No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Alfred Hedgehog

Episode Date: October 1, 2026

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss fufu, Yakity-Yak and perplexing painkillers.Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hobern. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray. 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 Andy. My fact is, half of China watches TV drums. that are one minute long. These are things called micro dramas.

And I hadn't really heard about them until I read an article saying they're all going out of business. So I feel like these have arrived and they're now leaving. It's taken me to notice. It's really weird to research something you've never heard of and then just see that they're one of the most ubiquitous things in the world. What else are we missing? There might be new large mammals that I have never heard of before.

Like huge mammals. You know what I mean? Yes. In fact, for all of us, there will be a largest animal that we've never heard of, right? It won't be the same. Never heard of. Yeah. No, like, there are millions of animals, right?

So there will be a largest one that you don't know about. Actually, there's quite a lot of, like, quite weird bovines and deer that live in various parts of the world that you won't have heard of. Have an example. They won't be exciting. There's not going to be a big cat that's just bigger than a lion. Probably not. It actually turns out. I found out about a kind of Mexican dog the other day.

Chihuahua. No. No. But that's the... So if anyone. could be go bigger than chihuahua. But that's easy because they're not in the news all the time. I'm surprised if you think pop stars, I ain't heard of McElmore who's in the news right now. I just hadn't heard of him. Yeah. I just don't listen to radio at the moment, you know.

Well, he was on the radio at least 10 years ago. Probably more like 15 years ago when he's quite, yeah, yeah. I've never heard of him either. But as, as you know, that's no sign of anything. We're not saying the McElw is the largest animal. It could be. He's a big guy. When he wears that big coat thing, he's enormous. He looks like a bit of charismatic. mega fauna actually. He looks like a yak. Yeah, he does. Here the Macklemore walks through the tundra. Yacklemore, more like. He's definitely bigger than the

mackle less. Lovely. So micro-travers These are, yeah, can't believe we never heard of them. It makes me feel like we might be out of touch and every listener will be going, wow, I watch this all the time. Well, we're not in China. That's the thing. So they're big in China, Southeast Asia, Japan.

They're not as big in the West. They've been tried over here a couple of times, but they haven't made a huge breakthrough yet. And basically, They're dramas where there might be 50 or 100 episodes in a series, but they're only one or two minutes long. They're tiny. And the business model is get people watching on their phones, film 100 episodes, there's a cliffhanger every 60 seconds. So the plots are quite out there. And you get the first five or ten for free, and then they start walloping you.

But you have to know by that point. You have to find out how it's going to end. It might be the most expensive way of consuming incredibly, often low. quality. No. Yeah. No, don't say that. Don't say low quality.

I've watched a bunch of these and I think they are fine art. They're absolutely hilarious and it does make you wonder if this is the downfall of humanity doing this. I don't know if you guys watched. I watched a few of the Chinese ones which I have subtitles, which are very amusing. And then The Guardian did an article about them, of course, a few years ago and it name checked loving my brother's best friend as one of the English language ones that was hoping to make it big. So did any of you guys watch that?

Of course. No. This one is meant to be like this is going to be a proper drama that people in the West are going to enjoy. The two characters in it are naked within the first minute. After 59 seconds, I reckon. Yeah. Yes. Charlie. Or just that 59 seconds, they start to take off their tops. It is like that. Yeah. We said about how much it costs. I think this was in The Economist, but it might have been The Guardian. But they said that you're basically pay more to watch Tricton. to having my ex-husband's baby, then you were paid to watch, you know, The Odyssey and IMAX. Right.

By the end of it, once you've added up all the different amounts, which is... It's very... I mean, it's, yeah, it's very clever, the micropayment thing. Well, in 2024, they worked out that it generated $6.9 billion American dollars, right? And in America, it was $8.7 billion for the cinema box office. So it was encroaching on that. It's a big business. And they trick you, don't they? When you go on these apps, you buy...

credits, but you don't buy it each time you buy like 100,000 credits for 500 quid or whatever it is. And then it says, do you want the next one for 724 credits? So you've got no idea what you're going. And then suddenly all your credits have gone and they still haven't got their tops off.

It's the longest one I've found. You guys might have found a longer one than this. This one is on Pocket FM. Just to give the boys and girls at Pocket FM. A bit of a shout out. It's called My Vampire System. I think this one's audio only. but it is 4,192 episodes long.

Wow. If you do all the like, I think there are some side quests and extra bits and all of that. Yeah, but I mean, how many episodes have we had and our episodes are an hour long? If you add all of the side quests. That's true. We've got on much longer than them. We should have charged people 20p per episode of fish. Because you might pay several hundred dollars just to listen to the whole of my vampire system.

But do you really think that people are going to pay like 50p when, Andy says, hey, guys, I've got a great idea for a new cop drama. And that's our clickfanger. Do you reckon people are going to click on that? The thing is you pay to skip. Sorry, I didn't make it yet. The show is free, but you can pay just get me to the end of this bit. Now, that is a good business model.

So your interjections are the equivalent of adverts on anything else. Yeah, they're alerts for things that don't exist. People will say, oh, do you skip the Andes? Do you know, I actually quite enjoy the Andes sometimes? That's what people said to me when I visited South America. There are big Western actors because this is massive in Asia, but as you said, Andy, it sort of did make its way over. There's one guy called Joseph Purcell. He was in movies called The Bad Boy Wants Me, Club of Desire, Falling for My Bodyguard.

He's big online, but you may not have heard of him. He's Miley Cyrus's stepbrother. He's super famous, but he's not really done any major TV or anything. Is Billy Ray Cyrus his father? No, no, he's not. What do we mean super famous? Well, I think, okay, if you... Writing, if you haven't heard of him.

What if you're... Okay, yeah, it's hard. I think in fairness, like, the way that the world is now is people can be very, very, very famous in a sub-genre. Yeah. Like, for instance, podcasters. Yeah. And you can walk down the street and no one has any idea who you are,

but then a lot of people do know who you are, but they're all spread around the world. Yeah, or pop music. If Macklemore came in right now, I would honestly would be like, I'm sorry, so we're recording. How did you get? get into the building. To be fair, everyone working here is much younger than us and they would all know who Michael Moore was.

