No Such Thing As A Fish - 326: No Such Thing As An Infortunate Occurrence

Episode Date: June 19, 2020

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss a sure fire way to get a million quid, the secret of word peace, and why some people are more gullible than others.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello and welcome to another Working From Home episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, with Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Tijinski, 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. Starting with fact number one, and that's my fact this week. My fact is, two days after receiving his latest book, The Author of Annals of Gullibility, Why We Get Jupt and How to Avoid It, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in a Ponzi

scheme. How embarrassing. Yeah. Very funny. He did admit that it was embarrassing. He kind of thinks it's funny now, you know, with the distance of time to look back at it, but this is a guy called Stephen Greenspan, and he'd written this book, and it was meant to sort of help you to understand how not to be duped by exactly the thing that caught

him off guard. So he got caught off guard by the greatest Ponzi scheme of them all, which was the Bernie Madoff, which set so many people around the world, losing thousands and millions in some cases. It's the biggest of its kind, and yeah, it was recommendation via his sister, and two days after receiving his latest book, he lost 400,000. Wow. In his advice as to how to avoid it, did it include things like, you know, don't take

advice from ill-informed siblings, and don't invest with people who have surnames that sound suspiciously like the phrase, made off. I think a revised edition was hastily issued with all this in there. Dan, can I just check? Is a Ponzi scheme basically a pyramid scheme? No, what it is is you get in early investors, and you get their money, and when you bring in new investors, you give the money of the new investors a bit of it to the early investors, so it seems as if they're getting return on their money, and then you kind of pull it

off. Oh, I thought that was a pyramid scheme, basically. No, a pyramid scheme is where you bring in new investors, and they have to bring in new investors, and that money comes up to the people higher up in the pyramid. It's slightly different. I see. So the Ponzi scheme is more flat. It's more like a large plane on the deserts of Egypt compared to the pyramid.

A Ponzi scheme is the thing that we used to do as kids, which I found so thrilling. Do you remember where you'd get a letter that had a chocolate bar in it, and it said, send this on with, no, wait, how would it work? I tell you now. No, you're right. You're doing it right. It sends you a letter saying, send me a chocolate bar, but then you send the letter to six people, and then you ask each of them to send you a chocolate bar, and then you get six chocolate

bars. It was amazing. That's a pyramid scheme. That's a pyramid scheme, not a Ponzi scheme. But Anna, if you had been investing... No, a Ponzi scheme. It's pretty similar. It's similar, but it is quite a distinctive difference.

So in a Ponzi scheme, you would get a load of Mars bars from loads of different people, and then you would cut some of the Mars bars up, and then give the Mars bar back with another half of a Mars bar to someone who sent you one Mars bar. And so they think they're getting one and a half back, but actually what you're doing is you're using other people's Mars bars to do it, and eventually you're going to run out of Mars bars. Do you have to rewrap the Mars bars once you cut them up? I feel like it's more different with Mars bars than it is with money.

It is when you get a manky half a Mars bar through the post, it's a bit different than when you get in a nice, crisp 50-pound note. We're rich, we're rich. You know what's weird? Just in order to get ready for this fact, I looked up what a Ponzi scheme was, so I knew what it was. I now have no idea what it is off the back of all these moments. It's literally...

All it is is the pyramid scheme has one person at the top, ten people next, a hundred people next, a thousand people next, whereas a Ponzi scheme has one person at the top, and then everyone else is flat, basically. You actually did explain it completely correctly, Dan. We just started throwing Mars bars around basically. The first Ponzi scheme was basically invented by accident, wasn't it, by Charles Ponzi? He didn't quite mean to do it. He sort of meant it to be legit, so it was in the 1920s, and he had this scheme where

he was buying stamps, or actually these things called reply coupons, and that was when if you wrote to a friend internationally, you included a reply coupon, which I think essentially meant it was like doing a reverse charge call, but on a letter, and it meant that they could write back to you for free. Anyway, he bought them overseas for much cheaper, because they were cheaper overseas, and then sold them for more in the US. He said to people, I've got this amazing scheme where I can make a massive profit on these reply coupons, and he got people to invest, and they did.

He hadn't factored in the fact that he'd have to pay for all the ridiculous international travel to these places to go and buy these stamps in the first place. He realized the scheme couldn't make any money at all, but these people were investing loads of money. You can see the reasoning where he started to think, I still am receiving all this money. Shall I just keep going with this, and not mention that it doesn't work? It's kind of working well for a short period of time, isn't it, I guess? It is, until he, I think someone did the maths and worked out that he was claiming to be

buying and selling 160 million reply coupons, and only 27,000 existed in the world. Yeah, and the Boston Post did an article in 1920, didn't they, demonstrating that it was completely impossible, and when they did an audit afterwards, they found only $61 worth of these stamps, even though he'd said that he'd bought millions and millions of dollars worth. So he did try. He got a few. Yeah, he got a few.

But when the Boston Post came up with this expose, everyone thought, oh my God, I've given him all my money, I need my money back, and so they did a run on him to try and get all of their money back, and he just completely fronted it out, and he just said, yeah, no, worries, you guys just queue up, and I'll give you your money back, and they stood in the queue, and he bought them sandwiches and coffee, and people weren't sure whether he was real or not, still at that stage, and so half the time they were cheering him, and half the time they were booing him, no one really knew what was happening, and then eventually the government got involved and looked at his accounts and found he was $3 million in

the red, and they later revised it to $7 million in the red, and he got arrested, and when he got arrested, everyone lost their money. Oh, wow. This is his long-term plan with that queue outside his house. I just think sometimes it's like, maybe tomorrow it'll be fine. Yeah. If you're calm enough with the beginning of the queue, then the end will probably get bored and go away.

