No Such Thing As A Fish - 114: No Such Thing As A Tantrump

Episode Date: May 19, 2016

Live from Up The Creek in Greenwich, and filmed as a pilot episode for QI's new BBC TV series No Such Thing As The News, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss elephant polo, robots replacing Royals, and everything that hasn't been discovered yet.

Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish. We have a very exciting day ahead of us. We are on our way to the studio to record the very first episode of No Such Thing as the news. It's our BBC2 TV show and it's gonna air May 20th at 11 o'clock PM on BBC2. So we need you guys to watch it.

We really need you to watch it because if you don't watch it, they'll cancel us. We will lose the entire series. So please, if you like our show, if you're hearing this now, cancel your Friday night plans and come to the TV, sit down, make yourself some tea and watch our show.

We'd really appreciate it and please spread the word. If you wanna watch it on iPlayer a little bit later, that is also okay with us. Just watch it at some point and you can go to the No Such Thing as a Fish YouTube channel and catch it there any time from Sunday morning. The episode you're about to hear now is the un-ed pilot which we recorded last week.

So enjoy. Yesterday, I took a bath. I took a bath and I took a bath. Yesterday, I took a bath and I took a bath. Hello, hello, hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as the news coming to you from Up the Creek Comedy Club in Greenwich, London. My name is Dan Schreiber and please welcome,

it's Anna Czenski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our favorite facts from the last seven days of news and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Czenski. My fact this week is that the first thing that Ted Cruz did after dropping it out of the Republican contest

was elbow his wife in the face. And this was. So you probably saw that about a week ago, Ted Cruz dropped out of the Republican race, leaving Donald Trump as the only contender for the throne of America. And yeah, it's just a great YouTube clip. You should watch it.

He makes this speech in Indiana saying he's very sorry, but you know, he seems to have not gone that well for him. He turns away from the microphone. He elbows his wife in the face as he's hugging his dad and then he sort of tries to compensate for it by then trying to do a three-way hug with his dad and his wife and then sort of slaps her about a bit as he goes back to do that.

And that was just seemed like an awkward end to an awkward campaign. I think he's had a very unfortunate time, Ted Cruz. First of all, Donald Trump made a reference to a JFK's killing and accused Cruz at some point of having been in a photo with Lee Harvey Oswald. To release?

Sorry, accused his father of being a friend of Lee Harvey Oswald. Yeah, so he's the spawn of a murderer and then everyone in America seems to think that he is the Zodiac killer. Even though his first murder was committed two years before Cruz was born. I find like there was, he had an online store that had lots of odd products. If you were trying to eventually run for president, you wouldn't naturally have,

but there was this one debate that he had with Donald Trump where he started telling Donald Trump to breathe and Trump was like, well, you breathe, I'm breathing. Why can't you breathe? And he was like, I am breathing. Why don't you breathe? They just had this real kind of like breathe-off kind of conversation. And then Rubio comes in and he's like,

when you guys are done doing yoga, it's like these weird calls. And then so Ted Cruz, then a few days later, for 35 bucks on his website, you could buy the Ted Cruz Breathe Exercise Mat that you would just learn to breathe better on. So he was just running with these gags and then he got sued by a company,

who are a yoga company, who are called Breathe, saying you can't suddenly start selling breathe yoga mats on your website. So he had to take the whole breathing away. So then he just was selling exercise mats for no reason. It was just, why not get an exercise mat of mine? Just the whole joke gone, just I guess we're now selling exercise mats.

Well, he's got to do something now. So it looks now it's going to be Trump versus Clinton, right? In the American presidential race. That means it's going to be the most unpopular presidential candidates in my lifetime, versus the second most unpopular candidates in my lifetime. And by a long, long way as well, yeah. I think Peter Walk tweeted a couple of days ago

that this came out in support for Hillary and it was a story and the tweet was, everyone vote for Hillary, it's the second worst thing that could possibly happen to the world. There was a poll this week by the public policy poll and they tested how popular Donald Trump is compared to various different things.

