really stupid experiments with these things though, don't they? Because they're so wacky, they want to see what their limits are. So there's a guy called James McConnell in 1964, who put some flatworms in a maze and taught them how to complete the maze. And then he chopped them up and fed them to another flatworm.
52:58 Speaker 04 And then put that flatworm into the maze and the flatworm could also complete the maze without being taught how to do it. And his theory was that basically they had learned through their food.
53:08 Speaker 03 Interesting.
53:09 Speaker 00 Is it like talking to them from inside?
53:10 Speaker 04 Well, it turns out that no one's been able to replicate this experiment. And what they think happened is the first flatworm left a load of slime in the maze and the second one just followed the slime.
53:20 Speaker 00 He didn't clean the maze out. That's loose.
53:25 Speaker 03 But given what we know about that, given that they can regenerate memories after being decapitated, I mean, yeah, it sounds like that experiment was flawed, but it's crazy what they can do.
53:34 Speaker 01 Yeah. What can they do?
53:35 Speaker 03 They can regrow their head and remember.
53:37 Speaker 01 I thought you meant once it's regrown, what they can do.
53:40 Speaker 03 Well, we know someone who can't remember things even with the same head.
53:45 Speaker 03 But it's just, it is just nuts, isn't it? Like if we could harness these abilities, we'd be unstoppable.
53:50 Speaker 01 We would.
53:50 Speaker 03 If we could, they can regrow from one two hundred and seventy ninth of their original mass.
53:55 Speaker 01 That's insane.
53:56 Speaker 03 So I don't know what that is for a human. It must be your little finger or something.
54:00 Speaker 00 And there are also, there are so many firsts in the flatworm world. They, so they're incredibly old. They're about eight hundred and thirty nine million years old. I'm going to take away the about because that's a very precise number.
54:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:13 Speaker 00 They are eight hundred and thirty nine million years old. They're probably the first hunter and the first thing that moved with any kind of purpose rather than just floating like plankton. So they chose what direction to go and moved. They're the first animals with a nervous system, a head, a brain, eyes. They're the first animal ever to internally fertilize rather than just leaving eggs around. And they were the first bilaterally symmetrical animals, i.e. ones with left and right sides, like pretty much all animals we know today. They pioneered that, having a left and right side. So obviously you get like jellyfish and stuff or stuff that's symmetrical in lots of directions. But. Um, yeah. And I was looking up other, I was looking up asymmetrical animals. There are some really cool, can you think of asymmetrical animals?
54:57 Speaker 03 An amoeba?
55:00 Speaker 04 I know what you mean, but they're just as likely to be blobby on one side as the other, right? It's not like they'll always have this on the left and always have that on the right. I was thinking like starfish, but I don't think they are, are they?
55:10 Speaker 00 They're symmetrical. I'm talking fiddler crabs.
55:13 Speaker 04 Oh, fiddler crabs, yeah, because they have one massive claw.
55:16 Speaker 00 A massive claw. Flatfish, remember that eye migrates around a flatfish so that it has two eyes on one side?
55:22 Speaker 04 Javelin throwers.
55:24 Speaker 00 Javelin throwers and raffinadale, yeah.
55:27 Speaker 04 Chronic masturbator.
55:31 Speaker 03 Fiddle of people.
55:37 Speaker 04 Welcome back, Anna.
55:38 Speaker 00 Thanks very much, yeah.
55:40 Speaker 04 Did you read about the new flatworm they discovered that was named after Covid?
55:45 Speaker 03 Hmm, no.
55:46 Speaker 04 Uh, Humbertium covidium. They just named it after that because a lot of the study was written during lockdown. Uh, but there's another flatworm called Hancock anus, which has nothing to do with Covid, surprisingly. Uh, but they get involved with penis fencing. Penis fencing, it's because they're all hermaphroditic. They're always fighting over who will be the one that puts their sperm into the other one. And the way that they do it is by a little bit of a penis fight and then, um, the winner gets to inseminate the other one.
56:17 Speaker 00 Yeah, because it's worse to be pregnant, as I personally know, than to not be pregnant.
56:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, but at least they get nine months off.
56:31 Speaker 00 I'll see you after the show, James.
56:35 Speaker 03 I was reading about, um, the native and non-native flatworms, because the, the, oh, okay, they're great, they're very interesting, but lots of them are not native to the UK and they absolutely decimate normal earthworms. Because they hunt them, they kill them, and na- native earthworms, which are really good for soil, obviously, and are, you know, brilliant in all sorts of ways, just get written off when flatworms invade. That's because we're trading plants and trading soil and stuff. But as a result of this, I found and joined the
57:02 Speaker 03 The Earthworm Society of Britain.
57:04 Speaker 04 Oh, that's nice.
57:07 Speaker 03 Membership is £5 per year.