Well, that's what happened, like, because loads of people started running on it, but some people still trusted him, so they became a secondary speculation market where people would buy the Ponzi coupons on a cheaper price so that the people in the queue would at least get something back, and the people who bought it thought, well, this is actually real, it's for real, so I'm going to get the full amount back, so it became speculation on the speculation. That's crazy. While we're on scammers, have you guys heard of Victor Lustig? I don't think we have ever mentioned him before.

Was he the guy who sold the Eiffel Tower or something? He was the guy who sold it twice. Oh, wow. So, he knew that Paris was broke. He was living in Paris, and he thought maybe the city would want to sell the Eiffel Tower off, because it's been up for 30 years, it's a bit rusty, and so he decided to forge some government stationery, and he wrote to a load of scrap metal dealers, and he invited them all to an expensive suite at a hotel, and he said, hello, I am the deputy minister of

posts, and he said, well, we're looking for buyers, but we've got to keep it quiet from public opinion, because there might be controversy, and then one of the guys was tempted, an especially stupid dealer called Andre Poisson, Andrew Fish, and he said, I'd really like to buy the Eiffel Tower scrap, and he paid a massive bribe to secure the ownership, and unsurprisingly, the Eiffel Tower was not the sale, but he got away with it, and he was so successful victoriously. Was he never busted? He was busted later on for his Romanian box.

What's that mean? What's that? It was a box which would duplicate any banknote that you put in it, obviously it wouldn't. Okay, well, James and Anna, I'm not going to try and sell you one, but Dan, you're looking interested, so he had concealed genuine notes within the device, and then as long as you only put in a selective range, and I had all these buttons and levers that you press and pull, and then another banknote would come out, and they'd think, oh my God, this is amazing.

Was he inside making the noises? He just made a complicated looking box, basically, and he sold the box for a lot of money to various different people, and then once there was a sheriff in Texas who realized that the scam caught up with him in another state, and then Listig said, oh, you're just not using it right. Don't worry. He completely persuaded him it was fine, and then said, look, let me give you all this cash to compensate you, which was counterfeit money, so he managed to pay his way out of

it. Yeah, he was very cool. Like you were saying about how he said, oh, I'm not really supposed to talk about this, and so people trusted him. Ponzi did that as well, so when they said to him, how are you making this work, because it doesn't seem like it'll work all these stamps, he said, oh, yeah, I've got a system which I don't want to tell you because then the government will shut it down. And then when everyone did the run on him and started queuing up for money, he said,

oh, guys, guess what? I've come up with a new system. It's completely different. It's not to do with stamps at all. It's just really, really awesome. And so this one will get you even more money, so why don't you give me more money? But he kept saying, I can't tell anyone what it is because if I tell you, then everyone will be doing it, and that's what kind of suckers people in.

Yes. Got to be adaptable. Do you know how you find out if someone is gullible? No. Oh, well, let me tell you about my magic box. I don't know. Is there like a questionnaire or something? It's exactly that.

There's a questionnaire, but basically it is just asking, are you gullible? It's amazing. It's a 12-question questionnaire. Some Australian authors came up with it, and it measures persuadability and insensitivity to untrustworthiness. But the questions are really, they're all things like, my friends think I'm easily fooled. Do you disagree, agree, strongly agree? And basically, if you answer yes to those questions or that you agree with them, you're

gullible. Oh, really? I would have thought gullible people wouldn't automatically know it. No, because as soon as you know that you're gullible, surely you can start correcting your gullibility. No, I know I'm gullible, and I can't stop it. If you guys decide to tell me some bullshit on this show, I will believe it until I see the smile on your face.

Hey, Dan, what do you think about this? We are in the midst of a high-frequency blossoming of interconnectedness that will give us access to the quantum soup itself. What do you think of that sentence? What's the quantum soup? Is that like primary or sub? Well, maybe you're not that gullible, because apparently people who take that kind of bullshit aphorism and think that it's quite deep are people who rate more highly on this gullibility

scale. Oh, OK. Oh. OK, so I'm still gullible. I'd be like the leader of the gullibles. I'd be going, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. I know how that sounds, guys, but I don't think that's right. I've not had that soup.

Do you remember that old joke at school, which was the world gullible isn't in the dictionary? Did you know that the OED published a special edition where they took it out of the dictionary? Amazing. No, they did it. They did it. Wait, hang on. They did it. Oh.

Think of the labor involved in printing an entire new edition of the dictionary just for one joke. It doesn't stack up. I just want to point out that Dan was the first one who spotted that. So I think, well, Dan, you're not as gullible as we all think, although actually apparently humans aren't too gullible. We all have this conception that we're really gullible and we're always falling for stuff, but studies seem to show that we're actually too skeptical.

And so there's been a bunch of things that, so fake news is often used as an example of how we're too gullible. We believe this stuff. We change our voting habits, but all the studies that have really been done on fake news over the last few years have showed that it didn't impact elections at all because people only ever consume the sort of fake news that already accorded with what they believed. So it wasn't like they were reading stuff and going, oh my God, Hillary Clinton really is a lizard.

