No Such Thing As A Fish - 240: No Such Thing As An Easy Tweet

Episode Date: October 26, 2018

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Maxïmo Park frontman Paul Smith discuss banned bananas, earthquake-sensing belts, and the Great Lost Massive Toilet Of London.

Hi, everyone. Before we start this week's show, I want to introduce to you our special guest, and that is- Hello. No, not you, Dan. I want to introduce our special guest. His name is Paul Smith, and he is the lead singer of one of my very, very most favourite bands in the whole world, Maximo Park. And actually, he has an album about this very day. Yes, it's called Diagrams. You can get it at PaulSmithMusic.eu. It's an awesome album, and we actually know Paul because we did his podcast last year to promote our book, The Book of the

Year, and our new book has come out exactly the same time as his album. So we thought, why not reunite? Let's make it an annual thing. We'll make it an annual thing. So if you want to buy that book to help us get another one, so we can meet Paul again, do go to Amazon or knowsuchthingasafish.com. There's links there. We'd love it if you'd get our book as well. On with the podcast. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Know Such Thing as a Fish,

a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chazinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and special guest. It's the lead singer of Maximo Park, Paul Smith, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Paul. The studio that made a hard day's night demanded the Beatles' voices be dubbed, because they thought Americans wouldn't understand their accents.

So good, and just for context, they were massive at that point, weren't they, in America? They were, and that's why the film was actually commissioned. United Artists gave them, I think it was £200,000, and I don't know what the equivalent of that is these days, but it's still not a great deal to make a feature film. And they thought, well, we'll sell loads of records off the back of this terrible movie that'll probably bomb, and it ended up being one of the biggest movies ever. Yeah, so it was a loophole, wasn't it? It was a loophole for the movie company, because it meant that they were able to release a Beatles album outside of the recording studio

contract, so they actually bought a Beatles album for an incredibly low sum of money. And it wasn't dubbed in the end. It wasn't dubbed in the end. You don't hear deep South accents, do you, in a hot day's night? Not that I know of. So, Paul, you must sell records in America, right? Just about. Can they understand anything that you say?

I'm very charming abroad, apparently. Right, okay. After the shows, you know, you get the usual, oh, I love your British accent, and that kind of thing. And it's, you know, I don't have a traditional British accent, so around America, I get a lot of, hey, you sound really Scottish. And I go, well, I'm nearly in Scotland. I live in Newcastle, and it's the last big city before you get to Scotland. Yeah, you get people, I think Americans sometimes will, you know,

say a Scouser as an Australian, or a Liverpoolans, you know, from South Africa. They're pretty wacky with where they guess we're from. But Scouser's accent is particularly hard for people to get, isn't it? It's like a really hard accent for non-Liverpuddlings to understand. So for instance, Jamie Carragher did a documentary, so he's a Liverpool footballer. He did a documentary a few years ago called Being Liverpool, and they even subtitled that for the UK audience. That's amazing.

No way. I'm afraid so. Wow. So on the accent thing, so the Beatles, they did have, I didn't know this, their own cartoon, which ran for about four years in the mid-60s, but none of the Beatles had any part in it whatsoever. So none of them sounded like themselves, because they were all voiced by other people. So apparently George sounded Irish, or maybe Scottish.

John Lennon sounded American, Paul sounded like a PG Woodhouse character. They just bore no relation to what they were like. Wow. Well, they did sing in American accents, didn't they? Like a lot of bands. But like if you listen to early Beatles, they sound American, and then in later Beatles albums, they go more British sounding. More Liverpuddly and sounding, they go as well.

More Liverpuddly and sounding, exactly. And I think because American is, A, it's a bit easier to understand the words, because Americans drag their words out more, and they have the like, Rotik saying their R's. And also it was just where all the rock and roll was at. Yeah, all their influences, all their influences were American. There were no... But also it was a good way to sell to a market that was using listening to American music. Whereas once they were well established enough,

by the time they got to Sergeant Pepper's, then they'd have things like, you know, it's getting better all the time, gutting better all the time. That's what the song sounds like. In the first studio album, they pronounced their R's 47% of the time, and by the time they were doing Let It Be, it was 3% of the time. But statistics. And then they went round the other side, where now Ringo sounds like he lives somewhere in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Because he's lived in America for a long time, and has obviously lives in a celebrity bubble, which is fine. That's no criticism. I would probably be living in that bubble as well if I was Ringo. But yeah, it's like little. Oh yeah. Yeah, I had a little... D's instead of P's kind of thing. Yes.

Just out of curiosity, because I know sometimes words are missed out. So there's a song fixing a hole. Would that have been fixing a hole? What? Like using internet, or not the fixing R. So you know how I would say using to internet or something? That's not a Liverpool Puddly infant. No, I know, I'm just thinking Northern accents.

I think in Liverpool, they tend to pronounce all of the words. Do they? But not the R's. Not the R's. Although, I'm thinking... You said they didn't pronounce the R's and let it be. I'm thinking of the lyrics of let it be, and it's mostly the word, let it be, over and over and over and over again.

I don't know R's. You used to call it let it be. None of us pronounces the R's though, we should say. You do. Actively insert R's into words that don't have them. You pronounce far too many R's. You collect up all of our dropped R's and say them all. But yeah, do you know why the Scouse accent is so singular and kind of odd?

No. So I didn't quite know. So it does sound really different to places quite nearby. So linguists say that actually if you take sort of a Manchester accent and a Newcastle accent maybe, they can be seen as different variations of the same kind of pattern, whereas Scouse is really totally different. And it's because when it became this really important port, there was so much Irish and Welsh emigration.

And so there's quite a lot of Welsh in the Scouse accent, isn't there? Irish, definitely. And Irish, yeah, which makes it completely stand out. But there is a theory that the Scouse accent is changing and softening as the air gets cleaner. So there's an old gag that it's, what is it? It's one-third Irish, one-third Manchester and one-third Qatar. And that's not the country of Qatar, is it?

