No Such Thing As A Fish - 365: No Such Thing As A Smart Cheetah At Harvard

Episode Date: March 19, 2021

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss slow cheetahs, smart cushions and why doing long charity broadcasts might be a terrible idea. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshensky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin, and once again, we have gathered round 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 Anna. My fact this week is that for cheaters, slowing down is more important than running fast or speeding up.

Wow, more important in what way? Yeah. In the successful kill rate. Is that because if they just carried on speeding up forever, they'd have no time to eat their kill? You can't just run and run and run and expect to have a meal at the end of the day. It's not quite that. So this is a few studies that have been done actually into kind of cheater locomotion.

The one I was reading was 2013, and the scientists spent nearly 10 years designing a battery-powered solar-charged kind of tracking collar, and then they put it on cheaters, and so it measured exactly when they're speeding up, when they're slowing down, et cetera, and then it looked at when they were successful in hunts and when they weren't, and basically, one of the things it said is they don't actually run that fast when they're hunting, so people think that they're cracking 60 miles an hour all the time, but they basically don't go over 40 really when they're hunting, and it said that the key factor that affected whether or not they caught something seemed to be how fast they slowed down.

It's all the decision over whether the prey lives or dies is made right at the kind of end game. You know, the cheater's really good at getting right up close, but actually, once they're slowed down, that's where the zebra either lives or dies, and it's in the manoeuvrability. That's a good way of describing it. You really kill something when you're motionless, don't you? It's amazing it bothers to run at all considering that this is the... I should just wait for the zebras to come to it.

Pretty much, yeah. Just stand still with your mouth open like a cartoon. Some animals do that, don't they? Some animals, you'll get worms who live in the sand in the ocean, and they just sit there waiting until something comes past them and they suck it up. Do you remember those snakes that live in the cave, and they just hang around hovering near the mouth of the cave, and as the bats fly out of the cave at night, bang, they grab them.

Yeah. Or bears that sit in the river that have the salmon just flying into their mouth, you know, when they're leaping up. See, the cheaters have watched all these documentaries and gone, why am I just doing that? Or us just kind of sitting at home waiting for Deliveroo to arrive with our pizzas. There's a difference between that and actually going to McDonald's and getting a takeaway yourself, isn't it? That's basically the analogy here.

Yeah. There we go. We've hit on it. Took us a while, but we got there. I get the door pretty damn fast, and Deliveroo driver arrives, my acceleration is through. But the thing is you have to stop when he gets there, otherwise you're going to run straight past him. That's what we're saying.

That's a good point. It's the same thing. Do you know what the most impressive bit of the cheater is, or, yeah, physically the most impressive thing? I thought like maybe it's legs or it's lungs or something. Yeah. Well, me, being a controversialist, I picked the inner ear. Oh, okay.

So this is, it genuinely is a bit of the cheater, which is really, really good at its job. It has this unbelievably massive inner ear system, and the reason that's good is that while it moves, it means it can keep its head unbelievably still, because if any one of us was running at 40 miles an hour, firstly, we'd be doing very well, and secondly, our head would be all over the place. We wouldn't be able to see what we were doing. We'd be sort of bobbing around going, ah, but the cheater can keep completely locked on its prey, and that's because it has a huge inner ear, so it keeps its visual stability

even while it's going at 40 or 50 miles an hour. And probably really important when it changes direction as well, right? Yeah, exactly. We can go at 40 miles an hour in a car, for instance, and we don't, like, our heads don't explode, but it's all the movement and stuff, right? Well, speak for yourself, James. I've never tried to get up to those speeds myself. You're on the motorway in the inner lane, 39 all the way.

There's this theory that cheaters, they heat up too much. That's why they have really short running speeds. Like, they run for a short amount of time, and then they stop, because if they don't, they'll overheat. And the reason we think that is because I was studying 1973 in Harvard, and they got some cheaters and they flew them over to Harvard and they made them run on treadmills with thermometers stuck up their bombs. And it was these readings that they used to say, well, obviously they can only run a certain

amount of time before they overheat, but of course, in the wild, cheaters don't run with thermometers up their bombs in Harvard on treadmills, and so there was a scientist called Robin Heaton from a university of Witwatersrand in South Africa, and she actually put some actual sensors inside the cheaters, like surgically put them really, really small ones, and so we can get a much better idea of what they do, and she's disproved this idea that they overheat when running. Because they do overheat when eating, apparently. This might be part of the same thing, and this is because they are super stressed when

they eat. Dinner is not a fun experience for a cheater, because they think it's because of the anxiety that someone's going to come and steal your food, and so when they're eating their prey, their body temperature goes up. Right. The closest that one of these sort of, let's say, the Harvard-esque cheaters, so the ones that were collared that were zoo-reared, got to was 59, so they can actually still get to these high points as well, and the one that managed to do that was called Ferrari,

which is rather nice. That was the cheater's name. But what was weird was, in the study as well, because they did 367 runs of clocking them and seeing how fast they could go, only a quarter of those ended in a kill, and apparently cheaters are quite crap at actually doing the deal. This was in Harvard, they were doing that. Who were they killing? They were just going after students.