It was like, they already thought she was probably a lizard, so it's just confirmed it. But actually we're too skeptical. So there's a very famous psychologist called Julian Rotter who died quite recently. But he said that the more trustful you are, the more successful you are in life and the better you are at determining if someone is trustworthy or if something's worth supporting because you've practiced it. So people who are more trusting generally, they practice it through life and then you learn who to trust and who not to trust.

Whereas the cynics who just think, oh God, everyone's a liar. Everyone's trying to jute me. They actually have no idea and they lose out because of that. So Anna, are you saying that me and Nandi are really great because we fell for your dictionary prank? Sounds like it. You're really smart. And we talked to you afterwards about a scheme I've got up and running.

But Dan is the cynic and he's just like living in his barrel, like Diogenes. Oh no. God. It always comes back to Diogenes, doesn't it? There was a dictionary scam back in the day where Huxtas would go around a pubs getting money off people with a dictionary based bet. So the idea is three of you go into the pub, you all pretend you don't know each other. You just sit at different places.

That's quite easy for us. Three of us, I've gone home. And then one of you guys will start repeatedly using the word unfortunate, okay? Let's say Dan. Keep saying, oh, it's really unfortunate about this. And then James or Anna will lean over and say, excuse me. I think it's unfortunate. Bingo.

Exactly. And then Dan will say, it's pretty unfortunate that you're such an idiot or whatever. And you get into this big argument. I can only apologize, James. I must have been quite drunk when I said that. You get into this huge row and obviously you get everyone else involved and you start putting money on it. And then Dan pulls out his dictionary, which does have the word unfortunate in it because

it's an old version of the word. And then you get the money. Wait a minute. Where does Anna come into this story? Shelly, she's the one with a dictionary. I've been at the bar this whole time. I got really bored very early on in this chat. And I went to talk to some people at the bar.

It must be the case that she happens to be a dictionary salesman who has a dictionary. Fuck it. Otherwise, what's the point? That's even better. That's even better. Yep. Yeah. That's very strong.

Unless the third person is just for audience purposes to cheer people on. It's sort of to get more people involved in the bet. Hey, come on. Look at the argument of these guys at her, Vic. That's very clever. And is there a whole history of that? Like, is that a gang that went around, the dictionary gang? Yeah.

Is this a one-off? Is this a one-off incident? No, I think some people have used it repeatedly, but I don't think it was a massive... Because the trend only lasts until everyone has heard of it because there are hundreds of gangs going around the pubs doing the unfortunate play. Oh, man. During gang wars, I wouldn't want to be in that gang. Have you not watched Gangs of London recently?

There's one episode where the dictionary gang comes along. It's the least violence of all the episodes, I have to say. Hey, you can get some pretty big dictionaries. You could do some serious damage with the full edition of the OED. Yeah. Kill someone. Yeah, sticks and stones, maybe. I found a gullible person who fell for a scam.

Have you guys heard of this guy in New York who a few years ago sued a psychic for fraud? No. I mean, it is sad, but in 2015 he sued the psychic because over the years he'd given her over $700,000 because he wanted her to make the woman that he fancied fall in love with him. It's an old classic Shakespearean tale. He should have just given the $700,000 to the girl. Actually, James, women can't be bought. I agree, but it's worth a try rather than giving it to a psychic.

That should have been his first. At least the person you like has got a lot of dash. He's walking down the streets in New York thinking, this is really sad. I've told the woman I really love her and she said she has no interest in me whatsoever. He passed a sign saying psychic with a flashing arrow. You already know he's a bit gullible. He walked in and the psychic just managed to convince him, for instance, to fork out $40,000 so she could do him a fake funeral to convince the bad spirits that he had died so that they

stopped plaguing him and let the woman fall in love with him. In fact, the woman he fancied to the fake funeral and see if she was sad that he died and then he bursts out of the coffin. That is never going to work, is it? That's how my wife and I got together. I think you might risk the woman thinking you're a weirdo, which I definitely wasn't, to be clear. He also paid $80,000 for an 80-mile-long bridge made of gold to lure the spirits into the other realm. Can I just say, that sounds like quite a good deal for a bridge made of gold.

That's an incredible bargain. Yeah, it's so cheap. It is. I think the thing is the bridge made of gold didn't really exist in this realm so you can never get the evidence that it has been built. Different realm bridge. Yeah, much cheaper. Different realm bridge. That's cheaper than the other realm.

It's much less. Did he not see the psychic increasingly turning up in fur coats, in Maserati's and all of this stuff? She's like, I bought them in the other realm, it's much cheaper over there. Eventually, after he fucked out another $90,000 for a longer bridge because the spirits weren't going over this one. Halfway through this, the woman he was in love with very sadly died and the psychic thought quickly on her feet and said, well, don't worry, we'll just have to pay a bit extra for my reincarnation machine to be built. Oh, Jesus. So, he paid $10,000.

This is a terrible story. Wow. But it is awful and it was only when she said she built this reincarnation machine and Michelle, this woman you're in love with is now inside this new woman you've just met. And he said, I met the new woman and I thought she doesn't seem like Michelle at all. And that was when I started to think the psychic wasn't who she was purporting to me. Right. How did this guy have access to $700,000 in the first place?

