No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Elephant Polo Rider In A Sombrero

Episode Date: July 12, 2019

Live from Stockholm, Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss Swedish cyborgs, swimming pools for horses, and self-destructing Game Of Thrones scripts.

Hey, don't know. Episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you live from Stockholm. And Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chisinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy. My fact is that Sweden has more than 4,000 cyborgs. This will be a thing that I'm sure a lot of you know about

Are there any sidebags in tonight? Oh my really? All 4,000 Genuinely? Oh, it's one over there That with your massive metal hand you just put in the air Are you actually, what have you got? So you have a chip implant in your hand

An RFID little chip implant Cool, I need to trash a lot of the abusive stuff I had That's so cool. Wow, so we've got cyborgs in the audience. This is a different gig to any gig we've ever done before. So this is it. Sweden is going cashless. A fifth of people in Sweden don't use ATMs anymore. And so more than 4,000 people in the country have these little microchips,

and it lets them pay for rail travel and for food. And official rail firms, you know, register your hands. and you can just pay with your hand. And you can order DIY kits and sometimes people do it at parties. They have implant parties. Yeah. It's chip and beer parties, they're called.

Fish and chips party. You can have... I don't know if that happens. I just made that one up. If it doesn't, please start it. You, Cyborg, get on it. It's been around for a while, hasn't it? People have been trying to make this catch on

and it feels like it is happening. So I think there was a girl called left anonym, and I can't remember where she was from, but this is in about 2010, and she realized that a lot of the technology that people were advertising to have sort of implanted was quite expensive cost a few hundred quid, and so she was one of the pioneers of sort of biohacking yourself, and she just started inserting random things under her skin. At one point, she said she inserted some device that she'd sort of made using a vegetable peeler and vodka to sterilize herself. Wow

But now she's quite famous Sorry she didn't put a vegetable peeler inside her body Because it wouldn't work if it's inside your skin No I don't be able to peel anything with her No The first thing that's peeling is your own skin No it was she I guess she opened up her skin

With a vegetable peeler and then inserted a little techie device Wow Well look desperate times That's amazing I almost became a cyborg myself Did you? Yeah back in England I did a TV thing where I was talking about cyborgs and they said

would you be up for having the little it's rice sized little RFID chip implanted in my hand and I said yes and I went there and the guy came and he had it with him and I got a call from my wife and she said if you become a robot man you are not coming home tonight and yeah but you could just bash

down the door probably I imagine so I had to fake the thing so I still got the injection it's a big it's a big It's a big, scary injection. It's like a straw, and it goes in between your forefinger and your thumb, and I had it pushed right in, and I still have a scar from where I should be a cyborg.

Okay, so what you're saying is, your wife said you couldn't do it. You still have a scar, but you really didn't do it. And what powers was it going to give you? You can get on a bus and tap it like a Jedi, and it will just go, whoop. But it doesn't work in the UK, does it? It wasn't work in the UK. It's not officially recognised in the UK. I think if you cut out the whole chip from a...

an oyster card, it might, I presume it does. There was a guy who took out the chip from an oyster card. He didn't put it in his body, but he put it on the top of a wand and he dressed like a wizard. So, yeah. He used to walk up to the oyster and go, when Guardian open aosa.

But there are lots of risks. It can't go wrong. So obviously, it's very safe to do, but there are risks with the human factor. So this last November, a writer for the website, vice, he got an implant and he wrote it up. And one of the first things you have to do with the one he had,

you have to secure it with a pin number. Unfortunately, he was at a party at the time and he said, he woke up the next day, hung over, and he couldn't remember the pin number for his own hand. But luckily he had it tattooed on his other hand. That is amazing.

But actually some people think that it is the mark of the beast to have these things. You know from the Bible, the idea that there's a mark which tells you if you're the devil or something. And apparently the passage in Revelation 1315 says,

also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave, to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark. And that's kind of the idea

that these people want us to have everyone to have these things and you won't be able to buy things without it. So what Satan's come to Earth to do is make sure we can get a free bus ride with our fingers. And also... He's got to start small. Also, I haven't seen evidence of anyone paying with their forehead.