No. But so the industrial economy obviously is not as big as it was. It started changing to service. And so clean air legislation has cleaned the air up. So there is a theory that this will have an effect. I wish I'd written down more of the details of how exactly it's affected. Well, the idea is that because people spoke more adenoidly or nasally because the air was so bad,

you would kind of close your airways while you were talking. Yeah, like a camel. Like a camel. Yeah. Do they do that? Well, they can close their nostrils, can't they? They can close their eyelids as well, yeah. I can close my eyelids.

Am I a camel? The other thing about the pollution in Liverpool is you used to be able to tell a true Liverpoolian in Liverpool by his dirty raincoats, because if they had a clean raincoat, it meant it was a sailor who'd just arrived from sea. Whereas if you were living in Liverpool all the time, the pollution was so bad that your raincoat would be dirty. Oh, so if the inside of the raincoat flashing at you is clean,

that's a newly-arised thing. That's not true of all Liverpoolians. Have you, I was reading a lot about in music how when a redub needs to happen lyrically because of a different country where the song is being done in France or in Italy, and so either they bring someone else in to sing a dubbed version or the lead singer of a band. So I don't know if Maximo Park is ever with you soloist of.

Yes. Have you ever done a different language? Yes, I did German for, on my last record, Contradictions by Paul Smith and the Intermissions, which is just a made-up band name. Really? I've got to confess it's just me. And yeah, I did a version of this song called People on Sunday.

Obviously it's called something different. It's called Mention Amzontag in German. And when I was about to play my German tour, I got a friend of my wife's who's German to translate it for me, but I was obviously, I'd honed it for the recording when I did it live. I had all of the words pasted in front of me on the mic stand. And it was, obviously there's quite awkward translations. Yeah, so do you speak German?

A little bit. A little bit. I'm Bishon. I would just say it's quite trusting. With your friends that they tell you that this is the right words. But she's German, so she's quite serious. Okay. So this is the thing, you know, and stereotypically,

she's very straight down the line. And so I thought she won't have me on. But yeah, I could cross-check it with my little bit of German that I knew. That must, because you have a singing style, which is your accent plays into the tone and the style of singing. And I always think that must just scramble what your identity as a vocalist is all of a sudden, when you say the language you don't know,

how does your accent play into it? It can't really, so. In some ways it does, because when we first started, one of the first songs that was put on it, it was put on a German magazine on a CD that you get on the front cover. And so lots of people knew this song. The coast is always changing. And in this particular song, I say,

I am Jung and I am Lost. And they love the Jung in Germany. They were going, I love the way you pronounce the word Jung. Yeah, yeah. It's really great. I think it's about the psychologist Jung. Well, this is the thing. I've been working out, I didn't go further.

But yeah, Jungen is a German verb, I think. And anyway. There's a great recording of Ian Dury playing in Germany. And he's just shouting at the audience in Cockney German, for at least half the album. It's amazing. And he translates blockheads into dumb cop. And he just keeps getting the audio to shout,

dumb cop, it's great. Yeah, when things went wrong in Germany, I had a little bit of German. So our keyboard used to break all the time. And I would go, das Klavier ist kaputt. And people would go, yeah. And I'd get, it goes down so well in Germany, just that little sprinkling of GCSE German gone wrong.

Yeah. But it's appreciated. Hoi, das Kino, bitte. My German isn't good enough. Yeah, no, no, no. I'm sure it was. I just assumed that was funny and gave you the laugh. Our small German listenership would have gone absolutely crazy.

Speaking of dubbing, in Russia, you would not have subtitles very often for movies. And they would just dub it into Russian. These days, they kind of do have subtitles. But in Poland, they don't, still they don't. And both countries have a thing called a lektor. And that was one person who would dub all the parts for everyone in a movie.

They still have that in Poland. In Poland, they do. In Russia, they do a little bit, but not as much as they used to. And basically, these are extremely professional people who would just read all these different things out. And they're so professional, they're not allowed to swear. So you would say rude word whenever you came up to a swear word

and stuff like that. But are they doing all the voices? No, they don't even get into character. They're just reading it almost like you would read Shakespeare or something like that. In the monotone. Yeah, in the monotone. So the example that someone,

some angry person gave on a forum, because I think some like more modern polls get a bit annoyed that this ridiculous system was that you're watching Sex in the City and all the voices are just this 65-year-old man speaking in the monotone. History. Like the younger people don't like it, but there was a poll in 2008 saying that only 19% of polls

supported the switch to subtitling and television. I don't think we can trust one poll to represent the entire nation. Just on the Beatles, I have a fact about. So even in 1963, Paul McCartney was still signing his name. Paul McCartney brackets the Beatles. Even in 63. And they were quite famous by 1963.

There must be another one. Yeah, there must be a lost Paul McCartney. Super famous. I was trying to find out about Beatlemania, because your fact poll was about, you know, when they were becoming huge in America and they did the Ed Sullivan show, and something like 37% of all American people watched that live,

which is just, you know, mind-blowing. Anyway, I got from there on to One Direction, Mania. I'm just trying to talk you through my process. Not Beatles fact after all. You're always trying to bring it round to One Direction. So one One Direction fan hid in a bin for four hours to try and meet the band, and didn't even get to meet them. No, because they couldn't see them.

They're in a bin. No, but they would. I think they were planning to burst out of the bin when One Direction came into the room. Did they miss the cube? Is it like when it was bin day for, who's someone from One Direction? Harry Styles.

Harry Styles, yes. It's bin day at Harry Styles' house. He's taken the bin out. It's been emptied, and then you hide in the bin and hope that he drags it back to his house. Is that it? I think it was in a hotel or something. But they're known for being really tidy.

They're bound to use, they're bound, the frequency of One Direction using litter bin is very high. But a source told the mirror, admittedly, the boys' minders won't be letting any of these tricks get past them. They'll look in every bin if they have to. Oh, the intern that gets that job. Really important job for you to do for One Direction.