That man is now the president of the United States. OK, it is time for fact number two and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in 2011, former Paralympian Josh Sundquist, who's missing his left leg, announced that he'd found his soul mate, i.e. someone missing a right leg with whom he can split pairs of shoes. Wow. I don't know how I saw Game Across this, but I was watching his YouTube channel. So Josh is a he was a Paralympian skier and now an author and a comedian,

a public speaker and he sort of posted a video saying he's got these piles of shoes he's been saving up for years because obviously you can't buy one shoe, but he only needs one. So he's got loads of right shoes and he's been looking for someone who could wear them. And then he found living in the same city as him, a chap called Steven missing a right leg, same shoe size and crucially same taste in shoes. So they had a lovely meet up where they did some swapsies. That's great.

That's great. It's a beautiful story. Although it was quite, I mean, I think he might have been conned to be fair because he'd obviously been saving up his right shoes over the years, Josh. And so he came with this giant mountain, whereas Steven wasn't expecting the soul mate reunion. So he'd presumably chucked away all his left shoes. So he only gave Joshua one shoe.

So it was sort of a one shoe in exchange for about 50 shoes. There are charities out there where you can... So if you have lost a leg or lost a foot, but also if you have a pair of feet that are different sizes, like we all do, but some people much bigger than others, there are some places where you can match up with people with the opposite size feet to you. Oh, cool. Yeah.

In America, there's something called the National Odd Shoe Exchange, which is Nose, N-O-S-E, and they put people together with mismatch feet. And in the UK, there's something called Joe's Odd Shoes, which is on Facebook, where all you have to do is pay postage and packaging, and they'll send you a single shoe. Very cool.

That's so cool. It's a bit weird, isn't it? Usually when you do those acronyms, it usually works out as something like foot. It's a bit odd to go for nose. You know, absolutely right. They should... Well, maybe they had this conversation before.

Footwear Odd One Out Trading, and it's foot, except foot is also the beginning of footwear, so it's a cheat. Apart from Odd One Out has got three O's in a row, so it'll be foot. So that's Josh. Great guy. But I was sort of looking into prosthetics,

and there's some really cool prosthetics out there that you can get. So have you guys heard of this woman called Sophie de Oliveira Baratta? No. She's got this thing called the Alternative Limb Project, and she's basically an artist. It's in North London, and she makes these bespoke limbs, and she was inspired to do it. She had this client who was a little girl who had one leg,

and every year she'd come for an upgraded leg because she was growing, and she started asking for... She asked at first for pepper pigs at the top of her leg, pictures of pepper pig eating ice cream, and so Sophie was like, yeah, sure whatever, and then she came back the next year and asked for a Christmas scene at the top, which I think is very short-termist, and she's going to regret that in February, but whatever.

And this woman, Sophie, thought, well, this is great. What a good idea. And so she was inspired by Inspector Gadget, because you know he makes gadgets. Yeah. He has long arms and legs, doesn't he sometimes? Exactly. So she makes long arms and legs and special arms and legs,

and so for one guy, she made a hyper-realistic foot that looked really like his own foot, and she got hairs off the back of his neck and put them on the toes. Not many people in history have ever looked at their toes and gone, that isn't hairy enough. Can we put more hairs on that? So I guess one of the next frontiers in prosthetic limb development is how to incorporate feeling and how to incorporate automatic responses.

So there's one recent development research at Newcastle University came up with this. It's got an AI camera inside it. It's a hand or an arm fitting, and it can recognize hundreds of objects using the camera, and when you move to grab something with your prosthetic arm, it automatically moves into the right position to grasp it. So if you're reaching for a pair of tweezers,

it'll move into a pinch position, or if you're reaching for a volleyball, it'll move into a sort of spread-hand position so you can pick it up like that. It sounds unbelievable. Wow. And it can be trained to develop more and more positions. Can you sort of code it so that if it's reaching

for your 10th toffee crisp of the night, it will refuse to clap down on it or something. Anna, we don't have time for your toffee crisp problem session today. Maybe if you hadn't sent that letter to so many people, you wouldn't have so many to get through. A toffee crisp. No one mentions toffee crisps. They're the best chocolates, aren't they?

I agree. They're the best. Are they? I'm not sure I've ever had one. What? Oh, my God. That's like me not watching ET. Jesus Christ. We definitely don't have time for the fact

that you've never eaten toffee crisps. That's amazing. They're the best. They are one of the very best. Are they? I reckon Eva Richard Osman would agree with that. I was reading up about Aaron Rolston. Do you guys remember Aaron Rolston? 127 hours.

Oh, yeah. I remember that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So he was the mountaineer slash adventurer who fell down a little gap between some boulders, a boulder collapsed on his arm and he had to cut himself free.

And so he now, when you see pictures of him, if he goes mountaineering, he has a prosthetic that has a little pick on the end. Oh, wow. They went back and they actually recovered his arm. So it was stuck under this boulder. They managed to winch it out, winch the boulder up and get his arm back.

And they cremated it there on the spot and he scattered the ashes symbolically all over the area. So that's really nice. But the little fact that I really like, that I've discovered about him, is his current place of residence. He lives in a place called Boulder, Colorado. No way.