I mean, you'd feel pretty stupid. Well, that's what... I was reading an FAQ by someone called Kyla Heffernan because this person was talking about a... It was a company that was getting their people to have these chips. And one of the questions was, do you have to lose your hand if you lose your job? Which the answer is no.

But then she also said to this thing about revelations, it says it's in your right hand or your forehead, but she says, actually many people get the microchip in the non-dominant hand, so it can't be to do with the devil. Well, I'm glad we finally cleared out whether or not it's the mark of the beast. You do get some hacks in the head, though.

There's one of the, another sort of pioneer of this biohacking is what I called Neil Harbors. and his device is mostly in his head and it's actually quite useful so sometimes these things can correct problems that people have and so he has a chromatopsia which is like extreme colour blindness he can't see colour at all he sees everything in grey scale and so he's had this antenna sort of implanted and then it kind of comes over his head so it looks like he's wearing one of those big reading lights or something it's called an iborg and it's mounted into his very clever yeah And it's mounted into his skull. And basically, it receives signals from the visible and the infrared light spectrums. And then it translates them into sounds that he can hear. And so then he can, because he's an artist, so he needs to be able to paint in the right colors. And so he can match up the colors that he's got labelled with the exact colors that are around him.

And it's very cool. And he also says that seeing in grayscale is more of a gift than a curse, because you see much better at night, apparently. So he sees better at night. He has a good memory for shapes. and they're very useful in the military, he claims, because they don't get fooled by camouflage, so they actually get employed sometimes in the military to be able to detect stuff.

Because you're not full by camouflage if you're not seeing colour, because you can't see that that green, leafy-colored thing looks a lot like all the other leaves. But surely absolutely everything looks like absolutely everything else. You would have thought. Yeah, I don't know if I trust near at all, but that's his claim.

There are smart gravestones these days So in Johannesburg Sometimes thieves will steal slabs of marble Because they can be very valuable So these days the smart graves They have a microchip in them And if someone tamper's with the smart grave It sets off an alarm

It calls security and it texts The relatives of the deceased I think I would just make it go Ooh Get off my gravestone You can't text the robber. That only works if the relatives have turned up. Or you mean the graves don't go?

As soon as it gets tampered with. That's even better. That's even better. It couldn't be that hard to rig up just a single hand about a foot below the soil to just go, blan. That is a brilliant idea. Yeah.

So good. Although it's going to freak you out every time you visit your grandma's grave. Oh, Colin, I knew I shouldn't step on that bit. It's very hard to put a chip, a microchip of this kind, into a starfish, bizarrely. And are they crying out for this biohacking as well? That's why you never see a starfish on the train. It's because it doesn't have the chip.

Very sad. That's because you can't get the oyster in there. Is that one? No, this was in... It was in a university in Southern Denmark, and they put a microchip inside a starfish, and they came back to the tank a few days later and it was laying there at the bottom of the tank. And they thought, that's so weird.

It's expelled the chip from, how did this happen? So they put chips into 53 other of the starfish to see what would happen and they monitored it and they noticed that it took days but it just moved it slowly out the body but not through the point of entry, which is the most obvious place for it to go back out. It went almost in the opposite direction

and it would move 10% of the distance from where it was put in every day to be expelled. and it has no problems doing it, no pain as far as they can tell. Maybe they thought that the people who put it in were guarding the entrance. Yes. Gotta go out of the back. I have a really quick fact about microchips and about the inventions of microchips.

So this is a fact from the Times newspaper, and it's about transistors, you know, the tiny switches that you get on microchips. So you used to be able to get thousands on, then you could get millions. These days, you can get 30 billion switches on an area of microchip the size of a fingernail. 30 billion. Wow.

So this is the fact from the times because obviously, you know, transistors have had to get a lot smaller over the years for this to be possible. The fact is, if a house had shrunk at the same pace that transistors have, you would not be able to see the house

without a microscope. Wow. That's how much they've shrunk over the years. And that is actually a lot like the most expensive flats in London these days. I just, one tiny thing, I wanted to say about biohacking is that it really serves a purpose for people who have had certain problems, as I said before, and it serves a particular purpose if you've had legs amputated or arms

amputated and you have prostheses and this kind of smart technology means that they can be really advanced. So I was looking at some people who've had smart technology implants like that. And there's a personal trainer called Jack Ears. And he was talking about the different prosthetic legs he has. So there are these companies which provide prosthetics for every occasion. So you can buy a whole bunch. And he said, I've got my water leg that I wakeboard in. I've got my sports leg, which is just a roughty-tuffty, smash it up and it won't break. He said he's got an electric leg, which is just for walking, but you don't really run in it.

