No Such Thing As Lithuanian Soap Ornaments

0:00Your sausage McMuffin with egg didn't change, your receipt did. The sausage McMuffin with egg extra value meal includes a hash brown and a small coffee for just $5. Only at McDonald's for a limited time. Price and participation may vary. Promotion pricing may be lower than meal pricing. Shaq here. What's it like to buy a car from Carvana 100% online and get it delivered to your door? Let me tell you. Your car is here, Mr. Shaq. Thank you, Mr. Carvana guy. Can't wait to take it for a spin. Only the best for you, Mr. Shaq. Let me tell you. So buy your car today on Carvana. Delivery fees may apply. See our 7-day return policy at Carvana.com. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

1:10My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tyshinsky, 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 James. Okay, my fact this week is that Antonio Salazar was deposed as dictator of Portugal in 1968, but until his death two years later, everyone tricked him into thinking he was still leader. This is incredible. This is unbelievable. I can't believe we've never read about it before. It's the greatest story ever. It's incredible. It's basically the Truman Show. Yes. Yeah. If Truman was a dictator.

1:49And that's the problem. It's the high stakes of his power and position. You know, I could imagine that if maybe for the last 10 years, you guys have been recording extra episodes with me and I'm not really on this show anymore. And I've just got a feed that I believe that I'm on. You know what? The other day I was in, I've mentioned this farmer's market a few times now on the show but i was in a farmer's market and we were ready to leave me and my wife my daughter and i said i'll go and get my daughter's scooter so i went to get it and then when i came back my daughter and my wife weren't there anymore and they'd actually gone to buy some flowers but for a moment i thought what if i've imagined having a wife and

2:23a daughter and i'm just a weird guy who wanders around farmers markets with a scooter do you never have that yeah I have that a lot yeah I've lost people and thought my whole family don't exist actually I'm just an orphan I'm still trying to work out how I'm not married to your wife and have your daughter you're actually the dictator of Portugalugal i had i had barely heard of salazar i mean i just i wasn't very well versed in portuguese history i knew that the whole liberian peninsula i knew that spain had had franco but salazar was a bit of a close book to me yeah um so he was in charge for a long time and a lot of people thought he was a really terrible dictator a lot of people thought as far as dictators are concerned, he wasn't that bad.

3:06Definitely in the dictator stakes, I would say. He's almost top. Here comes Anna. Name me a better one. Name a dictator you won't go into bat for. That's all I'm saying. When the Telegraph ran his obituary, they called him a benevolent autocrat. In fact, he himself said that he ruled with as much authority as necessary and as much liberty as possible. But he did have secret police. He had lots of secret denunciations and the paramilitary group for 7 to 14 year olds, all of this. But he sort of kept a bit clear of Hitler and Mussolini during that period. He was technically neutral during the war, but he let the British use the Azoresores or the allies i should say use the azores which were portuguese so that was kind of on our side but really when you read about

3:52it it tended to be that him and the rest of the portuguese just kind of backed whoever was winning at the time and um there was ambassadors in portugal from germany and britain and whenever germany was doing quite well in the war, a lot of Portuguese politicians would turn up to their garden parties. And then when Britain were doing well, they'd go to their garden parties and you could kind of gauge who was doing well in the war by that. Oh my God, really? Because that's roughly the first three years, last three years, is how that divides. And who did the best garden parties? But I guess that's why you don't know him, Andy, is because he wasn't this ostentatious character who we would see on the news,

4:30who you could almost talk about on this podcast so easily by having crazy amounts of money thrown around for his... He didn't rename Portugal Salazarria or he didn't say Thursday is now called Antonio or whatever. Yeah. And he wasn't corrupt. But can we talk about the fact that he faked his own, his own death was unfaked. The opposite of that. Very well put, Anna. So he had an accident and he went into a coma and we don't know exactly what happened with the accident. It could be that he fell off a chair, which is what most people say. Some people say that he fell in the bath. And another version is he was trying to sit down to let the chiropodist treat his feet when he slipped off the chair and

5:10banged his head but whatever happened he went into a coma and everyone expects that he's probably not going to come out of the coma and so they bring in a new leader and then like in the best sitcom scenario you've ever heard he suddenly recovers complete lucidity. And so then everyone's like, well, what are we going to do? Because he thinks he's leader. We can't really bring him back. We think he's run his course a little bit, actually. We've told everyone he's dead. And so what happened was they kept him in his house, kind of almost under house arrest, and people would go and visit him from his cabinet and say, what shall we do, sir? And he'd tell them, and they'd just ignore him. It's crazy. Did you read about the newspaper?

5:52They printed a fake version of the newspaper every day for him, which had removed all of the references to his successor. And I'm obsessed with the newspaper bit, because I'm just wondering how much of it was fake. Did they do a fake crossword every day where it was, you know, current dictator of Portugal, you, sir, or whatever. Yeah, you'd really have to scan that nothing made it through. Yeah, like horoscopes. I mean, all of it. So they, you know, every edition removed references to Caetano, who was the new one. And he just thought he was still in charge for two years, was it? Yeah. And it's quite confusing as to exactly why they did it rather than telling the truth. Because he wasn't totally mad.

6:30But this is another weird thing is that the global press knew about it. Like everyone knew this was happening. So Time magazine wrote an article in 1969, which was saying the president of Portugal, who was a different person, mostly nominal thing. The president arrived at one point in Salazar's offices and said he was going to break the news to him. This is according to Donna Maria, who was his housekeeper, who looked after him. So the president came and was like, I'm going to tell him. I have to tell him. And he went in with the firm intention of telling the truth, but he just couldn't find the words. You don't want to be the one. You don't want to be the bad guy. Yeah. And you think you're delusional and have you arrested or something.

7:04It doesn't matter. They can get up whoever he wants arrested because then as soon as you walk out of the room, you're not arrested anymore. Well, then that is actually really fun. Just having him like go like, you're going to die by puppies or something. And they bring the puppies in and they show you and you're scared and you're playing along. And then you all walk out and high five each other going, he bought it. He bought it bought it lovely i think it's all down to his housekeeper donna maria she was the one who just basically became in charge of him therefore in charge of consulting with every major military person who came in making sure the newspapers didn't get to him it was her world to look after it's extraordinary yeah she was a fascinating

7:40character wasn't she because she was his housekeeper for 50 years and she started out completely literate peasant. And by the end, she taught herself to read so well that she managed all of his finances. She managed his correspondence, all the staff, things like that. And she was his confidant. He never married. He seemed like kind of a lonely person. There was a quote from him, which was something like, I think it was Caetano actually who took over from him who had a meeting with him once and referred to him as a friend in the chat and he said okay this sounds very familiar around me colleague you know actually you're really gonna emphasize with this so salazar said angrily friendship is completely irrelevant to this conversation and then he paused

8:23and sadly said i can't have friends i am nobody's friend so this was really i'm coming around to this guy um that is weird isn't it yeah the thing about no relationships we think they probably did have one or two relationships but the state media liked to put him as if he was like this celibate monk like this is such classic dictator stuff isn't it? I mean Hitler was the same thing Eva Braun was not announced because it was like oh no Hitler's sort of given himself up to the German people he's married to the nation. It's always the way with dictators. They're always boffing on the side I don't think he was boffing that I think it was too boring to boff He definitely boffed with his biographer

9:00There was a married woman who came over She wrote a book about him and that's one of the only instances where they said that absolutely was the case, that they had a boss Tom. I'm glad that you specified that one, because I did read a lot by his biographer, Tom Gallagher, who's a middle-aged Scottish man. That's him. Golly, I wonder who was so positive about him. Him coming to power is very interesting, because he did the classic thing of he had a position in the government and then he resigned in high dungeon over something. And everyone was like, oh no, Salazar, come back. You're too great. We miss you. You know, it's very clever. So he'd been in the, he'd been a minister of finance. And then three years later, he was prime minister.

9:36Yeah, and they kind of brought him in from nowhere, didn't they? He was just like, he worked in the university as like a finance lecturer or something. And then there was a big sort of coup d'etat. And they're like, well, as like a finance lecturer or something and then there was a big sort of coup d'etat and they're like well we need a finance guy and he'd obviously been involved a little bit but they were like let's bring him in so he'd never been a politician until then yeah quite rare you get lecturers becoming dictators i don't know yeah they're usually dentists and stuff yeah it's always incredibly boring usually who. Who's it? Bernie MacAvador? Bernie MacAvador. And Assad was an optician, wasn't he?

10:08An ophthalmologist. Wasn't an optician. He was an ophthalmologist. So sorry. I didn't mean to insult him. Your head's coming off. He was, by all accounts, extremely smart. And I think everyone says of him, whether you're... And by Anna's account, he was handsome, dreamy. He had lovely eyes. Oh, dreamy fellas. I'd do some boffin'. I am not saying I am a fan. I'm saying that all people accept, whether they're pro or against that, he wasn't really into the crazed power. He didn't have the ego. He didn't want all the big statues about him. He didn't want loads of biographies. He didn't like speaking in public. He was like a reluctant dictator who was sort of austere and was like, oh God, everyone else is too stupid to run this country

10:52so I will. Which is weird because he didn't run it particularly well given the state it was in. I think something more was going on with him because it wasn't just that stuff. It was the way he led his day-to-day life. So he paid for his own stuff, like his meals and stuff. He insisted he did that. When he came back from hospital, the suitcase that came back was the same suitcase that 60 years ago he had as a student as he went into university. He hadn't updated his suitcases. Yeah, he was insanely frugal. Yeah, exactly. It's just something interesting going on when you've got a dictator who lives like he's almost a hermit. Apparently he didn't turn his heating on in the winter. I mean, he's in Portugal, so that helps.

11:29He used to work with a rug around him and then put his overcoat over the rug to keep warm. But again, like a lot of these stories, I do think they come through the window of state media. So him being very frugal when the country has not got much money and you need your people to be frugal, obviously it's a very convenient story to tell. i believe he didn't have enough money to pay almost to pay for his funeral at the end because he was so you know but he was a dickhead i just want to clarify how the secret police chased after you absolutely stitched up our next portugal tour anna can i just say i think he's still thought of quite fondly in portugal i think actually because he was voted the greatest Portuguese person in 2007.

12:07Wow. Do you remember they did this thing where every country did the 100 greatest Britons? I remember that 100 Britons won. King Arthur was voted as one of the greatest Britons. Yeah, but wasn't it in the Bar Kingdom Brunel who won it? No, Churchill won it. Oh, did he? Brunel was in the top 10, I think. Yeah, yeah. They made, I think, a separate hour-long documentary about each in the top 10 i think yeah yeah they made they made i think a separate hour-long documentary about each of the top 10 candidates before the final vote it was a really big thing yeah it's often just who was in charge during the war is uh well there's a lot of that i think the salazar won he won 41 of the vote but there was a separate poll done

12:40around that time that found that he only got 11 of of the vote with one poll and 6.6% of the vote with another poll. So a few polls done. And so what it looks like is it was a bit, it was telephone voting. So it looks like people did a lot of phone calls, maybe. I'm not saying it was rigged like so much as people using up a lot of phone credit. Eurovision style. I think there might've been a bit of that. You say Eurovision that's so bizarre because of course the portuguese autocracy eventually collapsed and the signal for the revolution to begin was that year's eurovision song was it a thing called the carnation revolution it was in 1974 you know this guy caetano had been in charge for a few years who

13:19took over from salazar and they wanted to the various army officers were saying look this is ridiculous there were lots of colonial wars which Portugal was fighting you know they were fighting resistance movements in their African or maybe their South American territories so there was a big thing saying that lots of people are dying can we just stop this this is crazy so anyway the signal to begin was a song what was it called a a depoido adeus I'm sure I pronounced that wrong but that's what Portuguese opposition figures picked and two weeks before it had been the Eurovision song and was it called a a depoido adeus i'm sure i pronounced that wrong but that's what portuguese opposition figures picked and two weeks before it had been the eurovision song and it had done

13:49really badly it got almost null point i think that's that was necessary that it did really badly because you had to hear it on the radio and know it was time to attack but if it was waterloo and it was on the radio every 10 minutes then what are you gonna do very good point, so did everyone have their Walkmans in one hand and their swords in the other? Well, how's that working? Well, I guess it's national radio, right? Not many radio stations. It's not like Spotify where you can play whatever you want. Yeah. In those days, it was like pretty limited what you would play on the radio. Oh, sorry. It's just an advert. Hang on. I'll find out if we do the revolution in 30 seconds. I'm doing two adverts.

