326: No Such Thing As An Infortunate Occurrence

Suffs, the new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

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It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com

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cows.

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

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

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Extraordinary.

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Hello and welcome to another working from home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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 this week.

My fact is, two days after receiving his latest book, the author of Annals of Gullibility, Why We Get Duped and How to Avoid It, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Ponzi scheme.

How embarrassing.

Yeah.

Very funny.

He did admit that it was embarrassing.

He kind of thinks it's funny now, you know, with the distance of time to look back at it.

But this is a guy called Stephen Greenspan, and he'd written this book, and

it was meant to sort of help you to understand how not to be duped by exactly the thing that caught him off guard.

So he got caught off guard by the greatest Ponzi scheme of them all, which was the Bernie Madoff,

which set...

So many people around the world losing thousands and millions in some cases.

It's the biggest of its kind.

And yeah, it was a recommendation via his sister.

And two days after receiving his latest book, he lost 400,000.

Wow.

In his advice as to how to avoid it, did it include things like, you know, don't take advice from ill-informed siblings and don't invest with people who have surnames that sound suspiciously like the phrase made off.

I think a revised edition was hastily issued with all that's in there.

Dan, can I just check?

Is a Ponzi scheme basically a pyramid scheme?

No,

what it is is you get in early investors and you get their money.

And when you bring in new investors, you give the money of the new investors, a bit of it, to the early investors.

So it seems as if they're getting return on their money.

And then you kind of...

Oh, I thought that was a pyramid scheme, basically.

A pyramid scheme is where you bring in new investors and they have to bring in new investors and that money comes up to the people higher up in the pyramid.

It's slightly different.

So the Ponzi scheme is more flat.

It's more like a large plane on the deserts of Egypt compared to a pyramid.

A Ponzi scheme is the thing that we used to do as kids, which I found so thrilling.

Do you remember where you'd get a letter that had a chocolate bar in it and you said,

and it said, send this on with...

No, wait, how would it work?

No, you're right.

You're doing it right.

Someone sends you a letter saying, send me a chocolate bar, but then you send the letter to six people and then ask, you ask each of them to send you a chocolate bar.

And then you get six chocolate bars.

It was amazing.

That's a pyramid scheme.

That's a pyramid scheme, not a Ponzi scheme.

But Anna, if you had been investing

the anime,

it's similar, but there's quite a distinctive difference.

So in a Ponzi scheme, you would get a load of Mars bars from loads of different people, and then you would cut some of the Mars bars up and then give the Mars bar back with another half of a Mars bar to someone who sent you one Mars bar.

And so they think they're getting one and a half back, but actually what you're doing is you're using other people's Mars bars to do it, and eventually, you're going to run out of Mars bars.

Do you have to re-wrap the Mars bars once you've cut them up?

I feel like it's more different with Mars bars than it is with money.

It is when you get a monkey half a Mars bar through the bust.

It's a bit different than getting a nice, crisp £50 note.

We're rich.

We're rich.

You know what's weird?

Just in order to get ready for this fact, I looked up what a Ponzi scheme was, so I knew what it was.

I now have no idea what it is off the back of all these Mars bars.

It's literally

all it is: your pyramid scheme has one person at the top, 10 people next, 100 people next, 1,000 people next, whereas a Ponzi scheme has one person at the top, and then everyone else is flat, basically.

You actually did explain it completely correctly, Dan.

We just started throwing Mars bars around, basically.

But the first Ponzi scheme was basically invented by accident, wasn't it, by Charles Ponzi?

He didn't quite mean to do it.

He sort of meant it to be legit.

So it was in the 1920s.

And he was, he had the scheme where he was buying stamps or actually these things called reply coupons.

And that was when if you wrote to a friend internationally, you included a reply coupon, which I think essentially meant it was like doing a reverse charge call, but on a letter.

And it meant that they could write back to you for free.

Anyway, he bought them overseas for much cheaper because they were cheaper overseas and then sold them for more in the US.

And he said to people, I've got this amazing scheme where I can make a massive profit on these reply coupons.

And he got people to invest and they did.

And he hadn't factored in the fact that he'd have to pay for all the ridiculous international travel to these places to go and buy these stamps in the first place.

So he realized the scheme couldn't make any money at all.

But these people were investing loads of money.

And you can see the reasoning where he started to think, oh, I still am receiving all this money.

Shall I just keep going with this and not mention that it doesn't work?

It's kind of working well for a short period of time, isn't it?

I guess.

It is.

Until he, I think someone did the maths and worked out that he was claiming to be buying and selling 160 million reply coupons and only 27,000 existed in the world.

The Boston Post did an article in 1920, didn't they, demonstrating that it was completely impossible.

And when they did an audit afterwards, they found only $61 worth of these stamps, even though he'd said that he'd bought millions and millions of dollars worth.

So he did try.

He got a few.

He got a few.

But when the Boston Post came up with this expose,

everyone thought, oh my God, I've given him all my money.

I need my money back.

And so they did a run on him to try and get all of their money back.

And he just completely fronted it out.

And he just said, Yeah, no worries.

You guys just queue up and I'll give you your money back.

And they stood in the queue and he bought them sandwiches and coffee.

And people weren't sure whether he was real or not, still at that stage.

And so half the time they were cheering him and half the time they were booing him.

No one really knew what was happening.

And then eventually the government got involved and looked at his accounts and found he was $3 million in the red.

And they later revised it to $7 million in the red.

And he got arrested.

and when he got arrested everyone lost their money oh wow what was his long-term plan with that queue outside his house

i just think sometimes it's like maybe tomorrow it'll be fine yeah if you're calm enough with the beginning of the queue then the end will probably get bored and go away but that's what happened like because loads of people started running on it but some people still trusted him so there became a secondary speculation market where people would buy the Ponzi coupons on a cheaper price so that the people in the queue would at least get something back And the people who bought it thought, well, this is actually real.

It's for real.

So I'm going to get the full amount back.

So there became speculation on the speculation.

That's clever.

While we're on scammers, have you guys heard of Victor Lustig?

I don't think we've ever mentioned Lustig.

Was he the guy who sold the Eiffel Tower?

He's the guy who sold it twice.

Oh, wow.

So he knew that Paris was broke.

He was living in Paris and he thought maybe the city will want to sell the Eiffel Tower off because it's been up for 30 years, it's a bit rusty.

And so

he decided to forge some government stationery.

And he wrote to a load of scrap metal dealers and he invited them all to an expensive suite at a hotel.

And he said, hello, I am the deputy minister of posts.

And he said, well, we're looking for buyers, but we've got to keep it quiet from public opinion because there might be, you know, controversy.

And then one of the guys was tempted, an especially stupid dealer called André Poisson, Andrew Fish.

And he said, I'd really like to buy the Eiffel Tower for scrap.

And he paid a massive bribe to secure the ownership.

And unsurprisingly, the aft was not for sale.

But he got away with it.

He was so successful, Victor.

Was he never busted?

He was busted later on for his Romanian box.

What's that name?

What name was that?

It was a box which would duplicate any banknote that you put in it.

I know, I know.

Really?

Obviously, it wouldn't.

Okay, well, James and Anna, I'm not going to try and sell you one, but Dan, you're looking interested.

He had concealed genuine genuine notes within the device and then as long as you only put in a selective range and it had all these buttons and levers that you press and pull and you know then another banknote would come out and they'd think oh my god this is amazing was he inside making the noises like that

he just made a complicated looking box basically and he sold the box for a lot of money to various different people and then once there was a sheriff in Texas who realized that the scam caught up with him in another state and then Listig said oh you're just not using it right don't worry, it's okay completely persuaded him.

It was fine, and then said, Look, let me give you all this cash to compensate you, which was counterfeit money.

So he managed to pay his way out of it.

Yeah, he was very cool.

Like you were saying about how he said, Oh, I'm not really supposed to talk about this, and so people trusted him.

Ponzi did that as well.

So when they said to him, How are you making this work?

Because it doesn't seem like it'll work all these stamps.

He said, Oh, yeah, I've got a system which I don't want to tell you because then the government will shut it down.

And then when everyone did the run on him and started queuing up for money, he said, Oh, guys, guess what?

I've come up with a new system, it's completely different, it's not to do with stamps at all, it's just really, really awesome.

And so, this one will get you even more money.

So, why don't you give me more money?

But he kept saying, I can't tell anyone what it is because if I tell you, then everyone will be doing it, and that's what kind of suckers people in.

Yes, gotta be adaptable.

Do you know how you find out if someone is gullible?

Oh, no.

Oh, well, let me tell you about my magic box.

Um, uh, I don't know.

Um, is there like a questionnaire or something?

It's exactly that.

There's a questionnaire, but basically it is just asking, are you gullible?

It's amazing.

It's a 12-question questionnaire.

Some Australian authors came up with it, and it measures persuadability and insensitivity to untrustworthiness.

But the questions are really, they're all things like, my friends think I'm easily fooled.

Do you disagree, agree, strongly agree?

And basically, if you answer yes to those questions or that you agree with them, you're gullible.

Really?

Which is weird, because I would have thought gullible people wouldn't automatically know it.

No, because as soon as you know that you're gullible, surely you can can start correcting your gullibility.

No, I know I know I'm gullible, and I can't stop it.

If you guys decide to tell me some bullshit on this show, I will believe it until I see the smile on your face.

Hey, Dan, what do you think about gullibilism?

What do you think about this?

We are in the midst of a high-frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself.

What do you think of that sentence?

I don't fully...

What's the quantum soup?

Is that like prime or soup?

Well, maybe I'm not that gullible because apparently people who take that kind of bullshit aphorism and think that it's quite deep are people who rate more highly on this gullibility scale.

Oh, okay.

Okay, so I'm still gullible.

I'd be like the leader of the gullibles.

I'd be going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

I know how that sounds, guys, but I don't think that's right.

I've not had that soup.

Do you remember that old joke at school, which was that gullible, you know, the word gullible isn't in the dictionary?

Did you know that the OED published a special edition where they took it out of the dictionary amazing no they didn't they didn't wait hang on

think of the labor involved in printing an entire new edition of the dictionary just for one joke it doesn't stack up i just want to point out that dan was the first one who spotted that and so i think well done you're not as gullible as we all think

although actually apparently humans aren't too gullible we all have this conception that we're really gullible and we're always falling for stuff but studies seem to to show that we're actually too skeptical.

And so

there have been a bunch of things that, so fake news is often used as an example of how we're too gullible.

We believe this stuff, we change our voting habits.

But all the studies that have really been done on fake news over the last few years have showed that it didn't impact elections at all because people only ever consumed the sort of fake news that already accorded with what they believed.

So it wasn't like they were reading stuff and going, oh my god, Hillary Clinton really is a lizard.

It was like they already thought she was probably a a lizard.

And so it's just confirmed it.

But actually we're too sceptical.

So there's a very famous psychologist called Julian Rotter, who died quite recently.

But he said that the more trustful you are, the more successful you are in life and the better you are at determining if someone is trustworthy or if something's worth supporting because you've practiced it.

So people who are more trusting generally, they practice it through life and then you learn who to trust and who not to trust.

Whereas the cynics who just think, oh God, everyone's a liar, everyone's trying to dupe me, they actually have no idea and they lose out because of that.

So, Anna, are you saying that me and Nandy are really great because we fell for your dictionary prank?

Sounds like it.

Really smart.

And let me talk to you afterwards about a scheme I've got up and running.

But Dan is the cynic, and he's just like living in his barrel.

Like Diogenes.

It always comes back to Diogenes, doesn't it?

There was a dictionary scam back in the day where

hucksters would go around pubs

getting money off people with a dictionary-based bet.

So the idea is three of you go into the pub, you all pretend you don't know each other, you just

sit at different places.

It's quite easy for you.

Yeah.

Three of us, I've gone home.

And then one of you guys will start repeatedly using the word infortunate.

Okay, let's say Dan keeps saying, oh, it's really unfortunate about this.

And then James or Anna will lean over and say, excuse me, I think it's unfortunate.

Bingo, exactly.

And then Dan will say, it's pretty unfortunate that you're such an idiot or whatever.

And you get into this big argument.

I can only apologise, James.

I must have been quite drunk when I said that.

You get into this huge row, and obviously you get everyone else involved and you start putting money on it.

And then...

Dan pulls out his dictionary, which does have the word infortunate in it because it's an old version of the word.

And then you get the money.

Wait a minute, where does Anna come into this story?

Surely, she's the one with a dictionary.

I've been at the bar this whole time, I got really bored very early on in this chat, and I went to talk to some people at the bar.

It must be the case that she happens to be a dictionary salesman who has a dictionary in her pocket, otherwise, what's the point of being there?

That's even better.

Yep, yeah, that's very clear.

Yeah, it does.

Unless the third person is just for audience purposes to cheer people on.

It's sort of to get more people involved in the bet.

Hey, come and look at the argument these guys are having.

That's very clever.

And is there a whole history of that?

Like, is that a gang that went round, the dictionary gang?

Or do we

have a lot of money?

No, I think some people have used it repeatedly, but I don't think it was a massive because if it's a the trend only lasts until everyone has heard of it because there are hundreds of gangs going around the pubs doing the unfortunate play.

Oh man, that's if during gang wars, I wouldn't want to be in that gang.

Have you not watched Gangs of London recently?

There's one episode where the dictionary gang comes along.

It's the least violent of all the episodes, I have to say.

Hey, you could get some pretty big dictionaries.

You could do some serious damage with the full edition of the OED.

Kill someone.

Yeah, sticks and stones, Maybrick.

Yeah.

I found a gullible person who fell for a scam.

Have you guys heard of this guy in New York who a few years ago sued a psychic for fraud?

No, no.

I mean, it is sad, but in 2015, he sued this psychic because over the years, he'd given her over $700,000 because he wanted her to make the woman that he fancied fall in love with him.

It's an old classic Shakespearean tale.

He should have just given the $700,000 to the girl.

Actually, James, women can't be bought.

I agree, but it's worth a try rather than giving it to a psychic.

that should have been his first at least the person you like has got a lot of dosh yeah he was actually he's walking down the streets of new york thinking this is really sad i've told this woman i really love her and she said she has no interest in me whatsoever and he passed a sign saying psychic with a flashing arrow and so you already know he's a bit gullible he walked in and this psychic just managed to convince him for instance to fork out um forty thousand dollars so she could do him a fake funeral to convince the bad spirits that he had died so that they stopped plaguing him and let the summer fall in love with him why not invite the woman he fancied to the the fake funeral and see if she was sad that he died and then he bursts out of the coffin

and then that is the woman he fancied

that is never gonna work is it in a romance that's how my wife and I got together fun true story yeah

I think you might risk the woman thinking you're a weirdo, which is what I definitely wasn't to be clear.

He also paid $80,000 for an 80-mile long bridge made of gold to lure the spirits into the other realm.

And then the psyche told him that...

That sounds like quite a good deal for a bridge made of gold.

That's an incredible bargain.

That's so cheap.

It is.

I think the thing is, the bridge made of gold didn't really exist in this realm, so you can never get the evidence that it has been built.

A different realm bridge.

Yeah, much cheaper.

A different realm bridge.

And then they are

much less.

Did he not see the psychic increasingly turning up in fur coats and Masaratis and all of this stuff?

And she's like, I bought them in the other realm.

It's much cheaper over there.

Eventually, after he'd fucked out another 90 grand for a longer bridge, because the spirits weren't going over this one, halfway through this, the woman he was in love with very sadly died.

And the psychic thought quickly on her feet and said, oh, well, don't worry.

We'll just have to pay a bit extra for my reincarnation machine to be built.

And so could we pay 10 million?

No, this is a terrible story.

It is awful.

And it was only when she said she built this reincarnation machine and Michelle, this woman you're in love with, is now inside this new woman you've just met.

And he said, I met the new woman and I thought, she doesn't seem like Michelle at all.

And that was when I started to think the psychic wasn't who she was purporting to be.

Oh my god.

How did this guy have access to $700,000 in the first place?

That man is now the president of the United States $100,000.

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

cows?

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

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

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

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

My fact this week is that in 2011, former Paralympian Josh Sundquist, who's missing his left leg, announced that he'd found his soulmate, i.e., someone missing a right leg with whom he can split pairs of shoes.

I don't know how I sort of came across this, but I was watching his YouTube channel.

So Josh is a Paralympian skier and now an author and a comedian and a public speaker.

And he sort of posted a video saying he's got these piles of shoes he's been saving up for years because obviously you can't buy one shoe, but he only needs one.

So he's got loads of right shoes and he'd been looking for someone who could wear them.

And then he found living in the same city as him, a chap called Stephen missing a right leg, same shoe size, and crucially, same taste in shoes.

So they had a lovely meetup where they did some swapsies.

That's great.

That's great.

It's a beautiful story.

Although it was quite, I mean, I think he might have been conned, to be fair, because he'd obviously been saving up his right shoes over the years, Josh.

And so he came with this giant mountain, whereas Stephen wasn't expecting the soulmate reunion, so he'd presumably chucked away all his left shoes.

So he only gave Joshua one shoe.

So it was sort of a one shoe in exchange for about 50 shoes.

There are charities out there where you can, so if you have lost a leg or lost a foot, but also if you have a pair of feet that are different sizes, like we all do, but some people much bigger than others,

there are some places where you can match up with people with the opposite-sized feet to you.

Oh, crazy.

Yeah, in America there's something called the National Odd Shoe Exchange, which is NOS, N-O-S-E,

and they put people together with mismatched feet.

And in the UK, there's something called Joe's Odd Shoes, which is on Facebook, where all you have to do is pay postage and packaging, and they'll send you a single shoe.

Very cool.

That's so cool.

It's a bit weird, isn't it?

Usually when you do those acronyms, it usually works out as something like foot.

It's a bit odd

to do it for nose.

You're absolutely right.

They should.

well maybe they had this conversation

footwear odd one out trading and it's foot except foot is also the beginning of footwear so it's a cheat apart from odd one out has got three o's in a row so it would be foot

um so that's that's josh great guy but i was i was sort of looking into prosthetics and there's some really cool prosthetics out there that you can get so have you guys heard of this woman called sophie de Oliveira Barrata?

Nope.

Um, she's got this thing called the Alternative Limb Project, and she's basically an artist, is in North London, and she makes these bespoke limbs.

And she was, she was inspired to do it.

She had this client who was a little girl who had one leg, and every year she'd come for an upgraded leg because she was growing.

And she started asking for, she asked at first for pepper pigs at the top of her leg, pictures of pepper pig eating ice cream.

And so, Sophie was like, Yeah, sure, whatever.

And then she came back the next year and asked for a Christmas scene at the top, which I think is very short-termist.

And she's going to regret that in February, but whatever.

And this woman, Sophie, thought, well, this is great.

What a good idea.

And so she was inspired by Inspector Gadget, because you know he makes,

he makes gadgets.

Yeah.

He has long arms and legs, doesn't he, sometimes?

Exactly.

So she makes long arms and legs and special arms and legs.

And so for one guy, she made a hyper-realistic foot that looked really like his own foot.

And she got hairs off the back of his neck and put them on the toes.

Not many people in history have ever looked at their toes and gone, that isn't hairy enough.

Can we put more hairs on that, please?

So

I guess one of the next frontiers in prosthetic loan development is how to incorporate feeling and how to incorporate automatic responses.

So there's one recent development, researchers at Newcastle University came up with this.

It's got an AI camera inside it.

It's a hand or an arm fitting.

And it can recognize hundreds of objects using the camera.

And when you move to grab something with your prosthetic arm, it automatically moves into the right position to grasp it.

So, if you're reaching for a pair of tweezers, it'll move into a pinch position, or if you're reaching for a volleyball, it'll move into a sort of spreadhand position so you can pick it up like that.

It sounds unbelievable.

And it can be trained to develop more and more positions.

Can you sort of code it so that if it's reaching for your 10th toffee crisp of the night, it will refuse to clap down on it or something?

Anna, we we don't have time for your toffee crisp problems.

Neggy, if you hadn't sent that letter to so many people, you wouldn't have so many to get through.

A toffee crisp.

No one mentions toffee crisp.

They're the best chocolates are there.

I agree, they're the best.

Are they?

I'm not sure I've ever had one.

What?

Oh, my God, that's like me not watching E.T.

Jesus Christ.

We definitely don't have time for the fact that you've never eaten Toffee Crisp.

They're there.

They are

one of the very best.

I reckon even even Richard Osman would agree with that.

I was reading up about Aaron Ralston.

Do you guys remember Aaron Ralston?

127 hours?

Oh, yeah.

I remember that.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, so he was the mountaineer/slash adventurer who fell down a little gap between some boulders.

A boulder collapsed on his arm, and he had to cut himself free.

And so he now, when you see pictures of him, if he goes mountaineering, he has a prosthetic that has a little pick on the end.

Oh, wow.

They went back and they actually recovered his his arm.

So it was stuck under this boulder.

They managed to winch it out, winch the boulder up and get his arm back.

And they cremated it there on the spot.

And he scattered the ashes symbolically all over the area.

So that's really nice.

But the little fact that I really like that I've discovered about him is his current place of residence.

He lives in a place called Boulder, Colorado.

Oh, no way.

That's amazing.

One last thing on prosthetics.

I was amazed to learn about there's a big comedian back in the early days of American comedy during during the silent era called harold lloyd and harold lloyd was at the time more famous than buster keaton and charlie chaplin he was he was the one who was pulling in most money at the box office and what i didn't know is that he lost two of his fingers he lost his thumb and his index finger um when he was doing publicity for a film of his called haunted spooks he stood in the photo with a prop bomb in his hand which turned out to be a real bomb.

No.

Yeah.

So the fuselage.

Wait a minute.

what kind of prop department has two boxes one with prop bombs and one with real bombs and accidentally takes out the wrong one how do you how do you end up in that situation now what we've done is we've labeled the prop bombs with a p and we've labeled the real bombs with a lowercase p don't put them upside down next to each other

was that someone simultaneously in the middle of a battle somewhere throwing the prop bomb and going oh god damn it what's going on

Yeah, so it

went off in his hand.

Yeah, it took off his thumb, it took off his index finger, it temporarily blinded him.

He took eight months to recover, and then they built a glove for him, which had the thumb and the finger.

And

the most famous surviving sequence or even image that we'll know of Harold Lloyd is him hanging off a clock

face.

He did that with a prosthetic thumb and finger.

It was after that.

It's during public sessions.

I've never heard that.

Yeah.

Cool.

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

My fact is that you can now diagnose a urinary tract infection using a fidget spinner.

Finally, I can get all my old fidget spinners out.

Oh, yeah, that is worth saying.

Customized, right?

Customized fidget spinner.

Don't go pissing on your children's

spinners.

Oh, what?

What do you mean, children?

They were put adults as well, weren't they?

Don't piss on any fidget spinners, whether they're the children's edition or the special adult fidget spinners that James owns, the erotic fidget spinners.

I saw, sorry to interrupt when you haven't even told us a fact yet,

because I didn't write this down because I didn't think it would come up, but did you see that there was a, you know, like, are they called pasties or pasties that erotic dancers put on their nipples and spin them around?

Pasties.

Pasties.

Yeah, Cornish pasties.

It happens mostly in Cornwall

that the strippers do this.

But they made one with fidget spinners, didn't they?

Which like fidgets spinned around when they twirled their breasts.

Of course they did.

Gosh.

So you can get adult fidget spinners is what you're saying.

Yeah, they're not the ones I have, though.

Andy, what is the, how does this work?

Well, this is a new scientific development.

Basically,

it's a pain diagnosing urinary tract infections.

It can take sometimes days to get the results back, and scientists are always looking for ways to improve the process.

So this is a way of detecting pathogens in someone's urine, which might reveal if they've got an infection.

And what you need is detectors that are cheap and simple and accurate.

And that's what this new one is.

They custom-made this team, a fidget spinner,

where you pee in the spinner.

Effectively.

Okay, pee in a jug.

Yeah, unless your aim is phenomenal.

You pee in a jug

and then the jug is, a bit of it's poured into the fidget spinner and it spins.

It spins around, obviously.

And the centrifugal force pushes the urine sample outwards and it pushes it through a little internal membrane inside the spinner.

And the membrane is fine enough to stop bacteria, which can tell you whether you've got one of these infections.

And then all you need to do is add a little bit of a dye, which turns the bacteria orange.

You look at the membrane a little bit later.

If there's orange on the membrane, you have these bacteria and you know that you've got the infection.

I would have added a dye which is a colour that's less similar to the colour of urine.

Yeah.

How orange is people's urine these days?

More orange.

James, than it is purple.

James, I know you're a sunny D fanatic, but

look, it's for adults as well as children, some dyes.

No, but do you know what I mean?

That would make sense.

I do.

I imagine that other dyes are also available.

But the good news is that it cuts the test times to under an hour.

And it does also mean that people don't get diagnosed antibiotics unnecessarily, maybe in the interim while they're waiting for the results.

So doctors might say, oh, we'll just take some of these anyway, which is a bad thing because it leads to antibiotic resistance.

So yeah, this is a good finally, we have found a use for the fidget spinner three years later.

Is it commercially available?

Can we all buy one?

No.

No, you can't.

It's just been invented.

It's very good.

And also, Dan, I think you'd probably want a medical professional to do your your diagnosis of UTIs rather than just pissing on your own pidget spinner.

Oh, yeah.

I just.

Isn't the idea that you could get it like a pregnancy test, you know, and you'd be able to buy one and then piss on it and then proceed with medicine?

Maybe you'd play with it.

Yeah, I guess you could.

I guess so, yeah.

Or just their issued to doctors who know how to administer the tests.

But either way.

I think everyone should be their own doctor.

Oh, God.

It sounds really simple.

Give it a spin, pour the dye in.

What am I missing?

Wow, you've already got the slogan.

Yeah.

One thing that they think it might work for in the future is also viral infections.

So hopefully this technology in the future, you'll be able to use with saliva instead of urine and you'll be able to detect viruses.

If you get your mesh fine enough, your membrane fine enough, then it will be able to find viruses.

So it might be that if there's a viral infection going around, then you'll be able to use something like this to tell whether you have it.

Wow.

That's great because fidget spinners have had a bad rep in a lot of corners over the years, haven't they?

They've been sort of banned quite a lot of places, quite a lot of schools in America went through a phase of banning them for being really distracting for kids.

There were lots of warnings that some of them were dangerous.

Do you remember there were various fidget spinners came out that were a bit like

ninja stars that had sort of pointed ends.

Really?

And there was actually this woman who was employed to test them,

a blades expert, apparently, called Sarah Hainsworth, who BBC Watchdog made her test these things to see if they could penetrate skin or eyeballs.

And her job, and only expert should attempt this, was to get a fidget spinner and stab a tomato with it, which apparently represents an eyeball, and then stab some pork skin with it that represents human skin.

So interesting because I have some fidget spinners in my house and I've also been trained how to throw ninja stars.

So I can actually try.

And I have some tomatoes.

You're qualified.

Do you say that anyone can do this, Anna?

Well, again, I think everyone should be their own blades tester as well as their own doctor.

So yes, you should start stabbing tomatoes.

Awesome.

Wow.

And the trick is in the flick of the wrist at the end, just in case.

You hold it like between your thumb and your first finger and then you throw it and then you flick your wrist at the last second and then it helps it to spin and helps it stick into things.

That's like flurring a knife.

That's why Harold Lloyd could never have become a ninja after his terrible publicity accident.

Yes.

He did have two hands.

Good point.

That's why Harold Lloyd would have had to be ambidextrous if he was to realize his ambition of becoming a ninja.

It's ironic that the one famous thing about him is he's on a clock which does have two hands.

Wow.

That is such a slap in the face, isn't it?

We wrote about fidget spinners at the height of their

craze back in 2017 in our first book of the year.

And James, you found out this thing, which is that of all the top 25 toys on amazon.co.uk, all of them were fidget spinners.

And I went to check up Amazon today just to see where they sit in the top 100.

And not a single fidget spinner has stayed in the top 100.

Really?

But yeah, and the top toy at the moment is a black balloon that's in the shape of a zero.

I think you can get it multicolored, but that's the image that you're met with.

That's quite a nihilist thing to give to a child.

A black zero.

Happy birthday.

Jesus.

But it did last longer than everyone thought.

So that was 2017 where it was at its peak.

But in 2019, fidget spinners still accounted for a fifth of all toy sales.

What?

Wow.

Really?

It's amazing.

I was looking at other toys that can be used for medical uses.

Oh, cool.

And I found a paper called A Novel Method for the Removal of Ear Serumin.

So that's earwax.

Can you think of what toy might be used to remove ear wax?

Okay, yes, yes, yes, yes.

A yo-yo, but a very small yo-yo that you just got to dip in the ear.

It's a good first guess, but not quite right, no.

So something, something absorbent or something with a little scraping edge.

Yeah, you need a scraping like a Lego man's hand, you know.

You can go in with that pincer grip.

It's got a pincer grip on it, doesn't it?

That's good.

Yeah.

Oh, oh, silly putty.

Just put in so much silly putty that the earwax is forced out.

So, have you guys never had any issues with earwax?

I think you haven't because you don't seem to know what they actually use in real life.

You suck it out, but I'm trying to think of something that you suck.

That's a toy.

A straw?

One of those really fun straws.

they don't suck it out ear doctors all have massive mouths and they just put their entire mouth around your ear and it's a henry hoover and they just stick it to your hair and they have to stop before the brain comes out um i know what it's going to be it's going to be a it's going to be a fake doctor's syringe maybe Exactly.

They syringe it out normally.

And what it is, is a Super Soaker Max D5000.

Wow.

This is a guy who he was living on an island and the child had real problems with earwax and he couldn't get to the doctors to get a syringe quickly enough.

So he said the owner of a Super Soca Max D5000 was sought out.

After hearing an explanation of its intended application, he granted permission for its use.

Verbal consent was obtained from the patient.

He then changed into swimming shorts, located himself on an ideal location on the deck and held a Tupperware container, product number 1611/16, to the side of his neck.

The Super Soca Max D5000 was filled with body temperature water and then mildly pressurized using the blue hand pump.

The trigger was depressed, releasing a gentle, narrow jet of water, which was aimed along the posterior wall of the ear canal.

And then after 15 seconds, bits of wax started coming out and it worked.

I might do that.

That's great.

I think don't do that.

This was a medically trained professional.

And this is a thing that happened and it is in a medical paper.

But I think if you do have earwax problems, maybe you should consult a professional.

You guys are so boring.

Don't piss in my fidget spinners.

Don't put super soakers in my head.

Do you know what the best-selling doll of 1976 was?

You'll be surprised.

Oh, 1976.

1976.

Was it a Richard Nixon doll?

Was...

Oh, that was very...

I was about to say, very close.

It's not very close.

Was it a...

When was Star Wars?

77?

So maybe

it wasn't

Skywalker.

Oh, I know.

Oh.

Oh.

The Exorcist, didn't that come out in 70?

Oh, nice.

Okay, well, you're all kind of getting closer.

It is a pop culture thing.

It was Cher.

Was it?

Really?

Yeah.

There were Sonny and Cher dolls, and the Cher one was very customizable, had different outfits and things, and it was hugely popular.

Really?

Best-selling doll of the entire year was Cher.

That makes sense, yeah.

I am surprised, Andy.

I just

don't have any references that I can make jokes about as Cher.

No, I'm just

trying to think of a single share song.

Shoop Shoop song is the only one I can think of.

The famous one with Sonny Bono, what was that?

The duet.

I got you, babe.

I got you, babe.

Yeah.

I was just imagining being a parent and having two kids and one share doll and convincing them it was called share because they had to share it.

I'm sorry I switched off and went there.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that Al Capone ran a soup kitchen during the Great Depression.

He served beef on Thanksgiving in 1930 because there had just been a theft of 1,000 turkeys nearby, and he didn't want the authorities to think it was him.

Makes sense,

yeah.

And he had to do something with the 50 cows he'd nicked, didn't he?

That's probably more like it.

So, yeah, Al Capone, Chicago gangster, public enemy number one,

bad guy, killed lots of his enemies, especially in the St.

Valentine's Day massacre in 1929.

But like a lot of these people who were bad guys, he had this kind of Robin Hood reputation where he would give to charity in the local area.

And the idea, I think, sometimes is that he's less likely to get ratted out if people like him.

Although it has to be said that this soup kitchen, although it definitely existed, he might have not paid any money for it because he could have like leaned on some local businesses to donate their beef and whatever,

because obviously extortion was

a lot of his shtick.

So he might have said to you guys, you better give me some stuff for my charity or else.

So that's a negative portrayal of Al Capone.

On the other hand, it was a soup kitchen.

It was a soup kitchen, yeah.

And they gave breakfast, lunch and dinner to over 2,000 people in Chicago every single day.

And the newspapers kind of were not sure about it because, on one hand, they thought, obviously, this is a good thing that people are being fed.

But on the bad hand, they could see him becoming like the mayor of Chicago if people liked him too much.

And they thought, if a gangster becomes the mayor of our city, then we could be in real trouble.

He was sort of de facto mayor for quite a while, wasn't he?

In that he ran the city, essentially.

Well, yeah, he didn't really need to become mayor because he had a guy called William H.

Thompson, who was known as Big Bill.

And basically, El Capone funded him and made sure that that he stayed in place.

And Big Bill was sometimes known as Kaiser Bill because he was very pro-German during World War I.

And in the 1920s, he threatened to punch the British king in the snoot.

Mind you, it's not the worst war in which to be pro-German, to be fair to him.

No, there have been worse ones since.

Yeah.

I just, I find Al Capone so amazing.

how it's like he conforms to all the gangster cliches and the fact that he could just commit multiple murders and everyone know and no one be able to do anything about it.

I mean, he shot people in

open public.

There was one of his rivals, he just went down into a bar and shot him in the head.

And everyone saw, everyone knew he'd done it, but no one's going to say anything.

They were all distracted by an argument about a dictionary going on in the other car that they

newspapers reported it as an unfortunate occurrence.

Anna, I wonder though, if you've got that wrong, you're probably right, but I wonder if if you've got that wrong when you say he conformed to the clichés.

I wonder if Al Capone invented the clichés.

Yeah,

all the movies born off the back of his life and of all the gangsters of that time are what inform us about the mafia.

So he kind of invented cliché.

Yeah, I didn't know that he was called Scarface.

I mean, I'm sure anyone who

has read a bit about it did know that.

But yeah, I didn't know that he had the big scars and that the first film called Scarface was about him.

No, I didn't know that either.

He hated the movie.

Also, yeah.

Yes, he did, yeah.

And he got the scars on his face from insulting a lady.

The brother of a lady was taken aback and slashed his face.

But he used to claim that he got it as a result of some service time in the army because he didn't want to just admit that he was,

you know, lost a battle.

In the fight where he got scarred, Al Capone, his brother, James Capone, kind of got involved in it and pushed the guy who scarred him through a glass window because obviously he just cut his brother and he was so worried that this guy was going to come back and get him that he fled the city and joined the circus

and then he served in World War I and then after the war he changed his name after his favorite cowboy and became a prohibition agent and basically spent his whole time stopping people from moving alcohol around which is where Al Capone got most of his money but he didn't realize that that had happened because at that time El Capone wasn't really famous for that kind of thing and so he only later later found out that his brother, who he'd left after that fight when he was 16 years old, had become the greatest mobster and he had become one of the big prohibition agents.

There needs to be a film that imagines the meeting between them where he knows he's arresting this huge prohibition breaker and suddenly they meet face to face.

He was called Vincenzo Capone, wasn't he?

This guy

originally.

And then he became Richard Hart.

But there were so many Capone's.

There were, I think, eight or nine Capone siblings in all.

And the last member of the family alive, or she was alive in 2012, and no, she is still alive because she's on Twitter, is Deirdre Capone.

Wow.

The most harmless name, Deirdre.

Well, I know.

She defends Al Capone's reputation, which I think is an uphill battle.

She's written a book saying he was a mobster, not a monster.

And she's written a book all about him, which includes recipes like meatballs a la Capone.

Wow.

And these days she's just retweeting, you know, like dogs and meditation.

She has a Twitter account.

It's so weird that a Capone family man.

She shouldn't be judged by your grandparents, should you, really?

Oh, or your Twitter account.

I'd just like to make very clear.

He was quite a family man, though.

Again, as the clichés then played out, he had that typical, I've got a wife who theoretically doesn't know anything that's going on, but maybe she knows everything.

He really loved his son.

So his son had hearing damage, probably because it was congenital syphilis syphilis contracted from alcapone which he famously had um and he spent a hundred thousand dollars fixing his son's hearing in 1925 when he didn't he didn't even really have huge amount to spare so he was a family guy but his syphilis was a much bigger part of his life than his gang time wasn't it i can we say that for sure

time-wise total time wise time-wise sorry time-wise it was a longer part of his life you're right

okay so biographers aren't always complaining why do they always focus on the gangster years it's more about his rancid penis.

I think of myself as a syphilis patient who happens to be in the box, not a monster who has syphilis.

Well, I think by the end, he basically couldn't think of himself as anything.

It was so awful.

I didn't sort of realise the symptoms of untreated syphilis.

But by the time he went to prison in 1930, he was starting to really suffer from it.

There's a theory that one of the reasons he was moved from Atlanta prison to Alcatraz, where he was famously sent, is actually that he was being bullied in the Atlanta prison because he was very weak and he was starting to lose his faculties because of the syphilis.

And his cellmate had to protect him because you know everyone else was bullying him.

And so he was accused of special treatment because his cellmate was protecting him.

So he was shifted.

But yeah, by the time he got to Alcatraz, he was having problems.

He was one of the first people ever to be treated with penicillin in 1941 for it.

Yeah.

Have you heard of his lawyer?

Or one of his lawyers, I'm sure he's not.

Do you know what's he called?

If it's Charlie Chapman, yes.

If it's someone I haven't heard of, no.

He was called Hiram Mendo.

No.

No.

Okay, so he defended him in a trial, I think, in 1930, which was when they first nabbed him.

You know, they eventually got him for tax evasion, but they first got him for

unlicensed ownership of a gun or something.

Anyway, this is the earlier trial.

That was in about 1930.

Guess when Hiram Mendo retired.

Okay, so he must have been at least 30 then, and he'll retire when he's 65.

So he retired in 1965.

He retired in 1994.

Oh my god.

Yes.

He died in 2001, aged 107, but he kept practicing law until he was 100 years old.

Oh my god.

I know.

Was he Donald Trump's lawyer?

He just feels like the kind of guy who definitely must have been Donald Trump's lawyer at some point.

He was just amazing.

His working life, he started working when he was six at the age in 1900, and he kept working for 94 years.

He wasn't working as a lawyer when he was six, just to clarify who said this earlier.

Who would you rather have the six-year-old lawyer or the 100-year-old lawyer?

He had another lawyer who was called Edward O'Hare who testified against him in court.

Not a good lawyer.

Oh, wow.

That's not the kind of lawyer you want.

And he's slightly a notable character, not just for his connection to Capone, but his son is called Edward Butch O'Hare Jr., off which O'Hare Airport in Chicago is named after.

He was a

Medal of Honor fighter pilot who single-handedly shot down eight Japanese bombers.

So he was a hero for Chicago.

Why did his lawyer testify against him, though?

That does seem like a bit of a rookie mistake.

I'm sure he wasn't representing him anymore at that point.

I call to the stand me.

Al Capone, the only time he got shot was when he shot himself, wasn't it?

He shot himself by accident.

1928.

He had a golf game.

So James Golf, dangerous game.

You've got to be careful.

I'm playing on Saturday.

Well, try not to put your gun too near golf clubs in the bag because that's how he did it.

The details are slightly unclear, but we think that after a round of golf, he got into his car and he opened his golf bag and fiddled around and he was keeping his gun in there as well.

And he shot himself and he shot himself sort of multiple times, I think, through the groin and through the...

the

why did he keep shooting off of the first that doesn't stack up Anna it really doesn't

I think he had multiple wounds maybe the bullet went in and out and in and out kind of like a sewing needle or if you press your finger on a trigger accidentally can it deploy multiple bullets it's a machine gun it can yeah

if afterwards someone said did you get a hole in one and he said a hole in one of my testicles

yeah uh he wasn't he wasn't a funny guy

he i read in one capone biography this thing that gangs habit that gangsters had in the 20s that brooklyn gangsters had which apparently they devoted huge amounts of time to um so and this is also in a book about brooklyn gangs but i couldn't find first-hand evidence apparently gangsters devoted huge amounts of time to the look

And the look is a threatening stare that you give someone.

It was a deadly gaze designed to strike mortal fear into the heart of an enemy.

And it was more frightening than any kind of violence or anything like that.

And so they practiced it.

Apparently, Al Capone is very good at it.

It's the source of all his...

Yeah, so Andy's doing it, sort of trying to do it now.

You know, you can't shake your fist, James.

That is cheating.

Apparently, the young gangster's habits was to stand in front of the mirror for hours on end each day practicing the look.

Wow, that's so funny.

Yeah, Capone used to think that he was very well-dressed guy as well.

He had to look in the other way, didn't he?

He had the nickname Snorky, which he much preferred to

Scarface.

So he's quite embarrassed by Scarface, and like if there were cameras on, he would try and move the scars to the so they couldn't see them on the camera.

And he wouldn't move the scars, obviously.

That's very difficult to do, isn't it?

He would move the scars, but only'cause they were attached to his head and he was moving his head.

But yeah, he liked to be called Snorky, which in those days meant someone who was well dressed.

He looks a bit snorky.

Snorky.

Snorky.

It's not like a cartoon dog.

He's much less threatening.

Al Snorky Capone.

Yeah.

I read a thing in Gentleman's Gazette recently, which was about Al Capone.

It said, Al Capone was known as much for his sense of style as he was for his psychopathic tendencies,

which I would dispute.

I think you're right.

I think it's number one, syphilis, number two, psychopathic tendencies, number three, style.

Yeah,

I think that's hierarchy.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James.

Oh, he's giving us the look.

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 our website.

You can go to no suchthingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise that we've released over the years.

Okay, guys, once again, we hope you're staying well.

We hope you're safe.

We hope your family are doing well.

Thank you so much as ever for listening to us during this weird, weird time.

We will be back again next week with another episode, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Good.

What are we doing?

Can I quickly say

at Deirdre Capone?

Just because we mentioned her on Twitter and I don't know if it's funny or not.

She's actually Deirdre Marie Cap.

I don't know why she put in Marie and left out Capone, but there we go.

Wow, because Cap is a slang word for putting a cap in it for shooting someone.

That comes from

Capone.

Put a cap in your ass.

Come on, we've just done a gullible podcast, Dan.

Right at the end.

I held that.

I deliberately held back.

Damn it.

I was still recording.

Life's messy.

We're talking spills, stains, pets, and kids.

But with Anibay, you never have to stress about messes again.

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

Made with liquid and stain-resistant fabrics.

That means fewer stains and more peace of mind.

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.

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.

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.

At the UPS store, we understand the importance of a first impression.

That's why we're here to help you put your best foot forward and be unstoppable with our printing services.

With high-quality paperstock options,

banners, business cards, menus, and more.

We make sure your small business stands out and your message reaches the masses.

After all, we're the one-stop prints-that-pop store.

Most locations are independently owned.

Product services, prices, and hours of operation may vary.

See Center for Details.

The UPS store.

Be unstoppable.

Come into your local store today and get your print on.