No Such Thing As A Fish - 99: No Such Thing As Bread Civilians

Episode Date: February 5, 2016

Live from the Birmingham mac theatre, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss sexy robots, samurai hairdressers and the world's oldest drive-through.

Hi guys, just to let you know, it is our 100th episode coming up this Friday, so to celebrate that, this Thursday, the 11th of Feb, we're going to do an AMA on Reddit and Ask Me Anything, where you can rock up and ask us anything. We'll be there for a couple of hours, whatever you've ever wanted to ask us, do it there. It's going to be 5pm this Thursday, 5pm GMT, that is midday Eastern Standard Time, and if you go to qi.com forward slash Reddit, you'll be able to find it easily. See you there. Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you from the Birmingham Mack. My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome to the stage, it's the other three elves, Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chazinski. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact this week is that a New Zealand firm has developed an irrationally angry robot to train tele-sale staff. So it calls the tele-sale staff. Yeah, I mean, it has to be programmed to do it. It can't just ring you up at night time or something. So, yeah, the firm is called Touchpoint, and basically they've developed this machine, which can simulate an angry customer, and it takes data from all the worst customer calls, where people are really furious, and then they sort of determine the factors which, you know, you could be set off by. And then the tele-sales person who's being trained has to try and calm the machine down, and that's the mission for that, yeah.

Do we know how the anger manifests itself? Does it start attack physically, physical assaulting? It's nothing physical, it's mind games. Mind games? Lots of passive aggressiveness. How twisted are people? I think it's a lot of shouting and insults, basically, from the computer. Wow. Does it sound like a robot? I don't know, I suspect not, because that would negate the point of it being a training thing.

So they must have someone recording all the audio to then... Yeah, I think so, yeah. Wow. It is irrational anger, right, and people go mad about cold callers, and the thing, apparently, so there was a survey done recently, and cold calling was voted the most annoying thing about the UK, which, I mean, there's some bad stuff going on in this country, everyone, calm down. But the most annoying thing about cold calling is cold-caller chomminess, the false chomminess that you get. I got a cold call this morning. Did you? Someone who said, did you have an accident in the car that wasn't your fault?

Okay, did you? Well, I played along for a moment, I said, yes, I did. And then she said, did you? You're literally the first person to say that. Yeah, she was really, it took her ages to say anything, because she was so surprised. And she said, did you? And I said, no, not really. I got one last night, and so it said, hi, we understand that you've had an accident recently, and you should be making a claim on it.

And I thought, oh, this is a robot. So I just went and stayed silent. Yeah. And then it went, hello? And I went, nah. And then it went, hi, are you still there? And I thought, oh, God, it's an actual human. Oh, sorry.

And then it started talking, and I was like, it got me. And AI is so good now that it, yeah. Yeah. They predicted that moment. Yeah. So it's like the Turing test, where if you can have a conversation with a machine, but you think it's a human, then the machines have won. As the... Well, thank God I'm not the bar.

Yeah. So there is a software that can tell from my voice when I'm on the phone whether I'm angry or not. Okay. And they use these in telecells, and so they'll have a computer in front of them, and I'll ring them up and get really angry and passive aggressive. And then their computer will say, he's getting angry. He's getting really angry. You've got to do something about this. Oh, wow.

And then they have to keep it below a certain level. As if they don't know that you're angry. Yeah. Well, I've denied it quite well, actually. Can you? The telecells person on the floor just sobbing and the computer's helpfully saying, he's a little bit pissed off with you. But it's amazing that computers can tell if you're angry. Yeah, that's very good.

Apparently, you can tell if someone's angry by the way they use their mouse to an 80% accuracy, you can tell... Well, like smashing you around the head with it. But I think just how you click on things and stuff like that, they can tell... If you click on, I am really angry.com. They can tell frustration, sadness, fear and depression with more than 80% accuracy. Just by the way, you use your mouse. Wow. Wow.

