389: No Such Thing As A Semen Chest

For the final trivia question, what is the largest mammal in the world?

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Afternoon, all.

You must know by now, if you've been paying attention over the last couple of months, that I have for some reason committed to traveling the country with these three upcoming idiots.

We are going to all sorts of exotic places like Ipswich, Barnstable, Poole, Reading, Peterborough, Chesterfield.

We're popping over to Dublin.

We're going up to Scotland, a few locations there.

Obviously, sitting on a tour bus for months on end with Dan, James and Andy is not how any sane person would choose to spend their time.

The only thing that's going to make it bearable is if you guys come along to please, no such thing as autofish.com has all the details, get tickets, come and watch us.

There'll be an exclusive first half, which will never be available anywhere else.

And then we'll be doing a different podcast every night for the second half.

See you there.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting at a humongous distance from Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Toshinsky.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact.

My fact this week is that it would take people around 10 minutes to adjust to the way Abraham Lincoln sounded before they could enjoy his speeches.

Wow.

So are the first 10 minutes of his speech is always really shit because he knows it has to be filler.

And then at the 10 minute mark, he launches his speech.

He does the whole, what do you do?

What's your job?

You know, MCing moments.

Wait, hang on, Dan.

Abraham Lincoln's most famous speech was the Gettysburg Address, where I believe he spoke for two minutes.

And also his most famous line is the first line of that address, isn't it?

Oh no, yeah, you're right.

It's true.

Oh, I would say it was the last line.

So it's the last line.

Wasn't it?

It shall not perish from the earth line.

Yes.

It was the first line four score.

Four score, four score.

I really would have gone the four score as the big line.

Would you?

And I would go by the people to, the people, for the people, with the people.

You didn't understand the first minute and a half, though, did you?

That's true, because I was so distracted by his weird voice.

His weird voice.

Did he have an accent?

He did have an accent, but he also had a much higher voice than you would think so i guess all of us probably had an introduction to abraham lincoln's supposed voice through the movies and so on for me it was bill and ted's excellent adventure and incredible

watched that this weekend did you well you would have seen it my niece had never seen it she's only nine and so yeah right introduced her to it it's brilliant so he's a fantastic movie yeah and he's talking about that yeah

so he comes out at the end and he does the four score and it's a very baritone full score and that's what we know is lincoln but all of the contemporary accounts of his speeches say that he had a tenor's voice a much higher voice and as a result there's a historian called Harold Holzer who's written over 40 books on both Lincoln and the Civil War and he found that there were all these accounts of journalists saying that for the first 10 minutes people just really had to adjust to both the accent and the sound matched with this tall human who was quite gangly and just putting all the things together.

It took 10 minutes before they could settle in and go, oh, okay, he's actually saying amazing stuff.

It sounds like a really weird voice.

Because obviously, no recording.

You're good at voices, Adney.

Can you do us a little.

He had a thin tenor or rather falsetto voice.

Almost as high-pitched as a boatswain's whistle.

Yeah, it's mad.

And

all the reviews are so negative of him.

The New York Herald said he had a frequent tendency to dwindle into a shrill and unpleasant sound.

It just sounds

like that.

Some people think it was useful, though, because there were some famous debates he did with a guy called Stephen A.

Douglas, and he had quite a baritone voice, Stephen A.

Douglas.

But they think that maybe in a big crowd, the baritone might sometimes get lost there, and the people at the back will be able to hear the high-pitched sounds better.

Interesting.

How interesting.

Is that like when your neighbours are having a party, and you can hear the bass much more indistinctly, but the high stuff is what really annoys you?

Yeah.

Well, for me, it's the bass.

Is that a joke?

No.

The bass is the annoying bit, right?

The bass is the bit that keeps you.

Yes, you're right.

Okay, so

it's like the the opposite of my life, which is my neighbours.

Cool, very good.

It's another brilliant analogy from Andy Murray.

The whole thing of it being the voice being low, the first time I think I've then heard the higher voice is when Daniel Day-Lewis played him in the Spielberg movie.

It's a fantastic movie.

I mean, it's.

It's no Bill and Ted.

It's no Bill and Ted.

Yeah, I read an article in the Library of Congress, and they said that his voice is closer to that Daniel Day-Lewis voice than any other impression that anyone's ever got.

Oh, really?

They even said it was more close than the one Andy is going to do on the podcast in a few weeks' time on that article at some point.

No!

So when Daniel Day-Lewis was cast for the movie, which was after Liam Neeson had to drop out, he spent a year pretty.

Was Liam Neeson going to play Lincoln?

Liam Neeson was going to play Lincoln.

I don't know if I'd take a role that I was second to Liam Neeson.

Well, I think Daniel Day-Lewis was the original choice.

He said no to it, and then Liam Neeson got involved, and then Liam Neeson had horrible.

I know, yeah.

Surely then Daniel Daniel J.

Lewis said, oh, God, fine, I will do it.

My lord, I'm going to find whoever stole my hat and I'm going to rip their heads from their body.

Yeah, so he took on the role and he spent a year, possibly more, prepping for it, read over a hundred books.

And that's when he was trying to find the voice, the voice of Lincoln.

And when he eventually found it...

Probably reading the wrong books, wasn't he?

I read an audio book.

When he eventually decided on what the voice was, he recorded it with a neighbor and he posted it to Steven Spielberg in a package where he drew a skull and crossbones on it and put a black mark on it because he wanted no one but Steven Spielberg to read

it to make it much more interesting and exciting to be tampered with.

If it was just a blank envelope, I'd be like, yeah, fine, I'm not interested in that.

All of a sudden, he didn't treasure that.

Exactly.

I don't know what he was thinking.

It sounds very odd filming with him because he is your classic method actor, I guess.

And he he insisted on being Lincoln on set so he talked in that voice the entire time on and off set for months and months when they were filming he never didn't talk in the voice he wouldn't allow any accents other than an American accent around him in case that put him on his flow yeah he um he made everyone refer to him as Mr.

President throughout filming I think Spielberg insisted on that as well as part of the presidential both presidents

it was very confusing.

Battle of the presidents.

No, no, he said let's let's buy into this.

Oh, so he said that everyone had to call Day Lewis president.

I believe so, because he started coming in era-appropriate clothing as well as the director to sort of make

Spielberg did that.

And Daniel Day-Lewis was not on the call sheet.

Abraham Lincoln was on the call sheet instead.

Whoa.

How do you dress era-appropriate as a film director if you're dressing for the 1860s?

Yes.

Surely, yeah, that he just walks in and he went, sorry, we can't make a film because film hasn't been invented yet.

Everyone go home.

There's one journalist who described Lincoln as a slang-wanging stump speaker.

That is a great phrase.

It's a really good phrase.

He was known for being humble, which some people cast as maybe not sophisticated enough in his language.

Slang-wanging.

He's wanging the slang around.

Slang-wanging.

His accent, we were saying before, was kind of different as well, right?

So whenever he was supposed to say chairman, he would say cheerman.

Cheerman.

Chairman.

And so chairman.

What about this?

If he ever said winder.

Winder.

That's Window.

Window, right?

Learned would be Laurent.

And he would always say Wreckham instead of assume.

That sounds really different.

Wow.

But equally strangely, he also had a lot of misspellings in his written work as well.

And he would often spell the word inaugural wrong.

Oh, yeah.

But you think that perhaps that gives a clue as to how he spoke as well.

If he spelled it slightly differently, maybe he spoke it that way as well.

Was it radically different?

Did it start with a Q?

No, it would be inaugural.

Okay.

Instead of inaugural.

Inaugural.

And he stood so still.

This was another report of the way he spoke.

So his law partner was a man called William Herndon, and Herndon recorded that, I don't know why he said this, but he said you could leave a silver dollar between his feet at the start of a speech, and it would still be there at the end.

I have a theory for why he did this.

So I was reading accounts of young Lincoln.

I I don't think he actually did that.

I'm just.

What do you mean?

He didn't actually leave a dollar between his fingers.

No, no, no, but he stood in credit.

The point was, the analogy was to make the point.

I thought you were saying that he had done that.

I have a theory that the coin was magic.

He used to be a busker, and he always put a few coats there to just get people there.

No, my theory, which probably is an established reason as opposed to a theory, is when he was young, he used to sit up late at night and he used to listen to his dad tell stories to all of his friends, really funny stories.

Lincoln was obsessed with them.

So in the morning, he would go and he would find his friends and he would tell all the stories that his dad had told the night before.

And he would stand on a tree stump and that is where he would deliver all of his speeches.

So he didn't have much of a stage.

He had the space of a tree stump.

And that would have informed the lack of leg movement,

which then took him probably to presidency.

When he was doing his inaugural speech, he was thinking, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

exactly.

The Gettysburg Address was not him.

What?

Yes, it was.

Wow.

Okay, this is a crazier theory than my tree stump theory.

This is, he stood so still because it was actually a robot.

No, the Gettysburg Address was someone else who delivered it.

So, really, at the event where he delivered the Gettysburg Address, he was supposed to be giving a very short closing dedication, which is why it was only two minutes long.

It was just a very quick, thanks for coming, guys.

Thank God these blokes gave their lives for the Civil War, etc.

If there's a carriage in the park with the license plate,

it's blocking the way, you need to move your carriage.

Yeah,

exactly.

The person who was supposed to give what they were calling the Gettysburg Address at the time was this great orator and politician, pastor, who was called Edward Everett.

And his was two hours long.

So that could be the one we all knew of by heart.

Wow, really?

So did he actually do that two-hour speech first?

He did a two-hour speech, which means it's incredible people had the energy to listen to Lincoln after that.

He did the two hours.

And then they loved it so much

after that.

I think he was sick at the time as well, Lincoln, when he then gave the speech afterwards.

And it kind of bombed.

I guess after a two-hour speech.

Yeah,

it got terrible reviews everywhere.

So The Times said that the inauguration of the cemetery at Gettysburg was an imposing ceremony, only rendered ludicrous by some of the luckless sallies of that poor President Lincoln.

He got a ring.

Yeah.

And in fact, there was an apology issued in 2013 by a newspaper called the Patriot News, who gave him a really bad review at the time.

They said it was silly remarks and that maybe he was drunk and that it deserved the veil of oblivion

and then in 2013 they recanted.

They decided to apologize.

Of all the things he should be apologising for, it does go quite far down the list.

When did Lincoln become president?

How do you all know?

1860?

Yeah, so when do you think the first town was named after him?

Ooh.

I would have guessed a few years after the Civil War or soon, or maybe soon after it.

Okay, I'm going to go the opposite direction and say he was an influential lawyer and maybe that led to something.

So two years before he was president.

Who are you and what have you done with Dan Schreiber?

That is absolutely correct.

It was 1853 because he was a lawyer.

Some people who were setting up a new town brought him in to kind of sign the deeds and they said, would you mind if we named this town after you?

God, that's nice.

So that's Lincoln, Illinois, which is still there today.

And at noon that day, he purchased two watermelons, carried them to the public square, and squeezed the watermelon juice out onto the ground.

Did he use his thighs?

Call back.

But then he said to the people, nothing bearing the name Lincoln ever amounted to much.

So he said that they shouldn't really have called it after him.

Wow.

That's very cool.

Humble chap.

One thing from the time that Lincoln was president was that the White House was an open house at the time, which is so bizarre to think of now, obviously, because there are two miles of security around it.

But people were just walking in all the time.

You just walk into the White House and people were free to climb in through the windows.

They camped outside his office door.

They were free to do that.

If it's open, why'd they go through the windows?

No idea, actually.

But they were demanding jobs from him.

It was just, the whole thing was carnet.

He's the president of the country.

He must have had one room where it was

do not enter.

Well, he had an office, but

they had to cut it down to two five-hour sessions a week where you could just knock on the door and go and see him and chat to him and ask for a job.

Oh, I see.

Ten hours a week of his working time was spent just being haranged by people.

and he called them his public opinion baths.

And people would just leave inventions that they thought he might like to look at.

It's insane.

And he couldn't walk from the office to his own private living quarters without being bothered along the way by people asking for jobs.

And the White House maintenance people had to build a partition to say, no, he actually just needs a corridor that he can walk along without being bothered all the time.

The corridor of power.

Yes.

He's mad.

I suppose it's kind of like an MP's surgery, isn't it, today?

Yeah.

But, you know,

for

the first president of the United States.

I think he did more than 40 hours a week, handy.

I'm going to say, maybe at the height of the war, yeah, you're right.

And now he bothers presidents because isn't he constantly reported, not constantly, but by a few, the ghost of Lincoln seen in the White House.

The people of, you know, presidents have said, yeah, yeah, I saw the ghost of Lincoln.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's him.

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

My fact this week is that 5,000 years ago, Scots built houses by dropping huge piles of stones to the bottom of locks and building their home on top of them.

That is so amazing.

Such a weird way of doing it.

And we don't know why they did it.

These are things called Kranogs.

I mean, if you live in Scotland, it's very likely you know about them.

I actually didn't know about them at all.

Yeah, never heard of them.

But there are about 600 of them known about so far.

They're artificial islands that were built in locks and they would be connected to the shore by like a little causeway and until quite recently it was thought they dated back to about 800 BC and then they just did some radiocarbon dating of pottery that's been sunken around them and they found out it actually dates back to 3600 BC.

So

before Stonehenge, before the pyramids,

the Scots were just piling up stones in locks and building a house on top for no apparent reason.

It's not just piling stones, right?

Like there's so much engineering that goes around.

Yeah, it's so impressive.

So the word kranog is Gaelic for son of tree or young tree and the idea is because they would cut these huge long timber piles and they ram them into the beds of the lock and then they would pile the stones in around them so they had a solid wooden foundation.

So you've got like a scaffold that you can stuff full.

Yeah, I think there are different types as well aren't there.

There are some that are just timber.

Some are just kind of wooden platforms and then there are some that are stones.

Yeah exactly and we've tried to remake them in modern times and it's taken taken about three years to construct one to be in a similar using the technology how did they

drive the piles into the bed of the lock they have to be meet they have to get meters into the bed of the lock yeah and you know that's obviously incredibly hard to do from a floating surface yeah well i think what happens is you put some stones near the shore yeah and then you put some a little bit further away and a little bit further away and you put like a path to the middle of the loch or not the middle maybe a few meters away from the edge and then you build it from there so you kind of make a causeway first and if you look from above, you can kind of see the little causeway underneath the water.

And then how do you get the pile to go so deep into the bay?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, it's all crazy.

How do you do it?

I think we all know.

You pile up on top like a circus trick.

You just have people standing on top of each other.

Sorry, the ghost of Lincoln, I think, is coming out again by his stuff.

If it's the Loch Ness monster, we're.

It's aliens!

Of course it's aliens.

No, we have no idea, do we?

It's absolutely amazing.

Lived there until the 17th century, apparently.

The last people were living on Kranogs, so pretty relatively recent compared with when they were built.

I think the ones where we found the pottery, we're not sure if people actually lived there, right?

Yeah.

So the reason that we think they might not have lived on these particular ones is because there isn't any domestic waste around there.

You do have these pots.

There's no human remains, so we don't think it's a funeral thing.

So we think it might be some kind of feast, maybe some kind of rite of passage, that kind of thing.

So what has happened is people have brought some pots to this island, this fake island, done something, thrown the pots in the water and then left.

It's a bar.

I mean, that's obviously just a bar.

It could be.

It's a tigi bar.

Yeah, it's a bar.

You're pissed, you toss your pot away, you can't be asked to carry it home.

It's a Scottish pub.

It's the first pubs.

It sounds so exciting being the person who discovered that they were really old.

So they are 3,000 years older than we thought they were.

And it was a retired Navy diver called Chris Murray who first kind of discovered this, and and it was 10 years ago and he was just going for a dive and he saw some pots and then he sent them off to be analyzed and turned out they were 5,500 years old.

But he was saying that in 2020 he was going for a dive and he found a 5,500 year old drinking vessel.

He just saw a little fragment sticking out of the mud.

So he took it and then he took a sip of water from it.

And you can think the last time someone did this was over five millennia ago.

Yeah.

Isn't that so cool?

It is amazing.

Maybe people will be doing that with our old horrible Ribena cartons and plastic festival cups in 5,000 years.

What a nice thought.

What a lovely thought.

All the plastic will still be there, won't it?

Yep.

Yep.

Artificial islands?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

So lots of artificial islands in the world.

I didn't know about the ones in Bolivia and Peru on Lake Titicaca.

They're amazing.

I've stayed on them.

No.

Wow, the floating ones.

The floating ones, the reed islands, yeah.

So, yeah, these are islands made of weeds woven together, and they're made by indigenous people.

And it seems like they were just made by the Uro people, and basically, they got to the shores of Lake Titicaca, hoping to set up camp and, like, take residence there a thousand years ago.

And they realized there were people there.

There was the Keshawa people, the Aymara people there.

So they were like, well, we can't live here.

What should we do?

So they built some platforms and then just sailed out into the middle of a lake and they still hang out there.

Yeah, it's really cool.

When I was there, they said that they went there because there were taxes they wanted to get away with.

So it was like a literal offshore account that they went so they couldn't tax them.

But some people think it was because there was a war and they went there so that people couldn't attack them.

But yeah, they taught me how to make the reeds and stuff like that.

Oh, cool.

Because you have to constantly sort of...

It's like repainting a bridge, right?

Like you're constantly fixing the reeds.

So near to where the islands are, there's like loads of massive reeds and you go over there and you cut them down and then you kind of turn them into like little, not like bricks, but like little groups of reeds.

And I went on a boat to the school because they have a floating school and a floating basketball court and stuff.

I was staying with a family of Uros and it was really cool.

Wow.

Highly recommend that.

It's so amazing.

Have you heard of Mischief Reef?

This is another created island and it's a new island that's been created by China.

And it's in the is it the South China Sea?

I think it is.

Probably.

It's where they do most of their island creation.

They're creating a lot of islands at the moment.

It's positive mischief.

Yeah.

They are.

They genuinely are.

I try to work out, was this called Mischief Reef before China started creating military runways and hangars and missile bases?

It's quite an innocuous term.

There's naughty boy islands.

Yeah.

Silly billy.

Mischief Reef is one of the biggest, and you can see photos of it from, you know, 15 years ago, photos now, and it looks like a different place.

It is a different place, literally, because it's been imported and installed and concreted and all over.

But there's this bizarre war of attrition going on, kind of Cold War style, between China who are building these islands, which are contested, by the way, the ownership is contested, and the US Navy.

So the US Navy keeps on sailing close to them to make the point.

They do a thing called a FONOP, which is a freedom of navigation operation.

And if you have a land, I think the barrier is 12 miles.

Like, that's how far your border stretches into the ocean if the island is definitely yours.

I know there are different sort of definitions, but the USA pointedly sails within 12 miles of Mischief Reef to make the point, these are international waters according to the international community, so we're going to keep on doing it.

And it hasn't broken into conflict yet.

A little bit, hasn't it?

Because, like, I think the Philippines want it, Japan wants it, Indonesia wants it, Russia wants it.

It's like, yeah, it's dodgy.

But do you remember?

I was telling you guys about in Bhutan.

on the border between Bhutan and China, China has just started building villages.

Yes.

and no one noticed.

In Bhutan, they're not.

In Bhutan, yeah, like the Bhutanese noticed and they were like, well, shall we tell the Chinese not to do this anymore or shall we just kind of leave it?

And they just kind of left it because there are other things that they want to have a good deal with China about.

But then the international community are like, well, last time we looked here, there weren't three villages and an airport and a, you know.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I thought it was called Mischief Islands because of a ship.

Oh, really?

Called the Mischief.

Might well be.

Yeah, I think it's in dedication to a ship that used to pass and that.

I could be wrong about that, but.

Jimmy's mischief.

Yeah,

that's possibly.

It was a party cruise ship, wasn't it?

It was a swinger's cruise.

Here's an island that I'd never heard of,

Dejima.

This was created in Nagasaki Bay in the 17th century in Japan.

And during the Edo period, Japan wanted to be a closed country, so it didn't want anyone else to come in.

The only people that were allowed to go anywhere near Japan were Chinese, Korean, and Dutch.

And they were allowed to do that for trading reasons.

Dutch is a bit of a wild card.

Seems like a Dutch got a weird free pass to the rest of European.

Okay, whatever, I'm not offended.

But basically, if you were a member of the Dutch East India Company and you were trading and you were like taking some silk there or some spices or whatever, you would go to this created island called Dejima and you would kind of live on there, but you weren't allowed onto the main island.

And there was like a bridge there with guards which would stop you from going over.

It's really, really cool.

There's an amazing book, David Mitchell book, set on Dejima, because it was very famous.

Japan's policy was they don't want any Western culture coming in and invading them, so which is why they really tried to block them out.

And then, you know, wars happened, and we got involved and forced them out of it.

But yeah, it's so brilliant.

That's the book.

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob DeZoet.

And yeah, so it's about this Dutch guy who goes over and stays there.

But yeah, completely fake.

Yeah, and while you're on there, like the local kids would kind of, oh, look, there's a Dutch person.

Isn't that strange?

Kind of thing.

And also, you were required to tell the Japanese about anything that had happened in the world while you were away.

Really?

You're a human newspaper for the news sort of three years ago when you last left the Western world.

I find that really cool because at one point Dejima was the only independent bit of the Netherlands.

So at one point the Netherlands was an artificial island.

So this is when the Netherlands was annexed by Napoleon, I think, in the Napoleonic Wars and like lots of Dutch territory was taken elsewhere.

And so that was where they lived.

And I think they succeeded there because they're so used to living on basically artificial reclaimed land, right?

The Netherlands is sort of mostly an artificial island in itself.

About 60% of the land in the Netherlands is just there because they've drained away the water and they've built it up.

It's amazing.

Yeah.

It's incredible.

Most of the population lives on land that shouldn't naturally be there.

Yeah.

There's an entire province called Flevopolder, which is the 12th province of the Netherlands, and it's new.

It's just a new

land, yeah.

Oh, because Polder is what they're called.

It's a Polder, the reclaimed land, isn't it?

It would make you nervous, I think.

That is incredible.

I found a really cool new artificial island, which I'm so annoyed.

I have not looked up the pronunciations, but I imagine you guys will know it.

So

it's a bridge which connects Copenhagen to Malmo, and it's the Orasund Bridge.

Urasund.

Have you been there?

Okay, apparently you've been to every artificial island.

So the Urasund Bridge, if you're passing it, you go in the bridge and then...

That is what the TV show, the bridge is basically.

Exactly, yes, yeah.

And it goes down underneath, doesn't it?

As opposed to it being a bridge that connects Copenhagen to Malmo, it goes bridge-like, and then suddenly it becomes a tunnel and you go underneath.

And that tunnel bit has become an artificial island, which is called Pepperholm.

And Pepperholm is called that because there is an actual island next to it called Saltholm.

And

yeah, so that's the...

They don't mention that in the bridge.

That's a really great TV show.

It's so exciting.

Saganaren, Lanski Malma.

It's really like cool and sexy and scandy.

And they don't ever.

If they just had one character who just gave bits of trivia about the area, that would be weird.

Maybe it would have been a successful show, exactly.

But so, yeah, so it's become this artificial island.

So how does a tunnel become an island?

There's a stretch of water between the two.

Between Malma and what is it?

So you have a bridge over some of it.

Then there's an island at the end of the bridge.

And that island then contains the portal to a tunnel.

Yes.

The tunnel runs under the rest of the water

so that boats can still go past.

But you can have a bridge.

I see, I see.

That's clever.

And so what's happened is this small, very concrete-looking island has become a place where new species have migrated to and set up shop.

And so you're only really allowed.

This place sounds like a penguin going.

Wanna fish?

Will I fish anyone?

Any fish?

So supposedly, I mean, this is, I don't know if this is definitely still the case in 2021, but for the last few years, it's been the case that you can only go there once a year, and it's only biologists who are allowed to go there.

And what they found on it is amazing.

There's 12 species of bird that are living there.

There were 20 species of spider, one really rare one, which they think might have migrated there via a train.

So it sort of popped off while it was on the train.

There's a couple of rabbits there that they think some people in a car must have just let out and let them be on their own.

There's 345 species of beetle, there's 421 species of butterfly.

Which vehicle did these all all leave out of?

The beetles came in a yellow submarine.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the only known species of marine lichen was discovered by a person named Ivan Lamb.

Their work often acknowledged the help of a Miss Elkie Mackenzie, but that turned out to be one in the same person, as Lam later transitioned and took that name.

It's very cool.

Isn't that cool?

So Ivan Lam was basically thanking her future self

Elkie Mackenzie

or teasing.

It's a

trailer for.

So I read an obituary of Elkie McKenzie written by Vernon Akmadjian,

but I'd actually first come across Elkie McKenzie in a blog by JSTOR, the website by Sabrina Imbler.

And in that blog, there was an amazing thing that said that Mackenzie had spent her whole life preparing this monograph of a particular type of lichen, only for her never to be able to quite make it because sometimes her specimens got blown away once she fell down an elevator shaft.

Did she fall down an elevator shaft or did the lichen fall down?

It's really hard to tell, but that was like what really piqued my interest about this person.

It's like, what an amazing life.

But yeah, a really cool person who kind of dedicated her life to lichen.

She worked in the Natural History Museum in London as an assistant to Annie Lorraine Smith in the 1930s.

And it's just so interesting that at the time, Annie Lorraine Smith was a huge character in the lichen world.

And she'd written a book, which became the sort of seminal textbook for the time about lichen, yet she was not officially hired by the Natural History Museum because they didn't hire women at the time.

So she had to have as her pay packet was outsourced to somewhere else that could fund fund it because that was the only way that they could do it because they didn't have women on the payroll.

Wow.

It's weird though reading about the history of lyconologists because there do seem to be a lot of women in there.

Like in the 19th century, a lot of the people I was coming across were women, which is kind of exciting.

It was like a secret area that women knew that they were going to be led into almost, but not quite.

And I did get excited that Carol Dodge, who was Elkie McKenzie's main rival, was also a woman, but it's not a woman.

But it's kind of sad, Carol Dodge, the Carol Dodge story, because Elkie didn't like Dodge.

So what Elkie found that was really revolutionary in the lichen world was endemic Antarctic species, right?

And she never got the chance to publish her Antarctic discoveries for various reasons.

And she didn't like Dodge because she thought Dodge's taxonomy was kind of reckless and Dodge was just identifying things all over the shop.

You know, you pick up a bit of lichen, you go, yeah, yeah, I bet that's a new one.

Come on, write it down.

And now Dodge's record of Antarctic lichen is the kind of authority because Mackenzie for various reasons one of which was that she said in I can't remember what year she transitioned was it the I think it was the late 70s maybe

but she said I am a woman so I'm gonna have the surgery and she basically was made to take early retirement yeah yeah that's the implication isn't it they sort of tried to rewrite the history in the moment, didn't they, by saying, oh, it's just for reasons, but it was quite obvious that that's why.

Yeah.

Post-Mackenzie's retirement, she got into woodwork.

Obviously, she felt like a bit of a wind down, and I think she had some mental health problems that she admitted to.

She'd been quite depressed, and so she quit the whole lichen game and decided to get really into making semen's chests.

So, you know,

where else are you going to keep your semen chests?

James, semen chests are a completely different thing to semen's chests.

Oh, no, wait,

then what have I been been keeping mine in?

Oh my god.

That's why they didn't invite you back on the boat.

Oh no.

There's a treasure map out there where one day when it's found, it's going to be hugely disappointing.

Just a pool of semen.

X-Mark's the spunk more like.

Wow, that was too far.

Too far, yeah.

No, she didn't make receptacles for semen.

Just to make that very clear.

She just made receptacles for semen's gear.

You know, it's like that.

It's like a suitcase.

The only notable thing really about them is that they're like a chest, but they have sides that tilt inwards because if you're on a rocky boat, you don't want them to tip over.

Very clever.

Very clever.

And they have very intricate knots in the handles called beckets.

And this is what Elkie got particularly into, is making these knots.

Just on lichen.

Lichen are incredible.

I didn't really know what they were.

God, me neither.

No.

Why have we ever talked about them before?

And what they are is, they're two things.

They're two species living in the same house.

It's mad.

Or they're rather there's one species living in a house built by another one.

So it's a fungus and normally an algae teaming up.

Sometimes it's an algae, sometimes it's a cyanobacteria, sometimes there are two algae.

It gets a bit complicated, but basically, basically, the basic thing is it's a fungus which builds a structure and the algae lives in it and photosynthesizes sunlight, which produces sugar, which the fungus then eats.

So the fungus is providing the home and the algae is bringing in the food.

And so what's the lichen?

It's the collective name for the lichen.

Yeah, exactly.

These two things that are working together, as you say, in symbiosis, the word symbiosis was coined by a guy called Heinrich Anton de Barry, and he was talking about lichens when he coined that term.

Although, Vernon Matian, who wrote the obituary of Elki,

he doesn't think they're in symbiosis.

He thinks that actually the fungus is a controlling parasite of the algae or cyanobacteria or whatever.

Roger stealing food off it.

He's a basic relationship.

He's saying that, yeah, exactly, that the algae has no choice in the matter and it could perfectly happily live without a roof over its head.

There's no evidence that they need this building that the fungi makes for them and the fungi is getting a free ride.

But it's very controversial.

It's a big old debate.

And it's like everyone knows couples like that where you think,

should they be together?

Isn't one of them fine without the other one?

Is it controlling parasitism?

No, you can only judge these things from the inside unless you are an algae or a fungi.

You cannot comment.

So, does the fungi absolutely need the algae then?

Yeah, because it gets energy from the algae.

So, the fungi can't do what most fungi do, which is eat decomposed matter, which is how fungi normally survive, but they've now evolved to just eat the food that's made for them by photosynthesis, so they would starve.

And the argument is that the algae is getting some protection in return, but a lot of people think that actually it doesn't need that protection.

Right.

Yeah.

It's controversial.

Well, I've got actually something even more controversial to blow this even wider open, which is that they now think it's not, a a lichen is not two organisms, it's three.

Three.

Yeah.

So that and this is a massive discovery in the world of lichen.

So this is that there have been a bunch of mysteries about it.

So one was that there were different lichen, which at a DNA level are exactly the same when they studied them, but that have different effects.

Like some will kill you when you eat them and some are perfectly edible.

And they're like, how is this possible?

They look like they're the same thing.

And they also had this problem where scientists can't recreate lichen in a lab, which you should be able to, because you should should be able to get the fungus and the bacteria or the algae, shove them together, create it.

Doesn't work.

And now they found a way of looking at them closer, and they've realized they all have inside them a different fungus, which is more like a yeast.

So right deep within their cells, single cells of this other fungus.

So is this every known lichen we're talking about?

It seems like it might be.

The definition of lichen is this third thing.

It's a new order of fungus.

So it's an extra fungus which is carried within the fungus that then takes to the...

Exactly.

It's very hard to blow this shit wide open because a lot of it is just learning about the original shit in the first place.

Can I just blow some more shit wide open?

Please.

So you know

there's a lot of species of lichen that they thought were just a single species.

There's one in particular which is called Dictyonema glabratum.

And they thought it was just one species.

And it turns out that it's at least 126 different species of lichens.

This one lichen that you'd never heard of.

I know.

It's actually 126 lichens that you'd never heard of.

It's amazing.

That's incredible.

Which lazy intern did the first count of that?

Well, the problem is that when you take lichen from the natural setting, if you see that in the countryside, it might be lots of different colours, it might be lots of different shapes and stuff like that.

As soon as you take it into the lab, it loses all of its colour.

It becomes like a boring grey-brown sludge.

And they kind of all look the same at that point.

And so loads of people were finding the stuff and bringing it back and they couldn't tell the difference.

Wow.

And it's only when they look at the genes that they can now tell the difference between the different species.

I'll tell you what, if anyone's thinking of becoming a lichenologist, and I imagine after this chat, you're going to be applying,

best place to do it, New Zealand, in my mind.

Really?

10% of the world's lichen is found in New Zealand.

And as of 2019, they had fewer than five lichenologists.

Did they?

You would have an absolute playground there if you wanted to go and do that.

And wasn't that the place that they had the sexy pavement lichen?

It was, exactly.

It's in one of our books.

We mentioned it in Book of the Year 2019.

It was that New Zealanders, I believe, were told by the government to stop licking lichen on the ground because it was acting like Viagra.

But

who was licking lichen off the ground?

I think they were taking it off the ground and they were ingesting it in a different way, maybe in a T or something.

Lichen this.

So they were getting an erection when they had this lichen, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So why were they not allowed to do it?

I think it was...

I can't actually remember.

Do you remember?

I think it was.

Who's going around stopping people having perfectly healthy erections based on snuffing pavement scrapings?

Maybe if you get the wrong lichen, then maybe your dick falls off or something.

You know, because they are hard to tell apart.

So it's probably very strange.

I do remember how it was.

What was it?

It was that basically you would get lots of heavy metals leaching into it on the pavements and stuff.

You might get dog poo in it.

You might get dogwing in it.

It's hard to regulate, Mike.

Truly.

It's hard to regulate.

There was high levels of lead they found.

They found cadmium in it.

They found mercury.

They found arsenic.

And the US Food and Drugs Administration bought one lot online and found that it was actually 20% grass clippings and 80% ground up Viagra.

No way.

I would say be a lichenologist in Britain because the British Lichen Society, as far as I can tell, are super on it.

They have an amazing website and they just have a fabulous time.

They've got about 650 members.

A lot of competition there, though, isn't there?

Like Dan was saying, only five lichen experts in New Zealand.

Fewer than.

Fewer than five.

That's true.

That's why they just didn't name the number.

Yeah, that's what the article said.

Surely you could just say three if that's what it was.

Actually, in Britain, it's useful to become a lichenologist because I was going through the list of the presidents of this society, specifically the women, and every single woman that I could find that had a Wikipedia article attached to their name, they've all got OBEs.

So I don't know what's going on in the lichen world world that the government is recognising their work towards the country, but they've all got titles.

Wow.

Yeah, so that's a quick way to an OBE, become a lichenologist.

Wow, maybe there's some secret they're not telling us.

Doesn't feel like a quick way to become an OBE.

Sorry, I think it takes years and years of craft.

It's not like become an OBE with this one weird trick.

I actually am not sure it does take that long.

Stop dedicating the work of the British Lichen Society.

They're serious science dudes.

Come again, please don't write in.

It's the OBE committee that we're talking about.

Oh, what, they just see lichen and they just waggle it through.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, no, I'm saying it doesn't take long to become a lichenologist.

It takes a while.

Okay, yeah, this is what Anna said.

That's my point.

This is because I was reading about Kerry Knudson, or Kerry Knudson, who's California's only professional lichenologist.

He's a really fun guy.

And he's

fewer than two, I believe.

You're a English Californian lichenologist.

Fewer than two.

He's published over 200 papers on them.

And he pretty much took up being a lichenologist after he retired.

And now he's he maybe knows more about lichen than anyone else in the world.

Wow.

Claims The Atlantic.

He was a construction worker for most of his life.

He so he ran away from home at 16 to join an anarchist commune.

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

He was a construction worker.

Sorry, so before he was a construction worker.

He built a lot of very wonky buildings along anarchic lines.

Yeah.

No, he ran away at 16 before being a construction worker.

He took lots of acid, wrote lots of poetry, got into quite magic, was a big fan of a friend of the podcast, Alistair Crowley.

And then he went off poetry because he didn't like the modernism direction it was going in, so worked in construction, got some blood clots in his legs, had to retire prematurely in his 50s.

And he said to his daughter, I'm going to go back behind the house and I'm going to study whatever I find there.

And he found lichen there.

And so now he's the world leading lichenologist.

And

he named one after Obama.

That's his contribution to the lichen world.

I read about that one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That was a big deal.

2008.

Huge deal.

You can age structures based on how fast lichen moves across it.

That's a fun thing to do.

Lichenometry.

They're incredibly slow growing, some of them.

And I really like this.

The oldest lichens in the world are found in the Arctic, and they're a species called Rhizocarpum geographicum.

And they've been aged at 8,600 years, some of them.

And they're still alive.

Yeah, which I think would make them the oldest living organism on the planet.

What?

They also use them for detecting pollution levels, don't they?

So if you're in a very polluted area, if if a certain type of lichen is introduced and it doesn't grow, that means that the pollution levels are too high.

And if you can bring them down and then the lichen starts growing there, that shows you that you're at the right level.

So it's a really interesting bar for...

That's why, because there's always some dickhead on a country walk that you're going on when trees are covered in lichen.

There's always someone who goes, that's a good sign, actually.

Because that means it's really clean air.

But isn't that true?

Yes, it is, but it's just annoying that they keep reminding me about it.

I get it, okay?

The tree looks a bit dirty, though.

I wouldn't like to be in your club.

This is a stressful country walking club.

Hey, can I please get listeners to solve a crisis that I had this weekend, which is sort of like and related maybe.

I was in the Chilterns.

I was staying in this little bit of woodland and we found a tree that was covered in ivy and then the ivy looked like basically a dump truck had dumped a load of mud on it.

Like every single ivy leaf was covered in red soily mud.

And we realized, we traced it, looking closely at the tree, back to these sort of large dinner plate sized, what looked like fungi, bright white, kind of beautiful fungi, growing straight out of the tree.

And in their dinner plate, which was like a bowl, there were mountains of this red soil stuff.

And I'm going to put, I am going to get a picture on the podcast Twitter feed.

Some have engagement, some old tea tree,

and someone needs to tell me what it is.

Some names of lichen, and you can tell me why they're called this.

Okay.

So, dog lichen.

Why is it called dog lichen?

Looks like a dog.

No, it doesn't look like a lichen's going to look like a dog.

It grows in the shape of Scooby-Doo.

It catches balls in its mouth.

No, not that.

If dogs pee on it, it eats it up and makes it stronger than the other dogs.

It grows towards the dog star.

Serious.

These are all amazing.

Oh,

it's hairy like a dog.

If you were walking in the forest, you'd be like, oh, it's a dog.

But that's the same as it looks like a dog.

That's just C-first answer.

Yeah, okay, I see.

Mix it with half a pint of warm milk, and it can cure

a dog.

Rabies.

Rabies, correct.

Named by Linnaeus in 1753, dog lichen.

Wow.

Just in case anyone's listening who does happen to have bitten by a rabbit dog, we should probably say it definitely doesn't cure rabies.

No, go get it.

Go and get it.

It's the half pound of milk that does all the work out for rabies.

I'm genuinely glad you guys added that.

Because in my head, that was how you cure a British soldier lichen.

Okay, for wounds on British soldiers, you would put it in it with sort of...

Nope.

I'm going to stick with my previous one.

Looks like a British soldier.

Does no one want to shag it?

You know how it was like the Americans came over and stole all the ladies, maybe because no one wants to shag the British.

Andy was right.

It looks like a British soldier.

Thank you very much.

It has a red cap, which looks a bit like the red hats worn by British soldiers during the American Revolutionary War.

And rock tripe lichen.

Ooh.

Tripe.

Tripe is innards and things, isn't it?

Oh, is it one that lives inside a rock?

Because there are like, what are they called?

They're like endolithic or something, like, and that live literally inside rocks.

Okay, cool.

Which is incredible.

Outside a rock, but underneath a rock in a cave.

Yeah, neither correct, but great outsource.

Yeah.

That's really good.

Grows in a kind of string.

And it looks like tripe.

Looks like tripe.

Two out of three.

It also was

gathered by George Washington's troops, supposedly, and boiled into soup at Valley Forge during the winter of 1777.

So that's, they ate it like tripe, but also it looks a bit like tripe.

That's a pretty bad winter as well, when you have to persuade yourself that what you're eating is tripe.

It's even worse than tripe.

There is a lichen called Rock Gnome Lichen as well.

Oh, yeah.

And this is endangered and no one's allowed to know where it is because the U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service said they had an option to label its location as critical habitat.

This is just, it's only found in like Georgia and the Carolinas and Tennessee and the mountains.

And if you label something as critical habitat, that means people know where it is.

You publish it.

And then you get these lichen collectors who are overenthusiastic, who go and nick it.

So they kept it super secret.

And sweetly, the person who was in charge of guarding its location was a National Park Service botanist called Janet Rock.

Oh, that's cool.

And where is it?

In Georgia and

I'm not giving you any further details, Jane.

I'm just thinking I could do with an OBE quite soon.

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

My fact is that eBay employs staff whose job includes sniffing trainers.

Wow.

Yeah, they're the shoe perverts of eBay, and they are for legal reasons not.

No, yeah, they're absolutely not perverts.

This is part of their job.

I don't need to make it any clearer, these people are not perverts.

They're not getting a kick out of it.

Also, I got a sick thrill this is because ebay sells a lot of shoes uh which i i didn't know because i'm not a sneakerhead is what they get called uh people who collect and trade and you know buy and sell and sometimes make a living selling shoes to each other and collecting them sounds like they're just people who wear them on the wrong bit of their body but um

could be the same

and so

There are so many fake shoes on the market now, which

are obviously not worth nearly as much as the real deal.

You mean fake brands?

The shoes, you could get your shoe onto your foot, right?

It's not like you put your foot in it and you're like, oh, it's an algae.

It's not made of blancmange, and it turns out every damn time.

No, they're real shoes, but they're not really made by Nike or whoever.

So eBay has got experts in trainer provenance whose job is to put shoes through their paces.

Nice.

Thank you.

To assess whether they're real or fake.

And any shoes that are worth over 150 quid that are bought on eBay because they have to have some kind of lower floor in it.

They can't check all of of them.

Any shoes worth over 150 quid go through this center, sneaker authentication center, and the seller doesn't get the money until the shoes have been authenticated and then they get forwarded to the buyers.

And the smelling is part of that because there are so many different ways you can tell whether a trainer is authentic or not.

There's the stitching, there's the glue, and the glue has a smell, and all these other methods.

It's something like 52 elements that you identified in the process.

Yeah, so it's, as you say, it's the glue, it's the quality of ink on the inside of the tongue, there's the variations of colour, there's the smell check as well.

Well, EBA is going on the road with this.

It's very exciting.

They're doing nationwide authenticity.

Like touring.

I wouldn't watch that show.

Come to our show.

Come to our show.

Can you see the antiques road show?

It's basically that.

Well, I mean, basically, they have an ice cream van.

I've slightly hyped up the nationwide tour element of it, but the ice cream van is touring the country.

And if you bring your sneakers along worth over 100 quid, then they will authenticate.

them.

Or not, they'll bust this shit wide open on your foot.

Will they fill one of my sneakers up with Mr.

Whippy and put a flake in it?

No, they won't.

They're only doing a few dates as well on this tour.

I think because ice cream vans can't go on the motorway and I presume they're going to have to take B-roads all the way around.

There was an amazing article on thisismoney.co.uk written by Grace Godson

and she actually smelled the shoes and said that she could definitely tell the difference.

The journalist.

Yeah, she said that the ones that are fake just kind of smell really chemically, a bit like nail varnish, but the real ones smell more like tennis balls, according to that.

But she also said that if you want to work in these warehouses, then you have to pass an entrance test, which involves a blind test, whether can you tell a sneaker is real or fake just by smelling it.

So you have to pass that test to get the job.

Weird.

Imagine them.

So they are blindfolded.

Yeah.

Wow.

Pretty weird, isn't it?

That's cool.

It is cool.

It's amazing.

It must be so hard, though, because a lot of these sneakers, most of them, are manufactured in China, in Chinese factories.

The real ones.

The real ones, but also the fake ones.

And the fake ones, in the article I read, say that they're often attached literally to the real factory.

So you've got the sort of fake factory that's using 90% of the materials anyway.

So 90% of it is as close to the thing that you would have.

It's just the actual manufacturing and stitching together process where

they're also employing trainers to test watches within the next couple of months.

Human trainers.

Human trainers.

Human trainers.

Humans sniff the trainers.

The trainers test the watches.

That's the center center.

I think the watches were first, actually.

Oh, were they?

Oh, I think maybe they're upgrading.

I read that they were looking for a new tranche of watch trainers in August this year.

I didn't realise that eBay gets almost all of its profits now from three items.

What are the three?

Trainers, luxury watches, trading cards.

Oh, really?

Apparently, this is a good thing.

The third category that has authentication from June 2021 is handbags.

Is it?

Maybe they're trying to branch out into a fourth direction.

Wow.

As and you can get everything else on eBay.

It's just that their shares are mostly going down.

People aren't buying other stuff on them anymore anymore.

Interesting.

But those three things.

And the thing is with the authentication is you, as a buyer, don't pay for it, and the seller doesn't pay for it either.

eBay pays for it.

And you think, well, what's the point of that?

But actually, the sales of luxury items like watches and sneakers and probably soon handbags has gone up massively since people have known that they're gonna get the real deal.

Has it?

Interesting.

The growth in sneakers is gone up by triple digits year on year for the last couple of years.

So yeah, apparently they sell a pair every nine seconds.

When companies make trainers and sneakers, especially in the last 10-15 years, they often make them mostly in sizes 8, 9, and 10 because they're the most popular sizes for men and men are the people who bought most of these trainers.

But these days, more women are wanting these trainers, and the smaller sizes are rarer.

And so, if you're a counterfeiter, you're more likely to go for the smaller sizes because, actually, you know, there's less on the market for them.

So, you're more likely to find that women's trainers are fake than the men's trainers.

But does it matter to sneakerheads?

A lot of these shoes are never worn.

That's the thing I find so weird about that.

You still buy them in your size, usually.

When you say never worn,

are there really many people who are buying loads of sneakers that they don't intend to wear?

Collectors have hundreds of pairs.

It's mad.

And a lot of of them, they can't afford to wear themselves because they don't want to wear out a $10,000 pair of sneakers.

They keep them because they have that value.

If they wore them, they'd become really grubby and they'd lose their value.

But there can't be that many people that do that.

That's what's funding eBay in its top

three most important things.

It's a billion dollar industry.

In the future, Dan, in 200 years, people will say, did you know people used to wear these decorations on their feet?

Yeah, it is.

That is true.

And the other advantage of doing the women's shoes, for instance, is because you need less materials to make them, of course, so the markup is bigger.

I always buy shoes three sizes too big so I can circumvent the possibility that they're fake.

There are sometimes seizures of counterfeit sneakers at customs and ports and things like that.

So in 2019 there was a Chinese guy called Ching Fu Zhang who was arrested for allegedly importing 22 shipping containers of fake trainers into the USA disguised as napkins, not disguised, labeled as napkins, which would have been worth $472 million.

It's just an insane amount of money that you can make.

And he had this complicated system set up to get them in and then get them distributed.

That's why they make you take your shoes off at security, right?

To test they're real.

You just look back, the security people are huffing away at them, giving them a good sniff.

Anna was talking about buying shoes that were too big and then putting loads of socks in there so that they fit.

I haven't actually come up with that workaround.

I just buy shoes that are too big, but thank God you've solved my blister problem.

well the reason that I made that solution in my head is because I was reading about a guy called Jim Thorpe who was the first Native American to win a gold medal at the Olympics and he was in the decathlon so after the first day he was miles ahead but then someone stole his shoes Okay,

so he didn't know what to do for the second day because they were his only pair of shoes.

So he looked around and he found like in the garbage like a couple of odd shoes and he wore them but one of them was massively too big so he had had to wear loads of pairs of socks

and that foot so there are pictures of him in odd shoes with one foot with loads of socks on and in the second day he won pretty much all the events and won the gold in the decathlon in the 1912 olympics and on the same day he also won i think it was the long jump or the high jump and the 110 meters hurdles and the 1500 meters wearing odd shoes.

Wow.

Isn't that amazing?

Why doesn't everyone do that now?

It's clearly an advantage.

It must be right.

But also, it sounds like he could have tried a bit harder just to get a pair of shoes right.

Like, if the Jamaicans were able to borrow a bobsled,

surely.

Guys, I only found out recently that shoes, you used to be able to inflate them yourself.

Sorry?

Because now I have to go to a shop to inflate them.

What are you talking about?

Can't all your shoes blow up shoes.

Okay, I'm glad you don't remember this, James, because this was during the sneaker wars of the 1990s.

You all remember.

The Nike versus Reebok.

And this.

Yeah, yeah, the Pon Pugs.

No, sorry, I'm not with you on that.

Wasn't Air Jordan's.

Well, they had the air pump as well, didn't they?

Did Air Jordan's?

Yeah, Air Jordan's had a paper.

Look, I was not allowed to wear any cool shoes during the Nike seconds.

Someone explained this.

They used to be on the tongue.

I bet you the pair of brogues.

You inflated them from the tongue.

And this was an innovation by Reebok.

Their tongue.

Have you seen the movie Men in Tights, Robinhood Men in Tights?

I have not.

I wasn't allowed to watch that.

But this apparently clinched it for Reebok for a while.

Nike's always been the big guy, Reebok's always been the underdog, and they had these self-inflate shoes, so no one bought them because they thought that's really weird.

And then there was just one slam dunk championship.

Basketball seems to be more about the shoes than it is about the basketball.

You rarely get a team in barefoot winning the NBA.

Not since the 1912 Olympics.

So this guy, Dee Brown, did this move before he did his amazing slam dunk and won the competition where he just bent down and he pumped up his shoes with the tongue and then he slam dunked it and then after that the crowd went insane and then it became his thing every time he went to take a shot he would pump up his shoes and then deflate them afterwards no no not not in a match he wouldn't dribble the ball not mid-match bend down pump yeah when you're doing like a dunk from standing position you know the lingo down you know what i'm trying to say well and i don't know we should just say for andy i it I don't know the pump actually did anything.

As in, your shoe functioned.

It wasn't like a deflated shoe that you pumped air into.

It just was this sort of.

But this basketballer who pumped the tongue, did that have an effect?

I didn't.

I mean, I don't know.

They always refused to say it's suggested it had ankle support.

And they were always asked, Does it give you a bit more bounce?

Does it make it pumpy?

And they always said, We're refusing to say if I gave it more bounce.

I never noticed it.

You didn't know.

You just had a fucking

tongue.

That was just a cool thing to do.

It wasn't like having a pogo stick suddenly attached to it.

No, exactly.

Yeah, they weren't moon shoes.

There was a story this year about a lady who has made £2,500 by selling old crisp packets from the 1980s.

Oh, yeah.

But they had released figures on how many of these ostensibly not very glamorous items have been sold over a three-month period this year.

350 crisp packets, 206 wine corks, 225 empty jam jars, 37 toilet roll tubes.

But it's hard to make a million from them because they on average go for 2p each.

That's a cheap telescope though if you want to make a

think people must be buying crisp packets to do the

blow it up and bang it thing.

Oh, yeah.

Which I love doing, but I don't eat enough crisps to do that as often as I'd want to.

I would have thought it was set dressing for a TV show in the 1980s.

It's weird where our brains go, because I was thinking you would buy it, and hopefully there's a few little crumbs of crisps left in the car,

and you can lick your finger and get them out.

We've all got good reasons.

I mean, that's true.

You won't be able to taste the 80s again, will you?

No.

That's a slogan for your firm.

Trade home.

You can taste the 80s.

Yeah, great.

You can taste the 2010s by buying the pre-sugar tax drinks that are available on eBay.

I genuinely thought about buying one of these for my brother, who I've never seen him so furious as when LucasAid halved the sugar content in their drinks.

It hasn't been the same.

It doesn't taste the same.

So in 2018, the Sugar in Iron Brew halved, there was lots of rules over the last few years saying, you know, you've got to reduce your sugar.

And you can buy a LucasAid pre-2011 for £145.

Okay.

That's quite a lot, isn't it?

But imagine how good that's going to taste now after all these years.

I'm with your brother, actually.

I think modern pop is disgusting.

Really?

Can you taste the difference?

Oh, yeah, really, I can.

I don't think any modern issue is.

But ironically, you listen to a lot of modern pop, which I find disgusting.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M.

James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

All of our previous episodes are up there.

Also, do check out the upcoming tour dates.

We are back on the road as of October the 5th, going around the UK and Ireland.

Come along, it's going to be an awesome night, and we want to geek out with you all.

Okay, we'll see you again next week with another episode.

Goodbye.

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