Absolutely. That's why he's here. He's been invited by them. Can I give you a few of my faith titles? Oh yeah. Because these are, I mean, they're good. I actually had a flash marriage with an abstinent male god. What's a flash marriage?

Is it where loads of people turn up to the marriage at once? That's it. Yes. You end up married to 250 people. My blind husband is a billionaire. Okay. All right. That's fair enough.

What's that doing? What's that title trying to get you in with? I think there are a lot of secret billionaires in these things. Yeah, there are. Ms. CEO's Baby Daddy is the Merchant of Death. Oh, I thought you were going to say Merchant in Venice. That would have been good. That's a great idea. Shylock's complicated domestic arrangements. What is the deal with the titles? It is like they're just owning the fact that they're shit. Like I went, go on real short. That's an English language one where you can watch them if you want.

spoiled by my four sea monster husbands. I think that's good. I think the draw of it is not dissimilar to Mills and Boone. And also, there was a big publishing boom a while ago. And when I say big, it made people very rich. Do you remember Bigfoot's bitch? And all those... Through you.

Yeah, but all those weird monster erotica. They got massive online. It's just this quick hit of romance. And in Mills and Boone, they kept saying you had to change it from millionaire to billionaires. to billionaire, and now it's trillionaire within Mills and Boone. Yeah, you just want a richer and richly. The fact that there's only been one trillionaire in world history, and thankfully at time recording, he's no longer a trillionaire. But when you say, I met my trillionaire husband, surely he can sue. Yeah. The only trillionaire in history, because he knows it must be

referring to him. He writes the books. That's how he became a trillionaire. That's how he's rich. So the big story in microdramas now is they're all going out of business. They're not going out of business, but AI is taking over. Everyone's being fired. Everyone's being fired. Apart from the card pullers, and the card pullers, they use prompts, and they keep putting prompts into AI, and then they get a scene, and then they go, is this going to fit in one of our stories?

If not, they get rid of it and put another prompt in, and they keep doing that until they get a prompt that they think is good enough to fit into the narrative. Add another sea monster husband. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wow. And then the problem is now that AI is able to do their job, so they're being kicked out as well. These card pushers are not being asked in the job anyway. So not only is this thing we haven't heard of, it's also been taken over by AI and also the people

who've taken over have been taken over by AI themselves. Wow. And that vertical drama vein of AI is insane because not only is it all just generated on its own, but there's versions where you tell the prompt where you want the story. to go next and it generates in front of you. So you are the director and there's even ones where I've read you can put your own face onto the lead character and be the hero of this AI adventure. You don't have to be the hero. Like if you have a very low self-esteem, you might accidentally make yourself like the fifth sea monster.

Oh yeah. The rejected sea monster. That's a good. I'm sorry, that's a good spin-off from that. Rejected trillioner sea monster is my boss. I was back on AI for one sec. This is obviously taking over all industries in various different ways. And did anyone see the TV show that went out on Channel 4 as part of dispatches? So this is their major investigation arm of Channel 4. And they released a show last year called Will AI Take My Job? And went around to all various different industries and showed how it was hip.

So it was the media, you know, but it was also music, fashion, law, supermarkets. And it was a pretty amazing documentary. It got really well received. The ending of it ends with the presenter going, AI is going to touch everyone's lives in the next few years. Call center workers, customer service agents, maybe even TV presenters like me, because I'm not real.

In a British TV first, I am an AI presenter. And the entire show was presented by AI. Wow. And you don't get that reveal right until the end, just to show you how scary and far it has come. Could you tell it when the presenter was walking around? Did they have all the fingers? And are they?

Yeah, I don't know. Actually, I didn't think they were leaving clues in. She was called Aisha, A.I. Shah. So they were seeding little things in there. I've got to say, and this just goes to show how AI just doesn't have that creative zing, saw that ending coming as soon as you started the anecdote. That's Dan, that's how Dan tells me.

You're right. He gives the real way. Did anyone? God twist, I am AI, Anna. That does not surprise me. The eye bits pretty surprising. You're a very early one though, aren't you? Artificial idiot.

Did anyone read about Tattle TV, which is the British microdrama platform? It sounds brilliant. It's going to be terrific. Again, owning up to what it is, I think it is terrific. One of the things is they've turned Hitchhawks, the Lodger, which was one of Hitchhawks' first films made in 1927. Sorry, you keep saying Hitchcock. I heard Hedgehog.

I'm trying to make this child friend. so I don't want to say the word cock. Well, this is more like Hedgehog. Alfred Hedgehog, which is very child-friendly. I mean, that is a kid's book rate to be written, isn't it? That's so good. Right, okay, no one. Don't put this out.

Alfred Hedgehog? Soi cow. Brilliant. Nice. Oh my God, we have something here, guys. Vertic cow. Hang on. Rear wind cow.

But it's just farting cows. North by North Cow You see sometimes the creativity needs that AI impact

Yeah you're right Bring on the AI Jesus You were saying Anna Oh yeah thanks

So it wasn't Alfred Hitchcock This was Alfred Hitchcock's 1927 drama The Lodger Silent Film The Lodger

A Story of the London fog and it's been remade for the two-minute long vertical format. And I read the reviews of it. There aren't that many. But one of them says, first time I've seen Hitchcock in vertical format. Yeah.

No shit. They should have done vertigo, vertical. Yeah. They should have done that. Yeah. And that's probably why it hasn't taken off. Yeah. Anyway, you can watch the whole film in YouTube.

And if you want, you can pause it every two minutes to recreate the experience. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the inventor of the chattering teeth and Kruplunk, as well as 800 other joke toys, is still inventing new products at age 105. That's so cool. Yeah. This is Eddie Goldfarb. At time of recording, he is 105 years old, and the man cannot stop producing toys.