I've got a spare mechanical leg. And then there's a pause. And then he says, of course, I've got my most important leg. I've got my wooden pirate's leg. You need that. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay. fact this week is that Queen Elizabeth I first's ladies in waiting would try on her

underwear every morning to make sure it hadn't been poisoned. What a quick thinking excuse from that maid when the queen came in. I wish I thought of that when my wife called me that time. That didn't happen. But how would that work? How long would they have to wear the underpants for before they knew? Oh, good question. So, um, first of all, we, we, It's quite controversial what kind of underwear Queen Elizabeth wore, because it wasn't very common that women would wear underwear in those days, especially not very wealthy women.

But we do know, we know according to her accounts, that she did have some drawers or, you know, knickers, but she definitely had stocking, she definitely had corsets. And in 1560, there was her secretary of state, who was called William Cecil. She was worried that the Catholics were coming to poison her. And he realized that the back doors of the chambers were kind of place. where servants came in and out and no one really paid attention to the laundresses and to the tailors and the wardrovers. So he thought this was a perfect way that someone would be able to poison her.

And so they decided that they were going to do this. And so the lazy waiting would try on the royal underpants and they would wait to see if there was any burning sensation. They didn't know about thrush back then. So... That would be the worst thing, wouldn't they? If they had thrush and then just someone get... gets executed. Some laundress.

Actually, I always think that with food tasters. What if you get your food tester who's allergic to peanuts or something? Oh, yeah. Well, this was the weird thing. The food tasters, they went way further than we would think of a food tasted now, just trying it a bit. So they would sometimes kiss and lick the plates and the cups and the cutlery of the king. All his cutlery was pre-licked.

All his plates, everything. Apparently, they would have to go kiss. They had to kiss the tablecloth, the seat, the cushion on the seat, everything. I think, yeah, because Louis XIV, employed 324 people specifically for that, didn't he? It takes a big team of people if you've got to lick every bit of cut away robbery. Dinner's going to go cold if it's one guy. Edward the 6th of England had servants test his chamber pot to see it was poisoned. I don't know how they tested that.

Was it splashback that's going to get in? How old that were? Maybe contact, no. I think it was that you sneak in, you powder a toilet lid with something. Henry VIII had a similar thing. So the idea is that there are poisons that can leach into your skin if you get your bare skin on them. So he might sit down on the chamber pot and it might come down that way.

Yes. I remember ages ago on the podcast we spoke about a, I think it was a king who sat down on the toilet, but there was an assassin underneath who put a sword up his bun. That's a slightly different thing. Like you're not going around... The king has been poisoned. You're not getting like a taster who goes around

and then he's got a massive sword through his tongue and he's going, oh, try to lick the toilet again, did you? It's true, that's why they call it arsenic, I think. But she was paranoid. Actually, she wasn't paranoid, but it was Cecil, who was paranoid and so he was the person who looked over her final years. And he does sort of sound like a pervert,

and I'm sure he wasn't, but when he makes this... He's not going to sue us now. He's a bloody pervert. So, yeah, he ruled that all garments that touched her body bare would be circumspectedly looked into. And he used to warn her about all these poisoning threats, which there were coming from all around the continent, because she had lots of enemies.

