51: No Such Thing As Dodecahedral Shredded Wheat

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Your ring, your way.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week, coming to you from the Soho Theater in central London.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Czaczynski.

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

And in no particular order, here we go.

Anna.

My fact this week is that the son of the man who invented shredded wheat was also an inventor.

He invented round shredded wheat.

That was.

That was what he did.

Was he an inventor?

He actually called himself an inventor.

It's not even a...

So he wrote a letter to Time magazine, I think, in the 1920s about his father and growing up under his father's influence.

Saying, I grew up under the influence of my father's enthusiasms, worked in every department of his shredded wheat factory, and actually became an inventor myself, made some inventors of my own.

In 1920, I invented Muffets.

And if you look at Muffets, they are shredded wheat, but round.

Do you think all the time he was working in

this factory, he was just totting.

Every time he saw a square or a rectangle on, he's like, oh, for God's sake.

You've got it all wrong.

He had an ideas book, which was just shapes.

Triangles.

No.

So decahedron.

No.

Too complicated.

One other thing he invented was symmetrical text or a symmetrical font.

Do you know about this?

No.

This is amazing.

It's a great idea.

So you have all the letters from A to Z, but you can read them all back to fronts as well.

So A is easy, because that always looks that way.

But then B, he kind of had a line on both sides, so you could read it from left to right and left and right to left.

And that was his idea.

He thought it was too much of a trouble to read from left to right and then go to the next line and read from left to right again.

And he thought you could write that way and then just go down and write that way and then go down and write that way.

That's awesome.

Cutting corners again.

I've seen the text and it is terrible.

It's a horrible idea.

But there was actually an old way of writing that that monks did back in the day, back in the Middle Ages.

It was called Bustophodon, and it meant as oxen turn when plowing.

And the idea is you write from left to right and then you rotate the page and so then you read from left from right to left, but you've turned it upside down and so you're reading it the right way again.

And they used to write like that.

There are manuscripts written like that.

Why?

Sorry to ask

silly question.

I think again it's kind of cutting corners because then you don't have to lift your pen from the page.

Have we said the name of the Shreddy's father and son yet?

No, no.

The son was called Scott H.

Perkey, and the father was called Henry Drussel Perkey.

Yes.

Good name.

That's true.

Perky and Perky.

And Henry invented shredded wheat to cure his

either diarrhea or constipation.

Sources vary on that, but yeah, he had cereal, he was a dyspeptic, and he decided that there needed to be something he could eat that wasn't bread.

It was a bread replacement, shredded wheat.

At the beginning, you were supposed to eat it with a poached egg on top or with like

it was to be spread on, it was like a breakfast.

The family actually put out cookbooks which had different recipes for shredded wheat.

And a lot of them were savoury, not just for breakfast.

And they also had a cereal restaurant.

They had loads of dishes, and they weren't all just shredded wheat, they had other things as well.

One of them was shredded meat inside shredded wheat.

That is so horrible.

There was shredded wheat ice cream, wasn't there?

On

his restaurant.

And the restaurant was over Niagara Falls.

It sounds amazing.

He had this roof garden, his first shredded wheat restaurant.

Shredded wheat ice cream and a shredded wheat drink, which sounds terrible.

It's just wheat.

I mean, it's pulverized wheat, I guess.

They also serve roast turkeys stuffed with shredded wheat.

Yeah.

I'm really into the idea of just relative combos where they do the same career.

I feel like we definitely live in an age where actors and musicians were seeing their children come up and doing the same thing.

But when you get inventors, it's so much better.

My favorite family of all time, I have to say, in terms of what they've done, the Picard family.

Do you know the Picard family?

Yeah, but it kind of putting down your own family a little bit when you say, this is my favorite family.

Is that what you say over Christmas dinner?

It's like, you guys are great, but you know.

Sorry, mum, dad.

Yeah, no, the Picards are incredible.

So Auguste Picard was the first person to travel basically to the closest point of space in a balloon.

And then his son was Jacques Picard, who went to the bottom of the ocean, to the Marianas Trench.

Well, and then his son was John Luc Picard.

And he went boldly into the.

Yeah.

No, his son was Bertrand Picard, who was the first person to go non-stop in a balloon completely around the planet.

So in three generations, they went up, down, and around.

There's a Picard right now at a dinner table who's like 18, going, What the fuck am I going to do in that time?

I like, so I like father-son combinations as well.

Do you know what Einstein's?

Einstein's son was quite high-achieving.

Yeah, yeah, he was.

Do you know what he was most famous for?

Being Einstein's son.

Let's be honest.

And in second.

Okay, in second place, he was a leading figure in the field of sediment transport.

In the small field of sediment transport.

I think that's why most people know of him, Hans Alfred.

I've heard that.

They've said he wrote the defining paper on sediment transport.

He did, it was a very good idea.

The defining paper of three.

Sorry, I'm just I'm not leading in any field, so I'm putting this guy down.

What was it called?

It was called Bed Load Transport as a Probability Problem.

He was very successful,

but yeah, not as widely known, I guess.

And then there was Randolph Churchill, who, before Winston, his dad, became Prime Minister, announced to his parents, I'm going to be Prime Minister one day, and then his dad was instead, and he was rubbish.

Tried to join Parliament, eventually did.

Even his own dad wouldn't have him in his war cabinet, I don't think, would he?

No,

it's not a father and son, but my favourite grandfather, grandson.

Combo.

It's you and your own grandfather.

No, it's Picard and Picard.

No,

it's Dick Van Dyke

and his grandson, Shane Van Dyke.

Because Dick Van Dyke did everything to make his family.

And he has a whole family who got into movies and TV as well.

And they did everything they could to bring them into whatever they wanted to do, Silver Spoon kind of thing.

And they said to Shane Van Dijk, you want to be a director?

You want to be a writer, an actor?

What would you like to do?

And he said, I have a project that I would like to make.

It's called Titanic 2.

Has anyone seen Titanic 2?

Basically, the story behind Titanic 2.

And bear in mind that Shane Van Dyke wrote this.

Titanic 2 is set 100 years after the launch of the original Titanic.

They decide that they're going to take the exact same course, but this time, no icebergs.

They're like, if we see them, we're going to move.

That's like they say that in the movie.

That's good thinking.

Yeah.

They're like, definitely, we're steering clear of those.

I don't think, so when the Titanic launched, it wasn't like you see an iceberg, you make a beeline.

You have to face icebergs down.

They're more afraid of you than you are of them.

90% of iceberg charges are bluffs.

So Titanic 2 is making its way through the ocean, and they get word from back home that an ice shelf in the distance has collapsed and it sends a tsunami towards Titanic 2.

But here's the thing, they radio Titanic 2 and they say, good news guys, the tsunami's not big enough to take you down, you're fine.

But what they didn't count on is the fact that the tsunami was big enough to carry on it like surfers, icebergs, which it then slams into Titanic 2.

Titanic 2 then goes down, one person survives.

Spoiler alert.

Yeah.

Best line ever in a movie as well.

The captain, who was like, this will never happen again, leaves the cabin.

He turns to his entire crew after it's been hit and it's going down.

He goes, looks like history just repeated itself.

But yeah, Shane Van Dyke, what a dude.

That's amazing.

I think we should talk about breakfast.

Oh, yeah, so do I.

Oh, have you got something?

Well, I think you have as well.

Yeah, I do.

So there was a study at Tel Aviv University that found that eating chocolate cake for breakfast was good for losing weight, which is good.

They looked at 193 obese people over 32 weeks, and they all had different diets.

Some of them had a 600-calorie breakfast, including a chocolate cake.

And these people lost more weight than those who didn't have the chocolate cake.

Really?

Yeah, that's good, isn't it?

And the idea is that if you have sweet things at breakfast, you're less likely to want them throughout the rest of the day.

Oh, it's not just because there's no chocolate cake left when it comes to

dinner.

On sugary breakfast cereal.

So the first ever sugared cereal was called it was called Ranger Joe Popped Wheat Honeys.

Fine.

And the man who designed it designed it to actually lower children's sugar consumption.

Because he said, if I make a very slightly sugary breakfast cereal, then children won't put lots of sugar on their own breakfast cereal.

It's not going to work.

Well, no, it didn't work.

I think the highest ever was sugar smacks.

Has anyone ever heard of these?

Has anyone ever had one?

Really?

Cool.

Nicotine sugar and smack.

That was the worst.

That was a test the police are in, and I have been taking notes.

But it meant you put less smack on yourself, didn't you?

No, no, it didn't.

That was the theory, and it didn't work.

People just ended up having more smack.

Sugar smacks are 56% sugar.

Whoa, whoa!

So I was looking at cereals, anyway, breakfast stuff.

And there was one cereal, Kix Cereal, which might exist still in America, KIX, which in 1947, when atomic bombs and atomic energy were quite fashionable, um it released an atomic

it released an atomic bomb ring as one of the free gifts that came with the cereal packet.

It was an atomic bomb ring.

It contained polonium that glowed

as you could be

your own little atomic bomber when you got it, yeah.

Wow.

It contained polonium.

It it made it very clear on the packaging.

I should be clear in case um they sue me that it was perfectly safe, capital letters, on the packaging.

I think you've got a problem when you have to put perfectly safe in massive letters on your packaging.

Oh, well, check this out.

There was a chocolate that you could get in Germany in the 1930s, and this is what it was called, Radium Chocolate.

That quickly went off the market.

Highly radioactive chocolate, which came with the slogan, eat this and feel great.

You know,

great,

the Tony the Tiger, the Frosties thing.

This is really cool.

The man who voiced Tony the Tiger for 50 years, he wasn't the first one, but he was by a long way the longest to do it.

It's called Thurl Ravenscroft.

He flew Winston Churchill as a pilot.

Really?

Really?

Because he was a civilian pilot navigator during the whole Second World War, and he flew Winston Churchill, Bob Hope, he flew to meet the troops, and he was great.

And he was the one who said great.

Yeah.

And when you look it up, this is genuinely on the Wikipedia on Frosties.

Tony, Tony, I promise.

Tony the Tiger has been the mascot of Frosted Flakes since its introduction.

Tony is known for uttering the serial slogan, they're great,

brackets, pronounced as one elongated word, not a stutter.

Close brackets.

I saw a Wikipedia page on Snap, Crackle, and Pop.

You know, these guys from the...

What are they from?

Rice Krispies, that's it.

And they explained what they do.

They said, Snap is always portrayed with a baker's hat, pop with a military cap and uniform of a marching bandleader.

Okay, Crackle's red or striped stocking cap leaves his occupation ambiguous.

We've said before, I think, that Kellogg, John Harvey Kellogg, invented cornflakes as part of a health drive, which, and a big bit of that was an anti-masturbation drive because he believed that he actually spent his wedding night writing an anti-masturbation tract.

Amazing.

Sure, if he doesn't need it anymore.

He wrote of masturbators, chronic or otherwise.

He said it killed you.

He said such a victim dies literally by his own hand.

Guys, we need to move on to our next act, by the way.

Should we do that?

You got anything else you want to add?

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Subject to change.

Okay.

Okay, time for fact number two, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that in the 1960s, a Canadian psychologist visited cafes across the world counting how much couples touched each other.

Um in Puerto Rico, it was 180 times in an hour.

In Paris, it was 110.

In London, it was zero.

I've worked out whether it was romantic couples.

I think it was just people who were in pairs in cafes, so it could be friends or family or anything, you know.

Yeah.

But

I'm not British.

Is that seen as a very is touch?

I see a lot of touching

1960s, so things were things were different.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, they missed it up tight in the 1960s.

The British 60s, as they were called.

I like, do you guys know about Knutsford in Cheshire?

The campaign that it ran at the end of last year, I think, to widen its pavements.

Because

so

it's finally been agreed that Knutsford and Cheshire is going to widen its pavements so that two people can walk along it.

And the reason two people can't walk along it is because there was this spinster called Lady Jane Stanley

who in the 19th century she lived in Knutsford and she dictated that couples shouldn't be allowed to walk along the pavements hand in hand.

And so she funded the building of all the pavements in Knutsford and made sure that only one person at a time walked along.

Her epitaph reads, A maid I lived and a maid I died.

I never was asked and never denied.

She sounds horrible.

Why do you think she was never asked?

Why did she not like people walking side by side?

Was it because she couldn't get around them or she just didn't like the effect of the

idea of

single things?

She liked a conga.

She got a kick and a single file.

No, she didn't.

She objected because she was a kid.

She was a single file.

Sorry.

So, yeah, touching.

Social touching and all kinds of touching.

Touching is amazing.

I should say this fact comes from a book called Touch, the Science of Hand, Heart, and Mind by David J.

Linden.

And I think it's a very interesting book.

There are so many cool things.

So there are some people who don't feel pain.

So there are people in a place called Norbotten, probably pronouncing that wrong, which is in Sweden.

And it's genetic, the reason that some people don't feel pain.

So some people are born without that ability.

And one of the people studied in this book is a girl called Camilla.

At the age of nine, and I'm quoting here, she would entertain her friends by jumping off her bed and landing directly on her knees.

She said she liked to hear the crunching sound they made, just like popcorn.

Wow.

I think the problem with people who have this genetic problem is that

they would die early, wouldn't they?

Yes, because you don't know.

You put your hand in the fire and you just wouldn't know that it's hot.

So basically, touch is vital.

And for babies as well, if they don't experience a parent touching them, then it's extremely bad for them, and you can get all kinds of conditions that way.

We're not sure how, but

Adolf Hitler

didn't like touching.

Did he like anything?

I'm starting to really dislike this guy.

For me, this was the final straw.

Martin Amis has claimed recently that Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun had sex without touching each other or even removing their clothes.

How does that even work?

Well,

I assume he likes the necessary parts touch, but he kept it to an absolute minimum.

He hated going to the tailor because tailors, you know, they have to touch you.

Imagine being Adolf Hitler's tailor.

Oh, my God.

I did like this.

I read about this in the International Business Times.

And the way it reported it was, it was saying about the recent claims that have have come out that he had sex without touching Eva Braun.

And I said, While Hitler's already tarnished reputation

was further questioned,

wow.

So, if you touch someone, they're going to trust you more, apparently.

That's a thing, isn't it?

Don't do it again.

Richard Wiseman did a study on this and found that when you asked someone on a date and you were touching them at the same time, they were 20% more likely to offer a dance in a nightclub 20% more likely to accept that and 10% increase on people giving their telephone number to a stranger in the street just from touching them does it make any difference where you touch them

I think further research is required

does you apparently I just struggle to believe this because I cannot empathize with it but as a salesperson if you touch people you're about 20% more likely to make a sale if you touch them on the arm which I find incredibly creepy just a light touch on the arm but it's culturally culturally specific, so they've tried these experiments and getting people to sign a petition in the street, it goes from 55% to 80% of people signing it.

However, not in Poland, where you're like a Polish man, Anna, because Polish men react very, very badly to being touched lightly on the arm.

A study in Poland found this.

That's a good thing.

They found that people are less likely to sign the petition.

It's like, and I'm a quarter Polish and I've never been able to access the Polish part of myself, and maybe that's what it is.

No, it's it's it's the skin.

Your Polish Polish coffee.

There seems to be a lot of controversy in the papers

when I was putting in,

I just wanted to see what Britain and touching certain people in Britain.

And apparently, the Queen is someone you definitely should not touch.

You've done the Queen, haven't you, Doug?

I've touched the Queen.

Yes, I met the Queen.

No, I did.

I'm not meant to.

Sounds like you knew and you did it anyway.

I went back to her face as I touched her.

Where did you touch her?

Her hand.

We shook hands.

Oh, yeah.

But yeah, because

I'm an Australian, and the Labour PM, Paul Keating,

he was...

Not current, yeah, yeah.

He touched the Queen on her lower back, which a number of people have done, and it's always led to massive controversy.

And the tabloids went insane, and they called him the Lizard of Oz.

The tabloids then recommended that all Australian expats be sent back to Australia, Clive James included,

because they ruined their chance.

It is a peculiarly sleazy feeling, someone touching your lower back.

I mean, I can understand trying to extradite every member of the national anti-the-crossing.

Other people you're not allowed to touch, the Thai Royal family, you weren't allowed to touch them traditionally.

And there was a Thai queen who drowned after falling from a boat.

This was in 1880, because onlookers were too scared to touch her.

And so she drowned.

No way.

Yeah, that's bad, isn't it?

I mean, they probably didn't like her very much either.

I did, yeah.

Because even if I was supposed to, you know, not touch someone, if they were drowning, I think I'd help.

Yeah.

Well, the law says that you'd be put to death if you did touch them.

Put to death?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Yeah.

In Tonga, the undertakers who look after the king are not supposed to use their hands for three months after touching the dead body of the king.

But that's better than it used to be because 300 years ago they would have their hands chopped off.

Wow.

And I bet undertaking courses were not popular in the country, were they?

So, wait, you can't use your hands for three months.

You have to explain this.

But these days, you would be put into a nice house and looked after for three months, so it's actually quite good these days.

We're going to have to move on.

I've just got one more thing, which I think is really interesting.

Things you can touch.

Something you can't touch is the papers of Mary Curie.

They're still so radioactive that you have to put on a full body suit in order to look at the papers

that are talking about the subject itself.

That's insane.

I'm on touching in the US.

There's been a campaign in in US schools recently to limit touching between people but just between pupils because girls often hug each other I think.

So there was a complaint by a head teacher saying that girls having been separated for forty minutes gone to different lessons will have to all hug each other in the corridors and it was clogging up the corridors.

So there was a campaign in a school in Iowa I think it was which was the hands-off or handshake campaign which apparently was genuinely successful which was saying to girls, you cannot have to hug each other every 40 minutes, maybe just a handshake.

And now girls in this school go down the corridor, see their mate, give them a handshake, and that's that done.

Wow.

That's good.

It's very much like 1960s Britain.

Hello.

Hello, how do you do?

Oh, I shook so many people's hands last night.

That's nuts.

We really need to move on.

Okay, time to move on to fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in a very particular time and place in history, you could avoid castration by shouting the word Soho.

But just to be safe, always do it

everywhere.

It's the time and place here and now.

We've asked the stars.

Yeah, what do you mean, time and place?

Yeah, it's not in Soho itself, which is where we are today.

This is an Ashanti law from the 18th and 19th century that said that if someone saw a member of the chief's harem naked, then he'd be castrated.

And so, if one of his attendants needed to go into the harem, he would shout out, Soho, Soho, and the ladies would get dressed, and so

he wouldn't see them naked and he wouldn't get castrated.

Is it a shanty?

A shanty, yeah.

Which is what?

They are Ghanaian, and they're part of the Akan kind of group of tribes.

So, if you really had a grudge against a guy and you're a woman, you just leave your clothes off, he's seen you naked, he gets castrated.

That'll do it.

Wow, tough.

Yeah,

but fair.

So, um, the Ashanti law was it would punish acts that were hateful to the tribe because they believed that their um their ancestors would come back and punish the whole tribe if they did anything that was bad.

Uh and also they um they thought that one of the most severe punishments that they had was ridicule.

And there was a proverb that was, if it was a choice between disgrace and death, then take death.

So ridicule was the worst thing that could happen to you.

Although castration sounds a bit worse.

They always shook hands because we were talking about handshaking.

They always shook hands with the left hand, didn't they?

Because that was the hand that you held your shield in.

And so it signifies the fact that you don't feel the need to defend yourself against them.

That's true.

And Baden-Powell was a big fan of the Ashanti, and that's why Boy Scouts were traditionally supposed to shake with the left hand, because he liked the Ashanti so much.

I saw some amazing footage years and years ago of David Attenborough when he was making a series called ZooQuest.

I think it was the ZooQuest series, and there was this one episode where he was going into a territory, so that he had a group of people guiding him around of a certain tribe.

And they stopped at this hill and they said, we're not going any further because the tribe that are over there are quite warlike and we don't want to get into this territory.

And Attenborough was like, okay, you guys stay back.

Me and the camera guys are going to go forward.

And they have this on camera.

Attenborough is walking over this hill when suddenly this warring tribe comes running over the hill towards him.

And they just come like they're yelling and they're going like just war yells basically, running towards him.

And he has no idea what to do.

He's panicked into a standstill silence.

And literally, as they approach him, the only thing he can think to do is to walk forward, put his hand out to shake, and says, How do you do?

Yes!

Yeah.

Yes.

And then it turned out that that was their way of greeting you by intimidating you.

It's like a great practical joke on there.

And they came and you see the guy go, and then shakes Adam Barrow's hand.

And that's the most British thing I've ever seen in my life.

Literally on the brink of death.

How do you do?

Extraordinary.

This is completely unrelated to the subject matter, but on David Attenborough, you know, he's the only person who's won a BAFTA in black and white, colour, 3D,

and HD, and some other weird thing called 4X or something.

There's five people on the back of the colour.

That's when he's literally massaging.

Five formats.

He's got black hands.

That's very cool.

It's impressive.

He's old.

So the Ashanta.

That's what I'm telling you.

Honest fact is.

So the Ashanti are famous for their golden stool.

Yes.

This was the throne of the Ashanti people.

It's quite a small stool, and it's so important to them that it's never allowed to touch the ground, so it has its own chair.

So it's like a stool on top of a throne, which is pretty cool.

Is that what?

Because, sorry.

I read that the legend comes from the fact that the golden stool started in the 17th century in modern-day Ghana when it came down from the heavens and landed on the king's lap which seems like such a strange picture

that's how good it is

that just sits on you

but it caused the war of the golden stool didn't it that's right

we I think we caused the war of the golden stool well some blame the stool some blame us

negotiations broke down

this was when our it was classic British colonialism

when the governor of the Gold Coast as it was at the time who was called Frederick Hodgson, heard about this golden stool thing and demanded to be allowed to sit on it

because he said, you know, the queen is your ruler.

Where is the golden stool?

Why am I not sitting on the golden stool at this moment?

I'm the representative of the paramount power in this country.

Why have you relegated me to a non-golden stool chair?

And so then the quote I read was:

The chiefs listened in silence and then went home to prepare for war.

Quite right, too, I I think.

The current king of the Ashanti is a man called Otumfo Osei Tutu II, and he is qualified in accountancy and public administration.

Which actually is a really good thing for a king to be qualified in.

He studied at Kilburn Polytechnic.

Did he?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he has a doctorate from London Metropolitan University, which is where he did the public administration.

I've got some Soho facts, but like Soho is in where we're recording tonight.

Yeah, I've got one.

Well, I say I've got some, I've got one.

It's

going to be good.

But it's on the very street that we're on, Dean Street, where there's a Pizza Express up the road.

And before there was the Pizza Express there, there used to be an ear hospital, and it was the very first ear hospital in the UK, something in all of Europe.

No one had done it before.

And it was run by a guy called John Curtis.

He was a bit of a charlatan.

He used to do this thing where he would try to convince the patient that he'd cured them and made their hearing better.

So they'd come and go, oh, I'm having trouble hearing.

And then he would go, okay, well, listen to this clock.

And he'd have a silent clock.

And they'd be like, I can't hear anything.

And then he'd get some hot water in a syringe and he would put it in their ear.

And while they were like doing that to their ear, he'd get his other clock, which made a noise.

He went, what about now?

And they go, I can hear it.

And he went, I cured you.

They'd go off.

But that only works for people who can actually hear, who don't have hearing problems in the first place, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But apparently, this one ear hospital has now expanded into what would become great ear hospitals, so it actually turned into a great ear hospital.

Yeah, so a little bit of his dubiousness.

A little bit south of here, there's a nose hospital, and then way further down, there's a throat hospital in Surrey.

So we're on the Soho Theatre is 21 Dean Street, and apparently

Mozart played in this building, or in what this building was.

A seven-year-old Mozart played the harpsichord accompanied by his four-year-old sister.

Wait, a seven-year-old Mozart?

How many

really he did?

Apparently, yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

According to the websites of this very company.

Right.

Apparently Marlborough cigarettes as well.

They started selling and manufacturing cigarettes on Great Marlborough Street.

Oh, and then

Marlborough.

No, no, no,

it was the name, and then they removed the u at the end because they thought that's not as sexy a look as a thing.

And on top of it, they were lady cigarettes, they weren't for men.

Wow, they were older.

It's not for men.

Genuinely, when they started up, they were for women, and because it was at a point where women were encouraged to start smoking cigarettes, which, if you've ever seen an Adam Curtis documentary, what was it called?

The Power of Nightmares, it's where he shows where one person who was a grandson, I think, of Sigmund Freud, convinced the entire world, because at that point only men smoked cigarettes, and they called them flame, what it was it, um,

sticks of liberty, flames of awesomeness,

liberty torches or something

like that.

But so Marlborough was a, and that was just down the road.

And he is the man who invented eggs and bacon for breakfast.

Which is true, he was the father of PR.

Yeah, and the father of good health.

Yeah,

yeah.

And his son invented round eggs and bacon.

So, after

They had, I think, a theatre, the Great Memorial Theatre in Soho was the only theatre not to close down during World War Two to support the war effort, wasn't it?

Because it was an exotic dancing/slash

naked what do you call these places where they're naked women's strip club?

It was that, and it was decided that it was too important to sacrifice for the cause of war.

So the Great Memorial Theatre, yeah.

It is no longer a strip club if you're going there, I'm pretty sure.

I think it's just a theatre now.

I think it is.

You think is it still a strip club?

I think so.

Look at him, I think.

Otherwise, that was a very avant-garde play.

I mean, there was no plot whatsoever.

So, the start of this fact was about safe words, because it's something you say to make sure you don't get castrated.

And I went on,

which is what a safe word is, right?

Yeah.

Well, to be honest, I wasn't sure, so I went on Wikipedia, Safe Words, and they said, in theory, a safe word is usually a word that the person would not ordinarily say during sex, such as pineapple, velociraptor, or Lindsay Lohan.

Oh my god.

And then another one, this is really great.

It's the next paragraph.

It says, since a scene may become too intense for a submissive partner to remember what a safe word is, in practice, commonly the word safe word is used as a safe word.

Wow.

I'm going to have to move us on.

We've got to

press on.

I know.

It's a shame.

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Okay, time for our final facts of the evening.

That's my fact.

My fact is that Mathieu Ricard, the man who is labeled the happiest man in the world, is unhappy people call him that.

This is by science.

They said you are the happiest man alive.

He's a Buddhist, but he's by science.

Sorry.

Science.

By Captain Science.

He basically they were doing this massive survey on trying to find out about happiness and he was one of the people that they did these experiments on.

They did it on hundreds of people and he literally could register no negativity.

in him whatsoever.

He just loved everything.

Until they said, you're the happiest man in the world, he's like, fuck's sake.

Yeah, apparently, according, I mean, I've not read it in a proper interview with him that he is unhappy about it, except for this book called Talk Like Ted.

It's a new book that's out.

And in it, she says that he's really unhappy about it.

Okay, they did this test.

They tested the happiness biometric thing.

So plus 0.3 was the most miserable on this scale they had.

Minus 0.3 was meant to be extremely happy people.

And he scored minus 0.45.

Isn't that cool?

He's off the charts.

He said he sounds like the most annoying person on the planet.

That is Anna plus 0.45.

He said when he was asked if he ever gets annoyed, he said, Of course I sometimes get irritated, but I usually start laughing quite quickly at the irritation because it's so silly, which sounds like an incredibly annoying response.

He's surrounded by the unhappiest people in the world.

I also saw an interview with him when someone asked him about a laptop that he had stolen.

And they said, did that not make you unhappy at least?

He said, I didn't feel aggrieved at all.

My only regret was that he hadn't been able to send the thief the power lead.

Bullshit.

No one can be that happy.

It's impossible.

But he's like a Buddhist guy, right?

He says meditation is the main thing.

He's the Dalai Lama's right-hand man.

Oh, yeah, really.

I saw an interview where they talked about the Dalai Lama, and someone asked him, Does he watch watch the Marx Brothers?

Does the Dalai Lama watch the Marx Brothers?

And this guy, Rikar, said, He doesn't have to.

His life is so full of humour.

Although I think he used to watch bash.

Best T V show ever.

Yeah, well, obviously the Dalai Lama doesn't think it's that funny.

So, as we say, Buddhism is a thing that really focuses on a thing, um, a religion that really focuses on trying to achieve happiness.

And in Bhutan, obviously a Buddhist country, um all new government policies have to have a gross national happiness assessment.

So every policy that's made has to be run through the is this going to cause gross national happiness rings in order to establish, which is so cool.

And so they're a really happy country.

They're one of the poorest countries in the world, and yet they're about number eight on the Global Happiness Index.

They're number eight.

I think they're about eight.

There are so many lists of the happiest countries.

Usually it's Costa Rica, number one, isn't it?

Denmark, usually, I think.

But Panama recently overtook them.

Did they?

You've been to Bhutan.

I have.

nice?

They're just all so bloody happy.

Do they announce the happiest country at an actual award ceremony?

Because I love to see the camera pan across everyone's face

when they find out it's not them.

Bhutan, I think they're so happy because they have a dragon king.

How happy would we be if we called our queen the dragon queen?

That's what they call him.

He actually went to school in England as well.

Just

Kilburn Polytechnic.

He's called Wang Chuk.

He is, yeah.

Anything funny about that?

And he's last in the Wang Chuk dynasty so far.

There's been like four or five Wang Chuck.

He's not been able to find anyone to take his surname.

He's got seven sons.

All of them.

No, I'm Smith.

Also, Bhutan has no traffic lights, does it?

Which may be why it's the happiest country in the world.

It's the traffic lights and the Dragon King thing.

And they've pledged to be a carbon sink forever.

Yeah.

So be a net absorber of carbon.

They did used to have one traffic light in the centre of Timpu.

It's near the golf course, if you want to know where.

But they've been, you've been, haven't you?

I play golf there, yeah.

But the place where

they put the traffic lights there and everyone got so upset by the traffic lights, they got rid of them, and now there's just a guy there the whole time who's doing the job of the traffic lights.

Because they thought it was too impersonal.

Yeah.

Because they're so happy-clappy.

They need a human to be doing their traffic lighting for them.

I've done karaoke in Bhutan as well, actually, with a load of monks.

No.

Wow.

That's another story.

No.

You don't get off the hook that easily here.

What did you sing?

I can't remember.

It was some, like, I think I sang some Bhutanese.

Happy Cameron.

Yeah, that's all they sing for El Williams five winter times in a row.

Keep the points up.

Look, it's going down.

Costa Rica's ahead.

Go on.

Supposedly, in Buddhist teaching, there are 84,000 negative emotions.

Really?

Yeah.

And there are also, there are 87,000 drinks combinations at Starbucks.

Coincidence?

Can't be.

That's like,

how many different types of smile are there?

There are something like 18 different types of smile, aren't there?

And there's only one of those 18 that makes that is a genuine smile of happiness.

So,

the mouth smile.

I'm out.

There's a Pan-American smile.

Yeah.

And that was air hostesses from back in the 50s.

The 50s?

Just fake.

With the mouth only.

Yeah, but it became, it was such a big thing, wasn't it?

It was the classic, on the side of planes, they would have the classic air hostess of the 50s look, and it it was the fake smile.

I don't know if that's one of the nineteen or eighteen.

They almost certainly was.

I think it is and the best one is the Duchenne smile and that's one you can tell by the eyes because it's the wrinkles around the eyes let you know that it's a real smile.

And that's probably why so there are a lot there's lots of data about how the older you get the happier you get and it's just because people have got wrinkled eyes when they're older.

'Cause it is the happiness index goes up and like right into your eighties.

But it goes down until your mid-forties.

Yes, it does.

That's the least happy and then but from then on it's all upwards.

It's all upwards.

Which means the graph looks a bit like a smile.

All right, Matteo Ricard.

Oh, by the way, Matteo Ricard has on his website, did you guys look on his website?

His website has a few features.

My favourite feature is Smile of the Week.

And it's just a different monk every week.

He's having a good old smile.

It's actually really nice to look at.

If he's unhappy about the happy thing, he's bringing it on himself if he's doing a Smile of the Week website, I think.

He's been celibate since he was 30.

He has a little counter on his website.

Dushen used to, as well as discovering the one smile that is a true smile, used to electrocute different bits of people's faces to create different expressions, didn't he?

To work out what different expressions meant.

And it's so funny.

And because it was the mid to late 19th century, and because it was the age of photography as well, he combined the two, and he just took loads of photos of these patients making mental expressions because he was electrocuting them.

These people were going like,

yeah, it's kind of mean.

Yeah, I just got a flash.

We're going to have to wrap up.

That's what that meant.

Yeah, that's what that was.

Do we have any final facts?

Do you want to chuck in?

Okay, well, Hitachi has come up with a happiness algorithm.

You put a badge on your shirt, and there's an accelerometer on there which measures your activity.

And it means that the boss of a company can tell how happy everyone is in the company and can adjust things accordingly.

Oh, brave new world.

I've got one last thing, which is that I was looking into, just when I was doing the research, I thought science has labeled this person the something in the world.

Oh, yeah.

And I only had one thing come up, which was the man with the largest penis.

Oh, yeah, I know him.

Well, I don't know him.

It was just one night.

I know.

James, your eyes are watering.

No, he works as a data entry clerk in America, doesn't he?

I think.

Yeah, yeah.

What's he using to enter the data?

All right, we don't even have time for the fact.

That's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said in this podcast, you can get us on our Twitter accounts.

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

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

And we're going to be back again in the Soho Theatre next week.

And if you want to hear any previous episodes, this was our 51st episode.

So there's 50 episodes online.

Thank you so much for being here tonight, guys.

Thank you to everyone listening.

And we'll see you again next week.

Have a good night.

Goodbye.

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