The chattering teeth, we all know it. It's the little wind-up teeth that chatter across your tape. He did the giant bubble gun, which is a gun where you put in the liquid that comes out as giant bubbles as you shoot it. Shark attack. Do you remember that? Okay, it's a plastic shark and you've got to push its teeth in one at a time and then it will slam down on your hand when one of them goes down. I had that as a kid. Oh, that's great.

Yeah. Now that he's 105, does he actually use the chattering teeth himself? Oh my God. He said this in an interview. It's so funny. He said he didn't really realize. people have false teeth. And he said when he was aged 100, now, of course, I do know people have false teeth. I see. I see. And when it gets cold in the winter, he must like chatter his

teeth and sort of hark back to a simpler age. Well, I'd hope he's, I'd hope he's comfortable in the winter wherever he is. I think he's in California. So he's in a retirement home. He's got a 3D printer where he prints out all of his new ideas. He might get cold sometimes. You know it's California, but you know, you get used to a certain heat. And then even when it goes, bit colder, you might chatter your teeth. Maybe. Yes. Okay, yes. Maybe he's got a fever or something. Do they have sharks in California? Probably off the coast, they do, yeah. So when he's pushing the teeth in those sharks,

maybe he harks back to simpler times. Simpler times. But he got really screwed on the false teeth. He got paid $900. And the guy he had sort of gone into business with sold it to someone else for $2,000 and a half thousand dollars. And then it went on to make millions, I imagine. You know, so he sold the rights outright rather than keeping a percentage or whatever. Well, he was new in the game at that point. This was before he had his big ideas. So he was born 1921.

I mean, it's amazing. You know, he was, he was born Adolf. He was born at a time where that was a good name to have. He's the only other Adolf I know outside of Harpo Marx. He had to change his name. I'm sure there are other famous ones. Of course, there will be. It was a half him most.

Adolf. Yeah. And before. Chico Croucho Zepo and Adolf. It's funny. And before he got into being a tortuio. He was involved with a Navy during World War II inventing radar systems to help them fight against the Japanese. Yeah, basically the submarines couldn't find the Japanese planes because the Japanese planes were going too close to the surface because they'd realize that the American radar didn't work there.

And so he came up with a new system that allowed the radar to work at very low altitude, which allowed them to see the planes. Yeah. Really? It's so ironic. So the closer the planes got to the surface of the water, the lesser submarines could see them. Like if someone's got a gun up really close to you, you can't. Good point. If guns within 10 centimeters, you actually don't know they've got one.

Also, your blind spot. It might sometimes get cold in those submarines. Oh, his teeth would have been chattering. Maybe with fear as the Japanese planes came into. Yeah, yeah. Because he was on the submarine. He was on with the USS Batfish, which once sank three Japanese submarines in four days, which I think is a PB for the US Navy.

Yeah, so he was inventing stuff at sea. But that's where he started. You're right. Batfish, the submarine is where he started, had these ideas. And then he goes and sells his first product. to a man called Irving Fishlove. Fish is big in his life. And now he's on our podcast.

Wow. Oh, yeah. Coincidence? Other toy inventions? Sure. The Frisbee. Oh, yeah. Originally pies.

And it was a huge company, a frisbee pie company in Connecticut. In the 1940s, we're selling 200,000 pies a day, which is a lot of pies. Sir, that's crazy that Frisbee meant a pie. A frisbee was a kind of. it was a maker of pie. It was a brand, yeah. And the students at Yale, because only really smart people could come up with this idea, when they bought the pies, they realized that if you threw the tins, they flew quite well.

And so evolved eventually the frisbee, a toy company, Wamo, saw people doing this. And they actually had been presented with something called the Pluto Platter, which was the first name for a frisbee. But they thought, well, kids are already calling something like this a frisbee. So they slightly tweaked the spelling, so they didn't get sued by the pie company. it was never that the pie company then turned its trays into frisbys. It was another company kind of copied their design and just named it after them. Yeah, just changed the eye to an e.

I feel like even with the eye to an e, you should be able to sue. I know, right? It feels very close. Yeah, you should have a word. Yeah, they did try to rejuvenate the pie company in 2017, I guess, thinking they'd missed out on the toy. Yeah, maybe there's a small portion of people in Connecticut who only know the frisbee as a pie. Yeah, I think they're quite collector's items, those tins now, because it wasn't that they were generic.

They said Frisbee on them as well. So you can get them online as the originals. You know the guy we were talking about who Goldfab sold his thing to, his chattering teeth? Yeah. Irving. Irving Fish love. Fish love is a huge deal in Toy World. Oh, really?

As an inventor and entrepreneur. He is the man behind the fake rubber vomit. Is he? Which is a big deal. Yeah, the rubber vomit. Fake barf, which is you just see it on the ground. That might help. What is his vomit?

word. You don't bath. Oh, wrong, barth. You're on page now? I'm afraid, like, if you can think of anything that it might possibly be, that's what it is. Yeah, okay. So it's just a common toy that, um, maybe I've always thought it was real vomit when I've seen it, so I didn't know it existed. Maybe it's not so much a toy as a gag gift. Yeah. Or a thing you'd get in a practical joke shop. Probably not a gag gift, I would say. Really? No. You would give it to someone. You would put it on the floor and pretend that it's just happened. Well, it depends on the occasion, doesn't it? It's probably not good for a wedding.

I believe the 27th wedding anniversary is the bath anniversary. So the incredible thing about it, I just started reading about the fake fake vomit. So Irving Fishlove would use it himself sometimes because he thought it was so funny that he would take his, I just love this for his poor kids, he would take his teenage children to really nice restaurants and then he'd start hacking and coughing away. And then he'd go, ah! And then there'd be this face.

vomit on the floor and the waiters would go oh my goodness I'm so sorry sir and then he'd be laughing his head off just in terms of pure parental embarrassment I think that might be one of the most embarrassing thing your dad could do unless he also invented the fake poo fake shit Anna just in close um and it's but it's still made to the state of fake vomit it's very successful and it's handmade I love this yeah they get the mix which is just bits of plastic and styrofoam and sort of soupy stuff. And then they ladled it out like a little pancake. So everyone is individual.

