No Such Thing As A Fish - 536: No Such Thing As A Soaring Chinchilla

Episode Date: June 20, 2024

Live from the Nerdland Festival, Andrew, James, Dan and Lieven Scheire discuss coughing crocs, cunning computers, testing toilets, and tall tales about tails. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, which was recorded at the Nerdland Festival in Belgium. This is a thing we do every year, or we have done for the last few years. It's a brilliant festival, it's definitely worth checking out for future years. It's basically, imagine Disneyland had nerds instead of mice. It is, that's what it is really. It's loads of talks, it's loads of exhibitions, it's science, it's nerd culture, it's everything you can want if that is your bag. And we always have an amazing time there

with a great audience. And as usual, we were joined by Leaven Skilla. And I did not make the journey this time, so it is the boys and Leaven who did this show. And Leaven, you will know if you are a regular listener to Fish, he may well have the record as most appearances of a non-elf on Fish. I'd have to look that up, but he's been on quite a few times. He is an expert on all things nerdy, all things sciency,

but at the moment he's really into AI as many nerds are. And why that's important is because he has a book about AI, the title is AI, can be found on Amazon and I'm sure in other places, but if you search for his name LIEVENSCHEEIRE-E-N-S-C-H-E-I-R-E, Levenskera, then you will be able to find his book on AI. And actually, if you go to levenskera.com, then you can see all of his recent AI talks, which are very informative and very funny.

If you struggle with Levenskera's name, then you can also go to www.levingshire.com, as in, What Hob hobbits do I presume which apparently also works so go to either of those places and you can find out more about Leaven and his works on AI. Anyway enjoy the show like I say it was really fun like always and of course we are doing lots of live shows which will include Anna towards the end of the year. So go to noticethingsofish.com forward slash live to find out more about what remaining tickets there are and there are not many. So get in there fast a bath in the car. Did you take a bath? I'll let you take a bath in the car. Belgium. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Leven Schaira. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting

with fact number one, and that is Leven. My fact is that in 2017, the AI computer Alpha Zero was given the rules of chess. And four hours later, it was better than the human world champion in chess. Insane. So it was given just the rules, no strategies, no examples of chess games ever played between humans, and it started practicing against itself. Did it try any really weird things? It plays chess in a different way than humans. One chess player said, I've always wondered if the same game was invented on Mars, and without any interaction between the cultures, we would have developed our own strategies

because everybody learns from the people before them and he says now I know because it takes more risks for example it will it will offer its queen sometimes without anyone knowing why and then it wins in the end so yeah can I just say leaving I think part of if one of the main parts of playing chess is being able to pick up the pieces and move them from one place to another and until it can do that I think I can beat it. Yeah well then you need robotics and some people are afraid of robots and I always tell them if at this phase of technology you're afraid of robots the only thing you need to carry with you at all times is a bucket of water and you're safe. Well actually we were in the green room just now and there was a robotic dog in there.

Spot robot from Boston Dynamics yeah. Yeah and also a real dog and I can tell you that real dogs do not like robotic dogs either. Really? Yeah. I'm just wondering, James I know you like chess, I'm sure you like chess. A bit. And I know you know a lot about AI. have you ever played against a man called Martin? Probably okay, who is he Martin is a middle-aged Bulgarian man?

Who wears a turtleneck jumper and he is the worst possible opponent on chess.com? Right, so he's a he's an AI. He's a computer chess player, but he has been programmed to be deliberately Unbelievably bad. That's amazing. He plays 10 million games every week and still he sucks at chess Does he like call the pawns prawns? Yeah His catchphrase is my four-year-old son just beat me out And he's he's really really bad at chess He's he's then they've done experiments with him to test how bad he is, because he's programmed to be a weak chess player. He has been given 31 queens on one board, and the opponent only

has pawns, and he has still managed to lose that game. Really? Wonderful. See, that feels more in check with where I thought we were at. The creator of QI, John Lloyd, he always has this line where he says, not only have we not invented artificial intelligence yet, but we haven't even invented artificial stupidity. Like, that's how far away we are from taking over. So that's Martin.

So this robot that we're talking about that beat the record in chess, the way that they trained it was they gave it a bunch of games to play, and it had to learn strategy from that and whoever was the best at learning a game would advance to the next level and train the next AIs together. So it didn't just beat chess, but it beat multiple Atari games. So as part of this program, the AI set a score on Pong, the highest score a human has ever set is 56,851, It scored 407,864. As part of this programming.

Important thing there is that the only input it gets is what is on the screen. So of course it's easy to program and use the software of all the positions to have an optimal software running it. But this was only fed what a human can see on the screen and then adapted its own neural network until it could play very well.

They thought that all the Atari games, it was at DeepMind, Google DeepMind in London, that's where they did it, all the Atari games, and then Go, the Chinese-Japanese game, Shogi, and chess. And so, in fact, now they can just give it rules of any game, and then it will practice against itself and improve until it can beat it.

