402: No Such Thing As A Pig Playing Fortnite

Transcript

Speaker 1 Running a business online?

Speaker 2 Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Speaker 7 Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

Speaker 9 There's never been a better time.

Speaker 12 Just go to godaddy.com/slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Speaker 12 Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs from daily communications to email marketing and everything everything in between.

Speaker 14 That's a little price for a lot of credibility.

Speaker 7 For a limited time, get a domain and matching professional email for just 99 cents a month for one year.

Speaker 1 Go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and look legit with godaddy.

Speaker 6 That's godaddy.com slash gdnow.

Speaker 3 Again, go daddy.com slash gdnow.

Speaker 8 There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

Speaker 9 New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately. See terms on site.

Speaker 10 go daddy.com slash gdnow

Speaker 16 Life's messy. We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.
But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

Speaker 16 At washable sofas.com, discover Anibay Sofas, the only fully machine-washable sofas inside and out, starting at just $699.

Speaker 16 Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics. That means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

Speaker 16 Designed for real life, our sofas feature changeable fabric covers, allowing you to refresh your style anytime. Need flexibility? Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa effortlessly.

Speaker 16 Perfect for cozy apartments or spacious homes. Plus, they're earth-friendly and built to last.
That's why over 200,000 happy customers have made the switch. Upgrade your space today.

Speaker 16 Visit washable sofas.com now and bring home a sofa made for life. That's washable sofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 17 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Barstapod.

Speaker 17 My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

Speaker 17 And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go.

Speaker 17 Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Speaker 17 Okay, my fact this week is that when the bird poo import industry first reached the UK, the smell was so bad in Southampton that the entire urban population fled to the hills.

Speaker 17 Was it in one go? You know, when you watch movies like Deep Impact or Armageddon, where you just see people flocking away from cities, was there a training?

Speaker 17 And you just got one guy with a cold going in the other direction, going, What the fuck are they doing?

Speaker 17 So, this is

Speaker 17 guano. So, it's in the olden days, you would get this bird poo and it would get brought into the country, and they would use it as fertilizer.

Speaker 17 And there is an English historian called Frederick Pike who wrote the modern history of Peru. So he was writing about the Peruvian guano industry.

Speaker 17 And he said that the stench was so miserable that the entire population of Southampton left the town. It might be true, it might not be true.

Speaker 17 This is what the historian says, so it's quite a good source.

Speaker 18 It certainly feels like it's an exaggeration, though, doesn't it?

Speaker 18 I'd eat all of my clothes right now if every human in Southampton evacuated and went up a hill.

Speaker 17 Well, surely we know about that. It's true, but have you ever been to Southampton?

Speaker 18 I have, and I don't know what you're saying about it, but I'm going to say I don't agree.

Speaker 17 No, I don't agree myself.

Speaker 17 Trying to say I'd eat all of my clothes right now is an incredible escalation of I'd eat my hat.

Speaker 17 What I did find was in Massachusetts there is a place called Woods Hole and there was a company called the Pacific Guano Company and I've seen some very good evidence that whenever the weather changed, the wind changed in a certain direction, the entire town would have to be evacuated from the smell.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 17 it is very smelly bird poo when you have it on such big amounts.

Speaker 17 And the reason it's so smelly is that it's not just any bird poo, isn't it? It's bird poo of specific birds that have been eating specific fish.

Speaker 17 And the reason that guano was this incredible wonder substance in the 19th century is that it has lots of, what is it, nitrogen and phosphate and potassium, all of the chemicals that just act as rocket fuel for plants.

Speaker 17 And so it's suddenly acted as this incredible fertilizer but the reason it smells so bad is it's so full of this very very oily fish so what so there's yeah so there's the fish guano which is very important but bat guano as well uh is very important but what are the bats eating they're not eating fish right they'll eat insects bats okay and it produces the same because those are the most important seabirds and bats

Speaker 18 i didn't know bounce was used as fertilizer It can be.

Speaker 17 I think mostly it would be used, they would use it as

Speaker 17 like to make gunpowder and stuff, I think. Yeah,

Speaker 17 but like the fish one, when they first found these islands off the coast of Peru, which had all this tons and tons of bird shit on, that kind of changed the world a little bit because it was the first mass-produced fertilizer that wasn't coming, let's say, out of humans.

Speaker 17 Yeah, well, they had islands just off Peru where the guano had built up for all those years that they were like 200 feet. Yeah, I've been there actually.
Having been to those guano islands, yeah.

Speaker 17 I tricked my wife into going there because

Speaker 17 there was an excursion to swim with sea lions. And I noticed it was on the Guano Islands.
And I was like, oh, you've always wanted to swim with sea lions, haven't you? And she hadn't.

Speaker 17 But we went down there, and I kept asking the guy who was in charge about the guano. I'm like, oh, you know, is there still guards here and stuff like that? And he didn't know anything about it.

Speaker 17 Really? He only knew about sea lions.

Speaker 17 I think you weren't cheated there. I think that's fair.

Speaker 18 I think one of the reasons as well that it was so useful, and I think this might be why bat guano is the other famous one, I suppose,

Speaker 18 is that it's all together. So the reason you can use Bat Guano for, let's say, gunpowder and this is that seabirds all flock to one spot and then they shit everywhere.

Speaker 18 Bats are obviously all in one cave, they shit everywhere. If it was pigeon guano, that would be hell, right?

Speaker 18 Because you'd have to crawl around the streets of London, scraping up individual pigeon poo after pigeon poo. You wouldn't get anywhere.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and also those islands, it hardly ever rains. So it's always quite overcast, but it doesn't really rain very often.
And so it never gets washed away.

Speaker 17 It just kind of layers and layers and layers. It was mad.
So there was a newspaper advert I read from the 1840s, and it just read, guano, guano, guano, and then in caps lock, guano.

Speaker 17 It was so impressive. And it was this kind of wonder substance.
So there was a story that the San Francisco Journal printed in 1857.

Speaker 17 And it was about a shipment of guano making its way across the Atlantic. And the ship's hatches were left open by mistake.
And the guano got wet.