And it turned out that he is less popular than traffic jams, used car salesmen, hipsters, jury duty, the band Nickelback, root canal surgery and lice. There's another on Ted Cruz's website. There's another product that he sold, which is a thing that he started, what he was trying to guess to be a kind of meme going around,

which is about, he called it Trump or tantrum. So the idea is every time Donald Trump was throwing a tantrum, he was like, it's a Trump or tantrum. And I looked at just the basic words and you think, well, why don't you just call it a tantrum? And I don't trust someone who doesn't recognize a good pun. Do you know how to tell if he's angry, actually? Donald Trump?

Yeah. No. He, as life and body starts building walls, he wears a red hat when he's angry. This is according to his butler, who I think wrote a book a couple of months ago, a few months ago, and said that the way to tell his mood is by the color of hat that he's wearing.

And when he's pissed off, he wears a red hat and that is when to leave Iran. So this is the American elections. We had the British local elections this week. I was a few funny, amusing things that happened there. In Wolverhampton, the Conservative Party accidentally put two people up for elections. So they came first and third.

Wow. Yeah. But the thing is they took votes off each other. So one of them said, no, no, vote for him, vote for him, but people didn't really pay any attention. And if the guy who came third got just 60 more votes, then Labour would have gotten. And also there's election going on in the Philippines at the moment

with the most unbelievably weird man. Yeah. Who's just won it? His campaign slogan is basically, I will kill all the criminals. Well, do we go Duterte or Duterte? Yeah. Or the punisher, as they call it.

Really? It is Duterte, I think, because his nickname in his old job was Duterte Harry. Oh, see, that is a good pun. 10 croons could learn something up there. And that's how he got into power. In an interview, many are asking what my credentials are and what I can do for the Philippines.

They are telling me that they have heard I am a womanizer. That is true. That is very true. He said, what? I mean the press conference, he just said that. At this point, he's boasted about his multiple affairs and the fact he uses a lot of Viagra to keep himself going. Boasted about his Viagra use?

Yeah, it's... Very confident, isn't it? Do you wait till you see the pills I have to take to sustain this? Maybe he's got an advertising contract with him. But yeah, he's reassured the public, after boasting about all his affairs, that his mistresses won't cost the public a lot

because he keeps them in cheap boarding houses. And he takes them to short stay hotels for sex. He's quite a character. He's like one of these strong men, presidents that are coming in around the world. I think he's one of those kind of guys. We need to move on to our final fact soon. Anyone got anything before we do?

Can I just quickly relate one thing about the recent UK elections? Yeah. In case you missed it, there was a Labour councillor called Duncan Enright. He wanted to be the councillor for Whitney in the West Oxfordshire area. And he sent a tweet out after the elections, just saying, lost by 70 votes or so.

Thanks for the opportunity to serve. The fight goes on. And then about 20 minutes later, he sent out another tweet saying, actually, it turns out I won. Bundle of my votes under a Tory pile. Thanks, Whitney. And that's how casual voting is in this country.

Oh, we found a bunch more votes under this pile of paper. Sorry. The fight can stop immediately. All right, so there we have it. Ted Cruz accidentally elbows his wife in the face. Now we are moving on to our second fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that this week,

scientists have discovered that we still haven't discovered 99.999% of life on Earth. That's a lot. Now, the big story that was in the news this week about this is that there's an estimate of how much life on Earth there is, and it changes all the time, but it's quite manageable in a way for counting purposes. So in 2011, they thought there was about 8.7 million

different forms of life on the planet. They just found out through this new study that they reckon that that number has gone up from 8.7 million to one trillion. One trillion. What are these things that we haven't... If only... There's like a few species of yak.

There's a lot of sports to be had. I think... Is it very, very small things that we haven't... Yeah, it's microbes. It's microbes. What they did is there's a way of kind of working things out called scaling laws, and say you know how big an animal is,

you can kind of tell what its metabolism is, and if the bigger it is, the more it is, so you can put the size of the animal in, and you can work out its metabolism. That's an example of things. And another way of doing this is you can work out how many big animals there are in an area, and then by putting them into an equation,

you can work out how many microbes, or how many small animals there are as well. And so they've worked out how many big animals they think there are, and they've put it into this scaling equation, and they've come out with one trillion. We just don't know. I mean, they are making this up, I think.