Oh, wow. And it takes a full day to dry. That will be the last ever industry that AI manages to take over. Yeah. Yeah. I saw a photo of them. They have on like a giant tray almost, 500 of them. And they look like little cookies if you're at a distance.

And they lay them out in the sun to dry. And apparently, much like Coca-Cola or KFC, there is a secret ingredient that no one knows. and they are protecting. The carrots. It's carous, isn't it? It's selfish, really, you know. Give it away to the world like Tim Berners-Lee.

If you've cracked something like that. Yeah, you're right. Do you know what else is different for everyone, toy-wise? Jenga. As in they individually cut. Every block is different and has to be for it to work. Really? And there are various Reddit threads

about people who tried to make their own Jenga and failed, because they assume that they all need to be the same. So you can slide them out more easily. It makes so much sense, right? When you play Jenga, some of them can slip out. If you just cut Jenga completely evenly and equally, they'll all get stuck together and you won't be able to force any out. Lots of people saying, I don't know what I've done wrong.

I've just cut a Jenga set out of my own block of wood. People are saying you've got to sand it down unevenly. Yeah. So are the craftsmen in the Jenga factory who, you know, like old Italian carpenters who are like delicately taking... And all the Jenga buys. Oh my gosh. Jesus.

And they hire one person to walk around occasionally just bump into them and nudge the little bit of precision out of place. Wasn't Jenga? I thought it was based on like an African game and invented by a woman from Oxford or something because I remember she came to the QI club, I think. Oh, yes.

Yes. Well, remember. She's called Leslie Scott. And yeah, she grew up in Ghana and it was called, and Cujenga means building in Swahili. But the amazing thing about her is, I think we've also mentioned her husband.

So she was just this woman who played this as a kid with her brother and then decided this is going to make me a fortune and it did. And she's married to this guy called Fritz Volrath who's a spider and silkworm professor at Oxford University and he's invented ballistic knickers

which out of spider silk inspired products, among other things which protect you from bombs. I think that guy came to the QI Club as well. I feel like that... It feels like you invited one and you said there's a plus one here. It's like whoever it was brought the spouse. We definitely met Leslie.

Yeah. We've had drinks with her, yeah, at the club back in the day. What a fun couple. Ballistic knickers. Yeah. Good nickname. Who's shooting directly at your knickers? It's for us.

Of course. You was a big film star in the 1950s. People knew her as ballistic knickers. They're for landmines. Yep, much less funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. A much more serious. Classic and a fact.

You've got to finish on the down to appreciate the ups. We mentioned earlier how this guy, Adolf Goldfarb, Adolf E. Golphabhar, Eddie Goldfarb. The gold father, he didn't get his money for his yak-di-y-y-y-k teeth, right? Someone else who didn't get the money for something they invented was a woman called K-Zufal. She was a person who saw that people were using Play-Doh to clean their wallpaper and thought, you could use that, you could give that to kids and they can make stuff out of it. There was basically this company called Cotal Products. Because people had houses that had coal fires, their wallpaper used to get quite dirty.

And they came up with this product that you could press onto the wall and it would take the coal off it and clean your wallpaper. Then coal kind of became less popular. Natural gas came in to warm people's houses and also washable wallpaper was invented. And so they didn't know what to do. They were losing all of their money. and this woman came in and said, well, why don't you turn it into a toy? And she never made any money out of Play-Doh, which was sold for millions and millions afterwards. But she was allowed an unlimited supply of Play-Doh for the rest of her life.

Okay. Wow. That's insulting at that point. So, Kay, did you go and negotiate for some more dough? Well, yes. I do fancy the idea of being a toy maker, because you just have an idea and you can sell it to. to someone if it's good in original life. Like Eddie Goldfar of 800 of these ideas.

It's pretty astonishing. And there's like supposedly the arcade basketball system. The ball comes down and you shoot it. That was Eddie Goldfar. Really? Yeah. He had this one invention which was it was a drink that you sipped. And as you sipped, it turned around a merry-go-round that was in a dome at the top of the

cup for kids. As you drink, the merry-go-round goes around. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's forcing it up. Oh, I see. The force of you drinking makes it around. So nice.

And also, this is a thing. how good Eddie Goldfarb was at ideas. When his son was born in 1953, he didn't have much money. And when they're in the hospital, they couldn't pay the hospital bill. So at night, he forged money. Yeah, he came up with monopoly. He came up with an idea that night, left the hospital, sold it to a toy making manufacturer, came back with the cash and paid for his son's hospital bill. That's how much his brain is. I know about that. That sounds like he's lazy and he only does it. when he really needs to. It sounds like if he's that good, then he could have done it every day

for the nine months leading up to the birth. You're kind of right, because 800 is a lot, but when you're 105, is that impressive, really? Actually, can you consider it? Well, you want to be a toy inventor and how many of you invented so far?

Dan, I think you could do it. Thank you. I think you could do it, and I think you could win one of the biggest prizes in toy making, which is called the Idiot Award. Genuinely, the international designer

an inventor of toys. It's so good. There's a UK toy inventors dinner, which does sound like a fun place to be. Oh, would they be quite tedious after a while? You know, you just want to have a boring chat about the weather

and they keep putting whoopi cushions on your sea. There's a lot of fake bath, I think, chucked around. Eddie's won the Idiot Award, of course. Yeah, he's also won the witty. Winning inventor toy of the year.

That feels forced. A bit forced. It does, yeah. Whereas Idiot came very naturally. Hula Hoops, they were insane. popular when they were invented. So they were invented in 1958. That year, 120 million hula hoops were sold in America alone. No. The population was only 180 million. Most people have them. And they had no idea. The toy company who had a hula hoop, had no idea what to turn it into it first. So they came from Australia. And Australians used to use these bamboo rings to exercise with.

I thought they must have come from Hawaii where hula comes from. They did not, weirdly. They came from Australia. And then this guy in Australia who knew someone at an American toy company went and brought him a hula hoop and said, here you go, guy who works at WAMO, see what you can do with this. And the vice principle of WAMO was just like, it just sat in our research office for months and months because we were like, what do we do with this? He said, we put it on pegs, we rolled it down the street, what the hell? And then another Australian came by the office and was like, oh, you got a hula hoop. And they said, yeah, what the hell do we do with it? And the Aussie said, I'm too embarrassed to show you. Come outside and just one of you can come.

