532: No Such Thing As 'Is It Mushroom?'

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Hi, everyone.

Just before we start this show, I wanted to let you know that James and I are going to be doing a talk, a chat, a lecture at the Hay Festival in Hay on Y next Wednesday, the 29th of May.

And we are going to be chatting about our new release of the paperback A Load of Old Bulls, which is all the most interesting facts and things we learned about sports.

It's for sports lovers, it's for sports haters, it's for sports sceptics.

You've got Mary Queen of Scots football in there, you've got Michael Palin's Conquer tournament, you've got lacrosse games involving over 100,000 players.

There's something for everyone.

Do come and listen to us.

Hey, it's such a fun festival anyway, so to get tickets for that, go to no such thingasafish.com/slash live.

And while you're there, obviously buy tickets for our tour if you haven't already, which you should have.

On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinsky.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the coroner who did the autopsy of President McKinley injected part of him into a dog.

So he was autopsied by two doctors called Harvey Gaylord and Herman Matzinger.

And Matzinger wanted to find out whether the bullet that had killed McKinley had been poisoned or had some bacteria on it, like a biological weapon.

And so the way he did it was he took samples from the wound and he injected parts of it into some rabbits and a dog and wanted to see how the rabbits and dogs reacted because if there was poison on the bullet, maybe they would die and that would be evidence that he'd been poisoned as well as shot.

And

it turns out that the thing that killed him was the bullet that went right through his body.

Yeah, the dog was fine, wasn't it?

In the notes that were given sort of said he was acting fine.

Doesn't mention the rabbit.

No, it doesn't mention the rabbit.

It said that he was acting well, the dog, but his body temperature was around 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

It's like a little bad for a dog.

It's bad for a dog.

Right.

It should be a bit lower than that.

You can react badly to an injection.

I certainly do.

Anytime I get a raised temperature.

We should say this was 1901 as well.

Just for anyone who's not up on their president's President McKinley.

Around 20th-ish?

Yeah.

25th.

I think.

He was 25th president.

That's right.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah.

So why am I talking about this today if it was something that happened around 1900?

Well, because we do

that.

This is a new feature.

Well, in the news this year, there was an auction site called the Rab Collection, and they found the personal papers of this Dr.

Herman Matzinger.

And that gave us all of this information about him injecting the president into the dog, which we didn't know until this year.

That's very good.

He was actually, no wonder he liked animals because he was a buffalo doctor.

And when I say buffalo doctor, he was a doctor who lived in the city of Buffalo in New York.

Who's that?

That was Matt Singer.

You're right.

I just thought I'd try and trick you guys there.

Good trick.

But he wasn't the first man to even look after McKinley when he came in.

Okay.

That was a different man called Doctor Mann.

And Doctor Man,

Dr.

Matthew Mann, and he wasn't even a proper surgeon.

He was a gynecologist.

He was a gynecological surgeon.

Oh, no.

This man has no vagina.

It's all going into openings, isn't it?

When someone's been shot.

What a troubling thing to hear.

Dr.

Anna say as you lie on the operating table, look, it's all just stuff going in places.

Don't worry.

It's all holes in the body.

Let's inspect your chest vagina now.

Oh, the exit vagina is a lot bigger.

But the weird thing is, Thomas Edison gets involved at this point.

Of course he does.

He sent...

to Buffalo a new x-ray machine, which is exactly like first ever episode of the podcast in President Garfield's shot.

In that case, it was Alexander Graham Bell sending a proto-metal detector.

Basically, all new technologies were at some point just being tried on presidents who have been assassinated.

Basically, if, God forbid, the American president gets shot in the next couple of years, they'll probably send the chat bot.

Yeah, yeah,

that's amazing.

So, so autopsies have come have come a long way since the days of injecting stuff into animals.

And I didn't know really about body farms.

That sounds grim.

And yet it is.

So they were basically invented by this guy called Billy Bass.

Remember that

singing fish.

Big mouth Billy.

Big mouth Billy Bass is singing fish.

But

he became body farms and then he did novelty singing fish.

Apparently so.

Or it could be that they are different people.

So this guy called Bill Bass was a forensic anthropologist in the 60s and 70s.

And he realized that we didn't know much about what happens to bodies when they decompose.

And so he kind of bought up some farmland and decided to collect loads and loads of dead bodies.

And it's still going today.

And there are now a few body farms around the world.

And they're extraordinary places.

It does sound like an excuse, doesn't it?

When the police come and they say, why have you got hundreds of dead bodies buried in your field?

Well, also because they're buried in really odd scenarios.

Because he has it.

So they're stored in the boots of cars, for instance.

Yeah, in pools of water, buried under rubble and in concrete.

No, this is my body allotment.

I hope one day to have a whole farm, but I've only got one so far.

Yeah, they're incredible.

And we've learned so much about forensics from them.

And yeah, they do things like you'll be walking through a field and you might not see any bodies, but you might see pipes sticking up out of the ground.

And that's because there are bodies underground and they're connected to pipes which are collecting gases.

And the gases will determine what bodies smell of.

And that's so that we can develop machines in the future that can detect them by smell.

That is stuff.

That's classy.

Leaving your body to science like that is a really good thing to do.

Yeah.

Well, I hope I have the gumption to do that.

I thought when we established you won't have any body remaining after we got to it from last week's episode.

It's a fun little callback if you haven't listened to last week's episode yet.

Find out what's going to happen to me when these three get their hands on me.

So the father of autopsy, what people call that, is a guy called Karl Rokitansky.

And he came up with the idea of looking at the internal organs to diagnose disease on the outside.

He personally performed 30,000 autopsies and supervised another 70,000 in a site.

70,000?

That's one a day for ages.

It's one a day for 100 years.

He did more than one a day, is the way he got through that.

Clever.

But that's weekends, that's evenings, that's your birthday.

Maybe you do more on your birthday.

I don't know if you're the father of it.

So I got a question.

I think Andy's the best one to answer this.

I guess.

But Dan might be able to answer, and Anna definitely won't.

So it's guy stuff.

