No Such Thing As A Fish - 254: No Such Thing As A Toilet In The Car

Episode Date: February 1, 2019

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss gingerbread in the toilet, the invention of wing mirrors, and silent movie bags.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Chazinski, and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Chazinski. My fact this week is that the rear view mirror was invented so that racing drivers didn't have to have a person sitting next to them in the car explaining what was going on behind

them. Yes, I think bizarrely I found this out because I saw a post from an insurance site or something, but anyway it was invented for the Indy 500 inaugural race in 1911, so the Indy 500 is that big race that happens in Indianapolis. 1911 it was won by a guy called Ray Haroon, and basically the reason he won it was that he realized that the cars always had two people in them, the driver, and then the person who had to do a number of things, one of which included turning around and saying if there were any cars behind them in dangerous positions to make sure there wasn't a pile up or a big

crash. And Ray thought that's a lot of extra weight, wonder if I can avoid that, and what he did was he got a mirror and placed it in the middle of his car, hanging in the middle of his car on a pole, and then he won the race because he halved the weight in the car. He did win the race, although we're not 100% sure that he actually won the race, as in he got given the prize, but the truth was that no one really knew how to count all the laps or time things or anything like that, and there were loads of pit stops, so really no one actually knew who won the race.

How did they decide? They just went, I feel like it should be over now, next person to cross the line. A little bit like that. There was a guy whose job it was to put who was in the lead, and they would change it every now and then. But the truth was that some people took two minutes to change a tyre, some people took them 15 minutes to change a tyre, some cars would come out of the pit lane and then back up over the finishing line and then go back over again so it added an extra.

No! That really happened. That wouldn't be... Oh my God! That couldn't have been allowed. They didn't know what was going on at all. They just didn't have the technology to work out times or anything like this. That sounds like a cheat that you would do in Mario Kart.

I remember doing that kind of thing in Diddy Kong Racing, and you see how close you can loop around the finishing kind of post for it to count, and it never does. Never does? So the technology there is more advanced than that. There was a guy called Mulford who was pretty sure that he'd won, and he went across the finishing line, and then what you always did was you did an insurance lap at the end just to make sure that you've done the right distance, because people might think, oh, you've done one not enough.

And so he did his insurance lap, and then when he got to the end of the insurance lap, he found that someone else had claimed the victory, which was Haroon, and Haroon was already being cheered as the victor, and he's like, no, wait a minute, I finished like two minutes ago. Wow. I think that Haroon used to work as a chauffeur, and he apparently... I read one account that said he got the idea for a rearview mirror in a car from a rearview mirror that he saw in a horse drawn carriage.

That's what he said, certainly. Well, that makes sense, because pretty much everything in cars came from horse drawn carriages, didn't they? I guess so. But it's just funny thinking of a horse drawn carriage with mirrors. I was looking for a horse drawn carriage mirrors, and I don't think they were really a thing. The only reference I could find to advising there'd be mirrors in horse drawn carriages were saying there has to be a mirror in order that the lady in the carriage at some point

might want to check her makeup. Yeah, it seems like that was the real innovator, that guy in the horse drawn carriage that he saw. Just on the horse drawn carriages and how they competed with cars, there was this early concept in 1899, when there was a point where cars and horse drawn carriages were into mingling, and it was scaring farmers, and it was particularly scaring horses. So a guy called Uriah Smith, and this was in Battle Creek, Michigan, invented this contraption called the horsey-horseless carriage, and you put a horse's head on the front of your

car, and it looks like you're just riding a horse, but you're actually driving your car. Sort of, except that the horse doesn't have a back end, does it? Yeah, but I guess if you were approaching a horse, it would be like, oh yeah, it's like if a horse was entering the room, and only its head had popped in, you might think it was a horse. Yeah. But then...

Is it like in a pantomime, if one guy doesn't turn up? It is like that. And it's quite frightening, because it's just up to the neck, it looks like someone's stuffed and mounted a horse's head and stuck it on the front of their car to our eyes. And the other thing was that they said, because I read a bit about it, they said that I think the horse's head was full of petrol. Yes, because it was an extra fuel reserve in case you were out in the main tank. It is a good idea, until you hit something, at which point it becomes a real fire liability.

