231: No Such Thing As A 24-Minute Podcast

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

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Alex Bell and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Czaczynski.

My fact is that the world record for the longest time spent holding one's breath is exactly the same length as this podcast episode.

Wow.

How on earth can we possibly know how long this episode's going to be?

My magic powers and knowledge that you're a good editor have told me.

So tell me how long do I have to edit to?

So you have to edit to 24 minutes and three seconds, if that's okay.

And this is a record that was set by Alex Segura in 2016 and he's a champion in the sport of static apnea.

I can't believe it's a sport.

It's a sport.

It's a spazzing.

It's a sport.

It's the sport of lying face down in a swimming pool and holding your breath while remaining still.

That feels like something I can get on barred with for the Olympics.

We should say that this record that he broke is looked down upon by some static apneists, including himself actually, because this one involved him inhaling pure oxygen.

That means you can hold your breath for much, much longer, so that doubles the volume of oxygen that you can store in your lungs.

So you breathe oxygen for something like 30 minutes before you go for the record attempt.

So 24 minutes,

that's the length of a sitcom episode.

If you were watching an American sitcom without adverts.

Well, is it though?

Yeah.

Well, not the new Netflixies style sitcoms, but if you go classic Seinfeld of Friends episodes.

Specifically Seinfeld.

Seinfeld's getting shorter.

What?

So the TBS have been caught broadcasting episodes of Seinfeld in Fast Forward 9% faster than the original recording.

So does he sound like a chipmunk?

No, weirdly he doesn't because you can get away with like maybe up to about 15%

without really noticing it.

If you put them side by side, obviously, like you notice, but who does that?

Was Alvin and the Chipmunks originally like four hours long each counting?

As a sort of cinema noir.

That is amazing.

So you lose, what, six minutes an hour?

Yeah,

exactly.

So you get an extra minute or so of adverts for each episode.

On sitcoms, do you know that the world's first sitcom, no episodes survive of it?

This is just kind of, I've only mentioned this because it's the kind of thing that makes Alex really angry.

But it was on the BBC and it was broadcast from 1946 to 47.

It was called Pin Rights Progress.

And I was just really excited to see it because it stars someone called James Hayter, who played Friar Tuck in a Robin Hood film that I swear no one else on earth has ever seen except me.

And I recognised him.

Oh, I thought it was because you're a James Hater.

And that subconsciously, I think, was the reason that I pursued this fact further.

There was a footballer called James Hater, and my brother used to always like him because my brother's also a James Hater.

We've got a big club.

But yeah, they've lost all the episodes.

James Hayter was also, by the way, the original voice of Mr.

Kipling makes exceedingly good cakes.

That's very cool.

The thing I love about this breathing thing is

people who do it without oxygen have gone for about half as long as Alex Segura.

But whoever does it, if you really push yourself to the limit, when you come up, would you have thought you breathe in or out?

You always breathe out.

You always breathe out, right?

Despite whereas there's no oxygen now, because you have loads of carbon dioxide in your lungs, right now.

Well, so we always breathe out, right?

Because when you suddenly start getting out of breath underwater, it's because your body has this automatic response to having too much buildup of carbon dioxide, which is an emergency response which says, get up, get up, breathe, breathe, breathe, because if you've got too much carbon dioxide, it knows you're going to run out of oxygen.

But all these champion static apneaists have learned to totally override that response.

So they go underwater, they hold their breaths, and the oxygen just gets absorbed and absorbed and absorbed.

So by the time they come up, they need to breathe in straight away.

So that's how you spot the difference between an expert and an amateur.

We breathe out and they breathe in.

I suppose the other way of spotting an amateur versus expert is the expert comes up 24 minutes later.

I was reading that insects often hold their breath and they do it for hours and even days at a time.

And the reason is, is that too much air would would actually kill them.

So they're actually stopping air from coming in to save their lives because too much of it damages their tissues.

So it's simply a process of stopping.

So too much oxygen damages them.

Yeah.

Exactly.

They subsidize, do they?

Like rust?

That's why they're all a bit brown.

Isn't that insects?

Yeah.

They're all rusty.

They're all just rusty, yeah.

But yeah, if you see an insect, it's most likely holding its breath.

That's so cool.

I was reading a 2016 Sanford University study about sighing, and sighing's really interesting.

So like sighing is basically just a breathing in and then breathing in again instead of breathing out.

So you're just taking in twice as much air.

And the reason you do it, or one of the reasons you do it, is to inflate the alveoli m more than it usually gets because your alveoli are always sort of collapsing like like the alveoli are the tiny little sacs on the edge of your lungs that absorb the oxygen into the rest of your body aren't they?

Yeah.

Lots of different alveoli are just collapsing on their own and so they periodically need to just be re-inflated with a massive amount of air in your lungs and that's what sighing is.

I always thought I sighed because I was really fed up with the 29th pun in a row that James had told but it's actually just all about my alveoli.

James Hater.

Go back to your club.

And what's really interesting is that when they originally built iron lungs which are the coffin-like

things that you put people in when they're having breathing difficulties and it's basically a pressure chamber that forces people to breathe from the outside, the mechanism didn't account for sighing, as in the iron lung didn't sigh, it only did normal breathing in and out and people kept dying.

And this is when they realised this is what accounted for it because their lungs collapsed.

They didn't sigh themselves to death.

No, they didn't sigh themselves to death because they weren't sighing because the iron lung was only doing normal breathing for them and it wasn't doing some sort of sigh.

If we didn't sigh, we'd die.

If you don't sigh, you die.

Yeah.

That should be on signs everywhere.

Well,

it is a subconscious reflex, Hannah.

You don't usually need to advertise those.

They don't have signs everywhere going, don't forget to breathe.

Keep blinking.

Sometimes I need these things.

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

My fact this week is that Nikola Tesla was one of the guests at the first ever party with a stripper jumping out of a cake.

Amazing.

Incredible.

It's a really cool party.

What was he doing there?

Well, he was just one of sort of several quite prominent guests.

This was a party thrown by a guy called Stamford White, who was sort of a member of the New York Elite at the end of the 19th century.

Really interesting character himself actually.

Controversial character as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he threw all sorts of sort of exciting dinner parties and drinks parties and things like this.

And this one was on May the 20th, 1895.

And one of the attractions of this party was a scantily clad girl called Susie Johnson.

We actually know her name.

Emerging from a pie made from galvanized iron accompanied by a recitation of Sing a Song of Sixpence.

Yeah.

Well, plus birds, right?

I think birds flew out along with her, didn't they?

Yeah, but the birds that came out were canaries.

And in the movie of this, which I watched the other night for research purposes,

it's called The Girl on the Velvet Swing, starring Joan Collins as the character who is basically Susie Johnson.

The guy comes in and he's like, oh, sorry, I couldn't find any blackbirds, but I've got canaries.

Oh, really?

The girl, was it also like, I couldn't find a velvet swing, but I've got a cast iron cake?

Well we'll probably get to this in a bit right

was it like sexy like sing a song of sex once because I can't work out how you sing it to be honest the bit with the pie I kind of left the room and went to my kitchen to get a drink and when I came back I think I missed the pie bit But the rest of it is all about this guy Stanford White who like Dan's about to say is very controversial.

Yeah very controversial.

The reason for the title of the velvet swing is to do with his controversiality.

He used to like to sneak girls back to a house of his in Manhattan and

no good way of saying it, drug and rape them.

That was his very bad human.

And the girl on the velvet swing refers to a girl who he did this to when she was age 16.

Yes, because her husband, who I think's name was Thor or something like that, not Thor as in the Norse god Thor, as in what happens to snow when it's warm.

Yes.

He then shot.

I'm just very confused in the cinema.

I saw a very boring film that I was very much in the point.

The Marvel movie where it's just snow melting.

He was at a theatre performance of Mademoiselle Champagne's I Could Love a Million Girls, and then Thor came over and shot Stamford White in the face.

Yeah, and this was in about 1905, wasn't it?

But this is why this whole jumping out of cake thing became well known because in the court case, everyone suddenly read about this amazing cake woman party, and then I guess it became a thing.

Imagine that's the bit of your obituary that sticks out.

So you've just been murdered by a millionaire in a public space, and then everyone's going to be like, oh my God, what's this cake bit?

That sounds pretty cool.

He made history in the sort of in the industry of raunchy parties.

Yeah, he's done the world a service in his murder.

But he did the world a disservice because there were more repercussions afterwards.

So the whole thing was covered by a journalist called Meryl Goddard.

And then Meryl Goddard was so good at covering this case that Randolph Hearst, who was a newspaper proprietor, decided to take her for his newspaper.

She was working with Pulitzer, and then Hearst and Pulitzer had a massive competition against each other for who could get the most readers for their newspaper, and that turned into sensational journalism, and that's why we have red top journalism today.

It all came from there.

So

your fact says she jumped out of a cake.

It was a pie.

Sorry.

When did it become cake?

It was a pie.

I mean, it was like, was it a crusted top pie?

In the movie, it's like, it looks like one of those, you know, where it's got crisscross of pastry on the top,

but that might just be for the movies.

I guess it makes sense that what traditionally there's like it like in banquets and stuff in sort of medieval times you've got very elaborate pies and things coming out of pies yeah and then it becomes more of a tradition to do things at parties and at parties we now have cake so they just said well why don't we have people jumping out of cakes it's a bit weird to have a pie at a uh like a birthday party but i guess cakes are more practical to jump out of and to hide to hide in really because they can be taller you could have a tall pie yeah i don't think so

you can just go

i'd be suspicious if i saw a really tall pie i'd be like there's a person in there whereas you can have a birthday what do you like have no idea there's a piece Hang on, hang on.

If you saw a giant cake come in,

you would suspend suspicion that there's a human in there and think this is probably all pets.

Because we've all watched it.

It could be a big cake.

Can I give my favourite jumping out of a pie incident?

Yes, please.

So this was one of the earliest ones, I think.

It was in 1454.

And it was when things being hidden in pies was used as a rallying cry of the Christians against the Ottomans.

So this was kind of during the era of the Crusades.

It was King Philip who, through this really, really elaborate banquet, was sort of jousting and these amazing table decorations that that we've talked about before, and then he led everyone into this really long table.

And on the table, he had this giant pie, and the pie opened up mechanically to reveal 28 playing musicians.

So, an orchestra of 28 people who leapt out of the pie and played.

Do you think if you saw a cake that size, you'd think just a normal cake?

Well, if it had music coming out of it, I'd be like, there's something else going on.

Maybe not people inside, but you know.

We don't know what song they played.

We don't know what song they played, although we do know at that same party, there was a statue of a beautiful woman who had wine springing from her breast that people could drink from.

At this party, Stanford White's party,

he was serving wine, but he had a blonde waitress who only served white wine and a brunette who only served red wine.

Really?

That's quite nice.

It's like having a lid to match the bottle kind of thing.

I know what you're saying, but then on the other hand, it's not very woke because it...

It's slightly objectifying these women.

I'll give you that.

As we've established, this guy doesn't have the best track record with Wimard.

Susie Johnson, the lady who jumped out of the pie cake, we don't know what happened to her.

She's another mystery in the whole story.

She disappeared.

People try to track her down because she became, as you say, we know her name.

They just check every cake.

She's not in this one.

It's the Mr.

Kipling factory, not in this one.

Multiple weddings ruined once again.

The cake police swoop in.

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

My fact fact this week is that when in London, Queen Louise of Sweden always carried a card saying, I am the Queen of Sweden, in case she was hit by a bus.

Cocky.

Well, she used to travel around London, as it were, in disguise.

She didn't go around with an entourage.

She loved shopping, and so she would just go on her own.

And one time she was almost hit by a bus.

As a result, she decided, God, if I was hit by this bus, how would people know who I was?

Why don't I carry a card inside my handbag that says, I am the Queen of Sweden?

And then they'll be like,

And then the people who found her, rather than going, I guess we'll just leave her there, we don't really care, would go, oh, hang on, she's the queen, we better sort out this car accident situation.

Also, it's a really weird reaction to have when you're about to be hit by a bus.

The normal reaction is, wow, I should be more careful crossing the road.

When that inevitably happens again, I better make sure I'm properly labelled.

Well, you're the only one that I know of who's

almost been hit by a bus.

How did you react?

I shouted at the bus.

What did you shout?

Go back to bus school.

This is one one of the greatest anecdotes in QI history, isn't it?

That comes up basically every week.

Go back to bus school.

It's the greatest line ever.

Would you keep that on a card in your handbag?

Just hand down to the bus driver.

Wouldn't it be amazing though if whenever you call 999, if you find someone unconscious on the floor, you call 999 and they say, okay, cool.

So first things first, have you looked through their handbag and have you checked their business cards?

Is it the Queen of Sweden?

Okay.

This has happened before.

She was really great, though, Queen Louise of Sweden, isn't she?

In her first passport, it had a thing called special peculiarities, where you put things about your face if you have a scar or whatever.

And she wrote, walks like a parrot.

Clearly.

She's, just to put her into a bit of context, she is the auntie of Prince Philip.

Yes, and so she was the Mountbatten family, formerly Battenbergs, wasn't she?

The Battenbergs, who hurriedly changed their name to Mountbatten when the Germans became the bad guys.

guys.

Yeah.

Yeah, and she was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, I think.

But all the European royal families are all just related to each other, aren't they?

They are.

Really?

And during World War II, because all of the royal families are all related to each other, but then they were all in countries that were all fighting against each other, she worked as a messenger, kind of giving messages between all of her family.

Not a spy.

I suppose you could call it a spy, couldn't you?

I mean, it's pretty much basically a double agent.

But I think she was doing it quite explicitly and not sitting on a bench handing over a message, and they're like, I am the Queen of Sweden.

What does this mean?

I'm sorry, you're on card.

And presumably, it was more like, Bobby just had a baby, rather than

the Nazis were on their way across the channel.

The Swedish royal family is quite interesting, though, and the modern Swedish royal family is as well.

So there's Carl XVI, who's king now, who I don't think we've ever said on the podcast is the 10th King Carl of Sweden.

Who did they miss out?

They added lots.

It goes back to the 15th century when a guy called Johann Magnus wrote this sort of fanciful history of all the Swedish kings, and he just added a whole bunch of kings.

So

he made up six Eriks and six Carls, and they've kept that numerical system ever since.

But why were they referring to this fictional account as history?

Because it became really popular.

It was a bit like the sagas, you know, it became a thing that was always read.

I think it's like we have King Arthur for a king.

King Arthur.

So if we were to have a new King Arthur, we would probably call him Arthur II, wouldn't we?

Oh, I'd love to see.

And if Prince Harry became king, he would be Henry IX.

He'd be our first Henry since the dreaded Henry VIII.

Well, if he kept the name, right?

Although sometimes you take on a different name when you become royal.

Because Prince Charles will.

Yes.

We think.

Become Henry.

He won't become Charles.

No, we were discussing this.

We had a party last week at my place, which you were invited to, but you didn't come.

And it was so exciting that we started talking about the regular numbers of the kings and queens of England.

We were so sorry I couldn't make it, guys.

It's going to be great.

Edward the Ninth, I think we found out.

That was what you thought.

That's what the bookies reckon.

Is it?

I think so.

I should quickly add just about the main fact itself.

I've read this in a few places, found a few sources, but nothing that I would say is concrete enough that I truly...

I want to see the card.

And if anyone knows if the card exists.

So the source for this, the original source, was Queen Louise's niece Dollar,

who was the Margraveen of Baden.

I don't know what that means, but anyway, it was a relative who first said this.

Yeah.

Okay, that's a good source.

Thank you.

Thank you all all for

helping me out.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that last year in the UK, two eight-year-olds were caught speeding.

This came from a freedom of information question that was posed to the driver and vehicle licensing agency, and they asked for all of the different different statistics and they also found out that 900 people in their 90s got penalty points for speeding last year including three people aged 99.

Wow.

Although I reckon 99.

That's the oldest, but it's quite a coincidence that it's 99 and not 100 and something.

So I reckon anyone that's over 99, they just put 99.

Maybe there's only two spaces in the form or something.

Oh, wow, yeah.

I reckon.

Or you just don't find someone who's 100 or more for speeding.

You just ask their age.

You go, fair enough, mate.

Go on.

It's unfair that you dock the 99-year-old, though.

Well, you know.

One more year in your home.

Yeah, you've got to hang on to your 100th birthday.

That's like saying unfair that you won't let the 15-year-old smoke when the 16-year-old's allowed to.

I mean, you've got to draw the line somewhere, haven't you?

Okay, sure.

99, that's a line.

Sorry, I also think the smoking age might have gone up since I was a smoker.

So, 16-year-olds, if it's illegal, just check.

Or, you know, whatever, don't smoke.

Maybe consider that.

There have been quite a lot of weird speeding fines fines and driving fines this year.

So

there have been two instances of people getting caught driving to the hospital because their wives are in labour and getting stopped for speeding.

And so one was in the UK, going at 101 miles an hour.

And then there was another guy in the US who missed the birth of his child because he was taken to a cell.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

Oh, that's hard.

It's really rough.

Because in the movies, there's no repercussions when you see them breaking all the laws to get to the point.

Yeah, the police are usually like, on the contrary, I'll give you an escort, which has never happened in real life ever.

That happened to me once in Oldham.

Really?

I wasn't speeding but I was stuck and then the police gave me a lift to the football game because they thought I'd missed the game and they put the siren on and they're probably not allowed to do this but they put the siren on and everyone moved out of the way and we flew through Oldham to get out of the way.

That's ridiculous.

Just to get you to the

how are you stuck?

We got off at the wrong train station.

Nothing even went wrong.

That's just bad travelling on your part.

It's just awesome policing by the policeman who's probably sitting by you.

Absolutely nothing else going on in Oldham if they're just doing that, just being like, where are you going?

Can we give you a lift?

Sean Connery was once stopped for speeding by an officer named Sergeant James Bond.

No.

Wow.

That's good.

I really hope he did the names Bond, James Bond.

But I'm going to need to see your license to kill.

And then your actual license.

We have in our book, we've got a similar sort of story.

What's that done?

It's called The Book of the Year, 2018, Your Definitive guide to the weirdest world's weirdest news do you know when it comes out uh yeah october the 18th okay where is that available it's gonna be in bookshops it's gonna be online um yeah andy's not here we can say amazon Amazon, it's gonna be on Amazon.

Yes.

This is the first I've heard of this.

Remember we found that thing of the guy who was done for drink driving, but claimed that he wasn't drink driving because he was only drinking every time he got to a traffic stop sign.

Stop, have a swig, and then get going again.

This is...

Sorry, Gone.

No, you go for it.

I was just sighing.

I just want to stay alive.

Did you know the first person to pass a driving test was called Mr.

Beer?

No, I didn't know.

So in 1935, he paid 37.5p.

Just found that out and also found out this weird thing that driving tests were suspended in the Second World War, which makes sense.

They were suspended again during the Suez Crisis, which is quite weird.

And especially given that during the Suez Crisis, learners were allowed to drive unaccompanied.

And I think, I don't know about the Suez Crisis, but it's definitely true of the Second World War that if you learned to drive during the war, they just gave you a license.

You didn't need to take a test at all.

What, just because you've been in a war.

I've learned how to drive.

You're obviously, if you could drive enough to defeat the Nazis, then you could drive enough to go to the Transportation.

If you can drive a tank through a minefield and not get blown up, I think you can manage the M25 very far.

Speaking of tanks,

I read this yesterday.

So you're allowed to drive a tank on the road in the UK.

You need a special license, but if you could get a provisional license, which is really easy, a provisional tank license, then as long as there's someone sat next to you who can drive a tank, then you can drive a tank through the streets of the UK at any time.

But you need to have learner plates on the tank.

But you would be able to do that.

That's so cool.

Actually, you know, I knew that because the QI's production coordinator was telling me a great story about how she had to get James Blunt to drive a tank through the BBC.

Oh, yeah.

That was, yeah.

Because he was an army guy, so he knows how to drive a tank.

Yeah.

But where do you get a tank?

This still feels like the main stumbling block.

My buddy.

She's just a tank.

Yeah, she just knew a guy.

Maybe he had a tank.

Who's your buddy?

Ed.

You've met Ed once.

We met him outside Burger Show.

Yeah, the guy in the tank.

His name's Ed Superior.

And he bought it.

He had many lakes.

He was trying to find somebody to park.

He used to have it parked outside Ash Gardner of Emprius's house.

They were neighbours, and outside was his tank.

And we used to go and sit inside it.

He made it into this really nice

sort of you know, where you have Netflix nights coming out.

Oh, it was a hipster time.

It was Limehack time.

Okay, that is 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.

James?

At James Harkinth.

Alex, at Alex Bell.

And Jasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

It's just been remade.

It has everything you would need from us if you wanted anything from us it's got links to tickets as all of our previous episodes it has all of our merchandise it looks awesome uh we've got speed up okay that's it we'll see you next week goodbye