So there is a thing about computers being angry and whether we should make angry machines, basically. Because one school of thought is that it's quite a good idea to make computers that can simulate anger. And that the ones you would need to worry about are the ones that don't simulate anger. That's not what the movies tell me. The robots take over the world, they're usually pretty angry. Think about the Terminator robots, they're not angry, they're just doing a job. Whereas if Arnie was really emotional in Terminator, then you'd know. He's vulnerable. You've got a weakness you can play with.

Yeah, but we can't really make them angry at the moment because we're just programming angry sounding responses into them. And it doesn't swear at you when you're not telling it to. It doesn't send you poo in the post or something. Unless you've programmed that. Which is the only reason I can assume that I keep receiving it. There was a really creepy robot telemarketer that lots of people were writing online about called Samantha West. And this was in the US. And I think she was selling health insurance and she denied vociferously that she was a robot.

I think it was the Washington Post or one of the US newspapers got realized this, got a call from her. And they all called and said, are you a robot? And she kept on saying, no, I'm a real person. Maybe there's something wrong with the line. Can you hear me okay? And they go, you really sound like a robot. And she'd say, I understand, but perhaps there's a fault with the line. And they eventually called and pressed all the buttons until they got through to a real person.

And said, look, there's a robot claiming to be a person working for you. And I'm not into that at all, it's really weird. And the person said, we do not have any robots here. There's no robot working here. And the next day, the number of hers have been discontinued. But I do wonder, maybe that just was a real person on their first day who was like, didn't want to deviate from the script. I was really, really nervous and said all these people going, you're a fucking robot.

Okay, own up. And that's why I should quit the next day. There was a guy who got fired because he put on a robotic sounding voice to get through his calls. Faster, because people assume if they're talking to a machine, they'll just say, yes, no, and option C. And he didn't want to do any of the fake chumminess. So he put on a metallic voice. Yeah, but he got fired for it. So ironically, his job will have now gone to a machine.

So you can get therapeutic robots. Have you seen this? There's one in particular is called Paro. And they've made this robot to help people who are suffering from, they've had some trauma. And it's shaped like a seal. And the reason it's shaped like a seal is because the guy who invented it says people are unlikely to have had bad memories of real seals. It's fair enough, I think, but seals are quite, you know, they can attack people. It's just that most people don't come up against seals that often.

There are so many things that fall into that category. Very few bad memories of octopuses or the planet Mars or Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually. While we're on robots, there is one subject I think we've been dancing around, which is sex with robots. Alright, maybe I'm the only one who's been dancing around it. I just wanted to tell you a better story from Malaysia. This is from the newspaper Free Malaysia today from October. And it goes like this. This proposed conference on love and sex with robots is illegal.

Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar told a press conference in Kuala Lumpur. And action will be taken against the organisers if they go ahead. There's nothing scientific about sex and robots. It's an offence to have extra marital sex in Malaysia, especially with robots. It's true, it was called the Congress on Love and Sex with Robots. And I think people just saw the title and just saw the last three words, sex with robots. Yeah, Congress. That's true.

There's a group called the Campaign Against Sex Robots. They're a growing group to stop people from actually having sex with robots in the future. And there are people who are saying, you know, we should make laws against this right now. And there was an article about it and there were some people who commented on the bottom of it. One person, Chrysler Harper said, if I want to have sex with my robot, then I will. My husband is always willing, but he isn't always there. This idea is stupid. The most advanced robot most people have is a Hoover, which I bet was what she was talking about.

And then someone called Manjeet replied to that saying, sex robots would at least not be as destructive as an atomic bomb. Very true. A lot of scientists do say, oh, we'll be having sex with robots in a couple of hours. As soon as you guys leave the press conference, actually. It's true, though. There was a very famous book, Sex and Robots, or Sex with Robots. And they say roughly the year 2050 will be when we'll be properly getting into bed with robots. So there's a reason to stay healthy for all of us.

Hold on tight, guys. Only 35 more years. Another creepy robot is this robot called Pepper, which was made in Japan as most of the most advanced robots are. And so 1,000 versions of Pepper went up for sale last year, and they went on for sale for 1,000 pounds each equivalent. And they sold out within a minute. So very sought after. And I was watching a video of the woman who's explaining what's so good about Pepper. And it's a robot for your house who can be your friend.