It's very exciting. So even the small bathroom, the bathroom bins, you're saying. Yep, even the small bathroom bins, even the ashtrays in the cars. You've got to look everywhere. We need to move on to our next fact. Can I just, do you guys know Cher's first ever song that she released?

The first single she ever released was when she was 18. It was under the pseudonym Bonnie Jo Mason, because her real name, Cher Eileen Appierre, wasn't thought to be American enough. And it was called Ringo I Love You. And it's a song about how much she loves Ringo Starr. She recorded it in a bend, didn't she? So weird.

It was a massive flop. Have you heard it? I have, yes. If you listen to it, it is a complete ripoff of, or it's like a splurging together of, she loves you, yeah, yeah, yeah. And another Beatles song. I can't believe they didn't get sued for it.

I think the fact that no one heard it at the time did help. She did pick the drummer as well. She could have picked a more popular member. Exactly. Yeah, I know. This is the thing. Although I actually went to the British Embassy in Washington on our last tour and played there,

and they said, well, you know, it's great that you've come and played here. This is really exciting. But one of the bands that we had before was the Beatles. Obviously, nothing to live up to that. And they said, the Beatles came and did a gig in the embassy, but they never did anything like that again. It was one of the last live things they did,

because somebody came with a pair of scissors into the British Embassy, which I can attest to it being fairly security conscious. I went to the toilet, and it's got on the back of the door in the toilet in the British Embassy, a sort of secure, really heavy. It's like you can lock yourself in if something goes down, something really horrific.

So it's quite serious. When you say sorry, something really horrific goes down in the toilet. If you've been in a band, band members are just notoriously stinky. Yeah, they were locked in there for hours. Yeah, you don't want to get locked in there when something like that goes down in an adjacent toilet.

Anyway, so somebody got into the British Embassy in whatever, 1965, with a pair of scissors, and cut a lock of Ringo's hair off. So perhaps Cher wasn't actually going in the wrong direction. Do you think that maybe was Cher? It might have been. It may have been. Could you dip in?

That's a long time between booking bands, isn't it, for a... It is. It is. Beatles Maximo Park. You could say that you were headlining for the Beatles, but there was just a long time to do it. Exactly, they're supported as ably. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that monkeys in Melbourne Zoo are no longer allowed to eat bananas, because humans have bred them to have so much sugar that the monkeys were getting obese. It's a funny story, but it's quite a sad story, I think. It's a funny answer. It's got everything. It's got everything. It's going to be a movie.

Yeah, so it's bizarre. And it's not just Melbourne Zoo. Like, loads of zoos have done this. So there are zoos in... There's one in Devon called Painton Zoo. There's Bristol Zoo. They've done the same thing. And it's because humans are great at breeding bananas, sweeter and sweeter and sweeter.

And in the wild, monkeys wouldn't get anywhere near this kind of sugar. They don't even eat bananas. I try to find proof that monkeys do eat bananas. According to Catherine Milton, who studied the diets of primates for decades, I'll buy that, yeah. The entire wild monkey-banana connection is a total fabrication. That's great.

Yeah. That should be a journey. Where did it come from, then, with this obsession with monkeys and bananas? I think it must be the circus. Because the thing is, like, you don't get bananas in the wild. These kind of bananas that we eat, you just don't get them in the wild. So unless they're breaking into farms. Are we saying that no monkey in the wild...

Is Dr. Catherine saying that no monkey in the wild has ever eaten a plantain? Oh, a plantain, yeah. But the kind of bananas that we eat, they don't. Because the wild bananas you get are rubbish, like, round and have loads of seeds in them and taste terrible, apparently. So monkeys probably just don't want them. But the thing is, they love bananas.

Oh, yeah. I mean... I'm not saying they don't like bananas. It's like crack. It's like Marie's Catherine Milton. It's not just saying that. They would never get... The ones that you get in weight trials,

they wouldn't get them in the wild. It's basically like having an all-crack diet. Yeah. Which is not healthy. What have we done to them, guys? Or sort of cake or chocolate. It's like eating only cake or chocolate. Instead, they're just fed leafy vegetables these days.

And they only get a banana if they have to have some medication. And then they hide the medication inside the banana. Sounds so rubbish. They're getting kind of kale and lettuce, aren't they? Yeah. How awful when you find this delicious stuff. It's like, if it's the only time we ever let you have a pint, we put some valium in it or something.

Yeah. Yeah. I'd claim I need a valium. Very often. Their favorite food, though, not banana, that's number two. Apparently, this is according to a study that was done in 1936. It's never been disproved. Monkey's favorite food is grape.

Apparently, grape is number one. And then banana is number two. They go absolutely nuts for grapes. So that's kind of the heroin, I think, and the banana is the cocaine. So if this, well, this is the thing about monkeys and grapes. If you make a monkey do a job, and I'm talking a simple, simple job. Not like civil engineer or something. No.

It was to take a rock and put it in the experimenter's hands. So it's a basic task. But if you make a monkey do that task for a reward, like a bit of cucumber, but then you let it see another monkey doing the same task and being given a grape, then the first monkey will start to slack off. And it will do the job with less enthusiasm and it will get a right less at the time.

It will care less. Fair enough. Why are you trying to drive these two monkeys apart and make them hate each other by preferring one over the other or things? Bananas are weird, though, aren't they? And... Yeah.

In what context? They're weird because whenever you cross breed the subspecies, they don't create seeds. So that's why we've got this brilliant seedless banana. But we're going to lose it. So people are worried. There was the main banana that people ate was the Gros-Michel banana until the 50s or 60s,

and then that was wiped out. And now this Panama disease that wiped out that banana has come back to wipe out the only variety we have left. And so we're in serious trouble. And scientists are trying to breed a new banana to get around this and they can't get it to taste right. You know the Gros-Michel is even sweeter than the current one. Really?