Endless post-grad students. No, these are not the Harvard ones. These are the ones from the other study. I was saying, it's similar to the Harvard ones. They're on the treadmill. They're on the treadmill in front, running as fast as they can on their treadmill. Interestingly, in the cheater world, if you say you went to Harvard, that's actually a lame thing to be, because you didn't run quite as fast than you had a thermometer up your

bum. Yeah, but you're super smart, you know. Oh, yeah. So that's where the cue does it. It's not smart enough to remove the thermometer, are you? That feels like one of those sorority pranks, doesn't it? Yeah. You put your naked thermometer up the ass, put on a treadmill.

Do you know who the first European to scientifically describe the cheater was? Well, someone who went to Africa, so like Mary Kingsley, or someone, no. Interesting. It was actually Daniel von Schreiber. Oh. What? You're kidding. Your former self, Dan, your career's really taken a nose dive, but in 1777, it was, it's

called Johann Christian Daniel von Schreiber, and he actually didn't even see a cheater. He based his description on the skin of a cheater, and he gave it a scientific name and described it. So there you go, Dan, your namesake. Well done. And everything you said just sounds like it could have been me as well. Didn't actually see it. Didn't actually have anything.

It wasn't actually there. Another thing about cheaters is, unlike all the other big cats, they're kind of quite close to house cats, and one way you can tell this especially is that they don't roar like a lion does or a tiger does. They meow and they purr because they have a different kind of voice box to lions and tigers and stuff. It's not as flexible, and so they can't really do these big sounds. They can only kind of go meow, meow.

It's mental when you look at it, and they also chirp like birds. So if you watch Look Up Cheater tweeting, and it's incredible, you've got this beautiful noble big cat opens its mouth, and it goes, I just did an impression of a cheater then, and my cat who was sat in the room sort of looked up at me, and I don't know if she thought I was a cheater or just a weird human doing a cat sound. We know. There's another noise they can make. The males specifically bark, it's called a stutter bark, and it's kind of shout, it's

just a kind of cheater shout, but it's insane because what it does is it literally turns females on. It triggers female cheaters to produce reproductive hormones, and I think this is unique in mammals. There's no other mammal species where the male just says something effectively, and the female gets ready for sex instantly. I think Tom Jones does that, doesn't he? Sorry, it's just Jesus and Tom Jones, I was forgetting. Yeah.

Well, do you remember years ago on the podcast, I said that there's a secret word that's been lost according to secret societies that if said directly to a woman will get her pregnant instantly. This is the closest that we have to this, so it's good to know. It's not impossible. It's not unusual. It exists. There's an article on the BBC News website, and the headline is just,

is it possible to escape a cheater? And I just, I love thinking of the people who are desperately waiting for that to load. Oh, the signal's bad, it's all right. What's the answer? Oh, I didn't read the article. Oh, imagine if someone right now is being chased out by a cheater, they happen to be listening to our podcast, and they're going, I can't believe my fucking luck, I'm about to be told how to escape this thing.

And then you didn't read the article, mate, you're part of the problem here. I'm sure it's possible if you believe in yourself, yeah. If you are being chased, just believe in yourself. I read that small cubs, small cheater cubs in the wild, they have a silver gray sort of bit of fur that goes over their head and it travels down their neck and their back. And it's basically camouflaged for them so that if they have any predators coming around, they can either hide into their surroundings or they can pretend to be a fake honey badger because they look so similar to a honey badger.

Sorry, Dan, we're not talking about honey badgers today. I demand we talk honey badgers at some point on this podcast. OK, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that Napoleon Bonaparte made his sister Caroline the Queen of Naples. But when the old guard reclaimed the city, she reinvented herself as Countess of Lepona, which was an invented place, which was an anagram of Napoli and Napoli being the Italian word for Naples. Clever. Yeah, she just wanted to be a queen.

She wanted to be royalty and, you know, Napoleon had taken over and she saw her chance. And she basically, you know, lobbied him to try and get anywhere in the world that she could become a Countess of. And eventually he said that she could go to Naples and then it was OK for a few years. And then eventually he got kicked out at Waterloo and then she got kicked out of there. And then she basically cosplayed it for the rest of her life. It's clever that it was Napoli and she was Napoleon's sister. Yeah, it's she could have made a little joke about that in her kind of welcome speech.

We had a successful stand up grid, didn't she? After Waterloo. Well, she's successful in maintaining this whole queen charade, do we know? When people said, where's Lepona? What did she say? Yeah. Well, it's wherever you want it to be, Andrew. It can be, you know, it's it's everywhere and nowhere. It's here and it's there.

It's in and it's out. It's up and it's down. I think I just thought it's you. I think that was who was that Katie Perry for a moment there. I went. No, she when they got deposed, a lot of the Bonaparte family were kind of kind of appeased when she was allowed to live in the south of Austria in her own little castle. And that was what she kind of she didn't call that Lepona, but she she took visitors and stuff and said that that's what she was.