So it's an emotional social robot who can kind of respond to your emotions, sense your emotions, calm you down, make you feel better. And she said, one of the things she said was, it will introduce games into the family that you can play together or take pictures of your children when you're not at home. One of the games it plays is, so then there's an example of this robot interacting. And it decides to play a game with someone. So it says, on three, we each take a deep breath and see who can hold it the longest. Evil robot. I saw when I was in Australia, there was an ad on TV for a new tracking device called Trackoo. And the idea is that Trackoo can be put, it's got magnetic little bits that you can put on the inside of a car.

You can put it in your grandfather's pocket. Basically, it was an advert saying, you can stalk. You can stalk and no one will know. But they kept going, Trackoo. It's like this little cute thing. And there was a grandfather going, where am I? It goes on cars. You can put it in a wallet.

You can put it in a hair. You can put it in a fish tank. You can't do it. It's on commission from Trackoo. You can put it in a fish tank. Just in case your fish goes missing. In case your fish goes missing and takes the tracking device with it. Look, we're having a poor dentist in Nemo.

Such a good point. That would have been a much shorter film if they'd had your ingenious tracking device. If Trackoo was on Nemo. Okay, it's time for fact number two. And that is Chazinski. Yep, my fact is that a fifth of America's meals are eaten in cars. That's so interesting. Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it?

But yeah, it's a study done. And another thing that either this study or another study at the same time found was that 31% of people in America say they have never eaten a meal in their cars. So there's obviously some people really bringing up that average, who are just like every single time they cook a roast, they go to their car, lock themselves in. Well, it's a big drive through nation, isn't it? Yeah, I think it's that.

Yeah. And they say if that's actually what it is. That is what it is. Yeah, so it's eating fast. That's suggested. I was like, okay, so it must be the roasts going into the car. There's a National Drive-Thru Day in America. Yeah, it's July 24th.

And it's one of those ones that isn't obviously officially recognized, but it will sort of trend on Twitter and everyone be going, hey, National, celebrate it like International Potato Day or whatever. I think it was made up by, I can't remember what the first company, the Pioneer Drive-Thru was, but it went out of business in the 80s. But I think it was them that made up National Drive-Thru Day in order to boost their business, wasn't it? Yeah.

Who were they? Was it the In-N-Out chain? No, I think that's one of those robot dolls. So this is a thing. This is in the UK, actually. Two-thirds of motorists say they've eaten while driving, and 55% of motorists think that eating while driving should be illegal. So obviously, most of the people who are eating while driving are going,

I wish they'd banned this. I hate myself. I think it kind of is illegal, isn't it? I think it might be, yeah. I think if you're not in full control of the car, it's up to the police, really, but if they see you eating a kick out of something or a banana, and then, sorry.

Just two of the many wonderful foods you can enjoy in this great nation. I genuinely yesterday read a story of a lady who got a ticket for peeling up a banana while she was driving, so you're on it. Thanks, Dan. Yeah. Yeah, so if they think that by doing that, you're not in full control, then they can pull you over. It depends on how you're peeling it.

Or it depends on if you're going at 90 miles an hour on the motorway, and you think that banana's looking a bit too wrapped for my liking. Fair enough. Do you know that bananas used to come wrapped in foil? Did they? Yeah. Considering they have their own wrapping already. That's amazing.

Yeah, when they first came over here, they were wrapped. Oh, my God. Yeah. That's kind of like past the parcel, then. The worst thing. There's only two wrappings, and there's always another. Maybe people used to eat the skin until we saw monkeys taking it off, and then they realized.

A few other drive-thru things. Oh, yeah. So the first ever drive-thru, do you know what it was? What? No. It was a bank. Ah, really? It was in Chicago.

It was in 1946. Ah, I have another one from 5,200 years ago. Well, okay. So I'm going to say that's the second ever drive-thru. No, there's like an old kind of place in Iran called Godin Tepe, and they're not 100% sure that it was a drive-thru, but they think it was because of... I'm going to be all over this, James.

I'm going to give this fact a very hard time indeed. Well, it's because of the height of the window and because the room seemed to have been used as a place to keep things, and it was for bullets and ammunition that soldiers would go through. 5,000 years ago, they had bullets. Yeah. What? Bullets were invented way before guns,

because bullets is just... What would you do? Well, before... I can't wait till I have something to put this in. You're in trouble. Well, before they invented guns, the word bullet was just a projectile. A stone.

It was a stone. Check out my bullet, mate. It's a pebble. They make room noises as they throw them. There's a room with some stones in it, and you're claiming it's a drive-thru. That sounds like an archaeologist who needs more funding and has got nothing in it, right?

We found some bullets for a drive-thru. OK, let's hear about your bank. They found a room with a loaded money. That's it. You just drove off and took money out or deposited it, but it was in Chicago as well. Did you have to show any identification or anything, because it was just a free...

When I'm a business, very fast. The first restaurant was in 1947. Oh, OK. And they used to, instead of driving through, you would just drive up... Well, you would drive through, but they would have waiters outside taking your order and carrying them inside,

and then bringing your food out to your car. It was quite nice. Just a way of getting your staff cold, basically. I found a few weird drive-throughs that actually exist in America at the moment. I think a couple of them have gone defunct, but if they have, it's only in the last few years. So these are for people who just wanted to make life easier for everyone.

There's a drive-through funeral parlor, and this is genuinely real. You drive up, and the person of your... who you love is just in a window as you go by, and you pay respects as you go by in the window, and you form a queue with the cars, and you just sort of go by and then drive on. So there's drive-through. I swear to God, it's real.

Are they wearing one of those McDonald's outfits? No, I don't think we're going to take you there. Held up by strings. My chicken sandwich in one hand. Yeah, it's a funeral parlor drive-through. There's an emergency services drive-through. So you just come up in the car, and a doctor quickly comes and helps you with any problem that you have.

So that you're sick, but you're still driving. But you're so badly sick that you have to go to your car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you drive through, and they can quickly just help you out while you're still in the car. And that is really bad, they put you in the funeral once. And this one's amazing. There's a drive-through bar that serves you alcohol,

but you can take it. I don't think they've thought that one properly through. Yeah, you just buy, I'll just have a pint of vodka. Just a normal drink. This is when they want more. You know, when the police want to get more ticks on their people arrested, they just plant policemen two yards up the road, presumably. Yeah, I guess so.

They've got some arrests under their belt. I was just looking at fast food. Have you guys ever heard of a yoke? No. A yoke? I've just realized why it's called that, and it's a yoke. Is it a part of an egg? Yeah, I did come across that.

No, with a W. So this is the latest fast food, and it's a runny, pre-cooked, boiled egg with pre-cut soldiers in it, and a spoon, which is a spoon that includes a tooth to help you crack the shell. And you say, wow, this is what you have to do. You buy the package with the egg in it,

you open the egg, you pour boiling water on it, leave it for five minutes, and then you've got your egg. It's amazing, because that takes longer to make than an actual egg. It literally takes longer to make. Yeah, the guy said, all you need is access to boiling water, and now you can enjoy a delicious yoke wherever you want in just five minutes.

Yeah, that's just a boiled egg, isn't it? Yeah, it comes with toast soldiers. It does come with soldiers, yeah. But do you have to toast them? I think the soldiers are not toasted, but I don't toast my soldiers anyway, so that's not a problem for me. Well, then they're not toast soldiers.

I call them soldiers. They're bread civilians. OK, it's time to move on to fact number three, and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that the most dangerous job in Britain is that of a hairdresser. Why? So this isn't the most people that die.

It's most kind of accidents or injuries, and hairdressers and beauticians are by far the most likely to suffer an accident, most commonly cutting themselves. But it's construction, which kills most people. Yes, definitely. Definitely by the most, by absolute numbers. I would say, like, if you're a trolman or something,

probably a lot of people die with that as well. But I'm going from accidents only, and that is hairdressers. There is actually one genuinely quite dangerous hairdresser called Albert Olmedo, and he's in Madrid, and he only cuts hair with samurai swords or blowtorch. Wow. Does it give you the option when you come in? What will it be today, the blowtorch or the samurai sword? I think maybe you have to pay extra for the blowtorch.

I don't know, but he swipes. It looks really cool, actually. He swipes, he has two samurai swords that he cuts your hair with, and he swipes them in opposite directions at the back of your head, and he says it's useful because you can do both sides at once. Wow. That sounds incredibly dangerous. Yeah, it does, doesn't it? Yeah.

Because what if you misjudge someone's head under the hair, and they have a really protuberant back of the head? It's when you ask for a bit off the top, and he literally takes it off the top. I think there might be a slightly more dangerous hairdresser out there. He's a Chinese hairdresser called Tianhao, and how he does it is he likes to feel the energy of the hair and not have any influence of, say, sight.

So he closes his eyes, and he starts chopping hair with his eyes closed, so he'll just feel it, and he's very popular in China. Yeah, he does really well. He's like a Jedi hairdresser. Yes, exactly. So there was a rumor going around Cambodia a few dozen years ago, and that was that the president, who's called Norah Damage Si Hunouk, he'd had a dream in which all the long-haired virgins in the country

would be taken to hell by an evil god. Okay? He was kind of quite revered, or at least feared at the time, and everyone kind of half-believed this thing that all the long-haired virgins would be taken to hell. And so all the virgins with long hair cut all their hair. And all the people who wanted people to think they were virgins and had long hair, they had their hair cut as well.

Okay, so there was a massive kind of epidemic of women having their hair cut in Cambodia. And according to the police at the time, they said that it was a rumor started by corrupt hairdressers. Wow. Very clever. So hairdressers are very widely trusted, supposedly. This has been in the news in the last two days.

There's been a big survey by Ipsos Murray, so it's a legit one. And it's their veracity index, which they do every year. And apparently the most trusted profession is hairdressers. 69% of people would trust their hairdresser to tell the truth. Really? Compound with 68% for the police. And newsreaders are only on 65, and then journalists and politicians are way down.

They're in the 20s of percent. That's so weird. I don't think I trust my hairdresser to tell the truth. Really? Well, they've been saying, I look great. Their job is to get to the end of a cut and go, yeah, that's fantastic. You know it can't. They can't have got a right every time.

Yeah, you never hear them going, oh, I've really cocked this up. There's actually a hairdressing card if now, Bauhaus hairdressers, I think it is, which offers a special quiet chair that you can nominate to be in if you don't fancy the terrible hairdresser's small talk. If you don't have a holiday book that year or... Yeah, didn't go on one last year. Yeah.

And the person, the manager is, so he's very relaxed about it. He says they can change their minds at any time, halfway through the cut, if they suddenly feel like a chin wag. But if you're in that chair, they will not say a word to you. The owner of that one, I think he's called Scott Miller, and he said, I always say, if you're asking your client where they're going on holiday, you've lost. So I think there are quite high standards

for hairdresser conversation these days. Yeah. God, yeah, where am I going to go to brag about my holidays? The last time I had my haircut, it was by... I was in a city that I don't live in, and the woman who cut my hair was a regional finalist in the National Hairdressing Championships. Really?

Yeah. Really? I mean, she was a finalist, she wasn't a winner. But she told me all sorts of stuff about the history of hairdressing, and she told me that there's a UK president of hairdressing. Oh, sir. Yeah. And there's a fellowship of British hairdressing,

which I didn't know either. Yeah, there's also a male hairdresser of the year. There's also a female hairdresser of the year. It's the big hairdresser awards that happened at the end of the year, each year. And in 2005, I was looking through the list of all the people who had won, 2005, the winner was a guy called Brent Barber. Wow. That's a cool name.

Really cool. Yeah. And this is interesting. I was reading about different kinds of hair that get done that aren't on human heads, and Madam Two Swords have hairdressers that actually do the hair of the waxworks. Okay. And in fact, the Twiggy waxwork that was done, the hairdresser who does Twiggy's hair came in to do Twiggy's waxwork hair as well,

to give it the cut to make it look like it would on Twiggy, which is quite cool. Did you know it was waxwork, or did you go away like Twiggy's in a bad mood today? I said, where are you going on your holidays? But just as a sideline fact, I discovered that when Madam Two Swords waxworks are made now, and I think this has always been the case, they make them two inches bigger, the whole body two inches bigger, because the wax shrinks over time, and that brings them to the actual size of the person. And you were telling me today that after the age of 30, you shrink by one-sixteenth of an inch every year.

Every year, yep. So they'd have to shave bits off the waxworks as well every year, another one-sixteenth off. Yes, although I learned that on Oprah about 15 years ago, and it's just one of those facts that stays with you, and I haven't checked it to then or now. So, yeah, it's true though, it's the discs in between your back vertebrae. It could be true. In ancient Rome, they had a job called an ornaterix, and this was a lady who would look after the hair of another lady,

and it would be colouring, a lot of the thing that they did was colouring. So if you wanted black hair, then you had to put a mixture of bile, rotten leeches, and squid ink in your hair. Wow. That would make it go black. Cool. And if you wanted blonde, it was a mixture of pigeon poo and ashes. I think I'll stay with the natural dude, actually. Barbas used to offer castrations as well.

Is that true? Well, there's medieval China. Oh, OK. So, yes. But for a given value of true, yes. No, it was, they did eunuchs. Yeah. Surely eunuchs are the ones that don't need it.

Sorry. They do, but... We say that, have we said before that Chinese eunuchs would carry around their testicles to be reunited with them in the afterlife? Yes. And there was one of the most famous eunuchs, who was one of the last eunuchs. To punish him for something, they stole his bits. And it was like, he just thought it was the end of the world for him,

because he would never be able to be brought back as a whole. Wow. That is mean. Yeah. Real mean. Do you know, the first ever proper QI fact that I ever found when I was working on the TV show, it was actually to do with Chinese hairdressers, and it was Mousy Tong's hairdresser.

Yeah, I was reading a biography, and it turned out that his hairdresser was called Big Beard Wang. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Elvis Presley once started a riot at the end of his show by saying to the crowd, girls, I'll see you all backstage. Wow. And they all went. They all went in that moment. So this was back in 1955.

The end of just as he was reaching his first sort of wave of popularity, and he didn't realize that that would be the reaction once he said it. So he just said this line, girls, I'll see you all backstage, and they literally just fled onto stage. They just went right on, and he got scared, and he had to run off to his little green room. They were ripping off his clothes. He was missing a shoe, he was missing the side of his shirt, and they locked him inside the back room, and no one could get to him.

Eventually, when it calmed down and he went to his car, his car, in the side metal of the car, there were names and numbers scratched into the side, and they couldn't see through the windscreen because so much lipstick was on it, with names and numbers for him to call. And also 500 tracous. Wow. And that was the moment that his manager went, okay, we've got a massive star on our hands here,

and yeah, that's when he got really promoted. I remember when we were filming QI Once, and Justin Bieber was in the studios. He was doing something next door, and it was crazy. It was unbelievable, they had so much security there. Every time you walked past a window, all they had to do was see a little bit of hair, and they would scream. It was great fun because you just kind of peek your head around, and then they got... I knew you were a powerful physical resemblance to Justin Bieber.

This was this with Justin Bieber. They did experience serious problems with that when the concerts would happen, because if he arrived late, or if they were told it was too chaotic, because actually so many fans were coming to the show, they would say, okay, we're cutting this short, or Justin's not going to be able to appear, and they would start rioting. And unlike a normal show where people would riot who were of adult age, the police just had no idea, what do you do when you're being attacked by children?

You can't do anything, you just have to accept it. That's what you need, the robots, probably. Take photos of them. I don't know. I'll just shut them up. Did you guys hear about David Spargo? I bet you must have. No.

Okay, he's a super fan of the Australian band Peking Duck, who I assume is some kind of popular beat combo, isn't he? But they were playing in Melbourne, and he decided that he wanted to get backstage and meet his heroes. And so he went backstage, and the security said to him, no, you can't come in. And he's like, no, no, I've got to come in, I'm the lead singer's stepbrother. And they're like, well, do you have any proof?

