No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Political Moss

Episode Date: February 16, 2023

Dan, James, Anna and Andrew discuss snail roads, convent gardens, political moss, and political goss. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at nosuchthingasafish.com/apple or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everybody. Just before we start this week's show, we've got an exciting announcement to make. And that is that our half-sister show, our sort of semi-siblings show, the Museum of Curiosity, is coming back. Absolutely. It's a show on BBC Radio 4. It takes place on Mondays, starting from the 20th of February, at 6.30 in the evening. And even more excitingly, our half-podcast sister, Anna, to show. Sinsky is starring in this year's series. Yes, that's exactly right. The show is hosted by John Lloyd, the father of QI. It's a sort of fictional museum and imaginary museum,

and every week they have brilliant guests submitting strange and wonderful and imaginary objects to the museum. John is the director of the museum, and Anna, this series is going to be the curator. So that's really exciting. Absolutely. If you love No Such Things of Fish and if you love QI, you will absolutely love Museum of Curiosity.

And just to remind you, it's on Monday the 20th of February at 6.30 and for the subsequent six weeks. Okay, on with the podcast. On with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Tishinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Andy.

My fact is that there's a type of moss called political moss. Jesus, is there. Yeah. Well, that's a great question, Dan. No, there isn't. What? Thank you for bringing into the show. No, wait a minute.

Your fact is that there isn't a type of moss called political moss. So what this fact is, that phrase, there's a type of moss called political moss, is something that a listener got in touch with a listener called Beau Stucky and he had been in touch with chat GPT which is a newish kind of artificial intelligence conversation bot basically that's one of the most powerful ever created

but in fact I think might be the most powerful ever created A time of recording Yeah exactly I mean if you're listening to this after the revolution It's the second most powerful ever created And if you're scurrying through rat holes And you know like eating old packaged food and fleeing the robots then yeah anyway but chat dpt is currently best in show

and um he asked chat dpti to come up with an episode of fish about that fact of political moss and it came up with I would say a pretty good transcript okay yeah do you think yeah well can we can we read the transcript and just see how it well you've passed them around to all of us so it feels like we've got no choice okay so everyone has a name here except me I'm a host I guess yeah okay welcome back to the show

which we never say No. Welcome back to the show. I'm your host, Dan. With me today, we have James, Anna, and Andy. So, Andy, what do you have for us today? Well, I've got a real doozy. Did you know there's a type of moss called Political Moss?

Political Moss? That sounds like something out of a dystopian novel. No, no, no. It's a real thing. Apparently it was discovered in the 1800s by a botanist named William Jackson Hooker. And get this, it's called Political Moss, because it prefers to grow in areas with high levels of pollution. Hey, funny. Funny chat, GPT. Sorry, I've gone off script. I'm so sorry. Right, back in the game.

Wow, that's really interesting. So it's like a canary and a coal mine for environmental pollution. Yeah, I can see how that would make sense. And I bet it would be a good indicator for scientists studying the effects of pollution on plants. Exactly. That's incredible. I never would have thought that something as small as moss could have such a big impact on our understanding of the environment. I think we need more political moss in the world, children. Indeed. I think we all do. And that's it for today's episode. No Such Thing as a Fish. Join us next week for more fascinating facts and interesting titbits. Or tidbits. Not titbits. Titbits is fine. Titt bits is a word. This is not in the Jap Beach's script, by the way.

podcast called Show Us Your Tipbits, and it's just interesting facts. That's great, written on people's breasts. Yeah. Okay. Great. So anyway, that was painful. Did we think it was realistic? It wasn't.

No, it wasn't, because we're not that worthy. There was no mention of the word penis in there. No, right. There was no pun. I didn't see a pun anywhere. No mention of golf. No. Could we call it a pun that it's high levels of pollution and it's talking about

metaphorical pollution in the world of politics? It doesn't really make sense. It doesn't work, does it? So is political moss real or not? No. No, it just might be. I mean, the details are all here, right? I think Bo Stucki, I'll listen to,

I came up with the idea of political moss, and then he saw what Chat GPD could come up with. I did check if there was a political moss. There isn't one. There's some politicians called Moss. And there is a political word, a moss back. In America, that's an extreme conservative, is a Mossback. Really?

And the idea is that it came from when people tried to dodge the draft in the Civil War. people from the Carolinas who tried to hide from the draft were called moss backs because it was as if they were putting moss on their backs and hoping that were people go past and then it later came to mean sort of reactionaries and then it later became to mean conservatives I'm not quite sure where the link came

but that's it's a bit like the Rolling Stone Gathers no moss you know and then you've stayed in one place for so long with all your opinions staying the same that now you've got moss on your back it could be that yeah it would make sense for a conservative yeah without that context is that what you're saying Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's their policy.

So, Jack DPD, it's really good at certain things. As I asked it for ideas for a birthday party. It came up with some great suggestions. Go on. That was fine. Oh, no, well, it was, it was just, it wasn't. I didn't write them down, but I just thought, oh, there's a great ideas. Okay.

But you can't remember any of them. Was it sort of top of the Eiffel Tower or just tea and cake with your mom? It was more like principals behind a birthday party, like invite people and, you know, and we like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, I actually, I was. I think that is one of the big problems with chat, what's it called? Chat, GPT, right?

And that is that it's really good at making things that are theoretically correct. It's good at grammar. It's good at making words that fit after each other, but it doesn't necessarily think like a human thinks. So if you say to someone, give me a good idea for a party, they might say, Pirates, vodka, let's go to the top of the Eiffel Tower. But the computer thinks you mean, invite people, you know. I was quite grateful for that. In fact, it showed me where I've been going wrong

A few years in a row now with my partners. Pirates and vodka. When is your daughter's first birthday? There's one great thing about chat dpd, which is it has, it warns you, it may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content. So it's, because it's broad, it literally has hoovered up trillions of words from all over the internet. That's quite good, isn't it?

Because I know a lot of humans who don't realize that they're doing that. Exactly. So it's aware of itself. And also, the other great thing about it is it has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021. And I did try it. I asked it, who is Liz Truss? And it says she's the Secretary of State for International Trade. Did it?

It's just a simpler time. How many of you guys have a smart speaker? Yeah, like an Alexa thing. You've got one. And I think you've got a Google thing. Yeah, yeah. So, Anna, I bet you don't. I'm a smart speaker, Andy.

Brilliant. But no, I don't have one. Okay. Okay, that's roughly where I thought the three of you would be. Yeah. Yeah. Do you, how do you address them? Do you say please?

No. You say, hey, fucker. Yeah. Boy. Play me some music now. They better be something I like. Okay. And come the revolution, James.

Goodbye. Okay, well, that again is broadly in line with what you'd expect because men are much less polite to their smart speakers than women. Okay. Men say, please, 45% of the time, still feels quite high. and women 62%. Yeah, I don't say please. I'm sorry to say.

I've never said, please. Well, there's a school of thought which says you shouldn't say please. And in fact, you shouldn't teach your children to say please because you're teaching them to respect the machines. And there's another school of thought which says, maybe we should teach them to respect the machines. And Google recently, it added a function called Pretty Please, right?

Which I find a bit sinister. Where if a user says please or thank you, they will get a delightful response from the speaker, which starts with, it'll say back to you something like, thanks for asking so nicely. and then it will say your answer. Yeah. Yeah.

But I think you're very lonely, aren't you, if you need that from your Alexa. Yeah, well, also you don't, I don't say please or thank you in the hope that someone will say, thanks for asking so nicely. I think there should be a slightly nicer tone of voice it uses for you, and you should get a slightly ruder tone of voice back if you don't say please or thank you. I think that would be a good way of doing it. Yeah. Or maybe it does things slightly worse.

Exactly. As in the less you say, please or thank you, the more you ask for it to play Bell and Sebastian and it plays Slipknot. Yeah. It plays Bell and Sebastian, but it also just spits in the middle of the song, just at the good bit. It puts you off. Is this what your one-person parties are like, Andy? It's me and a load of speakers.

They're all talking to each other. It's a social nightmare. They're all playing each other Bell and Sebastian. I'm just wandering around the room with my drink, looking for someone to talk to. Busted, play Busted. Come suddenly play Busted. Do you know there's a big split in the AI. world at the moment between the I guess the deep machine learning proponents which is most of

what we usually talk about now so obviously you just feed it shed loads of data and it figures stuff out and then the other group called them called themselves gofi which I just like and the gofires that stands for good old-fashioned AI oh okay and what's that so they're the ones who think that there needs to be more of an element of programming and structure and human input and their argument is that you can only get so far with the machine learning because what AI tends to be quite bad at if you do it that way is kind of categories

and hierarchies so it can get incredibly good at knowing what a cat is if you show it a billion pictures of cats you can spot a cat just by a little hair on its tail but it's not very good at knowing okay a cat's an animal and a dog's an animal so it'll see a dog and be like that's the same as a cat

or an elephant and be like that's similar to a cat in the sense that it's an animal whereas it'd be more likely to see something which is not like a cat but has pointy years and think, well, that's the same as a cat because it looks like it. Exactly, yeah. It's kind of like the difference

between going to a foreign country and living there to learn a language and kind of being taught the grammar, I suppose. Yeah. I actually do think that things like Babel are quite good programs for learning. That's brilliant. You're off the clock now.

No, I think they're amazing. Does it feel, Elon Musk says, we've got to be careful, AI is going to take over? is it dangerous a and what's i that'll be like proclamation number one for the robots wasn't it it's not a b anymore it goes a i b c yeah yeah i've forgot my follow-up question now is it that is a i dangerous

is it dangerous yeah and will it make us forget things google what was i trying to say please what was my second question actually there's obviously a lot of debate as to whether Elon Musk's AI is dangerous and kind of specifically in driverless cars. And I read this amazing thing from a few weeks ago, which I hadn't really seen covered until I went to research this. But there was a famous demo video of a driverless car in 2016, which I think I remember is the one I'm thinking of. And it was really well publicized, launched loads and loads of funding for driverless cars and lots of excitement, like, here's what they can do. And it's basically a video of a car driving driverlessly on its own autonomously and navigating traffic

lights and stuff but there's a person sitting in the driver's seat and I remember we talked about this at the time I think and it says under the video the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons he is not doing anything the car is driving itself I remember that yeah engineer at Tesla's just come out and said he was driving the car oh wow isn't that mad. Because I thought that in 2016, Teslas did try themselves for sure. You could go on to water. They could, but it was doing stuff that they couldn't do at that time. So, for instance, it was stopping at a red light.

There was an AI that was programmed to play a video game, a survival video game. And they just wanted to see what would happen. And it got the highest score that anyone had ever got. But he got that by having lots of children and then eating them all. Okay. Oh, my God. And it's just a classic way of the AI just, finds a way out that no human would ever think of doing that, right? Was that a thing you could do in the game? Well, they worked it out that it was a thing you could do.

You had to eat, right? And you had a way of making children. And every time you ate something, you've got more points. And so it's like, well, let's just keep making children. I got a fact that seems like it's about AI, but it's actually about cows. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

So there's, you're spoiled the ending there, wasn't he? There's an AI that can eat grass and make milk. It's brilliant. So there are these smart dairy farms now, right? And the point of them is that you can assess the health of your cows the whole time by filming them, right? And it's actually more useful than having a person there watching them, even if you could have a person there working, you know, all the time. And it's because you're scanning them as they walk and you can see if they've gone a bit lame, right? Now, the amazing fact is from the person who designed the system or co-designed it.

It's called Melvin Smith, who says that cows hide their limping when they think they're being watched. Because they're prey animals And if they've got a bad foot Really? They think, oh, I better conceal this And they walk, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm just walking That's really interesting. You know some humans, like there are some humans

that if you twist your ankle, you'll just kind of carry on walking and you don't want anyone to know And there's some humans who will make a right song and dance about it Thank you. Yeah, okay. Those ones who make a song and dance about it are the predators

and the ones who hide it are the prey. Natural prey. I didn't think I was a predator before, but I'd make such a fuss whenever I slightly turned an ankle or something. Show us how powerful you are. This is actually a power move. I'd like some peas now.

That's really interesting. I was chatting to someone on email for something else about an AI which has learned how to tell whether sheep are sad or sick or something like that. Because if you look at a sheep and you look at another sheep, it's really hard to tell anything about them because they just look like sheep, right? but there are very, very sort of micro expressions that they have

when they have saw rudders or they have, you know, saw feet or whatever, but the AI can scan them and can tell with 80% accuracy which ones are sick and which ones aren't sick. It's like a gambling thing, isn't it? Like if you're playing poker against the sheep, you could use that. Yeah. It's like a gambler's tell. But I presume you could use that in poker.

I presume that if you had that kind of technology, you programmed it for people, you could easily tell who had what. I suppose it's possible that humans have micro expressions. be a tiny tiny fuck and then you know yeah that happens it happens to the woohoo but so short that we can't see it normally certainly poker players think that there are certain tells that people have like maybe your your pupils slightly dilate if you've got good cards or bad cards or stuff

I don't know how to read that no I think most people are good at poker who basically hide any semblance of that and I don't think I think AI's better you're better of making an AI that has x-ray vision to see through the cards with the farm stuff though there's with pigs If you get a sense of photo as a farmer of your pig, if it's feeling unhappy, they'll be like, pig number eight is feeling down just by the machines. Yeah, by looking, yeah. That's incredible. Do you think the machines are trying to get the animals on their side before the apocalypse? Oh, McDonald had a farm AI, AI.

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that snails use trails like we use roads. Do they get their mucus from a shell station by any chance? Wow. See, it's because we have in real life. Where we get petrol from is called Shell as well. You were doing so well with that AI, AIA, AOL. Look, anyway, snails leave this slime trail, which obviously we've all seen and know about.

And if another snail gets into that first snail's slime trail and follows it, it takes way, way less energy for it to move. and when snails are moving, a huge amount of the energy that they're using goes into making this slime on which they kind of move. So I think the mucus production, the slime production cost of moving, outweighs the metabolic cost by 35 times. Right. You know, what does that mean? So that means like, you know, if you're respiring and trying to move the way we move,

that's the metabolic cost. But then on top of that, they're using 35 times more energy on just making slime to move. Basically, this is why snails have never made anything of themselves. It's quite tragic, really. What? Some snails, I read this, spent 60% of their energy making mucus. Right. And it's just, there's no time.

There's no time left in the day. You spend so much of your life making podcasts, and I don't think snails think much of that. That's why I've never made anything of myself. Well, that's what they do. They're snails. They make mucus. Yeah. I know.

But if they didn't have to make all this mucus, I just wonder what kind of stuff they'd have going on. But they can, as a result of the mucus, yes, it's a terrible amount of wasted energy when they're just trying to walk on, say, a flat surface. But they can climb walls. they can go upside down. That's the purpose of it. They're Spider-Man. We're just podcasters. They're also making roads for other snails.

So they're, you know, utilitarianistically, it's actually quite a good thing for them to make these paths. Yeah, but I bet there are some snails who just get dumped with all the mucus making and there are some real coasters aren't there. It's just like, fucking Barry again in my mucus trail. And I've literally never seen him make his own mucus. Yeah. But he is, you know, he's doing very well for himself.

His podcast is going brilliantly. Oh my gosh. You rarely see a sort of, you know, gridlock of snails sort of traveling. I always see snails sort of quite isolated and alone. I think they've got very long stopping distances on the roads, but much longer than ours. Yeah, you're right. I know.

I do agree with that because, like, if you see trails in your garden or whatever, it's not like you see a trail and then you see another snail following it. You don't tend to very much. True. And I don't know why, because obviously they're more effective at reducing the amount of energy it takes to move on them, the newer they are. So if you're on a newly laid trail, you know, you're reducing your energy levels of cost by about 50%. Yeah. And that's within a day you've got to get on that trail. Right. Wow. If we humans had this ability, you could effectively

lay a trail. So I could, if I had my family to go out on a walk, I could go like, I'll go out an hour early. Let me just walk ahead. And then they all get on. Let's go on a nice walk. Well, I'll go at different times. But they could catch up with me because it'd be like walking on a travel later. It'd be just as you finish your three-hour walk. Lovely. Oh, thanks, darling.

That's really great. Great walk. How are the kids? Where are the kids? I really like the fact that snails leave dotted trails. This is cool. Sometimes they do. And basically, there are lots of different theories I've read about why.

One is that there's a kind of snail called the Rosie Wolf snail, which is a predator snail. And it hunts other. snails by their trails. Obviously, if you get on the trail, you just follow it and then you, you know, you eat the snail. So that might be the reason. Or there's another guess that they're going over a very rough terrain and it would actually

require so much slime to properly slime all the ground under them that they make a little economy there and they just proceed without making slime for every bit of the part. I like the idea that they're leaving gaps so that people can't follow them. That's a cool idea, isn't that? It's nice idea. Because there was a thing, wasn't there last year in the news where they found some someone was smuggling snails in an airport or something. Yes.

And they found one snail. Yes. And then they just followed his snail trail back. They found like 100 more or something like that. That's exactly what. These giant, the giant African land snails, they're absolutely mega and people import them to eat them.

Yeah. They're really vilified the African land snails. And in fact, they have a close relationship with the rosy wolf snails, who I think are the most vicious snails on the planet. They're known as cannibal snails. And honestly, look up a video of them eating other snails, it's so frightening.

Time lapse, it must be. Yeah, yeah, I'll put it on at least two time speed. So they'll catch up with the snail by following in its trail, the Rosie Wolf snail. They'll sort of climb over its shell, and then the snail obviously retreats back into its shell trying to get away, and the Rosie Wolf just sticks its head. Imagine how frightening that is this huge head

coming into your shell and sucks it all out. It's grotesque. This is actually a question that's been, I saw it online, there's a meme question the other day. So the question is, you can have $10 million $10 million. I don't want this bloody Malcolm Gladwell question. No, no, no.

You can have 10 million quid, but if you accept it, there is a snail always chasing you somewhere around the world. It doesn't ever stop moving. It always knows where you are, and it doesn't ever die. Do you accept the money? But what? It's a killer snail. Oh, sorry.

Sorry, and if it touches you, you die. Oh, okay, so yeah, I missed out the only important bit of information. And crunch, problem. It's, um, it's, It follows the movie, isn't it? It follows, but with a snail. Yeah.

I don't think I take the money. Would you not? No, because I like peace of mind. Couldn't you just live half the year in Australia and the other half the year in the UK? So just as he's kind of getting over the Tasman, see you get on a plane. Is he or she a clever snail in that respect if I boarded a flight to Australia? Oh, could it boarded the next flight? Could it board the next flight?

Was that what these guys were doing in the end? air pot. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it could. Yeah, yeah. It's a clever snail. Oh, okay. Well, that's a bit different,

because I think the whole point of it being a snail is it's going to take forever to get to you. Oh, sorry, and it's got legs in it runs. And a knife. And it's six foot. So, yeah, snails are frightening, I think, is what we've learned here. Yeah. But actually, sorry, I did mention a connection between the African land snail,

which is a big bad guy because it's this big snail and it destroys invasive species. And the rosy wool snail. And that's because, so in Hawaii, There's loads of kind of endangered species of snail, lots of types of tree snail. And the African land snail rocked up and started threatening them. And so in 1955, we did the classic and we thought, what we'll do is we'll introduce a bigger snail. Brilliant. To eat the African land snail.

I went to Hawaii a few years ago. If you go there's just one massive snail. That's the island, isn't it? So they introduced another bigger snail. Yep. And it decided, the rosy wolf snail decided it preferred the taste of all the delicious tree snails that were really endangered to the African land snail. and it's now responsible for the extinction of at least eight native species. Oh, man.

We've got to stop doing that. We've got to stop it. So some winkles, which is kind of snail, that you can read the slime trails of other snails, and they can get all sorts of data from the slime, the sex, the species, the direction it was going, and how attractive it is as a mate. From its slime?

Yeah. And if you're a lady snail and you're free of parasites, which is to a male, there's basically the Benny Hill show happens where you've got a load of male snails chasing you and this happens so much that there are some they're called rough periwinkles the females they can change the composition of their slime

and basically turn on a cloaking mode where to hide their parasites well to hide the sex they leave a sex neutral trail because they've got so many bloody male rough periwinkles chasing after them I'm sick of this I'm not interested and so they change the slime

how cool is that? That's amazing Yeah. Like a phone box. Like a phone box. Your snail is snail trail. I don't know. I was just trying to think what the human equivalent is of leaving a trail behind you, advertising how sexy you are.

Oh, those things in the phone boxes. Yeah. I mean, it's a dated reference. I don't think the way they work is you go to one phone box and they say, right, now to the next phone box. And you keep going down the phone boxes until you eventually reach the prostitute. I think that's how it works. That's how it. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right. More and more clues every time. Yeah. One more number added to the phone number. She's been here. She doesn't then conceal her trail by leaving a gender neutral card in a phone box. No, no, she doesn't, not that kind of trick. What an average time?

We should move on in a sec. I just have some things on slime. Yeah. That I quite like. Do you know that to most of the inhabitants of the ocean? The ocean is slime. It's thick and viscous. Slimy, fiscis.

Slimy. What's to fish and things? To things more than fish. So I think to like plankton and microbes. And I don't think we know how it actually feels to them. But basically this was an article, it was a new scientist in the year 2000. So maybe it's been completely disproven.

But basically they found out that there are way more sugar molecules in the seawater than we thought there were. It's like this whole mesh of sort of saccharide molecules. And they trap water in their mesh. And that creates this kind of gel. And it's cobwebby, it described it as. And so if you're a small animal, going through that because you're so tiny that feels like really thick and viscous

and we think it must feel like that to them because if you look at how microorganisms are distributed in the sea or like plankton or tiny things they're not evenly distributed or randomly distributed they're sort of in clusters because I guess some bits are thicker than others in this weird cobweb and so they can't plough through them and yeah you're just a little kind of plankton going down the sea you can't really swim because you're plankton that's the whole point of plankton but then occasionally you just get to a bit and you're like, oh, great.

This is all slimy now. Yeah, you mean great sarcastically. Yeah, yeah. Oh, can you climb through the water as it were. If you're plankton, you can't move at all. You're just, you're, whatever the currents do. Whatever happens. Yeah.

Whatever happens happens. No wonder they've evolved sarcasm as a train. Force plankton's most powerful weapon. Okay. It is time for fact number three. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Italy's defense minister was once hospitalized for smoking 150 cigarettes in a day. Was it a challenge?

What was it? Was it a competition? I think he was very stressed. It was during an election in 2013. It's a guy called Guido Clasetto. And anyone who follows Italian politics will know that quite recently the brothers of Italy have won an election or become the biggest party. and they formed a government and they're kind of like the UKIPI nationalist

party of Italy and Gido who I think was the leader of Brothers of Italy at the time in 2013 he was electioneering and apparently had one cigarette every six minutes from 8 a.m. to 11pm and started feeling not very well and had to go to hospital.

Wow. But then after a few days he was fine. What does that do to you that level of intensity. What did they diagnose him with? Well, he felt that it was stress-related as well, I think. Oh, yeah. That's what a top of doctors, was it? So do you drink?

Oh, I just have a sherry at Christmas. Do you smoke? Well, you know, just 150 a day. Just every six minutes. Yeah, I think he... Definitely the stress thing, though. And I live quite near a main road. Can I unpack the six-minute thing, though? Because is that including, is that post-finishing a cigarette with a six-minute break?

No. So every six minutes he would have had to have started and ended. For the math to work. How long was it? Did he take a few minutes? You have to go quite quickly to get through one in three or four minutes. He might not have got to the filter in all of them. Right, right.

Yeah, because you're busy. It's stressful. You're campaigning here. I try to find any evidence anyone had ever smoked more than this in a day. Oh, yeah. And I don't know if you guys found Stefan Sigmund. Oh, yeah. No.

Right. But he's called Sigmann. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I didn't know. Stefan Sigmund. Sigmund.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's close enough. Anyway, in 1996, what he did, he was trying to get a Guinness World Record, apparently. And there are some people who say it didn't happen, but there is a photo of him doing it. Yeah, it happened. He jammed 800 cigarettes into a wheel, rigged them all up to a pipe. Yeah. And smoked 800 cigarettes in six minutes. Yeah, and it was a rotating wheel.

And the idea was that he'd be able to get a little bit of all the cigarettes. The people who said, I think it definitely happened. I think most people who say that. that it didn't happen were more saying that he couldn't have got much from the ones on the outside of the wheel. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That surely wasn't accepted as a...

Well, Guinness said it was not environmentally friendly. Yeah, or healthy. One good reason why it's not. But no, it's... Yeah, I read a newspaper article about him, because at the same time as doing this, he also ate 29 hard-boiled eggs in four minutes. And he leaped into a lake from a 135-foot cliff, all in order to get into the Guinness book of records.

but Carol Jones, a Guinness spokesperson, said, we do discourage this sort of thing and suggested that he tried the record for collecting cigarettes instead of smoking them. Okay. So, yeah. I wonder if he got any, I wonder if he holds any for any of those events

because it sounds, they're all too dangerous. It was almost like an advert, because it was in quite a lot of newspapers during the day, and it was almost like it was an advert for Guinness saying, don't do these stupid things because you won't get in the Guinness Book of Records because it listed a few things you couldn't get records. That's mad. I was just looking at tips for quitting if you're the 150 a day kind of person.

And I just came across an article that I really enjoyed in The Guardian because it asked for other people's ways that they found quit smoking when the normal stuff didn't work. And so if the patches and the gum haven't worked for you, here's what some people recommend. There was Pete who got all... I'm not going to say you smoke Pete instead. But just bury yourself in it. Yeah, yeah. And on top of that, you won't be drafted. into the war.

It's a win-win situation. Sorry, Anna. Peter. Peter, yes. He had all of his teeth removed. He smoked for about 40 years and he went to the dentist and said... Does that stuff you from being able to smoke? Because not that on its own, but he had them take out all of his smoking yellow teeth. And then he had them all replaced with fake teeth, which looked really good.

And then he was like, well, I don't want to do anything to damage these fake teeth. That's a good idea. Incentimizing. I like it. Great way to quit. Pull out all your teeth. Well, there's, okay, here's a different method then. Because they do lots, obviously, the warnings on the packet,

and then I think some countries have considered warnings on each individual cigarette in case you haven't got the message from the pictures on the packet. But you've seen your mouth, you can't read it. Unless you could create a cigarette that gives smoke signals that say, stop smoking. That's good. Like Gandalf kind of breathing out that shit, but he'd breathe out a picture of a disease.

lung. The director's cut. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, they kind of, so in 2013, there were some researchers at Sterling who kind of did this. They made a packet of cigarettes which shouted at you. When you opened the packet, it played an audio clip warning about the dangers of smoking. I think that's quite good. I have a, I've got a musical biscuit tin.

Do you? Yeah, yeah. And does it say, stop eating biscuits, fat, sell? It was a Christmas present. And I'm still working my way through it Because it's got lots of biscuits in it But every time you open it It's very hard not to play a bit of the tune

Because you move it You know, you move it and it's quite delicate And so And it does, it's more made me stealthy About opening the tin Because I don't want to give away the fact That I'm eating biscuits That's quite clever

I don't want my neighbours to hear And come over and say Hey can I have a biscuit You know So you think you're going to be like an ice cream man Your neighbours are going to hear A song of biscuits Very close to my favourite

my neighbours, we're great friends, but you know, you've got to keep something's private. You've got to have some boundaries, yeah. I think that's one of them. Just a one guessing game for just one other way to quit smoking. One woman said, convert from, when you're drinking tea, convert from mugs to a cup and saucer. She said, this is what made her quit. So she would have had a siggy with a mug of tea. Very good.

Yeah, but it's good to put your cigarette in the saucer because you've got something to rest it on. It's like a mini ashtray. Yep. A mug, a mug, a mug. What's a difference? Does the mug have a cigar? have like because they can have writing on them does it say mm my lovely fag she only had pro smoking mugs you know they used to do big business in them

I actually think she might be using a cup and sauce so differently to how we might use one for this to work oh she holds them in both hands and you've got those third hand free that's clever it's the object of a cup and sauce she got rid of all the tables in her house so she had to hold them she moved to a mountainous region with no flat surfaces at all. Just one cup, one saucer. It was a huge sacrifice, actually. She only smoked one a week.

Right. That's amazing. So there's a big movement these days, obviously, for trying to stop people from smoking almost altogether. So a lot of people on top of that are trying to erase their relationship with cigarettes, particularly for big companies.

So the example I have Walt Disney. Walt Disney supposedly used to smoke about three packs of Sigis a day. And if you used to go around Walt Disney, World, Disney World, you would see pictures of him holding cigarettes. And so many shots, it's just he's got a Siggy in his hand. And what they've done is they've photoshopped out every single cigarette that's ever found in a photo of Walt Disney at Disneyland. So wherever you go, the photo is still the same photo, but the cigarette is now missing. Do they put something else in his hand?

No, they don't. So that's the thing. You've got this weird little point thing. Make it a pencil. It's so easy. What they've done instead is every member of staff is trained to do the Walt Disney point with their two fingers. No way. Normalizes it. Yeah. And this is even used in the movie where Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney

with the Mary Poppins movie that was done. Yeah. It looks a bit like he's doing gun fingers. It does. Gun fingers, doesn't it? Or like you're swearing at someone. If you leave a gap of a cigarette.

Exactly. If you have a tiny gap. But so members of staff are specifically trained to do the Walt Disney point, which he never did because he had a seey in it. When do you do it? Do they tell you when to do it? Or is it just every five minutes,

you have to do it three times? I think probably if you're pointing somewhere maybe. It's just over there. Maybe if you're a bit stressed after sex With a cup of tea So cigarettes don't smell very nice To a lot of people Agreed

Yeah They smell pretty horrible to a lot of people To a lot of I suppose it depends if you're a smoker Yeah yeah yeah okay But have you heard of nice cigarettes These were launched in 1989 They were called the That wasn't the official brand name

I can't remember the official brand name But it was basically the first cigarette to smell good Was the idea and they burned with a vanilla smell and they were advertised under the slogan you shouldn't have to leave the room you shouldn't have to apologize Oh yeah

Well that's just going to smell like a vape Which I must say I'm not a big fan of either Well it sold terribly And there have been a few attempts But they were all the kind of proto-vap things So Premier smokeless cigarettes was another kind They were tested in 1989 And smokers didn't like them

Well customers who tried it complained That it smelled bad Lacked flavour and it was too hot to touch and industry experts noted that it could also be used to smoke crack. So it didn't make it off the testing line, really. Right, yeah. But apart from that, that's the thing smokers like the smell and taste of cigarettes

and have never liked stuff that doesn't really taste like it, really, except the occasional eccentric smoker who used to smoke menthol cigarettes. Just lest we think that smoking is on its way out ASAP, it's going up worldwide in terms of number of smokers and that is related to the population going out but still it's the biggest cause of preventable deaths in the world and by quite a long way because I actually didn't look up the second biggest

but I always sort of like things like car crashes are really big and other things are around alcohol even like I wonder how I wonder if they can measure alcohol yeah snails that are following you around for your 10 million quid That's actually ironically hot on the heels of smoking. The whole point of that is it's not preventable. That's like literally you just can't stop it. Leading inevitable calls of death.

Obviously, smoking has been banned in various places over the years. And in New York it was banned in 1908 smoking, but only for women. Really? Unladylike? Pretty much, yeah, pretty much that. They hadn't invented that Audrey Hepburn long cigarette. Yeah, absolutely. That came down later.

Yeah, it was a very short-lived ban. Basically, in 1907, there was a cafe, a very trendy cafe in New York, that allowed women to smoke. Because usually women didn't really smoke in public very much because it was seen as unladylike. But this bar decided, actually, we don't care about that. Anyone can smoke if they want. And then it was really, really popular. And so a load of other bars started to let women smoke in there. and the politicians didn't like it.

There was a politician called Timothy Little Tim Sullivan, and he decided that he was going to ban smoking, even though he had personally never seen a woman smoke. Right. He still decided he was going to ban it. And they did ban it. And there was only one woman, Katie Mulcahy, who was the only person who was cited for violating the crime,

because a few weeks later, the mayor of New York vetoed it. said, actually this is ridiculous, we're going to stop this. Really? But for two weeks, and for one woman in New York, it was illegal. That's cool for Katie. I bet that got her a good reputation. I reckon.

Did you guys see, we were just mentioning Audrey Hepburn had, you know, those beautiful, what were they called? The cigarette holders, yeah. Did you see the inventions of Robert Stone, who, this was in the 1950s? He just tried to come up with new innovative ways to make smoking a more pleasurable experience. So he invented these holders. There was one brilliant one. where it was for if it was raining and you wanted to have a siggy,

had just a little umbrella that hangs over the cigarette itself off the back of its holder. Yeah, it looked really, really clever. There was the periscope siggy, which would go upwards. No specific purpose, as far as I can see, for the periscope siggy. If you're in a submarine and you want a fag, what do you do? Because you can't go outside. Yes. Jamming up the pipe.

If you had a massive pipe going up. Well, we didn't see the approaching war ship. because Perkins was using the periscope to have a quick gasper. Ironically, they found us through the lit tip of the cigarette. Actually, weirdly, until 2010, you could smoke in a submarine as well.

Oh, yeah. Yeah, there was a room. There was a smoker's room in submarines and you could smoke down there. Space is at a premium on submarines. Yes, it's amazing how geared everything was towards smokers needed spaces because so many people smoke.

Interesting thing is the Beatles had a white submarine, but it just got stained by all the nicotine. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that's my fact. My fact this week is that actually, we've all been pronouncing Covent Garden wrong. Okay? Come on, Dan.

All of us? Or have you been doing it right all along? I've been doing it wrong as well. A different kind of wrong. Different kind of wrong. Still wrong. So I was looking into Covent Garden. I love where we work.

I love this area. It's full of incredible historical significance. And while looking into it, I discovered that the word is actually a bastardization of the word convent. It should be convent garden. That's how this started. The very first mention that was ever made of convent garden was in the 1200s. And it was in reference to the fact that this area was a lot of it was garden. And for Westminster Abbey, they had lots of vegetables and so on here.

So this is prior to the big market. And the reason it became a market, that's almost a... But wait, you've explained why the garden bits pronounce garden. But the convent bit is it was a garden of a convent, right? Yeah, it was garden of a convent. There were lots of monks here and so on, and they were running it. And so it was known as convent garden. This was basically a big old monastery around here that was kind of attached to Westminster Abbey,

which is not that close to here, which makes you think, wonder how that works. But actually, a load of monks lived here, and it was the dissolution of the monasteries, famously under Henry the Eighth that sold it all off. and then it became what it is today. Yeah. Is it, I think I read this too long ago to be absolutely sure of it now, but basically this was quite underpopulated bit of London because there were two main bits of London,

which were Westminster, the seat of power, and then there was the city, which is over further east, and actually the bit in between was not really populated at all. Not really. It was this sort of two-bit system. I think so. I think it definitely went down population-wise. Like it was a thing about the eighth, ninth century,

then it went down and then it came up again. But I think technically, Dan, you could argue you've been pronouncing it more right than us. Really? Well, you're pronouncing it with an extra R. Yeah. And what is R except half of an N in Corvent Garden? Very true. He puts the R towards the end of the word Covent.

You say Coventant, don't you? Yeah. Is there any other Covent? Do you get Coventry anywhere else? Coventry? Yeah. Should that have been Conventry? Oh, my God.

Oh, dear. Or was it a place where witches lived? Mm-hmm. Coventry. The Coventry. Yeah. And that's why Hitler went for it. Didn't like the witches.

Yeah. Famously. Fair enough. Not fair enough. My grandma lived in Coventry. We won't be tired in Coventry any time soon then. Yeah. Common Garden Market is the main thing that Commonwealth was famous for, wasn't it?

Yeah. For centuries. And, oh, man, it was so interesting. Such a cool time. What period are we talking? Oh, centuries. Which particular centuries? I think it started being officially a market in 1670, didn't it?

But it had been used the market before that. And in fact, still is today. If you wander out into the market from the office, you'll find. But it's not your big fruit and veg. It's not the biggest fruit and veg market in the country anymore. Like it was from whatever year around I said it was. But they sell knock off football jerseys. That's true.

And those are sort of the vegetables of today, aren't they? In a way. Yeah. But the market porters were a huge thing. And there's amazing footage from the 20s and 30s of them carrying stacks of the baskets on their heads because that was how everything was transported in the market. And they were slightly domed in the base. So they fit on your head very neatly and they stacked really well.

And have you heard of basket gym? Basket Jim. Is that a person? It's a person. He was called Jim Sainsbury. I don't know if any relation. But he worked at the Common Garden market in the 1920s and 30s. And there's footage of him doing 25 baskets in a stack on his head.

Wow. Unbelievable. It's like this stuff in the baskets. I don't know if they're full or not. I think maybe for the show, for display purposes, they might have been empty. That's still a lot, though, isn't it? The balance is the main thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It must be a different family. Otherwise, surely Sainsbury's baskets would have that head shape. If you walk around Sainsbury's now, I think you have to put it on here. You do, actually. Do you know the first Sainsbury's was in Covent Garden, actually? What's it? Yeah, it was on Drury Lane, just down the road from here.

There we go. And they sold like, what was it called? Railway Mill. That was their big seller. It was disgusting. You have to get up so early in the morning to see the trains being milked. But it's a beautiful sight. The idea was that it came from like Devin and Cornwall.

But it came on the railway so it's still fresh. Okay, right. The square was built for the fourth Earl of Bedford by Inigo Jones, the famous architect. For international listeners, Inigo Jones, I always feel sorry for, because he's gone down in history as not Christopher Wren, essentially, in England, wouldn't you say? He's basically the... The other architect that's not Christopher Wren. He was a very famous architect.

Yeah, but he's just the second most famous architects. Sure. I'm sorry, Inigo. I just wanted to say. Fair enough. Christopher Wren, who designed St. Paul's Cathedral, we should also say for international listeners. Because I don't think Christopher Wren is that famous outside the UK either.

Or in the UK, to be honest. And Inigo, Changes, is less famous than him, but still very cool. And has a cooler name as well. He does. He does. He actually has a less fun name than one of the people he worked with. So he was, he worked under James I first and Charles I, alongside the official royal stonemaster who was called Nicholas Stone. Nice.

Amazing. That's really good. Stone Master. Yeah, the Stone Master. What would the Stone Master do? Well, he would have worked with Stone. He would have worked at. He was Knicking Stone.

He was a sculptor, for sure. So Knicking it, his Nicholas Stone. Nick Stone. Very good. Yeah. And Inigo Jones was. more famous, no, less famous but quite famous for being the first person to do a survey of Stonehenge. Speaking of Stone.

That's cool. Yeah, but he did say that it was a Roman temple. Which it wasn't. Right. And that's why he's only the second most famous because Christopher Wren would have got that straight away. He loved Roman stuff. Actually, the sad thing, another sad thing about Inigo Jones is that the main thing he had to do, really, in this square. He was asked to build a square fit for gentlemen with ability by the early.

bed for the ability of being able to carry baskets on your head. It was just for the basket carriers, yeah, and the living statues. No, it's basically for really posh, rich people. And so the only thing they wanted, they wanted a completely bare square. So it was the first time London had this, a huge expanse with nothing in the middle. So, you know, you could promenade about it. And then with a church in it. And it was St. Paul's, and the church still is St. Paul's.

So Christopher Wren designed St. Paul's Cathedral, big F off, beautiful cathedral down the road and then he designed little St. Paul's Church on Covent Garden. It's still there today. But St. Paul's Covent Garden is better in some ways, in some ways, because it's a reverse church. It's a reverse church. It's where God comes to worship me. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's, yeah. Church authorities aren't very happy about it actually. It's like religious, but it's, no, it's a wrong way church, isn't it? It's a wrong way around church. Because what do you mean? Well, basically, churches have their doors at the west end and then the east end is the bit that faces towards Jerusalem. That's how churches are laid out.

Yeah. Right now? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, that's just how church is up. But he, because he, because he wanted the doors to open onto the piazza, because it was the first ever piazza that we were going to have in the UK, very exciting. He wanted these huge great double doors.

So he built them like that. And then the church said, absolutely not. You're going to have the altar at the east end and you're going to have the door at the west end, like normal. And so the doors are kind of false doors. Oh, really are they? Yeah, yeah. That makes so much sense because the back looks so much like a front.

kind of thing with that church. It's a wrong way around. It's a reversing percy church. So do all churches face Jerusalem? Not all of them, but the idea is that they face east because that's where you're looking and that's where you're praying, you're sitting in church facing the front, you're facing towards Jerusalem. If you're ever lost in a town, go to the church, whichever way it faces, just walk in that direction. If I'm on my way to Jerusalem. You'll get to Jerusalem, I'm the squeezy jiff lemon. We owe to Covent Garden. Squeezy Jiff Sorry, there's a lemon juice product called Jiff

and it comes in a bottle that looks like a lemon. It was invented by a man called Edward Hack in 1957. Not an original idea, but no, no, it was. That's just a joke. Supposedly, he looked at the whole, every lemon there was in Harrods and Selfridges of Fortnum and Masons. And then he looked at 900 individual lemons at Covent Garden to find the perfect lemon to base his lemon on.

Oh, I see, because it's in the shape of a lemon. Because it's in the shape of a lemon. Okay. Yeah. I thought you're going to say he looked at them all and made an average of all of those shapes. No, I think you just found one unbelievably nice lemon.

A flawless lemon. I must admit, I don't actually find any one lemon more attractive than any other lemon, but that's just me. James, you've got no heart. There was a place called the Rose Tavern, which I think was the best place to hang out in the

1700s, and it was where criminals, highwaymen, prostitutes, but then actors, poets, artists, Samuel Peep spent a lot of time there. He said he really liked food. Are you going to the bruffle again, Samuel?

No, no, no, I'm going for the sausage rolls. Their fish and chips is honestly done. I just like that simple pub grunt and the topless woman who serves it to me. There's Rose Street up there. I think it might be. So I think it is still there. Rose Street and then just off of it, there's some floral passage or something. Yeah, yeah.

Floral Lane or something. Probably. And the people who sort of performed there had amazing tricks. So there were, topless women would wrestle there as a thing. And you could put bets on it. It employed lots of posture moles, which I never heard of. Posture moles. I don't think you're going to guess what this is.

Well, it's obvious, isn't it? You dig down a hole into someone's garden. And then when you come out, you sit straight. Oh. It's like the conductor, Ethel Smyth, tying herself to a tree. to improve the posture. Okay, I don't think it would have got as much custom the pub if it was your version, but it would have been closer to...

A mole is a prostitute of some kind, isn't it? Oh, Moal, I see. Yeah. Oh, because I heard that posture women was a nickname for the women ploughing the trade around. It probably is the same. Maybe it's Posture Moles, Posture Women. But these people used to emphasise it they were not prostitutes,

but what they did was they would be paid by the clientele. Samuel Peep is either to be flogged or to flog them, one of those in public in front of people in the pub. In public? Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know, that's saucy. That is saucy. Well, I guess a strip club these days, it's all in the open, isn't it, as well?

They don't have a cat of nine tails. Dan always asked for the whipping. It's been 300 years, Dan. Oh, 300, okay, sorry. But the way they advertise who they were to say, you know, I'll whip you if you want, was they would lie naked on a table, and a waiter would bring a lit candle on a tray over to them, and they would simulate kind of having,

sex with it with the climax being that they would snuff the candle out. So wait a minute, until that had happened, you just think it's a normal naked woman lying on your table. And then as soon as she blows out the candle, having pretending to have sex with it, you're like, oh, you're a prostitutes. Exactly. You weren't just passing and felt like a lie down. It's a bit like when you go to TGI Fridays and you tell them it's your birthday.

They do that in some branches. No one's, oh, they've told them it's my birthday, they're going to do the thing. Oh, it's so embarrassing. He's only six. That was not what chat GPT suggested is a good idea for a party. Are you saying they snuffed out the candle? I think with their, yeah, with sort of their nether regions. Apparently they're...

In fact, the quote was, snuff out the candle in a highly obscene and hazardous manner to rules of approval from her audience. Because it's quite, you know, like him. if you have a candle and you manage to put it out with your fingers because you lick your fingers. Yes. It's a bit like that is it? I always feel really hard when I do that, like Danny Dye or Russell Crowe or something. Well, imagine doing that with your funny.

Maybe it's sort of like a downstairs sneeze. Possible. Gosh, okay. All my other common garden stuff is so tame. I found a record that was broken at Common Garden. But it was... Most candles snuffed that was a vagina. Yeah.

It was how you'd end the night there Put out all the lights, honey Cool, you just pick up of naked women to slowly dip her over every single Sorry, which record? Most medium hamburgers Even in one minute Medium sized or

Most, I don't know if they were mediums, I don't know if they were medium sized and medium coached Had they come from the, you know, from the Dead World They were medium sized ghost hamburgers that have been cooked Somewhere between rare and well done, right? Okay. How many was it?

Four. Four. Which in one minute. In one minute. That's impressive in one minute. It is by a bloke called Furious Pete from Canada. Furious Pete. Very nice.

T.J.I. Fridays was mentioned a second ago. There's a road called Maiden Lane. And right at the bottom of Maiden Lane on one end, opposite on the corner of Bedford Street, there is a building there. And if you look up on the building, you'll see a plaque. And that plaque reads that Charles Dickieff. Dickens used to live here in the workhouse when he was a young boy. And I was looking into it. And that building was, it was a sort of a working house. And he used to work downstairs putting black polish into tins. And you know, you would sell that. And I'm pretty sure it's where there used to be

TGI Fridays on the bottom. There was. There was. Yeah. That's, that would have been the spot where Charles Dickens, as a young man, was put in the front window of the building. Because what they used to like to show was how boot polish was going in fresh so it looked like you're getting the best sort of stuff. Oh, really? And he was, he would sit in the window with his best friend at the time and they would both do it together. And his best friend was called Fagan. So Fagin and Dickens used to sit in the window doing this thing right. And that became a TGI Fridays. And that became a TGI Friday. It's what he would have wanted. It was the best of foods. It was the worst of foods. Predominantly the latter. It was the best of foods. It was a, oh, happy,

Okay, that's it. That is 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 that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland. Andy, at Andrew Hunter, M. James. At James Harkin. And Anna. You can e-bber podcast at QI.com. Yep. You can go to our group account, which is at no-such-thing. Or go to our website. No-suchthing as a fish.com. All of the previous episodes are up there. So do check them out. and also check out Clubfish, our private members club.

There's lots of fun behind the scenes, extra shows, and all sorts of little bits up there to check out. So do that, or just come back here next week. We'll be back again with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.