Yes. Because you just smash a big petrol tank into someone else. Explosion. Oh yeah. But they were so paranoid, weren't they? I think we did a QI episode on this a few years ago, but there was that thing where various rules were written in the highway code or equivalent in America, which said things like, if you're driving a car and you think a horse is approaching about a mile

away, you hear a horse plopping in approach. You have to carry with you a scene of the surrounding countryside, which you stop your car and you throw the countryside scene over your car so you don't have to frighten the horse. That's so annoying, especially when it's just a guy with two coconuts walking past you. I thought it was that you had to dismantle the car. And sometimes get a dismantle the car. Yeah, you just sort of have to take it apart and hide it behind a hedge.

That was written down as well. Now I remember researching this, and I think there was a lot of exaggeration about the... So I could never work out what they actually did and what was actually written as a joke in the highway code. And I don't think they ever actually fully produced the horsey-horseless thing. It was concept-designed and patented. Yeah. There have been some great car patents over the years, though.

I was looking at some of them. So one car invention that never really took off was 1935, the dog sack, which is... If you don't want to keep your pet in your car because it gets hair everywhere, then it's a sack that clamps onto the running board of the car, and then it hooks onto an open window and you tie your dog up in it and you can carry it outside the car. That's good because dogs like to stick their head out of the window, don't they? Perfect. They're just now the whole body's outside the window.

That's what they've always wanted. If you put a dog in one of those, it will probably stick its head in the window. I think dogs just like to stick their head through windows, that's my theory. Did you hear about the steering wheel of death? No. This was a car innovation on a Cadillac. The 1954 Cadillac El Dorado, this is obviously really expensive cars, they're very luxurious. But the steering wheel of this Cadillac, it had a kind of bullet-shaped spike in the middle

of it. Right. So imagine a really large bullet, the pointy end of the bullet, the front end, as it were. So that was just in the middle of the steering wheel. So obviously that's quite dangerous in the event of a crash, and that's how it got the nickname. And Sammy Davis Jr., he had a crash in one of those cars and his face hit the wheel and he lost an eye as a result.

Sorry, did you explain why they had this spike in the steering wheel? Aesthetics. No way. Designed. It wasn't useful for anything. It was, you know, that was the era when cars had these fantastic cranes. Oh, that was the era where there were spikes in the middle of every car, like an Iron Maiden that you would drive around.

Boxes of TNT at the overseas. It's more rounded than a full-on spike. It doesn't look like an actual spike, but it does look like a big bullet. But Sammy Davis Jr. lost his eye because of that. Wow. But there was that idea that someone came up with, which was just a design idea. It wasn't real of putting a massive spike in every steering wheel. And the idea is that it would just make everyone drive really carefully.

Oh, yeah. Very good, right? The opposite of an airbag. It's a real carrot or stick kind of a put. The Duke of Edinburgh has been impaled again. Here's another Cadillac convention just very quickly that didn't work out. They tried to put working toilets in the inside of their cars. That was in 1947.

You can see photos of it. It looks really incredible. Great idea. It was in the back seat. Yeah. And you would have what was a proper toilet in this photo. But the problem was, it just didn't make sense really to have it. Why not?

Why not? Because the amount of space that you'd need for the tank, for the flush, the smell was too great. There was a lot of splashback, apparently, in the testing and the smells. Yeah. These feel like problems we can overcome. Yeah. It's true.

It looked so cool. I mean, splashback, for instance. Obviously, don't have it be water-based. Silly. Oh, just have it like a cat litter tray. Exactly. Yeah. Make sand castles if you don't need the loo.

It's multi-purpose. That's the thing. There are lots of rules, aren't there, about how fun you can make things on the road. Like service stations. Right. There are rules. In fact, there are laws about what you're allowed to have at a service station because the motorway network is so important for people for, you know, transport that you can't

have, say, I don't know, a casino at a service station because you can't have anything there that would mean people went there specially. It's interesting, though, because every single service station does have slot machines in it. Yeah. Remember when we were on tour? Literally every single one. Casino was a very bad example.

I don't know what kind of thing I think. Brothels? A cinema. Oh, a brothel. That's the only reason there are no brothels next to the M&M. It has to be just, you know, refueling, going to the toilet and the slot machine. It's just the important stuff. There's so much fun stuff on the British highway.

Well, they very recently opened a weather spoons in one of them, didn't they? And that was a massive deal. And everyone thought it was a terrible idea because you shouldn't have, be able to sell alcoholic service stations, but they didn't do. I went into a box that simulated a hurricane on one of the spots. On our tour. Did you make a special journey? Would you make a special journey to do that?

No, no, no, no. I went to, it blew my glasses off. It was very dangerous. I think, well, I've never heard of that being anywhere else, like a hurricane box. That's true, yeah. So, which services was it at? It was when we were on tour, our last tour. Oh, no, don't encourage it.

This whole point is you shouldn't make special journeys to the service stations. Oh, God. I'm going because then I'm going to get drunk at the weather spoons, play a bit of slot machines, do the hurricane thing, go to the brothel and then drive back. Great news, I got blown off at the service stations. Hurricane box. Back to the Indy 500, quickly, do you mind? So one of the things with the Indy 500 winners is that they drink a cup of milk after the

race. And it's a tradition that was born in 1936, Lewis Mayer. He finished and he asked for buttermilk after the race. And it was a dairy executive who saw him drinking it in a picture and they sort of, they must have approached them and that tradition was born. And so when you're going to race, they ask you what kind of milk would you like just so we can have it ready for you? Should you win?

Does that mean like a full fat or half fat? Exactly. And majority of it's full fat, they found. They just released the latest sort of preferences. I'm sorry, I was genuinely surprised. Why are you surprised by that? I just like semi-skim milk, I suppose. And you thought, because you're such a great racing driver, you thought, I'll surely all

the rest of them do as well. Oh, my buddies. Well, in this hipster era, they must be having to stock way more milk than usual because they'll be having almond and oats and laxative free. In 1913, the winner was Jules Gault, who was a French driver. He won by 13 minutes, actually, but he drank champagne throughout the race, in fact. Some people think he might have had as many as six bottles of champagne during the course of the race.

He definitely had at least half a pint in his first pit stop and then he was drinking it throughout the race. So he won the race, but he did lose his driving license. He would really have benefited from the car with a toilet in the back. You can't climb into the back of the car, I'll probably be racing. The trophy for the Indy 500 for people who aren't familiar with it, which I wasn't really is ridiculous. That's amazing.

It's revolting. I love it. I love it. Dad loves it. So it's five foot tall, it's ridiculously large, it's all made of silver. And as soon as you win the race, you get your head sculpted onto it and attached and then they ran out of space on it in the 80s, I think, so they had to add an extra level so they could get more heads on it.

So it's got all the old guys' heads as well. It's got the old heads. It's got the French guy looking a bit pissed. Everyone else has got, like, that milk mustache that you get. OK, it's time for fact number two and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that a 2018 paper suggesting that people who have a surname which occurs towards the end of the alphabet are more likely to end up academically and professionally undistinguished was co-authored by Professor Jeffrey Zaks.

I love co-author because he couldn't even individually author his own name for you. Well, he co-authored it with the guy whose name was Corley, beginning with C. Yeah. So yeah. He was the brains behind it, wasn't he? The C guy. Well, Jeffrey Zaks is quite cool, actually. He's a university aboulder psychologist and I listened to an interview with him on a radio

show called Top of the Mind and they asked him, you know, is the reason you're doing this because obviously you had a bad time of it because of your name. And he said he was sensitized to the issue because of that, but actually it doesn't affect him because according to their study, it doesn't affect people who are distinguished in any other way. So if you're kind of top of your class at school or bottom of your class or you look different or you're more attractive or less attractive, it doesn't really affect you. It only affects people who are right in the middle.

But they found that actually it does affect them. It means it gives them less distinction at high school, less satisfaction at high school and lower educational attainment after they've left school. And until you're about middle aged, it affects you quite badly according to them. What's the justification here? Is it just about reading out the register? So there are a few different reasons. So for instance, at infant school, a lot of kids are put in alphabetical order.

So the kids beginning with A are near the front of the class, which means they get more attention. People just tend to get asked more for things. So for not school, for instance, if your name is towards the start of the alphabet, you're less likely to give money to charity and that's because you get rung up more because your name is at the front of the alphabet and you get more annoyed by it. And so you're less likely to give money. Really? Yeah.

It's also like when it's graduation and they're handing out diplomas, this is one of the things mentioned. You start A to Z, it's all really exciting at the top and by the time you get to Zuckerberg. Oh, yeah. And that's why he never made it and it's just out there, right? But when you get to the end, most people have left because they want to get the restaurants early and everyone who's applauding, their arms are tired and stuff like that. And I can understand if you're marking a big pile of exam papers and Aaron J. Erinsson

makes a point and then Sammy Zamy makes the same point, you think, I read this in Aaron J. Erinsson's article and that was hours ago. Yeah. Exactly. And the teacher might say, OK, can someone read a report, Aaron J. Erinsson, can you do it? And then by the time Zuckerberg gets there, he just never gets asked and so you have less confidence in public speaking as well.

So this genuinely does seem to be a thing. Yeah. Although I'm not sure about his way of, I'm not sure about Zach's way of combating it. One of the ways he says he combats it is that he is a professor, so we ask students and he always calls the class register in reverse order, which seems to be to just be recreating the problem the opposite way around. He suggests that people should maybe do something to distinguish themselves like dressed strangely on something.

That's one of the specific things he said, like just so that people notice you because it's the people who aren't noticed who struggle the most. And if you're later on in the alphabet, you're more likely not to be noticed if you're otherwise undistinguished. Yes, that's right. And it works the other way around. So there's another study, which is that authors whose surnames are ranked towards the front of the alphabet are more likely to be cited in scientific papers.

And that was lead authored by a guy called Ars Nolt. So he has obviously seen that he's been cited more often than others because he's an A and also he has the word ars in his name, which I am for presidential candidates in America. That's another thing they think influences, because that's an alphabetical order as well when you go in for doing that. So you're more likely to go for someone at the top of this George Washington guy put himself in place. Who came after him?

Adams. You're saying that George Washington only became president because he sees how he would put himself in never have won a fair election. Yeah. Okay. There are definitely countries where it's law that on the ballot paper, you have to mix it up, aren't there? Or you do half and half on ballot papers because yeah, people just tick an A because it's a

lot of effort when you go to the ballot box and you're in a hurry to get to work anyway. You just cross the first one you see, don't you? One thing I think that's found, which is encouraging, is that by the time you're in your mid 30s, the effect lessens to the point of disappearance. Because you've been distinguished in some other way by then. So people are judging you not on your name, but on what you've done in life. Yeah. I thought it was because you weren't having register taken anymore.

Probably that too. The paper just for anyone listening is called Alphabetism, the effects of surname initial and the cost of being otherwise undistinguished and that paper has 96 citations and I counted them and there are 77 from A to M and only 17 from N to Z. Wow. Compounding the problem. Proof. Yes.

I find it so weird that Leonardo da Vinci doesn't have a surname, always thought there was a surname of Vinci just for people who are like me who didn't know that. But what do you mean by doesn't have a surname because our surnames are like that as well. In the end, that does end up being your surname. So there was, for instance, in 2016, I think that someone compiled a dictionary of 50,000 surnames from Britain that go all the way back to like the 11th century and they found that about half of the most common ones were locative, which is basically that, ones that say what place you're from.

So if your surname's Leicester or if your surname's, I can't think of like Jack London or... Stafford. Stafford. Exactly. So it's still the same kind of thing. George Washington. Washington.

Yeah. Do you guys know if any of your surnames have a... Mine will be Kin, will be family of, I should think, is Irish anyway. Yes, of course. Don't know about Murray. I read ages ago, both, there's claims for it in Scotland and Ireland that battle out for what the original... Murray is a place, presumably in Scotland as well.

Morey. Yeah. Morey Firth. There's a Morey eel. Yeah. You're named after the eel, aren't you? Yeah. Well, I think there is an eel somewhere at my family tree.

Yeah. And Tyshinski, a ski means son of, doesn't it? Tyshinski is like a bird. The name means like a bird. So some are descriptors and that's one of the most common types of name you have as well when you go back. Why are you looking at me funny? I am like a bird.

I'm like a bird. The only for that is I. Well, about a fifth of surnames, in fact, in our country are like that as in descriptors. So like Goodfellow, that's a nice descriptive one. Short is either means that the person who had that nickname was really short or it often meant that they were really tall. So you never know. Hang on.

Because it was like a funny ironic thing, you know, when you're like, all right, shorty. It was a tall guy. There were quite a lot of those. Medieval. Could it mean that whoever was called Goodfellow was actually a bit of a twatter? Yeah. Whereas we're as poor Derek twat from one of the nicest and kindest families in the town. OK, it is time for fact number three.

And that is my fact. My fact this week is that grocery bags used in Hollywood movies don't rustle. How? Why aren't we allowed them? I know. So this is this is something that I read on a website called proptricks.com. This is the website of a man who invented these bags. I'm about to tell you about Tim Schultz is his name and it's when on movie sets, you

see people carrying any kind of bags. Usually when you're recording, that makes so much noise that they can't cancel out that it ruins scenes. I have to constantly re-record scenes. And he was on the set of a TV show back in the day that starred Martin Lawrence called Martin. And Martin, as he's coming into the room, gets his pants taken off by a door frame that he gets caught on.

So he has to exit wearing only a bag and it kept rustling or rather that was the scene and he thought, how are we going to do this without it causing so much noise that you're not going to hear the scene. So he went away and invented a silent grocery bag. Wow. Yes. And it's used in tons of movies now and he's expanded his horizons. It's not just grocery bags.

He's got department store bags, bakery bags, lunch store bags, doggy bags. He's done silent gift tissue and silent cellophane for wrapping flowers in, which aren't completely silent. You can hear them slightly. Because it would be weird if someone was wrapping a present that was no sound effect. Yeah. You can add that on the poster. The point is exactly you added on post with Foley.

Yeah. So how do you know what they're made of? I've tried to find out, but I wonder if it's if I haven't dug hard enough or it's an industry secret that he's holding onto like the secrets of Coca-Cola mix. He could at least tell theaters, couldn't he? He could at least put them on boiled sweets in theaters because I think that's where that causes the most problems is the plastic crackling thing. There is a company called Silent Snacks that in 2016 launched a whole load of products

to have in cinemas and theaters, which don't rustle or don't make any noise. Wow. Like what? Ground popcorn. So basically instead of being like lumps of popcorn, it's just kind of popcorn dust. Disgusting. Cocoa butter balls. They kind of melt in your mouth rather than like, I guess, like M&Ms at my crunch.

Crisps. They've got silent crisps. Well, they're dehydrated purse slices, apparently they're just bendy enough to be pleasant, but not too crisp. I don't think any level of bendiness in my crisp is pleasant. No. No, I don't think you want to bend in crisp at all. I think if you hear the phrase, it's just bendy enough to be pleasant.

That date's taken a bad turn. They also invented an anti-gas grapefruit drink. Anti-gas. Anti-gas. They're not burping. Stop you burping and farting, yeah. Oh, it's not a major problem in cinemas. It is if you go with me.

Can you play the last 10 minutes again, please? So on movie props, the same newspaper has been being read in movies for about 20 years. There's this one newspaper that keeps cropping up in lots and lots of films. It's been in No Country for Old Men, it's been in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it's been in Desperate Housewives. So when you see someone in a film reading a paper. Do you know what the headline is? Can you remember?

No, I don't. I didn't write it down. Manlands on Moon. I'll just go one more thing on how to keep a set quiet when you're filming. Lord of the Rings, when they were filming, they obviously had a ginormous crew and there were two people on that crew whose job it was to sit at the local airport that they were closest to when they were filming and to call ahead when planes were taking off so they knew to not film a scene because very soon, yeah, they would have the sound.

So you didn't have the sound of airplanes, you just had lots of sounds of mobile phones going on. Yeah, it's like Gandalf's pockets are always buzzing. In Lord of the Rings, one of the props they had actually was a giant ring or a big ring anyway. So they had to have quite a lot of rings. There's one ring to rule them all, et cetera, but there's actually a number of replicas because...

Bring in another one of those one rings to rule them all. So it can fit different fingers because different people wear it, but then also they had a really big one about the size of a football, it looks like, in the photos. And that's for when you do wheeled close-ups, then you want it to look really intricate. So there's a scene where when you know you can sort of tell, it's a really seminal scene in the fellowship of the ring where Frodo drops the ring, he's supposed to be carrying it and he's like, oh no, where's it gone? And he looks up and Borom is picking it up and you see the ring being picked up out

of the snow and that's a giant ring. Does it make a giant hand? No, you don't see his hand come down. You see the chain attached to the ring be lifted up, so they made a big chain to go with it. Cool, very cool. I know. I thought you were going to say because are they all dwarfs or something in other of

the rings? They're pretty short, yeah. Yeah, so you'd need a big one to make it look like... They're all really small. I don't think that was why, but maybe it had that extra. So that's the only prop they had to adjust the size of the hobbit. You can see Frodo, you can see Norma's ring. They're not borrowers, I don't think.

