No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Tantrump

Episode Date: May 19, 2016

Live from Up The Creek in Greenwich, and filmed as a pilot episode for QI's new BBC TV series No Such Thing As The News, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss elephant polo, robots replacing Royals, and everything that hasn't been discovered yet.

Welcome to another episode and No Such Thing as a Fish. We have a very exciting day ahead of us. We are on our way to the studio to record the very first episode of No Such Thing as the News. It's our BBC 2 TV show and it's going to air May 20th at 11.5 p.m. on BBC 2. So we need you guys to watch it. We really need you to watch it because if you don't watch it, they'll cancel us. We will lose the entire series. So please, if you like our show, if you're hearing this now, cancel your Friday night plans

and come to the TV, sit down, make yourself some tea and watch our show. We'd really appreciate it and please spread the word. If you want to watch it on EyePlay a little bit later, that is also okay with us. Just watch it at some point. And you can go to the No Such Thing as a Fish YouTube channel and catch it there anytime from Sunday morning. The episode you're about to hear now is the un-eared pilot, which we recorded last week. So enjoy. Hello and welcome to another episode of,

no such thing as the news coming to you from Up the Creek Comedy Club in Greenwich, London. My name is Dan Schreiber, and please welcome. It's Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our favorite facts from the last seven days of news. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Chisinski. My fact this week is that the first thing that Ted Cruz did after dropping it out of the Republican contest was Elbow his wife in the face. and this was

so you probably saw that about a week ago Ted Cruz dropped out the Republican race leaving Donald Trump as the only contender for the throne of America and yeah

it's just a great YouTube clip you should watch it he makes this speech in Indiana saying he's very sorry but you know he seems to have not gone that well for him he turns away for the microphone he elbows his wife in the face as he's hugging his dad

and then he sort of tries to compensate for it by then trying to a three-way hug with his dad and his wife and then sort of slaps her about a bit as he goes back to do that. And that just seemed like an awkward end to an awkward campaign. I think he's had a very unfortunate time, Ted Cruz. First of all, Donald Trump made a reference to JFK's killing and accused Cruz at some point of having been in a photo with Lee Harvey Oswald. Serrely. I don't know it was his father.

Sorry, accused his father of being referred to Lee Harvey Oswald. Yeah. So he's a spawn of a mother. and then everyone in America seems to think that he is the zodiac killer. Even though his first murder was committed two years before Cruz was born. I find like there was, he had an online store that had lots of odd products. If you were, if you were trying to eventually run for president, you wouldn't naturally have. But there was this one debate that he had with Donald Trump where he started telling Donald Trump to breathe.

And Trump was like, well, you breathe, I'm breathing. Why can't you breathe? And he was like, I am breathing. Why don't you breathe? They just had this real debate. kind of like breathe off kind of conversation. And then Rubio comes in and he's like, when you guys are done doing yoga, and it's like these weird calls. And then so Ted Cruz,

then a few days later for 35 bucks on his website, you could buy the Ted Cruz breathe exercise mat that you would just, you know, learn to breathe better on. So he was just running with these gags. And then he got sued by a company who are a yoga company, who are called Breathe, saying you can't suddenly start selling breathe yoga mats on your website.

So he had to take the whole breathe thing away. So then he just was selling exercise mats for no reason. It's just, why not get an exercise mat of mine? Just the whole joke gone. I guess we're now selling exercise mats. Well, he's got to do something now. So it looks now it's going to be Trump versus Clinton, right, in the American presidential race.

And it means it's going to be the most unpopular presidential candidate in my lifetime versus the second most popular candidate in my lifetime. And by a long, long way as well, yeah. I think PJ Wark tweeted a couple of days ago that this came out in support for Hillary and it was a story and the tweet was, everyone vote for Hillary, it's the second worst thing that could possibly happen to the world.