At one point, he warned her that they'd been threatened by the prospect of a poisoner who was going to be a burly Italian man with a black beard called Stefan. No. Look out for that. So do you know the method that they had to detect poison? Because as well as testers and like the King's

300 official liquors, they had unicorn horns or what were supposedly unicorn horns. Obviously they weren't. But you would wave it over your food like a wand at an airport or a security wand. Or a tube station. Imagine a... Yes, I got it.

nice so they would wave it over food and allegedly if there was poison in the food the unicorn horn would sweat and start shaking and we now know what these were they were the tusks of narwhals you know the nars

whales yeah yeah and Pope Boniface had a stash of knives allegedly made from narwhal well they were made from narwhal and so if you touched your food and it had poison them your cutlery would start to sweat yeah and they

they would fully disintegrate if you poured something into them and they just fell to pieces or exploded, then it was thought that was signified that something was poisoned. But they were sought after and royalty loved them. So there was a British explorer called Martin Frobisher and he did a big expedition and he came back at 1577 with a six foot long tusk and he said it came from a unicorn of the sea, which again was a narwhal. And the way he tested if it had the ability to neutralise poison is he put a whole bunch of spiders inside it and he said all the spiders had died and therefore it's a poison tester

and very cool but Queen Elizabeth kept it next to the crown jewels as like she really value that highly you know Cleopatra yeah she killed herself supposedly with an

aspers snake biting her but the story about her death is that she experimented first with the idea of poisoning herself with deadly nightshade the plant and apparently she asked a slave to try the juice and she then observed the slave

and found that the death was not as quick and painless as she would like so she then went with the snake instead. Amazing. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Chazinsky. My fact this week is that the world champion polo player builds swimming pools for his horses

whenever they get injured and it's so sweet actually. Sorry, he builds a new swimming pool every time it gets injured. I think, he builds one for each new horse that gets injured, because you can't share a swimming pool as a horse.

Right. So, not to contradict you, but I do think it's just one swimming pool that he gets them to swim in, because he has a lot of horses. He, in fact, I think, has the most privately owned amount of horses. He does, although you do have to have multiple pools. And in fact, so this is a guy

called Adolfo Cambiaso, who's this amazing Argentinian guy, who's been the world leader in polo for 22 years. Actually, I was just wondering, do you think he has misunderstood how to play water polo another team drowned again today amazing he's world champion yet he's never understood the rules but yeah he loves his horses

and so he like breathes he breeds them all all the horses that he competes with he breeds personally and he grows special grass for them and feeds them this special diet on his massive farms and he says if they have a little bit of pain or if they have a pooled muscle then I dig a swimming pool for them where they do laps And in fact, I emailed today our producer at QI, who is called Pierce Fletcher, and he is very interpolo.

So I was asking him about this. And he was saying, this is actually quite common to give top-end horses hydrotherapy. So it's kind of these small pools, which are basically like a lock in a canal and with a treadmill at the bottom of them. And they just walk along them and they exercise against the resistance of water. Wow. Or in Pierce's case, he used to just pull horses through the middle of a river because that's the poor man's first. That's the way of doing it. Yeah.

This guy also, he's very big into cloning horses. He's done it many times. He's got one horse that he's cloned 14 times. Because he loves these horses. And what's amazing about this, it's said that this particular horse that he's had done 14 times, that during matches, he'll even swap

to a different cloned horse. That's like a tennis player changing a racket for the exact same racket. It's with horse swapping. So I didn't realize that in polo, you just swap horses constantly. So it split into these sections. called chuckers and it's sort of between four and eight about I think it's about seven and a half minute periods that are called chuckers that constitute a match in polo and if you're a professional you'll use at least one horse per chucker sometimes two and you'll just quickly go and swap a horse so yeah he's got all these clones and he's constantly like you know number one number seven number five of the same same variety he's supposed what was his name that guy he's called Adolfo cambiazzo oh yeah he's supposed to be is he the best polo player

in the world. Yeah, the last 22 years. I read that sometimes he can gallop at 40 miles an hour for the entire length of the polo field bouncing the ball on his mallet with no one able to get anywhere near him before he just hits it into the goal. Wow. And the other players

like him so much, I think he's so great that they'll just watch him play instead of tackling him. That's incredible. Imagine playing against Federer just standing there and being like, that's fantastic, sir. That's a great show. This guy, Cambiaso. He's quite humble, because is he Argentinian, I think?