I haven't seen it. In the book or in the whole thing, does the ring change size? No. I think so. Does everyone in the Lord of the Rings like to have the same size fingers? Yeah, that's a great question. You never wear it. You never wear the ring.

Yeah, they do. They go disappearing. It makes you invisible. It presumably must be magic to adjust to the owner's finger, or some people, it just doesn't fit on. Maybe sometimes you can put it like, for instance, my wife's wedding ring will fit on my little finger. So maybe they do that.

No, it's not... Okay, this ring has the power to create evil across the world. My wife's wedding ring. It can adjust size according to the finger. Can it? Is that a thing? I don't know if it is. I don't know.

It's like when it kind of gets bigger, so it went on my neck. It's a magic ring. It can do whatever it wants. You know what? But he never says, oh, and then it made itself a bit smaller, so it could fit on Frodo's tiny finger. So it could fit on Frodo's cock. Those scenes were deleted.

Oh, my goodness. I was reading a few blogs by a woman called Ellen Freund, I think, F-R-E-U-N-D, who is... I think she's one of Hollywood's main prop makers, really. It was really interesting. So she did the props for Mad Men and stuff like that, really good period pieces. But it must be so frustrating, because a lot of the props that you make as a prop maker never get seen by an audience, they're just to create the environment for the actors. So she was saying, you know, every single draw that someone opened in Mad Men, you wouldn't

see inside it from the camera angle, but, you know, the actors had to see all the stuff they thought their character might have. Are you joking? No way. I can just put a little post-it note saying there is stuff in this drawer. No, these people can't pretend that there's stuff in this drawer. They've got to see the star. That's so patsy.

It turns out they're not very good actors at all. But if the actors are freaked out by an empty drawer, imagine how they're going to be freaked out by the massive film crew who are on the other half of their office. They all have to disguise themselves as wallpaper lunches. They all have to hide behind the picture of the countryside. She made it sound kind of creepy also making props, Ellen did, because she said, you can obviously Google stuff for what things look like when you're trying to work out, you know, what a book would have looked like in the 1920s.

You can't possibly imagine. She's chosen the one object that hasn't really changed in time. She said, really, the only way you can get a proper idea for what, let's say, she has to design a bunch of stuff for 13 reasons why, which she worked on, which is contemporary teenagers. She said, you've got to go out into the world and see what they're actually wearing. So she said, I've got to go out and stand near high schools, for instance. I'll watch the children all day to make sure that I understand what they're back to.

But surely they all just wear school uniforms. And maybe she goes to the Mufti school. Mufti schools. It is Mufti and 13 reasons why. There you go. Yeah. So she goes to Mufti schools and then she says, I'll go down to the mall where I know the kids are shopping and then I'll watch them there to see what sort of stuff.

I mean, she must look like a real weirdo. Yeah. Yeah. I would say so. Especially depending on the kind of thing you're filming as well. Yes. If you're filming something set in a morgue, you have to go and hang out around a morgue all day.

See what they're wearing. But make sure you go to a Mufti morgue. OK, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy. My fact is that eating ginger can make you feel better about drinking out of a toilet. Is that because it tastes a bit better? It's not. It's... And this is a...

By the way, this is a toilet that's never been used. Oh, OK. So would you drink out of a toilet that's never been used? Yes. Do I have any other options? Like, could I just drink out of a glass instead? No, the glass... There's no glass.

There's no glass. So am I really thirsty? No, you've... You had a cup of tea about an hour ago. Was there a ginger biscuit I had with this cup of tea? Yeah, yeah. Oh, right. OK.

Yeah, I'm cool. See, it works. So this is an experiment. Ginger is said to help prevent nausea. And there's a lot of debate about whether you get disgusted because of a moral judgment you've made or whether it's kind of the other way around, whether a moral judgment's guide what we then find disgusting or whether disgust is inherent and then we judge based on that. So there was an experiment at the University of British Columbia which gave patients ginger

capsules and it experimented how disgusting people found things when they had had those as opposed to when they hadn't had those. So the experiment found that it reduced how disgusted people were by moderately disgusting photos like a photo of some snot in a napkin, but it did not help extremely disgusting things like vomit in a toilet. And they then tested how it affected so-called purity violations which is breaking taboos about purity and cleanliness. So for example, people who'd taken ginger were less strict about moderate violations

like drinking from a never used toilet bowl, but apparently it did not have an effect on extreme purity violations like sex between cousins. Right. OK. But if you had more ginger, do you think? Yeah, how much ginger would you need? To shag your cousin. It just implies that eating ginger, you can numb your moral compass, right?

If you have to commit a crime, there's nothing you can do and you're grossed out by it. If I have a shed load of ginger, then I'll feel less guilty. They said it works to a certain extent, but it depends on the crime you're thinking about. It only works on really, really minor crimes. Yeah. One big study came out a few years ago that was saying that the more easily disgusted you are, the more likely you are to be conservative and it can actually be used as a predictor of your voting even.

And this holds true across 121 countries they looked at. So the more conservative people are, the more easily triggered their disgust reactions are. What I found interesting is that, like you say, the people who are more disgusted are more likely to vote conservative, but also that between 2013 and 2016, the value of ginger imported into the UK has fallen by 15%. So maybe that's why we've become a more conservative country. People are eating less ginger. Maybe.

Let's start giving out gingerbread biscuits on the streets. You know there's a thing called disgustology. Scientists who look into this call themselves disgustologists, kind of a self-given name. That might become a surname in like 200 years. Well, one woman who could have it is Professor Val Curtis, who has a lot of the thing you have to do when you're one of these scientists is you have to come up with scenarios. And in one of her experiments, she had to come up with 70 different scenarios. And I just wanted to tell you a few of them to tell me whether they're disgusting or not.

So imagining a hairless old cat rubbing up against one's leg. That's all right. Well, a big fan of cats in general, actually. Okay. That's a Siamese cat in my head. All right. Stepping on a slug in bare feet. Hates like have an actual phobia of slugs.

Okay. That's okay for me. Feeling someone cough into your face. I'm okay with that. I'm okay. Yeah. I'm better with that than with the slugs. Okay.

Shaking hands with someone with scabby fingers. Fine. That's all right. Yeah. I'm a bit like, oh, but I wouldn't be disgusted. I think I am the scabby fingers. Finding out another, finding out a friend attempted to have sex with a piece of fruit. You're only ever going to be amused by that.

Depends on the fruit. What fruit would not be amusing? It's true. It's true. Two more. Learning your neighbor defecates in his back garden. Is that disgusting? It's his own back garden, but he's your neighbor.

And the final one is this disgusting or not. Seeing pus coming from a genital sore. That wraps up quite quickly, didn't it? I read a thing. There's this, psychologists have this idea that we have discussed disposal effect. The idea that if we are surrounded by things that disgust us, we really want to get out of the situation. And if you were, the study showed that if you were selling stuff, if you were exposed

to things that disgusted you and then you had to do your deal, you would reduce the price massively just to get out of the situation. Does that make sense? Yeah, it's if you're in a room that's full of vomit and you're selling something on eBay. Yeah. You will accept a lower amount. But you're on a desktop computer which can't be moved out of the room.

The only PowerPoint is in that room that's full of vomit. I think they did a different thing in their experiments. Oh well. Fine. We all design our experiments differently. That's my one. That's your one. Yeah.

It's weird though. Because I think if you could then go to a market and haggle and you could manufacture like say put a naked, hairless old cat against the man's leg who's selling you the trinket, you could reduce your price massively. Hang on. What's a trick? I'm in a market haggling for a trinket and I've got my hairless naked old cat under my arm.

I need to rub that against the seller. You might get the reduced price you were looking for. With my scabby fingers as well. And then tell you, you know, I just tried to have sex with that mango. I think this is all in Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal, isn't it? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy at Andrew Hunter M. James at James Harkin and Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yeah, but you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com. Everything is up there.

All of our previous episodes, tickets to our upcoming tour in March do come along. We'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you all then. 00:34:49,860 --> 00:34:50,860 Bye.