Is there anything that we can win at? Well, especially when it comes to boxing. There's one game that we still win, but I don't know how long it will take us. It's the game Diplomacy. Oh, OK. It's a bit like Risk. So you have to move around the world and capture areas.

But there's more tactics. you have different kinds of troops. But between every round, there's a round of diplomacy, where the players can go one on one and talk strategies with each other. If you move like this, then we can attack Italy there. Kissinger loved it, apparently. Kennedy played the game. And so now they have taught an AI to play it It's a bit scary You can see these large language models talking to other players like if you do that move there

Then I will come from that way so it figured all of this out It can't win from the world top yet, but it ends in top 10 at this moment in the game in a game of diplomacy I have a feeling that I would be able to beat any AI because I'm so dumb it wouldn't be able to guess the strategy that I was playing. It would be like why has he done that? That's probably where it learned to give the queen away first. I'd be like yep you can have that. Like I feel like stupidity of human error would be what confuses AI in a game.

Cut to the year 2030. The war against the machines has gone terribly badly wrong. Step up, Dan. But one man survived it and repopulated the earth. The one AI that's been built this year, this is very exciting, this is a new development this year. Researchers have built an AI sarcasm detector. Oh yeah, sure they have. It was in Holland, it was in Groeningen. Yeah, it was in Holland and they trained it with pieces from the Big Bang Theory and Friends.

Oh really? So it's sitcom sarcasm. It's a bit more Be any more predictable. But I read about it and there was, you know... What does it do? Mostly it can just detect sarcasm. It can detect if you're being sarcastic, which is useful. But there is a risk that it might start using sarcasm for its own...

Against us. ...evil purposes. Yes. Yeah. That's amazing. Do you think leaving this anything that AI won't be able to do in the future? Well, that's a difficult question. Basically, you could say AI is a new kind of software that is good at pattern recognition and recognizing patterns and generating patterns, like generating images and language. But it does it so amazingly well at this point.

The fact that it can win a game of diplomacy, it kind of makes you think with these large language models, it's not unthinkable that I ask an AI to buy a new car for me. It can do the negotiations much better. It's not unthinkable that an AI will sell your house at a better price because it knows what language to use. It could be coming. And especially when they start combining it with robotics which is what they're doing now then you give the system sensors and a sense of the world and that's what probably the next revolution will be. How interesting. In February 2023 so just over a year ago we asked ChatGVT to give us an episode of fish. Oh yeah.

Let's see if they could do our job and they were pretty terrible Anyway, I asked them to do it again this week with one more year of ability with the chat bots and they did a pretty good Job, so it begins with Dan Shriver says hello and welcome to another episode of no such things the fish blah blah blah weekly podcast All that stuff. Yeah, and then in no particular order. Here we go James What have you got for us? And then James Harkin says my fact this week is that alpha go the AI developed by deep mind learned to play the game Go, it's a superhuman level by playing against itself millions of times. Oh my god, you're doing the AI's fact Is it your main fact here? No

So even didn't know about it. It predicted what our facts was going to are you kidding? Honestly, I'm literally all I put in was give me a transcript of notice things. It's over. Let's just go home We just did okay, but some fields like creative ones surely they're immune. Yes, surely Andy surely Well, hang on. I'm sorry. Are we just gonna let that fly by the exact same fact was predicted by the machine We're all cool with that and it gets sorry. No, that's end of the world. Yes. What it gets worse. There's a new podcast It's out this year. It's hosted by a guy called Jake and it's created by a man called Jacob Redstrom, but Jake is AI It's a podcast hosted by an AI. Okay, right. Yeah Surely Andy I mean things like beauty that will never go to AI. Beauty?

Yeah, yeah. That'll always be a human trait. Yeah, of course. Well, there has been this year a Miss AI competition where a lot of chat bots slash attractive creations online went up against each other to see who was the most attractive. And not only did that happen, two of the judging panel were also AI-generated models. Wow. So the worrying moment will be in that competition when they say, what do you hope for? And they say, I would love world peace if the judge goes, sarcasm detected! That's when more dad. Have you ever asked GPT-4 to write a sonnet? This is, okay, write a sonnet.

I'm going to do it live now. An animal, what's your favorite animal? A chinchilla. Yeah, chinchilla. A chinchilla, okay. Write a sonnet about a chinchilla, okay. A chinchilla who really wants to fly like an eagle. Okay, there we go.

So a chinchilla is kind of rodent, cute. I'm not totally clear what it is. I just said it because James said it, but. Yeah, kind of. I'm gonna press start now. So I asked it to write a sonnet about a chinchilla who really wants to fly like an eagle. This is just, this is coming out as we speak. It's finished now. There we go. In Twilight's hush a chinchilla

dreams bright with fur as soft as whispers of the breeze. He gazes high where eagles take their flight and longs to soar above the tallest trees. His heart so bold defies the earthly bind for in his tiny chest a spirit burns. With wings of faith though not by nature's kind he yearns for heights for skies his soul discerns. He climbs the peaks where shadows kiss the light and calls to eagles with a hopeful plea. Their feathers brush the heavens free in flight while he on ground remains but longs to be. Yet in his quest a truth begins to rise. The flight resides in dreams not just in skies.

That's very good. That's... I thought it was quite long, wasn't it? But that's Sonnets. That's Sonnets, the 14 lights. Can we ask for a limerick next time? A limerick, I'll try. I'm looking for haikus if you do anyone.

Here's the thing. AI has been very big in the news in the movie industry, I would say. Well, you know, a lot of the strike that happened in America was off the back of how artists were having to be asked to sign their voices over as well as the writing to AI. And a lot of things are coming into place where they're trying to protect the artists' integrity and livelihood. And in Tennessee, a law has been passed where they are protecting musicians from AI. And in Tennessee, a law has been passed where they are protecting musicians from AI. So the act is called the Ensuring Likeness Voice and Imagery Security Act, or the ELVIS Act, because ELVIS is from Tennessee.

And that's happening in places now where they're going to say you can't use the likeness of the voice anymore, because it is happening. It happened with the new GPT system that talks. And Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, really wanted the voice of Scarlett Johansson, because she was in the movie Her. And he contacted her a few times and asked her it. She thought about it, and she said, no, I cannot do it.

I don't want to relate myself with AI, because there's so much criticism of it. And then the voice came out, and it was almost exactly like Scarlett Johansson. They had probably, they say they had found a voice actor who sounded really like her and adjusted it a bit, but well, she filed a lawsuit and it's all taken down now. But so they're trying to copy the voices of people. James Earl Jones has given over the voice of Darth Vader now to AI based on his voice which is so Interesting because that kind of is like the final step in Darth Vader's journey anyway from going human to Android isn't it?

Yes, like a real world. He's more machine now. Yeah, exactly We need to move on guys. Well, what's what's Belgian best at, Levin? What is Belgian best at? What's one of the most proud things a Belgian produces? What I just learned at the theme park science show that we just had, we are world-class in the wheels of roller coasters. I didn't know! Okay that's very cool. And beer and fries. Beer! Let's hear your roller coaster fact, Andy. Okay, no, NAI has just beaten humans at beer. Drinking or making Belgian beer? Not drinking. Making. Coming up with new Okay, no, an AI has just beaten humans at beer. Drinking or making? Belgian beer.

Not drinking. Making. Coming up with new recipes for Belgian beer. They had 250 Belgian beers, a panel of the best beer experts on the planet, rated them on all sorts of metrics, rated them on 50 different kinds of flavor and lab analysis, and then an AI algorithm suggested, why didn't you add a bit of this and a bit of that? And it came out tasting better, according to the experts. Wow.

So this is trouble. Today, beer. Tomorrow, I didn't speak up because I wasn't beer. Tomorrow, the roller coaster wheels will be in new shape. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast!

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job for free at linkedin.com slash fish. That is right, just go to linkedin.com slash fish, post a job for free, terms and conditions, as you might have been expecting, apply. On with the show. On with the podcast. It is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that crocodiles can cough up hairballs. This was sent in by Colin Crookshank. Thank you Colin. This is about, basically I didn't know this, I knew cats produce hairballs and owls and things. But crocodiles, they have the most amazing jaws, they have the most amazing stomachs, they produce amazing acid to digest things. They cannot deal with hair.

And normally it's not a problem, they don't eat a lot of hair, but occasionally they'll eat a pig and they end up with a hairball because they cannot deal with the pig's hair or the hooves. And you'll just see a crocodile on the banks of the river going... Where are these hairy pigs coming from? They're from Bristly I guess. They're sort of wild ones. Wow, that's amazing.

Oh, they're big. They're collectors in Queensland. The biggest one is the size of a football. Well, that's what's amazing about it as well, because it's not like it's just they've had a meal and they want to cough it back up. They can store that hairball for like 40 years so when they pop it up it can give you an idea of the diet over decades of while they have eaten so it'll be like hairy pigs all the other things so cool human in

some cases in Australia yeah it is the best option if you see a crocodile coming towards you with its jaws open that it coughs up a hairball. That's what you're hoping for. It's amazing. Hairballs. It used to be thought that they cured poison hairballs. Yeah these are bezoas which are you know hair balls that would come from animals mostly but there was a guy called Anois Pare, a friend of the podcast actually, we've mentioned him a few times, and he decided to see if this was true. So he took a cook at the King's Court who had been caught stealing fine cutlery. So he'd been sentenced to death for stealing these spoons. And he said, well, what I'm

going to do is I'm going to let you off, but I'm going to give you some poison and then I'll give you this herbal herbal which we all know this works So it'll be fine And then we'll see what happens and it turned out it didn't work at all and he died anyway But that was the first evidence we had that these herbals don't cure poisoning. They do they sound so weird and cool they like the Beezers or bizarre or what? Don't know how you say them, but they do for the rich, you know, Like the Beezers or Beezers or whatever. I don't know how you say them.