She seemed to have a very bizarre relationship with Napoleon. So she was the the very young sister of Napoleon. And when they were forced out to sort of they grew up quite rich and then they became quite poor and then Napoleon got very rich and he put them all through school. So she went to a finishing school that was run or at least she was taught by the former lady in waiting to marry Marie Antoinette. And she so she learned to sort of be someone who wanted to become

the heights of a princess or a queen, even. And Napoleon started handing around all of these different royal titles to his family, but not to her to begin with. And there's accounts of of her getting these kind of subpar titles and they would have dinners as an account saying that Madame Murat because she was married at this point. And that's the surname she took on. Madame Murat was excessively angry

and during the dinner had so little control over herself that she could not restrain her tears. And she ended up the next night getting in a massive fight, fainting because she was so angry. She was obsessed with becoming this princess and he just really held off from giving her that. Like she was. Yeah, she was always throwing these tantrums and fainting.

She had this terrible jealousy of all of her sisters and of Hortense, who was so that was Josephine's daughter. And they went to the same school, Caroline and Hortense. And Hortense was sort of the perfect pupil, did really, really well in school, was very refined. And Caroline was a bit more brash, a bit less well bred. And so Napoleon often preferred Hortense and this caused a lot of problems. And, you know, she hated Josephine so much.

Caroline hated Josephine so much that when she had a daughter who was to be called Josephine, she insisted on calling the daughter Joseph because she says, I'm not going to allow my daughter to take that name. Wow. And had to be, you know, properly controlled. I thought of something that was less close to Josephine, surely like Sandra or Barony. We had to be sticking within the Josephine format at that moment. God. Well, she wasn't all bad, though, was she?

Like she was one of the main people who helped to excavate Pompeii because she was really interested in archaeology. She started a school for girls in Naples. But then on the other hand, as soon as it looked like Napoleon might be losing, she suddenly got on the side of the opponents and just went, oh, yeah, yeah. No, we're on your side. We're on your side. Please don't kick us out of Naples and Joe. And Napoleon was absolutely furious about that.

For good reason, I suppose. Yeah, he would be. Napoleon was just surrounded by these bloody siblings who all wanted stuff from him. They were all hopeless. Not one of them had the military now. So it's insane. He was one of eight children and he gave all his siblings jobs and thrones. He was, you know, a rest of development. He's like the Michael Bluth who's just trying to keep things together.

All the other useless magician siblings just turn up. I really like there's a cat. So he had another sister called. Sorry, he had a wife, Josephine, of course, he married and made the Empress of France at his coronation at the coronation, which was, I think, 1804, his sisters and his sisters in law, so his brother's wives, they were told, look, Josephine is becoming the Empress of France.

So in the ceremony, we'd like you to carry the train of her dress along the, you know, along the aisle at Notre Dame, where the ceremony is happening. Joseph was so furious about this. He said he was going to move to Germany just to spite Napoleon. And then Pauline, Pauline was one of the best Napoleon's of the lot. She was so entertaining. She and the other two sisters, they only agreed to carry Josephine's train if they would have other people carrying their trains.

So there was this mad conga of dresses along the aisle. And then, and then just as Josephine got to the actual throne, was about to turn and sit down, Napoleon's sisters who were carrying it, they all pulled it back so she couldn't move. No. Yes, they just held her up. And Napoleon gave them an extremely angry look, and then they relented and let go and she sat down and was just mad. Why didn't they relent and let go at the exact moment that would mean

she fell flat on her face? Surely that's the finale. It's really interesting because lots of, I mean, lots of the siblings, especially, I think the brothers who were given, you know, bits of Spain and Portugal and all of this were just not as talented. But it was this was Napoleon's attempt to recreate a royal family. And if he hadn't done that, I wonder how much more successful he would have been in his attempt to take over the whole of Europe. But because he went into dynasty mode, you know,

it was one of the things that led to disaster. Anyway. Yeah, there's Trump. He was the Trump of his time, wasn't he? Kind of. Yeah. You've got to put your kids and siblings in high places. I was reading a bit more about Pauline, one of the other sisters, one of the older sisters. She was amazing. She had a life-size statue of herself commissioned by her husband, which could revolve.

It just had this inner mechanical system and it just would turn around. I've no idea how. But my favourite thing about her is that she liked to bathe in milk, right? Which is, you know, classic, you know, very affluent lady stuff. But then she would follow her milk bath with a milk shower just to wash off the milk that was from the milk bath. How did they do that? When they used to have milk showers and milk baths, did they then have

a water surf or did they just smell of rank gone off milk all the time? I don't know. I just I think that was the desirable fragrance. What? Gone off milk? Proper shower, gone off milk. Everyone likes cheese, James. Everyone likes cheese. Yeah, I like cheese, I must say.

I do like cheese. Imagine a woman smelling like a lovely red lester. Pauline was, yeah, she was wild. She was the wild one. And I've been trying to verify this, but in one book, it said she once asked a servant to lie on the floor with her breasts out so that she could warm her feet in them, apparently. And she was really in the breasts.

No, within the cleavage, right? You'd be within the cleavage and you would. She would. You would have to hold the cleavage together, I imagine. You need a wonder bra for that. You would do, yeah. But you'd have to have two servants. You'd have to have one foot. You'd have to have one foot per cleavage, wouldn't you? Yes.

And actually, do you know that if you used to go to clarks in the olden days, that's how you used to measure your feet? That would be someone laying there with their breasts open and you put your foot in between them and they say you're a size 12. God, it was a different time, wasn't it? You're a double C. I sort of imagined it actually is going under the breasts. So I was weirdly imagining it, I suppose, of a rather elderly servant

with heavy sag where you could slot a foot under each breast. Yeah. Which would also work. Also nice. OK. Murat, Caroline Tosman, was a character as well. And they actually sound a little bit like, I want to say, Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, maybe. So they were both very flashy.

He was called the Dandy King, because he liked to parade around the streets of Paris, dressed like a stage king. Dressed like Desperate Dad. Yeah. That's right. With a huge cow pie. He was very good looking. I think he was slightly out of Caroline's League, maybe, looks wise. And he was so vain that even at the end,

he was executed by a firing squad for sticking with Napoleon a little bit too long. And before he was executed, his very last words were, Soldiers, do your duty straight to the heart, but spare the face. Wow. Couldn't bear the idea of his face being lost to the world. Not going to be much use to him after he's lost his heart, though, is it? Yeah. No, but at least he looks fit at the funeral.

I understand that impulse, I must say. I do too. I can kind of say the same thing. Yeah? I'm not claiming to be a looker. I'm just saying. Go for the heart or the face, but spare the inner ear. Josephine was originally called Rose.

Wasn't she? She was called Rose. And then Napoleon decided that he wanted to call her Josephine. Possibly. We're not sure why, but possibly because her previous lovers will have called her Rose and he didn't want, you know, her to have the same name as her ex-boyfriends knew her as. And she kind of put up with it.

But on the other hand, she was massively into roses later in life. And a lot of people wonder if maybe the reason she was so into roses was just to annoy Napoleon. And so she would get roses brought over from England and plant them in Paris. And she would get like special passports for these roses so that when the war was happening, they could still come from overseas because she loved roses so much. She needs a therapist to work through that with her.

I think the rose session, yeah. She's got some unresolved issues there. I think that's I think that's Napoleon being a bit controlling there. And I know he was famously quite a controlling man, CF all of Europe. But I think it's definitely true that when you would ask your girlfriend to change her name, that is controlling. Yeah, I like that. In the initial change, people would have got confused

and end up calling her Rosephine and just sounding like Scooby-Doo. What? The only other thing about Napoleon's marriage to Josephine that I know is that on his actual wedding night, he kept Josephine waiting for two hours because he was busy planning the invasion of Italy. And he got so excited and carried away that he forgot the time. He just turned up at midnight or whatever.

Did you think it was a euphemism for the first hour and a half? He said, I'm planning the invasion of Italy, my love. And she thought, oh, this is way around a metaphor. OK, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that a Chinese tech firm has recently been busted for spying on its employees via their bottoms. This is just a story that was in the news lately. It's a firm called Hebo Logistic Technology.

It's a tech firm and they issued all their stuff with smart cushions. And these cushions were going to monitor their health and make sure they were staying healthy in the workplace. You know, these cushions are incredible. You sit on them, they monitor your heart rate, your breathing, how tired you are, your posture, everything. But the problem was the cushion was also a snitch and it reported when you were not sitting at your desk

and the company had full data and it just started asking people, hey, why are you not at your desk at these times? Hey, you've been leaving 10 minutes early a few days in a row. You know, you're missing. Human resources just completely went off on one and started using the Robo Cushion Bum Spies for evil. The company did deny it, didn't it? They did.

The company said that they're just collecting trial data, not monitoring employees. But then they don't explain how come a couple of HR staffers were going up to people saying, oh, no, since you're knocking off a bit early. Yeah, it's maybe HR just went broke. You know what HR are like. So it's. Do you now go into the company headquarters

and everyone's just got their cushions strapped to their arse? Because that's what I do. Yeah, that's a good idea. Beat the tech. But then it would think that you'd suddenly become extremely light. You've lost a lot of weight, sure. You could just have a sack of beetroots and leave that on your desk at all times, and it would.

Oh, yeah, you could do that Indiana Jones thing of swapping the golden icon for a bag of. I think a bag of beetroots, though, is that that's going to leave a telltale red stain on your cushion, isn't it? I'm not going to worry about your health, to be honest. You appear to be bleeding heavily every day. You sit down at the Chinese Communist Party official organ, which is the Global Times, the newspaper.