That's true. They said there's between 100 billion and one trillion, so that is actually quite a large gap between those two numbers, if you think about it. Don't think about it, just let it be. It is amazing. The difference between a billion and a trillion is it's a number that I'm unable properly to understand,

so I started thinking about it. I first thought, okay, everyone always has this dream of having a species named after them, so I thought, well, if there's a trillion, surely there's enough for us all, right, to go around. So I looked into... More than enough.

Yeah, exactly. So I looked into how many people have existed on Earth ever, all the dead people, all the living people combined, and apparently, according to the Population Reference Bureau, we estimate that about 107 billion people have ever existed,

which means that's a bit less than a trillion so we could do it. And that's really, that's insane, the differentiation of life on our planet. Yeah, but most of those people don't want some crappy bit of bacteria named after them. They want a large mammal, a large, delicious mammal.

That's what's so disappointing about this. You hear this, like brilliant lions everywhere, different species of lions. Oh, good. It's tiny microbes again. They're probably really interesting. You're probably,

you're probably being speciest against these microbes. They're probably very interesting. And I think you could probably, because I don't know actually what a microbe is, but I reckon, I reckon they're probably interesting when you look close at them. Do you know the largest species that we discovered last year?

No. The largest new species that I can find. So there were 2034 new plant species discovered last year alone, and the biggest was a tree, Gilberteo dendron maximum, which gets up to 45 meters high, and we hadn't found it before.

Wow. What was that? That was great. Was that something behind a slightly bigger tree? It was hiding in Gabon. Oh, really? Yeah. Also, last year,

the first ever animal found on Facebook. Oh, sorry. No, sorry. It was an insect-eating plant. I think it was identified because someone saw it on Facebook. Oh, it's great. I don't think it had an account.

No mutual friends? Who was this guy? What was really cool about that? I saw that article, and it was basically a guy found this plant, and he put a picture of it on, and then he had a friend, I think, who saw it and thought,

that's something new. But what's great about it is because the photo was geotagged, they knew exactly where it was, so they could go and find it, and they could check it out, and check it out, and find out that it actually was a real new plant.

It's really cool, isn't it? I love it. You think maybe social media isn't such a mistake after all. Actually, I think it's the sake of categorising. It's like the finding is the fun part, but then they're all sitting in museums or botanical gardens,

waiting for some poor intern to put them in a list. That's true. And that's where the hold-up is, I reckon. That's true. 2014, a new species that was discovered that was collected by Darwin. Like, that's how...

So in the Natural History Museum, every week, they discover about 50 new different species, because they're going through the backlog, so they still haven't gone through all of Darwin's stuff, and they keep going through and going, oh, my God, this is a new beetle species.

Surely you bumped that out to the top of the list. I just finished Darwin. Wow. I've been looking up a few things about David Attenborough, because he's a man who has a lot of things named after him, and a lot of species and things like that. And, obviously, news this week.

Hot news, no one saw it coming. His birthday. Yeah. Who knew? Thanks. We'll pass that on. Pass on that incredibly hard-hearted audience reaction. How old is he? He's 90.

I found out this thing about him, that in 2011, he sold a 132-year-old murder. What? In a sense. There was a murder that happened in 1879, and it was a woman called Julia Martha Thomas who was killed by her housekeeper. It was called Kate Webster,

and Webster was arrested, and she was tried, and she was convicted, and then executed. But the one thing that was never found was the murdered woman's head. And this was found in David Attenborough's garden when he was having an extension done to his home. When was this?

2011, and the murder was in 1879. Okay, so it was 200 and... 132. 132. And he's only 90. So he's not in the frame. That's all he claims. Imagine that scoop.