But they were for the rich, you know, because real Beezers are really rare. And if you couldn't afford one, you could maybe buy a sliver of one, or you could rent one for the day. If, I don't know what for. I think they were also thought to be useful in times of plague.

So maybe if you were visiting an area. Magic spells as well. Magic spells. And if you were very wealthy wealthy you might have one for yourself but one for your friends you know if any friends are visiting so that's nice. Have a hairball. Yeah yeah yeah no they're very cool. Lions can get hairballs. Oh really? Yeah there was one found in an African lion at the Colorado State Zoo and it was, how big do you think a lion's hair ball would be? Size of a cricket ball. Bigger.

Okay, two cricket balls. Let's go in sizes of animals rather than balls. Melon. Sizes of animals. The famous animal, the melon. There's a kiwi so who knows. famous animal the melon. There's a kiwi so who knows. Livan will have come here with the latest research proving that melons are actually technically. Andy was like I didn't know what a chila was and now I'm not

sure I know what a melon is. It was about the same size as a Chihuahua. So like the size of a small dog. Do you know why Chihuahuas were bred in Central America? They were religious animals and they were sacrificed to the gods. No, it's not much of a sacrifice. I've got to say, if I was one of the gods looking down and they're bringing me this tiny... And you were hungry? I'm hungry. You wouldn't want a Dane. Yeah, I would big big dog What was the sacrifice because if it's burning the steak very easy to light that's a what?

Well, they're gonna just go right up That's when they say So they were sacrificed to the gods and I love it when I walk in the street and I see people with a shiwa to go in, oh sweet dog, what are you going to ask from the gods if you sacrifice it? Well, do you know, this is a tangential story but there was a thing in the UK, I don't know if you guys in Belgium heard about it here, but there was a, what looked like a giant hairball was found by a lady, but she she went

Oh, it's a hedgehog and so she brought it home and she put it into a box and she gave it a hot water bottle And some food then it didn't recover took it to hospital and it turned out it was the the bubble on the top of a hat That people wear those Bubbles and apparently this happens a lot zoologists and also vets are saying we got to start understanding what animals look like again because like We're we're losing a lot of time when you're calling us out to like help a drowning swan and it's a chair leg Upside down we can't do that someone brought vets to their house to help them revive What they thought was a hedgehog but turned out to be a fruit loaf now a fruit loaf doesn't look was a hedgehog, but turned out to be a fruitloaf. Now, a fruitloaf doesn't look like a hedgehog,

but apparently it had been pecked at by a lot of birds so that it looked very spiky. And even then they were like, oh my god, it's dying! And they called out people to come. So this is a big thing at the moment. Sounds like cheap tamagotchis in a way. Just take cotton balls home and care for them. Or like chia pets. Remember those no Chia pet the pottery that grows No one

No one seen Wayne's world. Okay, much in the size of a room like this and you're the only one Yeah, that's pretty special moment. That's like me playing a move to AI What was that? Do you want to know the record for the largest ball of hair ever created? Okay, so this is not an accidental in your stomach. This is not an animal product. This is someone with a weird fetish I would not I Would not disagree But for legal reasons

it's well it was created by a hairst hair stylist from the USA called Steve and he said I got more spiritual as I've aged and I wanted to leave some kind of legacy when I'm gone and it hit me I'm going to build a giant hairball and he made a hole in the wall in his hair salon like a and he put a slide down to the basement of the building and every time he had hair he just shove it down the slide and then he glued it all together so how big was it oh so it's the biggest ever so it must be quite big it's quite big shall I go by the size of an animal yes please okay large horse oh not far off actually. Okay. A bison.

Smaller than a bison. Wow, what is that difference? I can't even... What's an in-between animal to that? Look, I don't know what animals are, it turns out. I don't know what animals are or look like. I actually saw this and I thought it looked like a really, really big hedgehog. Yeah, it was that.

It was a bit, yeah, yeah. It's actually a fruitcake. It weighed 102 kilos. 225 pounds it is Disgusting it is so it's horrible. I think it's Andy. I can't actually picture Genuinely, it was I mean it was on a wagon when I saw it like a large ish man would be about 100 kilos Okay. Yeah, and it is it's it's maybe eight feet high because it's made of hair It's not very dense and it's you know, it's maybe eight feet high, because it's made of hair, it's not very dense, and it's half-glue.