And I'll show you I'll show you in the privacy of the pavement They're probably thinking Oh God, it's a cock ring, isn't it? This is, wow. Okay, it is time for fact number three And that is Anna. My fact this week is that nobody knows

why paracetamol works. Come on. It's just weird, isn't it? I can't believe it. It just works. Just don't ask questions. There are boffins out there. They must have.

Have they not asked the buffins at fun.com? Exactly. They've forgotten to us called the toy makers. Maybe they can figure it out. They're next door. Don't confuse them. Yeah, I find this amazing. So we know very much how other painkillers work.

Ibuprofen and aspirin block this enzyme called the Cox enzyme. So they are indeed cox blockers. But paracetamol does seem to do something. to the Cox enzymes, but it doesn't stop any signals getting to the brain. Someone else said that it seems to activate cannabinoid receptors, so that maybe reduces a subjective experience of pain. It activates a Capsacin receptor. And, you know, sometimes people rub Capsacin on things,

even though chili also makes you feel pain as a handy nose. They always say with Capsacin, they always say, oh, we've just discovered the hottest chili in the world, which is hot enough to kill 200 people with one suck. And then they go, but it might be used to stop people from getting pain in the future, doesn't they always say that. Yeah, they do. They do. I'm going to try paracetamol first. But yeah, we just really don't know why. Is it possible that this is the most insane placebo that no one has called that? There we go. Well, I don't think it works. Well, it doesn't work on

everyone. It only works on some. It doesn't work on everyone. It doesn't work on everyone. On most people, right? Actually, quite a lot of people it doesn't work on it. That's one reason that a lot of doctors are starting to think maybe we shouldn't be given it to people because He has side effects in small cases. Like it can cause internal bleeding and it can cause different things if you take too much of it. And for some people, it just doesn't work. And so those people for whom it doesn't work might start taking more and more of it because it's not working. And they're the ones who might be susceptible to the side effects.

Wow. Can we talk about the guy who first synthesized it? We think he was the first to synthesize it. There may have been one friend of chemist earlier. But this guy was Harmon Northrop Morse, great name. So good. Two great names. Three actually.

Harmon. Oh, and to first do no harm on. Yes. Interesting. But he, so he came up with it in 1878, synthesized it. But then he had a colleague called Joseph von Mering, who claimed that maybe it might do some damage. And there were a couple of other painkillers on the market at the time.

And those were chosen over paracetamol. And for the next 70 years, nobody took paracetamol. Until the 50s, when a couple of other teams tried it, and found that the other medicines, the ones that had been chosen, were not terribly good for you. And in fact, they were basically converted into paracetamol inside you. Those were just sort of pro-drugs. You took those. In your body, they turn into paracetamol, and then that does actually give you the benefit of the pain relief.

Isn't it true that von Mering found it in people's urine who had taken one of those other drugs? I think that's right. So people have been taking this other drug, and then he was going through their piss for some reason. going through their piss in the piss bin I'm not sure exactly why he was doing that I guess he probably had some reason but then I think he found

paracetamol in people who'd taken it and the other one that were taking was called phenocetin and phenocetin I think caused some problems turned you blue didn't it turned you blue it did so there was like a precursor to paracetamol which turned you blue

because it stopped oxygen being able to combine with your hemoglobin Sounds bad. But really quickly after this, they managed to create something very similar that didn't do that. But everyone was like, I think it might have the blue thing still. How blue did you go? Just, you know, like it's really cold. Like a Smurf.

Like Smurf level. Again. The Smurfs actually had just taken this drug. That's the thing. Same with that guy from Eiffel 65, that song. Blue Dabody. Blue D and the Blue Man group. Are they just all on that medicine?

Right. It's a warning about phenocetin. You do feel like Eddie Goldfarb could do something with that. to turn that into a Halloween thing that you'd have, you know? What's actually happening here is Dan is testing out one of his new toy ideas. And when we didn't really respond to it, I think he's going to go back to the drawing. Yeah, no, no, it's cool. I've got other ideas. I've got other ideas. So guys at Wamo, I've got this great idea.

We give people this medicine, which may or may not be really bad for them. We're not sure. But they turn blue. But with the right packaging, move it from the chemist aisle to the toy aisle. You've got something there. Phariseedomol. It's another accidental invention as well. Another favourite. One of the times that it was discovered,

this was in the 1880s again and then it was sort of undiscovered, were two people, Kahn and HEP, who they had a patient, they were doctors, they had a patient with intestinal worms, and they actually ordered some naphthalene, which is what mothballs are made of. So they basically ordered mothballs from the chemist.

I'm afraid you've got moth balls. Is it like tennis elbow? Brilliant. Yeah. So they all... Your stand-up is just telling a joke and then saying brilliant straight after it. Don't rumble me 12 years in. Bolls is where your testicles just flitter towards any nearby light source.

It's very painful. Looking through your clothes, you know? So no, it wasn't that. It is an old joke That isn't it It's like my clothes are getting eaten Have you tried mothballs Well I tried but I couldn't get the little legs open

Yes That's a brilliant Brilliant Yeah there we go Yeah I made it better So mothballs Yeah come on We can do this

Yeah we can They order mothballs to cure intestinal worms And the chemist sent them the wrong thing The chemist accidentally sent them acetanilide, which is kind of like paracetamol, and it didn't get rid of the intestinal worm, but it did bring down his fever. So they said, oh, great stuff. And they went back to the chemist

to be like, so you gave us those mothballs, wow. And the chemist went, do you know what, I've just checked the packets. And I sent you completely the wrong thing. Right. Paracetamol could be useful, I think, in a children's birthday party. Riddle me this. Children are very loud. They shout a lot. Afterwards, you'll have a headache. James's party bags are really questionable. Culple all round. You should have a paracetamol, a fake shit. Before the party.

