No Such Thing As A Fish - 400: No Such Thing As A Pope In A Helicopter

Episode Date: November 19, 2021

Live from the London Palladium, our 400TH SHOW (!!) Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss microwaves, Microsoft and microlights. 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 this week coming to you live from the London Palladium! Tonight is also a very special episode for us, it is our 400th episode of... My name is Gage Shriver, I'm sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, 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 a particular order, here we go! Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that there's a 300-square-mile section of America where all microwaves have to be kept in cages. Are they living microwaves? They're scary like teethy. Violent, yes, some kryptonite was spilled on them in the 60s and haven't been able to keep control of them. No, they're kept in specific cages, I have misled you there slightly, they have to be kept in faraday cages, and that's because it's in the quiet zone.

So this is, the whole quiet zone is actually about 13,000 square miles, and across that radio transmissions and all electromagnetic transmissions are really restricted, and within this little 300-square-mile section, which is right next to this Green Bank Observatory, which is a few giant telescopes, which are really, really important for like seeing things from outer space, they need to have just no interruption, and that means no waves of any sort, and that includes if you're microwaving a burger at two in the morning, that could convince them there's alien life out there, so it's got to go in a faraday cage. I've had a few burgers at two in the morning that would convince me there's alien life out there, and it is because of this observatory, although it also happens to be where the National Security Agency has one of its listening stations, which also happens to be in the same area. Wait, so what are they listening to? Are they listening to...? Well, they might need a lot of quiet, so basically they're listening to any foreign transmissions that come into the eastern side of the United States,

so it helps them to be a bit quiet as well. It's for anyone who wants peace and quiet, really. The NSA, these telescope guys, weird conspiracy theorists, quite a lot of them there. I know, it's a big mix of people, isn't it? Yeah, conspiracy theorists, you've got your people who believe that they suffer from a disease whereby Wi-Fi interferes with them, and they sometimes have to sleep in boxes to get away from it. They should come to the QI office. Oh, that was a joke about how shit our Wi-Fi is. We have a few of the elves in the audience and they would have loved that joke. Also, we invited our IT guy today. I don't know history in this shit.

Sorry, buddy. It sounds just incredible. The list of restrictions there are, all because of these telescopes, so there are various things that aren't allowed. Lots of stuff about Wi-Fi is technically banned. Petrol-driven vehicles are not allowed because they have spark plugs, so if you fire them up, that might do something. I thought this was so interesting. I did not know this, that if you are prone to sort of wearing tinfoil hats or whatever and waves getting into your brain, petrol cars, terrible diesel cars, fine. Diesel is just compressed. I guess I never properly understood the difference. Just really, really compressed until it's hot enough to ignite, whereas petrol, you know, it needs a spark and that's giving off waves and that's fucking with your brain. Yeah.

It's not. I just want to clarify it's not. And the members of the public who live there, so it's a very small population there. It's under 200 people that live there. This is just in the tiny inner bit. Yeah, but they take it really seriously about how they have to make sure that nothing is messing with this telescope to the point where there's almost citizen police officers that go around driving in their car just looking every day for any kind of Wi-Fi signal or any... There was a guy called Wesley Sizemore and he used to just knock on doors and just go and walk in and go unplug your microwave, turn your Wi-Fi off. Yeah, he once amazingly tracked down the radio frequency interference of a faulty electric blanket in someone's house. And he went into their house and he confiscated it off them. Just woke up a poor granny at three in the morning.

There's a woman called Dr Karen O'Neill who works at the observatory and she says that she has members of her family who never visit them because the lack of Wi-Fi stresses out the teenagers. Yeah, that's why they're not getting visits. I'm so sorry, we'd love to, but the teenagers have to have their Wi-Fi. Now, I think a lot of you are probably thinking like, okay, you have to put the microwave in a Faraday cage. The first thing I thought was, isn't the microwave a Faraday cage? 00:05:08,000 --> 00:05:10,000 Yeah, I thought that was kind of the whole point of microwaves. But what it is is microwaves do have Faraday cages in them, but they often leak.

So you can test if you have a leaky microwave. So I tried this today at home. I put my phone into the microwave and got my wife to call me and I still got the call. And I tried the one backstage. We have a microwave backstage and I put my phone in there and one of the elves called me and I didn't get it. So this one is a proper Faraday cage, but my one at home is a leaky one. So, hang on, doesn't that break the microwave? No, it does turn it on.

Well, just, well, don't. We should say, in case anyone else was confused. Dinner tonight in the Harkin house. Cooked apple. Oh, very nice. There's a guy who has a van called Emit, which is the electromagnetic interference tracking truck. Which is a very forced acronym. But he, yeah, he, that might be who you were talking about, who drives around like the signals.

It's got 17 antennae on it. Yeah. Well, this might be the new guy. There's a new sheriff in town. Yeah, because yeah, Sizemore is retired. So there's a new guy who goes and you can see photos and it is like, like in the X files, that van that's just full of computers and stuff. Yeah, it's amazing. And they all think that it's part of the observatory that is messing with their lives in various different ways.

So there was a mother who called in saying that she was getting interference on her TV because of the telescope. So it just said N-R-A-O on her TV. And she was like, you guys are breaking my TV. So someone came around, it turned out that that acronym N-R-A-O stood for not rated adults only. And it was because, and it was because her son was trying to watch porn. Oh my God. People get imprisoned, I wonder. I mean, I know they don't, you get a small fine, but it's a strange crime to have done.