Anyway, you can go and visit it now, and add your own hair if you too have got more spiritual and you want to leave a legacy behind. Right. Do you know, a cat coughing up hairballs is responsible for one of the great voices of nerd culture? That one. That's a duck. Yeah. for one of the great voices of nerd culture. W what does it sound like at the cat coughing guppa? Oh.

Gollum. Gollum. Andy Serkis, when he was going to the audition of Lord of the Rings, was going, how am I going to portray Gollum in my audition? And his cat was next to him going... What a disgusting hairball Gollum would produce. That would be awful. That's the whole time. That's all it is.

Interestingly though, cats, when we think of them coughing up a hairball, that's according to vets, they get pissed off when you say coughed up a hairball. They don't cough up a hairball. They vomit up a hairball. Or they're really kind of just trying to thrust it out, but they're not coughing. It doesn't matter. Whatever it is, Steve will take it and he will glue it onto his big ball Do you know we've just missed National Hairball Awareness Day? Oh, yeah by how long anyone else observe it? That's terrible. It is bad when you're the only one yeah How long Andy since it was it was it's the last Friday in April so it's an annual thing

Do you know the date the specific day? Well, it's the last Friday in April. So it's an annual thing Do you know the date the specific day? Well, it's the last Friday in April. So like Easter it moves Which is convenient because what if it's at the weekend and people are not enough people come and celebrate Yeah, good. Yeah. And um, what what did you do to celebrate? Well, you know, you just pop and visit steve and it's great. Thank you No, it was founded by a vet who wanted to raise awareness of hairballs. I guess they can be bad for a cat's health, maybe? Yeah, yeah. It makes them sick. If your cat is coughing up a hairball, it is a sign of bigger issues gutturally that

is going on. Really? Theoretically, it should be able to process the bit of hair that it eats. Yes. So that's been building up inside of them in ways. We're going to have to move on in a second. Should we do a bit on crocodiles? If you give someone a crocodile to hold when they're in the casino, they'll make bigger

bats. What size of crocodile? I mean, like as big as a chinchilla Yeah, I think it's the bigger the crocodile the bigger the bats So it's like apparently it's a sense of heightened arousal makes you want to gamble more And if you think the crocodile might eat you that puts you in that story roused, but not the way you're thinking no no No, I'm not thinking anything at all. I'm just thinking, how do I get rid of this crocodile? If I win another $50,000, maybe I'll get someone to hold the crocodile and take it away from me. Yeah, that's my plan.

Sometimes in the States you have frozen lakes with crocodile snouts peeping out of the ice. It's when crocodiles hibernate and there's an ice layer on the lake. They just pop out their nose. Really? It's when crocodiles hibernate and there's an ice layer on the lake. Oh yeah. They just pop out their nose. So it looks like little green pebbles on the ice. And it's actually when you pull the pebble, it's attached to a crocodile. And they're completely hibernating. So they're in standby mode.

They don't react if you wiggle with the snout around. That's a good prank though. Yeah. So let's see who can pick up that pebble first. LAUGHS Yeah, actually the word crocodile means pebble worm. Really? Yeah, the croco is the pebble and the daeolus is the worm.

But in Greek, daeolus also means circumcised man. Right. So it could be the crocodile means pebble circumcised man. OK. Not sure. By the way, how misleading if someone says, The crocodile means pebble circumcised man. Okay. Not sure. By the way, how misleading if someone says, can you go and collect the pebble circumcised man over there?

And you come to a crocodile. That is, yeah, that's bad naming, I would say. MUSIC All right, it is time for fact number three, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in the 14th century, there was a rumor among Europeans that all Englishmen had tails. Now is the time to prove otherwise. I've basically come here to see if it's still a rumor.

Oh yeah. Is this still a thing that people in Belgium think that English people have tails? Wow. Oh, there we go. So this idea basically comes from the idea that Saint Augustine had visited the people of Kent and he was mocked by the locals and they pinned tails of fish to his robes to kind of kick him out of the town and he turned around and he cursed them with their own tails and this became a thing in Europe

to such the extent that when there was a siege in 1436 in Paris and the English were kicked out they were taunted by the locals saying, were your tails, were your tails? And the Scottish before a battle in 1332 said they would make ropes from the tails of the English to tie them with. Oh. They thought we were basically more close to beast hut, more close to the devil, it was said, the English were. And there is a thing in French where the word for tail, which is cuvee, and the word for hatch, which is cuvee, apparently, I don't speak French, but they're so close together, they had a theory that English people sat on eggs to hatch them. So yeah, that was how

we got our eggs. We all sat on them. I think we're getting off quite lightly now with just, you've all got bad teeth as a reputation. That is quite, you way we don't all have bad teeth just to say almost all of us have some teeth so I just want to say we have the best teeth ever ever seen so do you do you have in Belgium then are there any things that if you were talking about an English person you would say a certain thing like I was I just suddenly remembered that Michael Palin, when he went out to the Amazon, they were describing to him

how many trees are chopped down per day. They would say a Belgium, and it was the size of Belgium. So that would be a unit of measurement out in the Amazon for saying how much was chopped down. One Belgium of trees was chopped down again. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, do you have anything here where it's like, oh, you English people...

We chopped down one England of trees. No, just like we smell or we suck or you know that kind of thing. No, no, not really. By the way, Dan's just saying this because he's not English. Dan is Australian and he wants to get in on this bullying. Well, you know, when you're a child, you read comic books, and like asterisks going to England, and then you have all these, oh, really, oh dear,

and they're all very polite. Polite? Cutting the grass, really upper-class. You're describing Andy. You're just... But you get this upper-class image of what England is. And then you go there as a tourist and and you spend a Saturday evening okay you spend a Saturday evening

in a city center and you go oh my god I had no idea well okay there is this it's fair there is research. It's fair. There is research on this, which is people around the world were asked what the worst habit of the British is. So people in Brazil, China, Germany, India, and the USA, they were asked, what's the worst habit of the British? 27% of young adults said it's that they drink so much. But not all of those people.

We would never say that in Belgium. They wouldn't know. Not all of those people had visited the UK, actually. So this was a preconception. And of the people who had visited the UK, 34% of them said. Well, it's amazing. I was looking at some other stereotypes of the English from the 14th century. And sure enough, drinking was one of the things that Britain was most famous for all the way back then. There was also the stereotype that British people took excessive faith in the dreams of old women.

That is so me. I was thinking it was maybe Theresa May and Brexit And they also the Italians and Germans thought that the British were great lovers of themselves Very nice Leaven do you think British people are? emotionless like reserved That that that's what the cliché is. How dare you!

Well apparently British people are not the most emotionless in the world. So again, the people have been asked around the world, how many emotions did you experience today? Or did you feel anything today at all? And Britain was sort of in the middle of nations. It was not especially interesting. So the most emotionless country in the world, according to this survey from Gallup, which is asking people from these countries,

is Singapore, right? The number of people who reported on any given day feeling any positive or negative emotions was 36%. Oh, they were literally neutral. And the rest of the people said, nope, nothing occurred today in my mood I didn't have any feelings today. It sounds rather Swiss to be so neutral Could that be that their sort of normal level of emotion could be they could be always really happy

But they're not getting the highs and the lows. Yeah, possibly. Yeah. Yeah, that might be it I mean, it's a really strange finding. That's amazing. Yeah. Are we close to where the Flemish live around here? We are in Flanders. Yes. Sounds like you're pretty close, James. Yes. Not a preconception. British people know where everything in Europe is. Here's a question for you with that in mind.

16th century French scholar Jean-iste Le Buyer-Champier wrote that whenever you go to see the Flemish you should always carry a knife. Yes, it's to join us for dinner. That's why you will always be welcome. Any thoughts, Dan or Andy, why you might need a... now you've been here for a day. Why you might need a knife. Among the Flemish. They only have the plastic disposable ones and it's very actually hard to cut through your food. I know why. Well because we're staying at Leaven's house and his kitchen table there were like 16 different peanut butters on it

and I feel like you need multiple knives. You're pretty much there Dan actually and they had a reputation of consuming the most butter And so you should always carry a knife with you so you can spread the butter wherever you really that's not a knife This is a knife, but it is a butter knife. So This guy said that a day not a meal has gone by without me eating butter. I'm surprised they have not yet put it in their drink. It's brilliant. Working on it. Yeah. But we also use kind of a knife-shaped thing

to clear the head of a beer. So we always have, we always want a bit of foam on our beer. And so the foam is a bit over the glass, and we have this knife-like thing to scrape it off. For us, it's very normal. The first time I went to a bar with an Australian in Belgium, we went to order a beer, and then preparations are going, and this guy pulls out a knife.

He was really startled. He's like, what? What's it called? I don't know. Does it have a name? Does it have a name? No, nobody knows the name. We don't bother with names.

We want the beer. But interesting fact, that is actually how the French Revolution started. It was a simple misunderstanding in a bar, which then just escalated. Just please remove the hat from this one. But... Wow. The kitchen knife was, I think, invented or put in as a law that you had to use it. I think it was by Richelieu.

And the number of deaths at the dinner table dropped down to one tenth. Because people use daggers. You would eat with a dagger and cut your meat with it and everything. And of course it's a dinner table, it's where you have discussions and there's drinking. And so quite often there was a knife fight at the dinner No, and so by simply inventing this this kitchen knife this simple knife that is not sharp He cut down like the the lethal fights over dinner 200,000 people fucked

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Okay, I'm going to move us on to our final fact of the show. It is time for the final fact and that is my fact. My fact this week is that toilet paper testers have to train for six months before they are allowed to apply for the actual job. That is wild. This is not because obviously there's multiple different companies that hire people to test out toilet paper for them. This is very specifically an article I read to do with Procter and Gamble who do make

toilet paper. And basically the idea is that you need in order to understand what a perfect bit of toilet paper is as a tester, you need to do, you need all your senses. In the article that says outside of literally tasting it, you need to know how does it feel in the hand? What is it like to wipe, you know, if you've had, you know, a couple of Belgian beers the night before? Or what is it like if you've had a lot of peanut butter at Leven's house? Like it's gonna be different viscosity of poos each day. Yeah, okay.