So when you're getting the party ready. Oh, okay. So what do you need? Do you need balloons? You need... Keep going down that track. Pin the tail on the donkey? Keep going down the balloon track.

You need balloons. Blowing up. You need about the balloons. Does it give you more breath? It doesn't give you more breath, but it increases your risk-taking behavior. So they did an experiment where they gave some people paracetamol and some people didn't

and then they did something called the balloon test and in the balloon test you keep blowing up a balloon until you think this is the time I have to stop because if I don't stop now it's going to explode and the people who took the paracetamol would blow it bigger than the people who didn't take it because they're less risk averse. When you go to a kid's party,

do you really judge it if the balloons aren't big enough? I think kids do. Like when I've blown up, if I've blown up balloons for my jeans, for my daughter and her friend and one of them gets a bigger balloon than the other, that's the end of the day. Really good point.

Does it mean more explode in your face, though? It does. It does, but worth it for the big balloons. By the time you take it the paracetamol, you can't feel it anyway. So you're saying we're more brave generally with paracetamol on us than not... Exactly.

Reduced anxiety, more risk-taking behaviour. Wow. It does seem to have this amazing emotional effect, doesn't it? Which lots of little studies have shown, so scientists aren't totally short yet, but, I mean, it's coming up a lot. a reduction of empathy

people are quite worried about and I liked it there was another study where the title was anxious about life and afraid of death paracetamol may do the trick which is nice

because we all fall into that category right and this is a study that made some people watch a David Lynch series called rabbits and other people not and then they made both sets assign fines to certain crimes

that they'd seen and if they'd taken paracetamol they were more lenient with the fines. Incredibly confusing study set up. Very weird. It almost seems like the movie is... Irrelevant. Yes. But yet, they're saying that we're trying

to induce this terror of death and this existential fear. So we're going to give you Parasidemal and make you watch rabbits and then see how lenient you are on the fines, like whether you've got this existential fear that makes you harsher. But the other thing about David Lynch movies is they're completely impossible to understand. I'm sorry, I actually think you're mixing up the directors.

I think it was David Leach, who is part of the Alfred Hedgehold Earl of directors. So much less cute. Steven Spiel Cow. There we go. That is interesting. And if your partner has a headache and you're worried you might get a sympathy headache

because you're a very empathetic person. You should take paracetamol. So it can dull your ability to feel... What are you on about? If your partner gets a headache, you go? When you're going to your wife, should we have sex? She's like, oh no, I've got a headache. You're like, yeah, me too, me too.

I'm so run down. I think I need a holiday on my own. Do you know, I'll take that for you, actually. That's probably going to fix it. The idea is it dulls your ability to feel pain in others. You know, we're talking about feeling sympathetic pain, which some people do. Paracetamol apparently tamps that down. So if you've only got one left in the packet and your wife has a headache,

it should be for me. It should be for me. We don't want this catch. Can I quickly tell you about the largest aspirin transfer in history? This is so exciting because it's friend of the podcast, the Treaty of Versailles. Do you know about this? Bayer, the drug company, German, owned the patent for aspirin. And as part of the reparations for the First World War,

they had to give over the trademark to Britain, France and Russia between them. And they also had to give a quarter of all aspirin to the Allies A quarter of all aspirin made was just given to the Allied powers. I don't know weird? Actually, just on the war, well, another war,

only because I'm just looking through my notes now. Do you remember, Anna, you mentioned about the two students who thought they were giving naphthalene to someone but gave them this other precursor to paracetamol. Yeah. Their professor who organized

the experiment was called Adolf Kusmal. One of the only Adolfs I've heard of outside of Hitler and Harpo and Goldfar and Goldfar We're dragging Adolf

It's actually in the top ten boys' names this year I checked my phone to make sure I wasn't making this up But if you When we were naming my first son Wilf when we were looking for names I have a book at home

Which is boys names And Adolf is a suggestion in there Is it a comprehensive list of names If you like Has it got thousands of them Aousand1 names Yeah yeah for boys I'm just surprised

That it's still in there As an option for any Was it published in like 1919 or? It was a modern book. Do you reckon they had a thousand and one and they're like, oh, we should get rid of Adolf? They're like, yeah, but we can't think of anymore. We're going to have to change the name of the book.

Do they have notes next to it? You know, when you have the meanings of names. Do they have, you know, the origin of this is it means away from harm, P.S. sometimes associated with. They should do that, shouldn't they, in those baby name books? And they should also put things that it can rhyme with that people, might say in the playground. Yes, exactly.

They should like when you go to... Adolf is actually quite a good one for that because you can't rhyme too much with A-Oltf as in... Adolf. There aren't very many natural rhymes for that. So in fact, it's quite a good name to call your son in playground terms.

There's no way anyone will find a way of bullying. It's actually amazing that Hitler got so angry later in life when he probably wasn't bullied at school. Yeah. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in order to prepare the national dish of Ghana, you need to vigorously pound your foo-foo for at least 20 minutes.

You don't know. Since you sent this fact around to the four of us, James, how often I've said to my wife, don't suppose you care to prepare the national dish of Ghana. Sorry, I've got a headache. Yeah, me too, me too. It's a brilliant chat-up line. I'm so sorry. I mean, it's very childish. Sometimes you seem like you're the mature one of the show, and then sometimes you send this round new thing. He's a child. I am mature in age only. Poundy foo, yeah. So I was reading the Oxford Companion to Food

about yams for the Y series of QI. And in that book, which is a very venerable book about encyclopedia of food, it does say, to make foo, the bald yarn must be vigorously pounded for 20 minutes. And I just read that and thought, well, we definitely have to run

that. And not certain we'll get it onto QI. So I thought we might have to do it on here instead. But James, you can't blame the book unless it put a smiley, winky face after that. The book is just telling you the fact. It's you that suggested that it's very funny. I'm not blaming the Oxford Companion to food. Are you saying it's not funny, Anna, the idea of vigorously pounding your food for 20 minutes?