Yeah. You know, like banana candies, like little sweets, look like bananas and taste like bananas. But actually, when you think about it, they don't really taste like bananas, do they? Well, they taste like Gros-Michel bananas. They're a bit gross. No, just way sweeter.

Yeah. And people... There's a theory that actually it's a myth that the reason that they taste differently to bananas is because we made them when Gros-Michel bananas were around and we made them taste like those. But actually, we just made the candies taste like very sweet bananas and it just happens to be the same.

I wonder if we were in Melbourne Zoo and we were fed those candy bananas, whether or not that would be more hurtful to us than an actual banana is to monkeys in Melbourne Zoo. If that was all we had, then it would be bad, yeah. Would it be worse, do you think? Like, I'm trying to see the equivalence of how bad that is for... Well, effectively, you're just eating sugar

and food coloring and sweetener. I mean, how long do you think you could survive on just a diet of those candy bananas? A few years? No. Like, for instance, if you only eat rabbits, you can't last for more than a year. No.

Yeah. Where are you in this scenario? You're in a desert island and it's just you and two rabbits and you think, I won't eat them for now, I'll let them mate until there's loads of them. And then by the time that happens, you're fine, but then you eat them and then there's something in them that you don't get enough of.

Always one of the vitamins, isn't it? Yeah, it's one of the vitamins. It's A or D or... Yeah. Bananas are good, though. They've got almost everything that you need in them for a while. So, if you only ate bananas and rabbits? You want a fucking weird eye?

If you only ate rabbit splits. There wasn't a theory that... I remember reading ones. This is about Peter Andre. Peter Andre collapsed after eating too many bananas because he was obviously very, very muscular. Especially when he first started out, he was known for being Mr. Muscles.

This is the rock star kind of anecdote I like. And he's maintained a good physique. But in his early days, that was his selling USP. There was a selling point. The shirt always opened. Any waterfall that was nearby, he'd be underneath it. We've all seen The Mysterious Girl. Exactly. We've seen it. We know the score.

So, how does it look to bananas? So, before some sort of show that he was doing, which would probably be in a record shop or something, not necessarily an actual stage show, I think it was some sort of in-store appearance, Peter Andre collapsed and the rumor had it that he'd eaten too many bananas because he ate seven or eight bananas in a row

just to keep his potassium levels up because he felt or his dietitian felt that he needed this to maintain his stunning physique. And then I'm now getting into digression, sketchy territory. I then read a few years later that he had collapsed, but he was ill or something, blah, blah, blah. But he was eating a very large amount of bananas at the time.

He's his rider. His rider now says, no bananas, every gig. His manager says, what the fuck is this? Keep me away from the bananas. The bag check on the way into gigs is just for bananas. If Peter sees one of those, he collapses on stage. This is, I think that's true. Do you know who else used to have loads of bananas?

Gordon Brown. That's the one link between Gordon Brown and Peter Andre. Gordon Brown used to have nine bananas every day. Obviously, Gordon Brown has a very nice physique, too. Yeah. So, there's two quite good links. Nine bananas a day. He was trying to give up smoking.

Oh, now he started me thinking about smoking bananas. Not that I've ever done anything like that. In the 60s, Mellow Yellow, the Donovan song, people believed it to be about smoking bananas as an alternative to cannabis, a very cheap alternative, which, yeah, apparently has no effect. I see the big book of Paul Smith, banana pop anecdotes. Where's my contract?

Where's the book contract? I actually read about the Donovan song, and Donovan has since, I believe, done an interview where he said that that was the story that came out in the myth at the time, that it was to do with smoking the insides of bananas. In fact, in the lyrics of the song, he talks about an electric banana, which was a vibrator,

and Mellow Yellow supposedly is a vibrator. You know bananas' skins? Are they slippy? They're slippy. They are super slippy. They've got a good natural lubricant on them. And actually, if you look up banana skin lubricant, trying to find cool scientific stuff,

there is so much weird sex advice out there about what to do with banana skins. But that is not what I'm going to mention. Slipping on a banana skin has been a comedy trope since the mid-19th century. And actually, it was a genuine concern that it was a proper danger. So this is at a time when, from the mid-1800s,

then lots of bananas are suddenly being imported into America. And I found a New York Times article from the 1890s where the president of the New York police force declared war on the banana skin. So he said he was really worried because he explained that the bad habits of banana skin, dwelling particularly on its tendency to toss people into the air

and bring them down with terrific force onto the hard pavement. And he introduced a new sort of law in New York saying that you get fined for dropping banana skins. And that was president of the police force, Teddy Roosevelt. So that's where he got his start in life, stamping down on banana skins. I remember reading around the same time.

No, I wasn't reading that around the same time, but I was reading about things that were happening. This is really sketchy, but I think there was groups of people who would go around railway stations and they would deliberately kind of pretend to fall and they would drop banana skins on the ground and say, oh, you didn't move that.

I'm going to sue you. Oh, really? That was a big early insurance scam. I think we may have mentioned it briefly before, but it's worth mentioning again. Sure. And there were trained inspectors who were trained to ask loads of questions like,

were there bananas for sale on the train? All these details that you could use to spot a fraudster. Wow. Have we mentioned sliding Billy Watson before? No, but please. He was a famous vaudeville act, huge deal, early 1900s. And his sole gag was sliding on stage on a banana skin. People were easily pleased because there was loads of laughing records.

Some of the first ever recorded discs that became popular and widely bought were just of people laughing. Really? Yeah. And the laughing policeman is one of the most famous parts of that trend. But it was a total thing where people just loved hearing people laughing out of these new gramophones, people who never heard records. And so they didn't think, let's put a song on it.

They thought, let's record people laughing. And they made millions when it was called. Yeah. The laughing policeman is a great song. It's a classic. And the laughing norm, not so much. Have you heard that one? No.

David Bowie? Yeah. David Bowie's first, I think it's his first single maybe. The laughing norm. It was the B-side to I Love Ringo Starr, wasn't it? Some of our most famous stars have had inauspicious beginnings. Yes. In Korea, this is exciting.

They sell a one a day banana pack. So it's five bananas in underneath plastic. And they're all ripened. One of them is really ripe. One of them is almost ripe. One of them is not that ripe. One of them is not ripe at all. And the other one is almost unripe.

Wow. But then every day, at the end of the day, they're completely ripe. Well, in Japan, they have invented an edible banana peel. So you now just eat the banana. This is a big thing online. People keep saying it's really good for you. It's called a monkey banana. It makes you healthy.

It protects your heart. It kills insomnia and depression. Stops people slipping over. Stops people slipping over. There's no evidence for anything except it's stopping people slipping over. Even if there are nutrients in there, which there may be, your body won't be able to absorb them.

And also, if you don't wash it really carefully, you'll probably get pesticide. Yeah. So don't eat a banana peel. I can't believe we're having to say this. Imagine if. Do you think? Because that feels like the early kind of modern comedy.

If we got rid of banana peels or started eating them and comedy died. Oh, wow. I reckon it would. I reckon that would trigger the end of all comedy if we lost the slapstick banana peel moment. That's the moment in history where the universe is when. Yeah.

There's a universe out there where comedy doesn't happen. Yeah. Because we ate our banana peels. Right. Wow. Or maybe we'll be that moment in history. I don't know. Or maybe this podcast is that moment in history

where comedy doesn't happen. OK. It is time for fact number three. And that is Chesinsky. Yeah. My fact this week is that Nobel Prize when a Barry Marshall has developed a belt that senses stomach rumblings inspired by his son

who's a seismologist who makes devices that sense vibrations on the ocean floor, which I just find so cool as a kind of really random crossover of two totally different industries. So he's just around the table with his son one day saying, oh, I've got to look into this stomach rumbling thing. He's investigating IBS and he wants to know how to diagnose it quickly.

And his son just says, well, I've got this instrument that senses vibrations on the floor of the sea. You want to try that? And he has. And he's made this belt. Which should you just first say who Barry Marshall is because he's a bit of a hero, isn't he? Yeah.

He's a deal. His Nobel Prize is for an awesome reason. Yes. So he got a Nobel Prize in 2005 because he proved that stomach ulcers, which everyone used to say was caused by stress. And I think a lot of people kind of still do say that. He proved they were caused by bacteria.

And he did that by swallowing a whole bunch of bacteria and giving himself a stomach ulcer, which I think we've said before. And that proved that that did it. And that means that you can cure stomach ulcers with antibiotics. And then that has massively reduced stomach cancer in the Western world.

And he did it against the medical establishment, really, because you're not meant to self-experiment. And he was desperately trying to get it experimented on subjects who had it. But the medical board said no, not possible. So he went home and he was like, he put on some toast or something. It was like a broth, wasn't it?

Yeah. And it was against his wife as well, who was very, very upset about it. Really? And he said he never told her, because it was one of the occasions when it would be easier to get forgiveness than get permission.

But she got really upset about it, because she thought, she believed him, of course, that it was a bacteria that caused it. And she thought that by giving himself it, it would give it to the whole family and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, fair. But you can't, you don't kiss with your stomach.

You don't smush stomach together. I'm sure there's some sort of exotic practice. It's so interesting how everyone thought that bacteria couldn't live in the stomach. So that's why it can't be a bacterial thing when you have a stomach ulcer. But also, there was no incentive really to discover a cure, because antacids,

you know, things which neutralize the acid in your stomach, were very popular. And also, you have to keep taking them for life. Yeah, and also they do kind of help quite a lot, don't they? So it was almost like, let you say, not that much incentive, because the industry was huge, but also it was kind of doing quite a good job. It deals with the symptoms.

It just doesn't deal with the ulcer. Yeah. Because at the start of the 20th century, 100% of mankind had this bacteria in the stomach. Wow. That's great. Yeah, that's impressive. He deserved it.

He deserved the prize. Okay, can I just say, he also developed this, he did this, and he had to try it on a few patients. So it wasn't a complete shot in the dark, but he had to do it on himself. I can't remember exactly why, but it was after six months of unsuccessfully trying to give piglet stomach ulcers. So maybe he's not a great dude after all.

He only did it to the evil piglets. And the other thing is that Heliobacter pylori, which is a bacteria, is kind of useful in the body. So it modulates your immune system. And a lot of people think it stops your immune system from being too hyper-reactive. And perhaps, and this is really going out on a limb, now that we don't have as much of it,

you're more likely to get allergies and stuff like that. An IBS. An IBS. Which he's not trying to cure. So there is an idea of reintroducing Heliobacter pylori. If you could somehow make it so it doesn't give you ulcers, then you can put it back in your body if you could kind of genetically modify it.

So he's now frantically digging up the recipe for that broth you want to make. So he's not trying to cure IBS, which is possibly caused by the thing he cured. What's his cure for IBS going to give us? That's what I want to know. He keeps keeping himself in work. But IBS is a real problem, right?

That feels a bit like stomach ulcers were in that no one really knows what's causing it. And it's very hard to diagnose. And the diagnosis is quite invasive usually. And so what he's developed is this belt. And it records what he calls the creaks and undulations of the gut and recognizes the sonic signature of IBS.

Which it's so complicated because the gut's so long and so much is happening in it that the human ear can't do that. You can't listen to someone's gut and know they've got IBS. But by showing a sort of robotic belt, former IBS sufferers and training it to recognize it, you can do that. And yeah, he's done that.

And actually he was inspired first of all by his son who introduced him to the idea of these vibrations on the ocean floor. And then a colleague showed him a kind of shop bought acoustic device that he was using for detecting termites under houses. And he used the design of that for the belt. So he's using termites and seismology.

It's well, listen, seismology has given us quite a lot of non seismology based inventions. I think we have a lot to thank seismologists for. So for example, there was a guy called... How did I know you had an example? Andy Hildebrand. Now he was a research scientist in the oil industry and he developed software for processing the data

from reflection seismology. So it was a method... I'm reading the sentence out basically from this article, a method of estimating properties of Earth's subsurface using reflective seismic waves. So that was his job. What he then invented off the back of that technology was auto tuning for the music industry.

So when you hear auto tuning, it is from Andy Hildebrand who is a seismologist. That is very cool. And also, I can't remember his name, but it was a seismologist whose technology for predicting earthquakes was then used for predicting who's going to win the American presidential election.

Oh yeah, Nate Silver. Not Nate Silver. It's a guy who's been doing it. He's predicted the last five presidents basically of the United States using this seismology technology. It was quite a seismic event. This last election, wasn't it, Andy? I feel queasy.

I guess you could say it was a landslide, which is similar to an earthquake. It wasn't really because he didn't win the popular vote. That's true, yeah. But it was... It's so interesting. Paul's not saying anything, but you can see him regressing coming on this podcast

off the back of these last two pages. Let's talk about auto tune then. Do you use auto tune? I would never use auto tune. But that massively changed music, didn't it? Auto tune. For the better or for the worse, that's the question. I don't know exactly what it is.

Better if you're Cher. Well, I've heard... Yeah, well, Cher used it in an inventive way. In believe, right? Yes. Just so to give her a note, if you... Yeah, that's auto tune. Yeah, and...

Why does she need to use that? I just did it with my voice. No, not all as talented as you. Cher can't be expected to have your kind of range. That's fair. But yeah, I think it's now overused. It seems to be in a lot of R&B and rap songs when it doesn't necessarily need to be.

Is it a bit rude to accuse someone of using auto tune? Not these days. But yeah, it would have been. And I heard a few rumors about auto tune along the way. Don't say Peter Andre. Please don't say Peter Andre. Peter is of a higher colour than that. Surely not.

No one could hit those notes in Mysterious Girls. I heard Gordon Brown uses auto tune a lot. Yeah. So who were the rumors for? Are you allowed to say on that? Well, no. Go on, say. When we were making our first record,

there was a few rumors going around that our producer Paul Etworth at the time said that there was some going on, somebody that he'd worked with. But yeah, I won't say in kiss. In kiss, he was perhaps elaborating on a child's whisper. But someone who you wouldn't expect, is it? No, somebody you would expect.

Somebody who wasn't very good at singing, essentially. Etworth is a massive producer. But this is it. He's now Adele and whoever. This is what I'm just trying to get you to name people that work with. It's Adele. Okay, we got it. Adele can't really sing.

Have you seen her live? It wasn't Adele. It must be obvious when people sing live, though, right? But this is the thing when, yeah, there are a few people who are pretty ropey live and in the studio, they are using the electronic help. So is there no way of using... See, I really don't know about it.

Is there no way of slightly tweaking your voice live on stage? As in... Oh, there will be. Maybe singing into your phone. No, well, this is it. There will be a way of doing it live, as well, because it's just an electronic feed going down into a mixer that then comes out of the...

Because I've seen... Speaking of those fun toys that you can get, where you can make yourself sound like Darth Vader just by talking into that. Or Chewbacca. Yeah. Yeah, but you don't get Britney Spears sounding like Chewbacca to you when she's singing because they've got it on the wrong setting.

Yeah, that's an auto-tune cock-up and it's worse. I think I would kick-start her career. I think she's did all right, Adele. Britney? Yeah, she's still massive in America. She's on X-Factor and stuff. She does Vegas now. She does Vegas.

That's the thing after people lose that sort of... The number ones start becoming number tens or whatever. It feels like the graveyard slot of pop stars Vegas. She's doing about 400 shows a year. But this is it. Yeah, then you're successful. It's the graveyard slot. Critically, people will dismiss you then,

but obviously you're raking it in and it's... True showbiz. Can I just say to the people of Vegas, we're ready for that slot? We're so ready. So, some stuff about digestion. Yes, please. I was reading.

I do know that 95% of the body's serotonin is produced in the gut. So, you know, we think of serotonin as the hormone that's produced by the brain and it makes us really happy. And if you're an antidepressants, it helps you to release it. But 95% is produced in the gut. And I just... I find actually this whole thing amazing because I don't think that medicine as a tool come to terms

with how the brain is connected to the rest of the body. You basically have a second brain in your gut, don't you? You've got a second brain in your gut. And, of course, it's interacting so much with how you feel. So, you get butterflies in your stomach. That's you feeling nervous because you've got this whole nervous system. And it's a completely independent nervous system. So, it's the enteric nervous system.

And they actually found something really recently, which is the vagus nerve is the main nerve. No way. No way. That's a nerve called the vagus nerve. Yeah, you know, it's the vagus nerve. It's got Britney Spears playing halfway down it. I thought it was pronounced vagus.

I've heard it both, actually. So, I think it's fine, both. It's the vagus or the vagus nerve. And it's the main nerve that runs from your brain to your organs, basically carrying all the information there. So, we think that we think of stuff in our brain and then it's carried through the nerves to our various bits of our body to tell it what to do.

Scientists found out recently that 90% of the fibres that are in that nerve are actually carrying information from the gut back to the brain. And so, our gut is telling our brain what to do in a sense. I mean, this is like an amazing thing that scientists have just realized. 00:39:12,880 --> 00:39:14,480 Messages are being sent. Nervous messages are being sent from our gut. And also, because we've been saying that people have a gut feeling for things

for all that time, but actually it turns out that that's a really... Yeah, yeah. Viva Las Vegas. That's what I say. No. Oh, dear. Don't say a joke that means I'm going to cut this out, because it is quite interesting.

Just with the journey of how things are digested in the gut, there's a thing that we put in our latest book, which is a new app that scientists are working on, where you can track via your app the creation of a fart inside your body. So, it follows the fart from its beginnings all the way to the exit. And is that what you call your backside? Hey, nice exit. But yeah, so that's an app that's hopefully going to be available.

Well, I'd like to have it, but I'd just like to know when I need to leave a room, but like at the last minute, like, well, it's near the exit. Let's... I can hang out here till then. And the idea of that is that doctors might be able to use it to see what kind of foods cause gas and, you know... It's not so that you can time watching a film thinking, right, I've got 96 minutes, so we can watch these films before I need to talk. I'm sorry, Andy. Do you never fart during a movie?

It's like, I can't watch this movie because it's two hours long. I've got one brewing and I need to... I can't watch this till the intermission. Yeah, I think that's the reason. What movies have an intermission? Are you watching the sound of music over and over? Or you could use it in an alternative fashion. If you were like a schoolboy prankster, you could go,

here's one coming, I'm going to time it for the sort of the apex of this speech and assembly, which is what seemed to happen. There seemed to be some people at my school who were extremely talented at breaking wind at the right time just to undercut what was going on in the school assembly. Andrew Bird, he had a... And he had a particular tone as well. You wouldn't name the autotuners, but you're crossing up Andrew Bird, aren't you? I've heard that Andrew Bird autotunes his farts, actually. Andrew Bird is unlikely to be at the next festival about to lynch me behind the...

You're saying he won't sue because he's not got music industry muscle behind it. Exactly. If he does come after you to lynch you, you'll hear him coming. Do you know something really interesting? So, endoscopies where you, I guess, it's a way of looking into your insides, basically, by getting a big tube down you and getting cameras look around. Or up you, the first endoscopies. Who do you think?

Go through the exit. The first ever endoscopy where you have to shove something down through someone's mouth to try and look at their insides. Who do you think it was tried on? It's not a specific person, it's a type of person. Henry, someone with... A child, because they have a shorter... Oh, yeah. No.

Right. Is it a... Oh, I think I've worked it out and I know what it is. It's a Saad Swarmor. Yeah, so cool. Yes. So, yeah, this was in 1868. Adolf Kussmall made his patient, who was a Saad Swarmor, swallow a 47-centimeter tube, because obviously they've got those big ferrets. 00:42:24,880 --> 00:42:26,960 And it was used about a times in future.

The first ECG ever in 1906 was done on a Saad Swarmor. Maybe we shouldn't put the camera at the end of a sword. Well, they could do some surgery while they were in there. We should move on to the final facts. Just very quickly, Barry Marshall, what's he doing now? Apart from his belt thing, he's also written a new book that comes out next year. It's called How to Win a Nobel Prize. And it's a middle grade adventure about a girl who stumbles on a secret meeting of Nobel Prize winners,

including Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. And she travels through time learning the secrets behind some of the world's most important scientific discoveries. Middle grade, do you mean the sort of the school years? I actually don't know what that means. I think so instead of like for elementary school kids, because the way you said it, it made it sound like it was of reasonable quality, but not great. I haven't read it, so I don't know. It's all right, but stick to belts as your main job.

That sounds horrible. It sounds like it's a way to try and convince kids that you're having fun, but actually you're just obviously learning. What? I'd skype that. That's our whole job. I try to skype this every week. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that one building that burned down in the Great Fire of London

was a public toilet that could be used by 128 people at the same time. Same time. It's just as well. If you're looking at pluses for the Great Fire of London, there can't be many, but that might have been one of them. Some people say about the Great Fire that it was a plus, because they could really build those bits of London, don't they? But I don't know.

It sounds incredible. We don't have enough public toilets in the world, and in the UK, definitely. And I think one that could be used by 128 people would be quite a good thing. When you say they use it at the same time, it's not like a three, two, one, everyone on load. I mean, you could do it like that if you want, but it's basically it had 128 seats. 64 for men and 64 for women, which is quite progressive for the time, which you wouldn't get today, I'm sure, and it would empty into the Thames.

It was on cheap side in London. I read that after the fire, it was replaced by another public toilet, which instead of having 128 seats, had 12. Yeah, so what I want to know is, does that mean that in the old one, everyone was really squished together? Or in the new one, did people have loads and loads of space? Well, I think the new one also had six flats on top of it. Yeah, but it was between two rivers, wasn't it?

Because they needed a lot of water flowing through. Yeah, so it was between some two tributaries of the Thames. How did the fire burn it down with all that water flowing through? You would have thought that would be the perfect barrier. Yes, you would think that, but it wasn't. It was burned down the structure, I think, like a lot of things did. It was called Whittington's Longhouse, and it was named after Dick Whittington, because it was money that he left after being mad that built it.

And Dick Whittington, this is for people overseas, I hadn't heard of him personally, not coming from here. He's Dick Whittington, and his cat is a sort of famous story. It's a pantomime that's done a lot in this country. So he's a very known character who might not be known for his toilet. Well, most people in Britain, I would say, would think that he was a fictional character. Because it's like from a pantomime and stuff like that.

But it turns out that he's real. He was the mayor of London quite a few times, and he didn't have a cat, to my knowledge. I don't think he had a cat. But he left loads and loads of money behind, and did all this great stuff about toilets, and lots of really good things that he built. And they think that because of all those great things that he built,

that's why he became such a hero in London, and that's why all the stories got written about him. Am I right in saying that Dick Whittington itself, not being Richard Whittington, is a sort of inspired by character, as opposed to it's meant to be literally the mayor? Presumably, Nate. Well, in the story, he is the mayor, isn't he?

Yeah, he becomes Mayor of London at the end. I think he gets called to be mayor or something like that. He hears a voice saying... He goes to London to make his fortune, because the streets are paved with gold, and then I think I usually fell asleep, or insisted on leaving at that point in the pantomime. You missed the bit where it's paved with shit from his toilets.

I also left the pantomime at that point, but that's only because I could feel there was a fart on its way. So The Great Fire of London, I actually had my debunked myth re-bunked. Can you re-bunk something? Yeah. Okay, so what's the myth? Is it the one about people dying?

Yeah. Okay. So how many people died in Great Fire of London? I thought it was like four people died. Yeah, so I think most people think now, hardly anyone died, four or six people died in The Great Fire of London. Actually, there was a historian who's written a book on it,

and done a lot of research on it. He says loads of people probably died. Is that right? Yeah, but the censuses were very bad, or the public records were very bad, parish records, but there's evidence, like the number of burials suddenly shot up. So they went up by a third in the graveyard

that was closest to it, and the average age at death doubled in that month, which implies that older people are getting killed more easily, which makes sense if there's a bad fire. Young people can scarper, whereas older people are going to be a bit buggered. And basically, we think maybe. That's really, really interesting.

And lots of first-hand accounts say, you talk about like bloodied bodies in the street and stuff, and once it was taken to France, which are probably exaggerated, but at the same time, it's plausible that we don't have all the records. Wow, yeah. I mean, we basically have to re-edit QI now.

I heard, is this a myth, and sorry for bringing a depressing fact to the table, but... Oh, as opposed to those people who just died. Wow. Yeah. More people died than you think. No, that just feels more, I think historical.

This is a bit more recent. The fire monument for the Fire of London. Oh, the monument. The monument. There's a fact, which I don't know if it's definitely true, is that they had to put a lot of netting and so forth around it,

because more people, if we're going for the original staff of four people dying, and the more people who've died from jumping off there than were said to have died in the Fire of London. That was a stat, definitely. Right. But now it seems like Anna has re-de-bunked it.

Have you guys heard of Porcelain Palace? Nope. This is in Chongqing, China, and this is the city, Chongqing, and it is the world's largest public toilet complex in the world. It's at Foreigners Street Amusement Park. That's apparently what it's called,

and it's designed to look, it's got a sort of ancient Egyptian art theme to the whole thing, but it has a thousand toilets and urinals in it, so it is a palace of the toilet. It's the largest in the world currently. Can all a thousand people go at the same time? I believe so.

Yeah, yeah. The inventor of the first public toilets, the ones at the Great Exhibition. The first public toilets in Britain. Sorry, yep. That apart from the longhouse, which was also a public toilet. Yeah, that's right, yeah.

The first modern ones. Yeah, all right. Yeah, him, yeah. He was called George Jennings, and he had 15 children. I have a theory that he may have developed the public toilet, just so that he could go to the loo somewhere

because the bathroom was always busy because he had 15 children. Okay, nice. It's not a strong theory. If you paid a penny, you got to go to the loo, but you also got a towel, a comb, and a shoe shine.

No. It's a bargain. A shoe shine. Yeah, I don't know if it was all while you were sitting on the loo, but you were being, having a shoe shined and... So you don't get a shoe shine,

do you? Someone shines your shoes. Exactly, yeah. Um, do you get a comb? I don't think you get. Someone just comb your hair. I think you get comb. I think someone combs your hair. That sounds like someone combs your hair.

Well, you get to use the comb, maybe. Maybe there's a communal comb. What a disturbing time to spend on the loo with someone towel-ing you down, someone shining your shoes, and someone combing your hair. You wouldn't be able to go. The first she-wee was actually invented in 1898,

or the first kind of one that I could find. A she-wee is, I think women started using them in festivals. It's kind of like a co- upside-down cone-shaped thing that women can wee into and use it like a urinal. But also, yeah, so stand up to wee.

Yeah. So you can stand up to wee like men do. But it was invented in 1898, and it was called the urinet. And it was cheaper, it was more space-efficient, and so a few local councils, especially quite a few in London,

installed them. But women didn't want to use them because it was kind of improper. So there was one in Portsmouth, but women used to flee in horror when they saw it, apparently. Oh, no, come on. Flee in horror.

Frightening things. I'm sorry, because the modern she-wee is something you carry around with you. Yes, I'm sorry. And you use it like a penis, not like a urinal. Yes, these ones. These ones are more of a urinal

than a penis. So they were installed, and there was a curtain that went around them, and they were much closer together. OK. I hope my mother's not listening to this podcast. Hang on, is it like a urinal with a very long sort of front-bottom bit,

as it were? And then... Wow, that doesn't sound hygienic or anything. I think I would run in horror if I saw one of those flee in terror. Yeah. So I looked up some other buildings

that were in London at the time of the Great Fire. Oh, yeah. So one of the ones... Actually, so this is one that survived, but it's just an incredible building that was in mid-17th century London. It was called Nonsuch House, and it was on London Bridge.

So you know London Bridge used to be lined with shops and buildings? Which I find incredible. Yeah, so weird. Nonsuch House was a Renaissance palace, four stories high, in the middle of the bridge. It was massive. You have to look up pictures of it.

So good. I'll try and put one up on my Twitter feed. So it just lurched over the tent, the whole Thames, you know. Sorry, you'll try to put one up on your Twitter feed. They successfully built a four-story house on London Bridge, and you will try, if at all possible,

to bomb this one on my Twitter. Oh, but life's a lot harder now, isn't it? What a slam. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said

over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. Paul. At Paul Smith Music.

And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group count at Nonsuch Thing. Go to our Facebook page, Nonsuch Thing is a Fish, or our website, nonsuchthingasafish.com. We have everything from our previous episodes

to upcoming tour dates to a link to our book. Just everything's there. All of it. All of it. It's all there. You can go there. And you've got a website, presumably. I have paulsmithmusic.eu.

It's got videos and my new record. Buy my new record, and you see all my tour dates. And you've got a new record out now? It is. It's officially out today. Looking cool. It's called Diagrams. And yeah, I'll be playing a load of shows

at the end of November. So have a look from Glasgow down to London and somewhere in between. Amazing. Yeah. We're going to be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then.

Goodbye.