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Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello Tim Harford here. One of the most exciting

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Speaker 1: things happened to me a few weeks ago. My friends

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Speaker 1: at the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish called

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Speaker 1: me up and asked me if i'd be a guest

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Speaker 1: on the podcast. Now. If you don't know what No

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Speaker 1: Such Thing as a Fish is, and most of you

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Speaker 1: will because it's hugely popular, it's four nerds with obscure

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Speaker 1: facts being very funny, or at least trying to be

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Speaker 1: very funny. The regular nerds, James, Anna, Dan and Andy

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Speaker 1: make this look very easy. You are about to hear

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Speaker 1: me trying to live up to their standards. Cautionary Tales

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Speaker 1: will be back as always next Friday, where we're on

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Speaker 1: every other Friday with our regular Cautionary Tales episodes, but

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Speaker 1: this week as a special treat, and No Such Thing

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Speaker 1: as a Fish have allowed us to release their episode

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Speaker 1: featuring yours truly, Tim Harford, desperately trying to keep pace, enjoy, Hello,

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Speaker 1: and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as

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Speaker 1: a Fish, the weekly podcast coming to you this week

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Speaker 1: from four top secret, underground, undisclosed locations. My name is

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Speaker 1: Anna to Schinsky, and I am sitting here today with

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Speaker 1: James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and our very special guest,

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Speaker 1: Tim Harford. And once again we've gathered around our microphones

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Speaker 1: with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,

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Speaker 1: and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Tim.

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Speaker 1: My fact is that in nineteen thirty nine, the young

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Speaker 1: doctor at Boston City Hospital went on a scurvy producing

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Speaker 1: diet to see what would happen. In May nineteen forty,

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Speaker 1: his fellow doctors staged an intervention after his skin started

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Speaker 1: to bleed from his follicles and an old post operative

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Speaker 1: scar reopened. Now, lovely, why because they people sort of

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Speaker 1: knew what happened when you got scurvy at that point, right,

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Speaker 1: Why was he doing this? They did? So he survived,

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Speaker 1: by the way, So I read the medical paper that

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Speaker 1: he and a colleague wrote after this experiment. So the

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Speaker 1: puzzle was, I mean, people have been suffering from scurvy

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Speaker 1: and worrying about scurvy for hundreds of years and kind

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Speaker 1: of discovering cures and then forgetting cures. It's all very fascinating.

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Speaker 1: But by the nineteen thirties they'd figured out that scurvy's

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Speaker 1: caused by not having enough vitamin C but the puzzle was,

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Speaker 1: if you deprive people of vitamin C, it very quickly

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Speaker 1: leaves the body. So after a week or so, you've

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Speaker 1: got no vitamin C. But then everything's fine and people

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Speaker 1: don't actually develop any symptoms for weeks, for even months.

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Speaker 1: And so this guy, his name was John Crandon, and

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Speaker 1: his colleagues were just trying to figure out, well, how

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Speaker 1: long can you go and what happens and what order

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Speaker 1: do these terrible symptoms appear in? And he said, well,

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Speaker 1: no one else is going to do it, so I'm

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Speaker 1: going to do it. And so he did, and yeah,

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Speaker 1: he was absolutely fine for two or three months. And

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Speaker 1: then I read the description of what happened he started

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Speaker 1: October nineteenth, nineteen thirty nine. His scurvy producing diet was, actually,

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Speaker 1: it sounds okay. It's eggs, cheese, bread, butter, chocolate, and coffee.

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Speaker 1: Gets a bit boring after a little, and it's fine

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Speaker 1: for a while. Genuinely, that is my diet. Red wine

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Speaker 1: in there, and then that's basically after we finished this,

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Speaker 1: you're really going to start on wanting some orange juice

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Speaker 1: to add to that, James, I think so, he says.

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Speaker 1: He says, after about four and a half months, hyperkrototic

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Speaker 1: pat pules had developed on the buttocks. Now that doesn't

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Speaker 1: sound good at all. I was going to google hyperkerrototic

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Speaker 1: buttock pat pules, and then I decided I wasn't going

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Speaker 1: to do that. Don't worry. I've been eating nothing but

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Speaker 1: chocolate and bread for the last six months. I could

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Speaker 1: tell you exactly what they are. Oh please, don't the listener, James.

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Speaker 1: It's just taken his trousers and it is disgusting. It's

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Speaker 1: really I'm not going to be able to take that

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Speaker 1: image out of my mind now. And then after five

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Speaker 1: months he started, Yeah, I just started bleeding around the

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Speaker 1: hair follicles on his legs. He got incredibly tired. He did.

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Speaker 1: He used to run on a treadmill, and by the

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Speaker 1: end of this he could do fifty meters on a treadmill.

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Speaker 1: It took him sixteen seconds to do fifty meters, which

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Speaker 1: is not very fast. And then he that was that

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Speaker 1: was too much. He was quite a young man. And

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Speaker 1: at six months they made a surgical incision, basically just

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Speaker 1: to see whether it would heal, and it didn't. And

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Speaker 1: I think they probably shouldn't have been surprised at that

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Speaker 1: because he had a scar from a fifteen year old

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Speaker 1: appendex toomy that was reopening by this point, and then

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Speaker 1: they said, all right, you've done enough, you've done enough,

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Speaker 1: and they started giving him intravenous vitamin C and he

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Speaker 1: and he was fine. That's that's so scientific to say, well,

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Speaker 1: your scar has your old scar has reopened, but just

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Speaker 1: in case, we're going to have to make a the

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Speaker 1: scar and see if that also fails. To hear, like,

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Speaker 1: that's that's so impressive the scientific method, I think, is it?

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Speaker 1: I think so? I find that one of the most

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Speaker 1: kind of morbid things about scurvy is the whole wound's reopening.

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Speaker 1: It takes you back in time, but in just a

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Speaker 1: way that you really don't want to go back in time.

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Speaker 1: The idea that these ancient and bone breaks rebreak, don't

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Speaker 1: they because I think you start making collagen, which basically

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Speaker 1: holds your body together, And so I don't know the

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Speaker 1: idea of all these ancient wounds you'd completely forgotten about reopening.

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Speaker 1: It's pretty all your exes ring up and break up

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Speaker 1: with you all over again. Unknown symptom. It's really it's

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Speaker 1: really mad that it's two or three months that you're fine.

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Speaker 1: For because I guess that explains why in the age

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Speaker 1: of sail sailors got scurvy, because it was just long

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Speaker 1: enough to get really, really really far away from the

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Speaker 1: nearest lemon. As then if you've got it, then if

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Speaker 1: you've got it within a day of not having any

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Speaker 1: vitamin C, then everyone would immediately come back to port

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Speaker 1: and say, what, we die at sea, so we're not

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Speaker 1: going to go. It's quite cool. It's almost like a

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Speaker 1: lemon detector, isn't It tell how far away you are

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Speaker 1: from a lemon just by how much blood is coming

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Speaker 1: out of your pause. You can only tell to within

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Speaker 1: three months away. I mean, it's not accurate. There are

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Speaker 1: easier ways to detect lemons, and actually it's are there.

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Speaker 1: It's difficult that this is. I mean, the reason I

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Speaker 1: got interested in this is because I discovered that Scott

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Speaker 1: of the Antarctic suffered from scurvy. It's controversial as to

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Speaker 1: whether his final mission was affected by scurvy, but certainly

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Speaker 1: earlier missions were, and some of the people he went

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Speaker 1: to tried to get to the South Pole with were

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Speaker 1: affected by scurvy. And I thought, hang on a minute,

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Speaker 1: he's a British Navy captain and didn't the British Navy

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Speaker 1: figure all this out? In seventeen forty seven, James Lynde

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Speaker 1: famously did this the first ever randomized controlled trial, people say,

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Speaker 1: and discovered that you could prevent scurvy with lemons. And

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Speaker 1: then and then they started calling British sailors lime is

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Speaker 1: because they used to have lime juice. And so what happened?

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Speaker 1: How cold? How could the British Navy forget this? And

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Speaker 1: it is partly because it's not a very good lemon detector.

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Speaker 1: It turns out there's vitamin C in almost everything. You

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Speaker 1: have to work quite hard when James is doing this one,

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Speaker 1: you have to work quite hard to completely deprive yourself

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Speaker 1: for vitamin C. So people get confused. Basically, the signals

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Speaker 1: get very mixed. And what Andy was saying about these

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Speaker 1: sea voyages. Another reason that the British Navy started getting

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Speaker 1: confused is because they switched to steamships and so they

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Speaker 1: were still taking a remedy for scurvy that turns out

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Speaker 1: wasn't working. But because they were all on steamships, steamships

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Speaker 1: travel quite quickly, they have to refuel. Every time you refuel,

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Speaker 1: you take on fresh food and so they were they

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Speaker 1: were sticking to this cure for scurvy they thought was working.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't working. It didn't matter because there wasn't time

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Speaker 1: for anybody to develop scurvy. And then suddenly these Arctic

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Speaker 1: and Antarctic explorers all started coming down with scurvy and

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Speaker 1: everybody got monumentally confused to that. So the lemons and

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Speaker 1: limes don't really work that well. Is that what we're saying? Well,

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Speaker 1: there's two things. One is that limes, although they're more acidic,

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Speaker 1: have less vitamin C in so they still work. They

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Speaker 1: used to be using Sicilian lemons and they're really juicy

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Speaker 1: and got loads of vitamin C. And then they switched

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Speaker 1: for geopolitical reasons to West Indian lines, and that though

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Speaker 1: they're less effective. But the other thing is vitamin C.

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Speaker 1: It's destroyed really easily. It's destroyed by contact with copper,

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Speaker 1: and a lot of these ships had copper vessels. It's

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Speaker 1: destroyed by contact with sunlight, it's destroyed by heat. And

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Speaker 1: so you had this sort of old lime juice that

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Speaker 1: was going a bit rancid. There wasn't any vitamin C

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Speaker 1: in it anymore, but people were still taking it, and

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Speaker 1: so then when they started taking lime juice on expeditions

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Speaker 1: and it didn't work, they lost faith and they started there.

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Speaker 1: And at the same time, there's germ theory being developed,

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Speaker 1: and they started going, oh, maybe scurvy's nothing to do

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Speaker 1: with lemons and limes at all. Maybe it's to do

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Speaker 1: with some kind of germ that we can't see, which,

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Speaker 1: of course was completely up the wrong tree. It's just

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Speaker 1: crazy when you read about the history of scurvy, how

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Speaker 1: early on they suggested that citrus was a cure, and

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Speaker 1: how many hundreds of years they skirt around it and

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Speaker 1: skirts around it and sort of just like, yeah, I

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Speaker 1: think it is, and then go, actually, maybe not. It's

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Speaker 1: so frustrating because it's so easy to sort out once

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Speaker 1: you definitely know. But I found you know, it's really quick.

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Speaker 1: You know, Scott one of the people on his expeditions

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Speaker 1: who got scurvy was Shackleton, which I didn't know that

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Speaker 1: they did an expedition together, but yeah, and there was

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Speaker 1: a bit of bad blood. They didn't like each other.

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Speaker 1: That's quite a rivalry. Indeed, there seems to be a

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Speaker 1: bit of a conspiracy theory that maybe Shackleton wasn't that

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Speaker 1: ill and Scott sort of kicked him off the expedition

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Speaker 1: because he wasn't really getting along with him. Shackleton was

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Speaker 1: like the fun spontaneous one, wasn't he, And Scott was

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Speaker 1: a bit more the serious bore. Scott said, Oh, you're

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Speaker 1: definitely you're far too well. You've definitely got scurvy, and

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Speaker 1: Shackton was like, well, I haven't even got any hyper

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Speaker 1: kin ethic pat pulls. The point where Shackleton pulled down

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Speaker 1: his parents to display button. That's when he got chucked

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Speaker 1: off the expedition. Guinea pigs get scurvy, Yeah, I mean

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Speaker 1: if I eat guinea pig then I would not get

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Speaker 1: any vitamincy. I think if you eat a healthy guinea pig,

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Speaker 1: you'll be fine, because I know James that as well

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Speaker 1: as the diet you pig you eat. But you occasionally

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Speaker 1: have guinea pig mints on your bread and with your

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Speaker 1: coffee because they they can't make their own vitamincy and

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Speaker 1: that's we can't do that either, and we're all there's

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Speaker 1: this weird club of crap animals, including humans, which can't

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Speaker 1: make their own vitamincy. So it's fruit bats, guinea pigs,

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Speaker 1: some of the apes, and humans. Are the ones that

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Speaker 1: can't do it. Every other animal doesn't get scurvy because

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Speaker 1: they can just generate vitamin C I guess from internally

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Speaker 1: somehow they're generating. Yeah, Like, well, like we generate, you know,

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Speaker 1: we basically what a vitamin is is the things that

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Speaker 1: we need from our diet because we can't generate them,

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Speaker 1: and everything else we can generate, and I suppose these

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Speaker 1: animals can. But maybe we should form that club with

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Speaker 1: those guys, like a really sad rejects club, Like what

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Speaker 1: are those pig? What's that club called of men who've

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Speaker 1: decided that they've abandoned women in cells? It could be

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Speaker 1: the new in cells, Yeah, asked fruit bat's guinea pigs.

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Speaker 1: I'm just a bit worried the guinea pigs won't let

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Speaker 1: me in because I've just admitted that I won't say

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Speaker 1: it's some guinea pig. It turned out to be really important.

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Speaker 1: So people were being confused, as Anna says, just getting

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Speaker 1: confused about scurvy and what causes it and how to

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Speaker 1: cure it for centuries, and they keep sort of figuring

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Speaker 1: it out and then not figuring it out and getting

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Speaker 1: confused and forgetting and then finally in nineteen oh seven,

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Speaker 1: these two Norwegian scientists, Holston Frelich figure out that guinea

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Speaker 1: pigs also get scurvy, which is this absolute breakthrough moment.

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Speaker 1: And then how you can do how can you tell

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Speaker 1: that a guinea pig how scurvy is it? Because it

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Speaker 1: can only run for fifty meters on its little bob,

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Speaker 1: that must be it that in the papules. I think

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Speaker 1: it's those two things. Once they figured that out, it

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Speaker 1: was it was easy to clear up this massive confusion

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Speaker 1: about whether scurvy was caused by some kind of toxin

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Speaker 1: or some kind of bacteria, or whether it was a

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Speaker 1: deficiency and figured it all out. And then they turned

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Speaker 1: around and they told ritchof Nansen is a great Norwegian

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Speaker 1: polar explorer and a mentor to both Robert Scott and

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Speaker 1: Roald Amamson. And Nansen said, yeah, no, I don't believe

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Speaker 1: any of that. You can't learn anyth from guinea pigs.

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Speaker 1: Trust me, it's fresh seal meat you need. And so

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Speaker 1: he basically told them to bagger off, and both Amuson

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Speaker 1: and Scott then went to the Antarctica year later, and

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Speaker 1: Scott's whole crew probably got scurvy. If there was ever

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Speaker 1: a lesson to listen to the scientist people. It's really

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Speaker 1: is the history of scurvy. It's wild how much people

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Speaker 1: ignored them. So the reason that this is all puzzling

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Speaker 1: is because the story that randomized controlled trials nerds tell

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Speaker 1: is that in seventeen forty seven, this guy, James lind

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Speaker 1: who was a surgeon on the HMS Salisbury, figured it

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Speaker 1: all out. That's the story they tell, and he did

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Speaker 1: sort of run a controlled trial. He gave two they

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Speaker 1: had a whole bunch of sailors who had scurvy. He

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Speaker 1: gave two of them a quarter of cider a day.

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Speaker 1: Sounds quite nice, but it's not going to work. He

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Speaker 1: gave two of them seventy five drops a day of

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Speaker 1: sulfuric acid. He gave two of them vinegar, gave two

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Speaker 1: of them a paste of garlic, mustard, horsefadish, and aromatic

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Speaker 1: plant extracts, which sounds like it might be nice, but

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Speaker 1: none of that worked. But he gave the last two

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Speaker 1: two oranges and a lemon each day for six days,

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Speaker 1: and at that point they made a complete recovery. Unfortunately,

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Speaker 1: that was the ship's entire stock of lemons, so it

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Speaker 1: was unfortunate for everybody else. But the weird thing is

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Speaker 1: that even James Lynde, I mean, you would have thought, okay, brilliant,

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Speaker 1: you ran around him by trial, you figured it all

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Speaker 1: out perfect. But then he published this book all about

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Speaker 1: how to cure scurvy which had this right up of

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Speaker 1: this trial, but had loads of other stuff about oh

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Speaker 1: like maybe it's excess sweating, or maybe it's to do

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Speaker 1: with ventilation or this or that's the whole Who can say,

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Speaker 1: I mean, it was bizarre what the conclusion he came to.

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Speaker 1: And in the end he said, anyway, my cure for

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Speaker 1: scurvy is lemon juice that's been boiled into a syrup

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Speaker 1: preserved under olive oil. And it turns out that doesn't

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Speaker 1: work because if you boil lemon juices into a sup,

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Speaker 1: you destroyed all of it. Him in c so he

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Speaker 1: runs this randomized trial. He doesn't understand what he's done,

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Speaker 1: and then the conclusion he draws is this completely ineffective remedy.

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Speaker 1: And there you go that Science seventeen just can't believe

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Speaker 1: one of the groups was given sulfuric acid, which feels like,

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Speaker 1: you know, you could literally give the other group American

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Speaker 1: cheese and white bread, and they're going to do better

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Speaker 1: than the group you gave sulfuric acid to s yes

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Speaker 1: throatless Jimmy we call him. I really like the old

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Speaker 1: theory about how to cure scurvy, which was to bury

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Speaker 1: yourself in soil, and that was such a good idea.

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Speaker 1: It's such a you know, it really does make sense

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Speaker 1: because you were getting scurvy when you were away from Earth,

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Speaker 1: right you were on the water. You have thousands of

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Speaker 1: miles from a lemon, You're gonna get sick, and so

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Speaker 1: what was obviously the thing that you were missing. You

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Speaker 1: were missing dry land. And so they used to just

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Speaker 1: bury people up to the neck in soil and that

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Speaker 1: this would make them better. So funny, it's such a

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Speaker 1: good idea. And what they would do is they would

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Speaker 1: take boxes of earth with them on the voyages and

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Speaker 1: if someone got sick, they would bury them on the

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Speaker 1: ship in the earth. There was one captain called Thomas

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Speaker 1: Melville who found that it actually worked and it made

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Speaker 1: people feel better. But he was feeding people vegetables while

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Speaker 1: they were in the earth all the time. Probably the

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Speaker 1: earth thing, though, it's so good because it means you

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Speaker 1: can also as well as getting vegetables. You can disguise

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Speaker 1: your ship as a small island, and so you can

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Speaker 1: sneak up on other ships undetected because they just see

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Speaker 1: a load of well they see a load of soil,

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Speaker 1: don't they. You know? Yeah, clever, get a donkey a

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Speaker 1: little windmill. Yes, I'm just thinking my idea of like,

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Speaker 1: my idea of desert islands is more like palm trees

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Speaker 1: and habbits, not donkeys and windmills. And that famous cartoon

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Speaker 1: trope of someone on a desert island. How can you

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Speaker 1: tell them on a desert there's a donkey and a windmill. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: it's a classic. Stop the podcast, Gosh, I've always wanted

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Speaker 1: to say that this is a special episode of No

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Speaker 1: such Thing as a Fish featuring me Tim Harford as

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Speaker 1: a special guest, presented by Cautionary Tales. On with the podcast. Okay,

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Speaker 1: it is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay.

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Speaker 1: My fact this week is that there are more people

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Speaker 1: alive today who have been World chess champion than there

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Speaker 1: are people skillful enough to carve a night for use

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Speaker 1: in a World Championship chess match. How what are the numbers?

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Speaker 1: We talk? Incredible? Well, the numbers are ten who can

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Speaker 1: do the night. This is according to a video which

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Speaker 1: I saw, which was posted by Business Insider called why

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Speaker 1: Championship chess sets are so expensive. As part of that,

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Speaker 1: they said, there are only ten people alive who can

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Speaker 1: make the little horses that you use in chess, And

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Speaker 1: so I thought, I wonder how that compares with people

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Speaker 1: who have won the world championship. And I went onto

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Speaker 1: the onto Wikipedia and looked at the list of the

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Speaker 1: people who are still alive, and there's more than ten.

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Speaker 1: As it doesn't I think, how good do these things

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Speaker 1: have to be? I mean, because I would have thought

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Speaker 1: it's quite easy to carve a night. Most professional whittlers

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Speaker 1: I know, which is a lot, could probably do a

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Speaker 1: passable chess night. What's so special about these ones? Well,

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Speaker 1: you take all of the whittlers, some of them can

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Speaker 1: do it, some of them can't, and you go down

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Speaker 1: and down and down, and eventually you get the ten. Yeah,

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Speaker 1: you got it. No, they're made. These nights are made

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Speaker 1: in a place called Amritsar, which is in India. Very

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Speaker 1: specific factory makes them. They only make two hundred and

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Speaker 1: fifty per year one night. To kind of whittle it

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Speaker 1: down takes two hours, and it takes five to six

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Speaker 1: years to learn how to make this night. All the

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Speaker 1: other pieces take about four to five months to make,

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Speaker 1: and so if you were to buy a very very

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Speaker 1: high end chest set, the nights are worth approximately fifty

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Speaker 1: percent of the entire set. The value comes from just

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Speaker 1: the nights. That's what this so funny. It's about. It's

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Speaker 1: about five hundred dollars for one of these sets. They sound.

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Speaker 1: I think I've read the same piece, James. It says

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Speaker 1: this that the blocks of wood that they use for

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Speaker 1: the pieces were once large trunks, drive for three to

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Speaker 1: six months, cut down in shape to the necessary size,

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Speaker 1: which does make it sound like the using one large

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Speaker 1: tree trunk, Yeah, knocked down a giant red words for one.

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Speaker 1: They are really beautiful to watch them being carved on

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Speaker 1: the lathe, and it's a little bit like watching pottery.

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Speaker 1: It's that kind of beautiful, sort of hypnotic view of

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Speaker 1: this thing taking shape. But I have to say, it's

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Speaker 1: all nonsense, isn't it? Because this I saw this this

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Speaker 1: short film and at one point they say, oh, yeah,

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Speaker 1: it helps these grand masters to not make any mistakes.

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Speaker 1: That's just nonsense. Grandmasters, they can play blindfold. You literally

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Speaker 1: don't actually need the chessboard or the chess pieces. They

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Speaker 1: can play blindfold. What is this? I don't know why

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Speaker 1: you're the video. I've I've drunk the kool aid, and

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Speaker 1: I believe this. It's They say that because if you

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Speaker 1: don't make the chess pieces properly, and the king isn't

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Speaker 1: the tallest piece, then you might accidentally move one of

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Speaker 1: the other palms, maybe thinking it's the king. If they're

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Speaker 1: not waiting correctly, they might fall over and you accidentally

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Speaker 1: kind of resign. You're okay, okay, but no, no, no,

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Speaker 1: it's true. No. The thing about chess players is that

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Speaker 1: they're very stupid people. And James, I that falling over thing.

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Speaker 1: I've read that too, is that if you accidentally knock

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Speaker 1: your piece over and then you press you know, because

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Speaker 1: they're playing timed against each other in some matches, So

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Speaker 1: you you knock a piece over and then you press

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Speaker 1: the timer to move it on to your opponent's turn,

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Speaker 1: and then you pick your piece back up, you can

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Speaker 1: be disqualified from the whole match because you're technically eating

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Speaker 1: into your opponent's time there, and that has happened recently.

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Speaker 1: There was a game in twenty sixteen wherein Grandmaster very

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Speaker 1: good chess player at loss because he dropped his queen

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Speaker 1: and then did that really, and we're claiming that these

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Speaker 1: ten people who can make the nights are the only

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Speaker 1: people who can make a night that can successfully stand up.

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Speaker 1: If you can't, if you can't feel the bridle on

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Speaker 1: the night is positioned correctly, it'll completely throw off your game.

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Speaker 1: That's why Kasparov lost against Deep Blue. A slight discrepancy

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Speaker 1: in the rains. I want to see the chess grandmaster's

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Speaker 1: rant when he likes sort of a tennis player with

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Speaker 1: a broken racket, when he seizes a night waving at

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Speaker 1: the umpire, what the hell is this shit? I would

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Speaker 1: love to see these artisans, these craftspeople from Amritsar. I

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Speaker 1: would love to see them wrestle with a classic Prussian

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Speaker 1: war game chess crossovers, because there are some amazing kind

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Speaker 1: of chess mutations from a hundred years ago that I

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Speaker 1: think would pose a real challenge. So any of you

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Speaker 1: have heard of a Grosser's Connichpiel, which is a sixteen

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Speaker 1: sixty four chess variant, Well, I mean you can play

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Speaker 1: with a number of players. There's a six player variant,

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Speaker 1: the board looks a bit like a snowflake. But the

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Speaker 1: eight player variant, I think would give any that's very

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Speaker 1: sensitive in that game, Yeah, no one wins, it's just

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Speaker 1: a tie at the end, regardless. So the eight player

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00:21:32,970 --> 00:21:37,810
Speaker 1: variant has two hundred and forty pieces. It has pieces

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Speaker 1: including the King, the Marshal, the colonel, the Captain, the Chancellor,

400
00:21:43,570 --> 00:21:49,770
Speaker 1: the Herald, the Chaplain, the night, the Courier, the agitant, bodyguards, halbardiers,

401
00:21:49,850 --> 00:21:53,050
Speaker 1: and there are private soldiers and two hundred and forty

402
00:21:53,050 --> 00:21:55,810
Speaker 1: pieces in total. But that is nothing. The Duke of

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00:21:55,890 --> 00:21:59,650
Speaker 1: Rutland's chess variant has the Concubine, which is a rook

404
00:21:59,930 --> 00:22:03,650
Speaker 1: night mix, and even that pales into insignificance compared to

405
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Speaker 1: the game that was developed. Like Johan Christian Ludwig Helvig,

406
00:22:07,770 --> 00:22:09,770
Speaker 1: he was alive and the late seven teen hundreds early

407
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Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, he was a successful academic. He taught matts

408
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Speaker 1: to Gauss, the most brilliant mathematician of all time. Actually,

409
00:22:17,610 --> 00:22:19,450
Speaker 1: in fairness he sort of said to Gaus, to be honest,

410
00:22:19,490 --> 00:22:20,810
Speaker 1: you don't need to bother turning up to the lectures,

411
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Speaker 1: because he seemed to have it all sorted and he collected.

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Speaker 1: He collected so many insects it formed the heart of

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Speaker 1: the University of Berlin's Museum of Entomology. And his chess variant,

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00:22:33,690 --> 00:22:36,770
Speaker 1: which is called Creekspiel, which means wargame. It includes the

415
00:22:36,810 --> 00:22:40,410
Speaker 1: elephant which is a rook knight combo, the jumping Bishop

416
00:22:40,450 --> 00:22:43,370
Speaker 1: which is the bishop knight, the jumping queen not to

417
00:22:43,370 --> 00:22:45,610
Speaker 1: be confused with the dancing Queen of Aberfay. That's a

418
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Speaker 1: night queen. It contains forty pawns, four rooks, four bishops,

419
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Speaker 1: thirty knights work on that one enamor. It's a six queens,

420
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Speaker 1: five jumping queens, eight jumping bishops and seven elephants and

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00:22:59,410 --> 00:23:02,330
Speaker 1: the boarders up to two thousand squares. So does that

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Speaker 1: partridge in the per tree make that's the hardest to carve, actually,

423
00:23:06,970 --> 00:23:09,530
Speaker 1: the partridge that is absolutely amazing to you think he

424
00:23:09,610 --> 00:23:14,770
Speaker 1: invented this amazingly complicated chess game because his main job

425
00:23:14,850 --> 00:23:17,250
Speaker 1: was teaching girls how to do maths, and he's like,

426
00:23:17,850 --> 00:23:20,010
Speaker 1: I have so much spare time now I might as

427
00:23:20,050 --> 00:23:23,690
Speaker 1: well collect every single insect in the world. And I

428
00:23:23,690 --> 00:23:26,450
Speaker 1: mean the plas take forever a game. I think it

429
00:23:26,530 --> 00:23:29,450
Speaker 1: does I mean, I suppose it's before TV, wasn't it.

430
00:23:29,490 --> 00:23:31,570
Speaker 1: But he feels like there's no need to make chess

431
00:23:31,610 --> 00:23:34,850
Speaker 1: more complicated. It's already quite challenging for most people. So

432
00:23:34,890 --> 00:23:37,850
Speaker 1: there was this movement to make chess more like actual

433
00:23:38,250 --> 00:23:41,330
Speaker 1: war because chess is quite stylized. Really, I mean, it's

434
00:23:41,330 --> 00:23:43,490
Speaker 1: you're not going to learn that much about military tactics

435
00:23:43,490 --> 00:23:46,130
Speaker 1: from playing chess. So in I mean, this is a

436
00:23:46,210 --> 00:23:49,890
Speaker 1: Prussian thing. They're trying to teach their their young officers

437
00:23:50,210 --> 00:23:53,570
Speaker 1: how to make decisions on the battlefield. And so there's

438
00:23:53,570 --> 00:23:57,890
Speaker 1: this tendency towards more and more complex versions of chess,

439
00:23:57,890 --> 00:23:59,410
Speaker 1: and in the end they kind of went to these

440
00:23:59,650 --> 00:24:02,930
Speaker 1: war games or role playing games. But you've got different pieces,

441
00:24:02,970 --> 00:24:05,810
Speaker 1: you've got you've got different terrains, and they're trying to

442
00:24:05,810 --> 00:24:08,010
Speaker 1: train people how to make military decisions. It's good, it's

443
00:24:08,010 --> 00:24:10,250
Speaker 1: really I think it's really good. Beca. I do think that,

444
00:24:10,370 --> 00:24:13,290
Speaker 1: you know, war game exercises are like they are good

445
00:24:13,330 --> 00:24:15,210
Speaker 1: up to a point, but there are never enough concubines.

446
00:24:16,490 --> 00:24:20,170
Speaker 1: It just it's not realistic without the concubines or elephants.

447
00:24:20,450 --> 00:24:23,370
Speaker 1: It's the elephants and concubines that really make a war. Yeah,

448
00:24:23,410 --> 00:24:25,770
Speaker 1: I thought Chancellor was a weird one as well. What

449
00:24:25,850 --> 00:24:28,090
Speaker 1: does he yea like? He just does some photo option

450
00:24:28,170 --> 00:24:33,330
Speaker 1: then takes twenty percent of all your money. Well, the

451
00:24:33,410 --> 00:24:36,090
Speaker 1: thing is about chess didn't used to be military at all,

452
00:24:37,210 --> 00:24:39,130
Speaker 1: so and I don't think it should be. It used

453
00:24:39,130 --> 00:24:42,330
Speaker 1: to be sexy. This it was, this was back and

454
00:24:42,370 --> 00:24:44,370
Speaker 1: actually the person who ruined it and turned it into

455
00:24:44,370 --> 00:24:47,250
Speaker 1: a military game initially was the queen. Sadly, so we've

456
00:24:47,290 --> 00:24:50,650
Speaker 1: talked before about how the queen was introduced at various

457
00:24:50,650 --> 00:24:53,930
Speaker 1: moments in history in various different countries from about like

458
00:24:54,010 --> 00:24:57,090
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred thirteen hundred onwards. But instead of a queen

459
00:24:57,130 --> 00:24:59,330
Speaker 1: before that, you had the vizier as in the royal

460
00:24:59,370 --> 00:25:05,010
Speaker 1: as in Jafar, and the vizier couldn't move as broadly

461
00:25:05,090 --> 00:25:07,810
Speaker 1: and widely as the queen, more limited, and it made

462
00:25:07,890 --> 00:25:10,210
Speaker 1: chess a much slower game. And so I was reading

463
00:25:10,210 --> 00:25:14,290
Speaker 1: that back in medieval times it was completely gender equal game.

464
00:25:14,330 --> 00:25:16,370
Speaker 1: Women and men played an equal amount, and it was

465
00:25:16,410 --> 00:25:18,970
Speaker 1: more a thing you'd have and play throughout a day

466
00:25:18,970 --> 00:25:21,570
Speaker 1: at or at a soiree of a drinks and chats,

467
00:25:21,570 --> 00:25:25,570
Speaker 1: and it became really associated with romance and sex, and

468
00:25:25,730 --> 00:25:28,010
Speaker 1: because there were lots of stories of people falling in

469
00:25:28,090 --> 00:25:30,330
Speaker 1: love over a game of chess, you know, opponents would

470
00:25:30,330 --> 00:25:33,570
Speaker 1: fall in love. In fourteen hundred there was a famous

471
00:25:33,610 --> 00:25:36,610
Speaker 1: book at the time called The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess,

472
00:25:37,130 --> 00:25:41,770
Speaker 1: which sort of talked about is that why we call

473
00:25:41,810 --> 00:25:47,050
Speaker 1: it pawn Yeah, it's correct. That's why they're all naked

474
00:25:47,090 --> 00:25:50,170
Speaker 1: if you look closely at the pawns. But yeah, then

475
00:25:50,170 --> 00:25:52,210
Speaker 1: the queen came on board and it became very martial

476
00:25:52,250 --> 00:25:54,930
Speaker 1: and competitive and serious, and it was thought to be

477
00:25:55,010 --> 00:25:58,450
Speaker 1: unsuitable for women. Do you know the rules? The ten

478
00:25:58,730 --> 00:26:02,490
Speaker 1: rules of whittling? Have you memorized those? Everyone? I've only

479
00:26:02,530 --> 00:26:06,770
Speaker 1: got the first four? Sorry, oh, you know it's just

480
00:26:06,850 --> 00:26:09,330
Speaker 1: about a pass. This is according to Master of a

481
00:26:09,450 --> 00:26:13,730
Speaker 1: Chris Loupkerman, who actually has the Guinness World Record for

482
00:26:13,810 --> 00:26:16,530
Speaker 1: what he describes as the smallest rooster in the world.

483
00:26:17,170 --> 00:26:22,570
Speaker 1: That one what's another word for rooster? Think of um?

484
00:26:24,570 --> 00:26:28,130
Speaker 1: Because I'm pretty sure I have that record. I wonder

485
00:26:28,250 --> 00:26:30,570
Speaker 1: why I had to be over eighteen to access that video.

486
00:26:31,610 --> 00:26:35,010
Speaker 1: It's it's not the smallest rooster, it's not even a thing.

487
00:26:35,010 --> 00:26:38,210
Speaker 1: It's the smallest wooden carved thing in the world. According

488
00:26:38,250 --> 00:26:40,250
Speaker 1: to Guinness, it's a tiny little rooster, an eighth of

489
00:26:40,290 --> 00:26:43,570
Speaker 1: an inch tool. Anyway, he's an amazing whittler. His ten

490
00:26:43,650 --> 00:26:45,890
Speaker 1: rules is Rule number one is actually make sure your

491
00:26:45,970 --> 00:26:50,450
Speaker 1: knife is sharp. Rule number two and he guesses, don't

492
00:26:50,570 --> 00:26:56,090
Speaker 1: run with scissors. You're you're actually close. Your knife must

493
00:26:56,090 --> 00:27:01,170
Speaker 1: be really sharp. It's rule number two. What a fight club?

494
00:27:01,490 --> 00:27:03,930
Speaker 1: Could I just check out the other eight rules also

495
00:27:04,010 --> 00:27:06,570
Speaker 1: to do with sharp knives. I'm so I'm so glad

496
00:27:06,570 --> 00:27:08,770
Speaker 1: that you've saved me. How to read all of the

497
00:27:08,810 --> 00:27:13,250
Speaker 1: other rules. They're all different ways of saying before starting

498
00:27:13,250 --> 00:27:15,130
Speaker 1: to carve, checks if your knife is sharp, If your

499
00:27:15,210 --> 00:27:17,490
Speaker 1: knife is really sharp, cut much better. Rule number ten

500
00:27:17,610 --> 00:27:19,570
Speaker 1: is refer back to rules one to nine, which are

501
00:27:19,610 --> 00:27:22,010
Speaker 1: indeed different ways of saying, have a sharp knife. Very good.

502
00:27:22,490 --> 00:27:27,410
Speaker 1: So whittlers out there take note. Modern board games often

503
00:27:27,490 --> 00:27:30,970
Speaker 1: have these little carved wooden pieces. They're quite simple. They

504
00:27:30,970 --> 00:27:34,650
Speaker 1: look a little bit like if you carved the sign

505
00:27:34,690 --> 00:27:37,730
Speaker 1: for the gents toilets the little man. If you carved

506
00:27:37,730 --> 00:27:39,850
Speaker 1: those into wood and painted them different colors, that's what

507
00:27:39,890 --> 00:27:42,130
Speaker 1: they look like. Does anybody know what they're called? There

508
00:27:42,170 --> 00:27:43,610
Speaker 1: was there is a there is a term of art

509
00:27:43,610 --> 00:27:46,650
Speaker 1: for these things, wait for what for modern chess pieces,

510
00:27:47,330 --> 00:27:49,530
Speaker 1: modern board game pieces, not chess pieces, just board games

511
00:27:49,530 --> 00:27:52,090
Speaker 1: and gals. They'll I didn't even know what they were,

512
00:27:52,210 --> 00:27:56,050
Speaker 1: but no, gone, they're called me pals, which is which

513
00:27:56,130 --> 00:27:59,210
Speaker 1: is a sort of shortening of my people and so

514
00:27:59,730 --> 00:28:01,610
Speaker 1: so meeples is a board game thing, and they're you know,

515
00:28:01,610 --> 00:28:05,210
Speaker 1: they're cafes based on me pals and meeples clubs and

516
00:28:05,210 --> 00:28:09,970
Speaker 1: so on. But they're like tiny, tiny cafes that meeople attend. Yeah,

517
00:28:10,130 --> 00:28:12,010
Speaker 1: this one. I'm speaking to you from Oxford, and there's

518
00:28:12,090 --> 00:28:14,450
Speaker 1: there's a cafe about two minutes walk away from me

519
00:28:14,490 --> 00:28:16,490
Speaker 1: called Thirsty me Pals. You can go, you can have

520
00:28:16,490 --> 00:28:18,330
Speaker 1: your hot chocolate or a cup of coffee, and you

521
00:28:18,330 --> 00:28:22,170
Speaker 1: can play board games surrounded by by me pals. But

522
00:28:22,330 --> 00:28:25,530
Speaker 1: I reckon this whole, this whole kind of chess piece

523
00:28:25,570 --> 00:28:29,290
Speaker 1: carving thing. It's basically a conspiracy by Big me Pal

524
00:28:30,170 --> 00:28:34,410
Speaker 1: because there is wait, hang on, Big me pals are

525
00:28:34,410 --> 00:28:40,050
Speaker 1: just people, aren't they. You could be right, You're absolutely right,

526
00:28:40,050 --> 00:28:42,650
Speaker 1: you've caught me there. Anyway, it's a conspiracy. I'll figure

527
00:28:42,650 --> 00:28:45,250
Speaker 1: out who's behind it sooner or later, because there's a

528
00:28:45,250 --> 00:28:47,890
Speaker 1: problem with a lot of games that if you're trying

529
00:28:47,890 --> 00:28:50,370
Speaker 1: to make money selling the game, the game is actually

530
00:28:50,450 --> 00:28:52,690
Speaker 1: quite cheap. And you know, we buy a game like chess,

531
00:28:52,330 --> 00:28:54,410
Speaker 1: it just cost a few pounds and then you could

532
00:28:54,450 --> 00:28:56,810
Speaker 1: just play forever. So how do you make money? And

533
00:28:56,890 --> 00:29:02,770
Speaker 1: so there's this increased focus on getting very very fancy pieces,

534
00:29:03,050 --> 00:29:05,530
Speaker 1: very expensive pieces. So these guys in amorates are this

535
00:29:05,610 --> 00:29:08,290
Speaker 1: is an example of this, But I think the most

536
00:29:08,290 --> 00:29:12,050
Speaker 1: striking example is at games Workshop. So games Workshop is

537
00:29:12,050 --> 00:29:14,570
Speaker 1: this company I remember from the nineteen eighties when I

538
00:29:14,610 --> 00:29:17,410
Speaker 1: was a young nerd used to sell dungeons and dragons

539
00:29:17,410 --> 00:29:19,370
Speaker 1: and used to sell all kinds of games, and then

540
00:29:19,370 --> 00:29:22,490
Speaker 1: they basically got taken over by a division of the

541
00:29:23,290 --> 00:29:26,010
Speaker 1: inside the company called Citadel Miniatures, which just made toy

542
00:29:26,090 --> 00:29:29,690
Speaker 1: soldiers and toy and miniature figures. And these miniature figures

543
00:29:29,690 --> 00:29:33,130
Speaker 1: were so profitable that during Lockdown, Games Workshop had a

544
00:29:33,210 --> 00:29:38,410
Speaker 1: higher profit margin than Google. And Henry Cavalley, actor who

545
00:29:38,450 --> 00:29:42,130
Speaker 1: plays Superman, described these little miniature figures as plastic crack,

546
00:29:42,610 --> 00:29:44,450
Speaker 1: so that them all the money is in the pieces,

547
00:29:44,450 --> 00:29:47,090
Speaker 1: the money is not in the games. That's true. I

548
00:29:47,090 --> 00:29:49,330
Speaker 1: mean I used to collect those pieces and there were

549
00:29:49,330 --> 00:29:51,650
Speaker 1: some which was simply unaffordable for me with my fourteen

550
00:29:51,690 --> 00:29:54,090
Speaker 1: year olds budget. Really I used to have. I used

551
00:29:54,090 --> 00:29:55,970
Speaker 1: to collect them a little bit, not much, but I

552
00:29:56,050 --> 00:29:57,770
Speaker 1: was always really scared that I was going to die

553
00:29:57,810 --> 00:30:00,650
Speaker 1: of lead poisoning because there was lead in them. And

554
00:30:00,730 --> 00:30:02,530
Speaker 1: I don't know if someone had once told me that

555
00:30:02,570 --> 00:30:04,810
Speaker 1: you could die of lead poisoning, and these pieces had

556
00:30:04,890 --> 00:30:07,010
Speaker 1: lead in them, and I was just I was convinced

557
00:30:06,970 --> 00:30:09,610
Speaker 1: that I was going to die. You're eating them, no,

558
00:30:09,810 --> 00:30:12,410
Speaker 1: but I was like, because I was painting them and stuff,

559
00:30:12,450 --> 00:30:14,890
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to lick my fingers and yeah,

560
00:30:14,970 --> 00:30:17,890
Speaker 1: and you're closing and you're huffing away, you know, huffing

561
00:30:17,970 --> 00:30:21,290
Speaker 1: away over paints used to be water baked will the

562
00:30:21,290 --> 00:30:23,330
Speaker 1: paint still are water based, so you could you'd sort

563
00:30:23,330 --> 00:30:25,010
Speaker 1: of paint and then you would kind of lick your

564
00:30:25,170 --> 00:30:27,410
Speaker 1: paintbrush to get a fine point on the paintbrush. And

565
00:30:27,450 --> 00:30:30,570
Speaker 1: the paint is non toxic, but the but you're painting

566
00:30:30,570 --> 00:30:32,690
Speaker 1: these lead figures, so they probably were very dangerous. But anyway,

567
00:30:32,690 --> 00:30:34,690
Speaker 1: they're all they're all made of plastic crack. Now, as

568
00:30:34,850 --> 00:30:39,050
Speaker 1: as as Henry Cavill puts it, a bunch of crackheads,

569
00:30:39,050 --> 00:30:41,290
Speaker 1: it's the least cool kind of being a crackhead's being

570
00:30:41,290 --> 00:30:43,850
Speaker 1: a crackhead isn't cool, I want to emphasize, but this

571
00:30:43,930 --> 00:30:47,210
Speaker 1: is even less cool. It's so annoying when people tell

572
00:30:47,210 --> 00:30:49,330
Speaker 1: you that, so like, just like you were saying, James

573
00:30:49,330 --> 00:30:52,490
Speaker 1: with the lead and the painted the danger thing. I

574
00:30:52,730 --> 00:30:54,970
Speaker 1: always remember my friend Christopher when I was about I

575
00:30:55,010 --> 00:30:56,930
Speaker 1: don't know, eighteen, telling me that if I kept drawing

576
00:30:56,930 --> 00:31:00,010
Speaker 1: on my hand, I'd die, yeah, because the ink would

577
00:31:00,010 --> 00:31:02,570
Speaker 1: get into my bloodstream somehow. And I just wanted to

578
00:31:02,570 --> 00:31:06,370
Speaker 1: say a big old fuck you to Christopher writing notes

579
00:31:06,410 --> 00:31:08,330
Speaker 1: on my hand Since then, and I'm as fit as

580
00:31:08,330 --> 00:31:14,810
Speaker 1: a fiddel. I don't know. I think that explains something conceal.

581
00:31:15,250 --> 00:31:16,850
Speaker 1: It could be a John Cranden thing. It could be

582
00:31:16,850 --> 00:31:18,810
Speaker 1: just a matter of time. You're fine, you're fine, you're fine,

583
00:31:18,810 --> 00:31:25,490
Speaker 1: and then suddenly here's one thing on people who carved

584
00:31:25,490 --> 00:31:28,370
Speaker 1: wood for a living. You've got you guys. I'm sure

585
00:31:28,410 --> 00:31:32,250
Speaker 1: have heard of grindling gibbons. Oh yeah, yeah, it hasn't

586
00:31:32,530 --> 00:31:35,530
Speaker 1: just for anyone who's it's a horrible thing you do

587
00:31:35,690 --> 00:31:41,690
Speaker 1: to great apes. Actually an outlawed in most places. It's

588
00:31:41,730 --> 00:31:44,210
Speaker 1: such a weird name. You're right, I think he was

589
00:31:44,330 --> 00:31:47,890
Speaker 1: Dutch basically the most famous wood carver in history. And

590
00:31:48,050 --> 00:31:50,610
Speaker 1: I know that he's quite an obscure figure now, but

591
00:31:50,930 --> 00:31:53,410
Speaker 1: in the late seventeenth thirty eighteenth centuries he was catnip.

592
00:31:54,490 --> 00:31:57,370
Speaker 1: He's all over the UK because he worked in England mostly.

593
00:31:57,370 --> 00:31:59,650
Speaker 1: There are these incredible wood carvings. I've seen some of

594
00:31:59,690 --> 00:32:02,850
Speaker 1: them and they're amazing, as in he could he could

595
00:32:02,850 --> 00:32:05,410
Speaker 1: do the fuzz on a peach, but carved in wood.

596
00:32:05,650 --> 00:32:09,610
Speaker 1: You know. Wow. Really he's called the Michelangelo would by

597
00:32:09,650 --> 00:32:14,650
Speaker 1: some people by some people, and yeah, whysmum he lives

598
00:32:14,650 --> 00:32:18,890
Speaker 1: with anyway one of his crowning. It was really fair.

599
00:32:19,050 --> 00:32:21,650
Speaker 1: He was extremely famous. I mean it's not fair. Why

600
00:32:21,770 --> 00:32:25,210
Speaker 1: why Why would somebody who whittles be regarded as less

601
00:32:25,250 --> 00:32:28,050
Speaker 1: admirable than someone like Michael Angelo who works in stone.

602
00:32:28,090 --> 00:32:31,970
Speaker 1: It doesn't make exactly exactly get this. Could Michael Angelo

603
00:32:32,050 --> 00:32:34,570
Speaker 1: do this? I bet he couldn't. In sixteen ninety he

604
00:32:34,690 --> 00:32:39,010
Speaker 1: made a wooden cravat. I have a wooden bow tie.

605
00:32:39,850 --> 00:32:47,610
Speaker 1: It's completely different. Bow tie is designed to be stiff.

606
00:32:47,650 --> 00:32:50,050
Speaker 1: You can any chump can make a bow tie out

607
00:32:50,090 --> 00:32:53,290
Speaker 1: of wood. Two cross bits of wood. Now let to

608
00:32:53,330 --> 00:32:57,050
Speaker 1: get fine the cravat the most flowing of all. I

609
00:32:57,130 --> 00:32:59,330
Speaker 1: quite likely. I quite like how you just accepted that

610
00:32:59,410 --> 00:33:02,770
Speaker 1: I have a wooden boat. Yeah, oh yeah, sorry, that's

611
00:33:02,810 --> 00:33:05,610
Speaker 1: a that's a much better point. I just went to

612
00:33:05,650 --> 00:33:08,370
Speaker 1: the place in Portugal where all the cork trees are

613
00:33:08,530 --> 00:33:10,610
Speaker 1: and they sell a lot of merch and one of

614
00:33:10,650 --> 00:33:11,970
Speaker 1: them is a bow tie, and I thought it'd be

615
00:33:11,970 --> 00:33:14,450
Speaker 1: really cool, but I've never found the outfit to go

616
00:33:14,570 --> 00:33:17,730
Speaker 1: with it at its so weird. You need the full

617
00:33:17,770 --> 00:33:21,850
Speaker 1: wooden suits. Really well, James, if you tell you what

618
00:33:21,930 --> 00:33:23,810
Speaker 1: if you if you stand next to a donkey and

619
00:33:23,890 --> 00:33:25,690
Speaker 1: you put on your wooden bow tie and you make

620
00:33:25,730 --> 00:33:35,970
Speaker 1: it rotate, Anna will think you're a desert island. Okay,

621
00:33:36,090 --> 00:33:38,330
Speaker 1: it is time for fact number three, and that is

622
00:33:38,410 --> 00:33:41,370
Speaker 1: my fact. My fact this week is that in Ecuador,

623
00:33:41,850 --> 00:33:45,410
Speaker 1: cleaners are people who rub you down with stinging nettles

624
00:33:47,010 --> 00:33:51,410
Speaker 1: and it's not us. People pay for this service. Yeah people.

625
00:33:51,410 --> 00:33:53,650
Speaker 1: I think people pay, maybe even more than cleaners in

626
00:33:53,730 --> 00:33:56,730
Speaker 1: the UK, which even more than cleaners in the UK,

627
00:33:57,290 --> 00:34:02,570
Speaker 1: the highest paid bracket in the country. It's not possibladder,

628
00:34:02,850 --> 00:34:06,410
Speaker 1: it's a travesty and he'll spinoff podcast. Are cleaners paid too? Much.

629
00:34:07,130 --> 00:34:11,530
Speaker 1: I wish you're all the best. But these are olympiadores

630
00:34:11,810 --> 00:34:15,290
Speaker 1: in Ecuador and they are spiritual cleaners. But olympiadoras just

631
00:34:15,330 --> 00:34:18,250
Speaker 1: means a cleaner, like is just the word for a cleaner.

632
00:34:18,810 --> 00:34:21,330
Speaker 1: But these are people who sort of cleanse your aura.

633
00:34:21,370 --> 00:34:25,170
Speaker 1: And it's a deep rooted tradition in traditional culture. Is

634
00:34:25,210 --> 00:34:28,450
Speaker 1: particularly up in the mountains. A lot of people have

635
00:34:28,570 --> 00:34:31,450
Speaker 1: this service, and it's you're rubbed up and down with

636
00:34:31,490 --> 00:34:34,850
Speaker 1: stingy nettles and it removes all your bad energy and

637
00:34:35,130 --> 00:34:38,410
Speaker 1: bad luck and it hurts quite a lot, and that

638
00:34:38,570 --> 00:34:41,890
Speaker 1: just shows that it's working apparently. Is it like cleaners

639
00:34:41,930 --> 00:34:43,970
Speaker 1: in the UK where they come around they sort of

640
00:34:43,970 --> 00:34:46,530
Speaker 1: do an initial sight visit of your aura and they say, well,

641
00:34:46,570 --> 00:34:49,050
Speaker 1: this aura probably is going to need about a couple

642
00:34:49,090 --> 00:34:51,930
Speaker 1: of hours a week. I'd say maybe two visits actually,

643
00:34:51,970 --> 00:34:55,810
Speaker 1: because it's prone to become disgusting quite fast. Yeah. Is

644
00:34:55,850 --> 00:34:58,490
Speaker 1: it like cleaners in the UK where when they whip

645
00:34:58,530 --> 00:35:02,890
Speaker 1: you with nettles they sometimes miss the carners. Yeah, and

646
00:35:02,930 --> 00:35:04,770
Speaker 1: you're too embarrassed to say anything about it because you

647
00:35:04,770 --> 00:35:06,530
Speaker 1: don't you don't want to make a fuss. But so

648
00:35:06,570 --> 00:35:11,770
Speaker 1: I just whip my own cards. Anyone else got any

649
00:35:11,810 --> 00:35:15,850
Speaker 1: complaints about their cleaners? This very first world problems, A

650
00:35:15,810 --> 00:35:21,170
Speaker 1: little interaction we're having now, No, okay, um, So I

651
00:35:21,210 --> 00:35:24,330
Speaker 1: think with these guys, they they're professionals, the best ones.

652
00:35:24,370 --> 00:35:27,570
Speaker 1: They don't miss any spots. And in fact they have

653
00:35:27,650 --> 00:35:30,290
Speaker 1: an extra service where if you're actually ill and you

654
00:35:30,410 --> 00:35:33,930
Speaker 1: go to again Olympia a service, then they have a

655
00:35:33,970 --> 00:35:37,170
Speaker 1: diagnostic tool first where you get rubbed with an egg

656
00:35:37,250 --> 00:35:40,890
Speaker 1: and a dead black guinea pig and that did it?

657
00:35:41,050 --> 00:35:48,450
Speaker 1: Dia scurvy? Yeah? What egg and a dead black kidney pig? Yeah?

658
00:35:48,450 --> 00:35:51,250
Speaker 1: And somehow that diagnoses the problem. Then you sort of

659
00:35:51,570 --> 00:35:56,130
Speaker 1: inspected the egg is weird obviously beginning, So this nettle

660
00:35:56,170 --> 00:35:59,610
Speaker 1: stuff might have could it have helped? Like nettles? Are

661
00:35:59,610 --> 00:36:01,770
Speaker 1: they good for you or not? I don't not not

662
00:36:01,890 --> 00:36:06,690
Speaker 1: in this way. It's just a it's a traditional herbal treatment,

663
00:36:07,130 --> 00:36:10,090
Speaker 1: very popular and it's but it is still used quite widely,

664
00:36:10,130 --> 00:36:12,650
Speaker 1: so even in hospitals in the big cities in Equator.

665
00:36:12,690 --> 00:36:17,490
Speaker 1: Apparently doctors will let these olympiadores work alongside them, and

666
00:36:17,690 --> 00:36:19,650
Speaker 1: you know, so the doctors will give the conventional treatment

667
00:36:19,730 --> 00:36:21,450
Speaker 1: and then we'll accept that the patient will also ask

668
00:36:21,490 --> 00:36:23,050
Speaker 1: for a rub down with the nettles. I think it

669
00:36:23,130 --> 00:36:25,170
Speaker 1: is good. Few, I think a bit little bit. Yeah,

670
00:36:25,210 --> 00:36:27,530
Speaker 1: I read something and a few rub nettles onto an

671
00:36:27,570 --> 00:36:30,570
Speaker 1: arthritic thumb. The nettles will sting you, but you may

672
00:36:30,570 --> 00:36:33,970
Speaker 1: get some relief from the arthritis. There are quite a

673
00:36:33,970 --> 00:36:36,690
Speaker 1: lot of claims. Yeah, is that. I don't know how

674
00:36:36,730 --> 00:36:39,010
Speaker 1: much has been scientifically proven, but that's not to say

675
00:36:39,010 --> 00:36:41,410
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. There was a person who died of

676
00:36:41,530 --> 00:36:45,770
Speaker 1: nettles stings. I've found one. This was a tree nettle

677
00:36:45,890 --> 00:36:49,610
Speaker 1: in New Zealand called Artica ferox. Artica is like the

678
00:36:49,770 --> 00:36:53,770
Speaker 1: family of nettles. And apparently there was a lightly clad

679
00:36:53,850 --> 00:36:56,770
Speaker 1: hunter who died five hours after walking through a dense

680
00:36:56,850 --> 00:36:59,850
Speaker 1: patch of nettles. Oh, you don't really know what happened

681
00:36:59,850 --> 00:37:01,810
Speaker 1: to him. Apart from that, I guess it could be aniplexis.

682
00:37:01,930 --> 00:37:05,650
Speaker 1: You can get that through nettles. But yeah, and apparently

683
00:37:05,690 --> 00:37:09,930
Speaker 1: this nettle in New Zealand. According to Mary folklore, one

684
00:37:09,970 --> 00:37:12,930
Speaker 1: of their kind of God's coupe kind of used them

685
00:37:13,090 --> 00:37:16,850
Speaker 1: to hinder pursuers when he stole their wives. So he

686
00:37:16,890 --> 00:37:18,810
Speaker 1: would steal their wives, he would run away and he

687
00:37:18,850 --> 00:37:22,050
Speaker 1: would throw down nettles so that people couldn't follow him. Oh,

688
00:37:22,090 --> 00:37:25,210
Speaker 1: I'm feeling more guilty about something I did at primary school.

689
00:37:25,210 --> 00:37:27,530
Speaker 1: I've actually never confessed this to anybody, but just between

690
00:37:27,570 --> 00:37:31,050
Speaker 1: the four of us. So a friend of mine. I

691
00:37:31,170 --> 00:37:33,010
Speaker 1: got very vague memories of this, but a friend of

692
00:37:33,010 --> 00:37:35,450
Speaker 1: mine and I decided that for some reason we were

693
00:37:35,450 --> 00:37:37,730
Speaker 1: going to set a nettle trap, which I now realized

694
00:37:37,770 --> 00:37:41,010
Speaker 1: could have been fatal. And this nettle trap involved we

695
00:37:41,130 --> 00:37:43,410
Speaker 1: got some nettles and we just put them somewhere on

696
00:37:43,450 --> 00:37:46,090
Speaker 1: the playground where somebody might find them. And then and

697
00:37:46,090 --> 00:37:47,730
Speaker 1: then I think my friend said, oh, they only sting

698
00:37:47,810 --> 00:37:49,210
Speaker 1: you on the edge. I don't know if that's true

699
00:37:49,290 --> 00:37:52,410
Speaker 1: or not. And we thought, but maybe people won't I

700
00:37:52,450 --> 00:37:53,810
Speaker 1: don't know why we thought this is a good idea,

701
00:37:53,810 --> 00:37:55,970
Speaker 1: but maybe people won't pick up the nettles and they

702
00:37:55,970 --> 00:37:58,610
Speaker 1: won't be stung. So we then letter. We wrote a

703
00:37:58,610 --> 00:38:02,370
Speaker 1: little note that said please touch these leaves. And then

704
00:38:02,530 --> 00:38:04,050
Speaker 1: then my friend is like, but they only sting on

705
00:38:04,050 --> 00:38:06,490
Speaker 1: the edge, So then we added please touch these leaves

706
00:38:06,490 --> 00:38:08,770
Speaker 1: on the edge. I don't know if there were any

707
00:38:08,770 --> 00:38:13,250
Speaker 1: fatal but I'm burdened by guilt. What a genius ruse

708
00:38:14,650 --> 00:38:19,250
Speaker 1: master criminals fell for it. Yeah, there's just no trick

709
00:38:19,330 --> 00:38:21,690
Speaker 1: there is there. Really, It's like you're not trying to

710
00:38:21,690 --> 00:38:24,170
Speaker 1: disguise them as anything or anything like that. It's like

711
00:38:24,210 --> 00:38:28,090
Speaker 1: literally straight on the nose. Please injuring yourself with our

712
00:38:28,170 --> 00:38:35,770
Speaker 1: trap hand in mouse trap. I love that. I'm sure.

713
00:38:36,090 --> 00:38:37,810
Speaker 1: I'm sure. In the course of your research, you guys

714
00:38:37,810 --> 00:38:41,610
Speaker 1: came across the world netle eating championships. No oh, it

715
00:38:41,730 --> 00:38:46,050
Speaker 1: sounds really crazy. Well they haven't. They haven't. Endorset, very

716
00:38:46,090 --> 00:38:48,890
Speaker 1: near Breadport, which and we've mentioned before on the podcast

717
00:38:48,890 --> 00:38:51,650
Speaker 1: has the world's only thatched a brewery, so we don't.

718
00:38:52,290 --> 00:38:56,570
Speaker 1: There's no time to rake over that old wound. So

719
00:38:57,450 --> 00:38:59,490
Speaker 1: it's basically it happened to a pub called the Bottle

720
00:38:59,490 --> 00:39:01,490
Speaker 1: In until twenty nineteen, but the pub has been closed

721
00:39:01,530 --> 00:39:03,090
Speaker 1: lots on and off. But it is happening this year.