That's amazing. I have one last thing on prosthetics. I was amazed to learn about, there's a big comedian back in the early days of American comedy during the silent era called Harold Lloyd. And Harold Lloyd was at the time more famous than Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin.

He was the one who was pulling in most money at the box office. And what I didn't know is that he lost two of his fingers. He lost his thumb and his index finger when he was doing publicity for a film of his called Haunted Spooks. He stood in the photo with a prop bomb in his hand, which turned out to be a real bomb.

No. So the fuse lit. Wait a minute. What kind of prop department has two boxes? One with prop bombs and one with real bombs and accidentally takes out the wrong one? How do you end up in that situation? Now, what we've done is,

we've labelled the prop bombs with a T and we've labelled the real bombs with a lowercase B. Don't put them upside down next to each other. Was that someone simultaneously in the middle of a battle somewhere throwing the prop bomb and going, what's going on? Yeah.

So it went off in his hand. It took off his thumb. It took off his index finger. It temporarily blinded him. He took eight months to recover and then they built a glove for him, which had the thumb and the finger. And the most famous surviving sequence

or even image that we'll know of Harold Lloyd is him hanging off a clock face. He did that with a prosthetic thumb and finger. It was after that. That is insane. I've never heard that. OK, it is time for fact number three and that is Andy.

My fact is that you can now diagnose a urinary tract infection using a fidget spinner. Finally, I can get all my old fidget spinners out. Oh yeah, that is worth saying. Customised, right? Customised fidget spinner. Don't go pissing on your children's magic spinners. Oh, what?

What do you mean children? Who are for adults as well, weren't they? Don't piss on any fidget spinners, whether they're the children's edition or the special adult fidget spinners that James owns, the erotic fidget spinners. I saw, sorry to interrupt, when you haven't even told us a fact yet,

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

The strippers do this, but they made one with fidget spinners, didn't they, which liked fidget spinned around when they twirled their breasts. Of course they did. Gosh. So you can get adult fidget spinners is what you're saying?

Yeah, they're not the ones I have though. Andy, how does this work? Well, this is a new scientific development. Basically, it's a pain diagnosing urinary tract infections. It can take sometimes days to get the results back and scientists are always looking for ways to improve the process.

So this is a way of detecting pathogens in someone's urine which might reveal if they've got an infection. And what you need is detectors that are cheap and simple and accurate. And that's what this new one is. They custom made this team a fidget spinner where you pee in the spinner effectively. Pee in a jug.

Yeah, unless your aim is phenomenal. You pee in a jug and then the jug is, a bit of it's poured into the fidget spinner and it spins around obviously and the centrifugal force pushes the urine sample outwards and it pushes it through a little internal membrane inside the spinner. And the membrane is fine enough to stop bacteria

which can tell you whether you've got one of these infections. And then all you need to do is add a little bit of a dye which turns the bacteria orange. You look at the membrane a little bit later. If there's orange on the membrane, you have these bacteria and you know that you've got the infection. I would have fatted a dye which is a colour that's less similar to the colour of urine.

Yeah. How orange is people's urine these days? It's more orange than it is purple. James, I know you're a sunny D-phematic first. Look, it's for adults as well as children so we do that. No, but do you know what I mean? Yeah. That would make sense to you.

I do. I imagine that other dyes are also available. But the good news is that it cuts the test times to under an hour and it does also mean that people don't get diagnosed antibiotics unnecessarily maybe in the interim while they're waiting for the results. So doctors might say, oh, we'll just take some of these anyway which is a bad thing because it leads to antibiotic resistance.

So yeah, this is a good... Finally, we've found a use for the fidget spinner three years later. Is it commercially available? Can we all buy one? No. No, you can't. It's just been invented. And also, Dan, I think you probably want a medical professional

to do your diagnosis of UTIs rather than just missing on your own fidget spinner. Oh, yeah. But isn't the idea that you could get it like a pregnancy test and you'd be able to buy one and then piss on it and then presumably play with it? Oh, maybe. I guess you could. I guess so, yeah.

Or just they're issued to doctors who know how to administer the tests. But either way, it's a good thing. I think everyone should be their own doctor. Oh, God. It sounds really simple. Give it a spin, pour the dye in. What am I missing here? Wow.

You've already got the slogan. Yeah. One thing that they think it might work for in the future is also viral infections. So hopefully this technology in the future, you'll be able to use with saliva instead of urine and you'll be able to detect viruses. If you get your mesh fine enough, your membrane fine enough, then it will be able to find viruses.

So it might be that if there's a viral infection going around, then you'd be able to use something like this to tell whether you have it. Wow. That's great because fidget spinners have had a bad rep in a lot of corners over the years, haven't they? Yes. They've been sort of banned quite a lot of places, quite a lot of schools in America went through a phase of banning them

for being really distracting for kids. There were lots of warnings that some of them were dangerous. Do you remember there were various fidget spinners came out that were a bit like ninja stars that had sort of pointed ends. Oh, really? And there was actually this woman who was employed to test them, a blades expert apparently called Sarah Haynesworth, who BBC Watchdog made her test these things

to see if they could penetrate skin or eyeballs. And her job and only expert should attempt this was to get a fidget spinner and stab a tomato with it, which apparently represents an eyeball, and then stab some pork skin with it that represents human skin. So interesting because I have some fidget spinners in my house and I've also been trained how to throw ninja stars. So I can actually try and I have some tomatoes.