They had someone who was a lawyer who said that they think this this is probably illegal. So even the Communist Party are kind of on the on the employee side of this. They're saying you can kind of maybe test people and see what's happening. But if you're giving the information to even to another employee, even to HR, then that might be that might be an issue. It does keep happening, though. This kind of workplace buying technology is normally computer based,

obviously, because that's more of it's easier than giving people cushions. There must be computers in the cushions, though. You're right. What is what is what is a what is a computer? I guess is what we're asking. What is a cushion? But the age old question first posed by Plato never answered since. No, this happens everywhere. I couldn't believe it spyware. So in 2018, it was reported that half of large companies are using some kind of monitoring techniques on their employees.

So that's things like you have software set up that analyzes the text of their emails, their social media messages of like biometric data. And then in covid, that's massively searched because people are working at home. So I think demand has gone up by 108%. So you're all being spied on. Yeah, there was a Barclays in 2017. This was in the UK thing. And they put a black box underneath everyone's desk and people just went into the office

and went, why is there a black box under my desk? And they went, oh, no, it's nothing. It's nothing. And it turned out to be something called Occupy, which is like Occupy, but EYE at the end. And it's a heat and motion sensor that can tell whether you're sat at your desk or not. And according to Barclays, the sensors weren't monitoring you. They weren't checking if you were at your desk. They were just seeing whether the office space was being used efficiently.

And maybe if you're not, your desk, very often we could put a water cooler there or something. I don't know about that, but no, they were saying that, oh, no, it's not. It's not to check up on people. Yeah, the Daily Telegraph did that too. They got busted because they happened to employ a few journalists there who noticed. It's the easiest day of work of your life, isn't it? That investigative projects literally didn't have to leave my desk, which is good because my employees are monitoring me all the time.

I was just surprised generally, actually, how much of our planet probably is spying on us and us not knowing it. Because looking into the 50s and 60s of the CIA, FBI, the Chinese government, like everything seems to have been bugged. You know, dog poo using as transmitter devices. So if you see dog poo on the ground, it's quite possible it's not dog poo. It's a listening device or a tracking device. Yeah, I mean, anything is possible.

It's extremely unlikely that if you see dog poo on the ground, that is a listening device people if you're walking down the street. But James, whenever I want to have a close personal conversation with someone, and I don't want anyone to overhear, I make sure to have the conversation near some dog poo so that people see the dog poo and I think, oh, I don't want to go near those guys having a chat. One interesting thing is that, obviously, the thing is, when you and I are having a chat in the street, Andy, let's say, obviously, we're going to be at least, you know, five and a half, six feet away from the dog poo.

So that's when they started this theory that you should hang out on trees so that it's always at a head height so that you can hear people talking. But that's assuming you have a bag on you, right? So the whole idea of this is that who's going to pick up raw poo off the ground? So your transmitter device or your bugging device is just going to remain dormant there because why would you ever touch it? But people have got poo all the time.

We have people who are employed to clean the streets. These days, maybe one of the most filthy days. This is an old, this is a 1970s technology before we invented strength cleaning. Oh, when there was four everywhere. Yeah. But before there was two and it was shit-laden everywhere. Yeah, exactly. How have we invented the bin?

Freaked out, would you be if you trodden some dog poo, thought, oh, no, I've troddened in some dog poo. And then you looked down and there was just sort of glistening microphone entrails inside there. You'd go mad. Or that when you went on Facebook and you got adverts for dog poo cleaning products. Dan, on your shoes. You've made this assertion here. You haven't explained, you know, what?

Yes, what was the context? Yeah. Oh, well, I was saying, were they doing it? Why were they doing it? Et cetera. So this was 1970s. These were part of devices that have all been invented by the CIA in order to track, to bug, to. Yeah.

So it would be everything from, yeah, they would, they created these poos. And you can see examples of them that were tracking devices. You can see tree stumps that they invent or that they built that when you open them up had a huge tracking and transmission, radio transmission device inside. So they would leave those, those sort of cut off trees in the wood near places where they knew spies might be active. They have the great rectal toolkit, which is not quite for spying in the sense that we're talking about, but was a nice little addition in the list.

It's like this big giant pills. It's not as big as Dan. I've been to the museum in Washington, DC, where they have this rectal toolkit. And when you just showed us on the zoom, how big it was, you were talking probably the size of an American football. And I could say no, no, no, no, no. It's more of a Coke. I'd say it's a Coke can that Dan's showing us.

I'm showing a Coke can size. Yeah, exactly. What size are you talking? It was full of knives. Yeah. What are we talking then, Jones? How big was it? Chunky.

It would be a chunky tampon for sure. A super heavy flow tampon. It's a lot bigger than a tampon, I would say. It's like three tampons strapped together. Everything seems like a reasonable size until you have to put it up your bum, you know? James, didn't you see when you were at that museum, didn't you see a pair of fake testicles to wear over your testicles? Scrotum, yeah, yeah.

Fake scrotum, yeah. Right. Again, normal scrotum sized. Well, slightly bigger. Slightly bigger, yeah. That is incredible, that fake scrotum thing, because it's so clever. I don't think it was really ever used properly in the field, but it had a radio in it. So, if you were dropped over in enemy lines, they're going to look for stuff on you,

but they're possibly not going to look inside your scrotum. Right. They may look at your scrotum, but they wouldn't. No one would be paranoid enough. They would look at it if it was playing Smooth by Fam or something like that. Exactly. Archer's theme tune coming out. Zoe Ball starts talking.

Zoe Ball. Oh, dear. Yeah. None of these things were ever any use, is what I think. I think it's been McIntyre or someone else who's sort of gone through and gone, why are they putting so much effort into these stupid technologies, which were never useful, rather than actually just making peace? Well, possibly.

I mean, to make the Soviets think that you're doing these crazy things, when actually you're useful things, which are tiny little listening devices that are on things that actually go into embassies they don't think of. Yeah. Yeah. On companies buying on you, but for good reasons, for health purposes, Stanford University have created this smart toilet. I think we've researched this for QI this year, but it is pretty amazing.

So it scans employees' bums. And the idea of that is that it can build up a whole health profile of you. So without knowing it, it can diagnose you with some horrible illness that you wouldn't have known you have for three years. And it's because basically our anuses are all individual, are all special. So the lining, the anodome, the lining of your anus is like a fingerprint. I've just learned a new word.

That's really anodome. Yeah. Anodome. Yeah. Oh, I thought you said anodome, which sounds a lot more well-mad-maxed than anodome. You will be given this American football. It's not a, it's an inverted dome. It's a dome.

And basically it scans it so it can tell who you are. And then it analyzes the quality of your excretions. So, you know, if you've got a green poo, it's your wee bit funny smelling. And then it will upload this onto your kind of health profile that it keeps. And it can alert you if your health is, you know, bit dodged. It's so clever. It needs to be a bit of consistency. Isn't that nice?

And it's all it said was the press release from Stanford said, the only thing holding it back really is that to fully reap the benefits of the smart toilet, users must make peace with the camera that scans their anus when they go to the loo. Yeah, that's the thing. Is that the future of higher security to getting into these sort of top secret rooms? You've got to take your trousers down and scan your bum. You always see them scanning their palm or their iris, don't you? Yeah.

But what if like one of the bad guys steals your anodome to try and get into the top secret place? Next Mission Impossible movie, please lose the surprise. Anyway, so I was, I was looking at CCTV and looking at the inventor of that. And this was an African American lady called Marie Van Britton Brown. And she lived in Queens and there was a very high crime rate. And so she started off by getting her door and she put three peepholes in her door at different heights, sort of one high, one medium and one low. And the idea was that tall, average heights and children would all be able to look in a different peephole.

So this was her first idea of a security thing. And then she set up a camera outside so that people who look through the peephole will be able to see like round the corner and stuff like that. And then she put loads of cameras in and she came up with a wireless television system where you'd be able to see from all the different cameras. And this was the first ever radio controlled wireless system for cameras and the first ever CCTV. When was that? She got the patents in 1969.

And this is the best thing about her, which I'd love to believe this. I've only seen this on Wikipedia, so it might not be true. But her mother, father and grandmother were all named Didi. Isn't that weird? I mean, that is just going to be... That's a sitcom waiting to be written, isn't it? No, that's one of Shakespeare play. That's one of Shakespeare's most awful comedies

where everyone's got the same name and happens to look identical. And they're all on the CCTV. She should have called it DDTV. Well, yeah, I guess the future Shakespeare's will be writing about everyone who had the same name and identical anuses. That's right. Can't do one DD anus from the next. Henry Ford was maybe the first employer to really standardize spying on your employees.

And I didn't know the extent to which he did this. But he used to just send out secret agents to go and watch his employees in their private lives. Well, they weren't secret because actually everyone knew that he was doing it. So they were agents. But this is 1914 and everyone wants to work in its factories because they're the big cheese. And he employed a team of 200 agents who would go and question all his employees on their personal lives, on their marriages, on what they ate, on their exercise routines,

and to check. And he said it was to check that you are clean living and then your wages would depend on how clean living you were. And so, yeah, I know, it's not great. Wait a minute. No, because what's the point of being clean living to get loads more money? What are you going to spend your extra money on if you can't spend it on huckers and cocaine? I guess you just got to buy one of Henry Ford's cars.

Maybe that's the aim. People used to cheat it, apparently. There was a boarding house, for instance, where 11 of his workers lived. And it was run by this landlady and agents would come around and interview them one at a time. And each one would always borrow the landlady to stand in as their wife when they got interviewed and say that they were married. They're all single. That's so funny.

So what, they just went house to house and they saw the same woman popping up again and again. This is like a Shakespearean play. And your name is also D.D. I.C. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is my fact. My fact is, in 2014, a former Apple employee called Sam Sung raised money for a charity by auctioning his last remaining Apple business card that read Sam Sung Specialist.

That's amazing. They must have employed him because of his name. Listen to that, Paul. I don't know. Why would you, though? Why employ your rival company to be walking out saying they're Sam Sung Specialist within your shops? Well, because then Apple could sell a load of Sam Sung products, but pretend that they're named after this guy.

