421: No Such Thing As An Elephant On A Chessboard

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Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

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Hi, everybody.

Just before we start this week's show, we wanted to let you know we have a very exciting guest on.

It's none other than the undercover economist himself, Tim Harford.

Tim Harford is a brilliant writer, thinker.

He makes books.

He makes radio shows.

He makes books.

He's a bookmaker.

He's a bookmark.

He turns trees into paper.

He's bound a million books.

It's so amazing.

If you've heard of Messi or 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy or The Undercover Economist, all of these books, they're by him.

They are, and he's got a podcast called Cautionary Tales, which I would massively recommend.

I've just been listening to a bunch of them.

They are brilliant and true life stories which teach you things about how humans behave.

I've been listening to one about the mummy's curse.

There's an excellent one on Hansel and Gretel, which is really amazing and they often have a little twist at the end and really well told.

So check out that podcast.

But first of all, listen to this one.

On with the show.

On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, the weekly podcast coming to you this week from four top-secret, underground, undisclosed locations.

My name is Anna Tchinski, and I am sitting here today with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and our very special guest, Tim Harford.

And once again, we've gathered around our microphones with our four favorite facts in the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Tim.

My fact is that in 1939, a young doctor at Boston City Hospital went on a scurvy-producing diet to see what would happen.

In May 1940, his fellow doctors staged an intervention after his skin started to bleed from his follicles and an old post-operative scar reopened.

Wow.

Lovely.

Why did, because people sort of knew what happened when he got scurvy at that point, right?

Why was he doing this?

They did.

So he survived, by the way.

So I read the medical paper that he and a colleague wrote after this experiment.

So the puzzle was, I mean, people had been suffering from scurvy and worrying about scurvy for hundreds of years and kind of discovering cures and then forgetting cures.

It's all very fascinating, but by the 1930s, they'd figured out that scurvy is caused by not having enough vitamin C.

But the puzzle was, if you deprive people of vitamin C,

it very quickly leaves the body.

So after a week or so, you've got no vitamin C.

But then everything's fine.

And people don't actually develop any symptoms for weeks or even months.

And so this guy, his name was John Crandon, and his colleagues were just trying to figure out: well, how long can you go?

And what happens?

And

what order do these terrible symptoms appear in?

And he said, well, no one else is going to do it, so I'm going to do it.

And so he did.

And yeah, he was absolutely fine for two or three months.

And then I read

the description of what happened.

He started on October the 19th, 1939.

His scurvy-producing diet was: actually, it sounds okay.

It's eggs, cheese, bread, butter, chocolate, and coffee.

Gets a bit boring after

genuinely, that is my diet.

You can add some red wine in there, and then that's basically it.

After we finish this, you're really going to start wanting some orange juice to add to that, James, I think.

So he says, he says, after about four and a half months, hyperkeratotic papules had developed on the buttocks.

Now, that doesn't sound good at all.

I was going to Google hyperkeratotic buttock papules, and then I decided I wasn't going to do that.

Don't worry, Tim.

I've been eating nothing but chocolate and bread for the last six months.

I can tell you exactly what they are.

Oh, please don't.

The listener, James, has just taken his trousers down and shown us his buttocks, and it is disgusting.

It's really, I'm not going to be able to take that image out of my mind now.

And then after five months, he started, yeah, just started bleeding around the hair follicles on his legs.

He got incredibly tired.

He used to run on a treadmill.

And by the end of this, he could do 50 meters on a treadmill.

It took him 16 seconds to do 50 meters, which is not very fast.

And then

that was too much.

And he was quite a young man.

And at six months,

they made a surgical incision basically just to see whether it would heal.

And it didn't.

And I think they probably shouldn't have been surprised at that because he had a scar from a 15-year-old appendectomy that was reopening by this point.

And then they said, all right, you've done enough you've done enough and um and they started giving him intravenous vitamin c and he and he was fine that's so scientific that's so scientific to say well your scar has your old scar has reopened but just in case we're going to have to make another scar and see if that also fails to heal like that's that's so impressive the scientific method i think is it i i think so yeah i i find that one of the most uh kind of morbid things about scurvy is the whole wounds reopening.

It takes you back in time, but in just a way that you really don't want to go back in time.

The idea that these ancient and bone breaks re-break, don't they?

Because I think you start making collagen, which basically holds your body together.

And so, I don't know, the idea of all these ancient wounds you'd completely forgotten about reopening is pretty freaking.

All your exes ring up and break up with you all over again.

It's another unknown symptom.

It's really mad that it's two or three months that you're fine for, because I guess that explains why in the age of sail, sailors got scurvy, because it was just long enough to get really, really, really far away from the nearest lemon.

As in,

if you got it within a day of not having any vitamin C, then everyone would immediately come back to port and say, well, we die at sea, so we're not going to go.

It's quite cool.

It's almost like a lemon detector, isn't it?

You can tell how far away you are from a lemon just by how much blood is coming out of your paws.

Not very well.

You can only tell to within three months away.

I mean, it's not that accurate.

There are easier ways to detect lemons.

And actually, it's...

Are there?

It's difficult.

This is, I mean, the reason I got interested in this is because I discovered that Scott of the Antarctic suffered from scurvy.

It's controversial as to whether his final mission was affected by scurvy, but certainly earlier missions were, and some of the people he went to, tried to get to the South Pole with, were affected by scurvy.

And I thought, hang on a minute.

He's a British Navy captain.

And didn't the British Navy figure all this out in 1747?

James Lind famously did this, this, the first ever randomized controlled trial, people say, and discovered that you could prevent scurvy with lemons.

And then, and then they started calling British sailors limeys because they used to have lime juice.

And so, what happened?

How could the British Navy forget this?

And it is partly because it's not a very good lemon detector.

It turns out there's vitamin C in almost everything.

You have to work quite hard.

I mean, James is doing this hard work.

You have to work quite hard to completely deprive yourself of vitamin C.

So people get confused.

Basically, the signals get very mixed.

And what Andy was saying about the these sea voyages, another reason the British Navy started getting confused is because they switched to steamships.

And so they were still taking a remedy for scurvy that turns out wasn't working.