It's a $50 fine, isn't it? But the truth is that due to the fact that no one has any money anymore, the police are not spending their time going around trying to prosecute people for this. And that means that actually most of the places in that town now have Wi-Fi and have microwaves because they know that no one's going to do anything. And the observatory have kind of gone, well fine, we'll deal with it. We'll work out what the background is and we'll kind of deal with that. The conspiracy theories who think it's fucking with their heads, they are not happy. Right, of course. No, they're the ones who are really upset about it.

Wow. There's one ski resort which they made an exception for, which seems nice, always nice to let the old wealthy skiers have a way around the rules that bind everyone else. But that's Snow Shoe Mountain and it advertises itself as an oasis of cellular activity in an otherwise total dead zone. And they just had, they got one of the, you know, sell companies to wire it up specifically so that it wouldn't really radiate any waves but that you can still cool someone on the slopes and say, It's really annoying because you will have, I guess, reception at the start of the run. But you're like, yeah, yeah, this run's going really well, I'm just skiing down, hello, hello, as you get further and further away. I don't think it runs out, does it? They don't just put it on the peaks, that would be terrifying. But I guess also once you get it in the ski resorts and everyone's going to want it, right? It's a slippery slope.

Oh my God. Yeah, that whole, so that whole area, you've got the ski slope, you've got the neo-nazi area, which is quite a popular area there. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of neo-nazis because basically, as we were saying before, it's kind of like people are going there for either to get away from technology or they're going to a place where they can be a prepper and effectively get away from all the stuff and just live in isolation. So you've got the preppers, you've got the neo-nazis, you've got the slopes. Sorry, why are the neo-nazis being dumped in with the preppers and the people who are afraid of technology? I know the people who are afraid of technology are a bit silly and the preppers are a bit nuts. And the ski slope is, I'm just listing all the different communities.

Why are the neo-nazis there? Everyone's got to be somewhere. It's so nice to hear someone sticking up for the neo-nazis down, it's really good. I will not! My favourite one, just very quickly, is the Gazuntai Institute is there as well, which was set up by Patch Adams. Do you remember the brilliant movie Patch Adams? 00:09:31,000 --> 00:09:33,000 Yeah, I've recognised that's a sentence no one has ever said before.

So was he a real person, Patch Adams? He's a real person and he wanted to set up a hospital where you didn't have to pay and they used humour instead of medicine. And that's where that is as well. And they just read that laughter as the best medicine and took it literally. Yeah, I have heard of him actually. Is he the one who goes around with the world's largest pair of underpants? That is him. And I think the president of Costa Rica and the president of Ecuador have been in his giant underpants or something.

You know him. I remember him. Patch Adams, a legend. You've seen the sequels. I don't think that was even in the film. This telescope, just briefly, the actual Green Bank telescope, it is unbelievable. Okay, so I don't even really fully grasp this. It can measure the energy from, you know, billions of miles away, equivalent to a single snowflake falling onto the surface of the Earth.

But at any normal distance. That must be tough when the ski season starts. Yes. Oh my God! Yeah, the energy that they're looking for is the energy from extremely distant stars like quasars, which are very, very bright, but they're a long way away. And they can pick up, the energy that they give off, or that gets to us here, is a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of one watt per square meter. Which is why this telescope needs to be so enormous, it's two acres, the dish in capacity, in area, so that it can pick up those signals. They say, if you're on Saturn, if you find yourself on Saturn and you put your phone on airplane mode, they can still detect it from there.

Wow, even on airplane mode? Even on airplane mode, so you can't get away with anything. I thought airplane mode was absolutely impregnable. I'm afraid not. I'm afraid that's what the government wants you to believe. Oh my God, I have to go. How's anyone going to give you a ring on Saturn? Hey. I reckon that's the last one of those I can get away with.

I don't know. All I'm thinking is two-one, and I am. Challenge accepted. What a shame that that's such an amazing fact, but the thing that sticks out for everyone is airplane mode, you can still find us. That's the amazing bit, though. And the Saturn bit, but largely the airplane mode bit. Because you're not supposed to be giving off anything. Another cool thing about the telescope is that it's made of the huge dish which receives all the radio waves.

It's made of loads and loads of little panels, and it needs to be perfectly smooth. And actually, over the years, just the force of gravity would very, very slightly deform the panels. And so every panel has a tiny motor attached to it which senses, and as soon as it deforms by, you know, a micrometer by the width of a couple of human hairs, the motor senses it and adjusts the panel to make it smooth again. That's amazing. Another person who had a telescope that needed a lot of work on it was William Herschel. He was a guy who discovered Uranus. And he was... No, yeah, come on.

No, I'm with them. Say the proper name. Herschel, is it? So, William Herschel, he discovered Uranus, or Uranus. And he was really obsessed with his telescopes, so much so that his sister Caroline spent her whole life basically polishing his telescope. And... No, come on. I would accept Uranus, but come on. And also, he was like so obsessed with searching for the stars, she had to feed him by putting food directly into his mouth, because he was so on it.

And she's an amazing person. She basically was in Hanover, and then the French Army came in and they kind of took over Hanover. And then, so William Herschel left there and came to the UK, he became an organist, and then she came over and he started giving her singing lessons. And then before long, she was a superstar in Bath and Bristol. She was singing five nights a week, she was massive. But then when her brother wanted to become looking at the stars, she had to give it all up to just polish his telescope. Wow. But then in the end, he died in the end, and she took over his job, and she became famous as the discoverer of no fewer than eight comets. And for her 96th birthday, Humboldt presented her with a gold medal for science from the King of Prussia. Wow.

How did the brother die? Did he die mysteriously as a result of having received no food for several weeks? We need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the musician Ray Charles, who was blind, used to fly to gigs because he thought it was safer than driving. However, he also insisted on flying the plane himself. This is an extraordinary claim, and it's come up countless times from his friends, from his biographers. Supposedly, there was a plane that he owned and he would charter and he would bring all his band on. He had a few planes in his career, and he used to have a pilot who was a friend of his called Tom McGarrity. And when the plane had gone up and was at cruising level, he would get really bored and needed to pass the time.

So these are reports of Ray Charles going into the cockpit, sitting down at the controls and being handed over the controls from the pilot and just flying the plane there for hours. There are even stories that maybe he landed the plane once or twice himself. It's why they invented in-flight entertainment, I think, isn't it? To keep Ray Charles. To save pilot's lives. Do you believe the stories? My question is that. You believe he landed the plane? No, I don't believe he landed it. I do believe that he might have flown it.

It's so funny. I don't know enough about planes to know that, but there's Bobby Womack, for example, who didn't know that he would do that, was just sitting on the plane and suddenly Ray Charles runs to the cockpit. And takes over and he's going, is everyone cool with this? It's an incredible anecdote. He says, oh, Jesus me, oh, dear Lord, he started praying, Bobby Womack. He said, there's a blind man flying the plane. This is nonsense. And the trumpet player of Ray Charles' band just told him to relax and said, you don't need eyes to fly a plane. Everyone was on a lot of heroin at this point, obviously, by the way.

Including Ray Charles. Including Ray Charles. They got there really quick. What I find is that the closer you get to Ray Charles for these anecdotes, the more it gets to less that he was flying or landing the plane and more that he knew how to do it, but he didn't necessarily do it. So it's interesting. I don't know, if one of those inflatable things can fly a plane, then I reckon Ray Charles can. Are you talking about the movie Earthplane? Yeah.

That documentary. That's pretty true to life. I read his autobiography of the last couple of days. He doesn't mention it in there, but again, he does say that he would know how to do it. If worse came to worst and everyone else on the plane died, he would be able to land it without killing himself. That's what his claim was. It feels like he's done it. I mean, what else has he done? Memorised it in a book.

I don't think anyone would say they knew how to fly a plane if they'd memorised the textbook. Okay, can I tell you his technique that he was going to use then to land it? Oh, yeah, this is awesome. So his technique was that he was going to get all the dials because you need the dials to land as well as your eyes. But you need the dials and he was going to smash all these dials and he was going to use his hand to feel the way that the dials are moving. No, no, no, because there's one specific dial. I don't know if this is still an airplane, which is the shape of an airplane. It's like literally an airplane.

So he was like, I'd smash the glass and I would hold the airplane and just feel it as we're going down because that would tell you about the balance of the airplane. So yeah, so he would just, he would hold a toy airplane basically in order to land it. But he was, he was someone who, if you were looking at other vehicles, he was someone who took charge of other vehicles. So his son said that there was one day where he was coming home in his Corvette and the driver got to an intersection and he suddenly said, get out. I want to drive it. And the Valley said, I can't let you do that. And he said, it's my car. Okay. So he got out.

And so his son said they were sitting at home and there was this huge crash and they went outside and the car had totaled into the side of the house. In fairness, what happened there is that he was on the clutch and he'd accidentally let the clutch go and it kind of jumped forward into a car that came past him. So it's not even because he's blind, he's just a shit driver. Yeah. He started car adverts in the 90s. Have you seen that? Oh yeah. He was driving on the, in like the Salt Flat, Utah's Great Salt Lake.

So he's not on a road. There are no other vehicles around, but he's having a whale of a time driving away. It's lovely. And his driver, by the way, guess what his driver's name was? I don't know. Clarence Driver. That's cool. He did, he had a long history of doing this.

So the first time he took control of a car was when he was about eight. And this was when he was at primary school. And his teachers remembered him as kind of paid in the ass, I guess, kind of rebellious. And he, one time at primary school, he managed to break into one of the teacher's cars. It was, and he went to a deaf and blind school. It was quite groundbreaking. It was the only one in Florida. And he was sent there as, he was about five when he was sent there, five or six, wasn't he?

Or maybe seven. Well, he only went blind then. He went blind at the age of about six. Yes. And then his mum just sent him to the school. And yeah, he went there. He got control of a teacher's car and he had one of the deaf kids sit next to him or sit on the hood of the car, I think, with either his left or right hand to tell Ray to go left or right.

This is a Gene Wilder film. Richard Pryor called See No Evil, Hear No Evil. It genuinely is. Yes, that's the plot of the film. Do they end up like he ended up, which was crashing into a tree? Yeah, I think that happens quite a lot in the film. It's a pretty... He also drove motorbikes from time to time, definitely.

This is in his autobiography. So when he was about 14 or 15, he was in Tallahassee and he would ride his motorbike. And the way that he did that, he would be in a big sort of area with nothing else around him. The same way as the advert. But in Tallahassee, he would ride in this area and his friend would be alongside him. So he could kind of feel him next to him while he was motorcycling. So cool. He was better at music than he was at driving vehicles.

Oh, he was quite good. I don't believe that he was in the airplane. I don't believe he drove the airplane personally. Yeah, yeah. But if you read the biography, there's loads of stuff where he said at one stage, the pilot forgot to pull the flaps down on the plane and they weren't climbing properly. And he could sense the problem. And he said, you need to put the flaps down.

The pilot went, Is he Yoder? There was another time when they were flying at 11,000 feet. Okay, the traffic controller had told them they need to fly at 11,000. And he said, but I had 13,000 in my head. So I asked the pilot to check and sure enough, the controller had made a mistake. Maybe we would have had enough height to get over the mountains anyway, but I want to take chances.

He got quite slightly wrong. It's 30,000 feet in the air. I have. So he was really, really into aeroplane. Like he really knew a lot about them and he was properly into them. He really didn't like the idea of trading on being a blind musician. This is something I find really interesting. And in fact, it has to do with the instrument he played,

the fact that he was a pianist instead of a guitarist because there were so many blind blues musicians, particularly, who, you know, played the guitar. So there was Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Willie McTale, Blind Blake, no other name. This is normative determinism, isn't it? Blind Kerry Davis, Blind Boy Fuller and Blind Joe Reynolds. All of them, you know, were guitarists.

And so he said, I don't want to be associated with that. He said it was as much an association with blindness as it came to walk with the guitar. Although he did, he loved the piano from the age of three, which really makes me think I've missed the bow in finding my life's passion. If that's when you've got to get it. He was three years old and he grew up in extreme poverty. You really read about his early life and you think, God, I suppose I'll never complain again.

You can imagine like a single mother, dad's runoff, very, very poor, black family. And he heard someone playing the piano in the shop down the road and he ran through. He was three years old. He sprinted across, pushed his way through the door, jumped on his lap and that was it and started banging away and knew he loved it from then on. And when he went to school, when he was sent to this school, they were taught Braille, obviously.

And it was so hard to read piano music because, of course, you can only ever play while sight reading with your left hand. So he'd have his right hand fumbling away, feeling the music while his left hand plays and then he'd have to swap and then he'd have to memorize it. And he could memorize thousands of pages like that. Yeah, he was incredible. The Braille stuff is really interesting because he was very proud of the fact

that he could get on normally while being blind. And so everything that he got was in Braille. If a contract was sent to him and it wasn't in Braille, he would refuse to sign it. I think that's fair enough. It feels like someone's trying to do one over on you if that's what they're sending you. No, but like, you know, he got to see Ray, the movie with Jamie Foxx

and they turned the script into Braille for him so that he could read it and sort of fact check it and so on as it was going on. They should have made a 3D film where he could feel the screen bulging out of it. Why don't we have that? Why don't we have that? I would. Could it be cost effective?

I don't know. It's not very COVID secure. Everyone in the cinema especially, everyone just groping forward at the screen. And if you've got the seat that's the top left corner of the screen, you're not getting any action. He was really good at chess, wasn't he? And he had his own chess set where the black squares

were all raised slightly and all the black pieces were pointing to the switch, which was really cool. Did you read about him playing Willie Nelson at chess? Go on. He played Willie Nelson, another great musician at chess. He challenged Willie Nelson to a game back in his hotel room or wherever he was. And obviously Ray Charles was blind so he kept the lights off.

So... You got to save electricity, right? To save electricity? What's the point of lighting it? So he thrashed Willie Nelson at chess. And Willie Nelson couldn't fucking see what was going on. That's so good. You had this really weird thing which I didn't believe for ages, but I've found enough sources and the guy seems legit.

During the 90s, he got really bored of giving interviews, but he had to give interviews for promotional purposes. So instead, he got a white guy from New Jersey to be him in all the interviews that he did. So this is a producer and writer guy who interviewed him and knew Ray Charles inside out. When they had their interview, Ray was so impressed. He just thought, this is incredible. We have to meet up again.

And then there was this interview that was going to happen with a guy. The interviewer came over and Ray called him up. He calls him his white Ray Charles, this guy. And so he comes over and he says, I want you to do the interview as me and give all the answers because I can't be bothered doing it. So he said, okay, I'll do that. So he sits there and he starts doing it and the guy asks a question

and he says, well, Ray would say that and Ray said, no, no, no, no, don't say Ray would say, say, I would say, you are me in this interview. And they did this whole interview where he was Ray and it went so well that Ray said, we must do that again. And for a decade virtually. But not on television. Not on television.

This were all print interviews and people, if they were calling up over the phone, he would do the interview as this white guy from New Jersey. That's amazing. And after Ray died, there was even a book, a photography that was taken by a personal friend and he said to him, Ray can't write this book now. Would you mind writing it as him?

Post his death. He said, no, but yeah. Did they have a fight at one point? Ray's saying, what's all the shit about me driving a plane? I'm not just a student. He did one really fun thing when he was a kid. He, like I say, he was like a bit of a lovable troublemaker is the impression that I got.

And he used to love playing piano at school and there was another kid from, so the school was segregated. And there were a bunch of white kids who got a better education and then the black kids basically like got less good, got less good equipment, all of that. And one of the white kids really wanted to come and play the piano, which was in the black kids part of the school. And so this kid came up to Ray and said, I need to use a piano.

You need to let me, you need to get off the piano. I need to use it. So Ray said, fine, you can have it. Just give me 15 minutes. And this was related by his best friend at the time and that was weird because Ray would never give up without a fight. And lo and behold, they were in their dorm, like, you know, half an hour later and the white kid comes up furious

and Ray spent that 15 minutes unscrewing every single key on the piano and putting it in his bag. And they go, you said you're only one of the piano. That's so funny. We've got to move on in a sec to our next fact. I just found one other guy who can fly their own aircraft. What? Put an unusual one.

A lot who can fly. Well, this guy was Pope Benedict the 16th, Dan. It's that unusual enough for you. Thank you. You've got to work on the lead-in to that. You know, look, this, I mean, James, if you're skeptical about Ray Charles, the idea of Benny the 16th flying the papal chopper, I've only found it on the website called Catholic News Facts

and it's only there and I feel like they'd have given it more airtime as the Pope could fly a helicopter. How implausible was he one of the sort of 17th century ones? I always went out to keep track. Was it at least? Got it. The previous one. So what's the story?

He can fly a helicopter, that's the story. Well, thank God we didn't move on before you got that story. Wow. Now it's time for fact number three and that is Andy. My fact is the Pope can fly a helicopter. Thank you. Solid gold.

No. My fact is there is a zookeeper in America who cannot change job because the bird he looks after is in love with him. This is such a sweet story. I don't think it's very sweet. Well, we'll get on to the real details in a minute, but the broad brush strokes are very sweet. This was sent to me by a guy called Ali Bobson,

so thank you very much, Ali. It's this brilliant Washington Post investigation. There is a crane. Cranes are these very tall, very elegant birds, and this one is very endangered. It is a white napped crane, unbelievably rare and endangered, and it lives at the Smithsonian Conservation Institute in Virginia. There's a breeding centre there.

They had this bird. It was a female bird needed to be bred with to preserve the species, but it was a deadly bird. It allegedly had killed at least two previous partners rather than mate with them. It wasn't taking any shit. It was killing them, and they realised maybe it has imprinted, when it was a young chick,

it thought a human was its parent rather than a crane bird, so it is programmed to love humans, and so they got this keeper who is called Mr Crow, amazing, Chris Crow, and... Jump! Jump! Sorry, it just sounds like it. Chris Cross. Don't get it, don't get it.

But they loved it. And so they, in Chris Crow and Warner, are now basically an item, and they have done a lot of work, breeding work together. Now this is where it gets a bit icky. This is where it gets a fraction icky if you're squeamish. Yeah. So he slowly earned the female crane's trust

by sitting with her and touching her and all that stuff, and dancing with her is amazing. Dancing with her, they dance. Like, a lot of the cranes, before they get together, they do this kind of head bobbing dance and stuff, and he did all that with her as well. When no one was looking, he said. And now, basically, she will let him inseminate her.

Because previously, if you had a crane, and you needed to artificially inseminate them, you'd probably have to use an aesthetic, all that kind of stuff. She is well up for it. And he doesn't, we should clarify, inseminate her with his own seed. And he does remain fully clothed throughout this process.

He puts a different crane sperm into her cloaca. Actually, interestingly, the other crane is called Ray. No, really. It's a different one, different Ray. Different Ray, yeah. The article you sent round though, Andy, it does, like, as James says, it reads a bit bizarre. So, like, literally taking the words,

it says, kneeling behind the bird. Oh, don't put that tone of voice on it. If you put that tone of voice on it, if you put it away like that, it wouldn't make anything sound mucky. Crow rests a hand gently on her back. Then he starts rubbing her thighs, rhythmically.

30 seconds elapse before Walnut steps away. It's called Walnut, by the way. Walnut steps away from Crow, fixes a few out-of-place feathers and then stretches out her wings, asking for another go-around. Look, Dan, if this is your audition tape

for my dad, Rhoda Porno, it means a lot of work. And then it says, Crow then takes the opportunity to inject Walnut with a syringe of Crane Seaman. Like every beautiful relationship. But she keeps on wanting to make with him, even though at the moment they don't need any more eggs from her.

But sometimes he will just keep her happy by doing the massage. And he gives fake eggs, doesn't he? Yes. They don't give a social create eggs, but they don't need to be inseminated anymore, so they'll just sit and rot. So they have to chop the eggs out

and put fake eggs underneath her to convince her that she's doing a good job. But then she gets tired, she gets tired looking after the fake eggs which she has switched out. So he sometimes has to stand over the eggs and watch them for her, even though he knows they're fake,

so that she can have a break from looking after these rubber eggs. It does feel like he's going to be single, as far as human partners is concerned. He said in one interview, Walnut sets the bar pretty high. I'll never find a woman that's so happy

to see me that she just starts dancing. It's so sweet. It's like a roller coaster of sweetness, the syniaciness, isn't it? He has cheated on her though. What? Yeah, he's inseminated two other cranes. He's got a type.

I'm not denying that. Are they in the same zoo? Yeah, they are in the same zoo, but I don't think Walnut knows about so. I hope she doesn't listen to this. Yeah, but that would be terrible. But no, he's now a kind of love guru for the cranes in this place.

Really? Yeah, and apparently the way the cranes flirt most effectively, aside from this dance, is by picking up nesting material because showing that you want to build a home together, is something you've ever tried going on

a date around John Lewis? It's very sexy stuff, yeah. It's much like that, except if John Lewis saw the sticks and twigs, bits of grass. Chris Crowe did not invent this in case anyone was looking for it. This is not the first human crane

marriage as it were. The real daddy of this, I regret saying daddy already. There's a scientist called George Archibald who is a don of the crane world. He founded the International Crane Foundation. Just to give you an idea, he's pretty big in Crane Town.

And he, in 1976, there was a bird called Tex, which again, needed to be mated with to preserve the species. And he moved in next to her for three months, as in he put his bed next to her area where she lived. Mimicked her dance moves from 5 a.m.

every morning, was truly dedicated and they built a nest together and they worked together for... She's my colleague, darling, honestly. I just had to be in the office early again. I think he might have invented the practice of dressing up as a crane, which you now have to do.

To feed chicks so that this problem doesn't perpetuate itself, so that the chicks don't imprint on humans. Well, you dress your hand up as a crane for the feeding, don't you? Like you're in like a full white hood, aren't you? And then you have like the bird's hand. You're not like Rod Hull.

You're like the KKK. That's what it would look like. He moved to that little community in Green Valley, the observatory. And you can never say a word. You can't speak words to them when you're in the robe. You have to make crane noises, obviously.

Do you know how they sound? Just out of curiosity. I don't know. Because I didn't realize I didn't know cranes that well up until this fact. They're massive. They're big birds.

They're big birds. They're the biggest flying ones. Tallest flying ones, aren't they? Obviously, you've got the shit ones like the ostrich that don't count anymore. Yeah, that's right. They fly so high. They can get like 30,000 feet in the air.

Well, they're very tall. They're left still on the ground for a lot of that time. That's amazing, isn't it? And there's a lot of mythology around them because they can fly so high that you can't see them. But their voices still at that height

are so booming that you can hear them. So it's a sort of like, oh, there's a crane in the air. They make a lot of noise, don't they? Their track here is as long as they are. But it kind of winds around a little bit, but they make this huge booming. Not like Andy's, wha! It's more like wha!

Neither of you is successfully seducing a crane. It's my judgment. Yeah, so they need to fly high to my great. They're big old migrators. And there's an issue now, because a lot of them are very endangered, like you said. And I think certain cranes,

like hypercranes, were down to almost single figures in about the 1940s. But their populations have gone up. It's been quite a success story of conservation. But the way they've gone up is by humans raising them. And this has a slight problem where if their parents aren't raising them, they're not really evolving to know their migration routes.

So there's been a couple of people who have had to migrate with them. And they do this by, I don't know if anyone's seen the film Fly Away Home, but it's basically that. So you get a microlight for anyone who hasn't, like a little light aircraft, and you still have to be dressed up as a crane.

So I don't know what the crane fucking thinks now. I think the Pope did this once, didn't he? So do you have to stay in costume when you're flying? Yes, so now the cranes all think that their leading crane knows how to fly a microlight. And the first person who did this was a guy called Kent Clegg, like Nick Clegg's very much cooler older brother,

biologist and a craneer in the 90s. And yeah, he flew with them. It's an 850 mile journey. And he flew with them down from basically Idaho, which is on the Canadian border basically, to New Mexico. And others have been doing it still, but... I think in 2015 the US decided

that they were going to try and stop doing it because of the problem of, the cranes learn better from other cranes basically. So now that there's quite a lot more of them, they're in the hundreds now, they're thinking, let's phase it out. Yeah, well, they basically weren't mating. The whole point of migrating is to go up and mate.

So you fly to have kids up in Canada or whatever. And so they flew them there, but then the humans didn't know how to show them how to mate. So the crows! They're just awkwardly making conversation with each other for three months and then going home. There's a really prosaic example of that. Teaching the crows what goes on.

It's like you're raising them as a person in a costume with a glove puppet, a weird glove puppet on your arm, and you're not allowed to speak. But also they are taught to be afraid of foxes because that's not instinctive to them. So they have to be taught. And the way you teach them is to dress up dogs as foxes and get them to harass them.

Really? This is so... The humans are dressed as cranes. Who's dressed as a fox? The dogs are dressed as foxes. Who's the cranes dressed as? They're all dressed as the Pope. Is the weirdest nativity ever, isn't it? They're amazing.

But they're back in the UK. This is a huge victory for conservation. The first crane egg laid in Britain since about the year 1600 was in 2013. And it was given a 24-hour guard because it was so precious. And now the numbers are rising in the UK and it's a huge success story.

It's really good. They've done a fabulous job on it. Yeah. Okay. It is time for our final fact of the show and that is James. Okay. My fact this week is that Bill Gates

is responsible for putting chips in up to 80% of Americans. All right. Get to that quiet zone in America, James, where you belong. What websites have you been on, James? Well, I learned this fact from an anonymous video posted on Facebook.

No, of course not. That's why I got the Pope helicopter thing. No, of course not. So this is a story from a few years ago that Bill Gates has bought up hundreds and thousands of acres of land in America. On that land, he grows potatoes. He sells those potatoes to McDonald's

and they sell chips and Americans put them in their face holes. And so 80% of Americans up to have got chips from Bill Gates. So good. There you go. Yeah, it's incredible. And of course, he does it in the vaccines.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. But yeah, he's one of the few people in the world who has a McDonald's gold card. I don't know if it's connected to this. What's that?

McDonald's gold card is where you can go to any McDonald's, you hand it in and no matter what you've ordered, they give it to you for free. So what we have in the UK, what we have is the Nando's black card, which is quite a famous card which I've experienced a couple of times.

It's like, I have, yeah. A couple of friends of mine have had it. So Tom Davis, who is King Gary, he once had it, he applied for it. He got brought in front of the chicken council. Stop. Yeah, no, stop. And he had to, are they dressed as chickens?

Or are they, and he had to make his case to the chicken council. First of all, he stands behind the chicken, and then I had another friend who, and bear in mind, like Ant and Deck had to share one. That's the story going to see how rare the black cards are.

Yeah, that's true, yeah. Well, that's what keeps them together. It's just the black Nando's got, they've hated each other 20 years. But so he has this gold card and only quite a few Americans have it, the McDonald's card. I think it's not related.

I think that's just because he's really rich. 00:41:08,000 --> 00:41:09,000 Yeah, he is, doesn't he? Because since he became the richest man in the world and then started, he just started investing in lots of things, but also obviously huge amounts of, you know, very worthy stuff and trying to beat malaria and this kind of thing.

In 2009, he paid $50 million to circumcise 650,000 men. Okay, you've got to give that some context. Otherwise it feels like it's not fair on him. It was a project attempting to curb HIV because there are studies that, some studies that show that circumcision is becoming infected and he funded the program.

So he wasn't literally there? No, he insisted as part of it. He said, I'm going to give you $50 million, but I want to do them all myself. And he asked to keep them. It was weird. There were a lot of protests against this. I mean, various people saying this is not the way

to defeat HIV or AIDS. And also the Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project got in touch and they campaigned against him saying, no one on earth is more detrimental to Foreskin than Bill Gates. And they called him Foreskin Enemy Number One. Yeah, it was incredible. Their leader is a charismatic man called Glenn Callender.

He challenged Bill Gates, right? Because Bill Gates was paying for this thing. He said, if you put Bill Gates in a four by four meter room with me and my Foreskin for exactly 44 minutes, he will emerge convinced that circumcision is wrong. I would like to see him put in a room with him, but his Foreskin isn't in that room. How do you do that?

I don't have to be through a letterbox or something. Wow. Anyway, he's a hero. He was going to wear this project. No, you're aware. He was asked about the potato farms on Reddit because they said, is this part of your climate push? And he was saying, no, no, it's just part of investment

because he's made so much money outside of Microsoft. Microsoft is obviously a big part of the economy. It's a big part of his wealth, but a huge amount really is the other investments. And it's someone else who does the investing for him. So he has what he calls the Gateskeeper, who is someone. Yeah, who turned.

So there was $5 billion that he had, which was turned into $82 billion in the time that this guy, his main investment. So all these different companies and stuff. It's easier, isn't it, when you're starting with $5 billion? Let's face it. Yeah, that's true. His farm is 100 circles farm.

I think is the one that supplies McDonald's. And it's really cool America. We don't have this, but when you look at America from above, from the ISS, in fact, the farms are all circles, aren't they? In that particular, I think it's like a great plains area. Then it's perfect circles. It looks like giant crop circles.

Wow. And it's just completely transformed American farming, I think, when it happened. It's basically center pivot irrigation, which is like when you get one of those things in your garden that spins around in a tiny garden, a giant, giant version of that. And, yeah, it basically transformed a completely

unfertilized, useless bit of land into McDonald's. It is amazing when you fly over it. And they reckon that, okay, that it's not the climate change thing, but he is saying that he's financing them to find more productive seeds and try and improve agriculture to maybe help people to farm in Africa.

That's one of his excuses. Yeah, yeah. This isn't the first time that he's worked with French fries. Okay. He, do you remember Microsoft? Bob, the little system. Bob was a disaster of a product. It was meant to be something that hand walked you

through every single moment. And Clippy was invented for it. Was it like, it was like a room or something and you clicked on a little bit and it would take you to the word process and you click there and it takes you somewhere else. Exactly. And there was a dog called Rover

and there was Comic Sans was created for it. We've mentioned it on the podcast before. But it was just a very easy way to navigate basically Microsoft Windows. And the leaders on that project, on that failed project, was two people called French and fries. No.

So Melinda French, who then became Melinda Gates, his now ex-wife, and Karen Fries, who was the leader on the project. Wow. Do we know if that's what inspired him to do the whole McDonald's thing 40 years later?

He's not commented, no. You can do, when you've got Gates money, you can do whatever witch that you like. So in 2016, he offered 100,000 chickens to various countries, including Bolivia, and he got a rare refusal. Ouch. Yeah, Bolivia said,

we breed 195 million chickens a year. We do not need to share 100,000 chickens that Bill Gates is providing us. This is incredibly patronizing. I don't know. That's kind of locking the gift chicken because you've got that many chickens already, it feels like.

Yeah, okay, I want to have a chicken. Has anyone seen, this is about Microsoft, and it's something that our colleague, Alex, showed me recently, but if you have an hour, so you've never been more bored in your life and you've watched everything else on television,

it's the Windows 95 instructional video. Have you seen this? It's a sitcom. It's a sitcom, really? But the Microsoft guys wrote it as their fame was just starting. Jennifer Aniston and Matthew Perry. Basically, as Rachel and Chandler,

it's like the most excruciating hour of your life. Well, to be fair, the second half hour is just like instructions for how to use it. The first half hour is a script that really makes your genitals shrivel back up inside yourself as you're watching. I mean, there's some quite sleazy moments.

Quite a lot of people pervy on Rachel. There's a classic line from Chandler. They're ordering Chinese food like moushupork. Chandler says, you know what's interesting about moushupork? It's only good when it's together, because moo, not good,

and shoo, definitely not good, but moushupork, that's good. You've made Dan laughter or something? I think it's on your level, actually. You might really like it. Classic Chandler. It's pretty painful stuff. Wow, never heard of that.

Well, the second bit huge 90s sitcom, he's apparently ruined. We talked about it on the episode. I don't think we mentioned that on the episode, actually. Was he a fan of Frazier? He's a fan, and he turns up to do an interview with Frazier,

but then people just call in to the Frazier Crane show asking for technical support with Microsoft products. It's pretty funny, actually. He did do that once, didn't he? He was quite famous at that time. He walked into a support facility

and he just sat down, put the headphones on, answered a call, Hi, this is William. How can I help you? And sure enough, he managed to fix the problem because he's Bill Gates. And this is on a blog on the company's website, but apparently he was so good

that when the customer called back later, they said, I'd like to speak to that nice man called William who straightened it all out. Why were they calling back? That's an excellent question. He stood out from a really early age, his abilities, coding abilities.

He was a super smart guy. People often point out that he didn't get a university degree, so hope for everyone. But he did go to Harvard and was basically too smart to build the finishing because he was starting to build his own company.

But when he was at school, he went to one of the only schools in the area which had its own computer, and the quality was super good at coding. And so they asked him to write the school's computer program to schedule all the students' classes and put them all in the right classes.

And so he modified, this is him age 15 or whatever, maybe a precious thing to come. He modified the code in order that he was placed in classes with a disproportionate number of interesting girls. Feels like interesting's not being used in its traditional sense though.

Wow. Actually another, he once asked, sort of tried to kick him off the computer and he said, okay, you can have it in 15 minutes. And then... It's a keys joke, isn't it? It's a keys joke.

You know Microsoft Minesweeper? Minesweeper fans in? Wasted hours? Minesweeper crew are in. It was put on Windows in 1990 and everyone at Microsoft was addicted to it. Everyone loved Minesweeper because it's great.

And he uninstalled it from his computer and he would sneak into the vice president's office after work. He was so addicted. He had the company record. He could do the beginner mode, you know, it's a little like 10 by 10. Beginner mode in five seconds.

Can't you just luckily press someone and they all just kind of, just luckily is in the right place. Occasionally you can do that. I think if you get lucky. Five seconds is pretty good. Five seconds is amazing. But the firm's product manager was Bruce Ryan

saying when machines can do things faster than people, how can we retain our human dignity? Do you know he's only got one scientific paper that is published under his name, Bill Gates. And it's a possible solution to a mathematical problem about flipping pancakes. Tell us more, Dan. Well, because this is quite complicated.

It's so complicated that I was hoping to just lob it your way and then bring it back. But basically it is a mathematical problem, which is very intense. And it involves how can you flip a number of things that are out of order and make them flip? Yeah, so if you have a big pile of pancakes, they're all different sizes,

and you can put your spatula under any one of them and turn them upside down. How many times can you do that so that when you're finished, they start with the biggest one and they end with the smallest one? Yeah, and why are you doing this? I'll send that back over to you, Dan. Yeah.

Are they sweet or savoury? Oh, yeah. Sorry, back to James for that one. There is one version that they worked on called the burnt pancake problem, where, again, we don't know if they're savoury or sweet, but we know that on one side they're burnt, and apparently that makes a big difference to the problem.

It certainly does make a big difference. But not only are they the wrong size, they're now burnt on one side. I'm contacting the kitchen. So he did this while he was at Harvard and the professor, he was one of the names that he worked with a few other, and it was a couple years before the paper was accepted

and published, and he called Bill Gates, the professor, and he said, good news, our pancake flipping paper has been accepted and it's going to be published. And he said Bill Gates seemed really disinterested in the fact that this was happening and that he was now working in a company in New Mexico that was writing code for microprocessors.

And the professor said, I remember thinking, ah, such a brilliant kid, what a waste. So good. We're going to have to wrap up in a sec, guys. Can I just study about his house quickly? Yes. Known as Zanadu 2.0.

Oh yes, it's a semi, isn't it? It's semi-detached, three-bed. Yeah, it's nice. Very humble. It's a shared garden, one of those situations. It's got, I just don't understand this, it's got seven bedrooms and by one count 18.75 bathrooms

and by another count 24 bathrooms. It also has, well, according to a book hero in the 90s, one of the elements of which was describing his ideal home, it has guests get a badge when they enter that they wear and they put in their temperature and lighting preferences on their badge. And then whenever you walk into a new room, it automatically adjusts the temperature and lighting

and I don't know what it does if two of you walk into the room at the same time. Yeah. I would hack the badges to murder people and that would be my plot. Hi. Who likes having guests, really? I'd set it to a thousand degrees.

Yeah. A little paperclip turns up, it looks like you're trying to kill, kill, kill. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you. 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'm on at Shriverland. Andy. Andrew Hunter M. James.

At James Harkin. And Anna. You can email our podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website. No such thing as a fish.com. There is everything up there from

upcoming tour days of our Nerd Immunity Tour. Check it out. There are all of our previous episodes, but hey guys, listen, in all honesty, our 400th episode, we can't believe we're here. We can't believe we're in the London. Thank you so much, everyone, for coming tonight, selling this gig out for us.

Anyone listening? If you have any questions, if you're not selling this gig out for us, anyone listening at home, we will be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye!