Speaker 1: Pushkin. Hello Tim Harford here. One of the most exciting
Speaker 1: things happened to me a few weeks ago. My friends
Speaker 1: at the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish called
Speaker 1: me up and asked me if i'd be a guest
Speaker 1: on the podcast. Now. If you don't know what No
Speaker 1: Such Thing as a Fish is, and most of you
Speaker 1: will because it's hugely popular, it's four nerds with obscure
Speaker 1: facts being very funny, or at least trying to be
Speaker 1: very funny. The regular nerds, James, Anna, Dan and Andy
Speaker 1: make this look very easy. You are about to hear
Speaker 1: me trying to live up to their standards. Cautionary Tales
Speaker 1: will be back as always next Friday, where we're on
Speaker 1: every other Friday with our regular Cautionary Tales episodes, but
Speaker 1: this week as a special treat, and No Such Thing
Speaker 1: as a Fish have allowed us to release their episode
Speaker 1: featuring yours truly, Tim Harford, desperately trying to keep pace, enjoy, Hello,
Speaker 1: and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as
Speaker 1: a Fish, the weekly podcast coming to you this week
Speaker 1: from four top secret, underground, undisclosed locations. My name is
Speaker 1: Anna to Schinsky, and I am sitting here today with
Speaker 1: James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and our very special guest,
Speaker 1: Tim Harford. And once again we've gathered around our microphones
Speaker 1: with our four favorite facts from the last seven days,
Speaker 1: and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Tim.
Speaker 1: My fact is that in nineteen thirty nine, the young
Speaker 1: doctor at Boston City Hospital went on a scurvy producing
Speaker 1: diet to see what would happen. In May nineteen forty,
Speaker 1: his fellow doctors staged an intervention after his skin started
Speaker 1: to bleed from his follicles and an old post operative
Speaker 1: scar reopened. Now, lovely, why because they people sort of
Speaker 1: knew what happened when you got scurvy at that point, right,
Speaker 1: Why was he doing this? They did? So he survived,
Speaker 1: by the way, So I read the medical paper that
Speaker 1: he and a colleague wrote after this experiment. So the
Speaker 1: puzzle was, I mean, people have been suffering from scurvy
Speaker 1: and worrying about scurvy for hundreds of years and kind
Speaker 1: of discovering cures and then forgetting cures. It's all very fascinating.
Speaker 1: But by the nineteen thirties they'd figured out that scurvy's
Speaker 1: caused by not having enough vitamin C but the puzzle was,
Speaker 1: if you deprive people of vitamin C, it very quickly
Speaker 1: leaves the body. So after a week or so, you've
Speaker 1: got no vitamin C. But then everything's fine and people
Speaker 1: don't actually develop any symptoms for weeks, for even months.
Speaker 1: And so this guy, his name was John Crandon, and
Speaker 1: his colleagues were just trying to figure out, well, how
Speaker 1: long can you go and what happens and what order
Speaker 1: do these terrible symptoms appear in? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: no one else is going to do it, so I'm
Speaker 1: going to do it. And so he did, and yeah,
Speaker 1: he was absolutely fine for two or three months. And
Speaker 1: then I read the description of what happened he started
Speaker 1: October nineteenth, nineteen thirty nine. His scurvy producing diet was, actually,
Speaker 1: it sounds okay. It's eggs, cheese, bread, butter, chocolate, and coffee.
Speaker 1: Gets a bit boring after a little, and it's fine
Speaker 1: for a while. Genuinely, that is my diet. Red wine
Speaker 1: in there, and then that's basically after we finished this,
Speaker 1: you're really going to start on wanting some orange juice
Speaker 1: to add to that, James, I think so, he says.
Speaker 1: He says, after about four and a half months, hyperkrototic
Speaker 1: pat pules had developed on the buttocks. Now that doesn't
Speaker 1: sound good at all. I was going to google hyperkerrototic
Speaker 1: buttock pat pules, and then I decided I wasn't going
Speaker 1: to do that. Don't worry. I've been eating nothing but
Speaker 1: chocolate and bread for the last six months. I could
Speaker 1: tell you exactly what they are. Oh please, don't the listener, James.
Speaker 1: It's just taken his trousers and it is disgusting. It's
Speaker 1: really I'm not going to be able to take that
Speaker 1: image out of my mind now. And then after five
Speaker 1: months he started, Yeah, I just started bleeding around the
Speaker 1: hair follicles on his legs. He got incredibly tired. He did.
Speaker 1: He used to run on a treadmill, and by the
Speaker 1: end of this he could do fifty meters on a treadmill.
Speaker 1: It took him sixteen seconds to do fifty meters, which
Speaker 1: is not very fast. And then he that was that
Speaker 1: was too much. He was quite a young man. And
Speaker 1: at six months they made a surgical incision, basically just
Speaker 1: to see whether it would heal, and it didn't. And
Speaker 1: I think they probably shouldn't have been surprised at that
Speaker 1: because he had a scar from a fifteen year old
Speaker 1: appendex toomy that was reopening by this point, and then
Speaker 1: they said, all right, you've done enough, you've done enough,
Speaker 1: and they started giving him intravenous vitamin C and he
Speaker 1: and he was fine. That's that's so scientific to say, well,
Speaker 1: your scar has your old scar has reopened, but just
Speaker 1: in case, we're going to have to make a the
Speaker 1: scar and see if that also fails. To hear, like,
Speaker 1: that's that's so impressive the scientific method, I think, is it?
Speaker 1: I think so? I find that one of the most
Speaker 1: kind of morbid things about scurvy is the whole wound's reopening.
Speaker 1: It takes you back in time, but in just a
Speaker 1: way that you really don't want to go back in time.
Speaker 1: The idea that these ancient and bone breaks rebreak, don't
Speaker 1: they because I think you start making collagen, which basically
Speaker 1: holds your body together, And so I don't know the
Speaker 1: idea of all these ancient wounds you'd completely forgotten about reopening.
Speaker 1: It's pretty all your exes ring up and break up
Speaker 1: with you all over again. Unknown symptom. It's really it's
Speaker 1: really mad that it's two or three months that you're fine.
Speaker 1: For because I guess that explains why in the age
Speaker 1: of sail sailors got scurvy, because it was just long
Speaker 1: enough to get really, really really far away from the
Speaker 1: nearest lemon. As then if you've got it, then if
Speaker 1: you've got it within a day of not having any
Speaker 1: vitamin C, then everyone would immediately come back to port
Speaker 1: and say, what, we die at sea, so we're not
Speaker 1: going to go. It's quite cool. It's almost like a
Speaker 1: lemon detector, isn't It tell how far away you are
Speaker 1: from a lemon just by how much blood is coming
Speaker 1: out of your pause. You can only tell to within
Speaker 1: three months away. I mean, it's not accurate. There are
Speaker 1: easier ways to detect lemons, and actually it's are there.
Speaker 1: It's difficult that this is. I mean, the reason I
Speaker 1: got interested in this is because I discovered that Scott
Speaker 1: of the Antarctic suffered from scurvy. It's controversial as to
Speaker 1: whether his final mission was affected by scurvy, but certainly
Speaker 1: earlier missions were, and some of the people he went
Speaker 1: to tried to get to the South Pole with were
Speaker 1: affected by scurvy. And I thought, hang on a minute,
Speaker 1: he's a British Navy captain and didn't the British Navy
Speaker 1: figure all this out? In seventeen forty seven, James Lynde
Speaker 1: famously did this the first ever randomized controlled trial, people say,
Speaker 1: and discovered that you could prevent scurvy with lemons. And
Speaker 1: then and then they started calling British sailors lime is
Speaker 1: because they used to have lime juice. And so what happened?
Speaker 1: How cold? How could the British Navy forget this? And
Speaker 1: it is partly because it's not a very good lemon detector.
Speaker 1: It turns out there's vitamin C in almost everything. You
Speaker 1: have to work quite hard when James is doing this one,
Speaker 1: you have to work quite hard to completely deprive yourself
Speaker 1: for vitamin C. So people get confused. Basically, the signals
Speaker 1: get very mixed. And what Andy was saying about these
Speaker 1: sea voyages. Another reason that the British Navy started getting
Speaker 1: confused is because they switched to steamships and so they
Speaker 1: were still taking a remedy for scurvy that turns out
Speaker 1: wasn't working. But because they were all on steamships, steamships
Speaker 1: travel quite quickly, they have to refuel. Every time you refuel,
Speaker 1: you take on fresh food and so they were they
Speaker 1: were sticking to this cure for scurvy they thought was working.
Speaker 1: It wasn't working. It didn't matter because there wasn't time
Speaker 1: for anybody to develop scurvy. And then suddenly these Arctic
Speaker 1: and Antarctic explorers all started coming down with scurvy and
Speaker 1: everybody got monumentally confused to that. So the lemons and
Speaker 1: limes don't really work that well. Is that what we're saying? Well,
Speaker 1: there's two things. One is that limes, although they're more acidic,
Speaker 1: have less vitamin C in so they still work. They
Speaker 1: used to be using Sicilian lemons and they're really juicy
Speaker 1: and got loads of vitamin C. And then they switched
Speaker 1: for geopolitical reasons to West Indian lines, and that though
Speaker 1: they're less effective. But the other thing is vitamin C.
Speaker 1: It's destroyed really easily. It's destroyed by contact with copper,
Speaker 1: and a lot of these ships had copper vessels. It's
Speaker 1: destroyed by contact with sunlight, it's destroyed by heat. And
Speaker 1: so you had this sort of old lime juice that
Speaker 1: was going a bit rancid. There wasn't any vitamin C
Speaker 1: in it anymore, but people were still taking it, and
Speaker 1: so then when they started taking lime juice on expeditions
Speaker 1: and it didn't work, they lost faith and they started there.
Speaker 1: And at the same time, there's germ theory being developed,
Speaker 1: and they started going, oh, maybe scurvy's nothing to do
Speaker 1: with lemons and limes at all. Maybe it's to do
Speaker 1: with some kind of germ that we can't see, which,
Speaker 1: of course was completely up the wrong tree. It's just
Speaker 1: crazy when you read about the history of scurvy, how
Speaker 1: early on they suggested that citrus was a cure, and
Speaker 1: how many hundreds of years they skirt around it and
Speaker 1: skirts around it and sort of just like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it is, and then go, actually, maybe not. It's
Speaker 1: so frustrating because it's so easy to sort out once
Speaker 1: you definitely know. But I found you know, it's really quick.
Speaker 1: You know, Scott one of the people on his expeditions
Speaker 1: who got scurvy was Shackleton, which I didn't know that
Speaker 1: they did an expedition together, but yeah, and there was
Speaker 1: a bit of bad blood. They didn't like each other.
Speaker 1: That's quite a rivalry. Indeed, there seems to be a
Speaker 1: bit of a conspiracy theory that maybe Shackleton wasn't that
Speaker 1: ill and Scott sort of kicked him off the expedition
Speaker 1: because he wasn't really getting along with him. Shackleton was
Speaker 1: like the fun spontaneous one, wasn't he, And Scott was
Speaker 1: a bit more the serious bore. Scott said, Oh, you're
Speaker 1: definitely you're far too well. You've definitely got scurvy, and
Speaker 1: Shackton was like, well, I haven't even got any hyper
Speaker 1: kin ethic pat pulls. The point where Shackleton pulled down
Speaker 1: his parents to display button. That's when he got chucked
Speaker 1: off the expedition. Guinea pigs get scurvy, Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: if I eat guinea pig then I would not get
Speaker 1: any vitamincy. I think if you eat a healthy guinea pig,
Speaker 1: you'll be fine, because I know James that as well
Speaker 1: as the diet you pig you eat. But you occasionally
Speaker 1: have guinea pig mints on your bread and with your
Speaker 1: coffee because they they can't make their own vitamincy and
Speaker 1: that's we can't do that either, and we're all there's
Speaker 1: this weird club of crap animals, including humans, which can't
Speaker 1: make their own vitamincy. So it's fruit bats, guinea pigs,
Speaker 1: some of the apes, and humans. Are the ones that
Speaker 1: can't do it. Every other animal doesn't get scurvy because
Speaker 1: they can just generate vitamin C I guess from internally
Speaker 1: somehow they're generating. Yeah, Like, well, like we generate, you know,
Speaker 1: we basically what a vitamin is is the things that
Speaker 1: we need from our diet because we can't generate them,
Speaker 1: and everything else we can generate, and I suppose these
Speaker 1: animals can. But maybe we should form that club with
Speaker 1: those guys, like a really sad rejects club, Like what
Speaker 1: are those pig? What's that club called of men who've
Speaker 1: decided that they've abandoned women in cells? It could be
Speaker 1: the new in cells, Yeah, asked fruit bat's guinea pigs.
Speaker 1: I'm just a bit worried the guinea pigs won't let
Speaker 1: me in because I've just admitted that I won't say
Speaker 1: it's some guinea pig. It turned out to be really important.
Speaker 1: So people were being confused, as Anna says, just getting
Speaker 1: confused about scurvy and what causes it and how to
Speaker 1: cure it for centuries, and they keep sort of figuring
Speaker 1: it out and then not figuring it out and getting
Speaker 1: confused and forgetting and then finally in nineteen oh seven,
Speaker 1: these two Norwegian scientists, Holston Frelich figure out that guinea
Speaker 1: pigs also get scurvy, which is this absolute breakthrough moment.
Speaker 1: And then how you can do how can you tell
Speaker 1: that a guinea pig how scurvy is it? Because it
Speaker 1: can only run for fifty meters on its little bob,
Speaker 1: that must be it that in the papules. I think
Speaker 1: it's those two things. Once they figured that out, it
Speaker 1: was it was easy to clear up this massive confusion
Speaker 1: about whether scurvy was caused by some kind of toxin
Speaker 1: or some kind of bacteria, or whether it was a
Speaker 1: deficiency and figured it all out. And then they turned
Speaker 1: around and they told ritchof Nansen is a great Norwegian
Speaker 1: polar explorer and a mentor to both Robert Scott and
Speaker 1: Roald Amamson. And Nansen said, yeah, no, I don't believe
Speaker 1: any of that. You can't learn anyth from guinea pigs.
Speaker 1: Trust me, it's fresh seal meat you need. And so
Speaker 1: he basically told them to bagger off, and both Amuson
Speaker 1: and Scott then went to the Antarctica year later, and
Speaker 1: Scott's whole crew probably got scurvy. If there was ever
Speaker 1: a lesson to listen to the scientist people. It's really
Speaker 1: is the history of scurvy. It's wild how much people
Speaker 1: ignored them. So the reason that this is all puzzling
Speaker 1: is because the story that randomized controlled trials nerds tell
Speaker 1: is that in seventeen forty seven, this guy, James lind
Speaker 1: who was a surgeon on the HMS Salisbury, figured it
Speaker 1: all out. That's the story they tell, and he did
Speaker 1: sort of run a controlled trial. He gave two they
Speaker 1: had a whole bunch of sailors who had scurvy. He
Speaker 1: gave two of them a quarter of cider a day.
Speaker 1: Sounds quite nice, but it's not going to work. He
Speaker 1: gave two of them seventy five drops a day of
Speaker 1: sulfuric acid. He gave two of them vinegar, gave two
Speaker 1: of them a paste of garlic, mustard, horsefadish, and aromatic
Speaker 1: plant extracts, which sounds like it might be nice, but
Speaker 1: none of that worked. But he gave the last two
Speaker 1: two oranges and a lemon each day for six days,
Speaker 1: and at that point they made a complete recovery. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: that was the ship's entire stock of lemons, so it
Speaker 1: was unfortunate for everybody else. But the weird thing is
Speaker 1: that even James Lynde, I mean, you would have thought, okay, brilliant,
Speaker 1: you ran around him by trial, you figured it all
Speaker 1: out perfect. But then he published this book all about
Speaker 1: how to cure scurvy which had this right up of
Speaker 1: this trial, but had loads of other stuff about oh
Speaker 1: like maybe it's excess sweating, or maybe it's to do
Speaker 1: with ventilation or this or that's the whole Who can say,
Speaker 1: I mean, it was bizarre what the conclusion he came to.
Speaker 1: And in the end he said, anyway, my cure for
Speaker 1: scurvy is lemon juice that's been boiled into a syrup
Speaker 1: preserved under olive oil. And it turns out that doesn't
Speaker 1: work because if you boil lemon juices into a sup,
Speaker 1: you destroyed all of it. Him in c so he
Speaker 1: runs this randomized trial. He doesn't understand what he's done,
Speaker 1: and then the conclusion he draws is this completely ineffective remedy.
Speaker 1: And there you go that Science seventeen just can't believe
Speaker 1: one of the groups was given sulfuric acid, which feels like,
Speaker 1: you know, you could literally give the other group American
Speaker 1: cheese and white bread, and they're going to do better
Speaker 1: than the group you gave sulfuric acid to s yes
Speaker 1: throatless Jimmy we call him. I really like the old
Speaker 1: theory about how to cure scurvy, which was to bury
Speaker 1: yourself in soil, and that was such a good idea.
Speaker 1: It's such a you know, it really does make sense
Speaker 1: because you were getting scurvy when you were away from Earth,
Speaker 1: right you were on the water. You have thousands of
Speaker 1: miles from a lemon, You're gonna get sick, and so
Speaker 1: what was obviously the thing that you were missing. You
Speaker 1: were missing dry land. And so they used to just
Speaker 1: bury people up to the neck in soil and that
Speaker 1: this would make them better. So funny, it's such a
Speaker 1: good idea. And what they would do is they would
Speaker 1: take boxes of earth with them on the voyages and
Speaker 1: if someone got sick, they would bury them on the
Speaker 1: ship in the earth. There was one captain called Thomas
Speaker 1: Melville who found that it actually worked and it made
Speaker 1: people feel better. But he was feeding people vegetables while
Speaker 1: they were in the earth all the time. Probably the
Speaker 1: earth thing, though, it's so good because it means you
Speaker 1: can also as well as getting vegetables. You can disguise
Speaker 1: your ship as a small island, and so you can
Speaker 1: sneak up on other ships undetected because they just see
Speaker 1: a load of well they see a load of soil,
Speaker 1: don't they. You know? Yeah, clever, get a donkey a
Speaker 1: little windmill. Yes, I'm just thinking my idea of like,
Speaker 1: my idea of desert islands is more like palm trees
Speaker 1: and habbits, not donkeys and windmills. And that famous cartoon
Speaker 1: trope of someone on a desert island. How can you
Speaker 1: tell them on a desert there's a donkey and a windmill. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a classic. Stop the podcast, Gosh, I've always wanted
Speaker 1: to say that this is a special episode of No
Speaker 1: such Thing as a Fish featuring me Tim Harford as
Speaker 1: a special guest, presented by Cautionary Tales. On with the podcast. Okay,
Speaker 1: it is time for fact number two and that is James. Okay.
Speaker 1: My fact this week is that there are more people
Speaker 1: alive today who have been World chess champion than there
Speaker 1: are people skillful enough to carve a night for use
Speaker 1: in a World Championship chess match. How what are the numbers?
Speaker 1: We talk? Incredible? Well, the numbers are ten who can
Speaker 1: do the night. This is according to a video which
Speaker 1: I saw, which was posted by Business Insider called why
Speaker 1: Championship chess sets are so expensive. As part of that,
Speaker 1: they said, there are only ten people alive who can
Speaker 1: make the little horses that you use in chess, And
Speaker 1: so I thought, I wonder how that compares with people
Speaker 1: who have won the world championship. And I went onto
Speaker 1: the onto Wikipedia and looked at the list of the
Speaker 1: people who are still alive, and there's more than ten.
Speaker 1: As it doesn't I think, how good do these things
Speaker 1: have to be? I mean, because I would have thought
Speaker 1: it's quite easy to carve a night. Most professional whittlers
Speaker 1: I know, which is a lot, could probably do a
Speaker 1: passable chess night. What's so special about these ones? Well,
Speaker 1: you take all of the whittlers, some of them can
Speaker 1: do it, some of them can't, and you go down
Speaker 1: and down and down, and eventually you get the ten. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you got it. No, they're made. These nights are made
Speaker 1: in a place called Amritsar, which is in India. Very
Speaker 1: specific factory makes them. They only make two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty per year one night. To kind of whittle it
Speaker 1: down takes two hours, and it takes five to six
Speaker 1: years to learn how to make this night. All the
Speaker 1: other pieces take about four to five months to make,
Speaker 1: and so if you were to buy a very very
Speaker 1: high end chest set, the nights are worth approximately fifty
Speaker 1: percent of the entire set. The value comes from just
Speaker 1: the nights. That's what this so funny. It's about. It's
Speaker 1: about five hundred dollars for one of these sets. They sound.
Speaker 1: I think I've read the same piece, James. It says
Speaker 1: this that the blocks of wood that they use for
Speaker 1: the pieces were once large trunks, drive for three to
Speaker 1: six months, cut down in shape to the necessary size,
Speaker 1: which does make it sound like the using one large
Speaker 1: tree trunk, Yeah, knocked down a giant red words for one.
Speaker 1: They are really beautiful to watch them being carved on
Speaker 1: the lathe, and it's a little bit like watching pottery.
Speaker 1: It's that kind of beautiful, sort of hypnotic view of
Speaker 1: this thing taking shape. But I have to say, it's
Speaker 1: all nonsense, isn't it? Because this I saw this this
Speaker 1: short film and at one point they say, oh, yeah,
Speaker 1: it helps these grand masters to not make any mistakes.
Speaker 1: That's just nonsense. Grandmasters, they can play blindfold. You literally
Speaker 1: don't actually need the chessboard or the chess pieces. They
Speaker 1: can play blindfold. What is this? I don't know why
Speaker 1: you're the video. I've I've drunk the kool aid, and
Speaker 1: I believe this. It's They say that because if you
Speaker 1: don't make the chess pieces properly, and the king isn't
Speaker 1: the tallest piece, then you might accidentally move one of
Speaker 1: the other palms, maybe thinking it's the king. If they're
Speaker 1: not waiting correctly, they might fall over and you accidentally
Speaker 1: kind of resign. You're okay, okay, but no, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's true. No. The thing about chess players is that
Speaker 1: they're very stupid people. And James, I that falling over thing.
Speaker 1: I've read that too, is that if you accidentally knock
Speaker 1: your piece over and then you press you know, because
Speaker 1: they're playing timed against each other in some matches, So
Speaker 1: you you knock a piece over and then you press
Speaker 1: the timer to move it on to your opponent's turn,
Speaker 1: and then you pick your piece back up, you can
Speaker 1: be disqualified from the whole match because you're technically eating
Speaker 1: into your opponent's time there, and that has happened recently.
Speaker 1: There was a game in twenty sixteen wherein Grandmaster very
Speaker 1: good chess player at loss because he dropped his queen
Speaker 1: and then did that really, and we're claiming that these
Speaker 1: ten people who can make the nights are the only
Speaker 1: people who can make a night that can successfully stand up.
Speaker 1: If you can't, if you can't feel the bridle on
Speaker 1: the night is positioned correctly, it'll completely throw off your game.
Speaker 1: That's why Kasparov lost against Deep Blue. A slight discrepancy
Speaker 1: in the rains. I want to see the chess grandmaster's
Speaker 1: rant when he likes sort of a tennis player with
Speaker 1: a broken racket, when he seizes a night waving at
Speaker 1: the umpire, what the hell is this shit? I would
Speaker 1: love to see these artisans, these craftspeople from Amritsar. I
Speaker 1: would love to see them wrestle with a classic Prussian
Speaker 1: war game chess crossovers, because there are some amazing kind
Speaker 1: of chess mutations from a hundred years ago that I
Speaker 1: think would pose a real challenge. So any of you
Speaker 1: have heard of a Grosser's Connichpiel, which is a sixteen
Speaker 1: sixty four chess variant, Well, I mean you can play
Speaker 1: with a number of players. There's a six player variant,
Speaker 1: the board looks a bit like a snowflake. But the
Speaker 1: eight player variant, I think would give any that's very
Speaker 1: sensitive in that game, Yeah, no one wins, it's just
Speaker 1: a tie at the end, regardless. So the eight player
Speaker 1: variant has two hundred and forty pieces. It has pieces
Speaker 1: including the King, the Marshal, the colonel, the Captain, the Chancellor,
Speaker 1: the Herald, the Chaplain, the night, the Courier, the agitant, bodyguards, halbardiers,
Speaker 1: and there are private soldiers and two hundred and forty
Speaker 1: pieces in total. But that is nothing. The Duke of
Speaker 1: Rutland's chess variant has the Concubine, which is a rook
Speaker 1: night mix, and even that pales into insignificance compared to
Speaker 1: the game that was developed. Like Johan Christian Ludwig Helvig,
Speaker 1: he was alive and the late seven teen hundreds early
Speaker 1: eighteen hundreds, he was a successful academic. He taught matts
Speaker 1: to Gauss, the most brilliant mathematician of all time. Actually,
Speaker 1: in fairness he sort of said to Gaus, to be honest,
Speaker 1: you don't need to bother turning up to the lectures,
Speaker 1: because he seemed to have it all sorted and he collected.
Speaker 1: He collected so many insects it formed the heart of
Speaker 1: the University of Berlin's Museum of Entomology. And his chess variant,
Speaker 1: which is called Creekspiel, which means wargame. It includes the
Speaker 1: elephant which is a rook knight combo, the jumping Bishop
Speaker 1: which is the bishop knight, the jumping queen not to
Speaker 1: be confused with the dancing Queen of Aberfay. That's a
Speaker 1: night queen. It contains forty pawns, four rooks, four bishops,
Speaker 1: thirty knights work on that one enamor. It's a six queens,
Speaker 1: five jumping queens, eight jumping bishops and seven elephants and
Speaker 1: the boarders up to two thousand squares. So does that
Speaker 1: partridge in the per tree make that's the hardest to carve, actually,
Speaker 1: the partridge that is absolutely amazing to you think he
Speaker 1: invented this amazingly complicated chess game because his main job
Speaker 1: was teaching girls how to do maths, and he's like,
Speaker 1: I have so much spare time now I might as
Speaker 1: well collect every single insect in the world. And I
Speaker 1: mean the plas take forever a game. I think it
Speaker 1: does I mean, I suppose it's before TV, wasn't it.
Speaker 1: But he feels like there's no need to make chess
Speaker 1: more complicated. It's already quite challenging for most people. So
Speaker 1: there was this movement to make chess more like actual
Speaker 1: war because chess is quite stylized. Really, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: you're not going to learn that much about military tactics
Speaker 1: from playing chess. So in I mean, this is a
Speaker 1: Prussian thing. They're trying to teach their their young officers
Speaker 1: how to make decisions on the battlefield. And so there's
Speaker 1: this tendency towards more and more complex versions of chess,
Speaker 1: and in the end they kind of went to these
Speaker 1: war games or role playing games. But you've got different pieces,
Speaker 1: you've got you've got different terrains, and they're trying to
Speaker 1: train people how to make military decisions. It's good, it's
Speaker 1: really I think it's really good. Beca. I do think that,
Speaker 1: you know, war game exercises are like they are good
Speaker 1: up to a point, but there are never enough concubines.
Speaker 1: It just it's not realistic without the concubines or elephants.
Speaker 1: It's the elephants and concubines that really make a war. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I thought Chancellor was a weird one as well. What
Speaker 1: does he yea like? He just does some photo option
Speaker 1: then takes twenty percent of all your money. Well, the
Speaker 1: thing is about chess didn't used to be military at all,
Speaker 1: so and I don't think it should be. It used
Speaker 1: to be sexy. This it was, this was back and
Speaker 1: actually the person who ruined it and turned it into
Speaker 1: a military game initially was the queen. Sadly, so we've
Speaker 1: talked before about how the queen was introduced at various
Speaker 1: moments in history in various different countries from about like
Speaker 1: fourteen hundred thirteen hundred onwards. But instead of a queen
Speaker 1: before that, you had the vizier as in the royal
Speaker 1: as in Jafar, and the vizier couldn't move as broadly
Speaker 1: and widely as the queen, more limited, and it made
Speaker 1: chess a much slower game. And so I was reading
Speaker 1: that back in medieval times it was completely gender equal game.
Speaker 1: Women and men played an equal amount, and it was
Speaker 1: more a thing you'd have and play throughout a day
Speaker 1: at or at a soiree of a drinks and chats,
Speaker 1: and it became really associated with romance and sex, and
Speaker 1: because there were lots of stories of people falling in
Speaker 1: love over a game of chess, you know, opponents would
Speaker 1: fall in love. In fourteen hundred there was a famous
Speaker 1: book at the time called The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess,
Speaker 1: which sort of talked about is that why we call
Speaker 1: it pawn Yeah, it's correct. That's why they're all naked
Speaker 1: if you look closely at the pawns. But yeah, then
Speaker 1: the queen came on board and it became very martial
Speaker 1: and competitive and serious, and it was thought to be
Speaker 1: unsuitable for women. Do you know the rules? The ten
Speaker 1: rules of whittling? Have you memorized those? Everyone? I've only
Speaker 1: got the first four? Sorry, oh, you know it's just
Speaker 1: about a pass. This is according to Master of a
Speaker 1: Chris Loupkerman, who actually has the Guinness World Record for
Speaker 1: what he describes as the smallest rooster in the world.
Speaker 1: That one what's another word for rooster? Think of um?
Speaker 1: Because I'm pretty sure I have that record. I wonder
Speaker 1: why I had to be over eighteen to access that video.
Speaker 1: It's it's not the smallest rooster, it's not even a thing.
Speaker 1: It's the smallest wooden carved thing in the world. According
Speaker 1: to Guinness, it's a tiny little rooster, an eighth of
Speaker 1: an inch tool. Anyway, he's an amazing whittler. His ten
Speaker 1: rules is Rule number one is actually make sure your
Speaker 1: knife is sharp. Rule number two and he guesses, don't
Speaker 1: run with scissors. You're you're actually close. Your knife must
Speaker 1: be really sharp. It's rule number two. What a fight club?
Speaker 1: Could I just check out the other eight rules also
Speaker 1: to do with sharp knives. I'm so I'm so glad
Speaker 1: that you've saved me. How to read all of the
Speaker 1: other rules. They're all different ways of saying before starting
Speaker 1: to carve, checks if your knife is sharp, If your
Speaker 1: knife is really sharp, cut much better. Rule number ten
Speaker 1: is refer back to rules one to nine, which are
Speaker 1: indeed different ways of saying, have a sharp knife. Very good.
Speaker 1: So whittlers out there take note. Modern board games often
Speaker 1: have these little carved wooden pieces. They're quite simple. They
Speaker 1: look a little bit like if you carved the sign
Speaker 1: for the gents toilets the little man. If you carved
Speaker 1: those into wood and painted them different colors, that's what
Speaker 1: they look like. Does anybody know what they're called? There
Speaker 1: was there is a there is a term of art
Speaker 1: for these things, wait for what for modern chess pieces,
Speaker 1: modern board game pieces, not chess pieces, just board games
Speaker 1: and gals. They'll I didn't even know what they were,
Speaker 1: but no, gone, they're called me pals, which is which
Speaker 1: is a sort of shortening of my people and so
Speaker 1: so meeples is a board game thing, and they're you know,
Speaker 1: they're cafes based on me pals and meeples clubs and
Speaker 1: so on. But they're like tiny, tiny cafes that meeople attend. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this one. I'm speaking to you from Oxford, and there's
Speaker 1: there's a cafe about two minutes walk away from me
Speaker 1: called Thirsty me Pals. You can go, you can have
Speaker 1: your hot chocolate or a cup of coffee, and you
Speaker 1: can play board games surrounded by by me pals. But
Speaker 1: I reckon this whole, this whole kind of chess piece
Speaker 1: carving thing. It's basically a conspiracy by Big me Pal
Speaker 1: because there is wait, hang on, Big me pals are
Speaker 1: just people, aren't they. You could be right, You're absolutely right,
Speaker 1: you've caught me there. Anyway, it's a conspiracy. I'll figure
Speaker 1: out who's behind it sooner or later, because there's a
Speaker 1: problem with a lot of games that if you're trying
Speaker 1: to make money selling the game, the game is actually
Speaker 1: quite cheap. And you know, we buy a game like chess,
Speaker 1: it just cost a few pounds and then you could
Speaker 1: just play forever. So how do you make money? And
Speaker 1: so there's this increased focus on getting very very fancy pieces,
Speaker 1: very expensive pieces. So these guys in amorates are this
Speaker 1: is an example of this, But I think the most
Speaker 1: striking example is at games Workshop. So games Workshop is
Speaker 1: this company I remember from the nineteen eighties when I
Speaker 1: was a young nerd used to sell dungeons and dragons
Speaker 1: and used to sell all kinds of games, and then
Speaker 1: they basically got taken over by a division of the
Speaker 1: inside the company called Citadel Miniatures, which just made toy
Speaker 1: soldiers and toy and miniature figures. And these miniature figures
Speaker 1: were so profitable that during Lockdown, Games Workshop had a
Speaker 1: higher profit margin than Google. And Henry Cavalley, actor who
Speaker 1: plays Superman, described these little miniature figures as plastic crack,
Speaker 1: so that them all the money is in the pieces,
Speaker 1: the money is not in the games. That's true. I
Speaker 1: mean I used to collect those pieces and there were
Speaker 1: some which was simply unaffordable for me with my fourteen
Speaker 1: year olds budget. Really I used to have. I used
Speaker 1: to collect them a little bit, not much, but I
Speaker 1: was always really scared that I was going to die
Speaker 1: of lead poisoning because there was lead in them. And
Speaker 1: I don't know if someone had once told me that
Speaker 1: you could die of lead poisoning, and these pieces had
Speaker 1: lead in them, and I was just I was convinced
Speaker 1: that I was going to die. You're eating them, no,
Speaker 1: but I was like, because I was painting them and stuff,
Speaker 1: and I didn't want to lick my fingers and yeah,
Speaker 1: and you're closing and you're huffing away, you know, huffing
Speaker 1: away over paints used to be water baked will the
Speaker 1: paint still are water based, so you could you'd sort
Speaker 1: of paint and then you would kind of lick your
Speaker 1: paintbrush to get a fine point on the paintbrush. And
Speaker 1: the paint is non toxic, but the but you're painting
Speaker 1: these lead figures, so they probably were very dangerous. But anyway,
Speaker 1: they're all they're all made of plastic crack. Now, as
Speaker 1: as as Henry Cavill puts it, a bunch of crackheads,
Speaker 1: it's the least cool kind of being a crackhead's being
Speaker 1: a crackhead isn't cool, I want to emphasize, but this
Speaker 1: is even less cool. It's so annoying when people tell
Speaker 1: you that, so like, just like you were saying, James
Speaker 1: with the lead and the painted the danger thing. I
Speaker 1: always remember my friend Christopher when I was about I
Speaker 1: don't know, eighteen, telling me that if I kept drawing
Speaker 1: on my hand, I'd die, yeah, because the ink would
Speaker 1: get into my bloodstream somehow. And I just wanted to
Speaker 1: say a big old fuck you to Christopher writing notes
Speaker 1: on my hand Since then, and I'm as fit as
Speaker 1: a fiddel. I don't know. I think that explains something conceal.
Speaker 1: It could be a John Cranden thing. It could be
Speaker 1: just a matter of time. You're fine, you're fine, you're fine,
Speaker 1: and then suddenly here's one thing on people who carved
Speaker 1: wood for a living. You've got you guys. I'm sure
Speaker 1: have heard of grindling gibbons. Oh yeah, yeah, it hasn't
Speaker 1: just for anyone who's it's a horrible thing you do
Speaker 1: to great apes. Actually an outlawed in most places. It's
Speaker 1: such a weird name. You're right, I think he was
Speaker 1: Dutch basically the most famous wood carver in history. And
Speaker 1: I know that he's quite an obscure figure now, but
Speaker 1: in the late seventeenth thirty eighteenth centuries he was catnip.
Speaker 1: He's all over the UK because he worked in England mostly.
Speaker 1: There are these incredible wood carvings. I've seen some of
Speaker 1: them and they're amazing, as in he could he could
Speaker 1: do the fuzz on a peach, but carved in wood.
Speaker 1: You know. Wow. Really he's called the Michelangelo would by
Speaker 1: some people by some people, and yeah, whysmum he lives
Speaker 1: with anyway one of his crowning. It was really fair.
Speaker 1: He was extremely famous. I mean it's not fair. Why
Speaker 1: why Why would somebody who whittles be regarded as less
Speaker 1: admirable than someone like Michael Angelo who works in stone.
Speaker 1: It doesn't make exactly exactly get this. Could Michael Angelo
Speaker 1: do this? I bet he couldn't. In sixteen ninety he
Speaker 1: made a wooden cravat. I have a wooden bow tie.
Speaker 1: It's completely different. Bow tie is designed to be stiff.
Speaker 1: You can any chump can make a bow tie out
Speaker 1: of wood. Two cross bits of wood. Now let to
Speaker 1: get fine the cravat the most flowing of all. I
Speaker 1: quite likely. I quite like how you just accepted that
Speaker 1: I have a wooden boat. Yeah, oh yeah, sorry, that's
Speaker 1: a that's a much better point. I just went to
Speaker 1: the place in Portugal where all the cork trees are
Speaker 1: and they sell a lot of merch and one of
Speaker 1: them is a bow tie, and I thought it'd be
Speaker 1: really cool, but I've never found the outfit to go
Speaker 1: with it at its so weird. You need the full
Speaker 1: wooden suits. Really well, James, if you tell you what
Speaker 1: if you if you stand next to a donkey and
Speaker 1: you put on your wooden bow tie and you make
Speaker 1: it rotate, Anna will think you're a desert island. Okay,
Speaker 1: it is time for fact number three, and that is
Speaker 1: my fact. My fact this week is that in Ecuador,
Speaker 1: cleaners are people who rub you down with stinging nettles
Speaker 1: and it's not us. People pay for this service. Yeah people.
Speaker 1: I think people pay, maybe even more than cleaners in
Speaker 1: the UK, which even more than cleaners in the UK,
Speaker 1: the highest paid bracket in the country. It's not possibladder,
Speaker 1: it's a travesty and he'll spinoff podcast. Are cleaners paid too? Much.
Speaker 1: I wish you're all the best. But these are olympiadores
Speaker 1: in Ecuador and they are spiritual cleaners. But olympiadoras just
Speaker 1: means a cleaner, like is just the word for a cleaner.
Speaker 1: But these are people who sort of cleanse your aura.
Speaker 1: And it's a deep rooted tradition in traditional culture. Is
Speaker 1: particularly up in the mountains. A lot of people have
Speaker 1: this service, and it's you're rubbed up and down with
Speaker 1: stingy nettles and it removes all your bad energy and
Speaker 1: bad luck and it hurts quite a lot, and that
Speaker 1: just shows that it's working apparently. Is it like cleaners
Speaker 1: in the UK where they come around they sort of
Speaker 1: do an initial sight visit of your aura and they say, well,
Speaker 1: this aura probably is going to need about a couple
Speaker 1: of hours a week. I'd say maybe two visits actually,
Speaker 1: because it's prone to become disgusting quite fast. Yeah. Is
Speaker 1: it like cleaners in the UK where when they whip
Speaker 1: you with nettles they sometimes miss the carners. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you're too embarrassed to say anything about it because you
Speaker 1: don't you don't want to make a fuss. But so
Speaker 1: I just whip my own cards. Anyone else got any
Speaker 1: complaints about their cleaners? This very first world problems, A
Speaker 1: little interaction we're having now, No, okay, um, So I
Speaker 1: think with these guys, they they're professionals, the best ones.
Speaker 1: They don't miss any spots. And in fact they have
Speaker 1: an extra service where if you're actually ill and you
Speaker 1: go to again Olympia a service, then they have a
Speaker 1: diagnostic tool first where you get rubbed with an egg
Speaker 1: and a dead black guinea pig and that did it?
Speaker 1: Dia scurvy? Yeah? What egg and a dead black kidney pig? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And somehow that diagnoses the problem. Then you sort of
Speaker 1: inspected the egg is weird obviously beginning, So this nettle
Speaker 1: stuff might have could it have helped? Like nettles? Are
Speaker 1: they good for you or not? I don't not not
Speaker 1: in this way. It's just a it's a traditional herbal treatment,
Speaker 1: very popular and it's but it is still used quite widely,
Speaker 1: so even in hospitals in the big cities in Equator.
Speaker 1: Apparently doctors will let these olympiadores work alongside them, and
Speaker 1: you know, so the doctors will give the conventional treatment
Speaker 1: and then we'll accept that the patient will also ask
Speaker 1: for a rub down with the nettles. I think it
Speaker 1: is good. Few, I think a bit little bit. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I read something and a few rub nettles onto an
Speaker 1: arthritic thumb. The nettles will sting you, but you may
Speaker 1: get some relief from the arthritis. There are quite a
Speaker 1: lot of claims. Yeah, is that. I don't know how
Speaker 1: much has been scientifically proven, but that's not to say
Speaker 1: it doesn't work. There was a person who died of
Speaker 1: nettles stings. I've found one. This was a tree nettle
Speaker 1: in New Zealand called Artica ferox. Artica is like the
Speaker 1: family of nettles. And apparently there was a lightly clad
Speaker 1: hunter who died five hours after walking through a dense
Speaker 1: patch of nettles. Oh, you don't really know what happened
Speaker 1: to him. Apart from that, I guess it could be aniplexis.
Speaker 1: You can get that through nettles. But yeah, and apparently
Speaker 1: this nettle in New Zealand. According to Mary folklore, one
Speaker 1: of their kind of God's coupe kind of used them
Speaker 1: to hinder pursuers when he stole their wives. So he
Speaker 1: would steal their wives, he would run away and he
Speaker 1: would throw down nettles so that people couldn't follow him. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm feeling more guilty about something I did at primary school.
Speaker 1: I've actually never confessed this to anybody, but just between
Speaker 1: the four of us. So a friend of mine. I
Speaker 1: got very vague memories of this, but a friend of
Speaker 1: mine and I decided that for some reason we were
Speaker 1: going to set a nettle trap, which I now realized
Speaker 1: could have been fatal. And this nettle trap involved we
Speaker 1: got some nettles and we just put them somewhere on
Speaker 1: the playground where somebody might find them. And then and
Speaker 1: then I think my friend said, oh, they only sting
Speaker 1: you on the edge. I don't know if that's true
Speaker 1: or not. And we thought, but maybe people won't I
Speaker 1: don't know why we thought this is a good idea,
Speaker 1: but maybe people won't pick up the nettles and they
Speaker 1: won't be stung. So we then letter. We wrote a
Speaker 1: little note that said please touch these leaves. And then
Speaker 1: then my friend is like, but they only sting on
Speaker 1: the edge, So then we added please touch these leaves
Speaker 1: on the edge. I don't know if there were any
Speaker 1: fatal but I'm burdened by guilt. What a genius ruse
Speaker 1: master criminals fell for it. Yeah, there's just no trick
Speaker 1: there is there. Really, It's like you're not trying to
Speaker 1: disguise them as anything or anything like that. It's like
Speaker 1: literally straight on the nose. Please injuring yourself with our
Speaker 1: trap hand in mouse trap. I love that. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: I'm sure. In the course of your research, you guys
Speaker 1: came across the world netle eating championships. No oh, it
Speaker 1: sounds really crazy. Well they haven't. They haven't. Endorset, very
Speaker 1: near Breadport, which and we've mentioned before on the podcast
Speaker 1: has the world's only thatched a brewery, so we don't.
Speaker 1: There's no time to rake over that old wound. So
Speaker 1: it's basically it happened to a pub called the Bottle
Speaker 1: In until twenty nineteen, but the pub has been closed
Speaker 1: lots on and off. But it is happening this year.
Speaker 1: It's moving to a farm nearby and the competition because
Speaker 1: of nettle based fatality, shut down by Health and safety
Speaker 1: at this point. Um, so the farm is taking it over,
Speaker 1: taking the reins this year, which is great. The measure
Speaker 1: is by length. That's how you measure whether you're successful
Speaker 1: at eating nettles or not. Is how long in feet
Speaker 1: tidy as a literally how yeah, how many? How many
Speaker 1: feet of now do you can eat? So that and
Speaker 1: so it's the length of stork that is that remains
Speaker 1: after you've stripped all the little nettle leaves off it
Speaker 1: and eating what I do? You work your way down
Speaker 1: like a side of a road and just let us
Speaker 1: many it's I understand it's the stork because I understand
Speaker 1: it was Originally two farmers got into an argument about
Speaker 1: who had the biggest nettles, and it was and they said,
Speaker 1: if you can grow a longer nettle, then I've got
Speaker 1: growing on my farm. I'll eat it. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: I think that the idea is you strip the leaves
Speaker 1: off and then you it's the stork that remains is
Speaker 1: your measure of nettles. I think that argument was about
Speaker 1: more than I think that was about the length of
Speaker 1: the farmers roosters. I mean when I when I encountered this,
Speaker 1: I thought, oh, yeah, competitive netle eating, it's crazy. But
Speaker 1: it's like you know, the competitive chili eating or the
Speaker 1: competitive hot dog eating or song so it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: how many can you eat in one minute? Or how
Speaker 1: many can you eat in three minutes? But it's no
Speaker 1: it's how many can you eat in an hour? You
Speaker 1: spend an hour eating metals and it's too long. It
Speaker 1: doesn't count if you don't keep the nettles down. And
Speaker 1: there was one guy a few years ago who was
Speaker 1: way ahead and at fifty seven minutes he went to
Speaker 1: just threw up in the pub car park and he
Speaker 1: was disqualified. Can your imagine it's the winner, the all
Speaker 1: time record winner. It's called Philip Thorn. Now nettles don't
Speaker 1: have thorns, admittedly, but it's close. His record one hundred
Speaker 1: and four feet, so impressive, which is long. Do you
Speaker 1: know what I find most amazing about that? It's what
Speaker 1: it says about human capacity to improve because about ten
Speaker 1: years before he got the record, which is in twenty eight,
Speaker 1: see the winner of the same competition eight forty eight
Speaker 1: feet of nettles. Now, in just a decade phil Thorne
Speaker 1: has more than doubled that. How a human's got so
Speaker 1: much better a nettle eating in the space for ten years.
Speaker 1: That's like if in ten years time we can do
Speaker 1: the hundred meters in four and a half seconds, isn't
Speaker 1: it get Phil Thorne in the hundred meters of nettles
Speaker 1: at the end at the finish line. You're not allowed
Speaker 1: to cook them. I guess right. You just have to
Speaker 1: eat them. They're raw, freshly picked. Your tongue goes black
Speaker 1: from all the iron and them. It's painful, apparently almost immediately,
Speaker 1: within twenty seconds. It's very painful, and you then only
Speaker 1: got another three thousand, five hundred and eighty seconds to
Speaker 1: get through. So's terrific. I don't know how people do it. Yes,
Speaker 1: and you're not allowed to bring your own nettles. You're
Speaker 1: not allowed to bring any substances that might numb your mouth,
Speaker 1: although I'm sure some people have been tempted to try
Speaker 1: and smear vassline on. I don't know, because I just
Speaker 1: thought of a trick. But then I only thought of
Speaker 1: the trick after you told me the thing you're not
Speaker 1: allowed to do. So that's that's not going to work.
Speaker 1: But I think from memory in Hawaii, I think the
Speaker 1: nettles don't have stings on them. I think you turn
Speaker 1: up wearing your lay with your with your sun hat
Speaker 1: on in your in your tropical shirt, just think smuggling
Speaker 1: some broccoli or something and say, oh no, it's definitely nettles.
Speaker 1: I think that they might have evolved to have no
Speaker 1: sting because they don't have any animals that eat them
Speaker 1: or something really, so they don't need to repel. That's interesting. Well,
Speaker 1: you can do at the nettle Eating Championships is drink.
Speaker 1: You can either drink water or you can drink beer.
Speaker 1: I don't know if it has to be beer salced
Speaker 1: from a thatched brewery or not. It's going to be
Speaker 1: cider now that it's a side of farm cider is allowed.
Speaker 1: Cider is allowed because I think that would help. So
Speaker 1: the one in fact, as we're talking about incredible moments
Speaker 1: in the history of nettle eating, in twenty nineteen, the
Speaker 1: women's winner, Lindy Rogers. I don't know why the competition
Speaker 1: is divided sex. I have no idea, um, but there's
Speaker 1: a men's in a women's championship, the women's when a
Speaker 1: Lindy Rogers had an incredible Fosberry flop moment because she
Speaker 1: dipped her nettles insider inside her, I mean, first of all,
Speaker 1: that's disgusting. Second of all, I feel like it would
Speaker 1: hurt just as much in apple cider. Oh sorry, exactly.
Speaker 1: And so that's that's a method that apparently helps to
Speaker 1: take the take a bit of the take out of it.
Speaker 1: That feels like a loophole. They've got to close that
Speaker 1: one actually was a loophole. You know, it's all it's
Speaker 1: all loopholes. It's all loopholes. Yeah, yeah, wow. So the
Speaker 1: in the war, in the First World War, the Germans
Speaker 1: were encouraged to collect nettles. Um can you guess why? Maybe,
Speaker 1: and ammunition shortage is really biting. We're just going to
Speaker 1: have to thrash the British with our nettle bundles. They're
Speaker 1: planning to steal everybody's wives and then throw the nettles
Speaker 1: down to foil the pursuers. Very good setting a tap
Speaker 1: in the playground taking literally a leaf out of tims
Speaker 1: but touchant here. No, it was to make uniforms. So
Speaker 1: you can take the stalks off nettles and you can
Speaker 1: make like kind of material with it. The month at
Speaker 1: University in Leicester have got a thing called a Sting
Speaker 1: Project and they've been trying to find things that you
Speaker 1: can do with nettles and one of their team, a
Speaker 1: designer called Alex Deer, has invented underwear that's made from nettles.
Speaker 1: They've made a pink camusel top and pants made from nettles,
Speaker 1: and according to Alex Deer, they said, it is quite
Speaker 1: a hairy fiber, so you probably wouldn't want all of
Speaker 1: your underwear made of it. But we are trying to
Speaker 1: make a point of what is possible with this plant. Wow,
Speaker 1: I don't want to dip them inside. I wouldn't or
Speaker 1: have sex with someone who wears dock leaf pants. Maybe
Speaker 1: Old James, Come on, you know that's a myth. Don't
Speaker 1: propagate it for the kids. Submits, and nice Hannah submits,
Speaker 1: and it's good. It takes your mind off the stinging
Speaker 1: agony when looking for a dock leaf. So I maintained
Speaker 1: as a placebo effect. I go to the dock leaf
Speaker 1: eating championships and I got to say my record is
Speaker 1: pretty strong. Have you guys heard of the hornet ordeal?
Speaker 1: This is the el Gayo people in Kenya do this.
Speaker 1: This was an article by a guy called FB Welborne
Speaker 1: who underwent the initiation, who was Kenyon. And what it
Speaker 1: is is that boys are forced to crawl through tunnels
Speaker 1: made of stinging nettles, and then once you get out
Speaker 1: of this tunnel of stinging nettles, then you have the
Speaker 1: nettles rubbed on your genitals and then you have live
Speaker 1: hornets dropped on your back. And the reason that they
Speaker 1: do all this is that the nettles are there to
Speaker 1: prepare you for the hornets. So like the pain is
Speaker 1: to prepare you for the hornet pain, and then the
Speaker 1: hornet pain is there to prepare you for the circumcision
Speaker 1: that comes straight afterwards. Wow. I think the World Nettle
Speaker 1: Eating Championship should should go for this, so in the hornets,
Speaker 1: and then that would explain why there's a separate category
Speaker 1: for men and women. How is the circumcision contest judged?
Speaker 1: Is that by length? How's that working? I haven't worked
Speaker 1: out all the details yet. Wow, that sounds really horrible, James.
Speaker 1: The second, what does the circumcision prepare you for life? Oh?
Speaker 1: Boy gets worse dealing with a bloody counsel. All right,
Speaker 1: it is time for our final fact, and that is
Speaker 1: Andy's fact by fact this week is that the people
Speaker 1: of the remote island of Saint Kilda used to yell
Speaker 1: if they saw themselves in a visiting tourists mirror. They
Speaker 1: actually had plenty of mirrors. They just wanted to keep
Speaker 1: the tourists coming. This is about the remote very remote
Speaker 1: island of Saint Kilda, and it features in a new
Speaker 1: book called shadow Lands by Matthew Green, which is about
Speaker 1: various forgotten fascinating places. And St Kilda had people on
Speaker 1: it for about a thousand years. They lived there until
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty. The arland was evacuated in nineteen thirty. In
Speaker 1: the nineteenth century they started getting visitors by ship, Victorian tourists,
Speaker 1: not very many because it's so far away, but they
Speaker 1: played up to it massively and they would do this thing.
Speaker 1: They would, you know, they would scream or pretend to
Speaker 1: be incredibly surprised if someone showed them a mirror. They
Speaker 1: would look behind the mirror, saying, what there's no one behind,
Speaker 1: what's going on? I mean they would literally they were
Speaker 1: clean shaven, they had mirrors, they had shaved that morning.
Speaker 1: I read This was in an article by Neil McKenzie,
Speaker 1: who was the person who was kind of in charge,
Speaker 1: who was like the reverend who kind of went there
Speaker 1: and he's kind of in charge of anything and helped
Speaker 1: the islanders for quite a long time. And he said
Speaker 1: they would pick up pieces of coal and affect surprise
Speaker 1: at not being able to eat them, and when they
Speaker 1: came in front of a looking glass, they would start
Speaker 1: and express great surprise at not being able to find
Speaker 1: the person who appeared behind it. It's so funny. It
Speaker 1: really work out. Sometimes they would go on board a yacht,
Speaker 1: visiting tourist yacht, and they pretended that they thought all
Speaker 1: the brass on it was gold. You've got all this gold,
Speaker 1: you must be the richest man in the world. They knew,
Speaker 1: they knew about brass. You know, they were hamming it up.
Speaker 1: Did it work? Were the tourists locking? Doesn't Kilda to
Speaker 1: see these people be amazed at their own reflection, because
Speaker 1: it's hard to get to. I don't know if I'd
Speaker 1: take a holiday fucking It didn't become a major tourist economy,
Speaker 1: which is why the island economy fell apart in the
Speaker 1: place was evacuated in nineteen thirty. But they were doing
Speaker 1: their best to keep some money coming in. Yeah, they apparently,
Speaker 1: According to Mackenzie, they would all the time when they
Speaker 1: were doing this, they'd be talking to each other in
Speaker 1: gallic and they'd be saying, if we seem to be
Speaker 1: paying great attention and make them believe we are simple,
Speaker 1: they will be sure before they go away to give
Speaker 1: us something even better. Yeah, so they would just did
Speaker 1: this and they thought if they kind of make them
Speaker 1: think we're stupid, then eventually we'll get some really awesome
Speaker 1: booty from them. Yeah, smart guys. Yeah, so what I'm
Speaker 1: trying to work out what they were, what they were
Speaker 1: pretending to be. And so is it that they're pretending
Speaker 1: that they thought they were vampires and were surprised to
Speaker 1: realize that they weren't actually vampires? Could they were surprised? Oh?
Speaker 1: I thought I didn't leave a reflection in a mirror
Speaker 1: because I was a vampire human after all, that would surprise.
Speaker 1: That's what it was, and that's actually why the island
Speaker 1: broke done. Everyone was scared off. One of my favorite
Speaker 1: short poems is by John Hegley and it has the
Speaker 1: title A Vampire considers buying a new mirror, and the
Speaker 1: poem is simply on reflection. No, brilliant, very nice, that's
Speaker 1: really It's also a good one to be able to memorize.
Speaker 1: I found myself to remember that for the school like
Speaker 1: the citation competition. Yeah, yeah, I was trying to look
Speaker 1: it up. I saw it about twenty five years ago,
Speaker 1: and I was trying to look it up somewhere and
Speaker 1: I can't find it on the internet. And then I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I can actually remember that joke. Fine, it's
Speaker 1: been It's held fascination for people for hundreds of years,
Speaker 1: hasn't it. Saint Kilda. People have been visiting it, and
Speaker 1: it is. It's over one hundred miles off the coast
Speaker 1: of Scotland and it's a rocky ride to get there,
Speaker 1: and it's quite unclear when people have lived there and
Speaker 1: when they haven't. But there was definitely a society established
Speaker 1: by the sixteenth century, wasn't there. That's when we know
Speaker 1: that there was like a community of people who are
Speaker 1: living there successfully, so it's not like it's been populated forever.
Speaker 1: And then people who have traveled there ever since there was.
Speaker 1: The first proper account of the Islanders was written in
Speaker 1: sixteen ninety eight, called A Late Voyage to Saint Kilda,
Speaker 1: which I still don't know what he meant by late.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he'd meant to go ten years earlier.
Speaker 1: He died about five years earlier. Anyway. This is a
Speaker 1: writer called Martin. Martin brilliant. Actually I read his book.
Speaker 1: It's fascinating. One of the things he says is they're
Speaker 1: extremely good climbers, and so they live by hunting the
Speaker 1: birds mostly the island. So they'll climb up and then
Speaker 1: they'll catch the birds. And he described a particularly very
Speaker 1: high rock called the Thumb, which was as high as
Speaker 1: a tall steeple, and he said that the only way
Speaker 1: that you could get to the top of the Thumb
Speaker 1: is by at one point you swing your entire body
Speaker 1: sort of up onto a ledge, by holding onto a
Speaker 1: protruding bit of rock which is only big enough to
Speaker 1: accommodate your thumb. My god, so you got your whole
Speaker 1: body balancing on your thumb as you propel it up
Speaker 1: onto the next bit of rock. Quite impressive. And then
Speaker 1: the person who swung his way up there onto the
Speaker 1: thumb get drops a rope down and hoist the others up.
Speaker 1: And then that person gets an extra four foul at
Speaker 1: the end of the day for his achievement. The birds, right,
Speaker 1: because that's what the people of Saint Kilda mostly lived off,
Speaker 1: birds and stuff. Yes, what birds and pooh? Of course,
Speaker 1: so it's left hand, big one. Wouldn't they just leave
Speaker 1: the rope up A lot of fun out of it, don't.
Speaker 1: It is such a fascinating place, and it was unbelievably inhospitable,
Speaker 1: and it's amazing that people managed to scratch out a
Speaker 1: living there at all. So sometimes it would just rain
Speaker 1: for three weeks without stopping. Not once, it just rained
Speaker 1: for three weeks on end. There was once a fairness
Speaker 1: in Bolton or even think I think I could survive,
Speaker 1: all right, all right, there was once a storm that
Speaker 1: was so fierce that everyone on the island was left
Speaker 1: deaf for a week. It was like, I read, that's
Speaker 1: not true. It can't be true, can it's I think
Speaker 1: it can, I think it can. It was so windy
Speaker 1: the islanders sheep would sometimes just be blown over the cliffs.
Speaker 1: I cannot understand. Yeah, that is understandable, but every one
Speaker 1: of the island going deaf for a week, that doesn't
Speaker 1: make that can't be true. It's just not a thing.
Speaker 1: We should mention the amazing way that they used to
Speaker 1: communicate with the mainland, the Saint Kildan's in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: which was via mail boats. The end of a posts
Speaker 1: I was until the early twentieth century, and so they
Speaker 1: would just get a letter right it pop it on
Speaker 1: a homemade mail boat like a hollowed out a bit
Speaker 1: of wood with a little tin placed inside into which
Speaker 1: they put their letter, and then they'd burn onto the
Speaker 1: service of this tiny boat the words please open, and
Speaker 1: they'd inflate a sheep's bladder, attach it to the boat,
Speaker 1: send it off and hope that it got to land somewhere.
Speaker 1: And according to one report I read, two thirds of
Speaker 1: messages reached their destination, as in they'd reach a destination
Speaker 1: either the coast of Scotland or Scandinavia sometimes and then
Speaker 1: those people would open the message and find the actual
Speaker 1: address inside and post it on. It's roughly the same
Speaker 1: strike rate as the Royal male at the moment, So yeah,
Speaker 1: that's really cool. Pyrography it's called when you burn words
Speaker 1: onto bits of wood. It's kind of a subsection of whittling.
Speaker 1: I don't know if he came in your whittling. It
Speaker 1: used to be a very male dominated area. And then
Speaker 1: in the turn the twentieth century there's a Melbourne architects
Speaker 1: called Alfred Smart who invented a new way of pyrography,
Speaker 1: hierrographizing a new type of chiograph and the way that
Speaker 1: he did that he had a pencil with like some
Speaker 1: fuel attached to it, and so you could use and
Speaker 1: you could change the amount of fuel that came in
Speaker 1: and out, so you could start doing shading and stuff
Speaker 1: like that to do amazing patterns. And then it became
Speaker 1: a kind of a relatively not very common, but a
Speaker 1: relatively common hobby for women at the in the start
Speaker 1: the twentieth century, and I was reading about someone called
Speaker 1: Joe Schwartz who's a woodburner, and she is the first
Speaker 1: person to ever teach wood burning in Antarctica. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's right down on the list of survivability skills, isn't it,
Speaker 1: especially in a continent with no trees. But you know
Speaker 1: she's got a record, so that's good. From being the
Speaker 1: second person. Imagine going to Antarctic, going out, I teach
Speaker 1: them wood burning. I'm not even the first one to
Speaker 1: do this. D you see the Schwartz panel being hung
Speaker 1: up over the tent. Nightmare? Can I tellyone quick think
Speaker 1: abou the evacuation of Saint Kilda, please, Because because life
Speaker 1: got harder and harder, and a lot of able bodied
Speaker 1: young men went to the mainland, and as it was
Speaker 1: largely a subsistence economy, so like hunting birds, and farming sheep.
Speaker 1: That was a big problem for the island's survival. In fact,
Speaker 1: they got close to starving on several occasions, and so
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty they they contacted the mainland and said, look,
Speaker 1: we're going to tap out with this is horrible, but
Speaker 1: we don't like it. We're all deaf. They the government said, yeah,
Speaker 1: of course, we'll bring you over. By that point, two
Speaker 1: thirds of the population shared the same two surnames as
Speaker 1: in The diversity of families had really been, you know,
Speaker 1: whittled down over the years. And at the end of it,
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty, they ceremonially closed down the post office.
Speaker 1: I think it's amazing. They held one final church service
Speaker 1: and they drowned their dogs off the pier. I don't
Speaker 1: know why. I don't know why the rest that took
Speaker 1: such a horrible turn at the end of that sentence.
Speaker 1: Really they must have been guys. There's a rum on
Speaker 1: the boat for the dogs. But then when they got
Speaker 1: to the mainland, the government arranged for most of the
Speaker 1: men to be given jobs in the Forestry Commission. But
Speaker 1: unfortunately most of them had never seen a tree because
Speaker 1: there are no trees on so killed the we're just
Speaker 1: chopping everything down. Weren't they They've chopped down lamp posts
Speaker 1: or presumably they were going to get jobs at the
Speaker 1: RSPCA hurriedly rearranged. All right, that's it. That's all of
Speaker 1: our facts. Thank you so much everybody for listening. Thanks
Speaker 1: so much, Tim for coming on. If you want to
Speaker 1: get in touch with any of us, you can find
Speaker 1: these guys on Twitter. I believe James you're on, James Harkin,
Speaker 1: Andy At, Andrew Hunter, m and Tim have you fallen
Speaker 1: prey to do the scourge than this Twitter? I'm Tim
Speaker 1: Harford on Twitter, but I don't really pay any attention.
Speaker 1: People should just listen to the Cautionary Tales podcast instead
Speaker 1: and not tweet me. Great, so if you want to
Speaker 1: be completely ignored, then tweets at Tim Harford, but do
Speaker 1: definitely go and listen to his Cautionary Tales podcast. It
Speaker 1: is brilliant. And if you want to know anything more
Speaker 1: about this podcast, no such thing as a Fish, go
Speaker 1: to no such thing as a fish dot com, where
Speaker 1: you'll find all of our previous episodes and any other
Speaker 1: interesting news about us. Okay, that's all this week. We
Speaker 1: will see you again next week with another episode Goodbye,