57:09 Speaker 04 Okay. How did these guys make any money? And all of these people that you join, like the Lighthouse Keepers Association, all the Wallpaper Association? They get so little money from you.
57:20 Speaker 03 Well, those guys are 25 quid. This was a fiver. It didn't say anywhere what you get for the fiver, but I was so excited by that point that I just joined.
57:27 Speaker 01 Maybe you sponsor an earthworm. You know, you got letters from it.
57:32 Speaker 04 I think you got it cheaper because you got an early bird discount.
57:38 Speaker 03 Why isn't that on their website?
57:43 Speaker 03 I'll tell you what happens when my membership is processed. I'm very excited.
57:46 Speaker 04 Yeah.
57:47 Speaker 00 Oh, so that's it? You're a member?
57:48 Speaker 03 Yeah.
57:49 Speaker 00 Okay, looking forward to installment two of that.
57:53 Speaker 00 God for James's joke. Everyone's gonna think they forgot to put in the end of that anecdote. There wasn't one, guys.
57:59 Speaker 03 What happens is, Annette, I've developed this tactic where I just say something and then these guys save me.
58:04 Speaker 00 That was my thing.
58:08 Speaker 00 Did you guys come across the Myers Tapeworm Trap?
58:10 Speaker 03 The Myers?
58:11 Speaker 01 Tapeworm Trap?
58:12 Speaker 00 Yes.
58:13 Speaker 01 No.
58:14 Speaker 00 So tapeworms are a kind of flatworm. I'm famous for living in your tummy and eating all your food. And they're things that you don't necessarily want living inside you. And so in 1854, a doctor called Alpheus Myers patented a trap. And it's so good. I don't know why it wasn't mass-produced, actually. It's a hollow tube made of gold that contains a bit of cheese.
58:34 Speaker 03 What?
58:37 Speaker 00 And you swallow the trap. You leave it in your tummy. And as he explains, the worm will eventually seize the cheese. You have to fast for a few days so that the worm's really hungry. It will seize the cheese and then the trap will spring shut on it and trap it. And then you can pull it out with a string. So he says, and he says, the convenient thing is you can just fix the cord that hangs out of your mouth somewhere on your shirt.
59:00 Speaker 03 Right.
59:01 Speaker 00 A bit like a baby's dummy.
59:02 Speaker 03 Right.
59:03 Speaker 00 So you don't, you can go about your day.
59:04 Speaker 03 But it's dangling out of your mouth all the time.
59:06 Speaker 00 Yes. But eventually, he says, you'll feel the tugging and you'll see the string move. And it'll be the tapeworm tugging on the cheese. And at that point, you just pull the string up and you extract the tapeworm.
59:18 Speaker 03 I have a question.
59:19 Speaker 00 Yeah.
59:19 Speaker 03 I have a few. Isn't your body constantly trying to process and push this tube through you? Yeah. Because you've swallowed it and that's how your intestines function.
59:29 Speaker 04 The peristalsis would take it down to your stomach, but I think it could theoretically stay there if there's not, if you've got something else.
59:36 Speaker 00 Yeah.
59:36 Speaker 03 If it's tethered. So stomach, okay. I thought tapeworms were in your lower intestine or something.
59:41 Speaker 00 You know what, Andy? Well done. You've highlighted the flaw in his plan. The tapeworm couldn't have got up to the tummy. So it was actually a perfect invention, except for the fact that it wasn't the right organ.
59:51 Speaker 04 But could he not just shove this golden trap up his arse?
59:55 Speaker 03 As I'm sure a lot of early potential investors told him.
1:00:11 Speaker 01 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 can all be found online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James?
1:00:23 Speaker 04 My Instagram is nosuchthingasafish.com or you can email [email protected] .
1:00:27 Speaker 01 Correct. We're on Instagram.
1:00:29 Speaker 00 Or you can do Instagram at Nosuchthing or TikTok probably.
1:00:32 Speaker 01 Yeah. And if you want to send us any of your feedback to make it towards our bonus shows, which is Little Fish and drop us a line, [email protected] as Anna says, send them there. Andy monitors all the emails coming in. He picks out the best bits of feedback for Jewel. Drop us a line. And that's a hidden members' club show. So if you want to be part of the secret committee, the secret club known as Club Fish, just go to patreon.com/clubfish and you'll find us there. But if you've got a great fact as well, do send that to the same email address because we pick the best of those and bring them to our Monday show, Little Fish. So if you want to hear your fact read out, do that there. Otherwise, just come back next week because we're going to be back here with another episode and we'll see you then. Goodbye.
1:01:38 Speaker 02 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down. Rather than giving teens the answer, study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.
Previous Little Fish: Unencumbered By Any Knowledge Next Little Fish: Swallowing A Fabergé Egg Page updated October 30, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated