No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Wasted Material 2017

Episode Date: December 29, 2017

All the outtakes and deleted bits from Fish 2017. Happy In-between-Christmas-and-New-Year-bit!

Hi, Roy. Happy in the middle bit between Christmas and New Year. Ooh, very nice. Thank you very much. I'm trying to get a range of greeting cards out. Going very slow. No one wants to buy greetings cards after Christmas. Very weird. Yeah, Dan and Andy here.

We just want to quickly let you know what you're about to listen to. This is a compilation of all the outtakes from the whole of 2017. Every podcast, we always chop away a lot of stuff, and James has been secretly collecting it to put together for this big bumper edition, 78-minute-long episode.

78 minutes. 78 minutes of outtake. I could watch a short children's film or a very, very long episode of Frasier in that time. Frasier made 78-minute-long episodes? I don't believe so, but it was the only thing I could think of that's shorter than 78 minutes.

So what we're saying is, please do enjoy it unless there's a weird Frasier marathon on, in which case we give you a license to go and watch that instead. We hope you enjoy this. Have a wonderful New Year when it comes. I will see you then. All right, on with the outtakes. I'm off to watch Frasier.

Did you guys know that anteaters who have obviously famously long tongues have got very, very few taste buds? Really? What does one taste bud every middle? They can hardly taste what they're eating. Well, they're eating shitty ants and termites and stuff. They're eating ants and they occasionally swallow dirt

as well as the other thing. So it may be an advantage. You don't need to be a... Because all ants are going to taste the same, right? They're going to taste vinegary. Yeah, they are. Because they're full of formic acid. Okay, that's so antist.

Disagree. 100% disagree. Because there are some of those ants and do you remember that they swallow honey and they hang upside down and they're sort of honey repositories. Imagine how much you must think you've locked out when you get the old honey-tasting ant.

Such relief. They have, well, pangolins, which look quite similar, have their tongues attached to their pelvis. I don't know if Andy just has the same thing. Because they have such long tongues and they start at their pelvis. So I think their tongues are... So they're attached at the back.

They're attached at the back, yeah. On the inside of them. There's no way their tongue comes out and then sweeps round. That's what I was thinking. Hang on. It can't be all tongue all the way back. It's to all tongues, all the way back into a pangolin. Their tongues are longer than their bodies are.

What's the point of that? So you can, I guess, manoeuvre it all the way down the tongue and once it's back at the pelvis, the food's practically there. You barely need a digestive system. I don't know, they've just... That's the truth. That's amazing. Isn't it true that I think woodpeckers have them

all the way through back into the skull and they wind around their skull? I've seen like an x-ray of them, right? Yeah. And that helps cushion their skull when they're pecking, isn't it, as well as being a useful place to store their tongue. Do you know what the longest tongue is? And this is relation to body size.

It must be this pangolin. I think... No, go on. Go for it, no. Have a bat. Is it a bat? Yes, it is. Yeah. Oh, nice. It's the tube-lipped Nectar bat.

And its tongue can go to 1.5 times the length of its actual body. Wow. So that's the longest tongue in proportion to body size. Exactly, an animal. I know that it'll last a long time for that bat. Oh, do you? Or a fist-y later. How on earth did you remember that? It's weird that with them having such a massive tongue

and the tongue being 1.5 times bigger than the whole thing, that they... Who else to name it after the lip? Yes. That's true. But maybe they didn't see the tongue for a long time. Maybe they're like, whoa, look at that lip. Almost no one had ever seen the tongue because it's always in these massively long flower nose.

What am I saying? The flower nose. The flower nose. The trumpet of a flower. Do they think that the bat's face was a flower? The bat has got the head of a flower. It's really weird. Do you know when an elephant's charging you when you should be nervous?

It's running towards you very fast. Is it only about 30 centimetres before it hits you? You panic. It's not that. If an elephant has its trunk out, this is according to... Whoa, whoa, whoa. What is the... How can it have its trunk in?

If it's up its bum. If it's like coiled up, I guess, and not in use. If its trunk is facing downwards or coiled up or looks relaxed... It's always out, that was a bit. It is always out, so it's never sucked into its face. It's just like lifting it up and it's doing like... One of those like charging the light brigade fanfares out of it, like...

And charging at you, that's when you know it's going to attack. No, it's not going to attack then when it's doing the charge of the light brigade. So when it's got its trunk protruding out towards you, you can absolutely relax. You're going to be fine. Apparently, that's a bluff. And it's when the trunk's down and relax that they're doing a proper charge. I've never seen an elephant with its trunk straight out like a...

Well, that's because they genuinely want to trample you down, James. Have you seen that? I've never even seen a picture of that. I haven't really. You're running with your fist out, ready to hit someone. But you very rarely get to photograph an elephant charging from the side on, don't you? Normally, human elephant contact is rare enough, especially on safari, that there wouldn't be another group of people photographing the elephant from the side when it's truck out.

He saw it face on and it just looked like an elephant without a trunk, because it was pointing straight out. That's exactly what I'm talking about. I do see that, but I'm just surprised I've never come across a picture like that. I think it's something that happens. I'm surprised I didn't look at Google Images as soon as I read the facts. So what's going to happen if the trunk is stretched out and it's bluffing? Will it just get up to you and then just be an awkward height?

Get up to you and then nozzle you in a friendly manner. Shove its trunk in your mouth. It just makes you stress. It's just to scare you away. Oh, OK. I think it would work for me. Even if I remembered this conversation and thought, Hannah said that that's not going to hurt me. Imagine if I've got this the wrong way around and how guilty I'm going to feel. Well, I always forget the numbers.

I always think 99% of elephant chargers are bluffs. And then I think, or is that 99% of shark attacks and actually only 4% of elephant chargers are bluffs? But then it's also like the black bear and the brown bear, but then brown bears can be black and then which one is which? It's just a nightmare. Yeah. Just run away from them all. Just live in a city.

Have you heard of Hobot's Funnies? No. Good, great. So these were tanks that were used in D-Day and there was this whole range, like a range of superheroes, basically, they all each had their own special superpower. Were they named Funnies because they're unusual? Yeah, pretty much. That was a sort of nickname they were given. There was one whose sole job was to carry massive bundles of sticks.

Ah, fash skis. Fash skis, exactly. It was called the Faskeen Carrier. And basically, if you came to a ramp that was too steep or a hole in the ground that you needed to fill in, it just dropped a few massive bundles of... And these were enormous bundles of sticks. And that's where the name Fashism comes from. Exactly. So it was using the Faskeen Carrier to defeat Fashism.

Yeah, clever. They were the first ones, actually. The first armored vehicle launch bridges were the ones that just carried a big bunch of sticks and then tipped them into a ditch. It kind of seemed very scary if those were the first things the Germans saw on the horizon. The least scary robot wars robot. Yeah.

But you would think that the like in the end of Macbeth, spoiler alert, the trees are coming towards you. Oh, yeah, that's true. Yeah. I guess any German soldiers who had done English PCSE would have been frightened. Did you guys know that, and I'm not sure that this is true, so I'm sort of asking, as well as saying, that in France, Camembert is the translated equivalent of our pie chart.

It is. Yeah. Is it? Yeah. Camembert. Really? Camembert charts. I mean, look at this Camembert for a pie chart. That's awesome. Yeah, and that's because the correct way to eat Camembert is to slice it into pie shapes, really. And then the people who think Theresa May

would be a better prime minister get one bit of the cheese. They got a tiny little slither of cheese. And the don't knows just get a massive amount of cheese. And actually, on Reddit, I think it was this year, it was late last year, they had a big argument where somebody showed a picture of a Camembert that their mum had cut and their mum had cut it in not a slicey way. And this was a French lady, and they were all saying she should be kicked out of the country for that.

I've got to say, I can't. I wouldn't cross my mind not to slice it up like a pie. Who's doing it in a slicey way? That's insane. This lady. Well, this lady would have kicked out. Well, they didn't kick her out. I don't think in the end. But someone said, oh, there's a cause for loss of nationality.

And another commenter said, take her to the British border immediately. I actually cut off the top of the Camembert, the whole thing. Just the mould. I just eat that. Because that is just solid bacteria, isn't it, basically? I think so. The rind of the Camembert. Yeah, it's a solid mat of mould. And then the bacteria is the little brownie bits. And you should have some brown bits on it, but not too much.

Like a banana? Yes, like a banana. That depends what you like in a banana. It also probably depends what you like in a Camembert. No, this is objective fact. So I've been to Pompeii. I went last year and there was a lot of brothels there that they found, which were still standing.

In particular, there's one called Lupinar. And the Latin for that is She-Wolf, which was slang for prostitute. And it was two levels, had five rooms. And you know that it's a brothel because on the walls, there were still depictions of people in various positions having sex. And they think the idea behind that was it was almost like porn material to be watching while you were having sex. It was the equivalent of having a pornographic movie on in the background for them.

Isn't that weird? They had porn on their walls in the brothel. It might have been like one of those menus where if you don't speak the language, you just point at the thing you want. But yeah, no, it's an extraordinary place. Highly recommend you go there. They also one of the things they find amazing about Pompeii. Oh, it might be Herculaneum, which was the place nearby that the same thing happened to it is the scrolls that were found.

So 800 scrolls were found perfectly preserved as everything there was. And it's one of the ancient world's best surviving libraries, most extensive surviving libraries. And we can't read it or we can't read a huge amount of it because they're in such a delicate state that we can't touch them. So we've got all these rolled up scrolls and we don't know what they say. And they're sitting in museums and stuff. And we're just developing the X-ray technology to try and read bits of them.

And they've just found out that they use lead sometimes in the ink. And now X-rays can see what the lead shapes are and work out what they read. But how annoying is that? We wouldn't you just if I saw that I'd try and unroll one. Oh, well, they did try. But every time they tried, they would just fall apart. Right. So they did sample that. Yeah, they tried it and they fall apart.

And then I read an article. I don't know how this would work. But one time they said they tried to open it and exploded. Wow, that don't know how that works. But yeah, this X-ray stuff is really interesting, isn't it? Because they they can virtually unroll scrolls, which is just unbelievable. It's so cool. So they kind of get the X-ray scan of it and then they go, OK,

now we're going to take off the first layer and they can unroll it and they can see what's on the next layer, which is just outrageous. Yeah, that's amazing. How many scrolls do you think they ruined that turned a dust in their hand before they weren't, you know, or this isn't working? I would have stopped after about 50. I should have. In the 1930s, sociologist Norbert Elias

walked around Europe with his shoelaces on tight to see what people would say to him. No, he did. What was his real name, though? Oh, very good. Yeah, it sounds like alias. That's good. He found that in England, most old men, one that he might fall over

when he was in Germany, the older men would look at him with contempt. Wow. And he was walking around the Spanish fishing village with his shoelaces untied and he felt that he was being warned that his laces were untied, but he felt that it was helping him to be included in the village community. Really? Yeah, I think I read about this guy. There's something about I don't know what country he was walking and a bunch of girls were giggling at him.

Little girls were giggling at him because of the untying of the shoelaces. And then he tied them up and that really transformed how he felt about his connection to the places that he was in when he realized who he was. Yeah, that's weird, because if I saw someone walking around with their shoelaces untied, I think my instinct would be to go and try and step on one and to trip them over. Should we not find that happened a lot? Or to wait until they stop and then to tie them together. Yeah, definitely.

Wow, yeah. If you've got enough time for that, that's a dream. Yeah. Do you guys know about the orangutan that can tie knots and we don't know why? And this sounds like it's a bullshit animal fact, but it's genuinely true and it's bizarre. So there's this orangutan called Watana. She was born, I think it's a she. Yeah, she was born in 1995 in Belgium and the sky called Chris Hertzfeld has written

a book about her, but she ties knots and no one's ever taught her to do it. And she just finds if she finds two threads or two vines or whatever, then she ties them together. I think she's trying to escape. Is she kept in a very high zoo? She's she's never tried to climb up out of them or hang herself from them. She's sorry. Are you quoting here?

I got dark very quickly. That was my instinct when he said she was trying to escape. I realized that I'd got it wrong. Escape from the monotony of life. There was an article in The New York Times from 1976, which reports an occasion where there was an exhibition game of football between a team from China and a team from Athens and over the loudspeaker, Tune started blaring and both teams stood up and put hands on hearts because,

you know, they seemed it was the other ones national anthem and it turned out it was a toothpaste advert and everyone in the stadium stood up in respect for me. That's amazing. Do you know what the rules are about singing the anthem? The government have said that you should dress appropriately. Right. Also that you should stand still. Right. And that you should be full of energy. OK, that's interesting.

Yeah, stand still and so you're ready to go. You have to be I think you have to be quivering basically. That's not still. It's no, you're right. You're right. I don't know how. As soon as they finish, everyone's just going to explode in some kind of. Yeah, you're not allowed to whisper during it. You're not allowed to talk on the phone during it.

But lots of countries have weird rules, don't they? That's true. I think the Philippines in the Philippines, their national anthem has to be between one hundred and one twenty beats per minute. The Star Spangled Banner, when that was first written, it was supposed to be Conspirito, which means with spirit. Oh, I thought you meant it was meant to be called. No. Conspirito. It sounds like a magician.

And also the God Save the Queen, George the Fifth, he thought he was an expert because he'd listened to it so many times. And he said it was called God Save the King then as well. It's just desperate pleading for some kind of skill. How many times have you listened to it? If that is for it, he is like, I'm the person who has to hear this more than any of you. That's true. Can you sing it right? But if he sings it, it's called God Save Me.

That doesn't scan. God Save Our Gracious Me. It was like Prince Philip's joke, he jokes that he's the world's best plaque unveiler. Oh, yes, he's and there's a great cut of him saying it repeatedly. It's still a good joke. Anyway, he said that the opening section, you should set your metronome to 60. And then later on, it goes down to 52. That's pretty slow, that is what sort of is everyone loses energy.

No, that's always it's that big ending of an American national anthem. No, you're talking about God Save the Queen. So the American national anthem was supposed to be quite, you know, conspirator with spirit was supposed to be kind of quite upbeat and whatever. Of course, these days, if you watch the Super Bowl, you can bet on how long it's going to be. And the average is usually about one minute, 50 or something, I think. Is that slow? Yeah.

So they put loads of extra notes in like they're on American Idol, don't they? Other things that are being played at the wrong tempo. Oh, yeah. A lot of Beethoven. So this is a theory that Beethoven's metronome was broken. That just says like a sick bird from the review. Wait, so he wrote his songs at the wrong tempo? No, he wrote them at the wrong tempo because his metronome was wrong. So this is some research that's been done by.

By Brahms. Because he's not playing like, whoa, this is fast. No, no, no, that's not. So he played it at a tempo that doesn't sound fast. But he went through a phase of writing pieces of music that are unplayably fast. So between 1850 and 1820, the timing that he writes, the time he says he should play it in is like unplayably fast. It's impossible. So no one plays it at that tempo.

And everyone thinks, well, why not that he write this? It sounds awful. It's frantic and mad. And it turns out this guy called Peter Stadlin, who's a pianist, did some in-depth research and some mathematical analysis and worked out that the metronome he had was weighted slightly wrong. So Beethoven was just writing down the wrong stuff because his metronome was ticking wrong. So when his metronome was saying, yeah, you're playing at 60 beats a minute, he was actually playing at 90 beats a minute.

That is brilliant. That's amazing to know he wrote to a metronome. I'd never. Well, he actually owned the first ever metronome, I think, or he owned a metronome that was made by the inventor of the metronome. He was really excited by this new technology. Turns out it wasn't actually quite developed for the years. I suppose it's plausible that you could have a pianist who writes music and all

of his keys are out of tune. And then when he writes it down, it's just a completely different tune to what he thought it was. Like every single time Beethoven thought he was writing happy birthday or something, but then his keys just kept going out of tune. And do you think Beethoven's ninth is actually happy birthday? Yeah. Miswritten. I don't really think that. There's a really creepy ant colony that they've just discovered in Poland,

which lives in an old Soviet nuclear bunker. And basically there's this ant's nest on top of a ventilation pipe outlet that comes up from the nuclear bunker. But a lot of ants are falling through this ventilation pipe and they're falling into the bunker below, which is about three meters underground. And then they can't get out, so they can't climb up the walls and get back out. And they keep they do what ants do. So they build nests and they operate as ants, but they have no food, obviously.

So they die eventually. But they constantly are being replenished. So there's this deadly community where new ants keep falling down onto what is now about a few centimetres thick layer of their dead comrades. And then they just keep working and building at their nests and they die. And then their stock is replenished. That's like six sci-fi film. It is, isn't it?

It sounds like a metaphor for the Soviet times. It does. I'm seeing it's kind of like a metaphor for life, isn't it? That's really just what we're doing. Yeah, just falling into a life and dying on top of our dead comrades. And on that note. In 1850, there's an article that I found it in the English Civil Engineer and Architects Journal, and it states that the Academy of Sciences in France was considering an idea for a suspension bridge between England and

France, so going from Dover to Calais. Four barges would be sunk at equal distances apart across the channel. And then they'd have chains going up from the barges to the surface. And then the chains would be fixed to the bridge, which would run from England to France. And then above the bridge would be these huge balloons. It described them as giant balloons of elliptical form and firmly secured, which would support in the air the extremity of these chains. In my head, I'm imagining it like the big red balls in total wipe out.

And you could just bounce from balloon to balloon. That now I can see that working. What I think about those big plastic balls is they're in South America somewhere, aren't they? If mankind kind of collapses quite soon and then the whole of the world just kind of becomes grown over by plants and stuff like that, they're made of plastic, so they won't really biodegrade. So if aliens come along, all they'll see really is these big plastic things around.

No, no, I don't think that's true. No, I think that's true. If they landed in South America, all of the concrete and stuff would go before the plastic, surely. But we've got a lot more plastic than just the balls that are used in this weird TV show. Sure, sure, sure. But they'd probably think that that was the centre of human civilisation or something. This is where they built their greatest temple.

Exactly. You would probably look at it and they probably, they may be north self-aligned or something like that. Or they probably work out that they're aligned with the sun or something and they think that it was a temple. Yeah, although they think it's a model of the planners, they think it's an early human attempt to understand the solar system and that the different sizes represent the different things. They're all the same size, though.

So they'd be like these idiotic humans. They thought that Mars and tubes were the same size. Actually, James, you make a very compelling argument. Think of all the temples, the step pyramids in South America. Think what game show they probably were. Remember in Gladiators, they used to have a thing where you had to climb up a pyramid. That was probably it. Yeah, you get to the top and at the top,

you'll sacrifice it to the gods. I think we all know that they'll assume the Disney Plastic Castle in Paris is an ultimate temple. That's true. We're going to leave such weird stuff behind. I was reading an article the other day about what happens first when, if all humans disappeared, the rough running order of how things wind down. It was fascinating because it was talking about actually concrete lasts a lot less time than you would think because freezing and thawing.

In, let's say, New York, actually, in about 10 years, lots of plants will have grown in between the cracks in the concrete and it'll all be working loose. And actually, it's quite quickly that you end up with. In 10 years. You might be a bit more than that. Well, I did think. Because they don't just rebuild New York every 10 years, do they?

If, I mean, if this is predicting the apocalypse and they're like, well, all the concrete is going to disappear in 10 years, that should have been headline. I can't believe they buried the news. But it is a fair point, perhaps, that in 1500 years or 2000 years, that only the Disney Tower in Paris, the one in Disneyland, the one in Disney World, these are going to be the only buildings left because they're made of plastic.

Yeah. Are they made of plastic? We assume. Well, just Wendy houses. I think we all lived a tiny, a tiny race of. Polypocket. All the exhibits in their museums will be, you know, little Playmobil dolls and Lego people.

We think that these were the life forms themselves frozen when the disaster came. Why don't we talk about bridges? Absolutely lost it. How does Dan keep this thing together? So hard to know. So much fun when teachers away. And they used to, in the medieval times, draw elephants with actual trumpets for trunks. Did they? Yeah.

So the idea, they think, is not that they actually thought this was the case, but it was kind of an allegorical way of drawing. It would be very weird if they thought it was the case if they'd seen an elephant and they saw a trumpet. But the idea being that they did make loud noises and they thought the noises came from the trunks and the only way you can show them on a picture is by showing the trunk as an actual trumpet. And they think maybe a lot of medieval pictures are like this.

They're more allegorical than actually literal. Oh, that's kind of like so whenever you put anything that has notes coming out of it, like to symbolize music, like the musical notation, it's not actually. Yeah. Well, you said they thought that the noise came out of the trunks. It does, doesn't it? I don't know. Yeah, they do.

It sounds very nasal, the noise. I think it comes out of the trunk. Sure. You're basing this off your own. I just tried doing it. Yeah. And it sounded very elephant time when I did it out of the nose. I think you're right. And now with the mouth. Ha!

It's not the same. Actually, did you read about that woman? I think it was in this country this week or last week who ordered a takeaway and she put a note on the takeaway when it said, are there any delivery instructions saying, I feel so ill, I've got terrible flu, can't get out of bed. Please, could you stop by a chemist on the way and bring me some Benadryl? I don't even want the takeaway. I'm only ordering this so you can do that.

And so this restaurant brought her her medication. There was a Chinese restaurant near me that used to deliver cigarettes as well. So people just used to order a bag of prawn crackers and tin boxes of cigarettes. There was a guy at Harvard Business School who did a study and came up with this thing called the Ikea effect, which is that you place more value on Ikea for self-assembled furniture, which Ikea furniture. Yeah, because you made it yourself. Yeah. And you kind of get attached to it and fall in love with it as you're building.

And then by the end of it, you've got a shitty bookcase that doesn't really stand up right, but it's yours. But you fall in love with it. Is that I think that he said fall in love with his words on mine. All right. OK. Because that would be like a good argument in favour of like a robotic wife, for instance, that you build yourself or a Lego wife. Yeah, either of those.

But she's very painful. She will be tiny. You get massive Lego people, though, don't you? Do you? Yeah. A Lego land, not like a Lego land. But you'd have to get married at Lego land, wouldn't you? But I think I think if you're going as far as getting a Lego wife thing, that's probably not an issue.

No, it's going to be like, no, it's not really my scene. You've put on a lot of bricks since we married. Have you guys ever heard of the National Fruit Collection? No, I saw this. I was reading about apples and I just saw it and I've never heard of it. So I don't know anything about it, apart from what I saw in this article. But apparently it's in Brogdale in Kent and they have a living collection of apples, presumably old trees.

They have two thousand three hundred traditional varieties of apple. Wow, really? Apparently they get 40,000 visitors a year. That's so cool. So you get a chance to taste all those varieties that have gone out of public use. They haven't said you can eat them. Yeah, I know. I'm not sure if you're allowed to eat them.

I don't think you can assume anything in a museum. The National Fruit Collection was demolished this year. It's like hearing there's a zoo with the most rare and wonderful animals in all the world. And you can try all of them in our restaurant. You're the reason they don't have the please don't eat the penguin sign. Yeah, but it's not cool. Apparently it's been there since 1952. And I've never heard of it. I really want to go and visit that.

That sounds so fun. I found it. I think we should visit, actually. Yeah, let's go. Yeah, if you're listening to this and you work at the National Fruit Collection, why not invite us? Give us a discount. Do you know what was the company that was a huge boon for apple eating in the world over the last 15 years?

Strongbowl. Close, but that's their major in apple drinking. Apple eating. Is it an apple tart company? Like Mr. Kippling. It is not Mr. Kippling. The answer is, oh, I think we can get it. We can get it.

So I'll give you some clues. It's like a lolly company. It's like a flavouring thing. Smoothie makers. I'll give you some. I will give you some clues. So basically when sliced apples started being a thing, consumption suddenly went massively up. Sorry, I missed that memo.

I've sliced apples a thing. I have one in my lunchbox pretty much every day of school. I'm still stuck on avocado toast. You know, when you buy an apple in the supermarket, some people do and it's a slice and it's in a packet. I didn't know that. No. Have you never seen those in the food section? I have seen those. I think it's very weird.

I've never met anyone who's done this, but you can go to McDonald's and exchange your fries for sliced apples or carrots. Oh, that was you. It's like, why, but you can't. It's the answer to McDonald's, Anna. There you go. I was going to tell you I get points. There are no points. Well, I'm going to edit out what you just said.

It is McDonald's. So they introduced sliced apples in the 1980s into their restaurant fair. I think it was the 1980s and overall apple consumption tripled within 10 years. And it's because children, especially, but all of us, we are more willing to eat more of an apple. If it's sliced, it's just easier to eat and apple consumption shoots up. And it's also really helped in schools across Britain. People before that were just having one bite of an apple and throwing it away, weren't they? But I think it's also partly due to the just the size of McDonald's as a franchise,

because when they started giving away free books on in Happy Meals one year, they became the largest literary producer in the world. Literacy tripled in America. Yeah, so it's 10 percent of apples sold in the US are of sliced apples sold in the US from McDonald's, but exactly the same thing happened in the UK. When they introduced them into schools, then apple consumption went up by almost 100 percent. Yeah. Wow. It's easy in schools, though, because they can just make you eat stuff.

I was like, no, but they tried to make you eat full apples and it didn't work. And then when you get sliced apples, I had an apple this morning. And I'm amazed at my bravery in getting through it without having it sliced for me. James has an apple peeling machine by his desk. I do. I've never used it. I bought it for QI because for the opening show, I was going to put it in there as a weird opening thing. And then I bought it and everyone went, that's not weird.

Everyone has one of those. I think you can have it. What the hell? I've never heard of that. Does it actually work? It looks like a little torture device. It's made of metal and you basically skewer the apple and you sort of you put it on a skewer and then you turn it so it's being like spit roasted, essentially. And then there's a kind of little arm that comes down with a little knife on it

and you sort of turn it and it peels it off the it takes off the peel like a little big, big spiral. It's also for oranges. I only really like an apple on a skewer when it's got a suckling pig wrapped around it. So there is a shaving brush manufacturer around at the moment called Penn Halligans. I think they're quite an old, an old one with a lot of history on their website. They're asked, do you use badger hair on your shaving brushes? And they say, yes, we do, but they take them from parts of the world

where badgers are not endangered and, in fact, are primarily farmed for their meat. Whoa. And I don't know where that is because I can't see really many places in the world where they farm badgers for meat. But presumably they must do. Well, I was on a forum. I think it was a Gillette forum about whether the badger hair on razor on brushes was ethically farmed and they got theirs from China.

So I think it was Gillette wrote a really good email saying, you know, we make sure that we source only the most ethical badger. So do you think they fund badger for meat in China? Maybe they do. Maybe. They used to eat badger in Europe and old European recipes for badger would tell you to lay it in running water for several days to get rid of its rank of flavour. Several days.

You just have to tie it up in the river, I guess. Yeah. But rank flavour as well, otherwise. Or just eat beef. Yeah. Badgers, they don't make a noise, though. Do they? Do they not? Well, do they? They must. Yeah, it depends what you do to them.

Old MacDonald had a badger. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. With a. What? Did they? I don't know. Do they fluff like ferrets do? Like fluff, fluff. Maybe. I like that.

I imagine squealing. I reckon they squeal if you run in my loop. That'd be a great quiz, by the way. Just sing the old MacDonald song and put in a new animal and the person has to respond. And if they're wrong, they're out of the quiz. How many animals can you get down the line? Big ships.

Yeah. The Sea Wise Giant is pretty much the biggest ship, I think it is the biggest, is longer than the Empire State Building is tall. Wow. It goes at about 16.5 knots, which is about 30 kilometres an hour. And its stopping distance is nine kilometres.

Nine kilometres. Wow. If it's going at that speed. And its turning circle in clear weather is three kilometres. So that's like, imagine we're standing outside our office facing south and we wanted to face north. We'd had to go all the way round to around where Madame Two Swords is before we were facing north.

Wow. We're like quite close to Trafalgar Square here, aren't we? Imagine in an emergency, like in the way you would in a car, hitting the brakes on a boat, but nine kilometres away. Because if you did it just one kilometre too late, you'd be like, we're screwed. We just have to watch ourselves plow into this island. I have a fact about banning songs and rude songs.

So it's about parental advisory lyrics. You know that sticker that you see on albums? Do you know who those are partly thanks to? You may do. Can I actually have a genuine guess? Cypress Hill? They're all one of the early people to have it. That's not what I've got, although that might be part of it.

NWA. Is it a rap group? It's Al Gore's wife. I thought you were close. Is she part of a rap group? Yeah, she is, yeah. No, she was listening to Prince with her young daughter and she heard some very explicit lyrics.

They were things like, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend. I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine and she was very angry about this because she was listening with her daughter and she thought it was very inappropriate. So she wrote a book called Raising PG Kids in an Ex-Rated Society. And as part of this drive, she set up the Parents' Music Resource Centre and they released a list of artists called The Filthy 15. So this contributed to the rise of the parental advisory.

Filthy 15 is a great name, isn't it? Yeah. It's the sequel to The Dirty Dozen. But there was an album once that got a parental advisory label in spite of the fact that it was completely instrumental. Why? To have sex noises? No, it didn't.

No, it was completely instrumental. It was by Frank Zappa. It's a Frank Zappa album. It was called G-Spot Tornado. One of the other bits of trivia from the movie Twister was that there's a cow which goes through at some point. Yeah. That was a sort of early CGI cow.

Supposedly, I haven't backed this up yet though, supposedly that cow was originally one of the zebras from Jumanji. That's quite a career change, isn't it? I'm tired of being typecasted as a zebra. I also like that you say I haven't backed this up yet. Like, as soon as we stop this podcast, you're going to be out there. I like this zebra's CV. It says, oh, it says here you can also do cow.

You need two zebras, one in the front and one in the back of the cow. Yeah, no, you're right. After every podcast done, I go through verifying everything. What do you mean by that? Did they paint the stripes off the zebra? Did they paint stripes onto a zebra for Jumanji? I think maybe, because Jumanji came out first, maybe they had the design of a zebra going round in a tornado.

Yeah. And so they just used that footage. Not the footage, but you know what I mean. That little computer generated thing to be the cow. I don't, as I say, haven't backed it up yet. I'm going to do it as soon as the podcast ends. So my friend Dan, who works in CGI, told me a fact he learned at London Film School.

And again, I haven't been able to back this up. So possibly if someone's CGI is listening. If you guys could start doing your research before the podcast, that would be ideal. No, but this is, it's one of those things where it's been said, but don't know where the proof is. Anytime CGI has been used, I don't know if it's now, but let's say movies of the last 10 years,

roughly the last maybe five years predominantly, CGI has been using, if they have a person in it, they've been using Brad Pitt. Because when Benjamin Button was made, they made a full DNA, as it were, CGI of Brad Pitt, the full motion of him. And rather than needing to replicate that, you just use that.

So the company that built that sells Brad Pitt to all these different movies that need a body CGI. That's cool. Because they can use all the different ages of man as well. Exactly. So theoretically, in World War Z, the zombie film, would all the zombies that they used have also been Brad Pitt? Wow.

I hope they paid him well for that. I bet they did. What if there's someone really overweight or something? Was there a bit in Benjamin Button where he put on lots of weight? Two Brad Pits. One in the front, one in the back. Have you seen the new thing that IKEA is doing where they're using augmented reality?

This is pretty cool. So if you want to get, let's say you want to get a sofa, and you want to have it in your front room, but you want to know what it looks like, they've got a new app where you can take a photo of your room, and you can kind of augment a sofa in the place where it would be, so you can see what the room would look like with that sofa. That is so cool.

That's amazing. Clever, isn't it? Because they already had, they had like a built-your-own kitchen in your website, it was like a budget version of The Sims, but without the people in it. Which I had hours of fun with. We did that for our new house, it was amazing. We didn't go with that in the end,

but we've got pictures of what it might have looked like. This thing, you've got a happy ending of you then get this public kitchen, whereas I'm just like, well, I can't do this, I don't actually own any of this public kitchen. But there is a video game as well, you'll love this then. It's basically a, it simulates you building Ikea furniture, but on a computer, and there's no end to it. You know, you don't win.

No, because you don't even end up with the furniture. No, yeah, and the idea is that it basically simulates the frustration of what it's like to build Ikea furniture, and you can do it with up to four friends. It's a game called Home Improvisation, so Home Improvisation. Actually, the translation does it. What language were you talking about?

I googled that. Turns out it translates as Home Improvisation, and it lets you, yeah, basically through virtual reality, exactly what you're doing, Alex. So if you want to build stuff outside of kitchens, that's there for you. That's fine. There is a thing that's happening at the moment.

People keep having sleepovers in Ikea shops, and Ikea are not relaxed about it. They are really annoyed. Well, surely they could just stop people, like, as in kick them out. Well, people go in and they hide in cupboards at the end of the day. You can't go through at the end of every working day checking every cupboard in the shop.

There's an old stat, isn't there, something like, it might be 1% as well, of people in Europe were conceived in an Ikea bed. One in ten, yeah. One in ten, is it? Wow, and were they all in the shop? Somebody filmed the soap opera set entirely in Ikea, and they did it all without Ikea's knowledge,

and it was a web series, yeah. That's amazing. That's awesome. So they were in the physical shop, but they just never... Staff never call on to... No, they were always filming with, sort of, hand-tailed cameras and things,

and presumably they must have got asked to leave a few times, but as in they filmed an entire web series, and, you know, it was just... That's so cool. They were just, like, living in the homes, and stuff like that. Oh, because, yeah, because if it's a kitchen set up... Set up.

Yeah, they've got a set. I think the only awkward thing is that, in every scene, you've got random people walking around your house, and just, like, picking up your kids' utensils and taking them away. So the whole concept of the sitcom has to be about a place where you live,

where there's a lot of burglars. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know, if we ever said that when Nelson died, and he famously had Hardy next to him and cradling him in his arms, and the person who wrote the account, who was there at the time,

said that Nelson said, kiss me Hardy, and then Hardy kissed him, and then, have we ever mentioned that for about 80 years during the Victorian era, that story was changed so that he said, kismet Hardy, because they were too squeamish about the idea of two men kissing each other, and kismet was Turkish for fate,

and so they said that he'd said kismet Hardy, and this guy must have misheard it. No one would have said kiss me Hardy. Why do you say kismet me Hardy? Isn't that... Because he wasn't a fake pirate? It's a missed opportunity, I think. I bet Hardy got a load of those jokes

all the way through his name. Yeah. But if the story was that Nelson said, kismet Hardy, how do they explain the way Hardy then kisses him? Did they say, oh, Nelson said, oh, get off me, you weirdo. Can I throw in one Nixon fact before we move on?

Sure. Can anyone tell me what Richard Nixon's middle name is? Milhouse. Yeah, I'd say Milhouse. Yeah, so it is Milhouse. However, I'm going to put forward the reviewed fact that it's in fact a double-barrel story, in fact, a double-barrel surname,

because it is his mother's maiden name. Milhouse was his mum. Okay. So he took that on, and I would say that that's not a... That's quite... So my brother has the same thing with my mother's maiden name. That's quite common, and I would say that's not double-barreled, because it's not the mother's name

anymore, is it? Well, it can still be her name. She might, yeah. Was her name still Milhouse? I don't know, but it's taken because it's his mother's maiden name. Interesting. Yeah.

Oh, just I didn't know that connection in any case. It's a huge, huge news, if true, though, that Richard Nixon's middle name isn't Milhouse. It might just be a part of his surname. Yeah. Well, that's what I'm trying to put forward here, yeah. It is a relatively common thing. I think, especially in Scotland, they do that a lot,

don't they? They use mother's maiden name for middle names. If that is took correct, then there are presumably a lot of times his name has been carved into stone, but they're going to have to go back and do a really botched squeeze of the word Milhouse into it. I don't know how many times his name's been written in stone, actually.

Yeah, that's true. I mean, he's not, I don't think he's one of them out Rushmore, is he, Nixon? No. But it should be a shit Rushmore with Andrew Jackson and Nixon and Calvin Coolidge. Calvin Coolidge, Trump, yeah. Just another thing about his name.

He was named after a British king. So there's a thought that his family tree actually goes back and he descends from King Edward III of England. That's a sort of an idea that was put out there. But he's named after Richard the Lionheart, and he is one of four brothers, and all of them also carry English king names.

Really? What do you have the names? Well, there are only about three other English king names. Sorry, sorry. Three of them carried it, and then there was Francis, who was the name of his dad, who carried his dad's name. I think, isn't Richard the Lionheart far back enough that everyone has directly descended from him?

I think he is. Yes. I think Edward III is, so everyone on Earth is directly descended. What? Not everyone on Earth. Not everyone in Britain. Pretty much everyone in Western Europe.

But everyone in America as well, because... But Danny Dyer did Who Do You Think You Are, and they found that he's related to Edward III, and it's this huge story. And actually, the odds of him not being related... It would have been an amazing news story if he had not been related to Edward III. I don't think that's going to sell many papers, is it?

Danny Dyer not related to... Explain the odds. 99% of everyone is related to Edward III. It's suddenly a very interesting story. Yeah, but then people don't usually go much past their headlines, do they? And if their headline is Danny Dyer, isn't related to Edward III.

But that's an interesting story, because the odds are 99% that he would be. In my newspaper, it's going to have very long headlines and very short articles. Country music has the most intelligent lyrics, apparently, because one of the measures, which sounds like not a great measure, is the number of syllables in words,

and it doesn't have filler words, so you don't get a lot of, you know, that kind of stuff you get. I see what you mean, but if you say that the most advanced songs are the ones with more syllables, then the most advanced song in history is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.

Yeah, it takes years of study to understand that. The example the study used was country music uses more syllables using words such as cigarettes, tackle box and hillbilly. Tackle box? Apparently. So that's too advanced for an eight-year-old, obviously.

Yeah, fair enough. Also on Too Big To Fit, I googled Too Big To Fit, and Dwayne The Rock Johnson is Too Big To Fit in a lot of the cars in the latest Fast and the Furious. Wow! So there was an interview with him,

and they're asking him, why are you always in trucks and not in the little cars? And he's like, I'm too big to fit in there. Oh my God. Makes sense, yeah. I should drill a hole in the ceiling or something. Is he too tall or too... He's very muscular.

But that is extraordinary. He's good, that, isn't it? Could they have an adapted one where he's just got one seat in the middle, so it's not a two-seater? I guess they could, although they'd have to write that into the storyline of the film. What storyline there is of the film.

If you want to collect semen from macaques, it's quite hard. There are six little primates, little monkey things. What they used to do is they would stimulate their genitals with electricity. Sometimes a little weak jolt, but it would make them

ejaculate. But one researcher realised that actually they were ejaculating quite a lot anyway, because they do it like four times an hour or something like that. Yeah, they average four times an hour ejaculating when they're just having fun and just on their own.

Well, not whether they're asleep. Whether they're asleep now just keeps going. But do they ejaculate 40 times a day, you know? Yeah, I think they do. So what I'm seeing here on this bit of paper is on the island

the males masturbate on average four times an hour. So that's on average four times an hour. They're going to have some better hours than that. In a good hour. And so what she realised this researcher is what she could do is just kind of hang around, because it happens so frequently, and then when it happens

just quickly get in there with the pipette and suck it up. And she does that. The main problem being that they often lick the ground or their hands clean before she can get close because semen happens to be highly nutritious and they don't want to waste the nutrients. Devious.

Devious macaques. Yeah, they are randy though, so randy. You can obviously... Yeah, they like to masturbate. Look, we all like to masturbate, but they should get a job. You know, when crocodiles die, they bloat and float. They're bloaters and floaters

because of all these gases being released that keep them afloat. And they float for over a month without sinking. So I don't understand why we don't see crocodiles floating down. Well, we must do. Maybe we do in countries with crocodiles.

Yeah. Or crocodiles. Because they're very stealth, aren't they? Crocodiles. They don't do much movement. So if you saw one going like that, you'd think, oh, he's on a cheeky mission. Cockroaches go on their back, don't they, when they die famously? The reason being that they have long

legs for an insect and they have a high center of gravity. The center of gravity is quite near their bum kind of thing. And as they get older, they kind of start to get weighed down to the bum side. And then when they kind of eventually

die, they flip over and they don't have enough energy in their arms. They don't have enough strength in their legs to put them back over. And the same thing happens if you give them kind of pesticides. They spasm and they'll flip over and then they won't have the energy left

in their legs to flip them back. So they're flipping over their head. They're rolling over sideways. They're flipping over because their bum's weighing them down. They do a backflip. Well, I don't know if it's exactly like that. It could be a slightly sideways, slightly backflippy

thing. I don't know about that. But basically, you're walking around with a heavy bum and as you get older you're less able to deal with it. We know how it feels, cockroaches. Tortoises have that same problem. Do they?

Obviously, because they've got round shells. But they have this really weird balancing act because bigger animals obviously do better because they're stronger and they can fight other males and they can compete more. But also, if they get too big a bigger shell

means that it's hard to right yourself again. So you have all the advantages of being big but if you lose one fight and you then get rolled over onto your back it's much likely that you won't be able to right yourself again. It's a trade-off.

There's a really interesting thing about tortoises which we covered on QI years and years ago and that is that it's possible to invent a shape that you put it on a table and it always flips over to a certain side just due to the shape of the thing. It's felt like a gombok

but I think it's pronounced more like gumboots. Anyway, so this shape has been invented by computer scientists and it took us decades to do it and they managed to do it through using computers. But tortoise shells some tortoise shells have this exact same shape and so if they flip over

they naturally kind of roll back onto their feet. That's so cool. Was the inventor of the gombok inspired by turtles or tortoises or is that? I believe he was. I've met him and I can't remember. Was it vice versa?

Yes. Went to one of his shows and thought, guys, we should try that. I was so proud of myself for not finishing the sentence and I clearly knew where I was going with that. I was like, nah, because James started talking and I thought, ah, that looks like a clever question now.

I wasn't going to let him save you. Diamonds are the hardest substance in the world. I read a, whoop, they're not James Shaken attempt. Indiesel. Indiesel. They're not, what is then? They're the hardest naturally occurring substance. Sorry, that's what I meant to say. Yes, the hardest

naturally occurring substance. You can't scratch a diamond except with another diamond you can. So you can scratch a diamond with a diamond. That's what it means. That's what hardness means in this sense. It means that you can scratch something with something. So hardness is whether something can be scratched

and toughness is whether it shatters into a thousand pieces if you hit it with something. So diamonds because the layers of carbon are very tough, you know, internally but you hit it with a hammer, bang, smash it. Right. So don't try that. Don't do that. And that's, I think we may have said this before.

That's what traders used to do. If someone had mined a diamond, there were some unscrupulous people who'd say, well, okay, let's have a look and we'll just give it a quick test to see if it's a real diamond. I'll just hit it with this hammer, bang, smash it and then he says, oh, I'm so sorry. It wasn't a real diamond after all. It was something else.

But I'll keep the shards. I'll keep the shards and I'll pay you a nominal sum for them. I'll pay you a tiny bit to keep yourself going, you know, and then they just sell off a load of smaller diamonds. Very clever. Yeah. I'd rather make a bigger diamond again. Oh, God. I think that's where the imperfections come in. Come on down to Anna's shitty diamond store.

We've got loads of rubbish diamonds full of glue. I've got some stuff on quarantine. Oh, right. Yeah. It comes from the Italian for 40, caranti, which... Because you used to have to stay 40 days in quarantine. Yeah. Incubation period of the Black Death, supposedly.

Okay. They put astronauts in quarantine when they come back down. Do you know why? Yeah, because of radiation and in case, in space, they were given some sort of flu diseases. It was to do with diseases, wasn't it?

Well, it is a little bit. Aliens with smallpox. Yeah. So you might think if you were a sci-fi fan that it was to stop alien diseases coming to Earth. But it's actually because their immune system lessens due to them being in space. So when they come back down, they need to go in quarantine so they don't pick up bugs on Earth.

Isn't that amazing? Isn't it technically that you're putting the entire rest of the world in quarantine? Yes. That must be true of all quarantine. You just flip around the exit and entrance sign. Yeah, I suppose that is true. There was, you know, just picking up on that quickly. When the Apollo 11 astronauts came down,

they had to do that. They had to be in quarantine in this room where they had a sort of kitchen in there and living quarters and so on. They had to stay in there for ages before they could do any of their parades around the world. Wow. And what ended up happening was

if a scientist accidentally kind of was infected, as it were, with the room that they were kept in because they were delivering stuff and so on, I guess in suits. And so damn it was for possible space cooties, wasn't it? Yes, yeah. Those scientists then had to move in with them. So there was a whole batch of people

that subtly got or might have been infected so therefore needed to be quarantined. And then the next people came along to give them some food and they got infected. It's like a horror film. It's like, oh, where's Sarah? I better go and find out. Oh no, where's Bernard gone now? It's a bit like a game of sardines. It is, it is, exactly.

And there was a suggestion, and I'm not saying this is true, but there was a suggestion that some of the people who accidentally had to go into the quarantine looked like ladies of the night and who made their way into there and had to live out with them.

I don't even know what the implication you're making is. Prostitutes. Space prostitutes? No, because it's back on Earth now. And also, space prostitutes don't exist. Oh yes. But it really was another time, wasn't it, at the 60s? Yeah. I mean, it literally was, yes.

I looked at some skillful number people and I was looking at the world record and memorizing numbers and stuff like that. Okay. And the world record for most digits memorized in one minute has two different sections, one with the light on and one with the light off. Because apparently it's

miles easier when the light's off. That makes sense, what, because there are no distractions? I guess so, right? But you can close your eyes. How do you see the number to memorize? Maybe that's another reason. But yeah, maybe you're allowed a little torch or something, I don't know.

Can we perhaps give you an audio recording of it? Maybe, I don't know. So this is for binary digits, so it's zeros and ones. Oh. The specific one I'm looking at. And the record for most zeros and ones memorized in one minute with the light on is 107.

Okay. With the light off, it's 273. Oh, wow. Isn't that amazing? That makes that much difference. That's incredible. So all math exams should be held in the dark, shouldn't they? They were all in binary. Mine all worked.

Did you just quickly one thing on chocolate? I think it's quite funny. Bernie Madoff, remember him, is now running a chocolate racket in prison. Who's he again, sorry? He's the guy who... He ran a massive Ponzi Scream, didn't he?

Ponzi Scream. Yeah, so he was a businessman who it turned out was stealing lots of people's investments, so he got millions and millions of pounds and stole lots of money. And he's running this chocolate racket and in prison in America now, he's really respected because he's stolen more money than anyone else in there.

So he wrote this letter to his daughter saying he's quite the celebrity in there. Other inmates treat him like a mafia don and call him Uncle Bernie. I can't walk anywhere without people shouting their greetings and encouragement. It's really quite sweet and he's bought up all the chocolate in the prison

and now he runs this racket where the only person you can get it from is him because it sounds like that should be illegal, right? It's unusual to have people committing a very similar crime in prison to the one they were put in there for. And then to announce it, I mean, do prison guards not read news?

But that's not illegal. No, just to buy up, to get in there first and buy up all the stuff so you can sell it on for a profit. That's okay. It's immoral. It's a bit of a monopoly, but I don't think there's like anti-monopoly rules in prisons. It's touting. It is touting, yeah.

Good luck to him. I think that's what you're saying. Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. I'd love to know where the boxes are from deal or no deal. You'll notice I said nothing in that whole bit because I was busy thinking, yeah, did they I reckon the old Edmunds has got them in his house. Yeah. He probably, I reckon he uses them

to wrap Christmas presents. That would be such a good idea if he doesn't and he's listening. But that's a great Christmas present, so you unwrap it. There's a box, you open the box, there's nothing inside. You're like, oh, this is terrible. And he says, actually, it's one of the boxes from deal or no deal. And you're like, that's the best present

that Edmunds and Christmas has saved. I would be still unhappy with a deal or no deal box as my Christmas present. If it was a real one that was used on the show. I really intensely do not want that as a present. Great. Well, I'm sure someone else will have it.

I bought it now. Sorry, Noel, we thought you'd love it. I might use it for, like, storage. Yeah. Or if he goes shopping, putting his shopping in the boxes. Yeah. If you look at every photo of him these days, he's actually got a box with him.

If he gets fired, once he got fired from a job, do you think he cleared his desk in those boxes? Oh, yeah, when he got cancelled, yeah. How do you move them, though? Does he put handles on them or wheels? Yeah, because they don't have handles, do they? No, not very easy to carry. How many items of checking luggage will you have today, sir?

I read a thing. There's a basketball player called Jimmy Butler. He plays for the Chicago Bulls. I think he's just been traded, but I'm not sure to where. But he, I read an article, this is the, in the headline, it says that Jimmy Butler took out his car rear view mirror as a reminder to never look back.

Awesome. He was promptly arrested. Have you heard of the North American Walnut Sphinx caterpillar? No. That's a goodie. It pretends to be a bird to freak birds out. A bird's freaked out by other birds?

Yeah. That's the one thing they're most used to, right? They're used to hanging around with birds. Sorry, I should clarify. They make a noise like a freaked out bird. Oh, to scare the other incoming birds away. Exactly. So what they do, it's amazing.

To make the noise, they have not quite lungs in the sense that we understand they have these holes along the sides called spiracles, exactly. And to make the noise, they squeeze themselves shut like an accordion. No. It's amazing.

And that, when they do that, it makes a noise that goes eeee and it sounds exactly like a bird's alarm call saying there is a bird of prey nearby or get out of here, we're all, we're under attack. And so the other birds all fly off as soon as this caterpillar makes its way. They're doing it to scare the birds away.

That's extraordinary. Is that evolution or is that a coincidence at the note, the specific note? That everything's evolution. Is it? That's what we all are a product of. What was the other option?

Coincidence. Well, yeah. It could be evolution by coincidence. It probably started as a bit of a coincidence. That's what I was looking for, guys. But that's how evolution works. Evolution always starts as a coincidence which then evolves into being a pattern.

Yeah, yeah. No, but if you were an animal and you were living on the Galapagos and the trees were too high and the leaves were too high on the tree it's not a coincidence for you to grow your neck to try and... Yes, it is. It's a coincidence that there was someone who was born with a really long neck

No, but don't you grow your neck? No, oh my god. That's Lamarcusm. That's Lamarcusm, the original evolution. In some people's eyes, it's the best. No, one individual gets born with a slightly longer neck. Slightly. Not one individual is born

with 50 vertebrae. That's a coincidence. That has a million children because it's got all the leaves. Slightly, slightly longer neck and then can get one or two more leaves and then it's a bit more likely to pass on its genes. Yes.

I knew that bit. Right. Did you, though? Because it just sounded a lot like it didn't. When I was reading about caterpillars I read this statement that said that basically all they're doing is collecting food

for the moment where they go into their chrysalis stage. So their whole life as a caterpillar is just to feed themselves in order for that like how I moved house the other day. It'd be like as if my whole life was just collecting boxes for the move.

In order to live and breathe and for their processes to work they have to be metabolising some of the food. They can't just all be. They're just creating a small part as well. They're effectively just like I just need to just eat and get myself ready for this. They are also using the food, a lot of it

for energy as a caterpillar. Yes, totally. But what's the point of using all that energy so that you can turn into a butterfly? Slightly. It's the same as Dan saving up coac and prostitutes and whatever. But eventually he's been saving up for this house. Got it. They're putting something aside

is what you're saying. They've got a little savings account on the side. Yeah, but it defines their whole existence because then they're a new thing. It's a whole new account. Who are you to say what defines the existence of a caterpillar? I did not read it in an article. I don't know if a caterpillar would agree with that.

They probably wouldn't be able to argue me. Probably don't even know their caterpillars. Do you know auctioneers watch videos of other auctioneers at their best? Sort of like the greatest hits of auctioneering.

Do we, like, auctioneers have to do that as part of their training or just for fun? No, they watch it to marvel at the complexity of what certain auctioneers have done. So there's a guy called Chris Birch who's acknowledged as Christie's greatest auctioneer. Some people acknowledge him as a greatest auctioneer of

all time. What a thing. I think I've slightly made that up. He basically, so he joined Christie's in 1970 and he averaged, now I'm just going to read this sentence as it's written. I didn't fully understand it because I can't believe it's true.

Averaging more than one million dollars a minute in sales up to his retirement in 2012. No, can't be true. That speaks very fast. That's per minute across his sales, isn't it? So if an auction takes 50 minutes

then his average was one million a minute. In the 50 minutes? So if he sells one painting for 25 million dollars in one minute, he can then sit around for 24 minutes. Really not trying. That makes it amazing.

But so there's a video of him that auctioneers love to watch and he sold the 10 most expensive works ever sold at auction in the world. And the video is of him selling Monet's water lilies in New York and in it

he's taking bids from 3 people in the room and 2 people on the phone and what they're watching is the magic of him being able to juggle between it all be charming and witty and it's a sort of master class in auctioneering videos. Well, I mean I listen to other podcasts so it's the same kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean you want to, yeah if you do love auctioneering and you're an auctioneer of course you're going to watch videos. I just didn't know that they existed that there's a greatest hits out there. There are DVDs and things you can get. The most greatest auctioneers. I don't think that's the biggest auction of all time though

even the water lilies one. I've got one that was bigger. Go on. The entire Roman Empire was auctioned off in 193 AD. Yeah, it was auctioned off by the Victorian Guard who took bids from a couple of people.

It was a closed auction, it wasn't anyone could bid. This is according to Cassius Dio who wrote a history of Rome and 2 people were bidding, Saul Piccianis and Marcus Didius Salveius Julianis and he made the maximum bid. Supposedly it was the equivalent of about 5 million quid

in today's money which I think surely someone else could have stumped up more. Well it was past its best in 193 AD. Yeah, that's true. There was some damage but then several careless owners. So at the moment British police are investigating

a caterpillar thief who has stolen from a nature reserve in Norfolk some milk parsley plants, right? Now there is a kind of butterfly in Britain called the Swallowtail it's the largest native British butterfly and the caterpillars only eat milk parsley

and these plants in Norfolk had Swallowtail caterpillars on them so the police think that they've been stolen and the plants will be kept alive and then eventually the caterpillars will turn into butterflies and then collectors will kill the butterflies

and they're very rare these butterflies because they only feed on these plants. So someone's thrown the plants in order to get the caterpillars that they can sell to collectors? Yes, to turn the caterpillars into butterflies to be killed for collectors, yeah. But then you're breeding caterpillars I suppose so you aren't making more of a species.

It's not a butterfly as soon as it comes out of the thing. Swings around about it says No, it's not. It's all swings. Crap playground. Do you know they used to play cricket on the ice in the fens? This was in North in what's it called in East Anglia

in England. Was that not quite confusing if they were all wearing their whites? No, this would take place in the 18th in the 19th century and I read one account saying that the fielding and batting of many of the players was considered to be far superior

and more graceful than any cricketing on the green. Really? So apparently playing cricket on ice is better. Were they in skates or were they just running around on the ice? I think they were on skates, yeah. That must be amazing. Yeah, I mean the ball will go so far

if you hit it it goes out. Standing on skates to bat. The opposite was skid on the ice. Oh, once it hit the ground, it gave you superhuman power of hitting. Just quickly on the Dutch and how good they are at skating. They're amazing at speed skating, aren't they?

This is the thing. They're now so good that other countries are refusing to play against them. There's no point. In Sochi in 2014 the Norwegians dropped out of the 10,000m speed skating race ostensibly because they said we want to focus on the team event that was organized by the Dutch.

And Norway love skating as well so that's a big thing. So the women's 1500m team they came first, second, third and fourth in that event and out of 36 medals the Dutch got 23. No other team got more than three.

Maybe it's unfair because they're the tallest nation, aren't they? So perhaps it's unfair because their legs are too long. But they will have a higher centre of gravity meaning that it's easier for them to fall over. Are we sure that being tall is an advantage in ice skating?

I'm certainly not sure of that. I think long legs might help if you're propelling yourself forward because you can go further from each stroke and it's like a more efficient use of energy. I would suggest that if Jamaica were to take part in this event they might be as good as

if not better than the Dutch. I think we've just gone with the sequel to Cool Runnings. But the fastest skater, the world record holder for the fastest skater is a Russian called Pavel Kulesnikov and he's

whatever, how would you say it then, James? Kulesnikov? Yeah, they get Pavel Kulesnikov to be fair, I didn't even read the name until just now I should have run the phonetic spelling down and he was registered going at 53km an hour, registered going

on camera, but like I just think that's astonishingly fast for a skater and he was in a 500m race and he picked up speed fast. How many is that in miles an hour, please? I can't be bothered with this. 32.91, yeah. That's fast, isn't it?

Can you say in bulk run at 30 miles an hour? It doesn't normally happen in miles an hour, does it? They do it in seconds per 100 metres. I think it would be nicer if it was miles an hour for the spectators. He can run at approximately 3.9 seconds per 100 metres. I'm not sure what that is in miles per hour.

Someone at home can work it out. I think it's less, I think it's about 20 that he runs, isn't it? No, that's not great. That's like a build-up area. I was looking up lonely insects and I was looking up cockroaches and they suffer from isolation syndrome if they're left on their own

and they die or they are not able to mature properly and this is really weird so the way that cockroaches are really affectionate physically so if you see them they're always crawling all over each other and touching each other and it turns out all this physical contact

stimulates them to grow so if you isolate a cockroach even if you give it food and water then it won't grow and it won't mature but you can make it mature by poking it with a feather and that convinces them that they're having this physical contact with their fellow cockroaches

and they grow properly mature. Does it have to be a feather or...? It can probably actually be any kind of slightly ticklish device. Is there a limit to how big a cockroach grows? Because they can maintain it, right? If they were touching another cockroach they're like, I just want to grow a bit today

and so they'd touch a cockroach. So you're saying if you get a cockroach and you tickle it for like, let's say, seven weeks it might be the size of a dog? Exactly, that's my question. Maybe, try it. I think Andy's skeptical. I am skeptical and I'm surprised we've kind bossed a lot of the stupid things he said today.

I thought we'd just let this one pass. So for many years in many places, collecting flies and giving them to the government has gotten you money. So in China, officials in Luoyang offered $125

per 2,000 dead flies during a campaign. Really? Each fly was worth about $0.07. Was that a massive amount for a fly? That was quite recently, yeah. A cent is quite a lot bigger than a fly as well.

Yeah, that's not really how money works. It's interesting that usually the money's less than the thing. You don't find out. You go to the shop with loads of flies and they say you can't pay with that and you're like, well it's heavier than a 10 pound note. It's weird because the sandwich weighs a lot more than the 20 quid

but the 20 pound note is heavier. It doesn't really make sense, does it? Sorry, I completely retract that. It's a ridiculous thing to say. So in... Because then you wouldn't be able to buy anything. Diamonds are really expensive. I just bought my first house. Oh man, that must be tough.

Yeah, I had to find a coin as big as a house. That's what happens on the island of Yap in Micronesia. Oh yeah. Because they have massive stone coins with holes in them and the bigger, the better really. Yeah, that's where I was going with that. Salvador Dali, he was obsessed with

breasts, wasn't he? Lots of his art depicts breasts but his ultimate obsession was with the udder. Because he said it's a very weird sexual thing. It's half penis and half udder. What? Sorry.

It's half penis, half breast, all udder. In what sense is an udder half penis? It's incorrect. Salvador Dali was incorrect. He went out on a limb. He was wrong. He was a UFC fighter called Justine Kish. She was in a fight and halfway through the match

she was held in, I think, in a stranglehold and as a result she pooed herself mid-fight in the octagon. Nice. Still won the match and she got offered a bum wiping product as her sponsor for future matches.

Do you mean Tyler Piper? No, it's white. She got to the shop. We have some bum wiping product, please. The test goes like equivalent when they're not allowed to call it Jaffa cakes. Orange filled biscuits with chocolate on top. Without the chocolate on top.

But actually this wasn't Tyler Pay for you. No, no, it's wipes. It's bum wipes. Wet wipes. Wet wipes for adults as opposed to babies. She thought she was going to do it but she was really good because she won the match anyway and she came off and they asked her about it and she said, shit happens.

Did she use it as a weapon in the fight? I mean in no holds barred. There's no weapons in UFC. There's no rules, right? That's true. That's true. Oh, do you mean did she use the poo in the fight?

Not her wipes. I had to wipe the floor with you. Have you heard of the in Holland, there's a race in Holland called the Elf Stade and Tocht. Leaven Skyra told me about this actually. It's this race that happens whenever it's able to happen.

Sometimes it doesn't happen for 20 years, sometimes it'll happen in consecutive years and it's apparently a massive event in Holland when it does happen and it is an ice skating tour that is about 200 kilometers long and goes to 11 cities. That's what the name means, 11 city tour. Apparently it's just a massive event

where the ice is in winter and they go around the race track goes along a network of canals. Yeah, exactly. And they have to make sure that the ice is thick enough because it's an amateur contest and professionals and amateurs take part and so loads and loads of people

take part in it and then pretty much the rest of the country all cool and sick and watch it on television and apparently that's like a thing. It's like they stay home, like watch it. It's a bit like I know the Grand National here or any massive event.

Yeah, I have heard of that but I think global warming means it hasn't happened for a while. There was one that was going to happen in 2012 and they called it and what happens is they decide they're going to call it and then it has to happen in the next 48 hours so everyone has to rush to get prepared but then it didn't happen even though they called it

because the ice just wasn't thick enough. And there was actually, speaking of ice preparation they do this thing called ice transplanting which is taking thick ice from one place to say a bit under a bridge where the ice isn't very thick and to kind of fusing it to the ice. It's like a skin transplant but yeah, isn't that really cool?

Because it has to be six inches thick along the entire 200 kilometers of the course and obviously that's very seldom going to happen. Why aren't the climate change lobby using this more in their PR? I really think that might persuade the likes of

Donald Trump and other such people. Surely, if we know that this canal ice race is going to end I reckon people would step up to the plate. If Donald Trump was a secret passion for ice racing I don't think he does. It is incredible. It's so cool.

Do you mind if I ask why people are monitoring the Koala populations? Do we know that? Yeah, I think more... It wasn't that personal. Sorry, it stopped me finding really invasive. Did you guys see that photo from March of this year? There was a guy sitting

at a train station. He looked up and he just couldn't believe what he saw. He took a photo to prove it. He was stopped at Seven Sisters Station sitting right there on the platform with seven nuns. Seven nuns, seven sisters

and he took a photo of it. Do you think an eighth nun wanted to come on that trip but they were like, guys, we can't. This is like the moon landing is being fake. If you look in the photo, there is an eighth nun. Well, there's an eighth man. Well, there's one man

but he's an eighth in the party. Oh, I thought I saw an eighth nun when I looked at the photo. Oh, really? Oh, you're right. There's an eighth nun. Oh, my God, ruined. Oh, man. I'm sorry. I feel like I've killed Christmas.

Did you do it that easy with the moon landings as well? Have you heard of open-source seeds? No. OK, so... Is that seeds that don't charge you to read them? Kind of. OK. I think these are the seeds that are in these libraries,

these open-source seeds. Well, so in the 1930s the USA started applying patent law to plants. So there are various plants where the intellectual property is owned. Like you can own an avocado. Well, you can own an avocado

but you can own the whole avocado. The concept of the avocado. The whole species of the... They've got this new kind of rice called golden rice which is hardier and it grows faster and better and therefore has prevented starvation.

That is owned by someone, the intellectual property for it. Does that mean you're not allowed to grow it or you're not allowed to give it the name? I think you're not allowed to then... develop it and then make money selling your own extra strain of it. But I'm not certain.

I think that's because that specific breed of rice was growing in space and it was like the means that it took to do that. Well, therefore, those people deserve a kind of a cut of any profits. I don't think it's specifically the space thing. I just think that's

the effort that went into making that new breed of rice. Yeah, so it's kind of like developing a medicine in some ways. If you develop the medicine, you then get the rights to it because you've spent money developing it but they've now got this thing called open source seeds. German breeders are experimenting with it. You're not allowed to patent anything

that you get out of it, any new great strains that you get, but you don't have to pay anybody to do the developing and... Okay. Isn't that weird? Yeah, that's truly bizarre and it doesn't seem morally great, surely, if you're not allowed to let anyone grow this thing that could be

a great food source that you can propagate. You might not incentivize people to develop new strains if you can't own it. So there's a bit of a... That's your capitalism versus communism. Wrap it up in one simple sentence. Imagine you'd like everybody to have enough to eat Anna. Well, I'm sorry.

I suppose it's not a million miles away from Peyton Tinga Mars Bar. Or a strain of apple that is in like a Granny Smith or something. If Anna was in charge, just be formless lumps of nougat that we'd be eating now. But everyone would get one, wouldn't they? It's a better world.