But because they were all on steamships, steamships travel quite quickly.

They have to refuel.

Every time you refuel, you take on fresh food.

And so they were sticking to this cure for scurvy they thought was working.

It wasn't working.

It didn't matter because there wasn't time for anybody to develop scurvy and then suddenly these arctic and antarctic explorers all started coming down with scurvy and everybody got monumentally confused at that point so the lemons and limes don't really work that well is that what we're saying So well, there's two things.

One is that limes, although they're more acidic, have less vitamin C in.

So they still work.

They used to be using Sicilian lemons and they're really juicy and got loads of vitamin C.

And then they switched for geopolitical reasons to West Indian limes and that they're less effective.

But the other thing is vitamin C is destroyed really easily.

It's destroyed by contact with copper and a lot of these ships had copper vessels.

It's destroyed by contact with sunlight.

It's destroyed by heat.

And so you had this sort of old lime juice that was going a bit rancid and there wasn't any vitamin C in it anymore, but people were still taking it.

And so then when they started taking lime juice on Arctic expeditions and it didn't work, they lost faith and they started there and at the same time there's germ theory being developed and they started going, oh, maybe scurvy has nothing to do with lemons and limes at all Maybe it's to do with some kind of germ that we can't see which of course was Completely up the the wrong tree it's just crazy when you read about the history of scurvy how early on they suggested that citrus was a cure and how many hundreds of years they skirt around it and skirt around it and sort of just like yeah I think it is and then go actually maybe not it's so frustrating because it's so easy to sort out once you definitely know but I found you know it's really quick you know Scott one of the people on his expeditions who got scurvy was Shackleton, which I didn't know that they did an expedition together.

Yeah, and there was a bit of bad blood.

They didn't like each other.

That's quite a rivalry.

Indeed, there seems to be a bit of a conspiracy theory that maybe Shackleton wasn't that ill, and Scott sort of kicked him off the expedition because he wasn't really getting along with him.

Shackleton was like the fun, spontaneous one, wasn't he?

And Scott was a bit more of the serious bore.

Really?

Well, so Scott said, oh, you're definitely, you're far too ill.

You've definitely got scurvy.

And Shackleton was like, well, I haven't even got any hyperkinetic papules.

The point where Shackleton pulled down his pants to display his buttons to tell her, look at this, and that's when he got chucked off the expedition.

There we go.

Um, guinea pigs get scurvy, do they?

Yeah, because that means if I eat guinea pig, then I would not get any vitamin C, do you think?

I think if you eat a healthy guinea pig, you'll be fine.

Because I know, James, that as well as the diet, you eat.

I have eaten guinea pig, I'll just

but you occasionally have guinea pig mints on your bread

with your coffee.

No, because they can't make their own vitamin C.

And we can't do that either.

And we're all, there's this weird club of crap animals, including humans, which can't make their own vitamin C.

So it's fruit bats, guinea pigs, some of the apes, and humans are the ones that can't do it.

Every other animal doesn't get scurvy because they can just generate vitamin C, I guess, from internally.

Somehow they're generating it.

Yeah.

Like, well, like, we generate, you know, we basically what a vitamin is, is the things that we need from our diet because we can't generate them and everything else we can generate.

And I suppose these animals can but maybe we should form that club with those guys like a really sad reject club like what are those people what's that club called of sort of men who've decided that they've abandoned women because they hate them incels this could be the new incels yeah us fruit bats guinea pigs i'm just a bit worried the guinea pigs won't let me in because i've just admitted that i once ate some guinea pig

it turned out to be really important so people were being confused as anna says just getting confused about scurvy and what causes it and how to cure it for centuries and they keep sort of figuring it out and then not figuring it out and getting confused and forgetting.

And then finally, in 1907, these two Norwegian scientists, Holst and Frühlich, figure out that guinea pigs also get scurvy, which is this absolute breakthrough moment.

And then

how can you tell that a guinea pig has scurvy?

Is it because it can only run 50 meters on its little bulb?

That must be it.

That and the papules.

I think it's those two things.

Once they figured that out, it was easy to clear up this massive confusion about whether scurvy was caused by some kind of toxin or some kind of bacteria or whether it was a deficiency.

And they figured it all out.

And then they turned around and they told Fritjof Nansen, who's a great Norwegian polar explorer and a mentor to both Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen.

And Nansen said, yeah, no, I don't believe any of that.

You can't learn anything from guinea pigs.

Trust me, it's fresh seal meat you need.

And so he basically told them to bug her off.

And both Amundsen and Scott then went to the Antarctic a year later and

Scott's whole crew probably got scurvy.

If there was ever a lesson to listen to the scientists, people, it really is the history of scurvy.

It's wild how much people ignored them.

So the reason that this is all puzzling is because

the story that randomized controlled trials nerds tell is that in 1747, this guy James Lind, who was a surgeon on the HMS Salisbury, figured it all out.

That's the story they tell.

And he did sort of run a controlled trial.

He gave two, he had a whole bunch of sailors who had scurvy.

He gave two of them a quart of cider a day.

Sounds quite nice, but it's not going to work.

He gave two of them 75 drops a day of sulfuric acid.

He gave two of them vinegar, gave two of them a paste of garlic, mustard, horseradish, and aromatic plant extracts, which sounds like it might be nice.

But none of that worked, but he gave the last two two oranges oranges and a lemon each day for six days.

And at that point, they made a complete recovery.

Unfortunately, that was the ship's entire stock of lemons.

So

it was unfortunate for everybody else.

But the weird thing is that even James Lind, I mean, you would have thought, okay, brilliant.

You ran a randomized trial, you figured it all out, perfect.

But then he published this book all about how to cure scurvy, which had this write-up of this trial, but had loads of other stuff about, oh, like, maybe it's excess sweating, or maybe it's to do with ventilation, or this or that.

It's the whole, who, can say?

I mean, it was bizarre the conclusion he came to.

And in the end, he said, Anyway, my cure for scurvy is lemon juice that's been boiled into a syrup, preserved under olive oil.

And it turns out that doesn't work because if you boil lemon juice into a syrup, you've destroyed all the vitamin C.

So he runs this randomized trial.

He doesn't understand what he's done.

And then the conclusion he draws is this completely ineffective remedy.

And there you go.

That's science, 1747 science.

I just can't believe

one of the groups was given sulfuric acid, which feels like, you know, you could literally give the other group American cheese and white bread, and they're going to do better than the group you gave sulfuric acid to, sure.

Yes.

Throatless Jimmy, we call him.

Yeah.

I really like the old theory about how to cure scurvy, which was to bury yourself in soil.

I think that was such a good idea.

It's such a, you know, it really does make sense because you were getting scurvy when you were away from Earth, right?

You were

on the water.

you were thousands of miles from Aleman, you're going to get sick.

And so what was obviously the thing that you were missing?

You were missing dry land.

And so they used to just bury people up to the neck in soil and think that this would make them better.

So funny.

It's such a good idea.

And what they would do is they would take boxes of earth with them on the voyages.

And if someone got sick, they would bury them on the ship in the earth.

There was one captain called Thomas Melville who found that it actually worked and it made people feel better.

But he was feeding people vegetables while they were in the earth all the time.

So

probably the earth thing though.

It's so good because it means you can also, as well as getting vegetables, you can disguise your ship as a small island.

And so you can sneak up on other ships undetected because they just see a load of soil.

Well, they see a load of soil, don't they?

You know.

Yeah, clever.

Get a donkey,

a little windmill.

Palm tree, maybe?

Yes.

I'm just thinking my idea of like

my idea of desert islands is more like palm trees and hammocks, not donkeys and windmills.

A donkey and a windmill.

And that famous cartoon trope of someone on a desert island.

How can you tell they're on a desert island?

There's a donkey and a windmill.

Yeah, it's a classic.

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Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that there are more people alive today who have been world chess champion than there are people skillful enough to carve a knight for use in a world championship chess match.

Amazing.

What are the numbers?

What are we talking about?

Well, the numbers are 10.

Who can do the night?

This is according to a video which I saw, which was posted by Business Insider called Why Championship Chess Sets Are So Expensive.

As part of that, they said there are only 10 people alive who can make the little horses that you use in chess.

And so I thought, I wonder how that compares with people who have won the world championship.

And I went onto the onto Wikipedia and looked at the list of the people who are still alive.

And there's more than 10.

There's a dozen, I think.

How good do these things have to be?

I mean, because I would have thought it's quite easy to carve a knight.

Most professional whittlers I know, which is a lot,

could probably do a passable chess night.

What's so special about these ones?

Well, you take all of the whittlers.

Some of them can do it, some of them can't, and you go down and down and down, and eventually you get the 10.

Yeah, you've got it, Andy.

You can see where I'm going there.

No, they're made.

These knights are made in a place called Amritsar, which is in India.

A very specific factory makes them.

They only make 250 per year.

One night to kind of whittle it down takes two hours and it takes five to six years to learn how to make this night.

All the other pieces take about four to five months to make.

And so if you are to buy a very, very high-end chess set, the knights are worth approximately 50% of the entire set.

The value comes from just the knights.

That's what this is.

So funny.

And it's about $500 for one of these sets.

I think I read the same piece, Jones.

It says this: that the blocks of wood that they use for the pieces were once large trunks, dried for three to six months, cut down and shaped to the necessary size, which does make it sound like they're using one

large tree trunk.

Yeah,

knock down a giant redwood for one pawn.

They are really beautiful to watch them being carved on the lathe.

I mean, it's a little bit like watching pottery.

It's that kind of beautiful, sort of hypnotic view of of this thing taking shape.

But I have to say, it's all nonsense, isn't it?

Because

I saw this short film and at one point they say, oh yeah, it helps these grandmasters to not make any mistakes.

That's just nonsense.

Grandmasters, they can play blindfold.

I mean, you literally don't actually need the chessboard or the chess pieces.

They can play blindfold.

What is this?

I don't know what you're talking about.

The video, I've drunk the Kool-Aid and I believe this.

They say that because if you don't make the chess pieces properly and the king isn't the tallest piece, then you might accidentally move one of the other pawns, maybe thinking it's the king.

Maybe or if they're not weighted correctly, they might fall over and you accidentally kind of resign your king.

Okay, okay, it's boxed.

No, no, no, it's true.

No, the thing about chess players is that they're very stupid people.

James, that falling over thing, I've read that too.

It's that if you accidentally knock your piece over and then you press, you know, because they're playing timed against each other in some matches.

So you knock a piece over and then you press the timer to move it onto your opponent's turn and then you pick your piece back up, you can be disqualified from the whole match because you're technically eating into your opponent's time there.

And that has happened recently.

There was a game in 2016 where a grandmaster...

Very good chess player lost because he dropped his queen and then did that.

Really?

Really?

And

we're claiming that these 10 people who can make the knights are the only people who can make a knight that can successfully stand up.

If you can't feel the bridle on the knight is positioned correctly, it'll completely throw off your game.

That's why Kasparov lost against deep blue.

There's a slight discrepancy in the reins.

I want to see the chess grandmaster's rant when he, like sort of a tennis player with a broken racket, when he seizes a knight waving at the umpire.

What the hell is this shit?

I would love to see these artisans, these craftspeople from Amritsar.

I would love to see them wrestle with classic Prussian wargame chess crossovers because there are some amazing kind of chess mutations from a few hundred years ago that I think would pose a real challenge.

So, any of you have heard of Groß's Konigspiel, which is a 1664 chess variant.

Well, I mean, you can play with a number of players.

There's a six-player variant.

The board looks a bit like a snowflake.

But the eight-player variant, I think, would give.

Everyone gets very sensitive in that game, don't they?

Yeah, no one wins.

It's just a tie at the end, regardless.

so the eight player variant has 240 pieces it has uh pieces including the king the marshal the colonel the captain the chancellor the herald the chaplain the knight the courier the adjutant bodyguards, Halbardiers, and there are private soldiers and 240 pieces in total.

But that is nothing.

The Duke of Rutland's chess variant has the concubine, which is a rook-knight mix.

And even that pales into insignificance compared to the game that was developed by Johann Christian Ludwig Helvig.

He was alive in the sort of late 1700s, early 1800s.

He was a successful academic.

He taught maths to Gauss, the most brilliant mathematician of all time.

Actually, in fairness, he sort of said to Gauss, to be honest, you don't need to bother turning up to the lectures because you seem to have it all sorted.

He collected so many insects, it formed the heart of the University of Berlin's Museum of Entomology.

and his chess variant, which is called Kriegspiel, which means wargame, it includes the elephant, which is a rook-knight combo, the jumping bishop, which is a bishop-knight, the jumping queen, not to be confused with the dancing queen of Aberfay, that's a knight-queen.

It contains 40 pawns, four rooks, four bishops, 30 knights.

work on that one in Amoritza, six queens, five jumping queens, eight jumping bishops, and seven elephants.

And the border's up to 2,000 squares.

So does that partridge in the pear tree make?

That's the hardest to carve, actually, the partridge.

That is absolutely amazing.

Do you think he invented this amazingly complicated chess game?

Because his main job was teaching gals how to do maths.

And he's like, I have so much spare time now.

I might as well collect every single insect in the world.

And

it does take forever, a game.

I think it does.

I mean, I suppose it was before TV, wasn't it?

But it feels like there's no need to make chess more complicated.

It's already quite challenging for most people.

So there was this movement to make chess more like actual war.

Because chess is quite stylised, really.

I mean, you're not going to learn that much about military tactics from playing chess.

So in, I mean, this is a Prussian thing.

They're trying to teach their young officers how to make decisions on the battlefield.

And so there's this tendency towards more and more...

complex versions of chess and in the end they kind of went to these war games or role-playing games but you've got different pieces,

you've got different terrains, and they're trying to train people how to make military decisions.

It's good.

I think it's really good because I do think that war game exercises are like they are good up to a point, but they're never enough concubines.

It's not realistic without the concubines, you know.

Or elephants.

It's the elephants and concubines that really make a war.

Yeah.

I thought Chancellor was a weird one as well.

What does he say?

Yeah.

Like he just does some photo option that takes 20% of all your money.

Well, the thing is about chess, it didn't used to be military at all.

So, and I don't think it should be.

It used to be sexy.

This was back, and actually, the person who ruined it and turned it into a military game initially was the queen, sadly.

So, we've talked before about how the queen was introduced at various moments in history in various different countries from about like 1400 onwards, 1300 onwards.

But instead of a queen before that, you had the vizier as in the royal, as in Jafar.

And

the vizier couldn't move as broadly and widely as the queen, it was much more limited, and it made chess a much slower game.

And so, I was reading that back in medieval times, it was a completely gender-equal game.

Women and men played an equal amount, and it was more a thing you'd have and play throughout a day or at a soiree over drinks and chats.

And it became really associated with romance and sex, and because there were lots of stories of people falling in love over a game of chess, you know, opponents would fall in love.

In 1400, there was a famous book at the time called The Edifying Book of Erotic Chess, which sort of talked about.

Yeah, is that why we call it porn?

It is, yeah.

That's correct.

That's why they're all naked if you look closely at the porns.

But yeah, then the queen came on board and it became very martial and competitive and serious, and it was thought to be unsuitable for women.

Do you know the rules, the ten rules of whittling?

Have you memorized those, everyone?

I've only got the first four.

Sorry.

You know, 40%.

It's just about a pass.

This is according to master carver Chris Lubkerman, who actually has the Guinness World Record for what he describes as the smallest rooster in the world on his YouTube channel.

What's another word for rooster?

I just can't think of any.

Because I'm pretty sure I have that record.

I wondered why I had to be over 18 to access that video.

It's not the smallest rooster.

It's not even a thing.

It's the smallest wooden carved thing in the world, according to Guinness.

It's a tiny little rooster, an eighth of an inch tall.

Anyway, he's an amazing whistler.

His 10 rules is rule number one, it's actually make sure your knife is sharp.

Rule number two, any guesses?

Don't run with

scissors.

You're actually close.

Your knife must be really sharp is rule number two.

What?

Is this fight?

Anna, is this fight club?

Could I just check?

Are the other eight rules also to do with sharp knives?

I'm so glad that you've saved me having to read all of the other rules.

They're all different ways of saying, before starting to carve, check to see if your knife is sharp.

If your knife is really sharp, it'll cut much better.

Rule number 10 is refer back to rules one to nine, which are indeed different ways of saying have a sharp knife.

Very good.

So Whittler's out there.

Take note.

Modern board games often have these little carved wooden pieces.

They're quite simple.

They look a little bit like if you carved

the sign for the gents' toilets, the little man.

If you carved those into wood and painted them different colours, that's what they look like.

Does anybody know what they're called?

There is a term of art for these things.

Wait, for modern chess pieces?

Well, modern board game pieces, not chess pieces, just board games in general.

I didn't even know what they were, but no, go on.

They're called meeples,

which is a sort of shortening of my people.

And so

meeples is a board game thing, and they're cafes based on Meeples and Meeples clubs and so on.

But I think.

There are like tiny, tiny cafes that Meeples attend.

Yeah, but there's one, I'm speaking to you from Oxford, and there's a cafe about two minutes' walk away from me called Thirsty Meeples.

You can go, you can have your hot chocolate or your cup of coffee, and you can play board games surrounded by meeples.

But I reckon

this whole kind of chess piece carving thing, it's basically a conspiracy by Big Meeple.

Because there is.

Wait, hang on.

tim

big meeples are just people aren't they

you could be right

no you're absolutely right you've you've caught me there anyway it's a conspiracy i'll figure out who's behind it sooner or later because there's a problem with a lot of games that if you're trying to make money selling the game The game's actually quite cheap and you could buy a game like chess.

It just costs a few pounds and then you could just play forever.

So how do you make money?

And so there's this increased focus on getting very, very fancy pieces, very expensive pieces.

So these guys in Amiritsar, this is an example of this, but I think the most striking example is Games Workshop.

So Games Workshop is this company that I remember from the 1980s when I was a young nerd, used to sell Dungeons and Dragons and used to sell all kinds of games.

And then they basically got taken over by a division of the,

inside the company called Citadel Miniatures, which just made Toy Soldiers and miniature figures.

And these miniature figures were so profitable that during lockdown, Games Workshop had a higher profit margin than Google.

And Henry Cavill, the actor who plays Superman, described these little miniature figures as plastic crack.

So all the money is in the pieces.

The money is not in the games.

That's true.

I mean, I used to collect those pieces.

And there were some which were simply unaffordable for me with my 14-year-old's budget.

Really?

I used to collect them a little bit, not much, but I was always really scared that I was going to die of lead poisoning because there was lead in them.

And I don't know, someone had once told told me that you could die of lead poisoning and these pieces had lead in them.

And I was just, I was convinced I was going to die.

No, I think.

Are you eating them?

No, but I was like, because I was painting them and stuff and I didn't want to lick my fingers.

Yeah, and you're close and you're huffing away, you know, huffing away over a little bit.

Paints used to be water-based.

Well, the paints still are water-based.

So you could, you'd sort of paint and then you'd kind of lick your paintbrush to get a fine point on the paintbrush.

And the paint is non-toxic, but the, but you're painting these lead figures.

So they probably were very dangerous.

but anyway they're all they're all made of plastic crack now as as uh as henry cavill puts it

you're all a bunch of crackheads it's the least cool kind of being a crackhead and being a crackhead isn't cool i want to emphasize but this is even less cool

it's so annoying when people tell you that

just like you were saying james with the the the the lead and the the paint and the danger thing i always remember my friend christopher when i was about i don't know 18 telling me that if i kept drawing on my hand i'd die yeah because the ink would get into my bloodstream somehow and i just wanted to say a big old fuck you to Christopher.

I've been writing notes on my hand since then and I'm as fit as a fiddle.

I don't know.

I think that explains something.

It could be like you conceal.

It could be a John Crandon thing.

It could be just a matter of time.

You're fine, you're fine, you're fine.

And then suddenly, bustules and

got dead.

Here's one thing on people who carve wood for a living.

Oh, yeah.

You guys, I'm sure, have heard of Grindling Gibbons.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Who hasn't?

But just for anyone who's.

It's a horrible thing you do to great apes, isn't it?

It's actually been outlawed in most places.

It's such a weird name.

You're right.

I think it was Dutch.

Basically, he's the most famous wood carver in history.

And I know that he's quite an obscure figure now, but in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, he was catnip.

All over the UK, because he worked in England mostly, there are these incredible wood carvings.

I've seen some of them

and they're amazing.

As in, he could do the fuzz on a peach, but carved in wood, you know?

Wow, really?

He's called the Michelangelo of wood by some people, by some people.

Yeah, where's mum?

He lives with.

Anyway, one of his crowning.

I mean, it's not fair.

Why would somebody who whittles be regarded as less admirable than someone like Michelangelo who works in stone?

It doesn't make exactly.

Get this.

Could Michelangelo do this?

I bet he couldn't.

In 1690, he made a wooden cravat.

I have a wooden bow tie.

It's completely different.

Is it?

You really deflated Andy there.

The bow tie is designed to be stiff.

Any chump can make a bow tie out of wood.

Just two cross bits of wood, nail it together.

Fine.

The cravat, the most flowing of all ice cream.

I quite like

how you just accepted that I have a wooden bow tie.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

That's a much better point.

What?

I just went to the place in Portugal where all the cork trees are, and they sell a lot of merch, and one of them is a bow tie, and I thought it'd be really cool, but I've never found the outfit to go with it, I must admit.

Weird, so weird.

You need the full wooden suit to go with it, don't you, really?

Well, James, if you tell you what, if you stand next to a donkey and you put on your wooden bow tie and you make it rotate, Anna will think you're a desert island.

okay it is time for fact number three and that is my fact my fact this week is that in ecuador cleaners are people who rub you down with stinging nettles

and

it's not us people pay for this service yeah people i think people pay maybe even more than cleaners in the uk uh which not even more than cleaners in the uk the highest paid bracket in the country

it's not possible and it's a travesty and your spin-off podcast, Our Cleaners Paid Too Much.

Um, I wish you all the best.

But uh, these are limpiadores in Ecuador, and they are spiritual cleaners.

But Olympia Dores just means a cleaner, like it's just the word for a cleaner.

But these are people who sort of cleanse your aura, and it's a deep-rooted tradition in traditional cultures, particularly up in the mountains.

A lot of people have this service, and it's you're rubbed up and down with stinging nettles, and it removes all your bad energy and bad luck.

And it hurts quite a lot.

And that just shows that it's working, apparently.

Is it like cleaners in the UK, where they come around, they sort of do an initial site visit of your aura, and they say, well, this aura probably is going to need about a couple of hours a week, I'd say.

Maybe two visits, actually, because it's prone to become disgusting quite fast.

Yeah.

Is it like cleaners in the UK, where when they whip you with nettles, they sometimes miss the corners?

Yeah.

And you're too embarrassed to say anything about it because you don't want to make a fuss.

So I just whip my own carnas.

Anyone else got any complaints about their cleaners?

This very first world problems little interaction we're having now?

No?

Okay.

So I think with these guys, they're professionals, the best ones, they don't miss any spots.

And in fact, they have an extra service where if you're actually ill and you go to get Olympia, a service, then they have a diagnostic tool first where you get rubbed with an egg and a dead black guinea pig and that did it die of scurvy diagnosis yeah what

egg and a dead black guinea pig yeah and somehow that diagnoses the problem then you should have inspect the

the egg is weird obviously the guinea pig

makes more sense so this nettle stuff might have could it have helped like nettles are they good for you or not i don't not not in this way um it's just a

traditional herbal treatment, very popular,

but it is still used quite widely.

So, even in hospitals in the big cities in Ecuador, apparently, doctors will let these limpia dores work alongside them.

And, you know, so the doctors will give the conventional treatment and then will accept that the patient will also ask for a rub down with the nettles.

I think it is good for you.

I think a little bit.

Yeah, I read something that if you rub nettles onto an arthritic thumb, the nettles will sting you, but you may get some relief from the arthritis.

There are quite a lot of of claims, yeah.

Is that um I don't know how much has been scientifically proven, but that's not to say it doesn't work.

There was a person who died of nettle stings.

I found one.

This was a tree nettle in New Zealand called Urtica ferrox.

Urtica is like the family of nettles.

And apparently there was a lightly clad hunter who died five hours after walking through a dense patch of nettles.

We don't really know what happened to him apart from that.

I guess it could be anaphylaxis.

You can get that through nettles.

But yeah.

And apparently, this nettle in New Zealand, according to Maori folklore, one of their kind of gods, Kupe, kind of used them to hinder pursuers when he stole their wives.

So he would steal their wives, he would run away, and he would throw down nettles so that people couldn't follow him.

I'm feeling more guilty about something I did at primary school.

I've actually never confessed this to anybody, but just between the four of us.

So a friend of mine, I've got very vague memories of this, but a friend of mine and I decided that that for some reason we were going to set a nettle trap, which I now realize could have been fatal.

And this nettle trap involves, we got some nettles and we just put them somewhere on the playground where somebody might find them.

And then, and then I think my friend said, oh, they only sting you on the edge.

I don't know if that's true or not.

And we thought, but maybe people won't, I don't know why we thought this is a good idea, but we thought maybe people won't pick up the nettles and they won't be stung.

So we then let a, we wrote a little note that said, please touch these leaves.

And then my friend is like, but they only sting on the edge.

So then we added, please touch these leaves on the edge.

I don't know if there were any fatalities, but I'm burdened by guilt.

What a genius ruse

for a master criminal.

I still fell for it.

Yeah, there's just no trick there, is there really?

It's like they're not trying to disguise them as anything or anything like that.

It's like literally straight on the nose, please injure yourself with our trap.

Put hand in mouse trap.

I love that.

um you i'm sure i'm sure in the course of your research you guys came across the world nettle eating championships no oh it sounds really crazy well they happen in uh they happen in dorset um of course very near bridport which we've mentioned before on the podcast has the world's only thatched brewery but we don't there's no time to rake over that old wound um

so it's basically it happened at a pub called the bottle in until 2019 but the pub's been closed lots on and off but it is happening this year it's moving to a farm uh nearby and the competition

shot down by health and safety at this point um so the the the farm uh is taking it over taking the reins this year which is great the the measure is by length that's how you measure whether you're successful at eating nettles or not is how long in feet

no as in literally got it how yeah how many how many feet of nettles you can eat so that and so it's the length of stalk that is that remains after you've stripped all the nettle leaves off it and eaten.

Well, do you work your way down like a the side of a road and just eat as many nettles?

I understand it's the stalk because I understand it was originally

two farmers got into an argument about who had the biggest nettles and it was

and they said if you can grow a longer nettle than I've got growing on my farm, I'll eat it.

And so I think that the idea is you strip the leaves off and then you it's the stalk that remains is your measure of nettle.

I think that argument was about more than, I think that was about the length of the farmer's roosters.

I mean, when I, when I encountered this, I thought, oh, yeah, you know, competitive nettle eating.

It's crazy, but it's like, you know, the competitive chili eating or the competitive hot dog eating or so on.

So it's like, oh, how many can you eat in one minute?

Or how many can you eat in three minutes?

But it's no, it's how many can you eat in an hour?

You're going to spend an hour eating nettles.

And it's too long.

It doesn't count if you don't keep the nettles down and there was one guy a few years ago who was way ahead and at 57 minutes he went to just threw up in the pub car park and he was disqualified can you imagine it's the winner the all-time record winner is called philip thorne oh now nettles don't have thorns admittedly but it's close it's close it's close

his record 104 feet

so impressive which is long do you know what's um i find most amazing about that is what it says about the human capacity to improve.

Because about 10 years before he got the record, which was in 2018, the winner of the same competition ate 48 feet of nettles.

Now, in just a decade, Phil Thorne has more than doubled that.

How have humans got so much better at nettle eating in the space of 10 years?

That's like if in 10 years' time we can do the 100 meters in four and a half seconds, isn't it?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Get Phil Thorne in the 100 meters.

There's some nettles at the end at the finish line.

You're not allowed to cook them, I guess, right?

You just have to eat them raw.

Yeah, they're raw, freshly picked.

Your tongue goes black from all the iron in them.

It's painful, apparently, almost immediately.

Within 20 seconds, it's very painful.

And you've then only got another 3,580 seconds to get through.

Sounds horrific.

I don't know how people do it.

And you're not allowed to bring your own nettles.

And you're not allowed to bring any substances that might numb your mouth.

Although I'm sure some people have been tempted to try and smear Vaseline on.

I don't know.

Because I just thought of a trick, but then I only thought of the trick after you told me the thing you're not allowed to do.

So that's not going to work.

But I think, from memory, in Hawaii, I think the nettles don't have stings on them.

I think.

So you turn up wearing your lei with your sun hat on in your tropical shirt.

Whatever you go.

Just exeter, you know.

I think.

I just was smuggling some broccoli or something and say, oh no, it's definitely nettles.

I think that they might have evolved to have no sting because they don't have any animals that eat them or something

oh really so they don't need to repel that's amazing

what you can do at the nettle eating championships is drink you can either drink water or you can drink beer i don't know if it has to be beer sourced from a thatch brewery or not yes it's going to be cider now that it's a cider farm

cider is allowed cider is allowed because i think that would help Go on.

So one, in fact, as we're talking about incredible moments in the history of nettle eating, in 2019, the women's winner, Lindy Rogers, I don't know why the competition is divided by sex.

I have no idea.

But there's a men's and a women's championship.

The women's winner, Lindy Rogers, had an incredible Fosbury flop moment because she dipped her nettles in cider.

Inside her or insider.

Sorry.

I mean, first of all, that's disgusting.

Second of all, I feel like it would hurt just as much.

Absolutely.

In apple cider.

Oh, sorry.

Exactly.

And so that's a method that apparently helps to take a bit of the sting out of it.

That feels like a loophole.

They've got to close that one, actually.

Fosspea Lump was a loophole.

It's all loopholes.

It's all loopholes from here on in.

Yeah.

Wow.

So

in the war, in the First World War, the Germans were encouraged to collect nettles.

Can you guess why, maybe?

Ammunition shortage is really biting.

We're just going to have to thrash the British with our nettle bundles.

Were they planning to steal everybody's wives and then throw the nettles down to foil the pursuers?

Very good.

It's just setting a nettle trap in the playground, taking literally a leaf out of Tim's book.

Bitter touch and see here.

No, it was to make uniforms.

So you can take the stalks off nettles and you can make...

like kind of material with it.

The month at university in Leicester have got a thing called the Sting Project and they've they've been trying to find things that you can do with nettles.

And one of their team, a designer called Alex Deere, has invented underwear that's made from nettles.

They made a pink camisole top and pants made from nettles.

And according to Alex Deere, they said it is quite a hairy fiber, so you probably wouldn't want all of your underwear made of it.

But we are trying to make a point of what is possible with this plant.

Wow.

You'd want to dip them in cider, wouldn't you?

Or have sex with someone who wears dock leaf pants, maybe?

Oh, James, come on.

You know that's a myth.

Don't propagate it for the kids.

Some myths are nice, Anna.

Some myths are nice.

It's good.

It takes your mind off the stinging agony when looking for a dock leaf.

So I maintain there's a placebo effect.

I go to the dock leaf eating championships, and I gotta say, my record is pretty strong.

Have you guys heard of the Hornet Ordeal?

This is the El Gayo people in Kenya do this.

This was an article by a guy called F.B.

Wellborne who underwent the initiation.

He was Kenyan.

And what it is, is that boys are forced to crawl through tunnels made of stinging nettles.

And then once you get out of this tunnel of stinging nettles, then you have the nettles rubbed on your genitals.

And then you have live hornets dropped on your back.

And the reason that they do all this is that the nettles are there to prepare you for the hornets.

Um, so, like, the pain is to prepare you for the hornet pain, and then the hornet pain is there to prepare you for the circumcision that comes straight afterwards.

Wow, I think the world nettle eating championship should go for this.

So, after you eat the nettles, then the hornets, and then that would explain why there's a separate category for men and women.

How is the circumcision contest judged?

Is that by length?

How's that working?

I haven't worked out all the details yet.

Wow, that sounds really horrible, James.

Yeah, no, it is.

What does the circumcision prepare you for?

Life as an actor.

Oh, boy.

It gets worse.

Dealing with a bloody council.

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Alright, it is time for our final fact, and that is Andy's fact.

My fact this week is that the people of the remote island of St Kilda used to yell if they saw themselves in a visiting tourist's mirror.

They actually had plenty of mirrors, they just wanted to keep the tourists coming.

This is about the remote, very remote island of St Kilda, and it features in a new book called Shadowlands by Matthew Green, which is about various forgotten fascinating places and St Kilda had people on it for about a thousand years uh they lived there until 1930 the island was evacuated in 1930 in the 19th century they started getting visitors by ship Victorian tourists not very many because it's so far away but they played up to it massively and they would do this thing they would you know they would scream or pretend to be incredibly surprised if someone showed them a mirror they would look behind the mirror saying what there's no one behind what's going on I mean they were literally they were clean shaven they They had mirrors.

They had shaved that morning.

I read this was in an article by Neil Mackenzie, who was the person who was kind of in charge.

He was like the reverend who kind of went there and he was kind of in charge of anything and helped the islanders for quite a long time.

And he said they would pick up pieces of coal and affect surprise at not being able to eat them.

And when they came in front of a looking glass, they would start and express great surprise at not being able to find the person who appeared behind it.

It's so funny.

It's so hilarious.

They really were cut.

Sometimes they would go on aboard a yacht, a visiting tourist yacht, and they pretended that they thought all the brass on it was gold.

You've got all this gold.

You must be the richest man in the world.

They knew about brass.

You know, they were hamming it up.

And did it work?

Were there tourists flocking to St Kilda to see these people be amazed at their own reflection?

Because it's hard to get to.

I don't know if I'd take a holiday.

It didn't become a major tourist economy, which is why the island economy fell apart and the place was evacuated in 1930.

But they were doing their best to keep some money coming in.

Yeah, they apparently, according to Mackenzie, they would all the time when they were doing this, they'd be talking to each other in Gaelic and they'd be saying, If we seem to be paying great attention and make them believe we are simple, they will be sure before they go away to give us something even better.

Yeah, so they just did this and they thought if they kind of make them think we're stupid, then eventually we'll get some really awesome booty from them.

Yeah, smart guys, yeah.

So, so what I'm trying to work out what they were, what they were pretending to be, and So is it that they're pretending that they thought they were vampires and were surprised to realize that they weren't actually vampires?

They were surprised.

Oh, I thought I didn't leave a reflection in a mirror because I was a vampire.

I didn't realize I'm human after all.

That would surprise me.

That's what it was.

And that's actually why the island broke down.

Everyone was scared off.

One of my favourite short poems is by John Hegley.

And it has the title, A Vampire Considers Buying a New Mirror.

And the poem is simply on reflection.

No.

Brilliant.

Very nice.

That's really good, isn't it?

It's also a good one to be able to memorize.

I'll pat myself to remember that.

For the school,

like the citation competition.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was trying to look it up.

I saw it about 25 years ago and I was trying to look it up somewhere and I can't find it on the internet.

And then I thought, you know, I can actually remember that joke.

That's fine.

It's been, it's held fascination for people for hundreds of years, hasn't it, St Kilda?

People have been visiting it.

And it is, it's over 100 miles off the coast of Scotland.

And it's a rocky ride to get there.

And it's quite unclear when people have lived there and when they haven't, but there was definitely a society established by the 16th century, wasn't there?

That's when we know that there was like a community of people who are living there successfully.

So it's not like it's been populated forever.

And then

people have travelled there ever since.

There was the first proper account of the islanders, which was written in 1698 called A Late Voyage to St Kilda, which I still don't know what he meant by late.