He's called Karl Rocketansky.

And where do you know that name from?

Karl Rocketansky.

Rocketansky.

What are you guys both into?

Something that I associate with both of you, which is shit movies.

Oh,

was he in Adam Sandler's real name?

I tell you, it's unfair to call this a shit movie.

It's actually a classic, but it's the kind of movie you two would like.

Pacific Room 2.

He gave his name to Max Rokotansky, who is the main character in the film series Mad Max.

Oh,

amazing.

And that's because George Miller, who directed it, he was working as a doctor when he was getting funds for it.

George Miller.

Yeah, that's amazing.

That is very cool.

Yeah, George Miller's career has been amazing.

He's done Mad Max.

He did Babe.

Babe 2, Pig in the City, Happy Feet, and then More Mad Max.

Yeah, this weird function.

What was it called?

The latest one?

The one second to last.

Fury Road.

He's like in his 70s or 80s when he comes out to make that again.

And the new one's out shortly.

Yeah.

Anyways, this is a good idea.

This is why I thought they seemed like now this answer.

I have actually seen Mad Max uncharacteristically.

I thought it was very dystopian.

I'd rather be locked on a body farm.

Yeah.

You know what?

The plot was not lost on you.

Oh, dear.

James, I have a different father of autopsy.

Oh, yeah, go on.

Mondino de Liuzzi.

Mondin's again.

Who is the father of autopsy?

And

a lot.

Most episodes.

Mondino De Liuzzi was the restorer of anatomy.

He was Italian, if you couldn't tell,

at the University of Bologna.

And anatomy was banned, except for once every five years, you could do a dissection.

Wow.

Dissection.

Thanks for watching.

Is this like what's that film where sort of every 10 years or something you can all kill each other?

The purge.

Yeah.

This is basically the purge.

Oh my God, Anna.

You are in your dystopian worlds today.

I am, yeah.

So De Liuzi, he became the first person to do a dissection, document it, and publish his findings.

And it was the first documented public dissection in 1700 years.

It was amazing.

But weirdly, senior people like him, they would not do the actual dissection themselves.

So there's a picture of this happening.

And it was in the 14th century.

Senior people like him, they wouldn't do the dissection.

He would sit on a big elevated chair above the action.

Like a tennis umpire.

Exactly like that.

And he was reading aloud from a book.

I presume a book of anatomy.

No balls, please.

And he was commenting on, you know, he was reading Galen's anatomy to the audience and saying, look, now you're going to say, there was just a sort of barber surgeon actually doing the procedure.

And also, did we ever mention the ostensor?

That was basically someone with one of those pointers whose job was to just point out the bits that were being

autopsied or examined or whatever.

Separate to the guy on the chair.

The guy on the chair is talking you through it.

Because he can't reach.

You'd need a very long ostensor i mean they can go very long though that's true the ostensor is just there going

there's the pancreas uh-huh yeah fun girl yeah very they became really popular didn't they dissections uh in italy especially around the time of the 16th century they were so popular you could buy flap anatomies and a flap anatomy was like a book with flaps in it you know like a kid's book

where you could lift up the flaps and say oh look there's the gallbladder oh you no.

That's so cool.

Isn't that cool?

Wow.

I can't believe that technology is that old.

I don't know.

Well, I mean, the technology is quite basic for a flap book.

It's literally just a piece of paper.

But I don't know if there were any kids' books that did that before then.

I can't imagine the way.

So I think the original kids' flap book was probably this.

That's great.

Wow.

Have you heard of vampire autopsies?

These are very weird.

These are a real thing that used to happen.

There was concern that if you were dug up and you were very well preserved,

you might be a vampire.

And there was this big superstition that tuberculosis was an inherited disease.

Okay.

So the dead could drain the life of their descendants.

Actually, those people had TB, but the idea was that they were kind of being drained by the people who died.

And there was a theory that the body of the dead person had to be destroyed to protect the health of the living.

The last one of these happened in 1949.

What?

I know.

Was it to kill them to stop them vampirizing other people in 1949?

Yeah.

Right.

Very weird.

I should have done my spooky voice for for that.

I read about a very interesting autopsy that happened in 1533.

And it was an autopsy that was done on two children who were infant twins who were conjoined.

And the question was, are these two children two children with two souls or one soul?

And the autopsy was to determine that, to work out, is there one soul between two children?

How many souls did they find?

They found two.

Oh, did they?

Yeah.

They found two because there's a Greek idea that the soul resided in the heart and they found two hearts within the conjoined twins.

Therefore, that was the answer that they were given.

But that was like a very theological specific autopsy.

I think the important part of that was that these children hadn't been baptized,

but they would baptize people after their death, wouldn't they?

And so if they only had one soul, they'd only have to have one baptism.

But if they had two souls, they'd have to have two baptisms.

Surely less effort just to do the double baptism.

You know, just let's do to cover up the body.

Yeah, but if you're baptized twice, then that undoes the effect of the first baptism.

Actually, yeah, it's like being bonked on the head by something near to your memory.

Right.

The second bonker.

I see.

Another autopsy, which was quite amazing, was a little bit later on in 2010.

And this is the amazing stuff they can reveal now.

So this was a robbery in Oregon, and it was two men in masks who tried to rob a cafe or coffee kiosk at gunpoint.

And the guy who was managing the kiosk also whipped out a gun, because it's America.

And he managed to shoot one of the people who was robbing him, but the other one got away.

Now, they did an autopsy on the one robber that he'd shot, and they looked in his belly, and there was a still-intact French fry in his stomach.

Now, we know about how much French fries degrade and how quickly they digest, so they knew that he must have eaten a French fry sort of within the last hour.

Not only that, but someone doing the autopsy managed to identify it as a Wendy's French fry.

I think I could tell the difference between a Burger King and a McDonald's one for sure.

There you go.

Someone tasted it.

They drew straws.

So, some, you know, lovely.

So it's a Wendy's fry.

Wendy's fry.

So they just looked at all the nearby Wendy's restaurants because it couldn't have been more than an hour ago he ate it.

And they looked at the security footage, and there was one, you know, within an hour.

And they did indeed find the pictures of the two people on CCTV and found the other guy.

Wow.

I'm going to hear how they know it was a Wendy's fry.

I mean, I believe it.

I just, I'm just curious.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We didn't have Wendy's here, so we don't have.

If you can let us know if Wendy's fries are particularly

S-shaped or something.

The moral of this story is always chew your food.

It's a really good point.

Why is the fry intact?

I mean, he's literally inhaled that fry, hasn't he?

Oh my God, I'd be so easy to autopsy if I committed a crime.

All my food and does my body are completely intact.

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

My fact is that England's worst ever pennies are worth £350 each.

So they may be some of the best.

These are coins called the Tealby pennies, right?

And this is a story of a man.

Well, why am I telling you this fact today?

Well, I'll tell you.

Is this going to be a new feature now?

I'm going to start finding it quite tedious, I think.

Basically, there's a man called Tony House, which I love.

He's a metal detectorist, and he was out detectoring away.

And he found a stash of pennies, ancient ones.

They're from the 12th century.

He found one and then he found 600 more.

That's like if you see one ant in your house.

Exactly.

And they're worth about 350 quid each.

And the thing about them is they're really, really low quality coins.

They are badly made.

They're hard to read.

The image is just hopelessly stamped.

They're from the reign of Henry II.

They're named after Tealby in Lincolnshire, which is where 5,000 of them were found in a huge cache in the 19th century.

Ah, cache.

And they're just really ropey coins.

So, why are they worth so much?

Just because they're old.

Old now and rare.

Maybe.

They're all, they're pretty rare.

Oh, there are quite a lot of them.

Well, I was on a numismatist website called Numsock, which was really good.

It says this coinage is renowned for its ugly appearance, bad craftsmanship, and careless execution.

To collect TLB pennies in the first place brands you as a little strange.

Yeah.

Right.

To be strange in the numismatist world is

truly strangeness.

I kind of absolutely love numismatism, in fact, even though it's really hard to say.

And I love coin research because, A,

it's so reliable.

It's such reliable history.

There's no spurious, oh, what was this used for?

Because all the information that you need is on this coin.

It's like, there's a date, there's a face, it's a physical thing.

And people.

You're saying we have no mystery coins that we don't know the stories behind.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, we will have some mystery coins.

Don't worry, Dan.

There are the alien theories out there, I'm sure.

Could you save my research?

But people are also so obsessed.

I was on a Reddit thread which was started by someone who said, I ranked all the Roman emperors for their coinage based on its artistic value, variety, collectibility, and historical value.

Feel free to ask me about the rankings.

And everyone did.

That is really tragic if no one answers that to you.

Oh, don't you worry.

Thousands.

I can tell you that Claudius wasn't high enough.

And Claudius, of course, was responsible for the return to realism instead of the vaguely Hellenistic idealism on previous coins.

So he should have had at least an A rank, according to one person.

One person just said, I feel insulted you ranked Nero as high as Augustus.

And this is not as an emperor.

This is his coinage.

You were saying about there being no dubious coins.

And we should get back track on in fairness, but

I have an interesting thing that I found, which is about rainbow cups.

I don't know if you guys found this.

Was it related to the moon cup?

In the fact that they're cup-shaped, both.

Okay.

Only.

So these are coins that are cup-shaped.

And you find them, especially in Germany, and you'll find them in fields.

But these are often found after it had been raining, but then it was sunny straight afterwards.

Because not only are they kind of pushed forward by the muddiness, but also water gets into the cupness and it shines and they're really easy to find because the reflection of the light comes off.

And people associated them with rainbows.

And according to Discover magazine, which is usually a pretty good source, this is the reason that we have like a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow oh

people whenever there was a rainbow they would find these cup-shaped coins that's awesome and apparently there were tribes of southern germany that were celtic tribes that moved up into ireland and that's why the irish associate it with like leprechauns i love that that's amazing isn't that cool yeah that's really cool right i've got a i've got a favorite coin yeah

double eagle this is an american coin and it was a ten dollar coin issued in 1933 Half a million of them were struck, but they weren't issued as legal tender because 1933, the Great Depression, blah, blah, blah, banking crisis.

Gold coins are outlawed as legal tender.

It is now illegal to own a double eagle one.

What?

Yeah.

They're all technically US government property.

Because they never put them out.

You can't have accidentally got one in your change and own it.

If you have one, it must have been stolen.

I think there is one, isn't there?

There's one.

So there are two in the Smithsonian, which is kind of different, but then there's one, which is not illegal to own.

I can't work out exactly why that's the only one that's not illegal to own.

It was sold in 2021 at auction for nearly 15 million pounds.

Wow.

What happened was

a few of them were stolen and found their way into private hands via a jeweler called Israel Svit, who was from Philadelphia.

And when they came to light, they would just get confiscated because you weren't allowed to have them.

But one of them got sold to King Farouk.

of Egypt and he wrote to the Treasury Department and said, I have this coin.

Is it okay if I keep it?

And they hadn't discovered the theft at that stage, so they didn't realize that they'd been stolen.

And so they replied to him, saying, Yeah, you can keep it.

And that's the one.

That's the one that, if it ever comes up, is the one that gets sold in our minds.

Amazing.

That's wow.

So that's, I think, unique.

That is.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Just while we're on American coins, in 2007, there was a coin that was minted, which had an image of JFK on it.

And if you pressed a button on the coin,

he played a short excerpt of his Ich bin ein Beline.

So it had little technology in it to now.

I don't believe that was legal tender.

Do you know where that was minted?

What country that was for?

Germany.

Sounds it right.

Mongolia.

Lovely.

Do you guys know that the first book written about the history of the coin was called The Ass and Party Bus?

The Ass and Party Bus?

Is that right?

Is that a Latin book?

Yeah, yeah.

It's actually de ass et party bus.

So I have translated two of the words.

Of ass.

Something that's part of

means like parts of.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And ass was like an old Roman coin.

Oh, it was great.

Published in 1514 by Huyam Bud.

And to be honest, is quite boring.

But you read the whole thing, presumably.

Yeah, the first 10 pages are about the etymology of the word ass.

And then it goes on about...

I bet you read that so voraciously.

It's brilliant.

One thing.

One actually amazing thing, speaking of Romans and coins, is that coins are the reason that we're still discovering Roman emperors.

Which I sorry, I just didn't know.

Wow.

We discovered our latest Roman emperor in 2022.

No, I'm laughing.

No.

It's true.

Who are we missing?

This is.

It's not a biggie.

It's not like in between Nero.

Oh, yeah.

The heir to Augustus, actually.

Only came to light.

No, this is the great Sponcianus.

And yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a legit one.

Hi, I'm doing it.

Would you like to sponsor my anus?

This is from, well, we think it's from the disastrous century, whatever it's called, the crisis century in the Roman period, which was like the third century when it was all falling to pieces and there were sort of 1900 emperors.

But the reason he's only just come to light is because there were these coins found in Transylvania in the 1700s, which were assumed to be fake.

And people looked at them and said, sorry.

Kanandi, can you say these coins were found in Transylvania, please?

These coins were found in Transylvania.

Yeah, that seems to add to it for me.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Yeah.

They were found in Transylvania.

In the 1700s, and they had a picture of this bloke, and it said Spontianus under it.

Sponsidianus.

Just doesn't work when you spoil it.

Anyway, it was decided that they were fakes, and it was only in 2022 that that analysis of them actually concluded they were probably real.

And so we've literally just found out that there was a Roman Emperor sometime between 248 and 253 AD.

Okay.

Wow.

And that five.

Very much a sort of Liz Truss style Lincoln, you'll miss him.

Yeah, I think it was an in-and-out job.

And just one coin so far, did you say?

I think there are a couple.

I believe there are two coins.

Did you hear about the Eid Mar Aureus?

So there's another Roman coin.

Is this after Caesar was killed?

Yes.

Oh, this is is Eides of Mars.

This is an amazing coin.

This is a coin that celebrates the assassination of Julius Caesar, minted by Brutus, and it has the inscription Eid Mar, which is Eides of Marsh.

And it has their daggers on.

Brutus and Cassius' daggers are depicted.

I mean, easy.

It's like immediately after almost, right?

Like it's like merch.

That's kind of what they did, though, wasn't it?

It was like, get rid of the old emperor.

How do you do it?

Well, let's just mint a load of coins.

Yeah.

Let's go mad.

Interestingly, Julius Caesar was the first known autopsy that we have evidence of.

Yeah.

Was that required?

They found out that he was stabbed 23 times.

Right.

I mean, that.

But was that poison on the dagger, which was the actual cause of death?

I can't deal with this many vaginas.

But they wanted to find out which of the stabbings was the one that killed him.

No.

How did they...

No offense to the Romans.

How did they think they were going to be able to do that?

Surely it would have been some combination of the 23 that did it.

I could tell you because most of them were either in the face or the It was found.

I do.

I do.

Wow.

And it was just one or two.

And I think one of them went through the side of his arm and into his artery.

So they decided that that was it.

Wow.

Anyway.

Limey.

In the groin.

That's just, was that deliberate?

It does seem inadvertent, doesn't it?

Yeah.

Going for a crotch.

Coin villain.

Henry VIII.

Really?

Yeah, a bit of the numismatist's foe.

So he wasted lots of money on wars with foreigners, basically.

And he specifically debased the currency.

He issued new coins where he'd put copper in the silver coins just to make the silver go a bit further, basically.

And it caused mayhem.

People were hoarding their good coins from the before times, which were still worth every bit of silver in them, and they left the bad ones in circulation.

Foreign bankers refused to accept English money.

They were asking for gold instead.

It just was a disaster.

And then, a few years after he dies, Elizabeth I came to the throne, sort of 15 years later.

She had to recall every single coin in the kingdom and melt them down and reissue proper coins.

You have like a coin amnesty.

Everyone come and hand your coins in at the forum.

Pretty much.

They had those, you know, those machines where you pour all your coins in, and then it gives you a little slip.

They had those.

Not the ones with the tray going back and forward.

Is that what they're doing?

They're collecting my coins.

Well, they are collecting your coins, effectively.

You know those things, by the way.

They were invented by, oh, I can't remember who it was now, but they were invented, and the person who invented them thought that they would only last one year

Because there'd been quite a few of these kind of amusements that had come and gone really quickly and so they invented them They didn't patent them They made a load of them and then they became really successful and now you could just make them without any patents I didn't realize that yeah and the original one had the big hole in the middle which your coins would go in so they would make money Whereas now the holes are hidden so when the coins are being pushed there's holes on the side that you can't see and that's where the the coins kind of fall into and that's the cut that the

machines are.

So, I'm not aiming, I don't want to get into those holes.

No, so think about it: like I want to get into the big hole in the middle.

Every coin you put in in theory is going to come out again, right?

So, how do they make money?

Well, the way they make money is they have hidden holes, which the coins fall down and go into the bank.

Wait, why would every coin in theory be coming out again?

I just thought they got more and more and more coins until the whole thing exploded.

Until the whole thing was full of coins, yeah, exactly.

I mean, someone's equipped with those machines, and they're just.

You've never seen one of them fall to top.

I think

you fill them with coins to start off with because you've you've never turned up to one of those and there's no coins in it.

You've got a sign saying, please.

So they fill them with coins, and then in theory, everyone you put in is going to push nothing out.

I did not know there were side things.

I just thought they built up and then at night people came by and siphoned out and stacked them artfully so the next day none of them would fall in the hole.

That might happen as well.

Those machines are great.

I love them so much.

I spent so much of my money on them.

Yeah, they are amazing.

I look them as well.

You know, those penny collection machines, actually, what do you mean?

The one where you get all of your money that you've been keeping in a jar for

cash.

Do you know what the most that anyone's ever got out of

it?

Oh, great.

Oh, God, how much?

So I think I mentioned on the show once that I did it in Australia, and I think I got three or four hundred dollars out of it.

What?

How much?

Oh, yeah, you're pouring in coppers into a machine.

You got $400.

It's not all coppers, though, 50 cents.

What?

What Looney Tunes bank robbery had you just done to have $400 in spill?

It was all of Beans money they'd been collecting over the years.

Well, remember, he just spills change everywhere, never picks it up.

And I was unemployed, so I thought I'm going to try and contribute to this little domestic economy.

Go on, who's beaten my record then?

Yeah,

it's 2,000, I'm going to say.

No, the record is $13,084.59.

I'm sitting behind that person.

There was a man in Alabama, and he had to have all of his coins delivered to the bank to do this because obviously there were so many of them he couldn't carry them.

And it took seven hours to count them all.

And his collection weighed more than 4.5 tons

why did he stop um

the fool

yeah it's what a weird again that's an inside out logic i would have gone but why did he start does feel like perhaps there was someone else in his house who asked him to do it yeah fair enough i don't know have you guys heard of christopher ironside he was the designer behind the first decimal coins that we had in 1969 in the uk right and so so he designed the 50p that was the first thing that he does.

He designed all of the coins.

I'm so sorry.

I think it was 71.

Maybe he designed them early.

Maybe no, there were some that came out earlier.

71 was decimalization, but there were a few earlier decimal coins.

Right.

That's confusing.

Yeah.

That is confusing.

I mean, the whole decimalization thing sounds confusing, to be fair.

Oh, you would have loved the Daily Mail in 1971.

Why are there 240 anymore?

But so there was sort of an announcement that Britain was going to be heading this way, but the Royal Mint didn't say who was designing the coins.

But they had picked this guy, Christopher Ironside, and he had to do it in secrecy from 1962 all the way to 1968.

Now, you would think they gave him an office to go and do it in, that he could do it in secrecy if it was such a big deal.

They didn't.

He had to do it in his house.

He had his mother living in the house.

He had a daughter living in the house.

He had two young kids on the way.

He had a small house, so he had nowhere to do it.

And they're constantly at risk of discovering the big secret, which is that he's working.

But he's what he's designing.

All you need is a desk.

Exactly.

Anyone who like, there's the voice of Big Mint over here.

They could give him a room in the building, I would say.

I'm not saying they couldn't do that, but I'm just saying that the fact that he's working from home, like many of us does today.

Yeah, yeah.

But if I was working from home and I couldn't let my wife find out that I was working on a podcast, it might be tricky.

Would it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And what's this microphone for?

Well, she's she's at home because she's got two kids on the waist.

And she's finding drawings of 50p coins around the place.

She's saying, what's this?

It's nothing.

So

I think she gets into it because she becomes the model for Britannica on the back of a 50 coin.

Her name was Jean, and we were talking last week about Uma Thurman's grandmother.

Well, we now know who was basically the model for Britannica.

But he had to hide it from all his friends who would come over and so on.

So he had a big cloth that he would put over his desk.

What did he claim he was doing?

Did he say he was a spy?

He kind of felt like it.

It just doesn't feel hard to hide drawing a picture of Britannica.

No, he was making the molds.

He was doing all the molds.

Do you know how the kerkine is?

Yeah, totally, but like,

I think this guy had a rough time.

I do, I've got to say.

I want to know why it took him six years to design what, like, five coins?

Because he was constantly trying to hide his tiny molds everywhere.

I think as he reports into the office every quarter, no, sorry.

Um, no, my mother-in-law came into the room

just as I was making the molds, and then I had to throw it out of the window into the garden.

Then someone walked past the garden, and I had to go and bury it in the garden.

And then a fox dug it up, you see, that was the problem.

So I will need another three years.

I'm afraid to complete the mold.

He had to delay one of the coins because he found his daughter at the desk putting into the putty her like knife or whatever, and it completely ruined the coin.

So, he had to redesign the coin.

His whole vampire imagine is just going, darling, we don't care.

It's something to do with the coin.

We couldn't care less.

It's dinner time.

Oh, that's so good.

Yeah, that's hilarious.

Um, just very quickly before we go, crypto coins that exist include the Yeti coin, brilliant, the golf coin, the Mossland coin, the egregious fish token, and the AP wine coin.

Get out!

What?

For me.

They've minted a coin for me.

It's a crypto coin.

I'll explain later.

All right, yes.

Just send me your back details.

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

My fact this week is that in theory, you can get a peanut allergy transplant.

Good.

Why would I want that?

You wouldn't be asking for it.

This would be an accidental transplant.

So there's numerous papers out there.

The one that I read was to do with a 31-year-old woman.

She had liver failure.

So she had a liver transplant.

And then after the operation, she was kissing her partner and he had just eaten a peanut butter chocolate.

And as a result, she rashed up and she said, that's weird.

That's never happened before.

They went to the doctors and they worked out that she now had hypersensitivity to peanut, hazelnut, and pecan.

And they believe that that was new from post-transplant.

And then there are other multiple examples of people who have been claiming to have had a peanut allergy post-transplant.

That's very cool.

Yeah.

What a pain in the ass for those people.

Peanut allergies.

Did you say peanuts?

It was definitely, it was either penis or peanuts.

Oh, peanuts.

Sorry, no, no, no, still on peanuts.

There is a day of the year where in Canada, peanut allergy cases which trigger anaphylactic shock rise by 85%.

Can you work out what that day of the year is?

When they eat a lot of peanuts, Super Bowl.

No, Canada.

The World Series baseball, the hockey.

Hockey.

Hockey.

It's not sport.

When's a day when suddenly everyone eats a lot more peanuts?

Christmas.

Christmas.

It's the Canadian peanut Christmas.

When they all take flights and get them for free.

That's right.

When they go to the cinema, do they all go to the cinema one day of the year?

Canadians only go to the cinema one day a year because it's quite sinful, so they try and limit it.

It's National Peanut Day.

What's Charles Schultz?

Was he Canadian?

Oh,

these are such good guesses.

Okay.

Is it really obvious?

It's not really obvious.

Peanut-based confectionery gets eaten a lot more on one day of the year.

Halloween.

When they do.

Halloween.

It's Halloween.

You get children going house to house, having a lot of confectionery.

Maybe they didn't know they've got a peanut allergy, or maybe they are, you know, they're just excited and they have some unfamiliar confectionery and they already knew about it.

But yeah, that's 85%.

Easter is 60% rise.

I guess chocolate-containing peanuts.

Yeah, it's amazing how much it's changed over the last 20 years or so, isn't it?

It's bizarre.

Like the number of people who are allergic to peanuts just 20 years ago is so much lower than it is today.

Really?

So much.

And no one really knows why.

No.

1995 to 2016, there's been a five-fold increase in the UK in peanut allergies and more in other places.

And yeah, as James says, we're not really sure why.

It's much more in industrialized countries.

It could be to do with the fact that we are not getting as many parasites, they think.

And I think the immune system uses a similar mechanism to fight parasites as it does to flare up in allergies.

Yeah.

Yeah, we just don't know, but it's rocketing.

It is, and definitely, like, the more that you live in a city, the more likely you are to have it.

So, seems like it's something to do with not being exposed to natural environments, possibly vitamin D, sunlight.

Apparently, people with a vitamin D deficiency are 11 times more likely to have a peanut allergy.

Really?

But that might not be, that might be just that the two things are related to a third thing.

We just don't know.

Yeah.

One way of stopping getting allergies is to desensitize yourself by having small amounts of it, right?

This doesn't work in all cases, but it's a very common way of treating them.

And for that reason, there's a new kind of toothpaste that's been invented, which has got little tiny, tiny, tiny bits of peanut in it.

Oh,

you have this toothpaste and it desensitizes your immune system to the allergens.

Nut paste.

Nut paste.

Give your kids nut paste today.

I think we can go back to the branding drawing board before we start printing the packets.

Ironically, they all just get stuck in your teeth.

So then you need to use an actual normal toothpaste to get rid of it, presumably.

Yeah.

You can be, of course, allergic to peanuts.

Penis.

Penis, yeah.

Post-orgasmic illness syndrome is where you get like flu-like symptoms, rashes, itching after sex.

But it has been caused in a few cases by men being allergic to their own semen.

Their own?

Their own semen.

Yeah.

Oh, no.

There is a cure.

Thank God.

What is the...

We're back to nut paste, basically.

We are, I'm afraid.

No, it's multiple subcutaneous injections of the semen in question.

I think I'll just stay ill for life.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, so you get very, very tiny bits of the semen and you would inject it under the skin and your body would learn to

wow.

Yeah.

Scientists get allergic to the thing they're researching quite frequently because you're exposed to it day after day.

There was a great piece, I think it was The Atlantic, about a scientist called Brian Fry.

He studies snake venom and has since become allergic, not to venom,

but to snakes in general.

Really?

Yeah.

And if you, there's apparently the huge chance that if you work with something all the time, you develop an allergy.

40% of vets.

45% of people who work with lab rodents get an allergy to heavy.

There was a leech scientist called Danielle de Coehl who uses herself as bait when she's trying to catch catch leeches out in the field.

You know, she just walks through a swamp and gets them.

She now, after a year or two, couldn't do it anymore.

And her hands started swelling up massively if she was trying to feed a leech in the lab on her blood.

And she had to feed them pig blood instead.

That's weird, though, isn't it?

Because obviously you're supposed to sensitize yourself up until a certain point.

But maybe you can be overexposed.

Like if I'm eating peanut butter on a daily basis and a lot, does that mean I eventually might then become sensitized?

I read that article and it said 25 to 60% of people who work with insects become allergic to them.

So people who work with bees might come out in hives.

Right.

Lovely.

Now I think about it, people keep telling me that, because I love milk and I drink milk a lot, that I will become allergic to milk by the amount of milk that I drink.

And I listen to those people.

Do you know who told me it was Ash Gardner?

Didn't he?

Who did our theme tune, for anybody who doesn't know?

Who stopped drinking milk because he thinks he became allergic from drinking so much as a kid.

I think I'm right in saying that.

There's an interesting thing where people who think they are allergic to things in double blind tests, quite quite a high percentage of people turned out not to be allergic to them after all.

Right.

Just on the quickly jumping back to allergy transplants and just the idea of things being transplanted when you take in a body part from a donor, I read an article from a lady who said that her personality changed after a kidney transplant, where instead of reading celebrity trash and watching celebrity trash, she started reading Jane Austen.

And

that was purely

the back.

from the kidney.

She said she got a brainy kidney.

She said

there's a pseudoscience

theory, which is the idea that you inherit traits of a person that you might take something off.

And

so many exact doctor, there's a guy called Dr.

Hagen, who's an ER doctor, who claims that he inherited a love of avocados and barbecues after he got a transplant.

I don't know, maybe that your digestive system responds to a certain foodstuff seems more likely than liking trash magazines compared to Jane Austen.

Yeah.

To be fair to the doctor?

Yeah, fair enough.

He got in contact with the family because it was like a murder trial that she'd been killed in.

He went to the trial and the family took him in and they did prayers together.

And then he went back to their house and the sentence reads, he learned she loved avocados and barbecues.

Oh, and there's such unusual things that people like that could only possibly have come from this ridiculous idea.

Well, he never used to cry during movies as well.

As a surgeon, you're trained not to cry.

And then after surgery, he kept crying and kept crying.

And as well as learning that this lady loved avocados and barbecues, she was also an emotionally passionate woman.

But there's a doctor who believes that as a patient's about to go into surgery to receive their transplant, a few bits of details might come out about the person they're getting the transplant from.

And they embed that in a really emotional moment before they're about to go down.

And it goes into their psyche rather than it being a physical transplant.

Imagine, by the way, the kidney that you're receiving comes from someone who loved avocado.

Okay, go under.

There is a lot that we obviously don't know at all.

Like we've talked about fecal transplants before and how you can actually transplant unexpected things in them, it is thought.

And then we're in very early days of fecal transplants.

It changes with my personality if I get someone else's poo in me.

