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

17:07

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!