You're qualified. Do you say that anyone can do this, Sarah? Well, again, I think everyone should be their own blades tester as well as their own doctor. So yes, you should start stabbing tomatoes. Awesome. The trick is in the flick of the wrist at the end, just in case you hold it like between your thumb and your first finger

and then you throw it and then you flick your wrist at the last second and then it helps it to spin and it's sticking to things. That's like flaring a knife. That's why Harold Lloyd could never have become a ninja after his terrible publicity accident. You did have two hands. Good point. That's why Harold Lloyd would have had to be ambidextrous

if he was to realize his ambition of becoming a ninja. It's ironic that the one famous thing about him is he's on a clock, which does have two hands. Wow. That is such a slap in the face, isn't it? We wrote about fidget spinners at the height of their craze back in 2017 in our first book of the year. And James, you found out this thing,

which is that of all the top 25 toys on Amazon.co.uk, all of them were fidget spinners. And I went to check up Amazon today just to see where they sit in the top 100 and not a single fidget spinner has stayed in the top 100. Really? Yeah. And the top toy at the moment is a black balloon

that's in the shape of a zero. I think you can get it multicolored, but that's the image that you're met with. That's quite a nihilist thing to give to a child. Yeah, a black zero. Happy birthday, users. But it did last longer than everyone thought, so that was 2017, where it was at its peak.

But in 2019, fidget spinners still accounted for a fifth of all toy sales. What? Wow. Really? It's amazing. I was looking at other toys that can be used for medical uses. Oh, cool.

And I found a paper called A Novel Method for the Removal of Ear Ceremon. So that's earwax. Can you think of what toy might be used to remove earwax? Oh, OK. Yes, yes, yes. A yo-yo, but a very small yo-yo that you just got to dip in the ear.

It's a good first guess, but not quite right. OK. No. So something, something absorbent or something with a little scraping edge to it. Yeah, you need a scraping like a Lego man's hand. You know, you can go in with that pincer grip. It's got a pincer grip on it, doesn't it?

That's good. Yeah. Ooh, ooh, silly putty. Just put in so much silly putty that the earwax is forced out. So have you guys never had any issues with earwax? I think you haven't because you don't seem to know what they actually use in real life. You suck it out.

But I'm trying to think of something that you suck. That's a toy. A straw. One of those really fun straws. They don't suck it out. Ear doctors all have massive mouths and they just put their entire mouth around your ear. And there's a head ring hoover

and they just stick it to your head. I'm going to stop before the brain comes out. No, I know what it's going to be. It's going to be a fake doctor's syringe, maybe. Exactly. They syringe it out normally. And what it is, is a Super Soka Max D5000. Wow.

This is a guy who, he was living on an island and the child had real problems with earwax and he couldn't get to the doctors to get a syringe quickly enough. So he said, the owner of a Super Soka Max D5000 was sought out. After hearing an explanation of its intended application, he granted permission for its use. Verbal consent was obtained from the patient.

He then changed into swimming shorts, located himself on an ideal location on the deck and held a Tupperware container, product number 1611 slash 16 to the side of his neck. The Super Soka Max D5000 was filled with body temperature water and then mildly pressurized using the blue hand pump. The trigger was depressed, releasing a gentle narrow jet of water which was aimed along the posterior wall of the ear canal.

And then after 15 seconds, bits of wax started coming out and it worked. I might do that. Wow. That's great. I think don't do that. This was a medically trained professional and this is a thing that happened and it is in a medical paper

but I think if you do have earwax problems, maybe you should consult a professional. You guys are so boring. Don't piss in my fidget spitters. The Super Soka's in my head. Do you know what the best selling doll of 1976 was? You'll be surprised. 1976.

1976. Was it a Richard Nixon doll? I was about to say very close. It's not very close. Was it a... When was Star Wars 77? It wasn't Luke Skywalker. The Exorcist did not come out in 1976.

Well, you're all kind of getting closer. It is a pop culture thing. It was Cher. Was it? Really? Yeah. There were Sunny and Cher dolls and the Cher one was very customizable, had different outfits and things

and it was hugely popular. Really? Best selling doll of the entire year was Cher. That makes sense, yeah. I am surprised, Andy. I just don't have any references that I can make jokes about Cher. No, I'm just trying to... I'm definitely trying to think of a single Cher song.

Shoop Shoop song is the only one I could think of. Yeah. The famous one with Sonny Bono. What was that, the duet? I got You Babe. I got You Babe. Yeah. I was just imagining being a parent and having two kids

and I earned one Cher doll and convincing them it was called Cher because they had to share it. I'm sorry, I switched off and went there. OK, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that Al Capone ran a soup kitchen during the Great Depression. He served beef on Thanksgiving in 1930

because there had just been a theft of 1,000 turkeys nearby and he didn't want the authorities to think it was him. Makes sense. Yeah. Andy had to do something with a 50 cows evening, didn't he? That's probably more like it. So yeah, Al Capone, Chicago gangster, public enemy number one. Bad guy killed lots of his enemies,

especially in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre in 1929. But like a lot of these people who were bad guys, he had this kind of Robin Hood reputation where he would give to charity in the local area and the idea, I think, sometimes is that he's less likely to get ratted out if people like him. Although it has to be said that this soup kitchen, although it definitely existed,

he might have not paid any money for it because he could have leaned on some local businesses to donate their beef and whatever because obviously that extortion was a lot of his shtick. So he might have said to you guys, you better give me some stuff for my charity or else. So that's the negative portrayal of Al Capone. But on the other hand, it was a soup kitchen.