Depends whose poo you get.

Which one of our poo do you want?

And then I'll tell you what you'll get.

We'll save that for our therapy session after the show again.

No, you can't.

I think Andy mentioned on the show before that a mother who received a fecal transplant from her daughter suddenly became obese.

And her daughter was obese.

and because we really don't know that makes sense because it could be the microbes causing that right that's right um there was someone else who received a fecal transplant who had had alopecia and not had any hair since they were six who suddenly grew hair again and

i suppose this is all like the um micro um climate there's a lot still to learn about it and who knows what little things it's affecting yeah i buy it i buy it a lot okay here's a way if you are a parent and you have a baby who has a dummy you can protect them against allergies

how do you do it um never let them take the dummy out so no food could get into their mouth.

That's right.

That's right.

Can anyone think of a second method?

I know the answer to this because I've accidentally been doing it, all my three kids.

I've seen you doing it.

Oh, well, that must be you sucking on the dummy as well.

Yeah.

Is it really?

Yeah.

Dan still has a dummy.

He doesn't like to admit it, but it's no, it's

sucking.

Oh my god.

Oh my god, Dan.

For the listener, Dan's just got a dummy out of his pocket and popped it in.

We assume it came out of his pocket.

We couldn't see where it came from.

It certainly came from below the table.

That's That's incredibly dead.

Wow.

That's really disturbing.

It's weird how disturbing that is to see.

Well, I didn't know I had it in my pocket until I was coming in this morning and I felt it and I was like, oh, I've got Kit's dummy.

What's he got of yours?

Where's my research notice?

That would explain so much.

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

My fact this week is that the largest parasite in the world is a Christmas tree.

Feels a bit political.

Feels like you're saying Christmas is rubbish.

Okay, like it's feeding on ordinary families, trying to make them spend all their money on Christmas.

Basically, it's capitalism, and capitalism is a parasite on the working people.

Good point.

Christianity, actually, religion, organized religion of any form, is a parasite on our society.

All right, put down your joints.

Put down that old wacky baky.

Welcome to the dad cast.

This is a different kind of Christmas tree to what you might be thinking.

It's the Australian Christmas tree.

And the Australian Christmas tree is different to our British Christmas trees.

Upside down.

It's not upside down.

It's actually very beautiful.

It's also known as...

All the baubles are made of cork.

They're not used as Christmas trees, we should add, in Australia.

We use the classic Christmas tree in Australia.

Yep, you do.

You Australians listening do use the classic Christmas tree.

These are known as mongy or moo-jar trees as well, but they get called the Australian Christmas tree because they flower in December.

And they're endemic to Noongar County in Western Australia.

And they're really beautiful, actually, and they grow in very barren landscape.

And they're bright yellow flowers when they flower.

So they're like, you know, fires all over the desert.

But they are also parasites.

And it's so amazing.

So, their roots can steal from other plants that are up to 110 meters away by slithering under the ground to this other plant.

And then the plant root wraps around the other plant's root and then injects a spike into it and can just suck out all their nutrients.

It's extraordinary.

Amazing.

This is so cool.

It's actually

tipped me over into believing in plant sentience now.

You're always so skeptical about that.

I have been.

I've been on a fence, I've been on the line, but this is just extraordinary what it does.

The thing that tipped me over is that it's a beautiful-looking tree.

So, even when they are cutting down areas where this tree grows, they'll cut everything down but this hot tree that just looks so cool.

And then it feeds off the grass.

That's basically what it is.

It's like that's a sexy tree.

We're keeping that up.

It's evolved to be, I assume, a good-looking tree to the human eye.

No,

it's striking what it does.

It's pretty spooky stuff, if you don't mind me saying it.

So

it's so aggressive.

It's yet another bit of evidence of like the Australian version of everything is much more lethal than the non-Australian version.

So it'll attack power cables.

It can cut slice through power cables because it's so powerful, this wraparound organ it has.

Sometimes I read it steals juice from its own roots.

Yes.

That's embarrassing.

So what it's trying to do is get the juice from the power cable because it thinks that's a root.

Yeah.

Yes.

But actually, it's just not just trying to contact its friends on the phone on the other side well maybe it would be trying to contact aliens because there was one time there was a space tracking station in western australia which was connected by underground cables and it got into those as well

really

yeah

getting it from its own roots is an accident as well it is an accident yeah it just finds something else so i'd never i don't know if you guys had or the listener has but i'd never heard of parasitic plants before as in i didn't really recognize that this relies entirely on stealing other juices from other places the most famous one is is mistletoe, of which this is a type of mistletoe.

Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, mistletoe famously just grows on other trees.

Grows on other trees.

Photosynthesis is not a thing for it, so it just relies entirely on it.

But just the idea that this needs other living things to live is extraordinary.

It kind of explores your year nine biology when you learn about how plants survive.

When actually, there are thousands of plants that aren't doing any of that shit.

They're not bothering with all this complicated chemical equation with their leaves.

They just jab into other plants.

I think there are 4,000 species.

Have you guys heard of Hydenora africana?

No.

No.

According to one website I read, and I quote, no plant looks more like a labia than the Hydenora africana.

This flower not only has teeth-like traps to lure insects into leaving or picking up their pollen, but emits a feces-like scent to attract dung beetles.

Gosh.

I just love that sentence.

Nothing looks more like a labia and it has teeth that smells like feces.

That's why you get that.

That is a good riddle to ask.

But yeah, this one sort of likes to attract dung beetles

with its smell.

And a lot of those ones that are like really, really smelly plants, they are also parasitic.

The dodder is amazing as well.

Did you guys read about that one?

Yeah.

That one's extraordinary.

It's a little unstable on its feet, isn't it?

But it's pretty extraordinary.

Yeah, so this is a plant which is, it's got no roots or leaves and it's sort of yellowy looking.

It sort of grows on other plants and it's only got a lifespan of five to ten days without a host right so it needs to find a host in that time and it goes when the seed gets

dispersed yeah sorry when the seed gets dispersed and it can sense where the closest best host is through the air which is mad and then goes that way yeah that's

so sinister

no it is because we don't understand a lot of how they do this so it is extraordinary it is amazing and it is it's weird how pretty so many of them are it's like if you came out almost like they evolved just so that humans would like them.

Thank you.

James!

I love them.

There's one which lives entirely inside the stems of plants.

And this is a genus, Pylostyles.

Nicely described in 1948 by Australia's government botanist who was called Charles Gardiner.

Which is nice.

Very nice.

And it's so pretty.

So it just lives entirely inside a stem.

You don't know it's there.

It's just little threads.

And then plops out for about about a week of the year again, like the one Dan described.

And it's so pretty, and these white flowers come out all over the stem of a plant.

So you'd think, gosh, this plant's looking so pretty.

And actually, it's disease.

It's another plant.

It's another plant.

It's so weird.

I love it.

Did you guys hear about the lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe?

This is another.

So, this is a kind of mistletoe.

Most mistletoe seeds are dispersed.

Oh, most kinds of mistletoe, they're dispersed by birds.

Birds eat the berries and then they fly somewhere else, and then they poo out the seeds, and the seeds have a new environment to grow in.

Not the lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe it spreads by explosions

it's the basically the seed each fruit has a single seed inside it which is covered in this very very sticky stuff and then as the fruit matures the pressure builds and builds and builds inside it right and then eventually it just goes

I've seen these exploding cucumbers in Greece yeah

so it was growing almost like a weed and some steps but I noticed it and it's um it looks like a tiny little gherkin okay and then if you prod it enough, it just explodes and the seeds go everywhere.

And they're really cool, but they don't go that far.

But then it apologises.

Sorry, that's never happened before for me.

Do you know why mistletoe seeds are sticky?

Because they are when they're dispersed.

No, what is that?

Partly is because they have to grow from up a tree, which is kind of cool anyway, so to stick to the tree.

But as you say, they're dispersed by birds pooing them out and then wiping them on trees.

So, what it requires is for the bird to poo, but this annoying sticky seed gets stuck to its anus.

And so, this bird's going, I've got this seed on my bum.

I just need to wipe it on something.

And they wipe their bums on the tree branches.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And that's what sticks them together.

And also, because they've wiped their bums on the trees and their bums had poo on them, then they have their own fertilizer.

Lovely.

So, there you go.

If you're a seed, you know, you're being flown to the top of a tree and you're being put exactly where you want with a load of fertilizer.

It's a dream.

So, I just said, when you said that, that, I went, clever.

But I realized that's obviously humanizing it.

Like, what is it?

What is that?

If it's not clever.

It's just evolution to make it.

It's just what it is.

It's just what it is.

It's just a random thing.

It's not.

It's just over millions and millions of years.

Maybe even before humans existed,

different things have been tried out.

I don't think we invented sentience.

I'm not blaming humans grow on that alone.

Isn't is ivy parasitic?

No,

that just crawls on stuff.

If it just grows on something, it's not technically a parasite.

It has to be stealing its resources like it's

not.

It might not be particularly good for the thing that's growing on, but it's not parasitic.

Yeah, it could weaken a tree and make it fall and so on.

Yeah, but okay.

Do you know what it is, which makes people really angry?

Is orchids.

Are parasitic?

In fact, all orchids are parasitic.

No, another beauty.

But another beauty.

But this is something that is vigorously denied by the American Orchid Society.

It's so weird.

So basically,

they're a slightly different kind of parasite.

They parasitize mycorrhizal fungi, which are those threads underground, those fungal threads underground.

So all orchid seeds start off by parasitizing the fungi because they're not born with the resources to grow properly.

So they steal from this fungi at first.

Many of them do it for their whole lives.

So the parasites.

And yet, on the FAQ's page of the American Orchid Society, there's a question, are orchids parasites?

No, no, they're not.

Go away.

Stop asking questions.

Absolutely not.

Of the approximately 20,000 species of orchid, not one is parasitic.

So, how are they claiming that?

Are they claiming that because it's hosted by the fungus, that it's different to being hosted by a I think that's the assumption they don't address, much like hearing a politician interviewed on the Today programme?

They're really very much just repeating this one point.

I don't think anyone wants to talk about parasites.

No, people want to hear about the good work that I'm doing for the people of the underground.

Exactly.

I think I've been very down on sentient plants throughout this, but I do think fungi are evil.

Yeah, that's a good point.

So

there is a mushroom called Fusarium xyrophyllum.

This is amazing.

So it will find a plant called the xyrus plant and it will sterilize it so it can't make flowers.

But it will then make its own flowers that look exactly like the normal ones, but they're made out of mushroom.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

Oh my god, like a tofu alternative.

plant replacement food.

So you might think you're getting a nice bunch from Interflora, but actually all those roses and lilies and whatever, they're all actually mushrooms.

That reminds me of the show, Is It Cake?

Yes,

there should be a show called Is It Mushroom?

It looks like a sofa.

It's a mushroom.

And then the final episode, it turns out the host is a mushroom.

Yes.

It's a format.

You might think I'm the host, but in fact, I'm a parasite.

That's very funny.

I read just related to that: this 2024, Bolton, where I'm from in Greater Manchester, has been named the town of culture for Greater Manchester.

But also this week, it was named as the moldiest town in the whole of the UK.

And it just feels like they got the wrong meaning of the word culture.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on at Schreiboland on Instagram, James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

I'm on Twitter at Andrew HunterM.

And Anna, where can they get us all as a group?

You can go to Twitter or on at No Such Thing or Instagram at no such thing as a fish or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We've got all of our previous episodes up there.

We have the doors to the secret club known as Club Fish.

We put lots of bonus material up there.

It's a really fun place.

There's a Discord where all the listeners get to chat to each other.

It's really worth checking out.

Do that now.

And as you will know, we are back on the road with our new tour, Thunder Nerds.

We are going to be coming to a bunch of cities and towns around the UK, and then we're going down under to Australia and New Zealand.

Get tickets now before it sells out, or otherwise, just come back here next week.

We'll be here with another episode, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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