722
00:39:03,090 --> 00:39:07,450
Speaker 1: It's moving to a farm nearby and the competition because

723
00:39:07,450 --> 00:39:10,810
Speaker 1: of nettle based fatality, shut down by Health and safety

724
00:39:10,850 --> 00:39:16,010
Speaker 1: at this point. Um, so the farm is taking it over,

725
00:39:16,090 --> 00:39:18,210
Speaker 1: taking the reins this year, which is great. The measure

726
00:39:18,370 --> 00:39:21,290
Speaker 1: is by length. That's how you measure whether you're successful

727
00:39:21,410 --> 00:39:23,770
Speaker 1: at eating nettles or not. Is how long in feet

728
00:39:23,810 --> 00:39:28,450
Speaker 1: tidy as a literally how yeah, how many? How many

729
00:39:28,450 --> 00:39:30,490
Speaker 1: feet of now do you can eat? So that and

730
00:39:30,610 --> 00:39:33,090
Speaker 1: so it's the length of stork that is that remains

731
00:39:33,090 --> 00:39:35,490
Speaker 1: after you've stripped all the little nettle leaves off it

732
00:39:35,530 --> 00:39:37,450
Speaker 1: and eating what I do? You work your way down

733
00:39:37,730 --> 00:39:40,890
Speaker 1: like a side of a road and just let us

734
00:39:40,930 --> 00:39:46,090
Speaker 1: many it's I understand it's the stork because I understand

735
00:39:46,130 --> 00:39:49,250
Speaker 1: it was Originally two farmers got into an argument about

736
00:39:49,250 --> 00:39:52,130
Speaker 1: who had the biggest nettles, and it was and they said,

737
00:39:52,290 --> 00:39:54,970
Speaker 1: if you can grow a longer nettle, then I've got

738
00:39:54,970 --> 00:39:57,170
Speaker 1: growing on my farm. I'll eat it. Yeah, And so

739
00:39:57,250 --> 00:39:59,450
Speaker 1: I think that the idea is you strip the leaves

740
00:39:59,450 --> 00:40:01,930
Speaker 1: off and then you it's the stork that remains is

741
00:40:01,970 --> 00:40:05,370
Speaker 1: your measure of nettles. I think that argument was about

742
00:40:05,410 --> 00:40:06,810
Speaker 1: more than I think that was about the length of

743
00:40:06,810 --> 00:40:12,130
Speaker 1: the farmers roosters. I mean when I when I encountered this,

744
00:40:12,170 --> 00:40:16,250
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, yeah, competitive netle eating, it's crazy. But

745
00:40:16,330 --> 00:40:18,170
Speaker 1: it's like you know, the competitive chili eating or the

746
00:40:18,170 --> 00:40:20,250
Speaker 1: competitive hot dog eating or song so it's like, oh,

747
00:40:20,250 --> 00:40:22,170
Speaker 1: how many can you eat in one minute? Or how

748
00:40:22,170 --> 00:40:23,930
Speaker 1: many can you eat in three minutes? But it's no

749
00:40:24,330 --> 00:40:26,890
Speaker 1: it's how many can you eat in an hour? You

750
00:40:27,170 --> 00:40:31,890
Speaker 1: spend an hour eating metals and it's too long. It

751
00:40:31,930 --> 00:40:34,650
Speaker 1: doesn't count if you don't keep the nettles down. And

752
00:40:34,690 --> 00:40:36,690
Speaker 1: there was one guy a few years ago who was

753
00:40:36,730 --> 00:40:39,770
Speaker 1: way ahead and at fifty seven minutes he went to

754
00:40:39,850 --> 00:40:41,610
Speaker 1: just threw up in the pub car park and he

755
00:40:41,690 --> 00:40:44,930
Speaker 1: was disqualified. Can your imagine it's the winner, the all

756
00:40:44,970 --> 00:40:49,730
Speaker 1: time record winner. It's called Philip Thorn. Now nettles don't

757
00:40:49,730 --> 00:40:55,330
Speaker 1: have thorns, admittedly, but it's close. His record one hundred

758
00:40:55,370 --> 00:40:59,330
Speaker 1: and four feet, so impressive, which is long. Do you

759
00:40:59,370 --> 00:41:02,170
Speaker 1: know what I find most amazing about that? It's what

760
00:41:02,210 --> 00:41:07,130
Speaker 1: it says about human capacity to improve because about ten

761
00:41:07,250 --> 00:41:09,050
Speaker 1: years before he got the record, which is in twenty eight,

762
00:41:09,130 --> 00:41:12,930
Speaker 1: see the winner of the same competition eight forty eight

763
00:41:12,930 --> 00:41:16,450
Speaker 1: feet of nettles. Now, in just a decade phil Thorne

764
00:41:16,530 --> 00:41:19,290
Speaker 1: has more than doubled that. How a human's got so

765
00:41:19,410 --> 00:41:21,810
Speaker 1: much better a nettle eating in the space for ten years.

766
00:41:21,890 --> 00:41:23,610
Speaker 1: That's like if in ten years time we can do

767
00:41:23,650 --> 00:41:25,890
Speaker 1: the hundred meters in four and a half seconds, isn't

768
00:41:25,930 --> 00:41:33,170
Speaker 1: it get Phil Thorne in the hundred meters of nettles

769
00:41:33,170 --> 00:41:35,010
Speaker 1: at the end at the finish line. You're not allowed

770
00:41:35,050 --> 00:41:37,010
Speaker 1: to cook them. I guess right. You just have to

771
00:41:37,530 --> 00:41:40,290
Speaker 1: eat them. They're raw, freshly picked. Your tongue goes black

772
00:41:40,290 --> 00:41:43,650
Speaker 1: from all the iron and them. It's painful, apparently almost immediately,

773
00:41:43,810 --> 00:41:46,490
Speaker 1: within twenty seconds. It's very painful, and you then only

774
00:41:46,490 --> 00:41:49,250
Speaker 1: got another three thousand, five hundred and eighty seconds to

775
00:41:49,290 --> 00:41:52,850
Speaker 1: get through. So's terrific. I don't know how people do it. Yes,

776
00:41:52,930 --> 00:41:55,050
Speaker 1: and you're not allowed to bring your own nettles. You're

777
00:41:55,090 --> 00:41:58,090
Speaker 1: not allowed to bring any substances that might numb your mouth,

778
00:41:58,130 --> 00:42:01,530
Speaker 1: although I'm sure some people have been tempted to try

779
00:42:01,530 --> 00:42:03,570
Speaker 1: and smear vassline on. I don't know, because I just

780
00:42:03,610 --> 00:42:05,770
Speaker 1: thought of a trick. But then I only thought of

781
00:42:05,810 --> 00:42:07,570
Speaker 1: the trick after you told me the thing you're not

782
00:42:07,610 --> 00:42:09,850
Speaker 1: allowed to do. So that's that's not going to work.

783
00:42:09,850 --> 00:42:12,570
Speaker 1: But I think from memory in Hawaii, I think the

784
00:42:12,770 --> 00:42:16,770
Speaker 1: nettles don't have stings on them. I think you turn

785
00:42:16,890 --> 00:42:19,530
Speaker 1: up wearing your lay with your with your sun hat

786
00:42:19,610 --> 00:42:27,690
Speaker 1: on in your in your tropical shirt, just think smuggling

787
00:42:27,730 --> 00:42:30,250
Speaker 1: some broccoli or something and say, oh no, it's definitely nettles.

788
00:42:31,170 --> 00:42:33,570
Speaker 1: I think that they might have evolved to have no

789
00:42:33,930 --> 00:42:37,650
Speaker 1: sting because they don't have any animals that eat them

790
00:42:37,850 --> 00:42:42,050
Speaker 1: or something really, so they don't need to repel. That's interesting. Well,

791
00:42:42,050 --> 00:42:45,130
Speaker 1: you can do at the nettle Eating Championships is drink.

792
00:42:45,410 --> 00:42:47,850
Speaker 1: You can either drink water or you can drink beer.

793
00:42:48,050 --> 00:42:49,970
Speaker 1: I don't know if it has to be beer salced

794
00:42:50,010 --> 00:42:52,930
Speaker 1: from a thatched brewery or not. It's going to be

795
00:42:53,050 --> 00:42:55,850
Speaker 1: cider now that it's a side of farm cider is allowed.

796
00:42:55,890 --> 00:42:59,690
Speaker 1: Cider is allowed because I think that would help. So

797
00:42:59,770 --> 00:43:02,930
Speaker 1: the one in fact, as we're talking about incredible moments

798
00:43:02,930 --> 00:43:05,450
Speaker 1: in the history of nettle eating, in twenty nineteen, the

799
00:43:05,490 --> 00:43:08,490
Speaker 1: women's winner, Lindy Rogers. I don't know why the competition

800
00:43:08,570 --> 00:43:11,690
Speaker 1: is divided sex. I have no idea, um, but there's

801
00:43:11,690 --> 00:43:13,850
Speaker 1: a men's in a women's championship, the women's when a

802
00:43:13,970 --> 00:43:17,730
Speaker 1: Lindy Rogers had an incredible Fosberry flop moment because she

803
00:43:17,850 --> 00:43:25,450
Speaker 1: dipped her nettles insider inside her, I mean, first of all,

804
00:43:25,450 --> 00:43:28,050
Speaker 1: that's disgusting. Second of all, I feel like it would

805
00:43:28,090 --> 00:43:34,370
Speaker 1: hurt just as much in apple cider. Oh sorry, exactly.

806
00:43:35,170 --> 00:43:38,090
Speaker 1: And so that's that's a method that apparently helps to

807
00:43:38,090 --> 00:43:39,570
Speaker 1: take the take a bit of the take out of it.

808
00:43:39,810 --> 00:43:42,130
Speaker 1: That feels like a loophole. They've got to close that

809
00:43:42,170 --> 00:43:44,770
Speaker 1: one actually was a loophole. You know, it's all it's

810
00:43:44,770 --> 00:43:50,170
Speaker 1: all loopholes. It's all loopholes. Yeah, yeah, wow. So the

811
00:43:50,450 --> 00:43:53,730
Speaker 1: in the war, in the First World War, the Germans

812
00:43:53,730 --> 00:43:58,410
Speaker 1: were encouraged to collect nettles. Um can you guess why? Maybe,

813
00:43:58,930 --> 00:44:03,130
Speaker 1: and ammunition shortage is really biting. We're just going to

814
00:44:03,170 --> 00:44:06,490
Speaker 1: have to thrash the British with our nettle bundles. They're

815
00:44:06,490 --> 00:44:09,570
Speaker 1: planning to steal everybody's wives and then throw the nettles

816
00:44:09,610 --> 00:44:13,650
Speaker 1: down to foil the pursuers. Very good setting a tap

817
00:44:13,650 --> 00:44:16,130
Speaker 1: in the playground taking literally a leaf out of tims

818
00:44:16,130 --> 00:44:24,450
Speaker 1: but touchant here. No, it was to make uniforms. So

819
00:44:24,850 --> 00:44:27,450
Speaker 1: you can take the stalks off nettles and you can

820
00:44:27,530 --> 00:44:30,650
Speaker 1: make like kind of material with it. The month at

821
00:44:30,730 --> 00:44:33,330
Speaker 1: University in Leicester have got a thing called a Sting

822
00:44:33,450 --> 00:44:35,490
Speaker 1: Project and they've been trying to find things that you

823
00:44:35,490 --> 00:44:38,330
Speaker 1: can do with nettles and one of their team, a

824
00:44:38,410 --> 00:44:43,770
Speaker 1: designer called Alex Deer, has invented underwear that's made from nettles.

825
00:44:44,010 --> 00:44:47,930
Speaker 1: They've made a pink camusel top and pants made from nettles,

826
00:44:48,650 --> 00:44:51,930
Speaker 1: and according to Alex Deer, they said, it is quite

827
00:44:51,970 --> 00:44:54,810
Speaker 1: a hairy fiber, so you probably wouldn't want all of

828
00:44:54,810 --> 00:44:57,410
Speaker 1: your underwear made of it. But we are trying to

829
00:44:57,450 --> 00:45:00,650
Speaker 1: make a point of what is possible with this plant. Wow,

830
00:45:02,130 --> 00:45:05,530
Speaker 1: I don't want to dip them inside. I wouldn't or

831
00:45:05,650 --> 00:45:09,250
Speaker 1: have sex with someone who wears dock leaf pants. Maybe

832
00:45:10,490 --> 00:45:12,810
Speaker 1: Old James, Come on, you know that's a myth. Don't

833
00:45:12,810 --> 00:45:15,930
Speaker 1: propagate it for the kids. Submits, and nice Hannah submits,

834
00:45:15,970 --> 00:45:18,730
Speaker 1: and it's good. It takes your mind off the stinging

835
00:45:18,770 --> 00:45:21,130
Speaker 1: agony when looking for a dock leaf. So I maintained

836
00:45:21,130 --> 00:45:23,530
Speaker 1: as a placebo effect. I go to the dock leaf

837
00:45:23,570 --> 00:45:26,530
Speaker 1: eating championships and I got to say my record is

838
00:45:26,530 --> 00:45:31,890
Speaker 1: pretty strong. Have you guys heard of the hornet ordeal?

839
00:45:32,490 --> 00:45:36,850
Speaker 1: This is the el Gayo people in Kenya do this.

840
00:45:36,850 --> 00:45:39,610
Speaker 1: This was an article by a guy called FB Welborne

841
00:45:39,650 --> 00:45:43,010
Speaker 1: who underwent the initiation, who was Kenyon. And what it

842
00:45:43,130 --> 00:45:46,690
Speaker 1: is is that boys are forced to crawl through tunnels

843
00:45:46,690 --> 00:45:49,650
Speaker 1: made of stinging nettles, and then once you get out

844
00:45:49,690 --> 00:45:52,050
Speaker 1: of this tunnel of stinging nettles, then you have the

845
00:45:52,130 --> 00:45:55,570
Speaker 1: nettles rubbed on your genitals and then you have live

846
00:45:55,690 --> 00:45:59,610
Speaker 1: hornets dropped on your back. And the reason that they

847
00:45:59,650 --> 00:46:02,090
Speaker 1: do all this is that the nettles are there to

848
00:46:02,170 --> 00:46:05,610
Speaker 1: prepare you for the hornets. So like the pain is

849
00:46:05,650 --> 00:46:07,650
Speaker 1: to prepare you for the hornet pain, and then the

850
00:46:07,730 --> 00:46:10,410
Speaker 1: hornet pain is there to prepare you for the circumcision

851
00:46:10,410 --> 00:46:13,330
Speaker 1: that comes straight afterwards. Wow. I think the World Nettle

852
00:46:13,410 --> 00:46:18,650
Speaker 1: Eating Championship should should go for this, so in the hornets,

853
00:46:19,410 --> 00:46:22,090
Speaker 1: and then that would explain why there's a separate category

854
00:46:22,130 --> 00:46:24,810
Speaker 1: for men and women. How is the circumcision contest judged?

855
00:46:24,930 --> 00:46:29,130
Speaker 1: Is that by length? How's that working? I haven't worked

856
00:46:29,130 --> 00:46:36,010
Speaker 1: out all the details yet. Wow, that sounds really horrible, James.

857
00:46:36,050 --> 00:46:40,730
Speaker 1: The second, what does the circumcision prepare you for life? Oh?

858
00:46:40,890 --> 00:46:49,650
Speaker 1: Boy gets worse dealing with a bloody counsel. All right,

859
00:46:49,730 --> 00:46:51,770
Speaker 1: it is time for our final fact, and that is

860
00:46:51,850 --> 00:46:55,450
Speaker 1: Andy's fact by fact this week is that the people

861
00:46:55,490 --> 00:46:58,130
Speaker 1: of the remote island of Saint Kilda used to yell

862
00:46:58,330 --> 00:47:01,450
Speaker 1: if they saw themselves in a visiting tourists mirror. They

863
00:47:01,450 --> 00:47:03,730
Speaker 1: actually had plenty of mirrors. They just wanted to keep

864
00:47:03,770 --> 00:47:11,050
Speaker 1: the tourists coming. This is about the remote very remote

865
00:47:11,090 --> 00:47:13,610
Speaker 1: island of Saint Kilda, and it features in a new

866
00:47:13,610 --> 00:47:15,970
Speaker 1: book called shadow Lands by Matthew Green, which is about

867
00:47:16,050 --> 00:47:20,770
Speaker 1: various forgotten fascinating places. And St Kilda had people on

868
00:47:20,770 --> 00:47:23,730
Speaker 1: it for about a thousand years. They lived there until

869
00:47:23,810 --> 00:47:26,250
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. The arland was evacuated in nineteen thirty. In

870
00:47:26,250 --> 00:47:29,450
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century they started getting visitors by ship, Victorian tourists,

871
00:47:29,610 --> 00:47:32,210
Speaker 1: not very many because it's so far away, but they

872
00:47:32,210 --> 00:47:35,410
Speaker 1: played up to it massively and they would do this thing.

873
00:47:35,410 --> 00:47:37,570
Speaker 1: They would, you know, they would scream or pretend to

874
00:47:37,570 --> 00:47:40,170
Speaker 1: be incredibly surprised if someone showed them a mirror. They

875
00:47:40,170 --> 00:47:43,090
Speaker 1: would look behind the mirror, saying, what there's no one behind,

876
00:47:43,290 --> 00:47:44,970
Speaker 1: what's going on? I mean they would literally they were

877
00:47:45,010 --> 00:47:48,130
Speaker 1: clean shaven, they had mirrors, they had shaved that morning.

878
00:47:48,490 --> 00:47:51,850
Speaker 1: I read This was in an article by Neil McKenzie,

879
00:47:51,890 --> 00:47:54,170
Speaker 1: who was the person who was kind of in charge,

880
00:47:54,570 --> 00:47:57,170
Speaker 1: who was like the reverend who kind of went there

881
00:47:57,210 --> 00:47:59,210
Speaker 1: and he's kind of in charge of anything and helped

882
00:47:59,210 --> 00:48:01,530
Speaker 1: the islanders for quite a long time. And he said

883
00:48:01,610 --> 00:48:04,530
Speaker 1: they would pick up pieces of coal and affect surprise

884
00:48:04,610 --> 00:48:07,050
Speaker 1: at not being able to eat them, and when they

885
00:48:07,050 --> 00:48:09,010
Speaker 1: came in front of a looking glass, they would start

886
00:48:09,290 --> 00:48:11,730
Speaker 1: and express great surprise at not being able to find

887
00:48:11,770 --> 00:48:14,450
Speaker 1: the person who appeared behind it. It's so funny. It

888
00:48:15,650 --> 00:48:19,130
Speaker 1: really work out. Sometimes they would go on board a yacht,

889
00:48:19,570 --> 00:48:22,930
Speaker 1: visiting tourist yacht, and they pretended that they thought all

890
00:48:22,970 --> 00:48:26,170
Speaker 1: the brass on it was gold. You've got all this gold,

891
00:48:26,290 --> 00:48:28,770
Speaker 1: you must be the richest man in the world. They knew,

892
00:48:28,810 --> 00:48:31,130
Speaker 1: they knew about brass. You know, they were hamming it up.

893
00:48:31,850 --> 00:48:35,570
Speaker 1: Did it work? Were the tourists locking? Doesn't Kilda to

894
00:48:35,650 --> 00:48:37,770
Speaker 1: see these people be amazed at their own reflection, because

895
00:48:37,770 --> 00:48:39,530
Speaker 1: it's hard to get to. I don't know if I'd

896
00:48:39,530 --> 00:48:42,050
Speaker 1: take a holiday fucking It didn't become a major tourist economy,

897
00:48:42,050 --> 00:48:43,650
Speaker 1: which is why the island economy fell apart in the

898
00:48:43,650 --> 00:48:45,930
Speaker 1: place was evacuated in nineteen thirty. But they were doing

899
00:48:45,930 --> 00:48:48,410
Speaker 1: their best to keep some money coming in. Yeah, they apparently,

900
00:48:48,450 --> 00:48:50,730
Speaker 1: According to Mackenzie, they would all the time when they

901
00:48:50,730 --> 00:48:52,570
Speaker 1: were doing this, they'd be talking to each other in

902
00:48:52,610 --> 00:48:54,850
Speaker 1: gallic and they'd be saying, if we seem to be

903
00:48:54,890 --> 00:48:57,530
Speaker 1: paying great attention and make them believe we are simple,

904
00:48:57,770 --> 00:49:00,050
Speaker 1: they will be sure before they go away to give

905
00:49:00,130 --> 00:49:03,210
Speaker 1: us something even better. Yeah, so they would just did

906
00:49:03,250 --> 00:49:04,890
Speaker 1: this and they thought if they kind of make them

907
00:49:04,890 --> 00:49:07,410
Speaker 1: think we're stupid, then eventually we'll get some really awesome

908
00:49:07,450 --> 00:49:12,130
Speaker 1: booty from them. Yeah, smart guys. Yeah, so what I'm

909
00:49:12,170 --> 00:49:14,570
Speaker 1: trying to work out what they were, what they were

910
00:49:14,610 --> 00:49:17,730
Speaker 1: pretending to be. And so is it that they're pretending

911
00:49:17,770 --> 00:49:21,130
Speaker 1: that they thought they were vampires and were surprised to

912
00:49:21,170 --> 00:49:25,450
Speaker 1: realize that they weren't actually vampires? Could they were surprised? Oh?

913
00:49:25,530 --> 00:49:27,170
Speaker 1: I thought I didn't leave a reflection in a mirror

914
00:49:27,170 --> 00:49:30,010
Speaker 1: because I was a vampire human after all, that would surprise.

915
00:49:30,050 --> 00:49:31,850
Speaker 1: That's what it was, and that's actually why the island

916
00:49:31,850 --> 00:49:34,130
Speaker 1: broke done. Everyone was scared off. One of my favorite

917
00:49:34,130 --> 00:49:38,770
Speaker 1: short poems is by John Hegley and it has the

918
00:49:38,810 --> 00:49:42,770
Speaker 1: title A Vampire considers buying a new mirror, and the

919
00:49:42,850 --> 00:49:49,650
Speaker 1: poem is simply on reflection. No, brilliant, very nice, that's

920
00:49:49,810 --> 00:49:54,170
Speaker 1: really It's also a good one to be able to memorize.

921
00:49:54,610 --> 00:49:58,050
Speaker 1: I found myself to remember that for the school like

922
00:49:58,330 --> 00:50:01,930
Speaker 1: the citation competition. Yeah, yeah, I was trying to look

923
00:50:01,970 --> 00:50:03,570
Speaker 1: it up. I saw it about twenty five years ago,

924
00:50:03,570 --> 00:50:04,810
Speaker 1: and I was trying to look it up somewhere and

925
00:50:04,850 --> 00:50:06,810
Speaker 1: I can't find it on the internet. And then I thought,

926
00:50:06,850 --> 00:50:11,370
Speaker 1: you know, I can actually remember that joke. Fine, it's

927
00:50:11,410 --> 00:50:14,170
Speaker 1: been It's held fascination for people for hundreds of years,

928
00:50:14,210 --> 00:50:16,770
Speaker 1: hasn't it. Saint Kilda. People have been visiting it, and

929
00:50:16,810 --> 00:50:19,730
Speaker 1: it is. It's over one hundred miles off the coast

930
00:50:19,770 --> 00:50:22,770
Speaker 1: of Scotland and it's a rocky ride to get there,

931
00:50:22,850 --> 00:50:25,450
Speaker 1: and it's quite unclear when people have lived there and

932
00:50:25,490 --> 00:50:29,250
Speaker 1: when they haven't. But there was definitely a society established

933
00:50:29,290 --> 00:50:32,690
Speaker 1: by the sixteenth century, wasn't there. That's when we know

934
00:50:32,730 --> 00:50:34,170
Speaker 1: that there was like a community of people who are

935
00:50:34,170 --> 00:50:36,730
Speaker 1: living there successfully, so it's not like it's been populated forever.

936
00:50:37,130 --> 00:50:40,570
Speaker 1: And then people who have traveled there ever since there was.

937
00:50:40,610 --> 00:50:42,890
Speaker 1: The first proper account of the Islanders was written in

938
00:50:42,970 --> 00:50:46,490
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety eight, called A Late Voyage to Saint Kilda,

939
00:50:46,570 --> 00:50:48,530
Speaker 1: which I still don't know what he meant by late.

940
00:50:49,130 --> 00:50:51,210
Speaker 1: I don't know if he'd meant to go ten years earlier.

941
00:50:51,370 --> 00:50:56,210
Speaker 1: He died about five years earlier. Anyway. This is a

942
00:50:56,210 --> 00:51:00,930
Speaker 1: writer called Martin. Martin brilliant. Actually I read his book.

943
00:51:00,930 --> 00:51:03,090
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. One of the things he says is they're

944
00:51:03,090 --> 00:51:07,290
Speaker 1: extremely good climbers, and so they live by hunting the

945
00:51:07,850 --> 00:51:10,810
Speaker 1: birds mostly the island. So they'll climb up and then

946
00:51:10,850 --> 00:51:14,050
Speaker 1: they'll catch the birds. And he described a particularly very

947
00:51:14,170 --> 00:51:16,530
Speaker 1: high rock called the Thumb, which was as high as

948
00:51:16,530 --> 00:51:18,770
Speaker 1: a tall steeple, and he said that the only way

949
00:51:18,810 --> 00:51:20,250
Speaker 1: that you could get to the top of the Thumb

950
00:51:20,570 --> 00:51:24,050
Speaker 1: is by at one point you swing your entire body

951
00:51:24,290 --> 00:51:27,050
Speaker 1: sort of up onto a ledge, by holding onto a

952
00:51:27,050 --> 00:51:28,970
Speaker 1: protruding bit of rock which is only big enough to

953
00:51:28,970 --> 00:51:33,410
Speaker 1: accommodate your thumb. My god, so you got your whole

954
00:51:33,450 --> 00:51:36,570
Speaker 1: body balancing on your thumb as you propel it up

955
00:51:36,930 --> 00:51:39,290
Speaker 1: onto the next bit of rock. Quite impressive. And then

956
00:51:39,290 --> 00:51:41,090
Speaker 1: the person who swung his way up there onto the

957
00:51:41,130 --> 00:51:43,730
Speaker 1: thumb get drops a rope down and hoist the others up.

958
00:51:43,730 --> 00:51:46,570
Speaker 1: And then that person gets an extra four foul at

959
00:51:46,570 --> 00:51:50,490
Speaker 1: the end of the day for his achievement. The birds, right,

960
00:51:50,530 --> 00:51:53,170
Speaker 1: because that's what the people of Saint Kilda mostly lived off,

961
00:51:53,250 --> 00:51:56,410
Speaker 1: birds and stuff. Yes, what birds and pooh? Of course,

962
00:51:56,410 --> 00:51:58,490
Speaker 1: so it's left hand, big one. Wouldn't they just leave

963
00:51:58,570 --> 00:52:02,010
Speaker 1: the rope up A lot of fun out of it, don't.

964
00:52:02,010 --> 00:52:06,250
Speaker 1: It is such a fascinating place, and it was unbelievably inhospitable,

965
00:52:06,250 --> 00:52:08,370
Speaker 1: and it's amazing that people managed to scratch out a

966
00:52:08,410 --> 00:52:10,730
Speaker 1: living there at all. So sometimes it would just rain

967
00:52:10,810 --> 00:52:13,410
Speaker 1: for three weeks without stopping. Not once, it just rained

968
00:52:13,410 --> 00:52:16,130
Speaker 1: for three weeks on end. There was once a fairness

969
00:52:16,170 --> 00:52:21,050
Speaker 1: in Bolton or even think I think I could survive,

970
00:52:21,610 --> 00:52:23,490
Speaker 1: all right, all right, there was once a storm that

971
00:52:23,570 --> 00:52:25,610
Speaker 1: was so fierce that everyone on the island was left

972
00:52:25,650 --> 00:52:31,370
Speaker 1: deaf for a week. It was like, I read, that's

973
00:52:31,410 --> 00:52:34,050
Speaker 1: not true. It can't be true, can it's I think

974
00:52:34,090 --> 00:52:36,530
Speaker 1: it can, I think it can. It was so windy

975
00:52:36,890 --> 00:52:39,650
Speaker 1: the islanders sheep would sometimes just be blown over the cliffs.

976
00:52:39,930 --> 00:52:43,210
Speaker 1: I cannot understand. Yeah, that is understandable, but every one

977
00:52:43,210 --> 00:52:45,410
Speaker 1: of the island going deaf for a week, that doesn't

978
00:52:45,410 --> 00:52:48,290
Speaker 1: make that can't be true. It's just not a thing.

979
00:52:48,450 --> 00:52:50,570
Speaker 1: We should mention the amazing way that they used to

980
00:52:50,610 --> 00:52:55,090
Speaker 1: communicate with the mainland, the Saint Kildan's in the nineteenth century,

981
00:52:55,130 --> 00:52:57,890
Speaker 1: which was via mail boats. The end of a posts

982
00:52:57,890 --> 00:53:00,330
Speaker 1: I was until the early twentieth century, and so they

983
00:53:00,370 --> 00:53:03,210
Speaker 1: would just get a letter right it pop it on

984
00:53:03,250 --> 00:53:05,490
Speaker 1: a homemade mail boat like a hollowed out a bit

985
00:53:05,490 --> 00:53:08,610
Speaker 1: of wood with a little tin placed inside into which

986
00:53:08,650 --> 00:53:11,490
Speaker 1: they put their letter, and then they'd burn onto the

987
00:53:11,530 --> 00:53:15,210
Speaker 1: service of this tiny boat the words please open, and

988
00:53:15,330 --> 00:53:17,730
Speaker 1: they'd inflate a sheep's bladder, attach it to the boat,

989
00:53:17,970 --> 00:53:21,890
Speaker 1: send it off and hope that it got to land somewhere.

990
00:53:21,970 --> 00:53:24,930
Speaker 1: And according to one report I read, two thirds of

991
00:53:24,970 --> 00:53:28,930
Speaker 1: messages reached their destination, as in they'd reach a destination

992
00:53:29,050 --> 00:53:32,010
Speaker 1: either the coast of Scotland or Scandinavia sometimes and then

993
00:53:32,570 --> 00:53:35,290
Speaker 1: those people would open the message and find the actual

994
00:53:35,290 --> 00:53:39,210
Speaker 1: address inside and post it on. It's roughly the same

995
00:53:39,250 --> 00:53:41,810
Speaker 1: strike rate as the Royal male at the moment, So yeah,

996
00:53:42,650 --> 00:53:46,130
Speaker 1: that's really cool. Pyrography it's called when you burn words

997
00:53:46,130 --> 00:53:50,490
Speaker 1: onto bits of wood. It's kind of a subsection of whittling.

998
00:53:50,850 --> 00:53:55,850
Speaker 1: I don't know if he came in your whittling. It

999
00:53:56,010 --> 00:53:58,770
Speaker 1: used to be a very male dominated area. And then

1000
00:53:58,850 --> 00:54:01,890
Speaker 1: in the turn the twentieth century there's a Melbourne architects

1001
00:54:01,890 --> 00:54:05,850
Speaker 1: called Alfred Smart who invented a new way of pyrography,

1002
00:54:06,330 --> 00:54:10,010
Speaker 1: hierrographizing a new type of chiograph and the way that

1003
00:54:10,050 --> 00:54:12,650
Speaker 1: he did that he had a pencil with like some

1004
00:54:13,050 --> 00:54:15,770
Speaker 1: fuel attached to it, and so you could use and

1005
00:54:15,810 --> 00:54:17,810
Speaker 1: you could change the amount of fuel that came in

1006
00:54:17,850 --> 00:54:20,130
Speaker 1: and out, so you could start doing shading and stuff

1007
00:54:20,170 --> 00:54:23,970
Speaker 1: like that to do amazing patterns. And then it became

1008
00:54:24,010 --> 00:54:26,650
Speaker 1: a kind of a relatively not very common, but a

1009
00:54:26,730 --> 00:54:30,530
Speaker 1: relatively common hobby for women at the in the start

1010
00:54:30,610 --> 00:54:34,650
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, and I was reading about someone called

1011
00:54:34,730 --> 00:54:38,770
Speaker 1: Joe Schwartz who's a woodburner, and she is the first

1012
00:54:38,890 --> 00:54:42,450
Speaker 1: person to ever teach wood burning in Antarctica. I mean,

1013
00:54:44,170 --> 00:54:49,370
Speaker 1: it's right down on the list of survivability skills, isn't it,

1014
00:54:49,690 --> 00:54:55,050
Speaker 1: especially in a continent with no trees. But you know

1015
00:54:55,170 --> 00:54:57,650
Speaker 1: she's got a record, so that's good. From being the

1016
00:54:57,650 --> 00:55:00,130
Speaker 1: second person. Imagine going to Antarctic, going out, I teach

1017
00:55:00,170 --> 00:55:02,970
Speaker 1: them wood burning. I'm not even the first one to

1018
00:55:03,130 --> 00:55:06,010
Speaker 1: do this. D you see the Schwartz panel being hung

1019
00:55:06,090 --> 00:55:08,890
Speaker 1: up over the tent. Nightmare? Can I tellyone quick think

1020
00:55:08,890 --> 00:55:12,450
Speaker 1: abou the evacuation of Saint Kilda, please, Because because life

1021
00:55:12,450 --> 00:55:14,770
Speaker 1: got harder and harder, and a lot of able bodied

1022
00:55:14,810 --> 00:55:17,050
Speaker 1: young men went to the mainland, and as it was

1023
00:55:17,130 --> 00:55:22,810
Speaker 1: largely a subsistence economy, so like hunting birds, and farming sheep.

1024
00:55:22,930 --> 00:55:25,730
Speaker 1: That was a big problem for the island's survival. In fact,

1025
00:55:25,730 --> 00:55:28,570
Speaker 1: they got close to starving on several occasions, and so

1026
00:55:28,650 --> 00:55:31,730
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty they they contacted the mainland and said, look,

1027
00:55:31,730 --> 00:55:34,010
Speaker 1: we're going to tap out with this is horrible, but

1028
00:55:34,130 --> 00:55:37,690
Speaker 1: we don't like it. We're all deaf. They the government said, yeah,

1029
00:55:37,690 --> 00:55:39,850
Speaker 1: of course, we'll bring you over. By that point, two

1030
00:55:39,850 --> 00:55:42,570
Speaker 1: thirds of the population shared the same two surnames as

1031
00:55:42,610 --> 00:55:46,130
Speaker 1: in The diversity of families had really been, you know,

1032
00:55:46,450 --> 00:55:49,890
Speaker 1: whittled down over the years. And at the end of it,

1033
00:55:49,930 --> 00:55:53,570
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty, they ceremonially closed down the post office.

1034
00:55:53,650 --> 00:55:56,530
Speaker 1: I think it's amazing. They held one final church service

1035
00:55:56,890 --> 00:56:00,770
Speaker 1: and they drowned their dogs off the pier. I don't

1036
00:56:00,850 --> 00:56:06,210
Speaker 1: know why. I don't know why the rest that took

1037
00:56:06,290 --> 00:56:08,530
Speaker 1: such a horrible turn at the end of that sentence.

1038
00:56:08,650 --> 00:56:11,050
Speaker 1: Really they must have been guys. There's a rum on

1039
00:56:11,090 --> 00:56:13,170
Speaker 1: the boat for the dogs. But then when they got

1040
00:56:13,170 --> 00:56:15,210
Speaker 1: to the mainland, the government arranged for most of the

1041
00:56:15,250 --> 00:56:17,330
Speaker 1: men to be given jobs in the Forestry Commission. But

1042
00:56:17,410 --> 00:56:20,770
Speaker 1: unfortunately most of them had never seen a tree because

1043
00:56:20,770 --> 00:56:23,090
Speaker 1: there are no trees on so killed the we're just

1044
00:56:23,170 --> 00:56:25,730
Speaker 1: chopping everything down. Weren't they They've chopped down lamp posts

1045
00:56:27,730 --> 00:56:29,250
Speaker 1: or presumably they were going to get jobs at the

1046
00:56:29,330 --> 00:56:36,490
Speaker 1: RSPCA hurriedly rearranged. All right, that's it. That's all of

1047
00:56:36,490 --> 00:56:40,130
Speaker 1: our facts. Thank you so much everybody for listening. Thanks

1048
00:56:40,170 --> 00:56:42,410
Speaker 1: so much, Tim for coming on. If you want to

1049
00:56:42,410 --> 00:56:44,290
Speaker 1: get in touch with any of us, you can find

1050
00:56:44,370 --> 00:56:48,250
Speaker 1: these guys on Twitter. I believe James you're on, James Harkin,

1051
00:56:48,370 --> 00:56:51,210
Speaker 1: Andy At, Andrew Hunter, m and Tim have you fallen

1052
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Speaker 1: prey to do the scourge than this Twitter? I'm Tim

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00:56:54,090 --> 00:56:56,570
Speaker 1: Harford on Twitter, but I don't really pay any attention.

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00:56:57,090 --> 00:56:59,850
Speaker 1: People should just listen to the Cautionary Tales podcast instead

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00:56:59,890 --> 00:57:02,290
Speaker 1: and not tweet me. Great, so if you want to

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00:57:02,330 --> 00:57:06,210
Speaker 1: be completely ignored, then tweets at Tim Harford, but do

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00:57:06,370 --> 00:57:09,370
Speaker 1: definitely go and listen to his Cautionary Tales podcast. It

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00:57:09,490 --> 00:57:12,090
Speaker 1: is brilliant. And if you want to know anything more

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00:57:12,090 --> 00:57:14,050
Speaker 1: about this podcast, no such thing as a Fish, go

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00:57:14,170 --> 00:57:16,610
Speaker 1: to no such thing as a fish dot com, where

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Speaker 1: you'll find all of our previous episodes and any other

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00:57:20,010 --> 00:57:23,370
Speaker 1: interesting news about us. Okay, that's all this week. We

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Speaker 1: will see you again next week with another episode Goodbye,