That's incredible. Yeah. Wow. Well done, David. So well done him for having an extension done. Clever David. Also well done him, and I think he's probably prouder of that,

but when he was 89, so not long ago, he became... He broke the record for the deepest anyone's dived on the Great Barrier Reef. So he went down a thousand feet on the Great Barrier Reef in a submersible with a person who knew how to drive a submersible. It was brilliant.

I just think that's incredible, and there's footage of him doing it. He looked so comfortable, and he said it was brilliant. He wasn't nervous at all. It was like being in a cinema or something. You're in absolute comfort. You're just in there munching chocolate

and saying, this is wonderful. I'll sit next to him at the cinema. This is wonderful. Revenant, it's not meant to be wonderful. We're thinking about the bear. It's thinking about the grizzly bear. When I was looking for stuff about Leicester City, I was reading the Leicester Mercury,

and they had a headline. It was today in the Leicester Mercury, and it said, Should East Midlands Airport be renamed after Sir David Attenborough? And I think we should let the internet decide. You're pretty angry about Boating with Boatface, right, Andy? I have calmed down.

In the month, you know. Let's see if we can wind you up again. So obviously they've named the boat now after Sir David Attenborough instead. Don't worry, Boating with Boatface still survives. It's a remotely operated vehicle aboard David Attenborough. They've installed it on him. It's a submarine, which it looks really beautiful.

There was quite finally, there was a petition on, I think it was, Change.org for David Attenborough to change his name now to Boating with Boatface. He's also the only person, I just love this David Attenborough fact, to have received a BAFTA in five different formats. So he's received BAFTAs in black and white colour,

HD, 3D and 4K TV. And even though no one knows what 4K TV is, that's still cool. It's just extremely high resolution television. But great work, Dave. Yeah. We need to move on very shortly to our next fact. Have we got anything else before we do?

I can quickly tell you about a video that I saw on YouTube, if you want to. So there was this fisherman in Australia called Ronald Honeyset. And he was in Australia. And you can see the video and there's this little thing floating around and he's like,

is it, I think it might be a sea slug, or is it a new species of jellyfish? And so he put it onto YouTube to see if people would be able to tell what it was. And they pretty quickly managed to identify it as a rather large poo. Who did they name it after? OK, look, we need to move on.

We need to move on to our third fact of the evening and that is James Harkin. OK, my fact this week is that as well as winning the Premier League title, the owners of Leicester City also won the World Elephant Polo Championships. And no one is talking about that. I know.

What's going on? What versatile men they are. Is there anyone who's gone? OK, they bought Leicester City but they've also done another few different kind of spots and they're really good at polo. And as well as being really good at polo, they're really good at elephant polo.

And this year... Are they good at polo or are they good at giving loads of money to people who are good at polo? No, they are good at polo. The vice chairman is called Iowa and he's one of the players on the B team for the horse polo. So they put their...

But not the elephant polo. Not the elephant polo. And I read that Miss Thailand competes in the elephant polo. So I don't know how high the standards are, even with that. Is that her talent round? Actually, elephant polo started off as a bit of a joke.

It was invented by two British guys. In the 90s or the 80s, they kind of thought it was just a funny thing to do but then now it's kind of become a much bigger thing and it's a charity event. It's a little bit controversial. They make a load of money and they give it to elephant charities.

But also, there was an activist called Lek Chiliat from Thailand who said elephants are not made for polo. It would be a perverse God. He's quite an eccentric man, Raniere, isn't he? So that's the manager of Leicester. Yes, that's the manager. Who, at the start of the season,

he was the bookie's favourite to be the first manager in the Premiership to be sacked. I read, I think this was a Guardian that said he's an eccentric who offered a win bonus of pizza at a local restaurant to incentivise his players. So it's that kind of like unattainable prize. You've got to promise them in order to get them.

He also, he used to rally them with his cry of dilly-ding dilly-dong and when asked why that was the cry that he rallied them with, he said it was because he couldn't sing so he pretended to be a bell instead. Well, I think he achieved that, eh? My favourite thing, definitely, looking into the story

is the fact that because they're a Thai family they massively subscribe to Buddhism. And so they were flying over for every home game, monks to come and bless the team. They would slap Jamie Vardy and the rest of the team players' legs with these lashes that they were blessing them with and while the team was out there,

they sat back a bunch of monks chanting away, kind of guessing how the game was going based on the cheers and just chanting away for there to bless the team to win. They planted relics underneath the pitch. So the whole thing, it's extraordinary. Honestly, it's a massive Buddhist monk victory this whole season.

It's incredible, isn't it? He built them a temple, I think, or a shrine. Apparently, someone who worked at the club, I think one of the chefs said that the pitch was full of covered-in white marks from where the monks kept on blessing it and they don't know how they're blessing it. And I'm not addressing that.

Kelly, they're monks! And so a lot of the stories about Leicester win the title is how they were 5,000 to one at the start of the year. So I thought I'd look at a few things about odds and things like that. Two guys, Kelly and Justin Tomlinson, who, if either of them becomes Prime Minister,

they're going to get £500,000. And that's because they put a bet on when they were at university at 10,000 to one that they would become Prime Minister. And they're both currently Conservative MPs. There's another thing that I saw that a lot of people put a bet on them becoming 100, turning 100. And the way that they work out the odds on that

is they take your age, subtract it from 100, and that's the odds. So if I'm, what, am I 37? So that would mean that I would be 63 to one to reach 100. Really? And that's how they work it out. That's quite interesting.

Okay, well, that's it. That is Lester, also the Elephant Polo owners, which is amazing, the champions of the world in two different sports. Let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that Britain's first ever robot was designed to replace the Duke of York.

So this is in the news because it's a robot that we've lost, we don't know where it went. It was in 1928, it was built, and there's a campaign, the Science Museum are launching to rebuild it. They've got the designs and they want to make a new one, so I think there's a Kickstarter. But this is the most incredible robot.

It was called Eric, and it was in 1928, the Duke of York was meant to open an exhibition for the Society of Model Engineers, and then he dropped out, and so the guy who was organizing the exhibition said, well, we need a replacement, and he, and an engineer, he knew made one, and it stood up on the day,

and it made a four-minute speech, and it looked around, and it answered questions, and its teeth were sparking because there were 35,000 volts of electricity going through them. And then Eric just went on tour around the world, and huge audiences came to see him, and we have no idea where he went in the end.

Do you think the audience has been warned that there had been a change of booking, or before they had gone, the Duke of York's looking weird? So this, just to clarify, this is a Science Museum Kickstarter. The Science Museum of London has actually set this up,

and what they've had is they've found, not Eric himself, the robot, they've found the plans of the robot, and the idea is that they now want to refund it, send him back around the world to talk to people, I guess, I don't quite know, but they're opening up quite a similar kind

of robotic exhibition, so they thought, let's get Eric back on the scene. Yeah, they're rebuilding a lot, I think, aren't they? I read an article in the Sunderland Daily Echo from the 1930s, and they said that Eric was the perfect husband. Eric should prove the idol of all the girls. He never swears, does not stay out late at night

in his truest steel. Like a good boy he speaks when he's spoken to, and confesses he cannot think. That was fantastic. Yeah, but he, I, because this was his... He's all of his women in cheap boarding houses, and short stay hotels. And you should see how much viagra he gets.

Yeah, he was, so you said he was built in, did you say when he was built? 1928, wasn't it? But when you look in the newspaper archives, it seems in the 30s and 40s he became really popular. And I checked the popularity of the name Eric, and Eric was not very popular in the 20s at all, and then in, so in 1928 there were only 186 Eric's born in Britain,

but by 1948 there were two and a half thousand, and by 1958 there were more than 8,000. So I record that Eric might have caused the popularity of the name Eric. Oh my God, amazing. Good theory. So I've got a rival article to yours from the newspaper archives,

and I haven't written down which paper it was from, but it must have been a rival paper, because that said that he is as unattractive as any steel figure you've ever seen. And he is, if you look at pictures, but they were going to build him a sister, and this article said, so it promised that they say his sister,

who is now in production, is to be beautiful. She's like one of the figures in West End store windows. And I couldn't find anything more of the sister's manufacture. So Eric's sister, beautiful sister, maybe out there. I read about another robot that was in the news this week. So you have a load of robots kind of stood next to each other. They're only like six inches tall or something, and they're kind of communicating to each other

in their own little language. And whenever they notice that a human's coming by, they'll turn round and they'll go, oh, hello, what do you think? And then whatever you say to them, they go, oh, that's interesting. And they turn round and they carry on their little conversation. They don't understand anything that humans says,

but it's just a way of kind of pretending to be interested in humans. That is genuinely a push now for any robot or AI that they're trying to do. They're trying to get them to be better with humans and be more understanding. I was reading that's a Google for the past few months. They've just spoken about this this week,

but this has been going on for two months or so. They have been feeding. So they have a bunch of AI computers, and the idea is that the AI computers can learn better to interact with humans through various different ways. The current way that they're doing it is that they are feeding these AI machines at Google. Currently, they're halfway through,

about halfway through 2,865 romance novels. So they're just making the AI read romance novels. And the titles like Fatal Desire, Jacked Up, Unconditional Love. Jacked Up? Very romantic. For a robot, it would be. The idea is that apparently,

when we're Googling things, our conversation in terms of the Google, so we'll sometimes do quite a sort of chatty Google, is very predictable, and the best predictable dialogue you can find is in romance novels. And so they look to that, and they feed it in, so they come back.

Another, just on the whole thing about big companies trying to work AI into, so Google doing the romance novels, Microsoft a while ago, did you read about their chatbot? Does everyone know about this chatbot? Oh, my God. Okay, let's move on.

If you don't know it in the room, basically, they had this chatbot whereby they thought that it would just start its own Twitter feed and it would start talking to people, and within 24 hours, it transformed itself into what the article says, is an evil, Hitler-loving, incestual, sex-promoting,

bush-did, 9-11, proclaiming robot. And all of its tweets to people writing to her said that she started calling them Daddy and asking them to shag her. I thought those were romance novels. She has since announced that she will be voting Trump, so...

But, yeah, it goes wrong. They thought they were going to do something that would respond fantastically well. Did it take things that people were... or that were proving especially traction on Twitter? It learned from what people were tweeting towards it, so people started...

they realised that and started tweeting really racist things, and it just picked it all up. We need to wrap up really shortly, so if you've got anything... Well, I have a quick thing about the Duke of York. Remember that? I just thought I'd see what's going on in Duke of York news,

because of the Britain's First Robot thing. So, in the last month, Prince Andrew has opened a business club in Hungate. He has opened a luxury bed factory in Castle Donington, and a roundabout in Kent named after him has caught fire. So, we're going to wrap up very shortly.

There were a bunch of stories that we really wanted to talk about tonight, as our headline topics, but we didn't get time. So, just very quickly, could you just let us know, James, Andy and Anna, what you would have gone for tonight? One that we didn't get a chance to say is this one, which is, New Research reveals that 20% of Americans

are put off by the word moist. Moist. Anyone? Moist. Yeah, definitely a few people over there. Yeah, Anna, what have you got? Yep, I like this, that.

After a man in Croydon lost a bet with a friend, the frozen food company Iceland has warned shoppers not to lie down in their freezers to cool off. And, finally, Andy. In China, under new guidelines from the Ministry of Culture, live streaming services have banned the eating of bananas in an erotic manner.

But, someone, an unnamed Chinese person, has just said they will eat yams instead. Okay, that's it, that is all of our facts. Thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you all for watching at home. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast,

we can be found on nosuchthingasthenews.com where you can see all of the stories we're talking about tonight, as well as additional stories that didn't make it into the show. We will be back again next week with another batch of our favorite news stories from the past seven days. We'll see you then. Goodbye.