319: No Such Thing As 19th Century Feudal Japanese Monopoly

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Hi, everyone.

Before we start this week's show, we first of all want to make sure everyone's okay and hope that you're keeping well and keeping sane and you're getting through this lockdown okay.

But one thing we quickly wanted to say is that Dan is away still.

He'll be back next week, but in his stead, we have our good friend and colleague, Anne Miller.

Yep, that is right.

Anne Miller's here.

Not only is Anne Miller a QIL for you all know very well, she's also a published author, which I'm sure you guys might know.

And honestly, if you're looking for a book to entertain your children while you're stuck at home with them, having to endure whatever it is that children do, do go and look up Anne's book.

It's called Mickey and the Animal Spies.

I mean, I've actually read it and loved it, and I realise I'm 34, but I do think I loved it in the mind of like a nine-year-old.

It's about basically a bunch of animals, an array of animals who go around solving crimes together with the lead character, this really adventurous, kind of spunky gal called Mickey.

It's fab.

Yes, and actually, the other person who's on this week's show, as well as myself and Anna and Anne, is of course Andrew Hunter Murray.

And of course he has a book as well, which we should mention.

And that's for people whose reading age is above the age of nine.

So have you read that, Anna?

I have indeed.

So here I have to slip into my 10-year-old self to really get to grips with that.

No, that's called The Last Day and it's brilliant.

If what you're looking for to escape this kind of current dystopia is a fictional and much more exciting dystopia, you want to go to The Last Day.

The concept is amazing.

So the concept is that the world stops spinning and half of it's plunged into darkness, half of it's in light.

And it's all the repercussions of that combined with a thriller story.

And again, a great spunky female character.

I think it might be Mickey when she's grown up.

Oh, wow, imagine that if that's the same universe.

It is.

Oh my God, this whole thing has been blown wide open.

All right, so go and look up both of those books, The Last Day and Mickey and the Animal Spies.

Yes, especially at the moment when it's a really good time to be supporting authors and buying books.

It's such a good time to buy books.

The whole book industry is massively struggling, so it's just think of it as a good thing to do for the world as well as yourself to go out and buy books.

Okay, on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you not from the QI offices in Covent Garden, but from four rooms across the country.

My name is Andrew Hunter-Murray, and with me today are Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Anne Miller.

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 you, Anna.

My fact this week is that loofahs are edible.

A yummy part-time snack.

Yeah.

This is, I didn't say they tasted nice, but loofahs, which I find it a really funny word.

So loofahs are plants from the loffer, the loofah plant.

So I think I assumed, and maybe other people did, that real loofah sponges that you get in the shower are sponges, like the animals, the organisms.

But they're not, they're a plant, they're a gourd, in fact.

And you can grow them.

I realized that there's this plant that I've been looking at in my local shop in London pre-lockdown, obviously,

that I've never known what it is.

And it's this.

It's just a loofah sponge in its early days.

No.

Yeah.

It looks like a ridged courgette.

And

yeah, basically, it's like a gourd.

And the loofah that you have hanging in your shower is when it's past its delicious phase and more in the dried up, desiccated phase.

And it's like, if you think of a pumpkin, when you empty a pumpkin out to make a face out of it then all the the white stringy stuff in that when that dries up in the loofah it turns into a sponge.

Loofers are really loofahs have so many uses that I didn't know about.

So researchers in Mumbai they've made bricks out of loofahs and they have more air pockets than a standard brick so you can't you have to dry it and grind it down and mix it with aggregate material kind of like concrete is you know it's mixed together with other stuff but they're really porous and they can harbour plant and animal life inside the brick.

And they're so porous they have kind of mini water tanks inside them.

So that cools the building down.

So loofers sound like the ideal brick home building material.

Okay, but one thing you shouldn't really use loofahs for is scrubbing your back in the bath, isn't that right?

According to some microbiologists, they're like a breeding ground for bacteria

because they have lots of air pockets and lots of holes where bacteria can get in and dead skin cells.

You get dead skin cells in there.

What do bacteria like to eat dead skin cells where do they like to live in warm damp environments what is a bathroom a warm damp environment it's perfect i've read a bit of advice saying you should chuck away your loofah pretty much every week which feels like you're going through so many loofahs yeah so the three pack should last you about a month yeah that's too many yeah but loofahs are quite long i've seen one at two gardens and it's much longer than a loofah you put in the bath maybe you just cut a bit off maybe it grows back like celery and you just take the end off it maybe it does that

we're not sure anna maybe you can buy one from that shop when it reopens i will well if they're anything like your average kind of gourds you know when you try to grow courgettes and you end up at the end of the season with 200 000 courgettes or marrows by some point you don't have to go with it maybe

i've never grown a marrow

this this might be your experience but it's not a universal human experience

i think anyone who's ever done gardening and garden with uh courgettes that turn into marrow will know i remember this in my childhood that they grow much better than any other vegetable so you get so sick of eating them for every single meal.

Please write in if you've had this experience.

Anna don't say that you're gonna get hundreds of thousands of emails now.

I know I am.

The one thing you can do if you don't want to throw your loofah away is microwave it.

That's one advice from the loofah experts.

They say to eat it or clean it.

That's a great point.

I don't know how it cooks in a microwave but if you have a loofah in your bathroom and you're worried that it's getting a bit germy, apparently if you shove it in the microwave for 30 seconds or a minute, then it'll don't put it just start with 10 seconds.

That's what I'm saying.

Don't put it in for too long.

That's the

microwaves.

Always the way with the microwave, though.

Start for 10 seconds, build up to giving it an hour.

Yeah.

Take it out, stir it around.

Nice.

Do you guys know that there's only one hotel in the UK that grows its own loofahs?

Really?

Yeah, one hotel.

Where?

It's near Bath.

It's near Bath.

That's funny.

A place called Stone Eastern Park.

And not only do they make their own loofahs, they have an annual event, the loofah harvest, where you can go to the hotel and see the loofahs being harvested.

And it's the end of October or the start of November every single year, so hopefully it won't be affected by the current lockdown, fingers crossed.

And the gardeners will take you down and advise you on your own loofah cultivation.

And then they'll give you a demonstration on how to de-skin your loofah.

And then you get a two-course lunch.

I don't know if there's any loofah as part of that.

Must be both courses.

And then you get a loofah demonstration.

And at the end of the day, you get to go back to the garden and pick your own loofah.

Wow,

what a day out that would be.

I know.

Sounds amazing.

Yeah.

Hey, you know who would love that?

So I was looking up gourds and squashes.

So gourd is basically generally used for the inedible ones, and squash are the ones that we eat.

But the American Gourd Society, they began in 1937, and they are big enthusiasts of all the kinds.

And I was having a look at other kinds of gourds because the loofah, obviously great.

Do you know about the bottle gourd?

No.

So it's basically it's long and when you dry it out it kind of becomes hollow and it's got a long stem which works like a handle so you can use it to carry water around.

Oh, no.

It's kind of useful.

I was just thinking the word gourd I think I first came across it in the asterix books.

Did he used to carry like magic potions in his garden stuff?

Oh, that does sound well.

Yeah.

Yeah, because you'd definitely drink out of them, like use them as mugs mugs and stuff, wouldn't you?

Well, Anna, you must have a nightmare with your 200,000 Corgette mugs every year.

My cupboards are full.

Have you ever been to one of Anna's drinking parties where we all drink tequila out of a god?

All the drinks taste of courgette.

It's actually not very pleasant.

We're here for a god time, not for a long time.

That could be the tagline.

On other historical using of loofahs, it was a real craze in the end of the 19th century.

So this is when people really picked up on the loofah as being handy.

And it was because friction baths had just become very popular.

And so this was the idea that it began with the concept that showering or washing was bad for you.

So for about 200 years, it was quite common not to wash much because people thought that getting hot opened up your pores and let in lots of little bad guys.

And then they decided that scrubbing with something really rough and sandpapery.

So women used to use mohair or flesh brushes.

If you scrubbed and scoured your skin, that would get all the bad guys out.

And then they discovered loofah, which is perfect for scraping out all these tiny little

evil creatures.

The bad guys.

I guess we'd now call them sort of pathogens or something.

But there was this craze for friction baths, and it was invented by a guy called Lewis Kuhn.

And it was the friction sits bath.

And what you did was you sat in a bathtub, the water was about 10 to 14 degrees centigrade, so cold, unpleasantly cold, and you rub your lower abdomen, hips, and genitals very vigorously with a rough cloth or a loofah.

And the nerve stimulation was thought to evacuate all the toxins.

Wow.

And then you go straight to bed.

I wonder if that's part of the loofah day out that James passed.

I decided to go off the loofah day out if that's part of it.

The genital stimulation, you have to pay extra for that part.

Some of the people are not people, actually the opposite of people, animals.

Some animals that have friction baths are sperm whales.

Now, sperm whales...

People are animals.

You're right.

It's not the opposite at all, is it?

Animals are not people, though.

No.

Well, some animals are people.

This is contentious, guys, and for another day.

Okay, so anyway, animals that have friction baths include sperm whales.

And what they do is they get together and they exfoliate by rubbing against each other.

So normally sperm whales are quite solitary, or they'll be in small pods of maybe 10 or 15.

But every now and then, about 70 of them will come together and they'll all start rubbing against each other to get the bad guys off.

Because

they have like bad guys who attach themselves to the skin, like limpets and you know, stuff like that, parasites.

And theirs genuinely serves an actual purpose, doesn't it?

So, it's like temperature regulation.

If you're covered in algae, it's hard to regulate your temperature or you've got proper parasites.

Whereas for humans, it's kind of bizarre that we exfoliate, or I I obviously don't, because I'm not a fool,

but it's bizarre that exfoliating has become such an accepted thing.

I mean, what is it?

There's no scientific evidence to say it's doing anything useful.

Fine, it kind of gets rid of those gross, bumpy things on the back of our arms, which I'm kind of fond of.

That might also be personal to you.

I think you need to see someone about those.

Oh, no.

But when I was reading about the different kinds of girds that they've made, apparently a warty gird is quite a thing because it's like it's even more distinctive.

So, they like a warty girder, they were the one to explain.

I don't think kind of saying that her elbow looks like a warty god.

Well, actually, it sounds like it to me, yeah.

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Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Anne.

My fact is that the man who invented Jumanji did so because he hated Monopoly.

Wow.

If only we could all kind of channel that hatred for monopoly into some creative stuff.

I mean, we've all been there, right?

Yeah, he's awesome.

So his name is Chris Van Ahlsberg.

He is a children's author and illustrator.

And he's got really interesting ways of how he gets ideas.

So as well as right, he wrote Jumanji, the original picture book, and he also wrote The Polar Express, which also turned into a big movie.

And he said that when he was younger, he used to find it frustrating that if you were playing Cludo, you couldn't actually interrogate Colonel Mustard.

And if you were playing Monopoly, you didn't get any money.

You weren't actually rich at the end, even if you'd built lots of hotels and had all the expensive properties.

And then he also thought, well, what are things that I see a lot?

Like, everyone's seen footage of a rhino stampede, but they haven't seen a rhino stampede in a living room.

And then he was like, ah, a jungle game that comes to life.

That's what I'm going to make.

Okay.

Yeah, that was this huge thing.

But which game was he playing when he decided to do Polar Express?

I think that would be that train game, which I've forgotten the name of, that goes through Europe.

Oh, Ticket to Ride.

Ticket to Ride.

Wow.

And was he annoyed that at the end of Ticket to Ride, you're not in but a pest?

Like, this guy has very high demands of his board games, I would say.

I think everyone else accepts the fundamental conceit that at the end of Monopoly, you don't get 30 grand and the Hilton.

So yeah, it's interesting.

It's another interesting leap, isn't it, that he went from Monopoly to Rhinos.

He must have had a jungle penchant running alongside his hatred of Monopoly.

Yeah.

He does sound very cool.

No, I love him and his approach to story.

So he shared a letter that a fan wrote to him.

And this is a girl called Alexandra.

And she said, Dear Mr.

Van Olsberg, I love the books you write.

I am glad your books are so weird because I am very weird.

I think you are weird, but great.

I wish a volcano and flood would be in my room.

Okay.

What a silly thing to wish for.

A very, very troubled home life that we're not really going to have time to get into properly, I think.

My favourite origin story, actually, for a board game is there's the two men who invented Trivial Pursuit in 1979.

And it's an incredibly boring story if you get to the bones of it.

It's like the two businessmen who thought, yeah, should we invent Trivial Pursuit?

So it came about, I think one of them said they were inspired to invent it when they were playing Scrabble and some of the pieces were missing.

So they couldn't play it anymore.

Now, if you think about it, if you have pieces missing in Scrabble, it doesn't matter.

If the piece that's missing is the bard, then that's a problem.

That's the crucial piece.

Yeah, it's the only absolutely crucial piece.

No, I think there are lots of different ways in which you lose pieces.

So for example, if you lose all the vowels, that is going to be a tricky game of Scrabble to get through.

And that would actually be a great prank to play on someone.

It would.

Maybe it was the holder for the counters, and they couldn't find a way to display them without the other person seeing what they had.

Must have been the holder.

That's very good.

We found three different ways in which this origin story stacks up on us.

I like the origin of Operation.

Do you know that game?

It's like it's a guy in a hospital and you have to pick out bits of his body with tweezers right and if you hit the sides then it makes a buzz now this was invented by a student in the 1960s he was a design student and it was for his exam but before that Benjamin Franklin invented operation in the 1700s okay

He invented a game which was basically the same.

It was called Treason and it had a picture of King George II and you had to get a crown out of him and if you touched the sides then it would make a buzzing noise.

So Benjamin Franklin invented operation.

Isn't that amazing?

That's incredible, James.

If real-life operations were anything like operation, then surgeons would open up their patients and go, oh shit, there are no organs in here at all.

What have they all got?

Who's taken the organs?

Is that what happens in operation?

Do you just lose the organs over time?

Pretty much.

Immediately.

Okay, I've never owned a set.

Oh, now's a good time to get one, Andy.

Yeah, that's true.

I've only got four board games, one of which I bought for an earlier episode of Fish, which was the cattle semen trading board game Grayed Up to Elite Cow.

Oh, wow.

I know.

And then one of the others is the QI board game, and one is Scrabble.

I don't have a very good cover.

Do you think they could turn the...

You know how Jumanji is like kind of a board game, but then also a movie.

Do you think they could turn the cattle semen trading board game into a movie?

Yes.

I absolutely do.

I think some bad guys hold the world's cattle semen stock to ransom

and the rock will have to be involved somehow.

Because they did have Monopoly the movie, didn't they?

Oh, no, they're making

Monopoly.

I think they've tried before, but they're making a new one with Kevin Hart, who was in the new Dumanji movies.

So I feel like he's going to absolutely conquer board game movie crossovers.

Well, it's going to be very, very long.

That's the only thing we know about the Monopoly film.

It'll be 16 hours long.

You know, they're about to ruin Monopoly, or I think they might have ruined it already by inventing a new updated version where it's cashless, so they want to get in tune with the modern man or woman.

And so they've got a cashless Monopoly where basically Mr.

Monopoly is the banker, so no player gets to be the banker anymore.

Mr.

Monopoly is a top hat, a big top hat, who sits in the middle of the board

and uses voice recognition technology to know which player is talking to him.

And a player will say, I want to buy Park Lane, and then he'll just deduct that amount from your amount.

That's stupid.

And so it takes away the joy of cheating as the banker, which is the only reason anyone plays Monopoly in the first place.

Exactly.

The whole whole point is to cheat.

Well, Anna, I know which version you should get because they've also made Monopoly the Cheaters edition, where part of the game is to try and steal from the bank lie about your dice rolls, and it comes with a set of handcuffs.

Like, I'm talking of handcuffs.

Great.

They're really embracing the cheating.

But there's tons of novelty monopolies.

I had a look at a big list of them, and just the ones beginning with A include ABBA Monopoly, Alton Towers Monopoly, Alice in Wonderland, Alpaca Monopoly, that's an unofficial one, and Aberdeen Monopoly.

Wow.

There are so many.

If you look up Monopoly and if you're attempting to find facts about it, then half the news results are different places.

You know, Kingston-upon-Thames is getting its own Monopoly set.

And I do wonder what the advantage of this is, or whether they franchise it, or whether, because it seems like no one, you know, I used to live quite near Kingston.

I didn't want a Kingston Monopoly set.

Well, I think they're all pandering to this one guy who has the world record most number of monopoly sets.

Okay, he's called Neil Scallon, and he has the Guinness World Record, and how many Monopoly sets do you think he owns?

Completely, each one is completely different.

312.

I'm going to go, I think there's over a thousand novelty ones.

I'm going to go a thousand.

A thousand and one.

And each one of them?

I'll say 400.

He has, as of the 25th of January 2019, so a while ago, he has 2,249

different monopoly sets.

And if you go into the amazing website worldofmonopoly.com, you can see a list of all the ones that he has.

Oh my god.

What?

But like, but that's not a cheap game.

That's a lot of money.

He could almost have like real Monopoly.

I know.

I know.

And also,

Anna, you and I have a copy of an extremely random Monopoly set, don't we?

We do, the University of Kent, right?

Yeah.

And this guy also has that.

No way.

Yeah.

That's so good.

Christmas in this guy's household must be hell.

I was so sure we would have one that he didn't have, but that is amazing.

Jesus Christ.

I wonder what his like, like the most sought-out after, the most, the rarest, like, special monopoly is.

Because I read about one they made for Wall Street where it's like made of like solid gold pieces, which I think is a bit overkill.

But I wonder if there's like a, I don't know,

what's a like from a tiny village somewhere who's just got their own one and selling it in the post office.

I wonder what's the hardest to get.

I went onto eBay and I looked for the most expensive monopoly set at the moment.

Oh, and it was a Bulgarian monopoly.

I guess for some reason there weren't many made or something like that, but yeah, it was quite a few.

It was about £700 or something for a Bulgarian Monopoly.

And so you got it on the QI credit card.

I just, I don't want Neil Scallon to have it.

Stop him.

I wonder if Chris Van Ellsberg ever makes up with Monopoly.

They could make a Jamanji Monopoly.

That would be quite fun.

Oh, there must be one.

I don't think the world needs more editions of Monopoly.

I have to say, it's so interesting how people who play board games in any serious way all hate monopoly so much so the guardian asked people for their least favorite board games for a feature they were writing and one of the responses just said monopoly is awful because of the vice-like grip it has over how the british public perceive board games i'm going to a board game night at a local comic shop this evening nobody will be playing monopoly and if it was suggested then i would assume it was a sick joke of some kind

they had in 2016 hasbro now makes monopoly um announced they were operating a special hotline on Christmas Day where people who'd been traumatized by their Monopoly-based experiences could call

it actually ran from Christmas Eve to Boxing Day and I just feel so devastatingly sorry for whatever intern was asked to perform that role by Hasbro.

They literally it wasn't a recorded message.

They said we'll have experts on hand with the official rule books to instantly settle any disputes and advise on how to resolve common complaints.

God.

Okay, so it's Christmas Day.

You're an intern, you have to work and you're sat by the phone.

Would you rather no one called you or someone called you to talk to you about Monopoly?

Oh, God, it's Sophie's choice, isn't it?

I'd rather go directly to jail, to be honest with you.

I was reading some Monopoly strategy,

and I'm sure.

So there was basically an article in the New York magazine with the headline, you don't hate Monopoly, you just suck at it, and said, the reason we hate it is we can't play it properly.

But if everyone can play it properly, then we all suck at it again because there are only so many key skills and tricks you can get.

But the main things they say are: if you're after the oranges, it's good to stay in jail because there's more chance of rolling a double and completing your set.

When there are not so many properties available, it's good to sit in jail because then you don't have to pay any rent.

And they were very cross about the some people play a version where you collect the money from fines if you land on free parking, and they were very angry about that because apparently it messes with the game and makes it more random.

Oh, it's the only joy of Monopoly is getting to pick up that money.

And I hate the people who won't let you do it.

Well, you hate the people who use the actual rules of Monopoly, Anna.

I hate them.

You need that hotline.

I read an article with the 2015 UK Championship winner, Natalie Fitzsimmons.

Wow.

And she gave her tips of how to win Monopoly.

And this is, I mean, I think this is terrible, what she does.

So she basically goes and buys all of the property she can and then mortgages them all.

And so she gets the money back, but she doesn't collect any rent, but it doesn't matter because the rent's so small and then she collects one group and then puts four houses on each of those groups she doesn't put um a hotel on there or anything like that and then she tries to get into jail for as long as possible

and apparently this is the best technique to win the game wow

isn't that amazing and another another thing she says is sometimes you can get instead of mortgaging the mall you um get a few different groups and then you always put four houses on each so there's not enough houses left for anyone else to build houses.

What you just run out the pieces of the game.

Yeah, there's not enough houses in the box for everyone to put four houses on each thing.

So if you put four on all yours, it stops anyone else from being able to do it.

That can't be in the rules.

It is.

You run out of houses, you oh my gosh.

It is the rules.

It is the rules.

So when we were younger, we used to just put like a thimble instead of a house, but that we were doing it wrong.

Oh my god.

Wow.

That's amazing.

I suppose suppose that's realistic.

Yeah.

If you've run out of building materials, you can't replace them with a thimble.

That's true.

We've actually never mentioned it on this podcast, although I think we have on QI the origin story of Monopoly.

So basically, there's this guy, Charles Darrow, and if you go on the Monopoly website, actually, if you look at Find the History, which I think they've buried deeper than it used to be, it still says Charles Darrow, who dreamed up Monopoly in the 1930s.

And this guy, Darrow, went around saying he'd just come up with it.

In one interview, someone said, you know, where did it come from?

And he had no origin story.

He just said, It was like magic, it just came to me.

Jesus.

So, in fact, what happened, and this was only really uncovered in the 1970s, was that there was a woman about 30 years earlier in 1903 called Elizabeth Magee.

And she sounded so awesome.

She was very unusual, a proper self-made woman who was independently made a living.

She was a secretary, she wrote poetry and short stories, she did stand-up comedy.

She once came second in a beauty contest.

And you wouldn't have thought that someone so fun would invent monopoly, but she did.

She called it the landlord's game.

And the whole point of it at the time was that it exposed the folly of capitalism.

So there were two sets of rules.

There was the anti-monopolist rule, where everyone is rewarded for the wealth that they create.

And then there was the monopoly rule where you build up monopolies and crush your opponents.

And she didn't quite mean for humanity to fully embrace the second one and decide that was the one we wanted to play.

But she played it and she showed it to her friends and it caught on and eventually, you know, quite a few people played it in a certain part of the States and it reached Charles Darrow through a friend and he sort of like slightly tweaked it and published it, claimed the patent, sorted, he's a hero.

Wow.

That's terrible.

He needs to go straight to jail.

We're going to have to move on in a second.

I just have one thing.

I went off on a bit of a tangent here because it was about Jumanji.

And I was, and this, what this guy didn't like about Monopoly was the fact you couldn't go into the game you know and experience it so I was looking up other kind of going into immersive reality experiences and I just came across this short story that I read and it's called pygmalion spectacles from 1935 and I think it's the earliest reference to virtual reality sort of 3d amazing experience glasses so it's by this guy called Stanley Weinbaum and it starts out with a man who's a bit drunk at a party and stumbles out onto the street, meets a professor who says, Wouldn't you love to see a film that was really realistic?

Got to bear in mind this was the 1930s.

So the guy was like, Yeah, but that could never exist.

And he said, What if I give you these glasses?

And this chap puts on the glasses, and suddenly he can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell everything.

And he has this incredible adventure and it's really, really exciting.

And then he takes the glasses off and he's like, fuck, that was magic.

And then the professor says, it's not actually.

I just dipped these glasses in a chemical electrical solution which did all the audio input.

And the woman you fell in love with is actually my niece.

She's an actress, like in one of these immersive reality theater things.

But what I wanted to tell you was:

he said, So the guy was like, How did you make all the trees seem so real?

You know, it was like Jamanji, he was in a forest.

And he said, Oh, the trees, they are simply now.

What do you think they were?

Toilet brushes.

Incorrect.

Andy, you might know.

Moss.

It was club moss.

No way.

Trees are club mosses enlarged by a lens.

Now, I don't know if we have mentioned openly on the podcast before, but Andy's been insisting for years that club moss looks exactly like trees.

And now this is vindication.

Vindication.

Vindication.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that there is a man in Brazil who nobody is allowed to go within five miles of.

And is this a he hasn't showered for a long time?

No.

It's not a social isolation thing.

Well, it is a social isolation thing, but not a...

And actually, it is on government advice as well.

So it's kind of similar to what's happening, but he is the last survivor of an uncontacted tribe.

He lives in the Amazon rainforest.

And basically what happened in Brazil for a long time is these people who are living in the rainforests, they would try and contact them and try and assimilate them into modern life.

And obviously,

or maybe not obviously, but I think we now know that that is not a particularly good idea because basically you're bringing pathogens over there.

You're kind of destroying their ways of life.

They lose their languages, they lose their culture, stuff like that.

And so the current idea is a thing called policy of no contact, where you just let people live their lives.

You don't have to get in touch with them.

You don't have to give them stuff.

If they want to come to you, they will come to you.

If they need stuff, they'll come to you and get it.

But you need to leave them on their own.

And so there is this one guy who's living on his own.

It seems he's a last member of the tribe.

And in 2007, Brazil declared a 31 square mile area around him to be completely off limits for anyone else.

So no one else is allowed to go there.

And it was later expanded by 11.5 square miles, so about 3,000 hectares.

And now you are definitely not allowed to go anywhere in that area because you'll be disturbing his way of life.

Wow.

Yeah.

So cool.

Do the government have to keep proving that he exists?

That's a good point, actually.

I think the last time they saw him was a few years ago, but I think they do have ethnologists who go there every now and then just checking up to

see what's happening because he builds lots of different huts from place to place, goes from one place to another.

He makes traps for animals, which he then eats.

And he also makes markings on trees which they think may be some kind of spiritual thing so he's constantly using his environment for various things and so you can see when he's moving around and what he's doing.

Doesn't he also dig quite deep holes and people are because obviously nobody can ask him they're not quite sure whether that's for him as shelter, whether it's a trap for animals, whether it's something spiritual.

It's quite mysterious.

Yeah.

That's so weird.

Is that why they call him the man of the hole?

Yeah, we haven't said that he's called the man of the hole actually, but that is one of the things they call him, yeah.

James, if this guy moves does the zone of exclusion move with him so could he move to the center of rio de janeiro and everyone would have to just go

you're absolutely right this is one fundamental flaw with the way that i've worded my fact no one is allowed to go within five miles of him if he stands in the middle of his range

so if he goes right to the edge of the area which has been given to him then actually you could stand right next to him you could stand within two meters of him if he happened to be standing at the edge of that area.

Okay.

Otherwise it would be tragic if he ever tried to make contact.

People just sprinting away from him, screaming.

But I guess that's nice because then if he wants to greet people or meet someone, he can go to the end and there are people there.

Exactly that, yeah.

Because I was I was reading about the Santalese Islanders and they are basically hardly anyone has a contact with them.

There was a group of anthropologists who made two trips to try and make contact and the one way they managed to do it was they went in their boat and they floated coconuts over to the island and the the islanders don't have coconuts, so they took them.

And that was sort of like a beginning of a barter system.

But then when they went back, they were not quite so keen the next time.

So it's sort of trying to make contact if people want to make it, but not to impose yourself.

Yeah.

Especially you don't want to with the Sentinelese because they're famously

they're not, I wouldn't say unfriendly, I'd say quite murderous of

strangers.

I read one thing about those guys that if you go onto their island and they don't want you to be there, the first thing they'll do is turn their back on you and go down on their haunches and pretend to defecate.

And that is kind of their putting two fingers up saying, Fuck off, get off our island kind of thing.

And then, if you don't pay heed to that, then they'll start firing arrows at you and try and kill you.

That's really interesting.

But can you imagine the slight shame of the anthropologists who went all the way there being like, We're gonna do it, we found a way to make contact, and then they say, And what happened?

They buried their bums and pretended to defecate.

You can't really

you can't give a big lecture tour based on mooning, I don't think.

Do you know if you Google map North Sentinel Island, which is where they live,

you can zoom right in and you will see there's actually a bar there.

So

there's, yeah, go on to it.

It's a curry house and bar.

It's got a series of five-star reviews.

And at the moment, there is a sign underneath it that says hours may be affected by COVID-19, which is understandable.

But so the reviews include a good getaway, especially given current events, dinner good but interrupted by arrows and death threats from waiters.

So what is it?

Is it a joke?

It's a Google joke.

It was actually, someone sent it to me.

A guy called Harry Johnston wrote in, a fan of the podcast, saying, have you seen this about a year ago?

Wow.

And it's just stayed up there.

That's a lot of fun.

A curry house and bar.

Yeah.

That's so fun.

Give it a visit.

Don't.

I also went on Google Maps for this area where this guy is living, the Brazilian guy.

And it's an area called Valle do Havari.

A lot of people call it like one of the last unexplored areas of the world but actually of course lots of people live there because you have lots of Amazonian tribes who live there.

But if you go on Google Maps and you search for it it's basically just a grey square and then you can zoom out and zoom out and zoom out and zoom out and it's still just a grey square with like a river going through it and there's literally nothing and you can zoom out to about the size of like England and Wales and you can still not see any towns or anything.

It's just a grey square.

It's absolutely amazing.

But in this area, there is a mountain called Pico de Neblina and this is the highest mountain in Brazil and no one knew it existed until the 1950s

that is how isolated this is the tallest mountain in the whole country is there and no one knew it was there isn't that amazing that's very cool and in theory what happened is someone was flying over it in an aeroplane and thought oh there's a big mountain there where it's not supposed to be and they went maybe someone can check this out and then they measured it and it was way taller than anywhere else wow That's awesome.

I was having a look at other remote places, places that are hard to get to.

And do you know there's a section of America where they still receive their post by mule?

It's part of the official U.S.

Postal Service.

There is an Indian reservation at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.

And so it's hard to get helicopters down there.

And if it's windy, they can't fly at all.

But the mules go, whatever the weather, every day.

So they go by car, by road, to the edge of the Grand Canyon.

And then it is a three-hour trip down by mule, down to the bottom.

It's a postie called Charlie Chamberlain, it's his job.

And he, they basically, anything you can put a stamp on, they will take.

So they take food, they take supplies, they take post.

And they've got a joke that if you want the express service, they just let one of the mules go free and run to the bottom.

I would have thought the express service would be throwing a mule off the edge of the Grand Canyon.

It's a highly trained special mules, Andy.

That's air male.

I was looking up the other loneliest people in the world, people like this.

So

there's one person who missed Neil Armstrong saying this is one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

Guess who it was?

Michael Collins?

It was Michael Collins.

Michael Collins was on the other side of the moon and could not get that line.

So

many other people in the world would have had access to that.

And people keep asking Michael Collins, who's still alive,

about his isolation.

Because for 76 hours when Armstrong Armstrong and Aldrin were on the moon Collins was orbiting and for 48 minutes every two hours he was on the far side of the moon so he was completely out of contact with everybody and you know there was there was only one person on that side of the moon out of three billion people on the other side of the moon um

and he keeps being but he's so he's now enraged anytime anyone asks him so he says um he keeps being asked mr collins weren't you the loneliest man in the whole lonely history of this lonely planet by your lonely self behind the lonely moon in this lonely orbit?

Weren't you terribly lonely?

And he says he was really happy.

He had nobody, mission control went yakking away in his ear.

He was absolutely delighted out there.

Sounds like that journalist could have done with a thesaurus.

Yeah, I think the person who's got the Guinness World Record for the most isolated person is the other guy.

I can't remember.

This is just from memory, but it's the other person.

Al Warden.

Alan Warden, yeah, who also went around the back of the moon, the moon, didn't he?

Really?

Why does he get the record?

I think he was there for longer

while they were exploring.

I think it was three days.

It's kind of a

burn on him and his social life to give him a Guinness World record for loneliest dude ever.

Do you not think it's quite a good line in a bar?

Just go, hi, I'm the world's loneliest man.

What?

Is that a pickup line?

Do you think it's a bit needy?

I think it is.

It's a bit intense as an icebreaker.

I was was reading about life in the Amazon.

Did you know that there are no bridges across the Amazon River?

The whole river.

It's the longest, either the longest or the second longest river in the world, depending on how you measure it.

And there's no bridges across a whole thing.

And do you know why that is?

It's because it's massive.

What?

It's that.

Oh, you mean...

Because it's a massive river?

Because it's wide.

Because it's wide, yeah, yeah.

It's not always wide.

It's wide at its mouth.

But it's narrower at its source, isn't it?

Yeah, obviously, it's narrower in the source, I know that.

I'm just saying, I,

you know, it's most of it seems pretty big to me.

Well, I guess you're kind of half right.

Hang on, surely we can work this out.

Is it because

at the bits where it's narrow enough to put a bridge across, it's protected or sacred territory?

No, not really.

It's more that in the bits where it's narrow enough to put a bridge across, no one lives there.

So it's basically, you know, at the mouth of the river, there are a few cities, and really, it's too wide there to put bridges across.

Really, it's kind of super wide, but in where it gets a bit narrower, no one lives there, and there's a few kind of um boat crossings and stuff like that, but really, there's no roads.

So, why would you need a bridge?

Jesus, I can't believe there's not an in-between zone.

Yeah, you would think so, wouldn't you?

That's an amazing fact.

Yeah, isn't it cool?

Yeah, do you know that there's a bridge over the Atlantic?

Um, is this another Boris Johnson fantasy?

Yep, there is.

Over the whole Atlantic.

No.

Go on.

So I was on holiday on the west coast of Scotland a wee while ago, and that was one of the local attractions.

So it's a stream that comes off the Atlantic.

So they claim it as the bridge over the Atlantic because it's the same bit.

And I thought that was amazing.

So in my head, it's from Cornwall to New York.

What do you mean as a stream?

It's a bit of water that comes off the.

I can't remember the details.

I didn't actually get to visit it, so sadly, I did not get the information guide.

They claim it as the bridge over the Atlantic.

What do you do?

Do you go and look at it, or do you...

Yeah.

And you can walk across it, right?

Yeah, well, if I'd gone, I could answer all these questions.

So, you know, basically,

I think Anne's parents took her on holiday and told her they'd been to America when, in fact, they'd been to a small stream on the west coast of Scotland.

She walked across the bridge.

No, no, we didn't get to go, Anna.

This is my dream.

You didn't even get to go.

We went near the bridge over the Atlantic.

Amazing.

One more thing about living in the Amazon: one issue is they have piranhas.

But what do you think would happen if you actually tried to swim with piranhas?

I know.

Go on, Anna.

You've got your hand up.

If you fall in a river that's full of piranha, they'll strip off your skin like you skin a banana.

There's no time for screaming, there's no time for groans.

In 45 seconds, you're nothing but bones.

That was an amazing bit of improv.

Thank you very much.

What's that, bro?

I just happen to know the answer to your question.

What is it from that?

It is a random poem from my childhood.

And I'm sure it's scientifically accurate.

What really happens?

I'm really sorry for whoever wrote that poem, but that's not true.

Oh, God.

Piranhas, they're kind of scared of big animals.

They don't really want to go near you.

If you fall in the water and you don't bother them, they'll just hide away and they don't want to go anywhere near you.

Now, if they're in the dry season where they're not getting any food, or if they're in the breeding season, then you might have a bit more problem.

But really, they're more like vultures.

They're more like scavengers.

So if a bit of dead meat goes in there, they'll go after it.

But if a human goes in there, they'll think it might be something trying to attack them and they'll just hide away.

Oh, really?

So, most of the time, you'll be completely safe if you fall in a piranha pool.

And another kind of type of piranha that definitely won't kill you is the vegetarian piranha,

which is a thing that exists.

There is a species of piranha that is a vegetarian and they just eat seeds and fruits and stuff that falls into the water.

I love them.

But

those guys, they seem innocuous, but they can strip a courgette right down in 45 seconds.

You're nothing but pulp.

There is a hermit in Scotland just while we're on the subject of lonely people.

Okay.

And he's obviously he's playing amateur league hermiting if he's in Scotland as opposed to in the middle of completely nowhere.

But

he's quite elderly.

He's called Ken Smith and he was injured this year by a log pile falling on him, but he was rescued via Texas.

So

he has an emergency beacon on him and he can press press a button and it flags up with an American satellite and it goes to a command post in Texas saying the hermit in Scotland has had a mishap.

That's bizarre.

They contact the Coast Guard in Scotland and they say one of your hermits is injured and then they have to send out a team to go and chuck on him.

But they just go over that bridge of the Atlantic, don't they?

That's why they built it.

Yeah.

But the amazing thing is, that is the second time it's happened in two years that he's been rescued from.

That's amazing.

What does he keep doing?

Is he very clumsy?

He's got a wood pile, and I guess it's improperly stacked because it keeps falling on him.

Hey, he's doing that all by himself.

There's no one to help him build it safely, I guess.

No, true.

It's like a real.

You know how Jumanji is a real-life board game.

This is like the real-life Jenga that he's living.

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

My fact is that in 19th century Osaka, flat residents owned the rights to their own urine, but the rights to their poo belonged to their landlord.

Amazing.

So.

Okay.

Yeah.

And tenancy agreements must have looked absolutely bizarre.

Yeah, much messier.

So this was a great article on Aeon.com, which I will try and put up on my Twitter.

And it's all about the relationships between humans and human excretions basically and how it's been used throughout history and the the kind of commercial arrangements that we've made over it and in 18th and 19th century Japan and particularly in the city of Osaka

there were complicated arrangements because feces were used for fertilizer and if you lived in a an apartment building the rights to your feces belonged to the building's owner who would have arrangements in place to sell that

and it would be loaded onto ships and taken away.

But you owned your own wee.

That was something you had.

So feces were valuable because they would help to grow crops.

So

it would affect your rent.

If there were lots of people living in your flat then you would produce lots of poo for your landlord to sell and your rent would be slightly lower as a result.

Whereas if you're a single occupancy, you'd pay slightly more, not just because you got your own flat, but also because you weren't producing enough of the brown gold and could you say to your landlord if you're negotiating you know i eat a lot of curry i actually have quite extravagant bowel movements honestly you'll be getting triple the average from me do you think that was something in which you could negotiate i don't think so

so i was talking to a friend of mine in tokyo called john perry he is a writer of quiz books and pretty much my go-to expert on Japanese history and he said that what you say is true but it's very slightly different in that it's not the landlords who had the rights to your poo.

It was like the managing agents, because the landlords they would live miles and miles and miles away and would have nothing to do with this.

They would own your house, but they would really not be involved in your day-to-day life.

And what would happen is you'd have these people who were called Uya,

and they would be slightly higher than the tenants in importance, but not much higher.

But they had a full-time job where it was like looking after the house, collecting the rent, doing the repairs, settling disputes, stuff like that.

And they would be able to read and write, whereas the tenants might not be able to read or write.

And they would take the poo and they would sell it and they would get the money.

But the money was kind of expected to be used, it would pay their wages, but it was also used for all the tenants as well.

So they would buy rice cakes for New Year out of the money from the poo.

And so it would go, it would all go back into the community, all the poo money.

Nice.

Isn't that cool?

That's very cool.

And they're called Ooya, which sounds like the noise they would make as they're collecting your poo.

You'd walk into someone's bathroom and go, ooya,

that's a bad one.

It sounds like the noise you make while you're making the poo, doesn't it?

It does, it does.

And you were saying about like if you've had a curry, you would tell people or something, Hannah?

Yes.

Well, sort of what I'm saying.

Yeah, it's sort of what you were saying.

But

the value of your night soil, which is what they called it, depended on how rich you were.

So if you were rich, you had a really good diet, and it meant that your poo was better as a fertilizer, so you'd be able to sell it for more.

So it's kind of a monopoly thing, whereas the rich get richer.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

But in a kind of poo sense.

Because their poo is literally richer in nutrients.

But this is not, James, a version of monopoly I would like to play.

I don't think I need to play 19th century feudal Japan Monopoly.

Look, there are 2,500 different types of monopoly.

I haven't looked through the whole list.

For all I know, there is a poo monopoly.

It would be called monopoly.

I'm sorry, I just needed to say that.

It's good that you got it out.

Yep, thank you.

In 1724, in Oscar, there was a fight that broke out over the collection rights to poo.

So there were two groups from the villages of Yamazaki and Takasuki, and they

had the rights to buy the poo from um the managing agents and then they would give them to the farmers.

Um but they kind of fought against each other and it turned into a massive riot in the city.

Really?

A lot of sh kind of shit slinging.

Yes, there was a lot of that going on.

And it was got so valuable, people would steal it.

So people would just um in the dead of night come into your apartment and steal all your poo.

I mean

it's sort of it depends on the scale of the crime, doesn't it?

Whether it's worth it for you.

'Cause if you just go into

I just wonder about someone walking into their living room in the morning after a night's sleep and looking at the third cabinet and thinking, oh my god, we've been robbed.

Was it stealing large consignments, I wonder?

That probably makes more sense than individual burglaries.

Yeah, I don't think they would just take a single stool from each household.

There used to be quite harsh penalties in Japan for it, didn't there?

Because,

you know, it was lucrative.

And we should say this continued for hundreds of years.

And still, up until the 1980s, people would go around to people's houses in Japan and in lots of the East, actually.

So in China, it was a huge thing as well.

But in Japan, in the 1980s, there were vacuum trucks that would drive around to your house and you plug them into your sewage tank, I guess, and they suck the poo out.

And then it's gone and it's sold.

But yeah, China as well

used feces, human feces, to enrich their soil for many hundreds of years.

And it was crucial.

So a lot of people think that it was part of the reason that Chinese agriculture did really well in a time when a lot of Western countries didn't.

There was a soil scientist, I think this is in your article, Andy, that you sent us, a soil scientist in 1911 called F.H.

King, who estimated that over 180 million tons of human manure was collected annually in the Far East to enrich the soil.

And now that equates to 1.2 kilos of poo per person per day, which is quite a lot.

So, we do wonder if he overestimated slightly.

Even if you're efficiently collecting it from every single person, that's you know,

it's a lot.

You know, earlier I mentioned the bricks that you can make out of loofers.

Yeah, there's another way of making bricks out of human urine.

So, this is another, as they call it, bio-brick that you can produce.

And it's urine and living bacteria.

So, you get urine, you get sand, you get bacteria, you put it all in a brick-shaped mold, and there is a chemical reaction which ensues, and that gradually solidifies the brick, kind of like baking a cake.

Kind of like baking a cake.

Kind of.

Kind of.

I don't fancy your chances on the Great Bishop's Bake Off next year, aren't they?

For my showstopper, I've made a piss brick.

But

the really good thing about this is that astronauts might one day be able to piss their own moon bases.

That's basically what you could do.

You take a load of the molds up there, and you slowly, you know, we your own home into existence.

So that means as the food on the space station is depleted, the space station is being built around you, presumably.

Yes, exactly, yes.

Yeah, but you only get food or shelter, right?

That's true.

You're not very far up Maslow's pyramid of needs.

They do call it cake, actually, in like the biosolids that are used in all of our farming, lest we forget.

So sewage is picked up and it's treated and then it's often used as fertiliser.

But when they talk about the digest states of basically poo and other types of matter like that, they do refer to it as cake, and it comes in these cake-shaped and cake-textured particles that

you order if you're a farmer.

So, for the great British bake-off, you could say, I'm going to be making a cake today.

Yeah, you could get away with it.

I think you would be voted out, but

you could call it a urinal cake, and that has an that's like a triple meaning of the word cake.

They're always making cakes, aren't they, in the shape of weird things?

Yeah, so you could make it could be in the shape of a urinal cake, but it could be made of biosolids.

So it's almost, it's like a trick where you're getting one disgusting thing, but you get one even more disgusting thing.

As they're halfway through the first bite, you think, no, don't worry, guys.

I know this looks like a urinal cake.

It's actually a normal cake made of my piss.

Bon appetite.

Okay, that's it.

That's 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've said, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on AndrewHunter M, James.

At James Harkin.

And at Miller underscore Anne.

And Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yes, or you can go to no such thingasafish.com where you can find all our previous episodes.

You can find merch.

You can find actually loads of previous episodes because all 320 odd are now online and available for you to listen to.

So that's it for this week.

We'll be back again next week with another one.

Until then, stay safe.

Hope you're doing well and speak to you soon.

Alright, that's it.

Bye.

I don't know how Dan does this.

I've never listened this far.