Speaker 17 And the account is that the timbers of the ship started growing and sprouting in all directions. The rudder of the ship grew into a huge great oak.

Speaker 17 They had to start pruning the ship every couple of days.

Speaker 17 Apples were growing on the pump handle.

Speaker 17 Worst of all, the ship's cockroaches, all the cockroaches on board, had got into the guano and they got so big and powerful that they were able to pull up the anchor of the ship. Whoa!

Speaker 17 I mean, it's not true.

Speaker 17 This is such a, well, it's printed in the San Francisco Journal.

Speaker 17 Why did they print it? As a fable?

Speaker 18 It was a humorous myth.

Speaker 17 related to how

Speaker 18 potent guano was.

Speaker 18 Guano is so strong, if you chug a cockroach at it, it grows the size of a person. And then you'll go away going, wow, do you know what the senator just told me?

Speaker 17 I really would.

Speaker 17 I mean, it is super impressive stuff, isn't it? And

Speaker 17 people really valued it massively back in the day. So in 1850, President Fillmore, it was part of his union address that he was promising fairer prices for guano.
And that was like a big deal.

Speaker 17 We don't appreciate it now as much because it's a bit harder to get it because all the islands where the seabirds were pooing on, they've kind of been depleted.

Speaker 18 And also, we don't need it. That's the main reason, really, that it doesn't exist anymore, is that we managed to invent fertilizer around about the turn of the century, didn't we?

Speaker 18 Turn the 20th century, and so suddenly it wasn't necessary anymore. And so, it was the 19th century when this massive rush happened, right?

Speaker 18 But that was when Britain and the new migrant Americans discovered it. But it had been used for many centuries before that in South America.

Speaker 18 So, in the 17th century, in fact, when Europeans first got to America, they said that the Peruvians used it so much that it looked like they had loads of snow-capped mountains in the regions because they had just had huge mountains of guano that they had stocked up.

Speaker 17 That's a very disappointing ski trip, isn't it?

Speaker 17 Yeah.

Speaker 18 But yeah, the Incas were very into it.

Speaker 18 So, and the Incas had a cool communist kind of a system with guano where every town, every Inca town, was assigned its own guano island, island, and then every household in the town was assigned its own bit of guano or a bit of share of that island, and that was how much you had, and it was according to how much you needed.

Speaker 18 And that meant no one could get a big monopoly, no one could come in and raid it all, and it was all working very well.

Speaker 17 All right, Jeremy Corbyn has checked into the podcast.

Speaker 17 But lots of Britain was built on guano, effectively, or built on the money from guano. So there was a guano millionaire, maybe the first guano millionaire called William Gibbs.

Speaker 17 And he was the subject of a musical song which ran, William Gibbs made his dibs, selling the turds of foreign birds.

Speaker 17 And there's a local link with him, which is that there's a church in Exeter called St.

Speaker 17 Michael and All Angels Church, and that has this big memorial to William Gibbs because he was such a big noise and funded so many churches and chapels with

Speaker 17 the mining. Keyboard College, Oxford, was that their chapel was, you know, it's a huge thing.
It was completely funded by Bird Pooh, basically.

Speaker 18 Funny that more of them don't use this in their PR, isn't it? Built on bird ships, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 Well, the conditions in which it was mined were not great either, and there were lots of kind of indentured labor.

Speaker 17 You know, workers were shipped over from China, and it's pretty horrible stuff to work among because if you don't have a really, really good mask, um, you'll be inhaling kind of dust from it.

Speaker 17 I know you're covered with it, yeah, they don't really bother with masks as well, do they? No, and yes, there were no masks.

Speaker 17 Um, coolest thing that I think Guano has given us is that there's an island called Nauru, which made so much money from Guano, from the selling of it and so on.

Speaker 17 And they decided to invest a lot of that money in a musical called Leonardo, a Portrait of Love, the story of Leonardo da Vinci.

Speaker 17 Leonardo da Vinci and Mona Lisa, and how they had a relationship. I mean, it was completely factually inaccurate, and it was pretty much a flop.

Speaker 17 I think it had like one or two shows that went well in Oxford.

Speaker 18 I say, bring it back.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I'd love to see it. It's a musical.

Speaker 18 Yeah, not guano. I can live without guano.

Speaker 17 What about the guano islands near Peru? In 1865, when it was the real height of it, Spain decided they would send a scientific mission to South America to kind of look at this.

Speaker 17 It didn't belong to them, okay, but they just wanted to see what was going on. So they sent a scientific mission of about a dozen warships.

Speaker 17 And basically, then they forced a situation where some of their soldiers were were attacked and there was a full all-out war for birdshit. Wow.

Speaker 17 Basically, Chile got involved, Bolivia got involved, the whole of South America against Spain.

Speaker 17 They all blockaded the Spanish and eventually the Spanish disappeared with their tails between their legs. But really that was the start of quite a lot of battles over these birdshit islands.
Wow.

Speaker 16 What must the birds have thought?

Speaker 18 That's so weird one year to go back to this deserted island you've always shat on and to find warring nations desperately holding their hands up to your arseholes going please

Speaker 17 just a morsel

Speaker 17 oh my god bewildering it was in the u.s civil war as well guano featured in the american civil war it didn't change the outcome but the confederacy had been blockaded and so they had to mine bat guano to make their gunpowder so they went to they went to the bat cave uh in order to try and cool yeah that's robin's job isn't it when he's

Speaker 17 on the weekdays he's just scraping Batman's poo off the walls. Oh my god, that's how Bruce Wayne became a multi-millionaire.
We never really understand it.

Speaker 17 And Commissioner Gardens going, one more milestone, Baba.

Speaker 1 Running a business online?

Speaker 2 Look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from GoDaddy.

Speaker 7 Instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business.

Speaker 9 There's never been a better time.

Speaker 12 Just go to godaddy.com slash GDNow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you.

Speaker 12 Pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs, from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

Speaker 9 There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you. New customer purchases only, products auto-renew separately.
See terms on site.

Speaker 10 Go daddy.com slash GDNow.

Speaker 16 Time for a sofa upgrade? Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices with sofas starting at $699.

