Episode Transcript
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0:00
Hi everyone,
0:02
welcome to this week's episode of No
0:04
Such Thing as a Fish, which
0:06
was recorded at the Nerdland Festival
0:08
in Belgium. This is
0:10
the thing we do every year, what
0:12
we have done for the last few
0:15
years. It's a brilliant festival, it's definitely
0:17
worth checking out for future years. It's
0:19
basically, imagine Disneyland had
0:22
nerds instead of mice. It is,
0:24
that's what it is really. It's
0:26
loads of talks, it's loads of
0:28
exhibitions. It's science, it's nerd
0:30
culture, it's everything you can want if
0:32
that is your bag. And we
0:35
always have an amazing time there with a great
0:37
audience. And as usual,
0:39
we were joined by Leeven
0:41
Skerra. Anna did not
0:44
make the journey this time, so it is
0:46
the boys and Leeven who did this show. And
0:48
Leeven, you will know if you are a
0:51
regular listener to fish, he may well have
0:53
the record as most appearances of a non-elf
0:55
on fish. I'd have to look that up,
0:58
but he's been on quite a few times.
1:00
He is an expert on all things
1:03
nerdy, all things sciencey, but at
1:05
the moment he's really into AI as
1:07
many nerds are. And
1:09
why that's important is because he has
1:11
a book about AI, the title is
1:14
AI. It can be
1:16
found on Amazon and I'm
1:19
sure in other places, but if
1:21
you search for his name L-I-E-V-E-N-S-C-H-E-I-R-E,
1:23
Leeven Skerra, then you will be
1:26
able to find his book on
1:28
AI. And actually if
1:30
you go to levenskerra.com, then you can see
1:32
all of his recent AI talks which
1:34
are very informative and very funny. If
1:37
you struggle with Leeven Skerra's name,
1:39
then you can also go to
1:42
www.levenshire.com, as
1:45
in what hobbits do I presume, which
1:48
apparently also works. So go to either of
1:50
those places and you can find out more
1:52
about Leeven and his works on AI. Anyway,
1:55
enjoy the show, like I say, it was
1:57
really fun like always and of course we
1:59
are doing lots of live shows which will
2:01
include Anna towards the end of the year so
2:03
go to noticestingsafish.com/live to
2:05
find out more about what remaining
2:08
tickets there are and there are
2:10
not many so get in there
2:12
fast. On with the podcast! Hello
2:31
and welcome to another episode
2:34
of No Such Thing As A Fish,
2:36
a weekly podcast this week coming to
2:38
you live from Nerdland in Belgium!
2:47
My name is Dan Schreiber, I
2:49
am sitting here with James Harkin,
2:51
Andrew Hunter Murray and Leven Skira
2:53
and once again we have gathered
2:55
around the microphones with our four
2:57
favorite facts from the last seven
2:59
days and in no particular order
3:01
here we go! Starting with fact
3:03
number one and that is Leven.
3:05
My fact is that in 2017
3:07
the AI computer Alpha Zero was
3:10
given the rules of chess and
3:12
four hours later it was better than
3:15
the human world champion in chess.
3:17
Insane! So it
3:20
was given just the rules, no
3:22
strategies, no examples of chess games
3:24
ever played between humans and it
3:27
started practicing against itself. Did it
3:29
try any really weird things? It
3:31
plays chess in a different way
3:34
than humans. One chess
3:36
player said I've always wondered if the
3:38
same game was invented on Mars and
3:40
without any interaction between the cultures we
3:42
would have developed our own strategies because
3:44
everybody learns from the people before them
3:47
and he says now I know because
3:49
it takes more risks for
3:52
example. It will offer its queen
3:54
sometimes without anyone knowing why and then
3:56
it wins in the end. So can
3:58
I just say Leven I think part of, in fact
4:00
one of the main parts of playing chess is being
4:03
able to pick up the pieces and move them from
4:05
one place to the other. And until it can do
4:07
that, I think I can beat it. Yeah,
4:09
well, then you need robotics
4:11
and some people are afraid of robots and
4:13
I always tell them if at this phase
4:15
of technology you're afraid of robots, the only
4:17
thing you need to carry with you at
4:19
all times is a bucket of water and
4:21
you're safe. Well, actually
4:23
we were in the green room just now
4:25
and there was a robotic dog in that.
4:27
Spot a robot from Boston Dynamics, yeah. Yeah,
4:30
and also, yeah there was, and also a
4:32
real dog. And I can tell you that
4:34
real dogs do not like robotic dogs either.
4:37
Really? Yeah. I'm
4:39
just wondering, James, I know you like chess, I'm sure
4:41
you like chess. A bit. And
4:43
I know you know a lot about AI. Have you
4:46
ever played against a man called Martin? Probably.
4:49
Okay. Who is
4:51
he? He is a middle-aged Bulgarian
4:54
man who wears a turtleneck jumper
4:56
and he is the worst possible
4:59
opponent on chess.com. Right?
5:02
So he's an AI, he's a computer chess player,
5:04
but he has been programmed to be deliberately unbelievably
5:07
bad. That's amazing. He plays 10
5:09
million games every week and still
5:12
he sucks at chess. Really? Does
5:14
he like call the pawns prawns?
5:16
Yeah, he does. His
5:19
catchphrase is, my four-year-old son just beat me.
5:22
Ouch. And he's really, really
5:24
bad at chess. And they've done experiments
5:26
with him to test how bad he is because
5:28
he's programmed to be a weak chess player. He
5:30
has been given 31 queens on one
5:33
board and the opponent only
5:35
has pawns and he has still managed to
5:38
lose that game. Really? See,
5:40
that feels more in check with where I thought we were at.
5:43
The creator of QI, John Lloyd, he
5:45
always has this line where he says,
5:47
not only have we not invented artificial
5:49
intelligence yet, but we haven't even invented
5:51
artificial stupidity. That's how far away
5:54
we are from taking over. Martin. So
5:56
that's Martin. Yeah, yeah. So
5:58
this robot that we're talking about, that... the
6:00
record in chess, the way that they trained
6:02
it was they gave it a bunch of games
6:04
to play and it had to learn strategy
6:06
from that and whoever was the best at learning
6:08
a game would advance to the next level
6:10
and train the next AIs together. So it didn't
6:13
just beat chess but it beat multiple Atari
6:15
games. So as part of this program the
6:17
AI set a score on Pong, the highest score a
6:19
human has ever set is 56,851. It scored 407,864 as
6:22
part of this programming. Important thing there is that the
6:30
only input it gets is what is on
6:33
the screen. So of course it's easy to
6:35
program and use the software of all the
6:37
positions to have an optimal software running it
6:39
but this was only fed what a human
6:41
can see on the screen and then adapted
6:44
its own neural network until it could play
6:46
very well. They taught it all the Atari
6:48
games, it was at DeepMind, Google DeepMind in
6:50
London that's where they did it, all
6:53
the Atari games and then go
6:55
the Chinese Japanese game Shoki and
6:57
chess. So in fact now they
7:00
can just give it rules of any game
7:02
and then it will practice against
7:04
itself and improve until it can beat
7:06
it. Is there anything that we
7:08
can win at? Well, especially
7:10
when it comes to boxing. There's
7:13
one game that we still win but I
7:15
don't know how long it will take us,
7:17
it's the game diplomacy. Oh okay. It's a
7:20
bit like risk so you have to move
7:22
around the world and capture areas and
7:24
but there's more tactics, you have different kinds
7:26
of troops but between every round
7:28
there's a round of diplomacy where the
7:31
players can go one-on-one and talk strategies
7:33
with each other. If you move like
7:35
this then we can attack
7:37
Italy there. Kissinger loved it
7:39
apparently, Kennedy played the game
7:43
and so now they have taught an AI
7:45
to play it. It's a bit scary, you
7:47
can see these large language models talking to
7:49
other players like if you do that move
7:52
there then I will come from that way.
7:54
So it figured all of this out, it
7:57
can't win from the world top yet but it
7:59
ends in top 10 at this
8:01
moment in a game of diplomacy. I
8:04
have a feeling that I would be able to
8:06
beat any AI because
8:08
I'm so dumb it wouldn't be able
8:10
to guess the strategy that I was
8:12
playing. It would
8:14
be like, why has he done that? That's probably where it
8:16
learned to give the queen away first. I'd be like, yep,
8:18
you can have that. I
8:21
feel like stupidity of human error would be
8:23
what confuses AI in a game. Cut two,
8:26
the year 2030. The war
8:28
against the machines has gone terribly badly wrong. Step
8:31
up, Dan. But
8:33
the one man survived it and
8:35
repopulated the earth. The
8:40
one AI that's been built this year, this is very exciting,
8:42
is the new development this year. Researchers
8:45
have built an AI sarcasm detector. Oh,
8:47
yeah, sure they have. It
8:52
was in Holland. It was in Grueling. Was it?
8:55
And they trained it with pieces
8:57
from the Big Bang Theory and
8:59
Friends. So
9:01
it's sitcom sarcasm. It's a
9:03
baby anymore predictable. But
9:06
I read about it and there was, you know,
9:09
what does it do? Mostly it can just detect
9:11
sarcasm. It can detect if you're being sarcastic, which
9:13
is useful. But there is a risk that it
9:15
might start using sarcasm for its own. Against
9:17
us. Evil purposes. Yes. Yeah.
9:21
That's amazing. Is there anything that AI won't
9:23
be able to do in the future? Well,
9:26
that's a difficult question. Basically, you could say
9:28
AI is a
9:30
new kind of software that is good at
9:32
pattern recognition and recognizing patterns
9:35
and generating patterns like generating
9:37
images and language. But
9:39
it does it so amazingly well
9:41
at this point. The fact
9:43
that it can win a game of diplomacy, it
9:46
kind of makes you think with these large
9:48
language models. It's not unthinkable that I ask
9:50
an AI to buy a new car for
9:52
me. It can do the negotiations
9:55
much better. It's not unthinkable
9:57
that an AI will sell your house
9:59
at the move
16:00
on guys. Well what's what's Belgium best at
16:02
Leven? What is Belgium best at? Yeah it
16:04
was one of the most proud things of
16:06
Belgium producers. What I just learned at the
16:09
theme park science show that we just had
16:11
we are world class in the wheels of
16:13
roller coasters. I didn't know. Okay that's very
16:16
cool. And beer and fries. No no no
16:18
let's hear your roller coaster fact I do.
16:21
Okay no an AI has just
16:23
beaten humans of beer. Drinking or making?
16:25
Belgian beer. Not drinking. Making. All right. Coming up with
16:27
new recipes in Belgian beer. Oh yeah of course. They
16:30
had 250 Belgian beers. A panel of the best beer
16:34
experts on the planet. Rated them on all
16:36
sorts of metrics. Rated them on 50 different
16:38
kinds of flavor and lab analysis and
16:41
then an AI algorithm suggested why didn't
16:43
you add a bit of this and
16:45
a bit of that. And it came
16:47
out tasting better according to the experts.
16:49
Wow. This is trouble. Today beer. Tomorrow
16:53
I didn't speak up because I wasn't
16:55
beer. Tomorrow the roller coaster wheels will
16:57
be a new shape. Stop
17:05
the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi everybody just
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wanted to let you know we are
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sponsored this week by LinkedIn Jobs. That's right
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18:20
On with the show. On with the podcast. It
18:24
is time for fact number two
18:26
and that is Andy. My
18:31
fact is that crocodiles can cough up
18:33
hair balls. This
18:36
was sent in by Colin Cruickshank. Thank
18:38
you Colin. This is about, basically I
18:40
didn't know this, I knew cats produce
18:42
hair balls and owls and things, but
18:44
crocodiles, they have the most amazing jaws,
18:46
they have the most amazing stomachs, they
18:48
produce amazing acid to digest things, they
18:50
cannot deal with hair. Normally it
18:52
is not a problem, they don't eat a lot of
18:54
hair, but occasionally they will eat a pig
18:57
and they end up with a hair ball because they
18:59
cannot deal with the pig's hair or the hooves and
19:02
you will just see a crocodile on the banks of the river
19:04
going. Where
19:07
are these hairy pigs coming from? They
19:10
are bristly I guess. They are
19:12
sort of wild ones. That is
19:14
amazing. They are collectors in
19:16
Queensland. The biggest one is the size of a football.
19:18
That is what is amazing about it as well. It
19:20
is not like they have had a meal and they
19:22
want to cough it back up. They can store that
19:25
hair ball for like 40 years. When
19:27
they cough it up, it can give you
19:29
an idea of the diet over decades of
19:31
what they have eaten. It will be like
19:33
hairy pigs. That is so cool. Human
19:37
in some cases in Australia. It
19:39
is the best option if you see a crocodile
19:42
coming towards you with its jaws open that it
19:44
coughs up a hair ball. That
19:46
is what you are hoping for most of the time. It
19:49
is amazing. Hair balls. They used
19:51
to be thought that they cured
19:54
poison. These
19:57
are bizzoas which are hair balls that...
20:00
would come from animals mostly, but
20:02
there was a guy called Amboise Paré, friend
20:05
of the podcast actually, you've mentioned him
20:07
a few times, and he decided to
20:09
see if this was true. So he
20:11
took a cook at the King's Court
20:14
who had been caught stealing fine cutlery.
20:17
So he'd been sentenced to death for stealing
20:19
these spoons. And he said, well, what I'm gonna
20:21
do is I'm gonna let you off, but I'm
20:23
gonna give you some poison, and then I'll give you
20:25
this herbal, which we all know this works, so it'll
20:27
be fine. And then we'll
20:29
see what happens. And it turned out it
20:31
didn't work at all, and he died anyway.
20:33
Oh, wow. But that was the first evidence
20:36
we had that these herbals don't cure poisoning.
20:38
They do, they sound so weird
20:40
and cool. They're incredible. Like the beezers or
20:42
bizzos or what like, don't
20:44
know how you say them, but they, for the
20:46
rich, you know, because real beezers are really rare.
20:49
And you, if you couldn't afford one, you could
20:51
maybe buy a sliver of one, or
20:53
you could rent one for the day. If,
20:56
I don't know what for. I think they
20:58
were also thought to be useful in times of plague.
21:00
So maybe if you were visiting an area- Magic spells
21:03
as well. Magic spells. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if you
21:05
were very wealthy, you might have one for yourself, but
21:07
one for your friends, you know, if any friends are
21:09
visiting. So that's nice. Have a hairball.
21:11
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, they're
21:13
very cool. Lions can get hairballs.
21:16
Oh, really? Yeah, there was
21:18
one found in an African lion at
21:20
the Colorado State Zoo. And
21:22
it was, how big do you think a lion's
21:24
hairball would be? Erm...
21:27
Size of a cricket ball. Bigger. OK.
21:30
Two cricket balls. Let's
21:32
go in sizes of
21:35
animals rather than balls. Melons. Sizes
21:37
of animals. The
21:40
famous animal of the melon. The melon, well, but
21:42
I don't want to- There's a kiwi, so who
21:44
knows? Lee
21:47
van Will have come here with the latest
21:50
research, proving that melons are actually technically- I
21:52
think it was like, I didn't know what
21:54
a chiller was, and now I'm not sure
21:56
I know what a melon is. It
21:59
was about the size of a kiwi. I like the same size as a Chihuahua. So
22:02
I like the size of a small dog. Wow.
22:05
Do you know why Chihuahuas
22:07
were bred in Central America?
22:09
Mexico, right? Yeah. They were
22:11
religious animals and they were
22:14
sacrificed to the gods. No. Really?
22:16
It's not much of a sacrifice. I'm going
22:18
to say, if I was one of the
22:20
gods looking down, they're bringing me this tiny...
22:22
And you were hungry? I'm hungry. You would
22:24
want a dane. I would. A big
22:26
dog. What was the sacrifice, though? Because
22:28
if it's burned at the stake, very easy to light. That's
22:30
a... What? Well,
22:32
they're going to just go right up, aren't they? Yeah,
22:34
that's when they say, woof. So
22:42
they were sacrificed to the gods and I love
22:44
it when I walk in the street and I
22:46
see people with the Chihuahua to go in, oh,
22:48
sweet dog. What are you going to ask from
22:50
the gods when you're sacrificing? Well,
22:54
do you know, this is a tangential story, but there was a thing in the
22:56
UK. I don't know if you guys
22:58
in Belgium heard about it here, but there was a...
23:01
What looked like a giant hairball was found
23:03
by a lady, but she went, oh, it's a
23:05
hedgehog. And so she brought it home and
23:07
she put it into a box and she
23:09
gave it a hot water bottle and some
23:11
food. Then it didn't recover, took it to hospital.
23:14
And it turned out it was the bubble
23:16
on the top of a hat that people
23:18
wear, those beamy bubbles. And
23:21
apparently this happens a lot. Zoologists and
23:23
also vets are saying, we've got to
23:25
start understanding what animals look like again
23:27
because, like, we're losing a
23:29
lot of time when you're calling us out
23:32
to help a drowning swan and it's a
23:34
chair leg upside down. We
23:36
can't do that. Someone brought vets to
23:38
their house to help them revive what
23:40
they thought was a hedgehog, but turned out
23:42
to be a fruit loaf. Now, a
23:45
fruit loaf doesn't look like a hedgehog, but apparently
23:47
it had been picked at by a lot of
23:49
birds so that it looked very spiky. And
23:51
even then they were like, oh, my God, it's dying. And
23:53
they called out people to come. So
23:55
this is a big thing at the moment. Wow. That is amazing.
23:58
Sounds like cheap to my... Gotchis in
24:00
a way. Yeah. Just take cotton balls home
24:02
and care for them. Or like chia pets,
24:05
remember those? No. Chia pet, the
24:07
pottery that grows. No
24:09
one? Wow. No one's
24:11
seen Wayne's World? Okay. and
24:14
you're the only one who gets that reference.
24:16
Yeah, that was a pretty special moment. That's
24:18
like me playing a move to AI. And
24:20
then it's like, what was that? Do
24:23
you want to know the record for the
24:25
largest ball of hair ever created? Okay,
24:27
so this is not an accidental in your
24:29
stomach. This is not an animal product. This
24:32
is someone with a weird fetish. I
24:34
would not disagree.
24:39
But for legal reasons. Well,
24:42
it was created by a hairstylist
24:44
from the USA called Steve and
24:47
he said, I got more spiritual as
24:49
I've aged and I wanted to
24:51
leave some kind of legacy when I'm gone and
24:54
it hit me. I'm going to
24:56
build a giant hairball. And
24:58
he made a hole in the wall in his
25:00
hair salon like a, and he put a slide
25:02
down to the basement of the building. Oh my
25:05
God. And every time he had hair, he just
25:07
shove it down the slide and then he
25:09
glued it all together. So how big was
25:11
it? Oh, so it's
25:13
the biggest ever. So it must be quite big.
25:15
It's quite big. Shall I go by the size
25:17
of an animal? Yes, please. Okay. Large
25:20
horse. Oh, not far off
25:22
actually. Okay. A bison. Smaller
25:25
than a bison. Wow, what is that difference?
25:27
I can't even work. What's
25:30
an in-between animal to that? I
25:32
don't know what animals are, it turns out. I don't
25:34
know what animals are and look like. I actually saw
25:36
this and I thought it looked like a really, really
25:38
big hedgehog. Yeah, it was that. It was a bit,
25:40
yeah, yeah. It's actually a fruitcake. It
25:43
weighed 102 kilos. Oh,
25:45
well, 225 pounds. It is disgusting.
25:48
It is so, it's horrible. How
25:50
big is that, Andy? I can't
25:52
actually picture that. Genuinely, can't I?
25:54
It was, I mean, it was on a wagon when I
25:56
saw it. Like a largeish man would be about 100 kilos.
26:00
Yeah, and it's maybe eight feet high,
26:02
because it's made of hair, it's not
26:04
very dense, and it's half-glue. Anyway, you
26:06
can go and visit it now and
26:09
add your own hair if you too
26:11
have got more spiritual and you want
26:13
to leave a legacy behind. Hi, do
26:15
you know a cat
26:17
coughing up hairballs is
26:20
responsible for one of the great voices
26:22
of nerd culture? That one. That's
26:25
a duck. Yeah.
26:28
Daffy duck. Yeah,
26:30
James does a better daffy duck. Still
26:32
a duck. But that's a nerd.
26:34
Yeah, yeah, yeah. No one's saying. Is
26:37
it like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?
26:39
No, so it inspired the voice of
26:41
something that's very big in the dork
26:43
nerd world. So what does it sound
26:45
like a good cat coughing up hair?
26:48
Oh. Gollum. Gollum. Really?
26:52
Andy Serkis, when he was going to
26:54
the audition of Lord of the Rings,
26:56
was going, how am I going to
26:58
portray Gollum in my audition? And his
27:00
cat was next to him going, what
27:02
a disgusting hairball Gollum would produce. That
27:04
would be awful. That's the
27:06
whole time. That's all it is. I just got
27:08
that in his throat. Interestingly though, cats, when we
27:11
think of them coughing up a hairball, that's according
27:13
to vets, they get pissed off when you say
27:15
coughed up a hairball. They don't cough up a
27:17
hairball. They vomit up a hairball or they're really
27:20
kind of just trying to thrust it out, but
27:22
they're not coughing. It's not a, it's not a...
27:24
It is. Steve will take it and
27:26
he will glue it onto his big ball. Do
27:28
you know we've just missed National Hairball
27:31
Awareness Day. Oh, God. Yeah. By
27:33
how long? Anyone else observe it? That's
27:35
terrible. It is bad when you're the only one.
27:38
Yeah. How
27:40
long, Andy, since it was... It was, it's the
27:42
last Friday in April. So it's an annual thing.
27:44
Do you know the date, the specific date? Well,
27:46
it's the last Friday in April. So like Easter,
27:48
it moves. Which
27:51
is convenient because what if it's at the weekend and
27:53
people are, not enough people to
27:55
come and celebrate. Yeah. And
27:57
what did you do to celebrate? Well, you
27:59
know... We just pop them visit Steve and
28:01
it's great big ball. No,
28:04
it was founded by a vet who wanted to raise
28:06
awareness of... Of hair
28:08
balls. I guess that
28:10
could be bad for a cat's health, maybe?
28:13
Yeah, it makes them sick. If your cat
28:15
is coughing up a hair ball, it is
28:17
a sign of some bigger issues gutturally that
28:19
is going on. Really? Because theoretically it should
28:21
be able to process the bit of hair
28:24
that it eats. Yeah. So that's been
28:26
building up inside of them in ways. We're going to have to
28:28
move on in a second. Shall we do
28:30
a bit on crocodiles or not? Oh, yeah, yeah. If
28:33
you give someone a crocodile to hold when
28:35
they're in the casino, they'll make bigger bets.
28:41
What size of crocodile? I mean, like
28:43
as big as a chinchilla or as
28:45
big as a melon? I
28:47
think it's the bigger the crocodile, the bigger
28:49
the bets. Oh, wow. So
28:51
it's like apparently it's a sense of heightened
28:53
arousal makes you want to gamble more. Oh.
28:56
And if you think the crocodile might eat you, that
28:59
puts you in that stare. You're aroused, but not in
29:01
the way you're thinking. No, no, no. I'm not thinking
29:03
anything at all. I'm just thinking, how do I get
29:05
rid of this crocodile? If I
29:07
win another $50,000, maybe I'll get someone to hold
29:09
the crocodile and take it away from me. Yeah.
29:11
Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's it. Yeah. Sometimes
29:14
in the States, you have
29:16
frozen lakes with crocodile snouts
29:19
peeping out of the ice. Really? It's
29:21
when crocodiles hibernate and there's an ice
29:23
layer on the lake. They just pop
29:25
out their nose. So there's
29:28
it looks like little green pebbles on the
29:30
ice. And it's actually when you when you
29:32
pull the pebble, it's attached
29:34
to a crocodile and they're
29:36
completely hibernating. So they're in standby motors.
29:38
They don't react if you wiggle with
29:40
the snout. That's a good prank, though.
29:43
Yeah. So let's see who can pick up
29:45
that pebble first. Actually,
29:48
the word crocodile means pebble worm.
29:50
Really? Yeah. The croco is the
29:53
pebble and Delos is the worm.
29:55
But in Greek, Delos also means
29:57
circumcised man. So it
30:00
could. be the crocodile means pebble
30:02
circumcised man. Okay. Not sure. Either
30:04
way how misleading if someone says
30:06
can you go and collect the
30:08
pebble circumcised man over there and
30:11
you come to a crocodile that is yeah
30:13
that's that's not that's bad naming I would
30:15
say. All
30:22
right it is time for fact
30:24
number three and that is James.
30:26
Okay my fact this week is
30:28
that in the 14th century there
30:30
was a rumor among Europeans that
30:32
all Englishmen had tales. Now
30:36
is the time to prove otherwise. Um
30:41
I've basically come here to see if it's
30:43
still a rumor. Oh yeah. Is
30:46
this still a thing that people in Belgium think that
30:48
English people have tales? Wow.
30:51
Oh there you go. So this um idea basically
30:56
comes from the idea
30:58
that Saint Augustine had visited the
31:00
people of Kent and he was
31:02
mocked by the locals and they
31:04
pinned tales of fish to his
31:06
robes to kind of kick him
31:09
out of the town and he turned round
31:11
and he cursed them with their own tales
31:13
and this became a thing in Europe
31:16
to such the extent that when there
31:18
was a siege in 1436 in Paris
31:20
and the English were kicked out they
31:23
were taunted by the locals saying were
31:25
your tales were your tales and
31:28
the Scottish before a battle in 1332
31:30
said they would make ropes from the tales of the
31:33
English to tie them with. Oh
31:35
they thought we were basically more close to
31:37
beast hut more close to the devil it
31:39
was said the English were and there
31:42
is a thing in French where the word
31:44
for tail which is coulee and
31:46
the word for hatch which is coulee
31:48
apparently I don't speak French but they're
31:51
so close together they had a theory
31:53
that English people sat on eggs to
31:55
hatch them. So
31:57
yeah that was how we got our eggs we all sat there. quite
32:00
likely now with just you've all got bad teeth as
32:02
a reputation. That is quite, you know, it's better. And
32:04
by the way, we don't all have bad teeth, just
32:07
to say, almost all of us have some
32:09
teeth. So I just want
32:11
to say. We have the
32:13
best teeth, the best teeth ever,
32:15
ever seen. So do
32:17
you have in Belgium then, are there any
32:19
things that if you were talking about an
32:22
English person, you would say a certain thing?
32:24
Like I was just suddenly remembered that Michael
32:26
Palin, when he went out to the Amazon,
32:28
they were describing to him how many trees
32:30
are chopped down per day. They would
32:32
say a Belgium and it
32:34
was the size of Belgium. So that would
32:36
be a unit of measurement out in the
32:38
Amazon for saying how much was chopped down.
32:41
One Belgium of trees was chopped down again.
32:43
Yeah, exactly. Do you have
32:45
anything here where it's like, oh, you English people. We
32:48
chop down one England of trees. No, no, no, no.
32:50
Just like we smell or we start, you know, that
32:52
kind of thing. No, no, no, not
32:54
really. By the way, Dan's just saying this because he's not
32:56
English. That is Australian
32:58
and he wants to get in on this pully. Well,
33:02
you know, when you're a child, you read
33:04
comic books and like asterisks going to
33:07
England and then you have all these,
33:09
oh, really, oh, dear. And they're all very, oh,
33:12
polite. Polite? Cutting the grass,
33:14
really upper class. You're describing Andy.
33:16
You're just... But
33:18
you get this upper class image
33:21
of what England is. And
33:23
then you go there as a tourist.
33:29
And you spend a Saturday evening. OK.
33:33
You spend a Saturday evening in a city
33:35
centre and you go, oh, my God. I
33:38
had no idea. Can I just... Well,
33:41
OK, there is... It's
33:44
fair. There is research on
33:46
this, which is people around the world were
33:48
asked what the worst... What the worst habit
33:50
of the British is. So
33:52
people in Brazil, China, Germany, India and the USA,
33:55
they were asked, what's the worst habit of the
33:57
British? 27% of young adults said... is
34:00
that they drink so much. But
34:02
not all of those people. We would never see
34:05
that in Belgium. We wouldn't know. Not all of
34:07
those people had visited the UK, actually. So this
34:09
was a preconception. And of the people who had
34:11
visited the UK, 34% of them said. LAUGHTER
34:18
Well, it's amazing. I was looking
34:20
at some other stereotypes of the
34:22
English from the 14th century. And
34:24
sure enough, drinking was one
34:26
of the things that Britain was most famous
34:28
for all the way back then. There was
34:31
also the stereotype that British people took excessive
34:33
faith in the dreams of old women. LAUGHTER
34:36
Sweet. That is so
34:38
me. LAUGHTER I was
34:40
thinking it was maybe Theresa May in Brexit
34:42
that they were talking about. LAUGHTER And
34:46
also, the Italians and Germans thought
34:48
that the British were great lovers
34:51
of themselves. LAUGHTER
34:54
Ah. Yeah. Very
34:56
nice. Leven, do you
34:58
think British people are emotionless? Like,
35:02
reserved. Calm. That's
35:04
what the cliche... How dare you! LAUGHTER Well,
35:09
apparently, British people are not the most emotionless
35:11
in the world. So, again, people have been
35:13
asked around the world, how many emotions did
35:16
you experience today? Which is very... Or
35:18
did you feel anything today at all? And
35:21
Britain was sort of in the middle of
35:23
nations. It was not especially interesting. So the
35:26
most emotionless country in the world, according to
35:28
this survey from Gallup, which is asking people
35:30
from these countries, is Singapore, right? Mm-hm. The
35:33
number of people who reported on any given
35:35
day feeling any positive or negative emotions was
35:37
36%. LAUGHTER
35:40
Oh, they were literally neutral. And the rest of
35:42
people said, No, nothing occurred today in
35:45
my mood. I
35:47
didn't have any feelings today. It
35:49
sounds rather Swiss to be so neutral, doesn't
35:51
it? Yeah, it's very Swiss. Could that be
35:53
that their sort of normal level of emotion
35:56
they could be always really happy, but they're
35:58
not getting the highs and the lows. Yes,
36:01
possibly. Yeah, that might be it. I
36:03
mean it's a really strange finding. That's
36:05
amazing. Are we close
36:07
to where the Flemish live around here?
36:10
We are in Flanders. Sounds
36:12
like you're pretty close James. Another
36:15
preconception, British people know where everything in Europe
36:17
is. Here's a
36:19
question for you with that in mind. 16th
36:22
century French scholar Jean-Baptiste La Breuer-Champier
36:24
wrote that whenever you go to
36:26
see the Flemish you should always
36:28
carry a knife. Yes,
36:31
it's to join us for dinner. That's
36:33
why. You will always
36:36
be welcome. Any thoughts? Now you've been here for a
36:38
day. Why
36:41
you might need a knife. Yeah, among the
36:43
Flemish. They
36:46
only have the plastic disposable ones and it's
36:48
very actually hard to cut through your food.
36:50
In the 16th century, you're right. Well, because
36:52
we're staying at Leven's house and on his
36:55
kitchen table there were like 16 peanut
36:58
butters on it and I feel like
37:00
you need multiple knives. You're pretty much
37:02
there Dan actually. They had a reputation
37:04
of consuming the most butter in Europe.
37:06
Oh, wow. And so
37:09
you should always carry a knife with you
37:11
so you can spread the butter wherever you
37:13
like. Really? That's not a knife. This is
37:15
a knife but it is a butter knife.
37:17
So. This guy said not a day, not
37:20
a meal has gone by without me eating
37:22
butter. I'm surprised they have not
37:24
yet put it in their drink. It's
37:26
brilliant. Working on it. But
37:29
we also use kind of a
37:31
knife shaped thing to clear the head of
37:33
a beer. So we always want a bit
37:35
of foam on our beer. And
37:40
so the foam is a bit over the glass
37:42
and we have this knife like thing to like scrape
37:44
it off. For us it's very normal. The first time
37:46
I went to a bar with an Australian in Belgium,
37:48
we went to order a beer and then preparations
37:52
are going and this guy pulls out the knife. He
37:54
was really smart. What's it called? I
37:57
don't know that it has a name. No,
38:00
nobody knows the name. We don't bother with
38:02
names, we want to appear. But interesting fact,
38:04
that is actually how the French Revolution started.
38:06
It was a simple misunderstanding
38:09
in a bar, which then just escalated.
38:11
Just please remove the head from this
38:13
one. Yeah. Wow. The
38:18
kitchen knife was, I think,
38:21
invented or put in as
38:23
a law that you had to use it. I think it was
38:25
by Richelieu. Really?
38:28
The number of deaths at
38:30
the dinner table dropped down to one tenth.
38:33
Because people used daggers. You
38:36
would eat with a dagger and cut
38:38
your meat with it and everything. And
38:40
of course, it's a dinner table, it's
38:42
where you have discussions and there's drinking.
38:44
And so quite often there was a
38:47
knife fight at the dinner table. So
38:49
by simply inventing this kitchen knife, this
38:51
simple knife that is not sharp, he
38:53
cut down the lethal fights over dinners.
38:55
That's incredible. Yeah. 200,000
38:58
people fought to death. Okay,
39:09
I'm going to move us on to
39:11
our final fact of the show. It
39:13
is time for the final fact, and
39:15
that is my fact. My fact this
39:18
week is that toilet paper testers have
39:20
to train for six months before they
39:22
are allowed to apply for the actual
39:24
job. That
39:26
is wild. This is not
39:28
because obviously there's multiple different companies that hire
39:30
people to test out toilet paper for them.
39:33
This is very specifically an article I read
39:35
to do with Proctor and Gamble who do
39:37
make toilet paper. And basically
39:39
the idea is that you need, in order
39:41
to understand what a perfect bit of toilet
39:43
paper is, as a tester, you need to
39:45
do, you need all your senses. In the
39:47
article that says outside of literally tasting it,
39:49
you need to know how does it feel
39:51
in the hand? What is it like to
39:53
wipe, you know, if you've had, you know,
39:55
a couple of Belgian beers the night before?
39:57
Or what is it like if you've had
39:59
a lot of peanuts? butter at Leven's house.
40:02
It's going to be different viscosity of poos
40:04
each day. So basically you spend
40:06
six months doing that and then when you get to
40:08
the moment where they're saying okay now let's give you
40:10
the actual test to see if you can get the
40:12
job, you can fail it. You can fail it if
40:14
you haven't prepared for those. But how do you fail
40:17
it? I'm imagining that they give you
40:19
a single sheet of toilet paper and
40:25
you have to know where it's from.
40:27
This is a single origin. How many
40:29
ply? It might be a combination of
40:31
that stuff. They're quite secretive in the
40:33
toilet testing world. So it's a bit
40:35
hard to get into the clandestine world
40:37
of what's going on in those factories.
40:39
But they do say
40:41
that in that particular moment after six
40:43
months only half of the people will
40:46
make it through to the
40:48
job itself. Can you
40:50
become a toilet paper
40:52
sommelier? You're like, sorry,
40:55
last night I had steak and red
40:57
white. Oh, then I recommend this one
40:59
for you. Oh, yes. Yeah. There
41:01
has to be right. There must be. That
41:04
doesn't have to be that. This
41:07
is just a little bit of windsy. It
41:09
feels very... I think if you spent six
41:11
months of your life and then you fail
41:13
the audition, the least you can do is
41:15
have at least three different toilet papers in
41:17
your house. You hear the boots approaching your
41:20
stall and someone standing outside with the silver...
41:22
No, it's not. I hear the
41:24
sound of soft ply going in there. They do
41:26
have a lot of robots as well. I mean,
41:28
I don't know if this is an AI thing
41:30
too, or maybe it will be soon, but they
41:32
have a lot of robots because they need to
41:34
test the qualities of the paper. They need to
41:36
test how easily it tears, the angle that it
41:38
hangs at if it's on a roll, you know,
41:40
or... And they have a range
41:43
of finger probe robots to test
41:45
how sheets break. Really? If they're
41:47
mishandled or they're sort of taught
41:49
or... Yeah. But then AI robots
41:51
have eight fingers, so that's easy.
41:55
Actually, do you know if you are
41:57
in one of these facilities, how you
41:59
test a toilet paper? against a butt,
42:02
a bottom. So do they have like
42:04
an AI bum as well? No, it's to
42:06
do with you. You're the person who's doing
42:09
it. Me? Yeah. So you're in there. You're
42:11
given a fake bit of poo
42:13
that they have created with NASA. So
42:15
it's because they say
42:17
poo. Because they don't want to have to.
42:20
Why haven't we been back to the moon? Well.
42:23
To boldly go. So
42:26
here's the thing. If you're working in a factory that's
42:28
testing toilets and testing toilet paper, you don't want to
42:30
have real feces in there because it can cause
42:32
lots of disease and so on. So they for
42:35
years, it used to be dog food that they
42:37
would use to flush down toilets. Then they created
42:39
like bean curd and a lot. And then there
42:41
was like how KFC and Coke have
42:44
a secret ingredient. There was a secret ingredient
42:46
poo that they would use that they didn't
42:48
tell anyone about. And then they created this
42:50
thing with NASA. And so what you
42:52
would do is you would put your
42:54
arm tight so that your elbow
42:56
would have a little bum bum basically in
42:58
the corner. And you would put the poo in there.
43:00
And you'd squeeze it out. And
43:03
then you would wipe your bum bum. That
43:05
is very clever. That is the most disgusting
43:07
thing I've heard all year. I
43:09
don't know why. It just. I know it was like. I
43:11
think it was fake. He said bum bum bum. That was
43:14
it. It was bum bum. I know it's fake poo. I
43:16
know it's your elbow. There's no actual poo involved here. I'm
43:18
still revolted. I feel worse about this than I do about
43:20
Steve and his big old bald hair. How
43:24
many listeners are going to try
43:26
this at home? No.
43:29
Send your photos to Andrew Hunter
43:31
Murray. Maybe not. Podcast at qa.com.
43:34
No. Not
43:37
to give you any ideas, but I have 12
43:39
kinds of peanut butter at my house. You
43:44
know, like, it's very trendy to get
43:47
bamboo toilet paper these days. Yeah. Very
43:49
mentally friendly. Well, they did a lot
43:51
of tests recently. And they found that
43:53
some products contain as little as 3% bamboo.
43:57
So you think on the packet it says
43:59
this is. bamboo toilet paper but actually
44:01
what's mostly just old paper and they just
44:03
put a tiny bit of bamboo in this
44:05
has been a big sort of big deal
44:08
in the toilet paper world recently yeah I
44:10
worked out that if you were a panda
44:13
and you wanted to live entirely on
44:15
these toilet rolls you would have to
44:17
eat 7200 toilet rolls every day to
44:23
get enough bamboo and that's how many I
44:25
would use in 50 years that's that's almost
44:27
a Belgium during
44:32
lockdown somebody figured out how to make
44:35
moonshine alcohol from toilet paper
44:38
yeah because there's there's cellulose in it and
44:40
of course we cannot digest cellulose and and
44:42
I think the the yeasts
44:45
that make the alcohol need sugars that does
44:47
feel like you're solving one problem but creating
44:49
another one probably yeah but
44:51
you can you can use certain
44:54
enzymes that can dissolve the cellulose
44:57
into sugars and so he
44:59
actually did it it's on YouTube he documented
45:01
how he did it so this might be
45:03
the reason why everybody was hurting toilet paper
45:06
don't take my booze away yeah funny we actually
45:10
looked into the kind of lockdown hoarding and
45:12
we thought actually a lot of it did
45:14
kind of make logical sense that you would hoard
45:17
it and that's because everyone was suddenly at home
45:19
and you weren't in the office
45:21
anymore and the factories that
45:23
make office toilet paper are different from
45:25
the ones that make home toilet paper
45:28
because you know the office ones are often those
45:30
really big sort of rolls so there was actually
45:32
going to be a massive shortage of home toilet
45:35
paper because no one was in the office anymore
45:37
and everyone was going to the toilet home obviously
45:39
the work crazy people just buying loads of them
45:41
as well yeah yeah yeah that makes sense do
45:43
you know if you go into a toilet paper
45:46
factory where do we get
45:48
individual rolls of toilet paper from from
45:50
the packet no before then
45:52
is it a long one long one
45:55
that is cut no from the mother
45:57
real oh it's called the
45:59
mother real It is a
46:01
ginormous ginormous toilet roll. That's
46:03
amazing. Wait, is it long?
46:06
Yeah, it's long. Because
46:08
you're gesturing. You're saying it's tall. I know. I sort of
46:10
thought, because this is audio for the listener at home, it
46:12
didn't matter what I did with my hands. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
46:14
yeah. I
46:17
tell you what, you've had a bad day if the sommelier
46:19
comes with that, haven't you? So
46:22
each mother real, as they call
46:25
it, contains, when chopped up into
46:27
individual rolls, 25,000 individual rolls.
46:30
What? Yeah. So there's a guy called
46:32
Greg Wallace. We've mentioned him on the show before.
46:35
He makes a show where he goes around looking
46:37
at how they make things in the UK. It's
46:39
a documentary series, each show, different factory to show
46:41
you how it's done. So he was in a
46:44
big warehouse where they had 2,000 mother rolls
46:46
in there. And
46:49
they worked out that if you
46:51
were an average family, you
46:53
would have four toilet rolls a week
46:55
in an average family. That's how much
46:57
is used, right? So the amount of
46:59
toilet rolls in that room would mean
47:01
that your family could be wiping your bum
47:04
for 96,000 years, just
47:08
from that collection of 2,000 mother rolls
47:10
that they had sitting in the warehouse.
47:12
Do you know these toilets that squirt
47:14
water on your bum? A bidet?
47:17
No, the toilets as in inside the toilet. The
47:19
Japanese? Well, I was going to ask you, do
47:22
you know where they were invented? Japan. No,
47:24
they weren't. No, no, no. They
47:28
were invented in America. Really? Yeah, they were
47:30
invented in America and they were supposed to
47:32
be for like care homes and stuff. OK.
47:35
And then they sent a few over to
47:37
Japan and this company who got them thought,
47:40
everyone's going to want these. Let's start
47:42
making them for everyone. And so
47:44
they did. But the problem was that the
47:46
ones in America were kind of prototyping and
47:49
they were very good at measuring the
47:51
temperature and they were very good at
47:53
measuring the angle of squirt. And
47:55
so they quite often fired boiling water
47:57
straight into people's anuses. And
48:01
there was a market for that too So
48:04
we were talking about are you too busy to
48:06
drink tea the normal way well That's
48:11
a couple of English stereotypes together But
48:15
they are yes, so then this company
48:18
called Toto decided to start making these
48:20
but we're talking about Testing
48:22
toilet paper and stuff they needed to
48:24
get the angle right and so they
48:26
asked all of their staff members to
48:28
test these toilets Okay, and to
48:31
be honest it took quite a lot to get
48:33
people to cooperate But eventually they did okay and
48:35
all the members of staff would take it in
48:37
turns to sit on these toilets and have water
48:39
Fired up at different angles and
48:42
they found that the golden angle is 43 degrees
48:46
So it just cleans you the right amount and
48:48
for women at the front. It's 53 degrees So
48:52
that's a bit of information you never wanted to know I
48:57
I've read about the founder of Toto I didn't
48:59
read I didn't read any of that But he
49:01
was an amazing guy called Kazu Chika Okura and
49:03
he sort of had been to the West I
49:05
guess and He also
49:08
helped introduce the car to Japan
49:11
This guy was a big deal, right?
49:13
And he also created his own new
49:15
musical instrument the Okura Okura
49:17
Oulu a kind of vertical flute
49:20
What a vertical flute a
49:22
vertical flute recorder he invented the
49:25
recorder and And
49:27
he was president of linking it back to AI
49:29
the Japanese Go Association Wow,
49:32
yes, that's very cool.
49:34
It was a big deal. Well while we're
49:36
on inventions There's a there's a British word.
49:38
I don't know if you know it here,
49:40
but we often call the toilet the throne
49:43
So the the throne the toilet
49:46
it's attributed as an invention to
49:48
a guy called Sir John Harrington
49:51
And he built it. He was the godson of
49:53
Queen Elizabeth the third and suppose. Okay,
49:55
we've only had two Queen Elizabeths So gonna stop
49:57
you right there. What did I say Queen Elizabeth?
50:00
with the third. Yeah, so John Harrington invented it
50:02
in the year 3000. No, so sorry, Queen was
50:07
the first, yeah. So he invented
50:09
it for her and it basically,
50:11
what I'm talking about is a
50:14
toilet whereby it had valves, it
50:17
had a flush and she tried it and she was like,
50:19
this is fantastic, I'll take one. So it was a big
50:21
deal. So he invented
50:23
the throne and a descendant
50:25
of his is Kit
50:27
Harrington, John Snow
50:30
from A Game of Thrones.
50:33
Wow. So this is a series about everyone
50:35
wanting to get on the loo. Yeah.
50:39
One more thing on Pooh. Yeah.
50:41
There's a famous biologist in the
50:43
Netherlands who's called Midas Deckers who
50:45
writes great books about science and
50:48
one of his latest books is
50:50
The Story of Shit. So
50:52
he's a biologist and he just explains
50:55
the entire gut system, how it's produced,
50:57
what is happening there biologically. And
50:59
they asked him in a talk show, they asked him like,
51:01
why did you want to write a book about Pooh? And
51:03
he said, well, I was walking
51:06
around in these bookstores. You see all these
51:08
cookbooks. Nobody ever
51:10
tells you how it
51:12
ends. Look, we need
51:15
to wrap this up.
51:17
Thank you so much
51:20
everyone for coming to
51:23
this live recording. We
51:25
really appreciate it. That
51:30
is it. That is all of our facts. If
51:32
you'd like to get in contact with any
51:34
of us about the things that we've said
51:36
over the course of this podcast, we can
51:38
all be found on our various social media
51:40
accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. James. My Twitter
51:43
is at James Harkin. Andy. At Andrew Hunter
51:45
M. And Lieven. At Lievenskere. Good luck with
51:47
that. It's
51:49
the one country you can say that to. If
51:52
you want to get to us as a group, you
51:54
can go to No Such Thing or No Such Thing
51:56
as a Fish on Instagram, or you can go to
51:58
our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our
52:01
previous episodes are up there. You can also get tickets
52:03
to our live tour. We're about to go on tour
52:05
around the world, so please check that out. For
52:08
everyone here, thank you so much for coming.
52:10
We're going to be back again next week,
52:12
and we hope we're going to be back
52:14
here again next year for another awesome Nerdland
52:16
adventure. We'll see you again next week, everyone
52:18
else. Goodbye!
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