I'm saying the author of the Oxford Companion to Food, not me accused of finding it funny. It's Alan Davidson. He's a brilliant. He is a brilliant writer and I always read that book with a slight wink anyway. Because I think he's such a great writer. It's so good. They are amazing. amazing articles. But yeah, the other thing that I found is that you use a foo-fou pestle

to make it. So it's like, you know, like a mortar and pestle that you might have in your house is like that, but the sticky bit is three feet in length. And the bowley bit is obviously a bit wider than a normal mortar and pestle. So you put it on the floor, don't you? I mean, which makes sense in a lot of contexts maybe in Ghana. But like here, it's strange to put your pestle on the floor. Yeah, you wouldn't do that unless you were a borrower in this country. But this is to make Fufu and Fufu is not the official national dish of Ghana

because they don't have one but widely considered amongst Ghani's people to be so. And it is also across the whole of Africa really. West Africa, yeah. Yeah. So Ghana, Nigeria. Yeah. And my friend did say that she makes it a lot and said

that it's a massive workout. And also she said, and she's Nigerian, but it is very widely eaten Nigeria as well. She said, you often need to throw out the pot after you've made it because it's super sticky. So I don't know how many Evasta, I'll get, I'll follow up, I don't know how many pots

she's going through on a monthly basis, but yeah. So Fufu is the end product. That's the pounded, boiled, yam. Or it could be various different things as well. It's not always just yam. Sometimes it's cassava and sometimes it's something else. I read that when you eat it, you would go in with your hands and rip off a bit of it and you put it in your mouth

and you just swallow it down, much like an oyster, maybe, or a paracetamol pill. And you often, speaking to someone who's saying, his family always throws it in the air, which I think is common. Like, you throw it and you roll it into a ball,

you toss it in the air, and then you catch it quite fun, which we should start doing that more with food. A bit like pancakes, I suppose. And then you make a little hole in it with your thumb so you can scoop up soup and eat it. But, yeah, swallowing it down.

And they're quite big the bits that you have. So don't chew. So yams. Oh, yeah. Now, these are not sweet potatoes. And I think in the USA, there's a bit of lexical confusion. But I've got to say, I did think a yam was one thing. And how wrong was I?

Oh, there are so many yams. There are 870 odd species of yams. Many toxic. Many edible. Right. So, take your chances. I think that's very interesting. Yeah, and lots of non-actual yams get referred to as yams.

Yeah. It just gets used to refer to quite a lot of starchy, tubas. Yeah. So in America, it is sweet potato they're talking about when they say yams.

But they're not botanically yams. That's not the gam species. Exactly. Yeah. But in lots of African languages, the word for to eat is basically the same as jam,

just to indicate how significant as staple crop it is and has been historically for loads of people. Yeah. Millions of people. I actually bizarrely just read things fall apart,

which is a seminal piece of African literature, written in the 50s, but set in Nigeria in the late 19th century. And yams are the, the king. So the main character and things full apart of Conquo is like it's a male crop. Women can go near cocoa yams and cassava, but yams are the male crop because you have to

know so much about the soil to be able to get it right and you have to constantly kind of be pruning it properly and you have the big yam festival where you always give the biggest yam to the god that you're worshipping. And they talked about a really strange tribe where everything is upside down and it's the men who pound foo-foo for their wives. A lot of yam festivals around across Nigeria, Cote d'Ivoire as well, and Garner, obviously, as we've mentioned. So in Cote d'Ivoire, I read this. Sometimes a funeral or burial will have to be delayed until the yam festival is over because that takes priority. Way more important. It's kind of understandable, isn't it, if it's your main source of calories?

Oh, yeah, I suppose so. You're probably going to have to do your harvesting before. or anything else happens. You'd think you could knock off for half an hour, have a funeral, all the burial, and then back to harvesting foo-foo. Maybe. Dig the hole to harvest, put the person in the hole. Yeah, perfect.

They're about the same weight. A really big yam. Yeah. Really big yam. But the people who are good at digging have to do one or the other, really. Oh, I see. You know what you mean?

Oh, okay, that's very logical. Sorry, yeah, okay. Sorry, Derek's family, but we can't bury him because we're digging up yam. Am. Using the yam bonds? No. So you harvest all your yams and then they can last for eight, nine months.

But you have to store them and aerate them properly and they build barns out of yams. I was watching a YouTube video called The Largest Yam Barn in the world where a guy's showing you around his yam barns. It's like a shop so people are coming. And this woman's like, and what's this? And he's like, this is more yams. And then he walks down a corridor. And the whole, all the walls are made of yams. And he's like, and what's this one?

He's like, yeah, yeah, it's more yams. Yeah. And the whole thing just looks identical yams to me. She's going, and this one, he's like, yeah, it's more yams. Is this yam jenga that people play? It's jam jenga, yes. Wow, that's cool. They have those in the Trobeian Islands as well, which is near Papua New Guinea.

They're yam houses. But you don't put your own yams in. You would only put yams that someone else has given to you into your yam house. Because the trobrian culture is more like people giving things to each other. Oh. You wouldn't eat your own stuff that you've found. You would give that to someone else they would give it to you and it sort of makes the society more cohesive.

As long as you've grown good yams, I'd feel a bit embarrassed if I've grown a really bad yam and someone was giving me terrific yams. If you're moving into a house, do you sort of scope out the neighbours and see how their yam plot looks? I suppose you would. You have to, isn't you? Because you don't want, you know, some...

to move in next to something useless. That's like instead of looking up the good schools in the area, that's what they do in the Trobrian Island. Yeah, the good yam guide. You were growing your yams privately. No, I was going to use state yams, yeah, yeah. In the Trobrian Islands, the yam harvest is so important that everyone would get involved. And then at the end of it, you would have a big old party, which usually had lots of either sex or warfare.

Oh. How did you decide? Was that like stone, fake a scissors? Flipper yam. Flipper yam. Yeah. And so when colonialists and missionaries all came in and saw this was happening and didn't. think much of it. They brought cricket. And so now what often happens is they do the YAM festival.

And then after that, they have a massive cricket match. And it's one of these sort of cricket matches which has like 50 people on each side and loads of dancing and parades and all that kind of stuff. Right. That's nice. And also cricket bat would be quite good for pounding your foo, wouldn't it? Sure. It could be. Years ago, we mentioned yams and the fact that there is a suggestion that if you want to have twins, you should eat a lot of yams. And there's a town in Nigeria, where supposedly it's the highest rate of twin births in the world. And they even have a sign saying that as you go in. But the flip side of that is the first contraceptive pill that was developed, which was never commercially used, but it was developed, was made using Mexican yams. So this was a doctor in Mexico

City in the 1940s. He used the yams to thicken the mucus of the cervix to stop the sperm from reaching the egg. So that's exactly what it did. But he couldn't work out how to commercialise it. You can't just put it up your foo, can you? It's recommended. Yeah, then someone else got there first, but he managed it. Yeah. So cool. Andy, you mentioned lots of different types of yam. The cheeky yam, they quite like. This is one that you get in Australia, also known as the air potato. And it's cheeky because it's toxic unless you prepare it correctly. That is Cheeky. I don't think it's like death toxic.

I think it's like bath toxic. Unless you have too much for it, presumably. Real barf. Yeah, you slice it into tiny slices and you run it underwater. And the traditional way to prepare it is by slicing it with a kangaroo shoulder blade. Right. Climmy. Maybe that's the secret ingredient in the fake barf.

Someone just loves in a couple of those yams. A couple of cheeky yams. Yeah. Do you have to pound the foo food to detoxify it? Is it that it can be harmful if you don't prep it properly? These ones in West Africa, I think it's just to get the right consistency. Casava, which is often also what's used to make foo fu-fu, is toxic. A lot of cassava is toxic and to different levels.

So bitter cassava is toxic. So I'm just impressed that people confidently cook with it all the time, which they do because some of it you have to leave to soak for a day. two days to make sure you detoxify it, otherwise you get cyanide and you're poisoned. I always thought it was mad that you can buy cassava in the UK where most people probably wouldn't know how to prepare it. You always think that's crazy. And you can buy it in its toxic form, is what we're saying.

Well, I don't know, but I only learned that it was toxic a few years ago and then saw it in the shop and thought, is that wise? But they sell raw chicken in shops, don't they? And I have that every day and I'm fine. I found a claim that they can be 45 feet long, which I just think must be absolutely copper-bottomed rubbish. A yam? Yeah. They must mean four to five feet.

I think there was a decimal place, a decimal point, I think. And then the weights, you get some pretty, I was trying to find, you know, you know what researching these facts. It's like, biggest yam, oldest yam. Second World War yam. The oldest yam. Because we do on this show talk about the oldest ham quite a lot. Oh, yeah. Old friend of the podcast.

Well, I found a few different claims. One claim, which was printed in New Scientist, which is very reputable publication, right? In 2001, they printed a claim that the elephant's foot yam, which is a variety found in Southeast Asia, can weigh up to 300 kilos. And again, I'm a little bit skeptical,

because I just think that's a... That is quite heavy. Awful lot. Some of them can be over 100 kilos, Which is quite enough. 300 kilos must be not far off what the four of us together weigh. Yeah. For one yam.

It feels a bit toppy. Yeah. How would you... I mean, you need a huge frying pan, don't you? How are you cooking that? Well, you might cut it into smaller pieces. That's a good point. All right, chef.

Anthony Bordane over here's wowing us with the technique. The calendar in Fiji, five of the 11 months are named after things you can do with a yam. Are they in the picture as well? It's in the naughty calendar section. Do you do those things in those months? Yes, you do. So it's like clearing the land for planting yams and the month when young yam plants are ready to be tied with reeds

to get the vines to grow upwards. Wow. Uri. But it's basically, that's a traditional calendar, of course. It's not the one that everyone hangs upon the wall. But apparently in Fiji you deliberately plant your yams in very bad soil because there's a belief that it's like a sporting vegetable and it'll grow better if you give it a challenge. That's terrific. Weird idea. Oh, weird. I think that's a nice idea, don't you? Yeah, I think that's really cool.

October, maybe. Really good. Really good. Yeah, yeah. Can I say one last thing about Ghana? Because we might not be in these parts again for a little while. So nearly 4% of Ghana is covered by the world's largest. artificial lake, right? That's largest by area, not by volume, of course. But it's a huge amount of it. I mean, it's 3,000 square miles

more than. It's a big artificial lake. Right. It's used for hydro electricity and it is called Lake Volta. Now, why do you think it's called Lake Volta? Well, the Volta River is in Ghana, right? Is it named after the river? Yeah, it's named after the River. I was hoping someone would say it's named after

Count Alessandro Volta. Of course, it's the electricity pioneer. because it's a hydroelectric lake Oh I see James with his excellent knowledge of rivers Has absolutely torpedoed this way To be fair That's quite it would have been quite a stretch

To get Alessandro Volta I reckon I'm just impressed that you got the river Volta Yeah there are no wrong answers in this quiz It's a great quiz Well you were hoping that it was a thing That sounds like it's named after a person But it's actually named after

So it's a reverse Exactly Second book I'm already working on the second book We've tried to trick us. Very nice. 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're all online. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram, Andy. At Andrew Hunter, M. James. No six things, James Harkin. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna, where do they go? At no such thing on Instagram or podcast. At qI.com for email.

That's right. Podcast at QI.com is the most important destination for you. if you want to be part of the show and you've got two options. One is if you send us in a great fact, we're going to pick those out and bring them to our bonus Monday show, which is called Little Fish. We love reading out your facts. Do send them in. Or if you've got some extra information, if we've said something in the show you want to tell us more about

an experience you've had, maybe you grow yams. Tell us, and we will bring that to drop us a line, which is our bonus secret show. You've got to be a member of our secret club, which is called Clubfish. And you can get to that by going to patreon.com slash clubfish. a lot of extras there. It's a really fun place, so join the club now. Otherwise, just come back next week because we are going to be back with another show. Thank you as ever to Ling Lee, Ethan Ruperalia, as well as the larger Fish Buster Gang, and we'll see you next week. Goodbye.