There was a poll this week by the public policy poll. And they, like, tested how popular Donald Trump is compared to various different things. And it turned out that he is less popular than traffic jams, used car salesman, hipsters, jury duty, the band Nickelback, root canal surgery and lice. There's another, on Ted Cruz's website, there's another product that he sold,

which is a thing that he started, a kind of what he was trying, I guess, to be a kind of meme going around, which is about, he called it Trumper tantrum. So the idea is every time Donald Trump was. throwing a tantrum, he was like, it's a trump or a tantrum. And I looked at just the basic words, and you think, well, why don't you just call it a tan Trump? And I don't trust someone who doesn't recognize a good pun.

Do you know how to tell if he's angry, actually? Donald Trump? Yeah. No. He, aside from that he starts building walls, he wears a red hat when he's angry. This is according to his butler, who I think wrote a book a couple of months ago, a few months ago, and said that the way to tell his mood is by the color. of hat that he's wearing and when he's pissed off he wears a red hat and that is when to leave

Iran. So there's a few, this is the American elections. We have the British local elections this week. I was a few funny amusing things that happened there. In Wolverhampton, the Conservative party accidentally put two people up for elections so they came first and third. Wow. But the thing is they took votes off each other. So one of them said no, no, vote for him, vote for him but people didn't really pay any attention. And if the guy who came third got just 60 more votes, then Labour would have got in. And also there's election

going on in the Philippines at the moment with the most unbelievably weird man who's just won it. His campaign slogan is basically I will kill all the criminals. Rodrigo Duterte or Duterte

or the Punisher as they're called. Really? It is Duterte, I think, because his nickname in his old job was Duterte Harry. Oh, see, that is a good pun. Ted Cruz could learn something up there. And that's how he got into power. In an interview, many are asking what my credentials are and what I can do for the Philippines.

They are telling me that they have heard I am a womanizer. That is true. That is very true. He said, what, in the press conference he just said that. He's boasted about his multiple affairs and the fact he uses a lot of Viagra to keep himself going. He boasted about his Viagra use. Yeah, it's very confident, isn't it?

You wait till you see the pills I have to take. Sustain this. I don't know, maybe he's got an advertising contact with him on the side. But yeah, he's reassured the public after boasting about all his affairs that his mistresses won't cost the public a lot because he keeps them in cheap boarding. house. And he takes him to short stay hotels for sex.

He's quite a character. He's like one of these strong men kind of presidents that are kind of coming in around the world. I think he's one of those kind of guys. Right. We need to move on to our final fact soon. So anyone got anything before we do? Can I just quickly relate one thing about the recent UK elections? In case you missed it, there was a Labour counsellor called Duncan Enright. And he was going to be, he wanted to be the counsellor for Whitney in the West Oxfordshire area,

and he sent a tweet out after the elections, just saying, lost by 70 votes or so, thanks for the opportunity to serve. The fight goes on. And then about 20 minutes later, he sent out another tweet saying, actually, it turns out I won,

bundle of my votes under a Tory pile. Thanks, Whitney. And that's how casual vote he is in this country. Oh, we found a bunch more votes under this pile of paper. Sorry. The fight can stop immediately. All right, so there we have it. Ted Cruz accidentally elbows his wife in the face.

Now we are moving on to our second fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that this week, scientists have discovered that we still haven't discovered 99.999% of life on Earth. That's a lot. Now, the big story that was in the news this week about this is that there's an estimate of how much life on Earth there is, and it changes all the time, but it's quite manageable in a way for counting purposes.

So in 2011, they thought there was about 8.7 million different forms of life on the planet. They just found out, through this new study, that they reckon that that number has gone up from 8.7 million to one trillion. One trillion.

What are these things that we haven't? There's a few species of yak. There's a lot of sports to be ahead. Is it very, very small thing? that they haven't. It's microbes. It's microbes. What they did is there's a way of kind of working things out called scaling laws. And say you know how big an animal is, you can kind of tell what its metabolism is. And if the bigger it is, the more it is. So you can put the size of the animal in and you can work out its metabolism. That's an example of things. And another way of doing this is you can work out how many big animals there are in an area. And then by putting them into an equation, you can work out how many microbes or how many small animals there are as well. And so they've worked out how many big animals they think there are, and they put it into this scaling equation, and they come out with one trillion.

We just don't know. I mean, they are making this up, I think. That's true. They said there's between 100 billion and 1 trillion. So that is actually quite a large gap between those two numbers, if you think about it. Don't think about it. Just let it. It is amazing.

The difference between a billion and a trillion is, it's a number that I'm unable properly to understand. So I started thinking about it I first thought, okay, everyone always has this dream of having a species named after them So I thought, well, if there's a trillion Surely there's enough for us all, right? To go around.

So I looked into... More than enough? Yeah, exactly. So I looked into how many people have existed on Earth ever. All the dead people, all the living people combined. And apparently, according to the population reference bureau,

they estimate that about 107 billion people have ever existed. Which means that's a bit less than a trillion so we could do it. And that's insane the differentiation of life on our planet. Yeah, but most of those people don't want some crappy bit of bacteria named after. They want a large mammal. A large, delicious mammal.

That's what's so disappointing about this. You hear this fact, you're like, brilliant. Lions everywhere, different species of lions. Oh, good, it's tiny microbes again. They're probably really interesting. You're probably being speciest against these microbes. They're probably very interesting. And I think you could probably, because I don't know actually what a microbe is, but I reckon they're probably interesting when you look close at them.

Do you know the largest species that we discovered last year? No. The largest new species that I can find. So there were 2034 new plant species discovered last year alone. And the biggest was the tree, Gilbertio dendron maximum, which gets up to 45 meters high. And we hadn't found it before. Wow. How good was that?

That massive. It's great. Was it hiding behind a slightly bigger tree? It was hiding in Gabon. Oh, really? Also, last year, the first ever animal found on Facebook. Oh, sorry, no, sorry, it was an insect-eating plant. I think it was identified because someone saw it on Facebook.

I don't think it had an account. No mutual friends? Who is this guy? What was really cool about that? I saw that article, and it was basically a guy found this plant, and he put a picture of it on, and then he had a friend I think who saw it and thought that's something new. But what's great about it is because the photo was geotagged, they knew exactly where it was.

So they could go and find it and they could check it out and find out that it actually was a real new plan. It's really cool, isn't it? You think maybe social media isn't such a mistake after all? Actually, I think it's the sake of categorising. It's like the finding is the fun part, but then they're all sitting in like museums or like botanical gardens waiting for some poor intern to put. them in a list. That's true. And that's where the hold-up is, I reckon. That's true. 2014, a new species that was discovered that was collected by Darwin. Like, that's how...

So in the natural history museum, every week, they discover about 50 new different species because they're going through the backlog. So they still haven't gone through all of Darwin's stuff. And they keep going through and going, oh my God, this is a new Beatles. Surely you've bumped that out to the top of the list. I just finished Darwin. Wow. I've been looking up a few things about David Astenborough, because He's a man who has a lot of things named after him. New species, yeah.

And, obviously, news this week. Hot news, no one saw it coming. His birthday? Yeah. Who knew? Thanks, we'll pass that on. Pass on that incredibly half-hearted audience reaction. How old is he?

He's 90. I found out this thing about him, that in 2011, he sold a 132-year-old murder. Ooh. In a sense. There was a murder that happened in 1879, and it was a woman called Julia Martha Thomas, who was killed by her housekeeper. It was called Kate Webster, and Webster was arrested,

and she was tried, and she was convicted, and then executed. But the one thing that was never found was the murdered woman's head. And this was found in David Attenborough's garden when he was having an extension done to his home. When did this? 2011 and the murder was 1879. Okay, so it was 200 and... 132.

132. And he's only 90. So he's not in the frame. So he claims. Imagine that scoop. That is incredible. Yeah. Wow.

Well done David. So well done him for having an extension done. Also well done it. Clever David. Yeah. Also well done here, but I think he's probably proud of that, but when he was 89, so not long ago, he became... So last Thursday.

He broke the record for the deepest anyone's dived on the Great Barrier Reef. So he went down a thousand feet on the Great Barrier Reef in a submersible with a person who knew how to drive a submersible. It was brilliant. I just think that's incredible. And there's footage of him doing it. He looks so comfortable. And he said, it was brilliant. He wasn't nervous at all.

It was like being in a cinema or something. You're in absolute comfort. You're just in there munching chocolate and saying, this is wonderful. I don't want to sit next to him at the cinema. This is wonderful. Shut up. It's irreverent.

It's not meant to be white. We're thinking about the bear. The thing about the grizzly bear. When I was looking for stuff about Leicester City, I was reading the Leicester Mercury, and they had a headline. It was today in the Leicester Mercury, and it said, should East Midlands Airport be renamed after Sir David Attenborough? And I think we should let the internet decide. You're pretty angry about Boatim at Boat Face, right, Andy? I have calmed out.

In the month since it happened, you know. Let's see if we can wind you on. So obviously they've named the boat now. to David Attenborough instead. Don't worry, Boating at Boatface still survives. It's a remotely operated vehicle aboard David Attenborough. Yeah, it's a... Yeah, they've installed it on him. No, it's a submarine which they've, it looks really beautiful. There was quite, quite finally, there was a petition on, I think it was change.org, for David Attenborough to change his name now to Boatting.

Yeah. But yeah, he's also the only person... I just loved this, David Attenborough. In fact, he's the only person... In fact, he's the only person to have received a BAFTA in five different formats. So he's received BAFTAs in black and white, colour, HD, 3D and 4K TV. And even though no one knows what 4K TV is, that's still cool. It's just extremely high-resolution television. But great work, Dave. Yeah.

We need to move on very shortly to our next fact. Have we got anything else before we do? I can quickly tell you about a video that I saw on YouTube if you want. So there was this fisherman in Australia called Ronald Honeyset. and he was in Australia, and you can see the video, and there's this little thing floating around, and he's like, is it, I think it might be a sea slug, or is it a new species of jellyfish?

And so he put it onto YouTube to see if people will be able to tell what it was, and they pretty quickly managed to identify it as a rather large poo. Amazing. Who did they name it after? Okay, look, we need to move it. We need to move on to our third fact of the evening, and that is James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that as well as winning the Premier League title, the owners of Leicester City also won the World Elephant Polo Championships. And no one is talking about that. I know. What's going on? What versatile men they are? Does anyone go? Sryvet Hanapravos. Okay.

They bought Leicester City. but they've also done another few different kind of spots and they're really good at polo and as well as being really good at polo they're really good at elephant polo and this year or are they good at polo or are they good at giving loads of money to people who are good at polo? They are good at the vice chairman is called Ayahuat

and he's one of the players on the B team for the horse polo so they put their... Yeah but not the elephant polo. Not the elephant polo. And I read that Miss Thailand competes in the elephant polo so I don't know how high the standards are even with that.

Is that her attack? Talent round. Right, actually, elephant polo started off as a bit of a joke. It was invented by two British guys in the 90s or the 80s. They kind of thought it was just a funny thing to do. But then now it's kind of become a much bigger thing and it's a charity event. A little bit controversial. They make a load of money and they give it to elephant charities.

But also there was an activist called Lech Chilliart from Thailand who said elephants are not made for polo. It would be a perverse god. It's true. He's quite an eccentric man, Ranieri, isn't he? So that's the manager of Leicester. Yes, that's the manager. Who, at the start of the season, he was the book he's favorite to be the first manager in the premiership to be sacks. I read, I think this was a Guardian that said he's an eccentric who offered a win bonus of pizza at a local restaurant to incentivise his players.

So is that kind of like unattainable prize in order to get them. He also, he used to rally them with his cry of dilly ding, Dilly Dong. And when asked why that was the cry that he rallied them with, he said it was because he couldn't sing, so he pretended to be a bell instead. I think he achieved that, A. My favourite thing definitely, looking into the story, is the fact that because they're a Thai family, they massively subscribe to Buddhism. And so they were flying over for every home game, monks to come and bless the team. They would slap Jamie Vardy and the rest of the team player's legs

with these lashes that they were blessing them with. And while the team was out there, they sat back a bunch of monks chanting away, kind of guessing how the game was going based on the cheers, and just chanting away to bless the team to win. They planted relics underneath the pitch. So the whole thing, it's extraordinary. It's a...

Honestly, it's a massive Buddhist monk victory this whole season. It's incredible. He built them a temple, I think, or a shrine. Apparently, someone who worked at the club, I think one of the chefs, said that the pitch was full of covered in white marks from where the monks kept on blessing it. And they don't know how they're blessing it. I'm not to dress the past.

God, he's their monks. And so a lot of the stories about Lester Win the title is how they were 5,000 to 1 at the start of the year. So I thought I'd look at a few things about odds and things like that. Two guys, Kelly and Justin Tomlinson, who if either of them becomes Prime Minister, they're going to get 500,000 pounds. And that's because they put a bet on when they're at university at 10,000 to 1 that they would become Prime Minister. And they're both currently conservative MPs. There was another thing that I saw that a lot of people put a bet on them becoming 100, turning 100.

And the way that they work out the odds on that is they take your age, subtract it from 100, And that's the odds. So if I'm, what am I, 37, so that would mean that I would be 63 to 1 to reach 100. Oh, really? And that's how they work it out. That's quite interesting. Okay, well, that's it. That is Leicester, are also the elephant polo owners, which is amazing, the champions of the world in two different sports.

Let's move on to our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray. My fact is that Britain's first ever robot was designed to replace the Duke of York. So this is in the news because it's a robot that we've lost. We don't know where it went. It was in 1928 it was built and there's a campaign the Science Museum are launching to rebuild it. They've got the designs and they want to make a new one. So I think there's a Kickstarter. But this is the most incredible robot.

It was called Eric. And it was in 1928. The Duke of York was meant to open an exhibition for the Society of Model Engineers. And then he dropped out. And so the guy who was organizing the exhibition. said, well, we need a replacement and he and an engineer, and you made one, and it stood up on the day, and it made a four-minute speech, and it looked around,

and it answered questions, and its teeth were sparking because there were 35,000 volts of electricity going through them. And then Eric just went on tour around the world, and huge audiences came to see him, and we have no idea where he went in the end. Do you think the audience had been warned that there had been a change of booking it, or before they had going, the Duke of Lokes looking weird.

You're weird? So this, just to clarify, this is a science museum Kickstarter. The Science Museum of London has actually set this up. And what they've had is they've found not Eric himself, the robot. They found the plans of the robots. And the idea is that they now want to refund it, send him back around the world to talk to people, I guess. I don't quite know.

But they're opening up quite a similar kind of robotic exhibition. So they thought, let's get Eric back on the scene. Yeah, they're rebuilding a lot, I think, aren't they? I read an article in the Sunderland Daily Echo from the 1930s, and they said that Eric was the perfect husband. Eric should prove the idol of all the girls. He never swears, does not stay out late at night, and is true as steel.

Like a good boy, he speaks when he's spoken to, and confesses he cannot think. That's fantastic. Yeah, because this was... He keeps all of his women in cheatboarding houses. and short stay hotels. And you should see how much by aggregates. Yeah, he was, so you said he was built in, did you say when he was built?

1928, wasn't it? But when you look in the newspaper archives, it seems in the 30s and 40s, he became really popular. And I checked the popularity of the name Eric. And Eric was not very popular in the 20s at all. And then in, so in 1928, there were only 186 Eric's born in Britain. but by 1948 there were 2.5,000, and by 1958 there were more than 8,000. So I reckon that Eric might have caused the popularity of the name Eric. Oh, my God.

Maybe. Good theory. He was, so I've got a rival article to yours from the newspaper archives, and I haven't written down which paper it was from, but it must have been a rival paper, because that said that he is as unattractive as any steel figure you've ever seen. And he is, if you look at pictures. but they were going to build him a sister, this article said.

So it promised that they say his sister, who is now in production, is to be beautiful. She's like one of the figures in West End store windows. And I couldn't find anything more of the sister's manufacturer. So Eric's sister, beautiful sister, maybe out there. I read about another robot that was in the news this week. So you have a load of robots kind of stood next to each other. They're only like six inches tall or something.

And they're kind of communicating to each other in their own little language. And whenever they notice that a human, coming by, they'll turn round and they'll go, oh, hello, what do you think? And then whatever you say to them, they go, oh, that's interesting. And they turn round and they carry on their little conversation.

They don't understand anything that humans says, but it's just a way of kind of pretending to be interested in humans. That is genuinely a push now for any robot or AI that they're trying to do. They're trying to get them to be better with humans and be more understanding. I was reading that to Google for the past few months. They've just spoken about this this week, but this has been going on for two months or so. They have been feeding, so they have a bunch of AI computers,

and the idea is that the AI computers can learn better to interact with humans through various different ways. The current way that they're doing it is that they are feeding these AI machines at Google. Currently, they're halfway through, about halfway through, 2,865 romance novels. So they're just making the AI read romance novels. And they're titles like,

fatal desire, jacked up, unconditional love. Jacked up. Doesn't shine. Very romantic. Well, for a robot, it would be. The idea is that apparently, when we're Googling things, our conversation in terms of the Google, so we'll sometimes do quite a sort of chatty Google, is very predictable, and the best predictable dialogue you can find is in romance novels. And so they look to that and they feed it in, so they come back.

Another, just on the whole thing about big companies, trying to work AI into Google doing the romance novels, Microsoft a while ago. Did you read about their chatbot? Does everyone know about this chat bot? Oh my God. Okay, everyone knows. Let's move on.

But it's, okay, so if you don't know it in the room, basically they had this chat bot whereby they thought that it would just start its own Twitter feed and it would start talking to people. And within 24 hours, it transformed itself into what the article says is an evil Hitler-loving, incestual, sex-promoting, Bush did 9-11, proclaiming robot. And all of its tweets to people writing to her

said that she started calling them Daddy and asking them to shag her. That's all those romance novels. She has since announced that she will be voting Trump. But yeah, it goes wrong. They thought they were going to do something that would respond fantastically well. Did it take things that people were pretty, or that were proving especially traction on Twitter.

It learned from what people were tweeting towards it. So people started, they realised that and started tweeting really racist things and it just picked it all up. We need to wrap up really shortly, so if you've got anything... I have a quick thing about the Duke of York. Remember that?

I just thought I'd see what's going on in Duke of York News because of the Britain's first robot thing. So in the last month, Prince Andrew has opened a business club in Hungate. He has opened a luxury bed factory in Castle Donington, and a roundabout in Kent named after him has caught fire. So we're going to wrap up very shortly. There were a bunch of stories that we really wanted to

talk about tonight as our headline topics, but we didn't get time. So just very quickly, could you just let us know, James, Andy, and Anna, what you would have gone for tonight? Yeah, I can. The one that we didn't get a chance to say is this one, which is new research reveals that 20% of Americans are put off by the word moist. Moist. Anyone? Moist. Yeah, definitely a few people over there.

Yeah, Anna, what are you got? Yep, I like this, that. After a man in Croydon lost a bet with a friend, the frozen food company, Iceland, has warned shoppers not to lie down in their freezers to cool off. And finally, Andy? In China, under new guidelines from the Ministry of Culture, live streaming services have banned the eating of bananas

in an erotic manner. But someone, an unnamed Chinese person, has just said they will eat yams instead. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for being here tonight. Thank you all for watching at home. 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 no such thing

as the news.com, where you can see all the stories we're talking about tonight, as well as additional stories that didn't make it into the show. We will be back again next week with another batch of our favorite news stories from the past seven days. We'll see you then. Goodbye.