He grew up on a farm in Argentina. And he was interviewed by the Financial Times in 2011, and he said, I will never be a millionaire, and I don't want to be. And then the reporter pointed out that he is a millionaire. Many, many, many times old. So, well, there is another kind of polo where you, I don't think, can change your animal halfway through. And that's elephant polo.

so I spent a bit of today this happens a lot particularly in Southeast Asia so it's different in some ways the mallets have to be a lot longer that's one element of the game Of course, of course All the bowl would have to be massive

Yes Or the elephants tiny Yeah so they chose that work around The long mallet Probably simplest But I just started reading the rules The official rules of elephant polo today And they're just quite nice

Nice, you know, so they obviously have to have a rule for what happens if you fall off your elephant halfway through. They just stop. But also, you have to wear a traditional hat while you're playing elephant polo. That's really important. Can it be any traditional hat? No, no. Like some people with a sombrero. No, they're really strict.

It has to be a solo topi or, oh, sorry, or any other polo hat. There you go. It can be any hat. Just have to wear a hat. You've got to wear a hat. But if you're... It says here, should a players or elephant driver's hat fall off, the game is not stopped,

but the hat must be recovered immediately. Players and elephant drivers must not continue play without a hat being worn. I don't know why it's so important. What are you joking? You don't know why you need to wear a hat if you're riding in a quite violent

and very fast-paced game on the back of an elephant. I think it's a protection. It's like a helmet, isn't it? I think it's like a helmet. I didn't realize that. Okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Are you going to look like a right dickhead when you come up with your sombrera? So they stop play if they come after they? Because in horse polo, you don't stop play if you fall off. But you did used to. So this is actually something that our friend Pierce told me, that it used to be that as soon as someone falls off, you have to stop. But in 1936, a British player called Humphrey Guinness, so he was playing a match,

and he thought they were literally about to score, the opposition was about to score a goal, the ball was heading towards a goal, and so he just held himself off his horse. And you have to stop, so they had to disqualify the goal. And then after that, they said, maybe we should change that rule

because these fucking British dickheads are involved. We're going to have to move on in a second, guys, to final facts. If you really wanted to reclaim the traditional polo image, you could play Kokoru, which is Kyrgyzstan-trad traditional polo. So the ball is a dead goat. And the whole game is basically, everyone's on a horse,

and it's really tiring to play, obviously. Especially for the goat. Most of the game is just you and your team trying to pick up the goat. And the other team is also trying to pick up the goats. It weighs about 40 kilos, this goat. You just have to pick it up and carry it on your horse. You have to sort of shove it under your leg in the saddle.

That's a hard... That's a real sport. That's a really silly idea. There's also you can, if you want to stay in the UK, you can play Penny Farthing Polo, which is actually quite a hardcore sport because the world leader, I think, in Penny Farthing Polo is a guy called Neil Lawton,

and he's the guy who trained Bear Grills, so he went up Everest with Bear Grills, he's been up Everest a few times, I think. He's gone around the whole of the UK on a jet ski, he's flown a June buggy from London to Timbuck II. He's been on a Shackleton Memorial Expedition, to Antarctica and now he is competing in Sussex

in penny-fathing polo championships. Sad declined. Okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show and that is my fact. My fact this week is to prevent spoilers getting out some Game of Thrones scripts were built to self-detonate. That's why they all have such bad injuries

if you watch it. It's floated in their hands. Yeah, this was revealed by the guy who played Jamie Lannister in the show, the idea was, unfortunately, it's not as exciting as a Mission Impossible explosion of a script. Oh, I haven't seen that. I'd say that.

Oh, damn it. Yeah, that's the big bit of the movie. When Tom Cruise's script explodes. He didn't know any of his lines after that. Yeah. But yeah, so it is a digital script that they all get, And as soon as the scene has been shot, a button gets pressed somewhere,

and every single copy disappears, explodes into the cyber web. Sorry, wow. I'm in a room full of cyborgs, and I used... Cyberweb. Cyberweb.

Slow down, yeah. Yeah, you're right, it is all digital now, isn't it? So it means that the only paper on set is Starbucks cups. I assume... I assume that's some sort of spoiler, but I can't work out.

They have a real problem with their stuff being spoiled. So people fly drones very near where they're filming. And this is a massive problem because they can just spot scenes being filmed and, you know, they can find out that way. So what Game of Thrones did when they were making it, they filmed some of their scenes, they were in Northern Ireland, they filmed some of their scenes very close to Belfast Airport because it's a designated no-dron area.

But surely it's also a designated no-dragon area. That's true. Wow. Is that so, are there some shots where EasyJet just comes flying past? They also do have drone zappers for when they can't fly near Belfast. So it's a drone killer that can intercept, like it's a digital thing, it can intercept drones and immediately force them to land. Wow.

Wow. That's scary. I've found so I haven't seen Game of Thrones is now finished. I have been trying desperately to avoid spoilers. You both have seen it, James and Andy. And I thought, it was amazing at the very end. Well, so today I was, again, looking, we're talking about Game of Thrones and spoilers, had to be very careful looking, and I found that in fact in America there is a thing whereby

if you don't like someone, you can have this website called spoiler.io, send a spoiler anonymously to someone that you hate. That's terrible. Yeah. It costs 99 pennies, American. to do this and you give them the number and there's an FAQ that I read on the page for how does this work

and so what inspired you to do this? They said that it was a lady who had done this with an ex-boyfriend who she hated so much that she just kept texting him, Game of Thrones spoilers and he thought that was amazing, I just need to do that and the final question of the FAQ is how do you sleep at night? And the guy wrote, pretty well actually

I have a machine that simulates the sounds of the ocean he's fine now here's the shit thing I went to check out the site and right at the top was the spoiler of how it all ends now there why would you do that

I didn't set up the site and I guess you weren't going on to the site in order to spoil your one you know that's fair enough that's on them the worst people for spoilers are the actors in these shows aren't they?

They are not to be relied upon so apparently Robert Downey Jr. is a particular bad one, so he was involved when he was writing on a film a couple of years ago, and they actually made fake scenes for him to help write without his knowledge so that he wouldn't give away the

actual plot spoilers. Yeah. There's a guy called Tom Holland, who I think plays Spider-Man, and, well, you're not going to like him so much after this. He's so not trusted, because he's given away, he's leaked so many plot twists in the past, that

he's never given full scripts to act out. He's just given the scripts bit by bit, and he's also made to act out a whole series of fake scenes so that he doesn't know which is real and which isn't. No, but it's not even that. Even in the real scenes that they're filming, a lot of the people that he fights are CGI characters, they don't tell him who he's fighting in the CGI in the real scene.

He'll be like, who am I fighting? They're like, you don't need to know. Well, what shall I do? Just make some kick moves and stuff. But how big is he? That'll give it away, we can't tell you. So he has no, because he is very famous for consistently. He says that he has to have to have.

opposite a tennis ball sometimes. That's just what they use to show him where it is. They're all terrible. The Avengers, they're basically terrible at spoilers, aren't like? So Mark Ruffalo, for instance, complained that he had to do five different endings for Avengers Endgame

so that he wouldn't know which one was the real one. Although in fairness, he did once accidentally live stream the first 20 minutes of Thor Ragnarok on Instagram. So, you know, I'm allowed to spoiler Star Wars. Like the original trilogy, guys. You've had time, you've had time to see it. So, this is the really weird thing.

About two years before the second Star Wars film was released, Dave Proust, who was the huge guy, who was the physical body of Darth Vader, he was speaking at a sort of fan event. He was speaking to over a thousand fans and he started just imagining what's going to happen in the next few films and he joked that at the end of the third film

it would be revealed that Luke and Darth Vader were father and son he revealed this two years before the film came out no one knew at this point Wait so he that wasn't a coincidence He didn't know He didn't know, really? He had no idea Wait so was it possible that they stole that idea of him? Probably, it's amazing

He wrote an autobiography which was called Straight From the Force's mouth which is good but I thought a better title would have been the Empire Strikes Hardback that would have been and I told that to someone

who met him and he went uh apparently yeah token attempt at being polite him there spoilers obviously can be

it's hugely irritating if you follow something and you have a spoiler get told to you and it can really bring up anger and in fact there was a story that was in the paper a few years back where in Antarctica two Russian science researchers who were living there, there was a stabbing incident.

And the reason was because one of the science colleagues kept revealing the ending of all the books that this guy was planning to read. And it got so aggravating that he stabbed him. The guy survived. But yeah, that's... Well, things get pretty tense on Antarctica, don't they? Yeah. On spoilers, the first use of the word spoiler to mean, well, we mean it today, what it is today, was in 1971. It was in a magazine

called National Lampoon. And the idea was they were going to put the spoilers of horror movies so it would reduce the risk of unsettling and dangerous suspense in their viewers.

So if you didn't really want to be shocked by a movie you could read these spoilers and it would tell you what was going to happen. Oh, really? So you're actually doing someone a favour? Yeah.

That was the idea, yeah, yeah. Well, there have been studies which have claimed different things about whether spoilers affect your mood and your enjoyment of the thing. Some studies say that spoilers make you enjoy a story more because you know what's going to happen

you don't know how they're going to get there and another study has claimed that it makes you enjoy a story much less and that you get really consistently you find it less fun if you know what's going to happen. But the ones who say that you enjoy it more I think are complete bullshit I have to say because they make you read a short story and they just tell you at the start what the end is

whereas the whole thing is that it's something that you've been invested in and built up to over weeks and weeks in it so you can't really simulate that. Then you love Dickens, of course, which, and they have spoilers at the start of every chapter, don't they? They tell you what's going to happen. They do, yeah, but it's not. I don't, I don't love him like for the thrill. I don't love him for the big reveals at the end of every chapter, although that used to be such a big thing. So spoilers, sort of, the idea of a spoiler came about in the mid-19th century, really, and the concept that that might be a really bad thing to reveal the ending. But just

before that, Dickens was writing the old curiosity shop, and there's, and I'm really sorry if you haven't read this but I'm afraid you're too late. So there's this Little Nell is perilously ill at one point in the old curiosity shop and you probably know it was released in installments and the installments got to America after they had been released in Britain and people were so

desperate to know what happened to Little Nell because they just knew that she was ill that whenever the British people arrived in the New York Docks and started disembarking the ships they would riot. They would literally write at the docks begging them to tell them what had happened to Little Nell and they'd be screaming, is she alive? Is she alive? Is she alive?

Wow. And you actually, you didn't give anything away about whether she was alive or not. No, I didn't. You're right. You're right. She dies. We're going to have to wrap up very shortly, guys. Just a couple of really quick things about Game of Thrones. Yeah, yeah, let's go for it. So this is...

I can't quite believe this, but... So a lot of it's filmed in Northern Ireland because it has the right kind of terrain and stuff. According to the LA Times, almost 1% of the population of Northern Ireland has been an extra in Game of Thrones. Wow. And there's 1.9 million people who live there.

I've got a friend who was in Game of Thrones. And he was there the whole time. And literally you cannot see him at all. Because they just had so many extras. And the battle scenes are so massive. Yeah. So I've seen him dressed as a Dothraki, but we just never saw him on screen at all.

Believe me, we tried. In China, it's very common that people will download it illegally. And that's because you can watch it legally. but China disapproves of all sex, violence and supernatural horror. So in 2014, one internet person said that, okay, they've caught all the fight scenes, all the nude scenes, all the dragons. I guess that's okay if all you want to watch is a medieval European castle documentary.

That's so good. And you're playing it pretty fast and lose with the word documentary, I think. Yeah. I like that initially it was meant to be a short story. No. When he started writing it, he thought, this is going to be a great short story. And then he's like, oh, this is still going. What's going on here?

And here we are all these years later. One of my favorite things is that during the filming, this is just a little filming fact about it, Amelia Clark, who played Mother of Dragons, she was doused in so much fake blood during a scene where she has to eat the horse's heart, that during a break, when she went to the toilet, she was so covered in this blood that she couldn't get herself off the toilet. she was stuck there as a yeah the blood had sort of just congealed if only she'd had a toilet tester

yes does she die in the end by a sword up the bun by any chance don't tell me don't tell me don't tell me imagine if the answer was yes that's how they all die that would be amazing that would be incredible

There's just one character that you'd never see, but he's just a serial sod of the bug murder. The licker. He's the only other guy who survived. Never see him because he's busy licking shit all over. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy. At Andrew Humberham, James. At James Harkin. And Shazinski. You can email podcast at QI.com.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at No Such Thing. Or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there. Yeah. We have tour dates. All the links are upcoming tour dates. And we also have a few bits of merchandise.

Thanks so much, Stockholm. That has been amazing. That's been awesome. We'll see you again. Good night.