Speaker 16 Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 16 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.

Speaker 16 Visit washablefas.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.

Speaker 16 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 17 It is time for fact number two and that is Anna.

Speaker 18 My fact this week is that scientists have made a TV for fish, but if humans want to watch it, they have to wear sunscreen.

Speaker 17 Bizarre. Is that because it's placed on the beach and you need to...

Speaker 18 Yeah, good point. Yeah, just hovering above the sea.
No, this is a scientist at the University of Queensland, and they wanted to know about the visual capabilities of fish.

Speaker 18 They started with clown fish, often very good for experimenting on. And they were looking at what they can see in the UV spectrum.
So fish can see in the UV spectrum where we can't.

Speaker 18 And so they developed a screen display that just includes the violet and the ultraviolet spectrum. And they had the fish kind of peck at targets.

Speaker 18 So they have targets in certain UV wavelengths on it and they'd reward fish if they pecked at certain ones to see if they could see and distinguish between the different UV wavelengths.

Speaker 18 And they could, but the thing is, of course, it's giving off lots of UV radiation. And what do we know about that?

Speaker 5 It's bad for us.

Speaker 18 So you've got to wear Factor 50 and sunglasses.

Speaker 18 And also I don't think it's very good programmes.

Speaker 17 No, if it's just like UV light and you're just pecking on it all the time.

Speaker 18 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 18 But yeah, they can all see. In fact, loads of animals can see things that we can't.
I really like the idea that they're all seeing completely different stuff. Like a rainbow.
Never thought about it.

Speaker 18 That's not just red to violet, right? That goes to infrared in one direction. So if you can see an infrared spectrum, then you'd be able to see all the colours that we can't.

Speaker 18 And then the other side, like if you're a bird looking at a rainbow, so all birds can see UV, you'll see loads more colours, I guess, beyond violet. Wow.

Speaker 17 Do we know if they see rainbows? As in the end, they must do, right?

Speaker 17 But their eyes are on different sides of their head, often if they're prey animals. If you're looking at a rainbow and you close one of your eyes, does it disappear? I've never tried, and

Speaker 17 I'm not going to follow this line of inquiry any further. You put me off it.

Speaker 17 Fish aren't the only animals that TV's been created for. There is, well, there's Dog TV, which is a channel

Speaker 17 which

Speaker 17 is actually TV shows made for dogs. And I spent a lot of time on their website today.

Speaker 17 What do they watch?

Speaker 17 It's a range of shows to inform, educate, and entertain. It's very wreathy in the world.

Speaker 17 I imagine it would be like EastEnders but all the characters are dogs.

Speaker 17 Or do they watch animal-based T V. Or Great British Bake Off but all the contestants are dogs.
Yeah. No, I get where you're going with it, James.

Speaker 17 Or like it could be like the football match, but all the footballers are dogs. I think I think it's not exactly that.
Or it could be cruft, but all the contestants are humans.

Speaker 17 It's um I think sometimes there's a squirrel on the screen. But um that kind of thing.
But it's mostly it's to sort of it's to entertain your dog when you're not around.

Speaker 17 But the FAQ section of the website is unbelievable because it costs about the same as Netflix, but it's just for your dog.

Speaker 17 So one of the questions, the FAQs is... Is it called PetFlix? Brilliant.
It should be.

Speaker 17 It's called Dog TV.

Speaker 17 I think probably due to a legal issue with Netflix. But one of the FAQs is, it seems like my dog is not watching this, and I've paid for it.

Speaker 17 And the answer is, well, you have to understand, dogs don't watch TV the same way that humans do.

Speaker 17 It won't happen. Dogs, you know, some of them like the visuals, some just lie there and feel calmed by the relaxing music.
Either of those methods is great.

Speaker 17 And when you're there with the dog, he will always be more interested in you than the TV screen. So that's basically...
Right.

Speaker 17 You're never going to see your dog relax to this channel if you're in the room. It can only relax when you're away.

Speaker 17 One really interesting thing about dogs with TV is that until probably, I'm going to say about 10 years ago, they would not have enjoyed watching normal TV, any kind of TV.

Speaker 17 And that's because the number of frames per second and the speed in which they see those frames, it would kind of look like a slideshow to them. If you know what I mean,

Speaker 18 I mean, we did a slideshow in our first half today, and I think everyone enjoyed it. So, you don't necessarily not enjoy something because it's a slideshow.

Speaker 17 Yep, fair enough. But they wouldn't get all of the nuances that we would get from watching Breaking Bad, for instance.
Sure.

Speaker 17 But, like, they need about 70 images per second in order for it to look as if it's a continuous movement. And these days, your TV does have that.

Speaker 17 But until around 10, 20 years ago, it didn't look like that. So, recently, they'll have been looking at this box in the middle of the house that kind of just flashes these pictures.

Speaker 17 And then suddenly it was like a proper TV channel. Wow, that's pretty cool.

Speaker 18 You remember the day, don't you, where all dogs changed overnight.

Speaker 17 They all seemed so much happier. But it also means that they wouldn't want to go to the cinema because all cinemas have still got the same old frame rate because people prefer it.
Oh, okay.

Speaker 17 That's interesting.

Speaker 18 They do, I think they should make this dog TV for humans. It shows dogs surfing.
It is, you're right.

Speaker 18 It is pretty much all dogs because they've done experiments and it turns out all dogs want to watch. Self-involved as they are is other dogs.

Speaker 17 Sounds like they watch, but all the characters are dogs.

Speaker 18 That's what it is.

Speaker 18 I'd watch a show of dogs surfing for 10 minutes, I reckon.

Speaker 17 Yeah. Yeah.
I think that's a good point.

Speaker 17 God, I read the craziest thing about the TV show Skippy today. This is just, we're talking about animals on TV.
It's quite disgusting, so I'm very sorry if I'm going to ruin any Skippy lovers here.

Speaker 17 But Skippy on screen always used to have the ability to open up doors and stuff like that. So this is like a kangaroo, right? Skippy Skippy the bush kangaroo.
Oh my god, yeah, what am I doing?

Speaker 17 I'm talking about a show that hasn't been on TV for 50 years. Let's move on to it.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that was just for the youngest. No, no, it's a good point.
Like, no,

Speaker 17 Skippy, the bush kangaroo. It's like Lassie, but he's a kangaroo.
But he's a kangaroo. Yeah, yeah.
And what's that, Skippy? Yeah. Kind of thing.

Speaker 17 And so Skippy would be on screen as the kangaroo, but he was a really grumpy kangaroo and he would never properly enjoy it.

Speaker 17 And so when he had to do things like open the door, he couldn't really do that. So what they did was they had kangaroo hands that were from, I think, a dead kangaroo with sticks on them.
Oh my god.

Speaker 17 So when you see Skippy opening doors, they would lead in with the stick. And just have a kangaroo.
It's fucking horrible, isn't it? Oh my god, that is. I don't know why I told you guys.

Speaker 17 I sort of paused. I thought you were going to say he opened it with his pouch or something cute like that.

Speaker 17 Blue-tit birds, they get TV as well in one experiment that they did.

Speaker 17 And they worked out that blue-tits make better dinner choices at a buffet after watching TV footage of other birds making bad decisions. What are you talking about?

Speaker 18 Now, what is a bad dinner decision for a blue tit?

Speaker 17 A bad dinner decision might be something that is dead, that has just a foul taste to it that you might not have eaten as a blue tit, but it's presented to you in a package, you might go for it.

Speaker 17 And so they would see these blue tits eating this food and then going

Speaker 17 and spitting it out. And then later, when they then presented them with that food and other options, in most cases, they would avoid the one that they saw on TV and get a bad reaction.

Speaker 17 Yeah, so TV can teach. It's very Wreathian.
Very clever.

Speaker 18 And pigs can play video games.

Speaker 17 Can they?

Speaker 18 Yeah, properly now. They used to play them, but like with touch screen.

Speaker 17 Well, they used to play Pong, and now they're playing Fortnite, is what you're implying. Yeah.

Speaker 18 I think it is actually still Pong. But they're using a joystick.
This is leaps and bounds for Pig World. This is this year,

Speaker 18 scientists have put pigs in front of a video game and then they've given them a joystick to operate with their snout, which is harder than with a hand.

Speaker 18 And they realize that they connect what they're doing on the joystick to what's happening on the screen, and then they connect what's happening on the screen to rewards that they get.

Speaker 18 And so, you know, they can chase the right thing and catch it, knowing that they'll get a reward just using this joystick thing.

Speaker 17 That's clever. That's very cool.

Speaker 17 I think the thing with pigs is like they're quite intelligent, and you need to give them stuff to play with, don't you? I think even by law, you need to give them stuff to play with.

Speaker 17 So it doesn't have to be a PS5, it can just be a ball. But

Speaker 17 UV light, this fact is about these fish that can see UV light.

Speaker 17 There was a thing, so there's a condition where some people can see ultraviolet light, which is

Speaker 17 very strange. It's a condition called aphakia.
And it's where you don't have a lens in your eye. So the lens has been removed for whatever reason that is.

Speaker 17 And it means that you can sometimes see ultraviolet light. But this actually, there's a rumor, and it's not completely confirmed, that this was used in the Second World War which is bizarre.

Speaker 17 It's that military intelligence recruited people who had this condition aphakia to watch the coastline for German U-boats signaling to spies on the shore with UV lamps.

Speaker 17 Now, I don't think it's true, but I love the idea of it, but I don't, yeah. Here's a true thing.
You can buy ultraviolet trousers.

Speaker 17 These are really cool. I want to get these.
So ultraviolet will glow in a black light, right? So if you go to a club and you have a gin and tonic, it'll glow slightly because it's under the UV light.

Speaker 17 These trousers will look like normal trousers when you're walking down the street. No one will notice.
And as soon as you walk into a club, party in your pants. Wow.

Speaker 17 They're glowing in all sorts of different colours. Wow.
That's amazing. I hope you don't say that sentence when you walk into the club.

Speaker 17 Party in my pants, eh?

Speaker 17 We're going to have to move on, guys, to our next facts.

Speaker 18 Just one piece of technology created for animals that I liked is chickens. We also like to look out for, well, some farmers like to look out for their chickens' welfare.

Speaker 18 And chickens apparently like physical contact with their farmers when they know them. So they'll hold them and they'll stroke them.
When you've got lots, then you can't do that every single day.

Speaker 18 And so they've developed a chicken jacket. And chickens wear it, and it allows humans to give the chicken a virtual hug, even though they're not present.

Speaker 18 So a farmer will stroke a chicken model in his sitting room, and then the chickens wearing the jacket will feel the farmer stroking it.

Speaker 17 Can you do it for a thousand chickens at the same time? So they're all wearing the jacket and they all go,

Speaker 17 I guess that would work, right? Yeah, that does.

Speaker 18 But then they look at each other and they're like, what, he's doing to you as well?

Speaker 17 Oh,

Speaker 17 that's so cool. That is incredible.

Speaker 17 We do need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

Speaker 17 My fact this week is: just like how we have ice cream truck music in the UK, in Taiwan, they have garbage truck music. How cool is that? So, this, I mean, this was a genius.

Speaker 17 They must be different tunes.

Speaker 17 Still green sleeves, that's the amazing thing.

Speaker 17 No, but

Speaker 17 it's Beethoven. It's Fu Elise,

Speaker 17 which I think is

Speaker 17 that that one? Game of Thrones, isn't it?

Speaker 18 No, it's

Speaker 17 okay. After three, one, two, three.

Speaker 17 That one, yeah. Thank you.
Yeah, so this was a genius concept from Taiwan. Taiwan was an incredibly garbage-ridden place, it was just steaming with it.

Speaker 17 It was called garbage island, everyone knew it as that. And they needed to do something.
And they worked out that, and this was in 1997, they started a thing called a trash off-the-ground movement.

Speaker 17 And basically, like an ice cream truck coming out, and everyone running out to get an ice cream, kids running out.

Speaker 17 In Taiwan, they abandoned the idea of you stocking up your garbage and then putting it out on one single day.

Speaker 17 These trucks would go around four or five times a night and they would have their song playing and you would run outside and you would throw your garbage directly into the truck.

Speaker 17 And it became a social event.

Speaker 17 Most people who've reported about it said, this is the time that I got to properly meet my neighbors as we were out there excitedly holding our trash can bags and chucking them in. And as a result,

Speaker 17 the pollution problem in Taiwan has gone extraordinarily down. I mean, it's a model for how countries really should be operating for recycling and garbage waste.

Speaker 18 Oh, I'd love to see them attempt that in Britain or America. No one would do it.
There'd be riots immediately.

Speaker 17 There is no way I would do it. Another bottle of wine, another bottle of wine, another bottle of wine.

Speaker 18 You've got to adapt your laws to the people in your country. It does need to work extremely well there.

Speaker 17 Yeah, you said it was

Speaker 17 1998,

Speaker 17 1997. Before that, even in 1987, there was a group of 10 Taiwanese women, and they started something called the Homemakers United Foundation.

Speaker 17 And they were kind of the first group of people who really wanted to make a difference in Taiwan.

Speaker 17 And they were responsible for the yellow trash trucks, which kind of started going around Taiwan around that time.

Speaker 17 Yeah, and now, if you go to a tube station or something, or a metro station in Taiwan, you'll see these old ladies just kind of picking up trash and putting it in the bin. It's really cool.

Speaker 18 Let's hope they never get ice cream trucks. Otherwise, they'll realize what fun is really like.

Speaker 17 But they do crazy things as well, like there's public shaming. So, if someone hasn't done it probably or tries to cheat the system,

Speaker 17 they

Speaker 17 film them the CCTV footage and that gets circulated in their area, but they blur their faces because of

Speaker 17 exactly

Speaker 17 what that's Dan's shirt. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 18 Well, because they have quite convoluted recycling policies, don't they? Which, again, they demand obedience. So, the recycling truck, I think, follows basically behind the garbage truck.

Speaker 18 And you're obviously incentivized, I think, like we often are here, to recycle rather than throw rubbish away. So, it costs less, you know, it's free for the bin bags and stuff like that.

Speaker 18 But there are 13 different types of recycling bin, and you have to sort your recyclables into all those 13 different types. And if you fail to sort them, you get fined $200.

Speaker 17 I can only think of red wine, white wine, and rose.

Speaker 18 Your champagne. Oh, yeah.
But they sing a different song. They have a song called Any Empty Wine Bottles for Sale blasting out from them, which sounds fun.

Speaker 18 And there's an incredibly sad song from a film called Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing.

Speaker 18 But I recommend looking it up, it's quite nice.

Speaker 18 But Fur Release was apparently chosen because the head of the Environmental Protection Agency, his daughter at the time, was playing it constantly on her piano.

Speaker 17 So he just picked it up.

Speaker 17 You'd think he would want a break from the song if his daughter was learning it on the piano. Yeah, maybe she was so bad, it was like, this is what it's supposed to sound like.

Speaker 17 Yeah, even the bin truck can play this better than you. But you know, it happens so much, this music around town, and it actually pisses off a lot of people as well.

Speaker 17 Like, they, because there's now an app that you can get where you can see where the trucks are going to be and so some people try to work out where they can move where it happens less because between six and eight p.m sometimes four or five times you've got beethoven just playing in the streets and you're like oh my god it's just so annoying and there was this one guy who wrote a blog who said he was out in the countryside and suddenly he's hearing the song play and he's like, oh my god, I can't get away from this song.

Speaker 17 And then he realized there were no trucks there and he thought, what is going on? And he investigated it and it turned out that the local birds started mimicking

Speaker 17 and so people started throwing garbage at them.

Speaker 17 So he went out to investigate, and he's got this whole blog where he's trying to prove that there's a species of bird out there that is currently mimicking

Speaker 17 Beethoven. Imagine when Beethoven wrote that song.

Speaker 17 Could he ever have thought that it would translate then into a garbage truck song that then got picked up by a species of bird that would just fly around singing a song?

Speaker 17 I think you'd have to explain a load of concepts to them.

Speaker 17 Just on bins,

Speaker 17 the dumpster was invented by a man called Dempster.

Speaker 17 And he named it after himself. But he got it wrong? No, he just named it slightly differently.
But he was an incredible guy. He was called George Dempster.

Speaker 17 He was the mayor of a place in the USA called Knoxville. And he was

Speaker 17 an interesting man. He used to work on the Panama Canal when he was a young man.
And later in life, he created the Dempster Dumpster.

Speaker 17 And it was the first ever waste container that could be emptied onto a truck. So this was a huge advantage, you know, a a leap forward in taking rubbish away.

Speaker 17 Yeah, he was a bad person.

Speaker 18 And

Speaker 18 dump obviously meant still to dump something, didn't it? So that it was a fun pun for him. He didn't change it for no reason.

Speaker 17 He didn't invent the word dump, no, no, no, but he did, he did create the dump stir. I read about this guy,

Speaker 17 Dempster, and he was the mayor of Knoxville. And he got into a feud with the editor of the Knoxville Journal.

Speaker 17 The editor of the journal criticised him, and then Dempster decided that he would get the town police to follow the editor around, towing his car at every opportunity. Wow.

Speaker 17 And then, in retaliation, the guy from the newspaper cropped him out of every single newspaper picture.

Speaker 17 It was absolutely amazing. And then Dempster organized a police raid that caught the journalist with a large supply of illegal whiskey.

Speaker 17 Isn't that amazing?

Speaker 18 This feels like abuse of power. in a lot of ways.

Speaker 17 By both of them.

Speaker 17 But then the Knoxville News last year claimed 2020 as its own for Knoxville.

Speaker 17 They said that 2020 was a complete dumpster fire. So since we invented the dumpster, we now own this.

Speaker 17 Do you guys know what the French for bin is? French for bin? Yeah. Poobell or something.

Speaker 17 Poohll. Do you know why it's called Poohlle? Because it's got poo in it? No, it can't be.
No, not that. It's named after someone called Mr.
Poobe. No.

Speaker 17 So many bins are just named after people who invented the bins. Yeah.

Speaker 18 It's weird so many people want to put their name to it. You'd have thought of all the things you want your name stamped on.

Speaker 17 I actually don't know if it was him who did the dubbing on this occasion, because he was the police chief of Paris. Eugene René Poubelle.

Speaker 17 And he ordered that everyone had to have a rubbish receptacle outside their doors in the 1880s. And they got called Poubelles.
And that's where the French for bin comes from. Wow, that's so weird.

Speaker 17 That's so cool. Yeah.

Speaker 17 Just on

Speaker 17 words then, Susie Dent wrote this amazing book where she showed the slang language that

Speaker 17 exists within every different culture. So, you know, butchers will have slang terms that they use that that they'll all understand.
Police officers and garbage bin workers also have that same thing.

Speaker 17 They have words that they know. So I was reading about in America, Coney Island Whitefish in New York.
What would that be, do you think? Coney Island Whitefish.

Speaker 17 Okay, so Coney Island, there was a big sort of fun fair there. So lots of like...

Speaker 17 You won't get it from that, really.

Speaker 17 It's used condoms is what they would call. The Coney Island Whitefish.
Disco rice. Okay, so discos are fun places where people wear really cool trousers.
Yeah. Yeah, with his parties in your pants.

Speaker 17 Disco rice, maggots. Oh,

Speaker 17 that's fantastic. What a great hits dancing rice.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I'll buy that.
If you got air mail, if you were, if you were, I mean, this one's quite literal.

Speaker 17 Someone throws rubbish at your head. From New York, they would throw it from the windows into the garbage truck in the open toss and so on.
Yeah. That's cool.
Yeah. It's great.

Speaker 17 I love those kind of slang cultures.

Speaker 18 Do you know, we have a rubbish bin called Dame Foodie Dench.

Speaker 18 A food bin in this country in Bracknell Forest Council. Called it.

Speaker 17 It's like officially called it.

Speaker 18 Yeah, a rubbish truck, sorry, I should say.

Speaker 18 So, and, but not only this, this is in Berkshire, and there are a bunch of trucks, the fleet of trucks they have, they're called Truck Norris, Binderella, and then for some reason, just Hank Marvin, which I spent a long time looking at and seeing, am I missing something?

Speaker 17 What is that then? Because, like, that's slang for being starving, so maybe because it eats the garbage.

Speaker 17 That's good. okay.
That's a very compelling theory.

Speaker 18 All right, I'll accept that. But Dame Foodie Dench received a video message from Dame Judy Dench slanking it for the honour.

Speaker 18 She said she'd never been called Foodie Dench before, which is sort of like you're not being called Foodie Dench now. You've missed the point.

Speaker 18 But she'd never been called Foodie Dench before, and she was very proud of the accolade.

Speaker 17 I've got some from Thurrock Council. They got their school children to name their lorries.
One of them's named after a cult movie from the 80s, I think, 70s or 80s. Okay.

Speaker 17 Give us a bit more clue. With Brian Blessed in it.
Oh, Trash Gordon. Trash Gordon.
Very good. Very good.
One of them is named after a footballer who became a movie star.

Speaker 17 Eric.

Speaker 17 Eric Trashener. No, no.
What about the guy? He was in Lockstock and. Oh, Vinny.
Vinny.

Speaker 17 Binny Jones. Binny Jones.
You got it. Benny Jones.

Speaker 17 One of them is named after a male pop star, probably the biggest pop star of the last 10 years.

Speaker 17 Dustbin Bieber? correct really

Speaker 8 that's amazing oh that's good probably on house of games very good running a business online look legit and own your own brand with professional tools from godaddy instantly build trust with your customers and boost your credibility with an email that matches your domain so people know you mean business there's never been a better time just go to godaddy.com slash gdnow and choose from a wide variety of popular domains to find one that's right for you pair that with a professional email that works for all your business needs, from daily communications to email marketing and everything in between.

Speaker 8 There's never been a better time to choose the domain and email that's right for you.

Speaker 9 New customer purchases only products auto-renew separately. See terms on site.

Speaker 10 Go daddy.com slash GDNow.

Speaker 16 Time for a sofa upgrade? Visit washable sofas.com and discover Anibay, where designer style meets budget-friendly prices.

Speaker 16 With sofas starting at $699, Anibay brings you the ultimate in furniture innovation with a modular design that allows you to rearrange your space effortlessly.

Speaker 16 Perfect for both small and large spaces, Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out. Say goodbye to stains and messes with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics that make cleaning easy.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Plus, our pet-friendly stain-resistant fabrics ensure your sofa stays beautiful for years. Don't compromise quality for price.

Speaker 16 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.

Speaker 16 Shop now at washable sofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.

Speaker 17 It is time for our final fact and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1956, the BBC broadcast a magic show which involved a woman being sawn in half.

Speaker 17 Unfortunately, the show ran out of time and it ended before she was put back together. And the BBC was then inundated with complaints from people who thought they had just witnessed a murder.

Speaker 17 What a way to commit a murder. It was again

Speaker 17 On prime-time television.

Speaker 17 This was so weird. It was on Panorama, which feels like it must have been a very different show back in the day.

Speaker 17 This was a magician called PC Saucer, who was an Indian magician, is born in Bengal.

Speaker 17 He was over, it was one of his first big international gigs.

Speaker 17 So he sought his assistant in half. She was called Dipty Day.

Speaker 17 But the show was running really short of time. And it was all live.
So they just ran out of time. And he was sort of standing over her saying, Oh dear, what's going on here?

Speaker 17 And then the show was just completely out of time. So Richard Dimbleby, who was hosting, stepped forward and said, Well, that's all we've got time for, so now it's time for the news.

Speaker 17 The phone lines went crazy at the BBC. The BBC set up a special phone operator to divert calls to, with just this poor operator having to say, no, she is fine.
No, she is fine.

Speaker 17 But, of course, the theory is that PC Source I knew exactly what he was doing, and he would never have mistimed his trick so badly. Yeah.
Yeah, and it was a publicity thing for him.