So basically you spend six months doing that and then when you get to the moment where they're saying, okay, now let's give you the actual test to see if you can get the job, you can fail it. You can fail it if you haven't prepared for those. But how do you fail it? Do they, do they, I'm imagining they give you a sheet. I'm imagining your finger goes through. No.

Yeah. But I'm imagining that they give you a single sheet of toilet paper and you have to know where it's from. This is a single origin. How many ply? It might be a combination of that stuff. They're quite secretive in the toilet testing world, so it's a bit hard to get into the clandestine world of what's going on in those factories.

But they do say that in that particular moment after six months, only half of the people will make it through to the job itself. Can you become a toilet paper sommelier? You're like, sorry, last night I had steak and red wine. Oh, then I recommend this one for you. Oh, yes. Yeah, that has to be right. That must be... That doesn't have to be done This is just a little bit of whimsy feels very I think if you spent six months of your life

And then you fail the audition the least you can do is have at least three no You hear the boots approaching your stall. It's someone standing outside with the silver don't know I hear the sound of soft ply going in there. They do have a lot of robots as well. I mean, I don't know if this is an AI thing too. Maybe it will be soon, but they have a lot of robots because they need to test the qualities of the paper. They need to test how easily it tears,

the angle that it hangs up if it's on a roll, you know, or they have a range of finger probe robots to test how long sheets break Really, they're mishandled or they sort of tore tear or yeah, well an AI robots have eight fingers. So that's easy Actually, do you know if you are in one of these facilities how you test a toilet paper against a Butt a bottom. So do they have like an AI bum as well? No, it's to do with you. You're the person who's doing it. Me?

Yeah. So you're in there. You're given a fake bit of poo that they have created with NASA. So it's because they say today's poo. Because they don't want to have to. Why haven't we been back to the moon? To boldly go

So here's the thing if you're working in a factory that's testing toilets and testing toilet paper You don't want to have real feces in there because it can cause lots of disease and so on so they for years It used to be dog food that they would use to flush down toilets Then they created like bean curd and a lot and then there was like a like how KFC and coke have a secret ingredient There was a secret ingredient poo that they would use that they didn't tell anyone about and Then they created this thing with NASA And so what you would do is you would put your arm tight so that your elbow would have a little bum bum basically in the corner and you would put the poo in there and you'd Squeeze it out and then you would wipe your bum. That is very clever.

That is the most disgusting thing I've heard all year. I don't know why. I think it was when you said bum bum. That was it. It was bum bum. I know it's fake poo. I know it's your elbow. There's no actual poo involved here.

I'm still revolting. I feel worse about this than I do about Steve and his big old bald hair. How many listeners are going to try this at home? Send your photos to Andrew Hunter Murray. Podcast at qi.com. Not to give you any ideas, but I have 12 kinds of peanut butter at my house. You know, like, it's very trendy to get bamboo toilet paper. Yeah. Yeah

environmentally friendly well They did a lot of tests recently and they found that some products contain as little as three percent bamboo So you think on the on the packet says this is bamboo toilet paper But actually what's mostly just old paper and they just put a tiny bit of bamboo in this has been a big sort of big deal in the toilet paper world recently yeah I worked out that if you were a panda and you wanted to live entirely on these toilet rolls and you would have to eat 7200 toilet rolls every day to get enough bamboo and that's how many I would use in 50 years. That's almost a Belgium.

During lockdown somebody figured out how to make moonshine alcohol from toilet paper. No. Yeah because there's cellulose in it and of course we cannot digest cellulose and I think the yeasts that make the alcohol need sugars. That does feel like you're solving one problem but creating another one. Probably yeah, but you can use certain enzymes that can dissolve the cellulose into sugars and so he actually did it.

It's on YouTube. He documented how he did it and so this might be the reason why everybody was hurting toilet paper. Don't take my booze away. That's funny. We actually looked into the kind of lockdown hoarding, and we thought that actually a lot of it did kind of make logical sense that you would hoard it. And that's because everyone was suddenly at home, and you weren't in the office anymore,

and the factories that make office toilet paper are. And the factories that make office toilet paper are different from the ones that make home toilet paper, because the office ones are often those really big sort of rolls. So there was actually gonna be a massive shortage of home toilet paper because no one was in the office anymore and everyone was going to the toilet at home. Obviously there were crazy people

just buying loads of them as well. Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Do you know if you go into a toilet paper factory, where do we get individual rolls of toilet paper from? From the packet? No, before that. From the shop. Is it a long one that is cut?

No. From the mother reel. It's called the mother reel. It is a ginormous, ginormous toilet roll. That's amazing. It's cut up. Is it long? Yeah, itormous toilet roll. That's amazing. Wait, is it long? Yeah, it's long. Because you're gesturing, you're saying it's tall.

I know, I sort of thought, because this is audio for the listener at home, it didn't matter what I did with my hand. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But. I'll tell you what, you've had a bad day if the sommelier comes with that, haven't you? So each mother reel, as they call it, contains, when chopped up into individual roles, 25,000

individual roles. What? Yeah. So there's a guy called Greg Wallace. We've mentioned him on the show before. He makes a show where he goes around looking at how they make things in the UK. It's a documentary series, each show a different factory to show you how it's done. So he was in a big warehouse where they had

2,000 mother rolls in there. And they worked out that if you were an average family, you would have four toilet rolls a week in an average family. That's how much is used, right? So the amount of toilet rolls in that room would mean that your family could be wiping your bum for 96,000 years. Just from that collection of 2000 mother rolls that they had sitting in the warehouse.

Do you know these toilets that squirt water on your bum? No, the toilets as in inside the Japanese. Oh, I was going to ask you, do you know where they were invented? Japan. No, they were not. they were invented? Japan. No, they weren't. No, no, no. They were invented in America. Really?

Yeah, yeah. They were invented in America and they were supposed to be for like care homes and stuff. And then they sent a few over to Japan and this company who got them thought, everyone's going to want these. Let's start making them for everyone. And so they did. But the problem was that the ones in America were kind of prototypy. And they were very good at measuring the temperature.

And they were very good at measuring the angle of squirt. And so they quite often fired boiling water straight into people's anuses. And there was a market for that, too. So we were talking about testing. Are you too busy to drink tea the normal way well That's a couple of English stereotypes together But they are yeah, so then this company called Toto decided to start making these but we're talking about testing toilet paper and stuff They needed to get the angle right,

and so they asked all of their staff members to test these toilets. And to be honest, it took quite a lot to get people to cooperate, but eventually they did. And all the members of staff were taking turns to sit on these toilets and have water fired up at different angles, and they found that the golden angle is 43 degrees, so it just cleans

you the right amount and for women at the front it's 53 degrees. So that's a bit of information you never wanted to know. I've read about the founder of Toto. I didn't read any of that but he was an amazing guy called Kazuchika Okura and he sort of had been to the west I guess and he also helped introduce the car to Japan. This guy was a big deal. Wow. And he also created his own new musical instrument the Okura-Ulo, a kind of vertical flute. What? A vertical flute. A recorder. He invented the recorder. And he did.

And he was president of, linking it back to AI, the Japanese Go Association. Wow. Yes. That's very cool. This guy was a big deal. Well, while we're on inventions, there's a British word, I don't know if you know it here, but we often call the toilet the throne. So the throne, the toilet, it's attributed as an invention to a guy called Sir John Harrington and he built

it, he was the godson of Queen Elizabeth III and supposedly... Okay we've only had two Queen Elizabeths so I'm gonna stop you right there. What did I say? Queen Elizabeth III. Yes, so Sir John Harrington invented it in the year 3000. No, sorry, Queen Elizabeth first. So he invented it for her. And it basically, what I'm talking about is a toilet whereby it had valves, it had a flush, and she tried it, and she was like, this is fantastic, I'll take one.

So it was a big deal. So he invented the throne and a descendant of his is Kit Harrington, Jon Snow from A Game of Thrones. Wow. So this is a series about everyone wanting to get on the loo. Yeah. One more thing on poo. There's a famous biologist in the Netherlands who's called Midas Dekkers who writes great books about science. And one of his latest books is The Story of Shit. So he's a biologist and he just explains the entire gut system, how it's produced, what

is happening there biologically. And they asked him in a talk show, they asked him like, why did you want to write a book about Poo he said well i was walking around in these bookstores you see all these cookbooks nobody ever tells you how it ends look we need to wrap this up uh thank you so much everyone for coming to this live recording. We really appreciate it. That is it. That is all of our facts. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland. James? My Twitter is at James Harkin. Andy? At Andrew Hunter M. And Lieven? At Lievens Schere. Good luck with that. It's the one country you can say that to, and it's fine.

If you want to get to us as a group, you can go to at NoSuchThing or NoSuchThingAsAFish on Instagram, or you can go to our website, nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. You can also get tickets to our live tour. We're about to go on tour around the world, so please check that out. For everyone here, thank you so much for coming.

We're going to be back again next week, and we hope we're going to be back here again next year for another awesome Nerdland adventure. We'll see you again next week, everyone else. Goodbye! Thank you.