I don't know if he'd meant to go 10 years earlier.

He died about five years earlier.

Anyway, this is a writer called Martin Martin.

Brilliant.

I actually read his book.

It's fascinating.

One of the things he says is they're extremely good climbers.

And so they live by hunting the birds, mostly the island birds.

So they'll climb up and then they'll catch the birds.

And he described a particularly very high rock called the thumb, which was as high as a tall steeple.

And he said that the only way that you could get to the top of the thumb is by at one point you swing your entire body sort of up onto a ledge by holding onto a protruding bit of rock, which is only big enough to accommodate your thumb.

Oh my God.

So

you've got to get your whole body balancing on your thumb as you propel it up onto the next bit of rock.

Quite impressive.

And then the person who swung his way up there onto the thumb drops a rope down and hoists the others up.

And then that person gets an extra four four-foul at the end of the day for his achievements.

That's in the um the birds, right?

Because that's what the people of St Kilda mostly lived off birds and stuff, yes.

Well, birds and poo, of course, so it's left-hand big.

Why wouldn't they just leave the rope up?

It takes a lot of the fun out of it, doesn't it?

It is such a fascinating place, and it was unbelievably inhospitable, and it's amazing that people managed to scratch out a living there at all.

So, sometimes it would just rain for three weeks without stopping, not once, it would just rain for three weeks on end.

There was once I mean, in fairness in bolton or even like yeah in manchester i think i've i think i could survive that all right all right there was once a storm that was so fierce that everyone on the island was left deaf for a week

it's it was so like i i read it's just not true it can't be true can it it's not true i think it can i think it can it it was so windy the islander's sheep would sometimes just be blown over the cliffs i can that is that yeah that is understandable but everyone on the island going deaf for a week that doesn't make that can't be true.

It's just not a thing.

We should mention the amazing way that they used to communicate with the mainland, the St Kildens, in the 19th century, which was via mailboats.

They didn't have a postal service until the early 20th century.

And so they would just get a letter, write it, pop it on a homemade mailboat, like a hollowed-out bit of wood with a little tin placed inside into which they'd put their letter.

And then they'd burn onto the surface of this tiny boat the words, please open.

And they'd inflate a sheep's bladder, attach it to the boat, send it off, and hope that it got to land somewhere.

And according to one report I read, two-thirds of messages reached their destination.

As in, they'd reach a destination, either the coast of Scotland or Scandinavia sometimes, and then those people would open the message and find the actual address inside and post it on.

It's very good.

That's roughly the same strike rate as the Royal Mail at the moment.

So

that's really cool.

Pyrography, it's called when you burn words onto bits of wood.

It's kind of a subsection of whittling.

I don't know if you came across it in your whittling research.

Oh, yeah.

It used to be a very male-dominated area.

And then in the turn of the 20th century, there's a Melbourne architect called Alfred Smart who invented a new way of

pyrographizing.

a new type of pyrography and the way that he did that he had a pencil with like some fuel attached to it and so you could use and you could change the amount of fuel that came in and out, so you could start doing shading and stuff like that and do amazing patterns.

Uh, and then it became a kind of a relatively not very common, but a relatively common um hobby for women at the in the start of the 20th century.

Uh, and I was reading about someone called Jo Schwartz, um, who's a wood burner, and she is the first person to ever teach wood burning in Antarctica.

I mean,

it's it's right down on the list of survivability skills, isn't it?

Especially in a continent with no trees.

But, you know, she's got a record, so that's good.

Imagine being the second person.

Imagine going to Antarctica going out and I teach them wood burning.

I was like, oh my God, I'm not even the first one to do this.

You arrive, you see the Schwartz panel being hung up over the tent.

Nightmare.

Can I tell you one quick thing about the evacuation of St Kilda?

Yes, please.

Because life got harder and harder, and a lot of able-bodied young men went to the mainland and as it was largely a subsistence economy, so like hunting birds and

farming sheep, that was a big problem for the island's survival.

In fact, they got close to starving on several occasions.

And so in 1930,

they contacted the mainland and said, look, we're going to tap out.

This is horrible.

We don't like it.

We're all deaf.

The government said, yeah, of course, we'll bring you over.

By that point, two-thirds of the population shared the same two surnames, as in the diversity of families had really been

whittled down over the years.

And at the end of it, in 1930, they ceremonially closed down the post office.

I think it was amazing.

They held one final church service and they drowned their dogs off the pier.

Oh, my God.

I don't know why.

I don't know why.

No.

They must have been.

That took such a horrible turn at the end of that sentence.

Really, sorry.

They must have been.

Guys, there's room on the boat for the dogs.

But then, when they got to the mainland, the government arranged for most of the men to be given jobs in the Forestry Commission.

But unfortunately, most of them had never seen a tree because there are no trees on St Kilda.

They were just chopping everything down, weren't they?

They'd chopped down lampposts, tulips.

Well, presumably, they were going to get jobs at the RSPCA, and that was

horridly rearranged.

All right, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much, everybody, for listening.

Thanks so much, Tim, for coming on.

If you want to get in touch with any of us, you can find these guys on Twitter, I believe.

James, you're on James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter.M.

And Tim, have you fallen prey to the scourge that is Twitter?

I'm Tim Harford on Twitter, but I don't really pay any attention.

People should just listen to the Cautionary Tales podcast instead and not tweet me.

Great.

So if you want to be completely ignored, then tweet at Tim Harford.

But do definitely go and listen to the His Cautionary Tales podcast.

It is brilliant.

And if you want to know anything more about this podcast, No Such Thing as a Fish, go to no suchthingasafish.com, where you'll find all of our previous episodes and any other interesting news about us.

Okay, that's all for this week.

We will see you again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

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Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Liquid simply slides right off.

Designed for custom comfort, our high-resilience foam lets you choose between a sink-in feel or a supportive memory foam blend.

Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years.

Don't compromise quality for price.

Visit washable sofas.com to upgrade your living space today with no risk returns and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Get up to 60% off plus free shipping and free returns.

Shop now at washable sofas.com.

Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.