He said, yeah, yeah, look, on Wikipedia. And he brought it up, and he just changed Wikipedia two minutes earlier to say that he was that guy's stepbrother. And he got in, and he got to meet his heroes. Smart, isn't it? Very smart. Have you heard of, there's a Beatles fan called Jan Meyers, and she was a super fan in the days when they were first becoming popular.

And she crawled through the sewers under Abbey Road to hear them recording Rubber Sol through the floor. Wow. Yeah. I think she's writing a book now about being a super fan. But at the time she was a fan, they weren't super famous yet. And the first time she got an autograph from Paul McCartney, he wrote Paul McCartney, Brackets, the Beatles.

Oh, wow. Yeah, so they really weren't well known. They actually met Elvis once, didn't they? With the Beatles? Yeah. Did they? And it sounds like the most awkward occasion ever. Really?

Yeah, yeah, and apparently they just had nothing to talk about. Their press officer wrote about it years later. I said it was incredibly awkward. They had this weird small tour. There were long, long silences. And eventually someone obviously freaking out. Maybe the press officer freaked out and thought, I've got to do something.

So he brought in a load of guitars, and the Beatles just started playing some music, and everything calmed down a bit. And then later on, Elvis bitched about the Beatles, I think, to Nixon. Yeah. What? Yeah, he didn't bitch to Nixon. A big bitch.

He said he thought the Beatles were un-American because of their stance on Vietnam. Yeah, it's true. That is bitching. Yeah, I guess so. He didn't mean un-American, and that's a good thing. He's talking to the president of the US. I found this fact, by the way,

about the backstage thing with Elvis. Weirdly, not in an Elvis Presley book, but I've been reading a biography on David Bowie called Zigeology. And a big influence on David Bowie was Elvis. And there was incredible facts in this book. I just kept coming across amazing little nuggets about Elvis. This is my favorite one, and this is the exact wording.

Elvis's conception was so seismic, his father blacked out after the moment of climax. Yeah. Do you mean fell asleep? No, apparently he just blacked out and fell, he had to be sort of brought to, brought to. I think it was Elvis's mother that said that. And she should know.

Yeah, that's true. So he was mental. I didn't quite realize how mental Elvis was, although I guess maybe everyone else did. But for instance, the time he met Nixon was because he was determined that he collected police badges, and he wanted a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.

And I think he thought that meant that he could cross any borders with any substances at all. And he's wearing the badge, and that was fine. So he got one of those off Nixon. That's his only reason for meeting the president. He used to visit one of his favorite pastimes, apparently, was visiting the Memphis morgue to look at corpses. Was that a drive-thru one?

He wants, oh, I like this image. He was once with Tom Jones backstage, and he serenaded Tom Jones while Tom Jones was naked in the shower. Tom Jones said, I think he was checking me out. So that could have been a romance that never happened. Wow. We need to wrap up fairly soonish.

I've got just a couple more things, a slightly side-tracking. But as I say, I got this fact from a Ziggy Stardust book. And I found out this really great fact that I think people should know about. David Bowie, that's not his real name. His real name is David Jones. And the reason he had to change his name from David Jones to David Bowie is because of the monkeys.

Yeah, David Jones from the monkeys. David Jones from the monkeys. So he was trying to make it big as a musician. It didn't work. So he went to David Bowie. But David Bowie wasn't the first name that he went to before he went to David Bowie. The first name he picked after David Jones

was Tom Jones. And then a couple of weeks later, this new singer came along and he went, oh, Jesus Christ. And then had to change it to David Bowie. Someone else called Tom Jones would come along. Yeah, mate, do a weird name. It's not a usual one.

Now booing, no. And the riot begins. OK, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Shriverland, James, at X-shaped, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. And Chazinsky. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or you can go to know such thing as a fish.com where we have all of our previous episodes. Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you guys so much for being here. We really appreciate it. I hope you enjoyed it. And we'll see you again sometime. OK, goodbye. APPLAUSE