Speaker 17 But what's amazing is so the 1956, right? So all the newspapers the next day were, you know, girl cut in half, shock.

Speaker 17 It was all, it was all properly, you know, it was a confusion whether or not this happened. He was doing a run at the Duke of York theater and as a result of this stunt, he sold it out completely.

Speaker 17 As if people just needed the answer. Like, was she going to be there? It was definitely a publicity.

Speaker 17 Like you say, the newspapers, if you look at the British newspaper archives, you can see always like woman cut in half and whatever.

Speaker 18 but if you go to the stage newspaper which was the newspaper for magicians their headline was sorcerer is publicity magician and it was all about how he was a publicist and how he'd done this before yeah he was great at that wasn't he self-promotion even from the start of his career where he started out in bengal he called himself the world's greatest magician immediately before even really starting his career and shortened it bizarrely to TW's GM, the world's greatest magician, which feels like a a really complicated, weird non-acronym.

Speaker 17 Well, it's weird to do an acronym where there had to be an apostrophe S in it.

Speaker 17 And he did call himself that. He was, I'm TW's GM.

Speaker 17 Of course, he then came over to Europe, and everyone's like, well, you're not the greatest magician.

Speaker 17 But his idea was, well, India is the home of magic, and I'm the best magician in India, so therefore it's fine that I call myself the world's greatest magician.

Speaker 17 But basically, all the other magicians really didn't like him very much, and they started like writing pieces in the newspapers about how bad he was.

Speaker 17 And there was one where they called him a Pakistani illusionist.

Speaker 17 This was a time when India and Pakistan had been at quite a lot of war in the previous few years and he felt like everyone was against him.

Speaker 18 Someone who didn't like him was Schreiber. Helmut Schreiber.

Speaker 18 I don't know if he's a relation, but

Speaker 17 Uncle Helmut. Uncle Helmut.

Speaker 17 He was Hitler's favourite magician, wasn't he? He certainly was.

Speaker 18 He was the one who I think turned people onto

Speaker 18 this magician, PC Saucer, because people didn't like him. But then Hitler's favourite magician came along in 1955.

Speaker 17 It feels a bit late to be training on the Hitler's favourite magician label there at that point.

Speaker 18 I think maybe he was trying to abandon the label at that point, but these things stick, don't they?

Speaker 18 So, yeah, people knew he was Hitler's favourite magician.

Speaker 17 He was mostly taught in Argentina, didn't he, at that stage. It's very successful.
He was very good at making former senior Nazis disappear.

Speaker 17 He performed in front of Hitler. He once conjured 150 Reichsmarks into Hitler's jacket.
He made Eva Braun's diamond-studded platinum watch disappear and then come back.

Speaker 17 But he was, after the war, he was the first German entertainer to get permission to perform abroad.

Speaker 17 And they said, well, you were part of the Nazi party, weren't you? And he was like, oh, I don't know what you're talking about.

Speaker 17 And some people said he was the Houdini of coming to terms with the past. Yeah, right.

Speaker 17 And there were rumors that he'd taken a lot of the kind of Nazi gold.

Speaker 17 And so when he died, his widow kind of went back sort of desperately trying to find where all the money was. And all she found was seven keys to seven different safes.

Speaker 17 But didn't find the safes.

Speaker 17 Oh, she found the keys. Yeah, she found the keys.
How does she know there's a safes?

Speaker 18 So they have little labels on them saying safe number one.

Speaker 17 But to be fair, I'd have just bought seven keys for a laugh and labelled them

Speaker 17 massive safe full of gold number one.

Speaker 17 I'm going to do that. I'm going to do that.

Speaker 18 What is the Houdini of coming to terms with the past? I'm sorry, I'm really struggling with this.

Speaker 17 It is someone who manages to escape from the past.

Speaker 17 So he kind of

Speaker 17 was part of the Nazi regime, but he managed to convince people that he wasn't. So he escaped from his dark past.

Speaker 17 Look at this CV of mine. I'm going to make it completely disappear.

Speaker 17 Okay. Like that.
It sort of works.

Speaker 17 Do you know that Jonathan Creek was based on a real person? Was it Alan Davis? No.

Speaker 17 No.

Speaker 17 No, Jonathan Creek was played by a real person, Alan Davis. You're absolutely right.
Oh, that's how TV works. I'm afraid so.
You should get on this TV for dogs thing. You'd love it.

Speaker 17 No, he was a magician called Alibongo. And that was who.

Speaker 17 He's famous. He is famous, yeah.
David Rennick,

Speaker 17 the writer of Jonathan Creek, said he was based on Ali Bongo.

Speaker 17 This guy, PC, what was he called? Saucer?

Speaker 17 One thing about him is that he had a rival called Gogia Pasha, who was another Indian magician.

Speaker 17 They were real proper rivals, and there was a lot of argument that maybe Saucer had stolen some of his tricks. And there was another magician called K.

Speaker 17 Lal, and he told an author Lee Seigel when he was writing about magicians that Sorsad once bribed a member of his crew 10,000 rupees to sabotage a sawing and lady in half magic trick.

Speaker 17 That's a risky one to sabotage, isn't it? I would just sabotage the rabbit in the hat.

Speaker 17 And yeah, basically, what he did is he bribed this guy a load of money to make this trick fail. And at the last minute, this guy, Pasha, realised what had happened.

Speaker 17 And so he ran over and he put his finger in a little hole in the trick and managed to stop the blade from sort of going towards her. Wait, did he lose the finger? He didn't, but he was badly wounded.

Speaker 17 He was like,

Speaker 17 cut to the bone, they said.

Speaker 17 Oh, my word. So that's one of the reasons why people didn't like him so much.
Yeah, I mean, that's quite a good reason, isn't it? Fair enough. Wow.
David Copperfield saw himself in half once.

Speaker 17 Yeah, I mean, I think that's really impressive, yeah. Did he put himself back together?

Speaker 17 Yeah. Wow.