Yeah, true. Yeah, because that drinking is in Peru, which is from the collar people and contains coca leaves and they call it coca-cola. It wasn't in the year 1304 or something. There was a girl in Europe called Diet Coke. Yes. Yeah. Although she didn't capitalize on it like an idiot.

The only group of people in the world who can go yes to someone saying, wasn't it in 1304? Did Sam really capitalize on this? I mean, how much did he actually make for this business? He did. Okay. Well, no, I mean, he was an employee. He worked in an Apple store in Vancouver at a Pacific center, which is on his card. And he worked there for a couple of years and he quit or left for whatever reasons.

He was thinking, because people always used to ask him, could I have a business card? And they always found it so funny. He just thought, you know, I want to raise some money for some children's charities. And what a good way to try and see if this generates anything. So what he did was he auctioned it as his final business card, but not only that, he framed his former Apple employee t-shirt, his lanyard, and the card in there. And he put it up on eBay.

He wasn't really expecting anything. And very quickly, the auction price went up to $80,000. Yeah, but like with those things, he sort of went, hang on, this can't be real. So he knocked them out and he went down to what he thought must be the only genuine one and which ended up being in the $2,000 region. So still a nice amount and just a nice little quirky. To be honest, it's the kind of thing I would buy on eBay. Yeah.

Saying that's the kind of thing I would buy on eBay. That doesn't limit it to anything on eBay. It doesn't narrow it down one bit. But it does answer what was going to be my next question, which was who on earth would buy something like that? Narrow it down from anything that has any possible use. Yeah, you're right. So I'm going to keep its value.

We know it's not going to be that. Wow. That's cool though. That's good. Yeah, you've got to love an imaginative attempt to raise money for charity. Did you guys read about Joe Cooper, who was the 24-year-old builder who him and 10 friends actually agreed to get their hair waxed off for a local hospital charity, and there were onlookers doing it.

I think onlookers got to bid to be allowed to wax off a bit of hair, and his mates had their chest hair waxed, and then they pulled out and they said, I've had enough. And he said, I'm going to go for the testicles because it's for charity. He had a radio hidden in there that they didn't realize. The CIA had snuck in there. His testicles are actually made of dog poo. I think the phrase testicles made of dog poo is the worst thing we've said, 365 episodes.

Well, you wait for the next bit. His friends paid various amounts to have a chance to rip off some of the hairs on his testicles. One of his friends pulled too enthusiastically and ripped off his six outer layers of skin, of seven apparently, and he had to go to hospital and they told him that one more layer of skin and his testicle would have gone. Wow, that's useful to know that we all have seven layers of skin on our testicles. Well, he claimed this is what the hospital told him. It's quite specific.

And he only raised three grand, which I think is not enough. We're almost losing it all. Does he even cover the costs of what it would have cost the hospital in money? Yeah, exactly. That's presumably the hospital he was raising money for. Shit, that's a really good point. Does that cover the NHS cost of sewing someone's skin back onto their ball? Well, that is a thing, isn't it?

Like, there was a study of parachute jumps in Scotland a few years ago. These are all charity parachute jumps and they looked at how much you made compared to how much it cost the NHS when you landed badly and broke your ankles. And it turned out I think it was for every pound that you got for the NHS. It cost the NHS £13.75 and returned to look after you and that's on average. Wait, so is that including the parachute jumps that go right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, no.

So basically, you only get a few hours. This was what the people were saying. I'm sure some parachute jumps are different than this, but they were saying that they only got like six hours of training and when they were kind of falling down, the earth is rushing up and you just forget everything that you've been taught and you just kind of panic and loads of people were like getting broken ankles and stuff. And a couple of people went into surgery and surgery is very expensive.

And I think people were on average only making about 30 or 40 quid for charity. Well, it's just like... A parachute jump. Yeah, but it's, you know, you do it because your friends are doing it, right? Your friends go, do you want to do a parachute jump? You go, yeah, sure. And then it's hard to get people to give them a parachute jump. So there's a thing called the martyrdom effect,

which is where people are willing to donate more if a fundraising effort will require pain or exertion. And we are recording this obviously the day before we do 20 hours of podcasting in a row. And I think that will cause pain and exertion. But have you guys heard of Peter Tripp? I don't think we've mentioned him before. Peter Tripp. He was a DJ and in 1959, he decided to broadcast his regular show from Times Square

for 200 hours. He sat in a booth and it went really badly wrong for him. It was bad. Letting us know that literally under 24 hours before we do ours, he died. He was going 10 times longer than we're going. Yeah. So after 100 hours, which I don't think we'll be in... We're not going to run over and do 100 hours tomorrow accidentally.

But after 100 hours, he was no longer able to do simple maths or recite the alphabet. After 120, he... Don, have you been doing 19 hours before we started today? Sorry. I like to kick into it, you know, just to get warm enough. It was an open goal. He just hit me on Wednesday. So that was 100 hours.

After 120, he walked into a nearby hotel to shower and change. And he opened a chest of drawers and he saw flames shooting out of it. At which point, he did not think I'm hallucinating. He thought, ah, the scientists are trying to trick me. So he developed serious paranoid delusions. He was basically having dreams while awake. And he started confessing to everyone around him, thought, although everyone thought he was Peter Tripp,

he was not actually Peter Tripp anymore. And he was drugged for the last 66 hours. I have no idea why someone didn't step in and say, we think this is not a bit far. And he did it. He did it. He made it through. But I think the effects lasted a while, a lifetime.

Wow. So did you say he was broadcasting? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what the last 66 hours when he was drugged, but still awake and still broadcasting must have been like. They can't have been great. I was just looking at stupid charity attempts.

And one is, well, it's actually a yearly fundraising event in Japan. It's called Stop AIDS. So Stop Exclamation Mark and then AIDS, which is a really weird place to put the exclamation mark in that sentence. But it's, so it's a Japanese charity that raises awareness by HIV and AIDS. And they hold an event. And they've been doing it since the early 2000s, which the name loosely translates to boob aid.

And it's, but it's this, this event is run by an adult TV channel, five porn channel. And what happens is they have their actresses stand and let people squeeze their, Wow. Squeeze their breasts and pay money for the purpose. Did they let you warm your feet up?

I think you have to pay double for that. And so it's very controversial, obviously, because it's raising money, but it does involve basically lots of sleazy men going up and squeezing a porn star's boob in order to do so. Yeah, it doesn't, the optics are not good. Yeah. The optics are pulled. I mean, presumably they,

they have to be told that you're not allowed to squeeze more than once or whatever. I mean, they'd have, they'd have to be pulled off. You can squeeze multiple times, but you have to pay multiple times. Anna, you're responding to something that really did quite well. I'm sorry. Yeah, I couldn't, I couldn't believe you were doing that. So I, And for the, for the listener,

Andy did a little dance afterwards while Anna was trying to. He grabbed his own breasts. Very nicely. I will make a charitable donation to myself later on for doing it. That's disgusting. I honestly thought I can't, I can't respond to that. Yes, they'd have to be pulled off. Thank you.

There was a, there was a sheriff in America who I, I quite like, he's called Leon Lott, which is a good name. And he allowed himself to be tased to raise money for charity. So for every thousand dollars that was bid, he would let the tasing go on for an extra second. The winning bid was $2,000, which meant he was tased for two seconds. But I think that's probably, yeah, I don't, I don't know how much longer he could have let the bedding go on for before

he would have just been killed by the tasing. I think Ed Ball's got tased. Yeah, but not for charity. It was for his documentary about something. Didn't even want to raise money. Interesting thing about Ed Ball's seven layers of skin. Interesting. One charity thing that I really like was from 1943.

And this was a book that was published in aid of the famine relief committee called Famous People's Pigs, Blindfold. And the way that this works is they got a load of famous people to put on a blindfold and draw a picture of a pig. And then they put it in the book. And they had Arthur Conan Dial did it. George Bernard Shaw, George Bernard Shaw did it. Jasper Maskeling did it.

Hiram Maxim, who invented the machine guns in it. They had some real big hitters who put on a blindfold and drew a picture of the pig. I'm just trying to make sure Misunderstood drew pig Maley. Very good. But yeah, that's so funny. And the pictures are online. You can see them. The one that Hiram Maxim drew is one of the worst things I have ever seen in my entire

It just looks like nothing. It's just loads of lines and you could kind of make out that it's supposed to be an animal, but the legs are in the middle of the body and the heads kind of off the body and stuff like that. And then they asked him about it afterwards. They said, what's going on with this pig? And he said, I have just a suspicion that the pigs that are so well drawn in your album are by people who had their eyes partly open. The trouble with my pig is that my eyes were too tightly closed.

So he thought everyone else was cheating. He was so shit at drawing a pig. What an accusation to throw around. Our grapes to me. Sounds like it, doesn't it? Let's hope he didn't design his gun blindfolded. No, it's a disaster. James, when you said famous people's pigs blindfolded,

my mind immediately went to there must have been enough celebrity pig owners in the UK who will be willing to put a blindfold on their own pig. And then I guess you would have to guess as the reader who whose pig is this. Who the pig it would belong to. Agatha Christie's pig wearing a blindfold. But yours is better. I concede that. That's suggesting though, Andy, we would recognise celebrities pigs

based on their eyes, right? That's Agatha's, isn't it? Yeah, you're absolutely right. You've got a blindfold then. You could get Rebecca Loose's pig, of course. But then if you don't want her in the pitch, she'd have to be pulled off. Oh, good. That's staying in, is it? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening. If you would 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 am on Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. James. That's James Harkin. And Anna.

You can email podcast.qi.com. That's right. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there. We also have our mammoth 20-hour-long episode that we just made for Charity, an aid of comic relief. The Just Giving page is still open.

If you could please donate to that, we would really appreciate it. But do check it out. It's not happened yet. It's happening tomorrow. But I'm going to say it was great fun. I couldn't believe that last couple of hours when Andy, we put him on a load of drugs. Do you remember?

Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm not Andy. I'm not Andy. Well done, whoever sent fire to his chest of drawers. Anyway, we will be back again with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.