445: No Such Thing As Genghis Khan in Wimbledon

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week, coming to you live from the London Podcast Festival.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that researchers have concluded that cats don't like cat people.

I'm really sorry.

Scientifically speaking, the more you like cats, the less they like you.

But I would say I I have a cat, and I wouldn't say I'm a cat person, and my cat definitely doesn't like me.

So could it be that cats just don't like any people?

Sometimes they're just good judges of character, James.

But

this is actually not that.

So this is a study that was done at Battersea Dogs and Cats Home with a bunch of universities were involved and it got 119 different people to interact with a cat in a room.

And then it looked at various things about the people, like their personality type.

Are they kind of neurotic?

Are they agreeable people?

You know, you fill in a questionnaire and say all that stuff about yourself.

And it asked them, have you ever owned a cat?

How long have you owned a cat for?

And do you like cats?

It turns out the best predictor of how much a cat is going to like you is the number of years that you've lived with a cat, but they're inversely proportional.

No.

Yeah, the more and people who people would like say, you know, I'm really good with cats.

It's the people who are self-professed cat knowers.

Well, the thing I was reading is that a lot of it is about cat people,

people who like cats.

Cat people.

So, just good clarification.

Sorry, in case you all thought we were talking about half cats, half person.

Really annoyingly, that's all my research.

Well, I think this was the study.

It found that they touched the cats' so-called red areas more when left alone with cats.

Red areas are things like the, please, the

We all went to that HR meeting, Andy, we know.

The base of the tail.

Or the belly.

Apparently the hairs on their belly are really sensitive, and so a big old belly rub will, you know, I'm sure cats vary from cats.

They don't seem to with the red areas.

It's just the belly and base of the tail that are red, and they really seem to across the board dislike.

The rest of the cat is yellow area.

Like traffic lights is a little bit more.

There's no green.

There is.

No, there's.

The green was under the chin.

You're absolutely right.

Yeah, I mean, I read it.

I didn't just show you that.

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, they love a little tickle under the chin.

And

the cheeks and the ear base of the ears.

Yeah.

But yeah, that's basically it.

That cat people are too tactile with cats.

And also this study found that their interaction style, they want to control the interaction.

Whereas cats really dislike that.

So they prefer to be the ones who approach you.

They only want to get touched if, you know, they've initiated it.

They've said, all right, come on, you can touch me now.

And this isn't what p cat people do.

And similarly, older people, cats tended to like them less because older people,

sorry, but you're usually cat people.

It's the old cliche that you know, it's always the person in the corner of the room who's ignoring the cat that it goes to.

It turns out that it's true, yeah.

There's been a recent study as well that says that they recognize the names, cats, but they're just they don't want you to know that they recognize their names.

So, this was people at Sofia University in Japan, and they played a load of noises including the cat's name that was said by the owner and then as soon as their name was called they saw their tail move almost imperceptibly.

They just very slightly moved.

Some people think that that's because they recognize their name but other people think, well, it's just something they kind of associate with food.

So you might as well be shaking a box of cat food and do the same.

I feel like all of these cat studies are dancing around the fact that cats are dicks and none of the scientists want to say that cats are dicks because they know that if they say cats are dicks in the abstract of their paper then they'll get in trouble with cat people.

So here's another one.

Again, they didn't say cats are dicks, but I think we can all agree the implication.

When you own a cat, it will not side with you against your enemies.

Okay?

That's bad.

So there's this experiment.

Basically, you get a cat, and the cat observes its owner struggling to open a container of something, right?

And then the owner would request help from an actor, a stooge, sitting nearby, and

either the actor did help or didn't, right?

And then later on, that actor, whether unhelpful or not, offered the cat some food.

The cats were completely agnostic about whether they took the food or not, whereas dogs, dogs would refuse, frequently refuse food from the person who'd been a dick to their owner.

Cats were not like that.

Cats were totally neutral, but it is possible that they are too stupid to understand

the play that had been put on for their benefit.

Wow.

Yeah.

Speaking of dicks,

this study,

that is definitely a red area.

So this study that I mentioned was done by a bunch of universities, Nottingham University, the two Nottingham Universities, in fact, and also the Royal Brackets Dick closed brackets School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh.

And that's its name.

The Royal Dick School of Veterinary Studies in Edinburgh.

It is named after a person called Dick, so it's usually abbreviated to the Dick Fet.

Sounds like it's a real specialty vet.

And

it was established in the 19th century by a vet called William Dick.

And before you say anything, James, no, there's no evidence he ever shortened his name to Willie, okay?

Willie Dick?

Never did he go by Willie Dick.

Good.

Very nice.

Have you guys heard?

This has blown my mind, and I can't believe it's not bigger news, but there's an app out now called Meow Talk.

Have you heard of Meow Talk?

Everyone listening, everyone here, everyone watching, if you have a cat, get Meow Talk.

It's an app that translates what your cat is saying to you.

And it was, I swear to God, this was done with scientists.

And if you read the reviews, it sounds like it's actually genuinely picking up what the cat is saying.

So this was a New York Times article that was written by Emily Anthes.

And she was saying she tried it out.

And there's basically what they break it down to is different sounds of the cat get matched to certain terms.

So they can tell by the tone, the pitch, the length, and so on of the meow in order to say roughly they are saying this.

So she first used it, and the cat meowed after, I think, eating something, and it translated as, I'm happy.

She was away from home, and she came home, and the cow purred as she got in, and her app said, The cat says, Nice to see you.

Like, oh,

absolutely.

This had so many reviews.

I swear to God, this is a real thing, where they think that that is happening.

But then it's also got like weird little terms that it uses as well.

So there was one time that she went to the cat, and the cat went,

which translated as just chilling.

This is not true.

Okay, stick with me, guys.

So they've got, look, the other terms they've got is there was another time that she came in and the cat went, meow, which went, my love, I'm here, which is the words that it used.

Is there another one where you kind of get it and it goes, you should upgrade your membership to a premium account?

If you read all the reviews of the app, that's unfortunately, they get a lot of one stars because the first meow leads to, you need premium membership to understand what your cat is saying.

But the best one is she lifted her cat off the ground once and she was moving it somewhere and the cat went, meow and that translated on her phone as hey baby let's go somewhere private.

But this is real.

We can now talk to cats through meow talk.

I've never been more convinced you've been completely duped

and that's saying something.

Have you guys heard of Caden Griffin?

No, no.

So

he's relevant to this field of study.

He is an American teenager,

sixth grader.

Last year he was in the sixth grade, which I think is about 12, 13 years old, and it's from Tennessee.

And last year he became curious about how often the objects in our home are touched by cats' bottoms.

Okay?

If you own a cat, you might think, oh, is the cat rubbing itself on everything I own?

So he, being a scientifically minded child, ran an experiment by putting lipstick on his cat's bottom.

Then studying the home for where lipstick was popping up.

And

what an amazing thing.

And

toothbrush day after day.

It's really good news for owners of long-haired cats.

There's basically no lipstick anywhere at the end of the trial period.

Short-haired cats, there's a little bit on soft furnishings,

but you know,

in general, it's okay.

Okay, yeah.

Do you know that outdoor cats are banned in Husevi in Iceland, which is the town where they did the Eurovision movie.

Oh god.

I don't remember that.

Beautiful.

And there's actually a few places, also a place called Akureri, where they're just about to ban them and they'll be banned in 2025.

But to try and stop that, there was a guy called Snorri Admundsen and he started the Cat Party.

And in the recent local elections, they got 4.1% of the votes.

That's not.

This is just cat people in Iceland.

They beat the Pirate Party,

who actually a Pirate Party quite big in Iceland.

Like a few years ago, they anyway.

And a lot of the candidates for the cat party said that they were expressly running on behalf of their cats because the cats weren't ineligible to vote or run for office.

Right.

I dread to think the kind of genuine bastards we'd have in charge if actually we voted on behalf of our cats.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I'm going to have to move us on very soon.

I've got a quick story about someone who doesn't like cats.

Okay.

And that is Andrew Lloyd Weber.

Hang on.

Who apparently was so annoyed and so angry with the recent movie Cats that after seeing the movie he went out and bought a dog.

He was just

he was so angry, right?

And but then he fell in love with this dog and it became a really great thing and he was traveling a lot overseas.

So anytime he got on a plane he tried to bring the dog with him and the only way you can really do that is claim for it to be an emotional animal, like an emotional support animal, right?

So that's what he did.

So he said, I wrote off and said I needed needed him with me at all times because I'm emotionally damaged and I must have this therapy dog.

He said the airline wrote back and said, can you prove that you really need him?

He said, yes.

Just see what Hollywood did to my musical cats.

And a note came back saying, no doctor's report required.

It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that if you take 50 generations of confucius descendants and read out their names from oldest to youngest in it it will reveal a secret poem

so this is this i find really interesting um this is the story of confucius confucius basically has the guinness world record for the longest unbroken lineage And I happened to make friends quite recently with the 79th generation descendant of Confucius.

He's He's a guy who lives in London called James Kong.

And the Guinness World Record has recognized that basically for thousands of years, the Confucius family have been charting their family tree so consistently, so tightly that we know who everyone is inside the Confucius family.

And there's two million of them.

So every 60 or 70 years or so, they update the big database of all the descendants.

And in 2009, one book, which was broken up into 80 volumes, weighing over half a ton, was published, having every single name of all of the descendants, both living and dead, in there.

And James Kong is almost the closest that we get to a direct descendant that's alive.

Now, the reason that their names would reveal a poem is there's a beautiful thing that they do in China.

Certain families do this, which is a generational name.

And a generational name means that all the families can know which generation a child is from by inserting a key word into their name.

So what they do is they write a poem and the next generation just takes the next word in that poem.

So you can look at that poem and you can go, this is the 79th, 78, 77, 76.

So if you're out and about and you meet someone from China and you ask their name and you hear a key word, you can go, oh my god, it's a descendant of Confucius.

That's really cool.

Yeah, which is really awesome.

So you know this poem?

Yeah.

Does the next generation have to make up the next line, like an improv game or something?

Yeah.

Like consequences, Confucian consequences.

No, No, so it's a word at a time.

As far as I know, it loops back onto itself once because you're not going to have 50 generations alive at once, so you're not going to get confused.

You're not going to get confused.

Really good joke.

What's really nice is that back in the day, Confucius was a very prominent person in China and his descendants, therefore, were almost like a class of their own.

So if you knew that someone was a descendant of Confucius, there would be things like tax breaks breaks when they were buying houses and stuff like that.

Yeah.

And then it all went tits up when the Cultural Revolution happened because Confucius then became a sign of something that Mao Zedong and so on didn't want.

So basically they lost everything.

The main bloodline of Confucius had to flee to Taiwan and it became hard times for all of them.

But now it's better again and this one family handed the reins over to James's family.

But when James goes back, he lives here.

He's a very normal guy.

In China, he goes back and it's like in Coming to America, when Eddie Murphy goes back to Zamuda.

It's like everyone's bowing and kissing his feet.

And yeah, he's a big deal back in China.

But the thing is, if anyone has a grasp of how numbers work, there are shitloads more than 3 million descendants of Confucius out there, right?

I mean, I think everyone in China is probably directly descended from Confucius.

But if you go back, even, I think we're all descended from Genghis Khan.

So this is just people who have managed to get the paper trail to prove it.

Yeah, basically.

Wait, am I descended from Genghis Khan?

I think you might.

I mean, there's a little bit of grey areas because how much immigration happened, we don't really know.

Your family never left Wimbledon for five million generations, did they?

No.

And Genghis Khan didn't make it to Wimbledon.

Imagine that.

We'd have been furious if he'd made it.

The lawn, the lawn, darling.

They've damaged the lawn.

I'm going to go and say something.

I'm going to go and say something.

I'm going to get it.

That's what thwarted him in the end.

He couldn't couldn't handle the British passive-aggressive attitude.

Can you imagine, though, Genghis Khan, if we ever crack time travel and the descendant to go back to meet him is Andy?

Hello, Jenkins.

I think you'll be quietly impressed.

Would you?

Yeah.

It's Warlord.

Yeah, I think you'll say, I see, he's got soft skills, and that's important.

Famously, soft skills is something that Genghis Khan made.

Just on Confucius, Confucius was, I I didn't realize how unsuccessful he was in life.

He was incredible.

He basically became important about 100 years later.

During his life, he was not listened to at all.

Nobody took up his ideas for a century at least.

And he, I'm kind of not surprised.

His main book is

called, I think it's called The Analects, is it?

Yeah.

And it's not by him, it's anecdotes about him.

So it's like sort of fun stories about Confucius.

Hence the Confucius says as a kind of term that came out.

Exactly, yeah, yeah.

But But

he didn't charge any of his pupils or his students, and he was teaching philosophy.

All he requested from them was a symbolic bundle of dried meat.

But I can see why he's priced himself out of the market at the wrong end, basically.

And I think you're not going to be respected if you say, I want one pepper army, and I will then tell you the secrets of the universe.

Exactly, you would probably go for the second cheapest option, wouldn't you?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He had 3,000 students, and only 72 managed to pass master all of his teaching.

So that's quite a high bar, isn't it?

That's impressive.

But the Analects, there are two versions of the Analects.

One's called the Liu version and one's called the Chi version.

And really exciting.

Lou version, that's the easy reading, big fun.

Funny jokes in it.

Keep it five minutes.

Get the Lu version.

Well, the Chi version was long lost, but really excitingly in 2015 we found a copy in the tomb of Emperor Liu He

and he was one, he was like a really not a great emperor.

He was dethroned after 27 days, which is the shortest reign of any of the Han emperors.

And the reason he was kicked out is because he was like debauchery, a terrible lifestyle.

There was like a period of mourning, and during that time, he bought a special kind of chicken and had lots of sex.

With concubines.

No, no, no.

With concubines.

With concubines.

It is better.

It is better than concubines.

It's better than chickens.

I do think that.

It is better than chickens.

And he's still thinking.

Well, anyway, he was punished by being given a small fife of 2,000 families who would pay tribute to him.

Well, he was punished by being given tribute.

He was, and his subordinates were all executed.

Oh, bloody hell.

Why was that a...

Sorry,

because that does sound nice to me.

He's going from being an emperor to just being in charge of a couple of thousand families.

It's like, we're going to take off the main responsibility for you.

It's like how, you know, if I was in charge of something and then you guys demoted me so I was only in charge of holding Sharpies for after-show signings.

Yeah.

That would be, for example, just an example.

Just an example.

Do you remember that show a couple of shows ago when we didn't have any Sharpies?

Got the Sharpies?

Yeah, that was awful.

I'm still sorry about that.

He's just when I read his story, I thought there were kind of parallels to Tootin Kharmoon, because in the same way that Tutin Kharmoon's grave was found virtually intact, I know there was a grave robbing, but it was because he was kind of wiped from the records, wasn't he?

He's sort of

no one knew to loot it.

It's kind of like this guy as well.

His tomb, where they found this Confucius reference, was kind of untouched because he was sort of wiped out from history as well.

Yeah, I think so.

So go to all the irrelevant people's tombs.

Let's go to...

Tim Farron's tomb and see what's there.

He's still alive.

I don't know.

He was just.

But he might as well be dead, I think, is what you're saying.

I don't even know who he is.

Who is he?

Speaking of politics, as we were down.

He's a politician.

He's a politician.

You're going to say you don't know who Joe Swinson is next.

He's a politician.

They're all alive, though.

I feel bad.

Sorry, Joe.

So speaking of politics,

Confucius, like Andy said, not that successful when alive, but he was the Minister for Crime.

He was basically the pretty patel of his day.

Wow.

She's a politician.

And so he was working for a duke.

It was like a dukedom.

And he was in charge of sort of punishments and crime and stuff like that.

And he fell out with the duke, apparently, and wandered for 12 years after he fell out with the duke.

And apparently, the reason that he fell out with him is he was at a sacrifice and the sacrificial meat was being offered around, but he wasn't offered any.

And so, without taking off his sacrificial bonnet, he left the country.

He loved meat.

Yeah.

That's the main thing I'm getting time and again.

Do you know what?

I've got a data point to add to this.

When he was, so he wandered for 13 years, trying to, or 12, 13 years, trying to get people to listen to him.

No one did.

So he went back, became a politician again.

And he was quite successful as a politician, to be honest, just not spreading his ideas.

But he transformed the town that he was counselor of.

And the way he transformed it, I read, mainly, is by ending the adulteration of meat.

God.

What?

He's just the sausage king, and he just happens to have...

This is amazing.

Incredible.

He once said that the main goal of life is to become a man of virtue, which is there's a word for that, a junzi.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing that wrong, but it's about education, it's about compassion, it's about observing ritual.

But if you don't succeed, that is also a chance to gain virtue.

And he said, Is not a junzi one who stays unruffled, though men ignore him?

Anyway, I've got another flag to

moment.

If you compare him to what other people in, let's say, Europe were doing at this time and saying, basically, philosophers were quite pro-war, they were pro-pride, they were pro-like patriotism or your city.

There wasn't much chat about compassion and kindness and generosity, and he was much more about all of that, which was about 2,000 years ahead of where anyone else was.

He was quite crap on women, which is a slightly annoying thing about him.

He did think that

they were like a different species,

really, or not like a different social class.

There was one moment where he met a leader who said, I've got ten very good ministers working for me.

And Confucius looked at them and went, well, one of them is a woman, so you've only got nine.

But look, I know.

Confucius cancelled two and a half thousand years later.

We all made mistakes.

I've just got some stuff on family trees, if you want to hear it.

Yeah, yeah.

So a couple of very long family trees, possibly, you know, almost records compared to Confucius.

The Lurry family, some people think that's the longest in the world.

According to Dr.

Neil Rosenstein, who wrote a book about it, they can trace their lineage all the way back to the biblical king David.

Oh.

Okay.

But in the Bible, it says that David was begat by Jesse, who was begat by Obed, and then Booz, and then Salmon, and then Nassan.

So I don't know why they stopped there, because we know who came before that.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

And then the only other family that could be around the same is the house of Solomon.

And they claim to go back to the Queen of Sheba.

That's the imperial family of Ethiopia.

And we know who the latest on that line is.

It's someone called Zira Yaqub, who was the second African to ever go to Eton College, to ever go to Eton College.

And in the 90s, the last time I could find him, he was living in the Rastafarian community in Manchester.

And according to the legend, his family looks after the Ark of the Covenant.

So

Indiana Jones could have just gone to Rush Holmes.

What a downer that movie would have been.

All right, you're coming over here looking for your Ark of the Covenant.

I love you, mate.

All right, look, I need to move us on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that there is a two-headed tortoise in Switzerland whose two heads prefer different foods.

And here he is!

So people at home, their picture has just come up on the screen.

And he didn't have him in his pocket.

Yeah, Janus is his name, named after the old god with two faces.

Yeah.

Two heads, facing different ways.

And he's 25 years old.

He's just turned 25.

He was born in and still lives in Geneva because he's quite slow moving and he hasn't managed to leave yet.

Hopefully Hopefully, in about 50 years, he'll be in Zurek.

Yeah, exactly, yeah.

This is all from a great piece just about him in The Times, by the way.

And

he lives in the Natural History Museum, and he sounds like a great guy.

I mean, he really

has a wonderful life.

He has.

Can I just ask?

With there being two hats, should you not say they rather than he?

I agree, they need two names.

Like Janus 1 and Janus 2, maybe?

Yeah.

That'll do.

Okay, well, just rip up these notes then.

Well, they...

No, you're right, because

they have different personalities.

You're right, yeah, yeah.

Alright.

Well, anyway, between them, these two little guys who share a shell,

they have a skateboard, which I love.

Do they?

Yeah.

Isn't that cool?

That is really cool.

Do they...

Someone gave them that, right?

They didn't go out and make their way to the shop and say...

Yeah, he or they get Valium rubbed on their heads every day.

That's nice.

Vaseline.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

You do not want to get those two mixed up.

So,

I've got Valium here, but I think I just wrote that as a kind of wish fulfillment thing.

They have Vaseline because their heads bump into each other too much.

And why would Valium prevent chafing, as I've also put in the notes?

This is why you're always in so much pain.

I'm intelligent.

I'm depressed, but I'm incredibly smooth.

But yeah, and also, like, he does have a lot of, or they both have a lot of issues in terms of general lifestyle.

So they're 25 years old.

These tortoises can live for quite a long time.

If they were in the wild, they'd probably be dead by now.

One of the ways that tortoises, as we know, survive in the wild is if a predator comes in, they can back up into their shell.

But there's only space for one of the heads to go back in, which would just leave the other one hanging out.

Unfortunately, he's got a skateboard, so he can make good his exit.

I was just thinking maybe if they cover him in Vaseline he might be able to slip in there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They chuck valium at the predator.

This is a mutation, right?

Where you have two heads instead of one.

If it's a mutation, then that means, because he's 25 years old now, it means we have all missed the time when there was a genuine genuine teenage mutant hero tortoise

owning a skateboard.

Oh my god.

I know.

And he was 25, so he's now a mid-20s mutant hero.

He's old for a skateboard, really.

25 years ago.

On the skateboard, it's not putting one foot down to propel itself, right?

It's just someone's pushing it around.

I think his helpers are pushing him around, yeah.

Yeah, because I visited the embalmed body of Jeremy Bentham, and they said, oh, he's got a skateboard.

And I saw the skateboard.

It's not a skateboard.

Hang on, I mean, he's definitely not riding that skateboard.

Why has he even got that?

Oh, because when he rides out of his box to get vacuumed each year, they need to.

But actually, doesn't he have two heads, Jeremy Bentham?

He does have two heads.

Yeah, yeah.

He has like his real head is hidden away, and he's got like a fake head.

The sort of a wax head.

Wow.

Oh my god, we've blown this right open.

Two-headed tortoise.

Jeremy Bentham is a tortoise.

And so, what?

They just skate him out to hoover him.

Yeah, when transporting him, they put him on what they call the skateboard.

I imagine it's the same with.

To be honest, I didn't know that they hoover Jeremy Bentham once a year.

We've mentioned it in the show, I think.

Yeah, yeah.

They have a little vacuum and they hoover him.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, tortoises.

So, yeah, so Janus is a tortoise, and it is quite rare, but if you go online, you can see lots of tortoises that have two heads.

Probably the second most common animal to have two heads.

I think snakes, slightly more common, but yeah,

you're gonna get any animal with two heads.

If it's not a snake, it's probably a tortoise.

Snakes all over the place.

Bite carefully, as it's called.

One in a hundred thousand snakes.

That's loads.

Yeah.

And they, again, they never really live that long unless they're in captivity, because partly because of this whole the heads argue with each other thing so in snakes it's a serious problem um if they like one head will fight with the other for food and they'll end up kind of no one gets it and they exhaust so much energy fighting with each other that they starve to death and what's crazy is it goes into the one stomach well it depends some of them have two and some i have one but yeah but of the ones that have one yeah exactly the two heads will be fighting not knowing never having studied anatomy and realizing it's so sad because it feels like they could um lady and the tramp out all their meals.

Yeah.

And that would be very charming.

But I know, because I think that is incest, isn't it?

Definitely.

I think something else has to happen for incest, really.

Yeah, that is hard.

Yeah, the thing about that is.

Wait, just kissing is not incest?

Dad's interested suddenly.

We found a very interesting philosophical question, which is: if a two-headed snake has a wank, is it incest?

What is it using to have a wank?

Oh!

There's plenty of tail there, I think, could do the job.

Oh, puts the tail up?

Yeah, yeah.

The other thing is...

We need to take it to the dick vet to find out I guess.

So

snakes, tortoises, Tasmanians are the other people with two heads

commonly.

Apparently there's a thing,

in the olden days there's a thing in Australia that all Tasmanians had two heads.

Really?

And the reason being that they had a problem with a deficiency of iodine, and so would often have goiters.

So people in Tasmania would often have goiters.

What is a goiter?

So a goiter is like a growth on your neck.

And it can get really big, and it can almost look like a second head.

But actually, what would happen is they would have some surgery, and so they would have like a scar on their neck.

And then during the war, a lot of Tasmanians would go to the front line.

line and they'd meet Australians and they'd say, well, where's your other head?

Because they saw a scar and thought that a head had grown there.

I believe these days it's not so common to be iodine deficient in Tasmania.

And it probably wasn't 100%.

But I do think the ones that did it, because they are Aussie, so they've got a sense of humor.

I assume they drew a face on their goiters and

went around freaking everyone out.

That's true.

I found this through at QI actually.

In 2019, a two-headed rattlesnake called Double Dave was born.

Do you know why it's called Double Dave?

Because it's got two heads.

No, it was found by two scientists called Dave.

That's amazing.

You know Nicholas Cage?

No.

Who's that?

He was Ming Campbell's predecessor as leader of the lib Dems.

No, he was Nick Cage.

He once spent $80,000 on a two-headed snake because he'd had a dream.

He dreamed of a two-headed eagle, which you can't get.

And so

he went on eBay and searched the two-headed eagle.

Exactly, yeah.

And this is why it came up.

Yeah, weirdly, you can't get a two-headed eagle.

As in, no one's ever seen a two-headed eagle, even though it's the symbol of loads of countries and it's a big thing, and that just doesn't happen as far as we know.

Anyway, and he got so freaked out that he gave it away to a museum because they fought.

And he said, I had to put a spatula between the two heads to feed them.

Is that where he got the idea for face-off?

It's quite a different plot, but there it is.

Once these Hollywood types rework a script

I'm gonna have to move us on very soon

so you can you can get Janus cats cats with two faces which I think is the correct use of the term Janus because Janus had two faces not two heads so I actually think that this tortoise here they fucked up.

Misnomer.

It does have two faces as well in fairness.

Okay it does have two faces you're right but it's it's not how you describe describe it, is it?

If you were saying that tortoise is going to be a little bit more.

You can't look forward into one year and look back into another year, like exactly.

Because that would be so shit if you had a two-faced tortoise and one of the faces just looked backwards into your shell the whole time.

Chanus and Anus, I guess.

Oh, my God.

Well, that's just Anus.

Lovely lipstick, Anus.

It is time for our final fact of the show and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Jägermeister was originally drunk to stop people from feeling sick.

How many do you have to have?

It's about 12.

Okay.

So no, it was originally a digestif.

And in fact, some Germans still call it liver glue.

And the idea is that you would take it after a large meal and it would settle your stomach.

And it was always taken at room temperature, and that was the only reason you would have it.

And it was invented by a guy called Carl Mast, and it was his nephew Gunther who came up with the idea that you could take it cold and have it as a social drink and get hammered with it.

I haven't thought of it as something you had cold.

Just whenever you have Jägermeister, you are so unaware of the temperature of the drink.

Excuse me, can I send back this Jägermeister, please?

It's a few degrees off.

I think it's corked.

Yes.

But yeah, Jägermeister, invented in Germany by this guy called Kurt Mast.

He was the son of a vinegar maker, and he decided he would go into liquor, so he invented loads of types of drinks.

Burning Love was his biggest one until he came up with this 56 herb recipe for the Jägermeister.

Do we believe the 56 herbs in?

Because they sort of are open about 10 of of the herbs.

But then they claim that it's definitely 56, but the rest are all secret.

And it's secret, they've got a chief, sort of chief bartender.

He's called the brandmeister at the moment.

His name is Willie Schein, and he says that he...

Come on, grow up, guys.

He says, Willie Shine says he is legally only allowed to discuss 11 of the 56 ingredients.

Wow, I know.

So does that mean if you ever talk to him about licorice or something, he's like, you can't say anything.

Yeah, he's like a a one-man guess who, but instead of guessing a person, you're guessing ingredients.

Isn't it amazing, though?

Because I know, I guess, back in the day, you know, Coca-Cola has the secret ingredient, or KFC, you know, the secret ingredient.

Like, these days, are you allowed to get away just saying there's a magical something in there?

No, I don't think you're allowed to.

No, I've got an allergy.

A secret ingredient?

Get the fuck out.

I thought it was.

It's still allowed.

Yeah, it's still allowed.

I guess maybe alcoholic drinks seem to be a loophole.

I've never looked at the back of a bottle of Jeeper.

No one has ever read the back of a bottle of Jaegermeister.

Yeah, it was quite a sort of a stiff, like a drink for kind of stiff types, wasn't it?

Before it was loosened up.

It was basically well-to-do German people who drunk it.

And then I think it was in the 1970s there was a businessman called Sidney Frank who realized in America that the only people drinking this thing were these well-to-do German kind of immigrants and for some reason thought I reckon I can make this huge and he completely transformed its reputation.

He hired a a lot of Jaegerettes and Jaeger dudes, I think, came later.

Jaegerettes are scantily clad women who tend to be just rolled out whenever you need to sell anything in life.

But he

sent the sort of scantily clad Jaegerettes around the bars of the US and it went huge.

Yeah, and one of the things that he did was kind of spread rumors about Jaeger Meister.

So there had actually been a guy who had been up, I think, for attempted murder or something, and he said that he'd had something called liquid valium.

Actually,

stop it.

He actually had solid Vaseline.

It was solid Vaseline.

But then later on, a bar in New Orleans started selling this Jaegermeister as if it was called liquid valium as a publicity thing.

So it was like maybe it had caused this murder or this attempted murder.

Just on sorry, just on the Jagerettes thing, very quickly before we move on from that, I was once in a bar in Budapest, and someone came around, a sort of young woman came around who was

like a kind of Jaeger, but she wasn't selling shots of alcohol, she was selling carrots.

Really?

And I got one, and it was like a quid for a carrot, which in the supermarket, which in the supermarket is crazy, but next to a glass of wine, you think that's a good investment, isn't it?

That's reasonable.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I swear to God, that was the best carrot I had ever eaten.

It was about a foot long.

It was clean.

It was

crunchy.

It was shaved.

It had been shaved or peeled, as we call it.

Oh yeah, that's the weird one.

You paid a quid for a carrot.

I don't regret it for a second.

And I looked around the button.

Every other man in the room had also just standing there with a carrot.

Wow.

I've never seen this in any other bowl or any other country or anything like that.

That's because it was a one-off.

I have no question in my mind that you were part of a scientific study setting out to prove that men are so stupid they will literally buy anything at any price if an attractive woman sells it to them.

So what?

So what?

Apparently, I'm also a mug when the Sprout girl came round a couple of minutes later.

That was a fucking lovely sprout, it only cost a fiver.

Jaegemeister, the word itself,

it means master hunter.

And

it's really interesting, the story.

So if you look at a Jaegemeister bottle, you'll see there's a stag on it, and in between, there's a Christian cross going across it.

The crucifix is there, and sometimes it's depicted when you see pictures of where he took this idea from with Jesus on the cross itself.

And what it was was it was a guy who eventually became a saint, Saint Hubertus.

He was out and he was hunting, and he suddenly saw a stag come around the corner.

He was meant to be in church, but he wasn't.

And he saw a stag come around the corner, and the stag had a sort of crucifix, just a cross in between glowing through its horns.

And he had this sudden conversation with this stag where the stag was like, Dude, what are you doing?

I was thinking of the yoga dudes there.

I assume that's how they talk.

Where he basically

basically said, You need to be more ethical in your hunting.

You need to make sure that if you're going to kill a stag, it's one that's older or maybe sickly.

Oh, do it, you know.

And he sort of introduced ethicalness into it.

So he became a saint, Saint Hubertus.

He's the patron saint of hunters, mathematicians, opticians, chicken roasters.

Could you find any evidence of the chicken roasters?

Because I couldn't find any evidence of where they're in the room.

It's a bit left field, isn't it?

It's sort of just there was left over and they weren't.

What is a chicken roaster?

It's not even a thing.

But rotisserie, you see sometimes you see there's a counter at the supermarket which has a rotisserie.

You just thought if you're saint of the chicken roasters, you'll be saint of just all the meat roasters.

It's just very expensive.

No, Andy once paid 20 euros for a rotisserie chicken.

That was an error.

Another thing that he did was cured rabies.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

What, just sort of

people or animals, because both can get it.

Both can be cured by St.

Hubert's.

Oh, great.

St.

Hubert's key,

which is a key that I think priests would keep them, wouldn't they?

And sometimes normal, like, shops would have a St.

Hubert's key, and you would, it was like an iron bar and you heat it up really.

It was a defibrillator.

It's exactly like that.

Yeah, yeah.

Effectively, what you were doing was you were heating up the key and you were branding the person with the key.

So if they were bitten by a dog that might have rabies, you would immediately heat up the key, put it on.

And the idea is that the burning would sterilize your.

Well, I think the idea was that it was a magic key.

Yeah,

it turns out that actually it might have worked because of the sterilization of the heat.

It's possible.

And you would have cauterized the wounds, so no bacteria could have got in.

So it might have worked slightly.

They got lucky.

It's always one in 1,000 of these bullshit magical cures happen to also work.

Yeah.

Jaegermeister, back to that.

Yeah.

Jaegermeister do not like Jaeger bombs.

Yeah.

Just for the streamers, there was a gasp in the room.

They can't believe it.

So Jaeger bombs is Jaegermeister and Red Bull and you drop one and the other and it's great.

And so

they didn't invent it and I think they have slightly distanced themselves from it.

The Jaegermeister firm.

They say they have to promote responsible drinking and the marketing director who's a woman called Nicole Goodwin she said you will never see us actively support or promote Jaeger bombs.

That's very much driven by our customers.

And they recommend you have it with ginger beer.

And a carrot.

And an ice.

And they've signed up to the Portman Group, haven't they?

The Portman Group is a thing that encourages responsible drinking that a lot of sort of alcohol companies sign up for.

But they have admitted that it's helped.

So they don't like it, but you know, they're not going to stop you from doing it, I think.

So I mentioned Gunther earlier, who was the nephew of Karl Maast.

And he, in the 70s, came up with an advertising campaign which was one for all.

So, like I said, it was quite an upper-class kind of German drink, but he wanted to get normal Germans drinking it.

So, the idea was it would be a poster, and you would have a normal German, and they would just look like it could be a man, a woman, young, old, anything, but it'd be completely unknown.

And they would say, I drink Jägemeister because,

and then it would give an excuse.

So, and they were

a reason.

An excuses a bit differently.

An excuse is what you have to say the next morning.

I drank all that Jägermeister because.

Well, for instance, I drink Jägemeister because as a teacher I have to go to school my whole life.

That's so good.

Yeah.

One of them was, I drink Jaegemeister because my husband always calls me Erika even though my name is Heidi.

These are genuinely adverts for Jägermeister.

That's incredible.

There's just

one more thing.

The factory that makes Jägermeister is in is on Jägermeister Strauss, weird coincidence,

in Wolfenbottel in Germany.

And an independent journalist went to see what goes on there and stayed in the Jägermeister guesthouse where you have Jaeger Meister in the mini bar, obviously.

And he went to visit Jaegermeister HQ, and you're told that you're not allowed to take a phone in because the alcohol fumes in there are so thick that they might spark an explosion.

Apparently,

a literal Jaeger bomb.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter F.

James.

At James Harkin.

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

You can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Do check them out.

Also, check out the link to the new improved club, Fish.

It's got all, thank you.

Yeah, it's a very exciting place.

We've got lots of bonus content going up where we dick about behind the scenes and just think of new fun things to try out.

Also, it's ad-free, so if you want that, get that.

Otherwise, just stay here if you're listening at home at this very same place that you get us because we'll be back again next week.

London Podcast Festival.

Thank you so much for having us.

That was awesome.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.