It was a soup kitchen. Yeah, and they gave breakfast, lunch and dinner to over 2,000 people in Chicago every single day. And the newspapers kind of were not sure about it because on one hand they thought, obviously, this is a good thing that people are being fed, but on the bad hand, they could see him becoming like the mayor of Chicago

if people liked him too much. And they thought if a gangster becomes the mayor of our city, then we could be in real trouble. He was sort of de facto mayor for quite a while, wasn't he, in that he ran the city, essentially? Well, yeah, he didn't really need to become mayor because he had a guy called William H. Thompson, who was known as Big Bill,

and basically Al Capone funded him and made sure that he stayed in place. And Big Bill was sometimes known as Kaiser Bill because he was very pro-German during World War I. And in the 1920s, he threatened to punch the British king in the snoot. It's not the worst war in which to be pro-German, to be fair to him.

No, there have been worse ones since. Yeah, I find Al Capone so amazing how he conforms to all the gangster cliches and the fact that he could just commit multiple murders and everyone know and no one be able to do anything about it. I mean, he shot people in, you know, open public. There was one of his rivals. He just went down into a bar and shot him in the head.

And everyone saw, everyone knew he'd done it, but no one's going to say anything. They were all distracted by an argument about a dictionary going on in the other corner. Newspapers reported it as an unfortunate occurrence. Anna, I wonder though, if you've got that right, you're probably right, but I wonder if you've got that wrong when you say he conformed to the cliches.

I wonder if Al Capone invented the cliches. Yeah, you're right. All the movies born off the back of his life and of all the gangsters of that time are what inform us about the mafia. So he kind of invented cliches. I didn't know that he was called Scarface. I mean, I'm sure anyone who, you know, has read a bit about it

didn't know that. But yeah, I didn't know that he had the big scars and the first film called Scarface was about him. No, I didn't know that either. He hated the name. Yes, he did, yeah. And he got the scars on his face from insulting a lady. The brother of a lady was taken aback and slashed his face.

But he used to claim that he got it as a result of some service time in the army because he didn't want to just admit that he was, you know, lost a battle. In the fight where he got scarred, Al Capone, his brother James Capone kind of got involved in it and pushed the guy who scarred him through a glass window because obviously he just cut his brother.

And he was so worried that this guy was going to come back and get him that he fled the city and joined the circus. And then he served in World War One. And then after the war, he changed his name after his favorite cowboy and became a prohibition agent and basically spent his whole time stopping people from moving alcohol around,

which is where Al Capone got most of his money. But he didn't realize that that had happened because at that time Al Capone wasn't really famous for that kind of thing. And so he only later found out that his brother, who he'd left after that fight when he was 16 years old, had become the greatest mobster and he had become one of the big prohibition agents.

There needs to be a film that imagines the meeting between them where he knows he's arresting this huge prohibition breaker and suddenly they meet face to face. He was called Vincenzo Capone, wasn't he, this guy? Originally. And then he became Richard Hart. But there were so many Capones.

I think eight or nine Capone siblings in all. And the last member of the family alive, she was alive in 2012, and no, she is still alive because she's on Twitter, is Deirdre Capone. Wow. The most harmless name, Deirdre. Well, I know.

She defends Al Capone's reputation, which I think is an uphill battle. She's written a book saying he was a mobster, not a monster. And she's written a book all about him, which includes recipes like meatballs, a la Capone. Wow.

And these days she's just retweeting, you know, like dogs and meditation. She has a Twitter account. It's so weird that a Capone family member... You should be judged by your grandparents, should you, really? Oh, or your Twitter account. I just like to make very clear.

He was quite a family man, though, again, as the cliches then played out. He had that typical, I've got a wife who, theoretically, doesn't know anything that's going on, but maybe she knows everything. He really loved his son, so his son had hearing damage,

probably because it was congenital syphilis contracted from Al Capone, which he famously had. And he spent $100,000 fixing his son's hearing in 1925. He didn't even really have a huge amount of spare. He was a family guy, but his syphilis was a much bigger part of his life than his gang time, wasn't it? Can we say that for sure?

What? Time-wise. Total time-wise. Time-wise, sorry. Time-wise. It was a longer part of his life. You're right. OK, so biographers aren't always complaining.

Why do they always focus on the gangster years? It's more about his rancid penis. I think of myself as a syphilis patient who happens to be in the mob. Not a mobster who has syphilis. Well, I think by the end, he basically couldn't think of himself as anything. It was so awful.

I didn't sort of realize the symptoms of untreated syphilis, but by the time he went to prison in 1930, he was starting to really suffer from it. There's a theory that one of the reasons he was moved from Atlanta prison to Alcatraz, where he was famously sent, is actually that he was being bullied in the Atlanta prison because he was very weak,

and he was starting to lose his faculties because of the syphilis, and his cellmate had to protect him because, you know, everyone else was bullying him, and so he was accused of special treatment because this cellmate was protecting him, so he was shifted. But yeah, by the time he got to Alcatraz,

he was having problems. He was one of the first people ever to be treated with penicillin in 1940 for it. Really? Wow. Have you heard of his lawyer? Oh, one of his lawyers. I'm sure he has heard of him over this time.