Speaker 17 How do you do that, though? He was, I think it's, I think it's quite a famous one. He's tied to a table, isn't he? And it's just like Goldfinger, where there's something, you know,

Speaker 17 there's a saw coming down towards him, and he doesn't get away in time.

Speaker 17 And that's the, you think you're watching a trick where he's going to show you and escape, but you don't, and he gets sawed in half. And I think the blade is a bit more.

Speaker 18 Is it very bloody?

Speaker 17 No, it's not at all. And I think the blade, but it's a version of the sawing someone in half trick where it's meant to look like it's a mistake.
So

Speaker 17 David Copperfield, as it's happening, the box is up and this huge, as Andy says, this incredible drill, which I believe was owned by Orson Welles, who was trying to get into magic. So

Speaker 17 he bought Orson Welles's. Yeah, Citizen Kane's Orson Welles.
He bought this big thing off the estate, or maybe even personally from him. So it comes down, and as it's coming down,

Speaker 17 the box that he's in flips open. So you can see him laying there and it goes through him.
And that's meant to be the big, it's meant to be the sawing trick that goes wrong.

Speaker 17 I just remembered actually on QI in Series H, we chopped Daniel Radcliffe's head off. Do you remember? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 17 And I had to do that in the rehearsal, had to pretend to be Daniel Radcliffe having his head chopped off.

Speaker 17 And there was a massive argument afterwards about whether we would show afterwards that he was fine or whether we would just say, oh, sorry guys, we're going to have to stop the trick.

Speaker 17 I should have said, oh, we've run out of time on the show.

Speaker 17 That would have got the publicity in.

Speaker 17 David Copperfield, there's a story I read about him, which was he was walking after a show with a couple of his assistants from the show, and they all got mugged in the street and the mugger went, give me all the stuff that you have, you know, give me your wallet, give me your, and so

Speaker 17 yeah, so the so the two assistants took out their wallets and their airplane tickets and their passports and gave it.

Speaker 17 David Copperfield, who also had his phone, his wallet and his airplane tickets on him, went into his pockets and then did a trick where it looked like he had nothing.

Speaker 17 So he was like, I don't have anything on me. And the guy was like, okay, that's fine.
And went away. He risked this guy's worth over 800 million dollars

Speaker 17 it would have been worse if he pulled out a load of flags and then a load of handkerchiefs and stuff maybe a few dubs that would have been so good

Speaker 17 you've got to use it i'm sorry if you've been training to do you've been training for that moment your whole life if you don't then whip out the tricks then when are you gonna do it oh like carry a saw on you and chop the guy's head like do something that's actually gonna save his life what happened to me in nuremberg that time when we were on tour i don't know if i said it so we were on tour and

Speaker 17 I was dressed in like a yellow and black suit, and Andy said that I looked like a magician, which, in fairness, I did look a bit like a magician.

Speaker 17 So we decided to put some magic tricks on, and I had this kind of cane that's just appeared from nowhere, and I had like the kind of the handkerchiefs that would come out.

Speaker 17 Anyway, we finished the last tour of the gig, and then I had to go to Nuremberg to see my in-laws the next day. And I didn't have, I couldn't put stuff in the hold, so it was all hand luggage.

Speaker 17 And so I had all of my tricks with me in my bag and this like cane that appeared from nowhere just looked like a bomb basically and so we went through the airport and they were like what's this uh what's this uh these german guys and i'm like oh oh it's magic it's magic it's magic and they went what i said it's magic it's magic i said let me show you let me show you and so then i did a load of magic tricks in front of them in security uh and they were like oh okay okay and i was just about to go and they went no no stop stop stop stop i'm like oh shit what what what they said do it again

Speaker 17 and they got all of the other security guys in the whole of Nuremberg at the part and they made me do a magic trick in front of them all. That sounds really funny.

Speaker 18 Just a finding place to be questioned, Nuremberg, isn't it?

Speaker 17 Just while we're on tour stories, on our previous tour, we had a guy who was our road manager called Daniel and he lives in Wales.

Speaker 17 And just on mugging, he was walking home one night in Wales and he was going under a bridge and a guy... walked up behind him and tried to mug him.
So he went, oi!

Speaker 17 And Daniel turned around and Daniel's a really big guy and he's he's from America and he's quite an intimidating character if you didn't see the front of him.

Speaker 17 So he turns around and this guy's holding a knife at him, but he looks at Daniel and sees the size of him and the look of him and goes,

Speaker 17 want to buy a knife?

Speaker 17 And Daniel went, yeah, it looks good. And he bought it of him.
No. Yeah.
For 20 quid.

Speaker 17 And he has that knife. He brought it on all of our tours.
It's what he he uses to cut things to poke things like this up. Really funny.

Speaker 17 That is it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 17 If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland.
Andy.

Speaker 17 At Andrew Hunter. M.
James. At James Harkin.
And Anna.

Speaker 18 You can email our podcast at qi.com.

Speaker 17 Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

Speaker 17 All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to our ongoing tour, Neurodimmunity. We're doing all of the UK.
Check out if we're coming to a city near you.

Speaker 17 But just very quickly, Barstival, thank you so much for having us here. It's been so much fun.
And we will be back. We'll see you again.

Speaker 17 Everyone at home, we're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.
Goodbye.

Speaker 17 Let's be real.

Speaker 16 Life happens. Kids spill.

Speaker 17 Pets shed.

Speaker 16 And accidents are inevitable. Find a sofa that can keep up at washable sofas.com.
Starting at just $699, our sofas are fully machine washable inside and out.

Speaker 16 So you can say goodbye to stains and hello to worry-free living. Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.
They're kid-proof, pet-friendly, and built for everyday life.

Speaker 16 Plus, changeable fabric covers let you refresh your sofa whenever you want. Neat flexibility?

Speaker 16 Our modular design lets you rearrange your sofa anytime to fit your space, whether it's a growing family room or a cozy apartment.

Speaker 16 Plus, they're earth-friendly and trusted by over 200,000 happy customers. It's time to upgrade to a stress-free, mess-proof sofa.
Visit washablefas.com today and save. That's washable sofas.com.

Speaker 16 Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply.