Who Shat On The Floor At My Wedding? And Other Crimes - S3 E14 Pleasurable Percentages - BONUS

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

How good are we at solving crimes… statistically speaking?After several months of operating the Unqualified Detective Agency, we finally attempt to answer the question no one asked but everyone fears: what is our actual crime-solving success rate?A supposedly simple calculation quickly descends into bickering, selective memory, creative accounting, and a spirited debate over what should and definitely should not count as “solved”.To restore order, we bring in a professional statistician to crunch the numbers properly. The result is a percentage so alarming it raises serious questions about competence, confidence, and whether maths should ever be trusted.If you’ve ever wondered how not to measure success, this bonus episode is for you.The next case opens on January 1st.Support us on Patreon http://patreon.com/whoshatontheflooratmyweddingFollow us on Instagram @whoshatontheflooratmywedding for case evidence and behind-the-scenes. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Detective work looks different when you have no business doing it. You can spot it instantly in the way we open every case. Blind confidence followed by immediate regret. And every single case we take on leaves its mark. We've endured botched interrogations, undercover operations wearing bow ties and clown pants, school stakeouts, bribery gone wrong, flirting, trespassing, and enough embarrassment to last a lifetime.

Every mistake forces us to wonder why we keep pushing forward. And yet, against all odds, this unqualified detective agency staggers on. In this episode, there are no suspects, no crime scenes. The only thing under investigation is us. This is a special bonus episode all about our detective agency, and specifically our performance. We're about to reveal something that most investigators would bury. our official crime solving rate.

Success in our line of work isn't always straightforward. Sometimes we only solve fragments of a case and we just have no idea if that is good or bad. So we've brought in a statistician. Someone who is willing to calculate and then confront us with the number that defines our work. Because now, staring down the barrel of the numbers, one question hangs over us.

What if the biggest mystery we've ever faced is whether we should have become detectives at all? Warning, this episode contains spoilers about previous cases we've worked on. If you're not fully up to date, proceed with caution. Tell me. Well, it's not tell me, it's just I've lined up a statistician. So we need to go through and we'll have to present this so we can work out what the latest case-solving rate is. So obviously 0% for season 1, 100% for season 2, clean cut. Then who shucked my dishwasher, 100%.

But is it 100%? We don't have a confession. If we were a real place, we would have to verify the confession. 95%. And then round it up to 100. Okay, then human versus bear. I think we should discuss that with a statistician about this percentage because I think we solved it 100%,

but it was not really solved by us. It was solved by the internet jury and expert. So perhaps we should remove. a certain percentage if it wasn't solved by us? But if the case was already cracked by the public and by the CEO of Sunbears and we just verified it on a podcast, did we therefore crack it?

Yeah. Yeah, okay, so that person, the statistician, is going to have to make a lot of assumptions, which I don't think maths professionals like doing because they won't want to do that because they will want to be like formulaic and buy the book and we'll be like, hey, but what about this exception to the rule? and there are no exceptions to the role in maths.

You know when you look in the mirror, looking in our statistical mirror is not going to be pretty. It's not going to be nice at all. And also, what's 40%? Doggy bag is not 40% solved. Basically, I put 40%, because I also think there should be a rule about the amount of effort that we go to for each case.

So there'll be one thing of like, maybe we need another column. I think 56%. If it, for her shit, on the floor at my wedding? Yeah, I mean, we didn't do. No, no, no. That is 100% Absolutely not

And also, should we tell this person The reason that effort was low Like I failed to finish my detective course Yeah, but that applies for every case So Oh yeah, let's not bring that up Should we do intelligence So intelligence rating

Intelligence, I can't even smell it Yeah Intellectual Strategic Strategic Strategic Intelligence rating So that gets zero

Well, it's a percentage of how well we did with our strategies. I think push out would be way higher then, wouldn't it? How smart we were. You sniffed the floor, Lauren. Sniff the floor. Don't write that down. Don't write sniff the floor.

Case of the tiny suitcase, I think we were quite desperate, but we didn't invite the perp to the midsummer party. We forgot. To be honest, I think actually it should be probably minus 15. Yeah, I'd go minus because that's going to also go some out. Because we also did the cat hair thing. Negative 15% yet. He shat my dishwasher? No way, it's not 40.

We didn't do anything. We just copied and pasted that from something else. Oh, good, okay. Because she already knew it was Sharon. Most likely Sharon. And we're just like, oh yeah, it's probably Sharon. So I reckon 1%. He's literally not prepared for what we're of asking him. But I feel like detective effort and solving strategy intelligence rating are the same thing. No, it's intelligence versus absolute brute time and energy put into it.

It's like working smarter but not harder. Exactly. Working harder. What is it? We basically worked harder rather than smarter for a lot of the cases and that we should be honest about that. Human versus bear, I think we get 100% intelligence rating just for the approach. It was quite innovative.

I agreed. But I think the detective effort was zero because we relied on everyone else to do the work for us. But we, no, let's put 10% for us. We did arrange. No, we became lawyers. We learned how to become lawyers. We didn't learn how to become lawyers. We just became lawyers.

Okay, 22% is what feels right. Then vehicle, fugitive. I think 5%. Wow. It's a bit harsh. We're always outsourcing our work to others. 30%. Oh, it's quite high.

Okay. 15. 15 feels good. Because of William Hanson. I'm still trying to work out how to pronounce statistician. Doggy bag. A hundred. What?

For intelligence rating? Yeah. I think we did all the effort. We worked very hard and not so smart. So I feel like this has always got... These two columns have got to be a little bit. I still don't really understand the difference in the columns. No, me neither, but I think it helps.

Yeah. I don't think we did much in terms of intelligence. We went undercover at Louis Vuitton. Or you did. You got a bag from Louis Vuitton for free. You might be carrying this percentage. It was a creative approach. I think we need to make it easier for this mathematician.

Well, here's what his job is, so... He doesn't understand. and solving rates. You don't know that. How's he going to be like, oh, how'd you crack 20% of that? Because you narrowed down the suspects from 10 to 4. You still don't, you haven't solved a murder. I don't want us to come across cocky to one of these experts.

We also need to ask, because we shorten the time for cracking the case to 24 hours, does, like, solving it 20% equal 100? You know what I mean? If we crack half of the case in less time, is that equivalent to a full amount of time for a cop cracking it. Because speed solving, we've got to get some sort of like bonus thing there. The police have endless time to crack a case.

We have only 24 hours. So at what percentage can we be on the same level as police? Can we say we've cracked it because we've got less time if we only crack half of the case? We wanted to make it easier, not more complicated for this poor guy. Yeah, well, I feel really clear about what we're asking

from the statistician now, do you? No. Good morning. Good morning. How are you? Yeah, I'm well, thank you. Do you know what? Just the fact that you're here and like given the very little information that I gave you

about who the hell we are and what this is about. What the hell we're doing? My name is Michael Whitehouse and I am a post-doctoral research associate at Imperial College where I study the statistics of the spread of infectious diseases. I was hoping you'd say the word statistician, so I could check if I'm actually saying it correctly. Is that correct? Yes, oh, a statistician, yeah. The pronunciation is perfect.

Thank God. That was number one on the agenda. How do you say statistician? My first question was also how do you pronounce statistician? And then the second one was what is a statistician? You've sought out a statistician. Yeah, exactly. You've gone on a journey to find a statistician.

So what does it mean to you? There's no... Wow, you've felt... I feel like you've been media trained. I think there's no such thing as a stupid question. And I genuinely don't really know what a statistician is other than someone that's good at maths. So what is it?

You observe phenomena of the real world and you're taking some kind of numerical recording of some phenomena. So in my instance, it would be a number of positive cases of a given disease over a given timeframe. You ought to say something meaningful about these numbers. So we ascribe some kind of descriptive model of these numbers.

We have a responsibility to do that in a honest and integral way and to imbue these numbers that we observe with some kind of meaning. Okay, so it's basically counting and then making meaning. Yeah, yeah, that's good. I like that. Thanks. Do you think we need to get the intro from Mike, one more, time so I wouldn't mind hearing the word. Are you able to say statistician in your job? So I think that would be a easier. I can go.

Okay. Okay. No, I know you can pronounce it. I'm not suggesting you can't pronounce it. I'm just saying you didn't say statistician in the first bit. And I, you were like postdoctoral research and I feel like we might need the job title of statistician. Hello, my name is Michael Whitehouse and I am a statistician. I've got a simple mission for you today. I say it's simple. It's very simple. To calculate our current crime solving rate based on a measurement criteria we agree on in this call. How about it relate to crime solving rate? It was fine at first because we did season one, which was one case.

The shit on the floor. The shit on the floor. We didn't solve that. So that's a horrible 0% crime solving rate for that one. Then season two, again, just one crime. So that was 100% crime solving rate. So we were like, well, that's pretty easy. We were kept on saying we got a 50% crime solving rate when we finished season two,

which FYI is better than the real police case solving rate. I think that's about, what was it, Lauren? 21 or something? The UK place. We were like more than double as efficient and effective as the real police, so we were quite proud of that. But now things have got a little bit trickier because we've started season three, which is a slightly new concept. There was a lot of discussion about, well, if we're reducing the time,

that we have to solve it. Surely if we do solve a crime, that's extra, that needs extra waiting. I think your success rate changes. I think the percentage of the crime being solved doesn't change, but the success rate does go up, which is where we need your help. But don't worry until you've seen the table. The table will explain everything.

I'll withhold all comments until I've seen the table. So, yeah, in column C, we have the case name. In column D, we have the percentage solved, which Karen just talked you through. Then we have the detective effort. which is the energy and time put into the case that gets kind of a random percentage that's been carefully calculated and is not random at all. And then in column G we have the solving strategy intelligence rating. So how smart we were when we actually went through the

investigations and you'll see some negative percentages there where we did some things that weren't 100% intelligent. For example, the case of the tiny suitcase, we found a small grey hair on the suitcase. We sent it to the real forensic scientists that I was telling you about earlier, who called our podcast Career Suicide. She took it to her lab, got a whole team of people. They paused investigating murders and investigated this hair, which we were excited about because some of our suspects had short grey hair,

and it later turned out to be the hair of a cat. We did let a cat into the forensic examination space twice. But yeah, that's kind of where we're at with our various percentages. Okay. With these various percentages, at the end of all this, you want another percentage, which is how good are we? Is that basically we're after? Yes, yeah, like success, success rate, I guess.

So are we asking you to come up with a formula that includes the numbers from column E, G and H to equal a new percentage? Is that what we're asking you? Is that a question for me? Yeah, there's a question for you. Maybe offline I can come up with some kind of weighted score of hard gives you guys have been at solving crimes. Speed solved a crime, but you've got 33%. What's this compared to taking two years and not solving a crime?

But you scored yourself higher in terms of intelligence rating. Yes. That's interesting. We tried everything. I mean, some cases are just harder to crack. People don't want to come forward and say they're the one who shout on the floor at the wedding. After it goes viral. I feel like I'm just suddenly getting a bit defensive all of a sudden.

Right, okay. I've got some ideas. What would your approach be of working through this? A naive approach would be to add up the number of crimes you've successfully solved and divided by the number of crimes you've attempted to solve. But what we've got is we've got this timeline column, so how long we've spent doing these crimes, which we're going to want to use to wait.

the attempts. And then the detective effort, which I think the jury's out on whether that counts in your favour or against your favour. The timeline, the detective effort and this intelligence rating are all going to be used to weight this solved column. And so the idea being if you've solved a crime in less time, that probably counts for more than if you've solved a crime in two years.

Agreed. Do you feel like you're quite impressed with the brief? Are you more impressed than you thought you were going to be? so I don't even know what that question means. It's an interesting question. Trying to work out what the question is is the interesting part, I think. Yeah, I agree with it because we have forced you to come up with the question that we're asking you. That's a big part of a statistician's job, you know.

It's my job to work with you guys to imbued and with some meaning, which is, you know, calculated with the utmost honesty and integrity. Sorry, I just come back to the agenda. There's one point which I've forgotten what it means, but I think I was meant to do this at the beginning of the call to justify why we needed to waste your time. I have an agenda point that says, prove our mathematical shortcomings.

Do you think we covered that? I think you've got a sense of it, but then it says times table roulette, which I think my idea was that you got to ask Lauren and I a very basic times table question and then we'll probably won't be able to answer and then therefore we prove to you that we are so inept mathematically

that we absolutely need your help and therefore it's worthy use of your time. Three and seven? 21. Oh, you're fine. Lauren, five times nine. 45. I think I've done enough. That's enough that we're not wasting.

This is ridiculous. I did not approve the agenda point, by the way. If we went above 50, I would worry a little bit how we would conduct ourselves going forward. Yeah. We'd get a bit cocky. You go to your head. Yeah. Things go to our head very quickly and very easily.

So, yeah. It's important that you keep us grounded. Yeah, with your equations. That's actually a big part of this calculation and say is the psychological impact on us, making sure we do. Yeah. Yeah. So you have to take that into consideration as well, the psychological impact.

Could you describe how you felt before this call and how you feel now? Intrigued and confused beforehand. Now, feel confused. and intrigued enough to find out what the questions really. Yeah. So your intrigue rate has dropped. Has it dropped? No, no.

I think it's the same level just in a different way, I suppose. I'll get stuck into the spreadsheet and cheer it up and spit out a number. Something's not adding up more. It hurts me a little. bit how little that means. It's quite an unwieldy mathematical object. One, three and seven? Oh, my brain.

Hang on, hang on. Willoughby's maths for now. Right, okay. I'm in a really good mood because I'm excited because we're about to get the big results reveal of our case-solving stats. Okay. I don't know if you might want to temper those expectations,

So what we're going to do, I'm going to recreate this moment, like in sound design, we're going to imagine like a little jazz snare percussion. So can you imagine it, can you hear that slight jazz drum? Keep it going in your head, put it on a loop and then play it in your head as you reveal the results. The drums are going. The drums are going and we're going to go on mute. Given the case-solving statistics overview that he gave me with lots of, Useful information around a percentage of cases you've solved the amount of effort you put into the amount of time it took you to solve these cases.

I've looked into developing a score for how successful you've been in solving cases. I started with the simplest way of summarizing the numbers you've given me, and that is to just simply work out the proportion of cases you've sold. and that gave me 41% which is good but it doesn't include all of this extra information given me so what I've decided to do is weight your scores and solve the cases with the efforts and the time

and so if we do that we actually get 31% but then I thought well what if we think about it terms of your case solving efficiency. And so what I mean by that is, you know, per unit of effort put into solving a case, what is your rate of solving the case? So what that would actually do is upweights the cases where you've put less effort in

because it's like, well, you know, we're super efficient. We don't even need to put that much effort in and you can solve the case. And so that's the headline figure I'm going to do. you answer that is coming from waiting your solved cases inversely proportionate's the amount of effort you've put in and if I do that the case solving rate I've come to 69%

why that's but you know that's like a comedy number and I didn't even do it on purpose I'm not even trying to be funny that is I plug in the numbers 69% our case solving rate is a sexual position Oh, God. That's a really high number, but all of the, like, goodness of that number is completely stripped away by the fact that it's a sex position.

But we can round up to 70, surely, that's the decent thing. That's the dignified thing to do here. Yeah, what's the decimal placement there? And what have you, what's the rounding score rule? It was point, it was point one T. So I round it down, but you can round up if you want to save, say, safe face. I just want to be taken seriously and I feel like if we put on our website that we've got a 69% case-solving rate, I just don't think it's going to do our reputation any good. I don't think we should

be rounding because this is like a really careful, this is a very carefully constructed figure that's been created by a professional statistician and for us to just randomly bring the number down or up. I don't think that's effective. 69.1.2 is the number I can see. There we go. That makes it that is fine. 69.12. Yeah. That makes it more serious. That's a serious number, but 69 is not a serious number. I just don't think there's a sex position that is 69.12. I think it's only a 69er.

So I think when you add point 1-2, it takes it away from the sexual realm. I completely agree. I feel more comfortable with the specifics of 0.12. That is so high. we're really good. Do you think it's more fair to our new clients to say our case-solving rate is between 31 and 69.12%. Well, I suppose what you could say is... I don't want to misleads. Our crime-solving rate is between zero and 100%.

Depending on which model you look at. That you can say for sure. That is indisputable. Well, I suppose what you could say is our crime-solving rate is, our crime-solving rate is, is 41.65%. But what you could say is, if, big if,

if we were to put in 100% effort every time, then it would be 69.12. Okay. So, you know, you can tell your clients, we're really going to, you know,

a loss officer and going 100% effort for your case, in which case, you know, there's a about 70% chance of a solving. Yeah, roughly 70%. Yeah.

Yeah, I really like that. That is amazing. But I'm actually kind of happy with 31% to 69.12. I agree. I actually think it's better to give a range because then we can cover ourselves with the amount of effort that we put in. So it would be like, look, you know,

worst case, you're going to get 31% chance. Because I don't want to guarantee that I'm going to put in 100% effort every time because I just don't feel like it sometimes. Brilliant. Well, I think we've got our case-solving rate and we are so grateful, Michael, for you, having done such an intense calculation that we don't understand.

Can you send over your notes that you made? I'm afraid that's now the patented technique and model. Yeah, but we agreed on splitting the patent, didn't we? Because I think we hold 69.12% of the patent, and you hold the remaining 30. Here we go. 8.8%. Gosh, that was tough, wasn't it?

The moment has arrived. It's time to expose our own. official crime solving rate. We stand at a dangerously precise, unapologetically sexual, 69.12%. Is it unconventional? Yes, but the numbers don't lie, mostly because a real statistician staked their reputation on them. If this revelation sparks an emotional or sexual reaction, feel free to broadcast it from wherever you are right now.