I don't know what he called. If it's Charlie Chaplin, yes. If it's someone I haven't heard of, no. He was called Hiromendo. No. No. Okay. So he defended him in a trial, I think, in 1930,

which was when they first nabbed him. You know, they eventually got him for tax evasion, but they first got him for unlicensed ownership of a gondola or something. Anyway, this is the earlier trial. That was in about 1930. Guess when Hiromendo retired? Okay.

So he must have been at least 30 then, and he retired when he's 65. So he retired in 1965. He retired in 1994. Yes. He died in 2001, aged 107, but he kept practicing law until he was 100 years old. Oh, my God.

Wow. I know. Was he Donald Trump's lawyer? He just feels like the kind of guy who definitely must have been Donald Trump's lawyer at some point. He was just amazing. His working life,

he started working when he was six at the age in 1900, and he kept working for 94 years. He wasn't working as a lawyer when he was six, just to clarify, you could say this earlier. Who would you rather have the six-year-old lawyer rather than 100-year-old lawyer? He had another lawyer who was called Edward O'Hare, who testified against him in court.

Not a good lawyer. Oh, wow. That's not the kind of lawyer you want. And he's slightly a notable character, not just for his connection to Capone, but his son is called Edward Butch O'Hare Jr., off which O'Hare Airport in Chicago is named after. Oh, really?

Yeah, he was a Medal of Honor fighter pilot who single-handedly shot down eight Japanese bombers. So he was a hero for Chicago. Why did his lawyer testify against him, though? That does seem like a bit of a rookie mistake. I'm sure he wasn't representing him any more at that point. I call to the stand, me. Al Capone, the only time he got shot,

was when he shot himself, wasn't it? He shot himself by accident. 1928, he had a golf game. So James' golf dangerous game, he's got to be careful. I'm playing on Saturday. Well, try not to put your gun to near golf clubs in the bag, because that's how he did it. The details are slightly unclear,

but we think that after a round of golf, he got into his car and he opened his golf bag and fiddled around, and he was keeping his gun in there as well. And he shot himself, and he shot himself sort of multiple times, I think, through the groin and through the upper... Why did he keep shooting after the first... That doesn't stack up, Anna.

It really doesn't. I think he had multiple wounds. Maybe the bullet went in and out and in and out, kind of like a sewing needle. Or if you press your finger on a trigger accidentally, can it deploy multiple bullets? It's a machine gun, it can. I wonder who doesn't keep a machine gun in their golf bag.

If afterwards someone said, did you get a hole in one, and he said, a hole in one of my testicles. Yeah. He wasn't a funny guy. I read in one Capone biography, this thing that gang... Habit that gangsters had in the 20s,

that Brooklyn gangsters had, which apparently they devoted huge amounts of time to. So... And this is also in a book about Brooklyn gangs, but I couldn't find first-hand evidence. Apparently, gangsters devoted huge amounts of time to the look. And the look is a

threatening stare that you give someone. It was a deadly gaze designed to strike mortal fear into the heart of an enemy. And it was more frightening than any kind of violence, or anything like that. And so, they practice it. Apparently, Al Capone is very good at it. It's the source of all this...

Yeah, so Andy's doing it, sort of trying to do it now. You know, you can't shake your fist, James, that is cheating. But probably the young gangsters' habits was to stand in front of the mirror for hours, and end each day practicing the look. That's so funny. Yeah, Capone used to think that he was very

a well-dressed guy as well. They had to look in the other way, didn't they? He had the nickname Snorky, which he much preferred to scarface. So, he's quite embarrassed by scarface. And like, if there were cameras on, he would try and move the scars to the... so they couldn't see them on the camera.

He wouldn't move the scars, obviously, and that's very difficult to do, isn't it? He would move the scars, but only because they were attached to his head and he was moving his head. But yeah, he liked to be called Snorky, which in those days meant someone who was well-dressed. He looks a bit snorky.

Snorky? It's not like a cartoon dog. He's much less threatening. Al Snorky Capone. Yeah. I read a thing in Gentleman's Gazette recently, which was about Al Capone. It said, Al Capone was known as much for his sense of style as he was for his psychopathic tendencies,

which I would dispute. I think you're right. I think it's number one, syphilis, number two, psychopathic tendencies, number three, style. Yeah. I think that's the hierarchy. MUSIC OK, 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, always giving us the look. At James Harkin.

And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yeah, but you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or our website. You can go to nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there, as well as links to bits of merchandise that we've released over the years.

OK, guys, once again, we hope you're staying well. We hope you're safe. We hope your family is doing well. Thank you so much, as ever, for listening to us during this weird, weird time. We will be back again next week with another episode, and we'll see you then. Goodbye. MUSIC

MUSIC MUSIC MUSIC Good over there. Can I quickly say at Deirdre Capone? Just because we mentioned her on Twitter, and I don't know if it's funny or not.

Deirdre Marie Cap. I don't know why she put it in Marie. It left out Capone, but there we go. Because Cap is a slang word for putting a cap in it, for shooting someone. That comes from Capone. Put a cap in your ass. Come on, we're just in a gullible podcast, Dan.

Oh! Right at the end! I held that. I deliberately held back. Damn it! We're still recording. MUSIC MUSIC