14:23I should have got premium. You'll get the latest Spotify coup list. There's another time that he undied, using your very nicely chosen words, Anna, which was there was a bomb that should have killed him. Did you read about this? No. So he was a guy who did the same thing at the same time on Sundays, which was he would drive into his car park spot and go to his local church to do mass. And it was always the same routine. So if you wanted to kill him, it was right there for the taking. And someone did take this chance. It was a group of anarchist militants, and they buried a bomb underneath where he was parking his car. And the bomb successfully went off. But because of the different sewers that were down there where they'd placed this bomb,

15:02by a matter of centimeters, it meant the explosion went down the wrong funnel. But the priest was on the toilet at the time and the water shot up his anus. This holiday, all plans, even unlimited, are just $15 a month. A holiday deal this good obviously deserves an enormously expensive holiday song like All I Want. Right. Okay, we can't afford that. You know what? Forget the music budget. We're going to stick with whatever's in the public domain. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three months, $90 for six months, or $180 for a 12-month plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. New customer offer for initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes. May slow when network is busy. See terms.

15:47Hi, I'm Sherry Harris, owner of LifeSource Water. Are you sick of harsh chlorinated water and dry skin and hair? Fed up with hard water buildup and plastic bottles? A LifeSource whole home water filtration system is your solution. And now LifeSource is offering new customers a double dip in savings. You get free basic installation plus an extra $250 off. That's up to $1,250 in savings. Call 1-800-WATER-99 to claim your double deal or visit LifeSourceWater.com. Offer ends September 30. Warranty limitations apply. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the lead singer of the Motown group The Four Tops was once put into a straight jacket by doctors

16:31because he was thought to be delusional after telling them that he was the lead singer of The Four Tops. This was Alexander Morris, who was in hospital because he was having difficulty breathing, he had chest pains, and he informed a nurse and a security guard that he was a member of the four tops and for some reason this raised an alarm and they thought this guy's delusional we need to get him looked at immediately so they put him in a straitjacket he is complaining the whole time going i promise i am well that's what you would say isn't it if you weren't the leader exactly exactly also i presume that it's just they had him put in the straitjacket it's a bit boastful, isn't it? Just saying, you know,

17:07I'm the lead singer of the four tops. Did you know? It's not relevant to your medical condition. Unless you've got a gig to get to, I suppose. Do you think they did it for arrogance? God, can they do that? They could put you away for being cocky. I don't know. Probably they didn't do that, in fact, because actually it was quite a serious thing and he sued them, right? He did sue. And the reason he said it was he had security concerns. So he thought stalking fans were nearby that could get to him in this vulnerable state So he eventually had to show them a YouTube video of him singing and then the nurse was like, oh god, it is him Oh, this was recently then. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This was in the 70s. No, this is in 2024

17:37I think it happened. I think his wife turned up right and then it was his wife who said look this is him at the Grammys Yeah, and he did sue and he he sued for a good amount something in the tens of thousands which was much better than what they originally gave him which was a 25 gift card to a local superstore uh they thought that would deal with it sorry just to say um the case has been dismissed with prejudice in 2025 we don't know exactly what that means because it wasn't in the press. I haven't found in the press anything that says what happened, but I found this in the court records. I think it probably means is they settled, but it might not mean that. What's dismissed with prejudice?

18:15Sounds like we're dismissing it, but it is because we have prejudice against this kind of person. It does sound like it. I think he was saying that the racial profiling at the hospital was a problem. That's part of the reason he was put into the straitjacket. Yeah, just to confirm, with prejudice means that he can't re-sue them for the same thing. I see. That means that the case is closed. Pre-judged. Yeah. But there might be a reason why they thought that he was telling a lie, Alexander Morris, and that is because the Four Tops is one of those groups where they had four original members that were the same for a very long time, and then they swapped in and out. It's Sugar Babes. Deaths and so on. Yeah. And it's now a sort of traveling Motown band that has links to the original band,

18:53but it's now just got random members. So he took a stint as the lead singer. But if you miss that seven year period or however long it was, you wouldn't know it was him. So Motown. Yeah. Which is a beloved music. Is it a genre?'t know it was him so motown yeah which is a beloved music is it a no it's a label isn't it a lot of genre it's a label yeah i feel like it's a label that became a genre unlike anything else yeah to an extent it did it sort of dominated a territory for a very long time but then i think if you played something that was uh sounds like motown but wasn't technically motown you get people writing to you saying oh that's technically not Motown, that was Tamla or something Interesting, yes, I think you're right

19:30but the main figure in the Motown label was Barry Gordy, he lived in Detroit he had been all sorts of things he was still quite young when he founded the label he'd been a boxer and he'd been a soldier and he'd had a jazz shop which had failed. So he took a job at a car factory. Yeah. But all the time he wanted to be a songwriter. And he was, by all accounts, a pretty good songwriter, but much better at knowing what would and wouldn't be a hit. Yeah. And so then he founded this label. The thing about him working in the car factory is important because for two reasons. Number one, it was in Detroit, which is known as Motor Town. And that's where motown comes from but secondly he took the idea of the production line which he got from the car factory and then put that into making records so it was like you do this you do

20:17that you do this you do that eventually we get a record and we do that a million different times and we're going to be millionaires yeah it worked worked. It did. And I loved his analogy, which was that just like in his car factory where he worked, the body of a car enters at the start and then it goes through all these processes on the production line and it emerges a full brilliant car. You get a nobody from off the streets who enters at the start and then you put them through his music factory and then they come out a huge star with their in-house producers, writers, like all the start, and then you put them through his music factory, and then they come out a huge star with their in-house producers,

20:47writers, all the funding, the studios. It was Simon Cowell. He got some pushback. He said when he was interviewed about it about 10 years ago, he said, my family said, that's stupid. Those are cars. You can't do that with human beings. And he said, well, it's the same thing. He's still alive, Barry Gordy. He is still alive. 96. Yeah, incredible. And it's quite interesting, because it the same thing. He's still alive, Barry Gordy. He is still alive. Yeah, incredible. And it's quite interesting because it is a bit different to Simon Cowell in that the people who became the stars, so you had The Temptations, you had Stevie Wonder. When he was a kid, you had Marvin Gaye. And they all used to perform on each other's albums

21:19in various different roles. So you'll find Marvin Gaye as the drummer on someone else's hit song. And they used to tour together as well, slightly to protect each other. various different roles. So you'll find Marvin Gaye as the drummer on someone else's hit song. And they used to tour together as well, slightly to protect each other. So the Four Tops in the mid-60s went on tour with The Temptations. And this is when, if you were going around, there were a lot of white supremacists who really didn't want you performing. So they all carried guns on them. And when the- What? Yeah, yeah. Purely for protection because they were getting chased out of towns and they were getting shot at. So when the temptations were on stage, the four tops would be standing in front looking out for anyone trying to jump the stage.

21:50And then when they got off and performed, the temptations would act as the security line on them as well. You can't just fire into a crowd of audience. Absolutely. But you are allowed to carry guns in America. So it's just they were carrying guns. Didn't Elvis do this? Didn't Elvis have an ankle gun? Supposed supposedly in case anyone tried to fire him he thought how his lower half was wiggling all the time maybe that's why maybe the gun was going off all the time he was just dancing around the four tops would they would record you know 20 different songs in a day that were all written by different people and then loads of other artists would all sing the same song as well and then barry gordy's team would say well

22:29this version by these people is the best one so we're going to use that one and they would do it in that way so um the the most famous song which is reach out i'll be there they didn't really want it to be released because it was a bit sort of outre for them it was like he's shouting quite a lot on it the lead singer and it's just it's a bit weird it's a bit different from the other stuff they had and they were like yeah we don't really think you should put this out as a single but barry gordy's like no trust me people are gonna love this and sure enough they did and it was absolutely massive but actually barry gordy wasn't the main person eventually who had that big ear for a hit. There was someone called Billie Jean Brown,

23:06and she was assistant to Barry Gordy's sister, and she really knew what was good, and she would be the one who would pick them out. Yeah, so it sounds like she was a real dragon. Barry set up this whole quality control department, and she headed it, and she would have a meeting every week, 9 a.m. sharp, and Smokey Robinson, like greatest Motown writer ever, some people would say, said that like even he, if he arrived at 9.01, the door's shut. And she's like, come back next week with your songs for me. Billie Jean, what was her name? Billie Jean? Billie Jean Brown. She wasn't by any chance Billie Jean, was she, of the song Billie Jean? I don't know if she was or wasn't, but I don't think so.

23:40So Michael Jackson was with Motown for a bit? Yeah, with Jackson 5, he started there. Right. Did you guys find or traverse the website Motown for a bit. Yeah, with Jackson 5. He started there. Right. Did you guys find or traverse the website Motown Junkies in the course of your research? Oh my God. This is incredible. It's a website. Motown Junkies, an unofficial guide to every Motown single ever released. And it's one guy who is reviewing every A-side and B-side in chronological order that Motown ever released. And it's so good. So I just wanted to tell you a line from the website. New reviews appear every couple of days. Think of it as an unauthorized track-by-track companion to the magnificent,

24:18the complete Motown singles, CD box sets and beyond with marks out of 10. I'm not Paul Nixon. I beg your pardon. You know what? Until then, I didn't think he was. And now of all the people in the world who I think might be Paul Nixon, he's number one on my list. That's all I'm going to take away from this. Oh yeah, the Motown Junkie guy, Paul Nixon. No, no. Paul Nixon is a music journalist. And the guy who runs Motown Junkies has the username Nixon. No, no. Paul Nixon is a music journalist. And the guy who runs Motown Junkies has the username Nixon. But it's not Paul Nixon. I just want to make that so clear. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. The lady doth protest. But anyway, there's just a list of amazing band names and song names.

24:58The Chuckalucks, the Headliners, who tragically fell to an attraction audience and didn't last at all. Oh, really? Yeah. Shorty Long, have a guess at why he got his name? He was a medium height. He was 5'1". So what was long? Well, what was long about him? Just his surname. Which ironically is quite short. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Diana Ross. Big deal. Supremes. Huge deal. She had a son who she called Ross. Ross Ross that's true. Diana Ross, big deal. Supremes. Oh, yeah. Huge deal. She had a son who she called Ross. No. And I believe he actually, weirdly, all her other children had the surname Ross, but he doesn't seem to have the surname Ross. Yeah. Maybe that's why. Barry Gordy had children called Barry, Terry, Kerry, and Sherry.

25:40Stop. The audacity. No mary the obvious opener well they all end in e double r y so i guess you could save money somehow like when you're when you're putting the names in their school jumpers you'll be able to change one of the letters nice that is so good or the letters on the door of their bedroom yeah yeah so he had So he had eight kids in all, very gaudy. And they all worked in the music industry in some way. His eldest child, Hazel, married Jermaine Jackson. And another child, Kennedy, who's known as Rockwell, sang Somebody's Watching Me. You know, that one that's got Michael Jackson in the background, I think. Okay. And his youngest child, Stefan, is known as Redfoo and was the co-founder of LMFAO.

26:28Oh, yes. Who did Party Rock Anthem and I'm Sexy and I Know It. Oh, wow. And that was co-founded with him and his nephew. So that's Barry's grandson, Sky Blue. So the family is still going. Family's still going. Well, it was such a family enterprise, like you say, wasn't it? He hired his sisters, his brothers his dad who was apparently a legend who like all the most famous motel acts got together to sing a song about his dad barry senior weirdly his dad's name was barry junior but because he became barry gordon the third's father he then became known as barry senior um his father was bar, but the only relation who wasn't... There were a lot of Berries around. It was Berry, Berry and Berry. What was the song they sang him?

27:12Thank you, Berry, much. One of the only relations who didn't go into the music industry became president. So the great grandfather, who actually wasn't called Berry, the first one not to be called Berry, slept with one of his enslaved people, women, and that gave rise to the Berry family, and then slept with his legal wife, which gave rise to Jimmy Carter three generations later. Crumbs. Crumbs indeed. Wow. Can I tell you one more thing about Detroit? We're just researching a bit because it's Motown, it's Motor City. So the reason it's motor city is largely i'd say down to henry ford okay who based his factories there and his companies yeah and in the mid 20th century one in six working americans was involved in the car industry one in six that's stunning

27:59directly or indirectly i mean feedstock and like the parts and all this stuff. But Henry Ford had his things in Detroit. And it was a massive city. It was a very multiracial city because people came from all over. They came from England, Scotland. They came from the heartlands of America, all over. So it was very mixed nationally and ethnically. And he had this ceremony, which I don't know if you guys remember. We may have mentioned it before, where he would americanize anyone who was from another country and the ceremony was you would walk into a massive melting pot and there are photos it is a literal melting pot in your national dress and you would come out a homogenous american like they had an actual pot wow and this was seen

28:43as a really good thing at the time you know know, this is one of the ideas of America is that it doesn't matter where you come from, you're American now. You know when you get citizenship in the UK, you get the invite to the ceremony and the mayor of Hackney sort of gives you a scroll or something. Or equivalent. Not wherever you are. It's not always Hackney. On the invitation it says you're allowed to wear national dress. And what that means is if you're from Ethiopia you can wear a traditional Ethiopian dress but when my wife got citizenship she read it as you're allowed to cosplay as a British person so she wore a bowler hat and a pinstripe suit and a black umbrella that is so cool that's amazing but she turned up well why do you need citizenship

29:24you're already clearly British. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is, the number of people conducting the Indian census is bigger than the number of people in Lithuania. Wow not so not even people answering the census it's the people going the number of people answering the census is everybody that would just be the fact that india is bigger than lithuania in population terms and india is bigger than lithuania both geographically and in population terms no this is the number of people in what sense is lithuania bigger than India, though? Oh, there'll be something. Like exports of small carved soap ornaments or whatever. There'll be something in which Lithuania is crushing India.

30:14They probably don't even have more Lithuanians. India probably has more based on population size. I'm not sure that there's a massive expat community of Lithuanians. Podcast at QI.com, please write in. But actually, what I was thinking is all the people conducting the Indian census, like they do that once every 10 years, right? What are they doing for the other nine years? They could go to Lithuania and do the census there. Now each person counts one person. That's a really nice idea. That's great. It's like a pen pal system. Yeah. And of course course i mean it we could have it the other way around everyone in lithuania could do the indian census but everyone in lithuania would have to go who's going to make tiny so part of this and it would be a disaster

30:55as well because they don't speak many of the local languages like it would be that would be chaos it would be terrible but india is having a census and that census has happened every 10 years normally but this one is going to be mega because it's been delayed by I think five years due to COVID and um there are 1.4 billion people in India and there are three million people who've been hired and it's often teachers or civil servants who are you know they've got time off over the summer maybe or they've you know they've kind of been dragooned into it and it's going to be a biggie it's going to be very exciting um is it going to be exciting biggie. It's going to be very exciting. Is it going to be exciting?

31:27I think your sentence is, you've got a tick box. No. But is it exciting? No, but there's something different about this particular Indian one, which is really interesting, which is there are, I think it might be 33 questions on it, but they're going to be studying one thing in particular, which hasn't been, that's not the interesting thing. Don't make a sarcastic noise, okay? Now i see why you're so excited oh my god the interesting thing that they're doing this hasn't been done since 1931 is they're going to ask a question about caste and the caste system and basically you need to judge the extent of the caste system and how it's impacting people's lives and just to say that the caste system is like a very very very complicated version of our

32:06class system, basically. Exactly, exactly. And there are castes and there are subcastes and there are clans and there are surnames. So they did try in 2011 to study caste but it was a disaster because they mixed all of those different kind of categories up. They got 4.6 million separate castes out of it. Not helpful. like not useful data to get what because they didn't um categorize them properly and do the subcategories they basically gave people an open box to write in whatever they wanted to write in so you know it's really important to have that because the caste system is basically like an old brahmin network in many ways and it's these days it's much more about connections but you need to be able to study it in order to

32:44move on from it yeah so when's this happening uh it's happening over the course of several months it's a long it's a long process in 2026 six and seven okay yeah it's going to be happening okay it's weird that they got the car system question wrong because i happen to be reading a handbook given out to enumerators in the 1890 indian census and they were very good so it just happened to be and and then we did this fact. It was so lucky. Yeah, I was just in the middle of it, and Andy suggested this. It's pretty long, so... Woke your husband up. Hey, you'll never guess. This bedtime reading is going to come in useful after all. I don't need to tell you all these facts anymore about the gender of everyone in Bombay in 1889.

33:27Wake up, another bloody cast. When's it going to end? 33 questions. So this is a handbook for who? It's a handbook for the enumerators of the 1890 Indian census. And so I'm sure a lot of people will have read it but for those who haven't Sorry, if I could be serious for a moment was this British administrators conducting the census because of the imperial time? Yes, British administrators and obviously Indians mostly conducting it but under the instruction of the Brits So you're reading the English version? No, I read it, so I had to learn Hindi first as well, which is unreal. But I'd heard it was best in the original language. You miss a lot of the nuance, don't you? You can never really appreciate the 1890 guidelines for enumerators.

34:21Oh, dear. But I'll give it to you in the English. The categories that they listed, it's a real letdown now. Religion, sect of religion, caste, subdivision of caste, subdivision of that. And then the only other questions they asked were age, are you married, language, and then a column at the end which says, are you insane, deaf-mute from birth, totally blind, or a leper? NB, do not enter if you're only blind in one eye or if you've become deaf and dumb since birth or if you only suffer from white leprosy. And they're the only categories. And so are they still in? I am not insane. I am the lead singer of the four tops. Stand right next to you. I am not Paul Nixon So the questions this year are going to include things about

35:12what electricity access do you have what kind of clean water access do you have do you have access to a toilet and what kind of, is it indoor, outdoor that kind of stuff to gauge poverty what is your main cereal that's going to be an exciting one It it's not cocoa pops down it's like yeah exactly yeah well this yeah this is exciting uh one thing that they're going to have an issue with is the andaman islands um the sentinelese people who live on north sentinel island if you go anywhere near them they fire bows and arrows at you. Yes. And so no one has been on this island from the West for many, many, many years. Wow. And whenever they do, don't they get killed straight away? They do. A couple of idiots have been, haven't they?

35:53A couple of idiots have been and been like, I think one idiot went and managed to escape, but then was immediately arrested. But it's part of India. So how do you count those people if whenever you go near them they're going to shoot bows and arrows at you count the arrows like the british archers ajinco could fire three arrows at once really good really good so maybe count them and divide by three i don't know whatever so what they've done is in the past they've basically gone around the island on a boat and counted the number of people on the beach and then sometimes estimated from that and then sometimes just literally gone well there were 39 people on the beach so let's just say it's 39 because probably if you're on a little

36:37island you spend all your time on the beach don't you so it's probably all of them we just don't know and then they're talking about using drones for this current one. Okay. But the problem is, like, do you remember the big tsunami in, whenever that was, 2004? There was helicopters went over to make sure these guys were okay, and they fired arrows at the helicopters as well. So they just don't like people going anywhere near them. Yeah. And definitely they won't like drones. So it's just a bad idea all around. Yeah. Just leave them alone. Leave them be. Doesn't feel like you need to know, does it're not really taxing them you don't particularly need to know what cereal they're eating yeah no but yeah i suppose yeah they might need to you might

37:12need to know how many people are there so you know what support but i guess if you're not supporting them yeah they're keeping themselves to themselves but that's the whole point of a census right well there's a few different points but one of them is you work out what people need and that's one big problem with censuses are often over counted or under counted you might not give the right support to a community because they're not replying to the census or vice versa so in the last american census in 2020 there was loads of political stuff going on but ethnic minority groups were not responding to the census as much. So they were undercounted. And it was the first one you could do online. And so more affluent people were responding to it more.

37:52And so it meant that you got this really distorted thing where you didn't think there were so many poor people and you did think there were a lot more rich people. And it meant that the resources were going to the wrong places. They also have a problem with census data in China. So for example, one census showed that there was 1.334 billion people, but actually estimates are as high as 1.5 billion people. And the reason is people are avoiding the census, either as illegal migrants or the one childchild policy so you will be fined something like 20,000 pounds if you admit that actually I did have a child under that time. Oh no, hang on you're saying there are more Chinese people than we think? Yeah. Yeah I'm saying there are fewer. Oh well, fight it out! Okay because

38:39there is a claim that a hundred million Chinese people don't exist. The demographic stats are lower than the officials in local government stats. And that might be officials in local governments having an incentive to say there are loads more people here because it means you get more resources from the state, that kind of thing. And actually, it's a slightly maverick theory, but I think it seems pretty possible. So maybe it cancels out. When you're dealing with countries as big a population size as India or China, and as you're saying, Andy, this is going to go over months, what happens with the rate of death and birth that means your census is in any way accurate? Or does it level out? I think the statisticians are figuring that out, aren't they?

39:19There's a lot of people smarter than us dealing with this kind of thing. I actually happen to be reading... Oh, yeah, here we go. Speaking of statisticians, the Office for National Statistics methodology section on how they do the census. Sometimes the 1890s stuff gets a bit too exciting, doesn't it? And you want somebody to calm down before bed. That's the toilet book, isn't it? It's the Office for National Statistics that do the census, usually. So they're in charge of it. And I just came across a bullet point in their methodology for census taking, which said, we've made methodological adjustments to the data for children aged 0 to 2 years. This is because people often forget to add their babies to their census return.

40:00And I looked it up, and it's across countries. And it's a much bigger effect than you think. So in Australia, America and the UK, about 5% of 0-2 or 0-3 year olds are not counted. Is that wishful thinking of very tired parents? It's got to be, right? I mean, we don't know. People just forget to say, yes, I'm my newborn baby. Yeah, you're right. And in Australia, they put a note on the ONS press release saying, please do remember to count any newborn children in your household. So I was looking up some jobs from the 1921 census. So there was getter, brackets, someone who getters things. Oh, okay, yeah. Knobber, removes head of fish with a knife by hand. Odd boy, rabbit destroyer, assistant bottomer, very funny uh then i thought look what

40:48do i like i thought i'd go to the s listing there are 10 different sausage related jobs in the census okay oh great sausage case maker sausage casings cleaner sausage casings dresser sausage filler sausage linker sausage maker sausage, sausage meat mincer, sausage skin cleaner, sausage skin dresser, sausage skin maker. So wait a minute, you had sausage skin dresser and another kind of sausage dresser, didn't you? Sausage case dresser. Sausage case dresser and sausage skin dresser. Possibly people are filling in slightly different... I feel like we have a cast issue here don't we where people have just been given a box and they could write what they want i just like the idea of the sausage factory which has all of these people in strictly demarcated it did read

41:33like they were each standing next to each other on the production line save a line in the budget by sacking one of the sausage cases no you're absolutely right. In 2022, there was a question on the census that asked, can you speak Scots? And it became apparent that Scottish people weren't entirely sure if what they spoke was Scots or if it was just weird English. That's basically what Scottish people said. Scottish English. Yeah, the truth is with Scots is an English person who's never read Scots in their life can read a paragraph of Scots and get the gist of it quite easily. Exactly. You can sort of get the gist, exactly. So there's a great website now called I Can, A-Y-E Can, which basically says, listen to people on this site speaking Scots

42:16and it will help you decide if you can understand it, if you're a Scots speaker, whether this is your main language. It should have been called I Can because Can is Scots for knowledge. They can't even speak Scots, for God's sake. The people who made the website. Anyway, it sounds great because it sounds beautiful, doesn't it? Yes. Yeah, you're going. You're going for yes, cool. It would have been a very brave podcaster to say no to that. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is anna my fact this week is that japan's biggest toilet maker is an essential part of the computer chip industry this is weird but it's toto and they make toilets not the band the toilet maker toilet maker. I hear the drains down in Africa.

43:06That's very good. Nice. So Toto, known for washlets. Those posh loos that spray warm water on your bottom and then they give you a bottom dry and then they've got some cleansing stuff. The best things in the world. Do you think they're the best things in the world? Oh, I've got a theory about why you in particular might say they're the best things in the world. Okay. you want to save it or you want to tell me no i'll just say now i'm sure we'll talk more about lose later but um the reason toto became so good became industry leaders is because they started out researching everyone's bottoms and they started researching the golden angle the angle at which you should be sprayed and and they did their first research on golf courses so they're you know they've been aiming

43:53for your your custom james yeah so that's what they do you may or may not love them but 40 of their profits come from making electrostatic chucks so So as far as I understand it, all the circuitry in a computer chip, like the bit that stores all the data and does all the important stuff, is printed on a silicon wafer, a really, really thin, like a quarter of a millimetre thick bit of wafer. Each circle of wafer is then put into the chip. But when you're printing the circuitry onto that wafer, you need to hold it really still in place but you don't want to use like a tiny little clamp because that takes up space on the wafer that you want to print the circuit onto okay so a chuck is this amazing disc of material that uses

44:37like electrostatic forces to suck the wafer onto itself hold it perfectly still so you can print the circuitry on it and toto make these tiny tiny chucks when they were invented did a load of humans lose their jobs who were like people who are really good at jenga and they could hold things really really still then suddenly they weren't needed anymore amazing at those did you ever play those steady hand things where you have to take a ring across yeah now you just see them at fairgrounds, don't you? Just playing those steady hand games. And they're like, oh, I used to be important in the microchip industry, you know. They can hold out a cup for loose change incredibly still. And the reason being

45:17is these things are made of porcelain. Partly made of porcelain, yes. And obviously, who makes porcelain? A toilet company. Toilets. There you go. And porcelain is very non-conductive, so it's not going to cause shorting. It's not going to make the electric charge run away from it. But it can pull heat away from the wafer because it won't conduct the heat. So anyway, it's just the perfect material to make these chucks and to make toilets. And it pulls the heat away from your bottom. It's useful as well that they're non-conducting porcelain toilets isn't it because imagine if every time you went to the toilet in a carpeted house and you had one of those electric shocks that you get yeah i mean oh i certainly do yeah yeah was it a financial times story that

45:56you sent around anna as the source for this yes because i did you guys read the story it ended with this amazing sentence toto is not the first ostensibly non-tech company in Japan that has become part of the AI boom. Ajinomoto, better known for soup stocks, uses resin derived from its expertise in umami flavourings to make insulation material between chips and motherboards. So cool. Is that mad? I think what happened was around 2020 the government started this idea where they would try and get people to if you had a company you should go into techno stuff uh and they basically gave people money to go from making ramen into making chips or whatever making ram very good and in, I read an FT article about this.

46:46They found that a lot of seafood companies had gone from fish to chips. My shoe company. Well, not my shoe company, I wish. But I heard a pair of shoes by the company. Murray Brogues. For the quality gentlemen. You now make leather wafers onto which circuitry is printed. Yeah, I do. So there's this firm called All Bird and I have a pair of shoes by them. And they were sort of a, I think they were kind of, apparently they were quite bro, tech bro-y shoes, which I was not aware of. I just thought they were kind of woolen sneakers, which I quite liked. But they recently announced, yeah, we're going to be doing ai from now on and everyone said what but basically they just said yeah we're going to be new bird ai from now on uh we've lost massive amounts of

47:33money making shoes and we seem to be completely doomed so now we're going to acquire graphics processing units yeah and their share price went up 600 and the shoes now walk out of your cupboard and put themselves on you lovely lovely because they? Lovely, because they're AI. They're AI shoes. I've been sacked from my job of putting my shoes on. Actually, relatedly, on Japan and AI, I was reading an article about why so many of these companies do these switches in Japan. And another of the reasons was, according to this guy who's called David Dai, who's a Japanese analyst at a semiconductor company, so he's really looked into why people do this. He said, in, you've got much more of a Zen long term approach generally. And a lot of companies really, really embody that they've

48:12never been so short term capitalist driven, which make them quite good for this, but also very slow to respond to demand. And an example of this is that in the UK 32 percent of workers are now using ai in the us 50 percent of workers are in japan only eight percent of workers use ai at the moment um and he was saying this is because there's this you know like caution conservative let's just stick with what we were doing yeah so maybe they'll turn out to be the only ones who survive another part of the world that does this kind of pivoting quite nicely is south korea for instance samsung they started in 1938 and they were selling groceries and dried fish and noodles and stuff and now they sell electronics and all sorts of stuff like that but this is due

48:58to something called chaebol and it's a korean idea where where it's a family business and you have your main family business that the people in charge of your family are like concentrating on, but everyone else can kind of do their own thing, but you're under one big umbrella of the family. And so it means that your kids can do risky things, but it doesn't really matter because you have the overarching family business that's always going to carry on. So like useless cousin Derek can still fit into the family business and he can still be making his little soap ornament, for example, but AI now. So, you know. Wait, how many family free riders can you have before you're like, I need to have one grandchild who's doing something?

49:38I guess the hope is that your dried fish company is still going to carry on no matter what. Right. And then maybe crazy cousin Derek, who's actually making very nice TVs, says, oh, you know what? Mine's doing all right now, so I can take over. I see. And then he becomes the new umbrella. That's really good. That's very clever. In the UK, it feels a bit more haphazard, I think. I don't think we have that attitude. So case in point, walls. What do they make? Ice cream. With a gun to your head? Right, ice cream. Sorry. Okay. And what else do they make? There's another gun to your head. Walls. what do they make? Ice cream. With a gun to your head? Right, ice cream. Yeah. Okay, and what else do they make?

50:06There's another gun to your head. Walls. Sausages. Sausages. Oh. Sausages and ice cream. Why? Is it because you only eat ice cream in the summer and sausages in the winter? Did you cheat and research this in advance? No, I didn't. Thomas Wall saw his staff working terribly hard of the year flogging sausages, and then when the weather changed, he had to sack everybody. Was there like one really perfect goldilocks day of the year where you would get a 99 with a sausage in it i think i half do remember this fact and i think he might have had like a refrigeration unit or something that he could start using for ice cream maybe so clever yeah yeah so i'm basically but basically that's it it's it's the it's an ultimate pivot

50:44based on your existing resources and having to sack all your staff half the year, every year. Oh, even the sausage casing maker and the sausage skin maker as well. The sausage linker and the sausage filler. Pivots are great. I do love pivots. I found a great one, which is in 1882, the Plymouth Iron Windmill Company, who made windmills, ran a promotion whereby if you bought a windmill, they bundled it with a free BB gun that they also made. And the BB gun proved so successful that they rebranded as the Daisy Outdoor Products Company. And they now exclusively sell air guns. And they are one of the biggest BB gun manufacturers. Sorry, can I ask? How many windmills were they selling because it feels to me like a windmill is a very high value commodity yeah you

51:32might only sell one or two of them in a year yeah and to sell a bb gun with every single one there's not that many bb guns i don't know the windmill craze of 1882 in michigan america but it might have been huge. They used to be tiny. Windmills did used to be much smaller. I didn't realise the date. So in America, they used to have those kind of metal tripods. And almost only like five metres high. They were really little. They wouldn't run much power. And it's definitely not the ones on a wooden stick with the plastic bits that spin around in the wind you put in the garden. It could be. Because a windmill could be good for target practice with a BB gun. That would be really fun. Which I imagine why they bundle them together.

52:12Must be, yeah. What is a BB? Ballbearing gun. There we go. On we plough. Can I tell you a listener fact that got sent in exactly on this topic? This is from Ron Liebach. Thank you so much, Ron. You were going to be in The Little Fish, but i've bumped you up wow it's a new thing promotion yeah main show from the inbox to you know glory uh so ron writes in about the nintendo company now i think you guys might know because we may even have mentioned before nintendo was founded in 1889 as nintendo coppite they made playing cards right anyway they were founded 1889 vincent Nintendo copy, they made playing cards, right? Anyway, they were founded in 1889. Vincent van Gogh, he says, died in 1890, which begs the question, did Vincent van Gogh play Nintendo?

52:54And actually, between 1640 and 1854, the Netherlands were Japan's sole trading partner with Europe. I heard that he did play Pokemon Van Gogh. Oh, my God. But he did have an obsession with Japanese art Van Gogh and you look in a bunch of his paintings and there's he's painted a Japanese painting in the background. There is a painting of him with a bandaged ear I think and it's got a picture of Mount Fuji in the background. Yeah this is it so he got obsessed with this kind of woodblock print towards the end of the 1880s. There is a chance that maybe he played with Nintendo Hanafuda playing cards. Are we saying that maybe he ended it all because he couldn't beat Whiz Pig? I don't know what that means.

53:39I think beating the Whiz Pig probably is a bit of a euphemism. That's so disgusting. Oh no, don't ruin my childhood um we mentioned very briefly the toto company and the experiments they did on golfers um well it was quite buggy this um original toilet that kind of squirted water at you uh when they were practicing at the very start quite often people ended up with red hot water fired but they did get finally to what andy called the golden angle in fact what they called the golden angle so it was 43 degrees which was the exact angle that would wash your anus and they would also have a 53 degree spurt at the front for washing female genitalia and they that was what they said was the big sort of breakthrough that made them really

54:32popular because they tried it out in america and people weren't really up for it at all and then they went to japan and they were like people were like yeah we do like this yeah these things really took off in japan but still people are you know a bit funny talking about it and they took off partly because they have a suite of anti-embarrassment devices like you press a button and it makes a flushing noise to cover any embarrassment and all of this can i ask when you say you've got the embarrassment flush that's a flush to cover up the sound of you pooing is it because i think i find what i find embarrassing okay is when you do... I don't think this is overshared. When you're reading out loud the 1890s Indian sense of...

55:10In Costa Coffee toilets. I'm sorry, coming from the next cubicle. You know when you have to do a flush and it doesn't work, so you have a big pause and you have to do a second flush? I find it very embarrassing because people outside will know if I haven't emerged very soon after the first flush... You've had to do a double flusher They're going to know and I would imagine this embarrassment flush actually is going to make people assume that I suppose people will know that there's just stuff going on in there for you It's just now they know if three flushes come out at once then that's when you've done a really big one Yeah Everyone's always counting the flushes guys We should wrap up in a sec guys

55:44I have one bit of toilet innovation which i read on my feed literally this morning so it's new news and that is scientists who have created a mosquito toilet it's a 3d printed funnel uh which is coated with a super hydrophobic material. So when the mosquito does a poo on it, it kind of just goes down into a collection jar and they use it to analyze the feces and they can find what viruses are in the mosquito. And we're finding new viruses in mosquitoes that we didn't know about before because of these tiny mosquito toilets. How do you persuade it to use a toilet? Are they not house trained? That's the big problem, I think. in mosquitoes that we didn't know about before because of these tiny mosquito toilets. Oh, wow.

56:25How do you persuade it to use a toilet? Are they not house trained? That's the big problem, I think. You start off with nappies and then you get pull-ups. What's my job? I fit nappies onto mosquitoes. I used to work holding electrostatic trucks very, very still. And then I teamed up with a guy who used to work as a sausage case manufacturer. 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 show, we're all online. You can find us there. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James? Come and join me on LinkedIn. It's my real name, James Harkin, and lots of people are adding me

57:17and doing nothing with it. So come and join me. Nice, Andy. I'm on Instagram at AndrewHunterM. Yep. And Anna? You can email podcast.qi.com or go to instagram at no such thing yeah and uh if you want to send us something that you would like read out on the show podcast at qi.com is the most important one if you want to send us some extra information you know are you two reading the old indian census perhaps you want to invest in murray brogues write into us we will bring all that information to our bonus show, which is called Drop Us a Line. And that is part of Clubfish, which is on Patreon.com slash Clubfish. We have lots of tiers. There's Excel episodes. So if you heard this episode and you wanted more of this episode, well, there's a longer

57:57version there. We do online quizzes. There's a bunch of great stuff. Check that out. Or if you've got a brilliant fact that you would love for us to read out, we have a whole separate show for that called Little Fish, where we put down our facts and we read the best of yours. So check that out as well. Otherwise, come back next week because we're going to be back with another episode. Thank you as ever to our team, Liying Li, Ethan Ruperalia, as well as the larger Fish Buster crew. And we'll see you again next time.