536: No Such Thing As A Soaring Chinchilla

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Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, which was recorded at the Nerd Land Festival in Belgium.

This is the thing we do every year or we have done for the last few years.

It's a brilliant festival.

It's definitely worth checking out for future years.

It's basically imagine Disneyland had nerds instead of mice.

It is, that's what it is, really.

It's loads of talks, it's loads of exhibitions, it's science it's nerd culture it's everything you can want if that is your bag and we always have an amazing time there with a great audience and as usual we were joined by Levin Skera uh anna did not make the journey this time so it is the boys and Levin who did this show and Levin you will know if you are a regular listener to fish he may well have the record as most appearances of a non-elf on fish i'd have to look that up but he's been on quite a few times.

He is an expert on all things nerdy, all things science-y, but at the moment he's really into AI, as many nerds are.

And why that's important is because he has a book about AI.

The title is AI.

It can be found on Amazon and I'm sure in other places.

But if you search for his name, L-I-E-V-E-N-S-C-H-E-I-R-E, Levenskyra, then you will be able to find his book on AI.

And actually, if you go to LevinSkyra.com, then you can see all of his recent AI talks, which are very informative and very funny.

If you struggle with Levinsky's name, then you can also go to www.levingshire.com, as in what hobbits do, I presume, which apparently also works.

So go to either of those places and you can find out more about Levin and his works on AI.

Anyway, enjoy this show.

Like I say, it was really fun, like always.

And of course, we are doing lots of live shows, which will include Anna towards the end of the year.

So go to no suchthingsoffish.com forward slash live to find out more about what remaining tickets there are.

And there are not many, so get in there fast.

On with the podcast.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Nerdland in Belgium.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Levin Skyra.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Lieben.

My fact is that in 2017, the AI computer AlphaZero was given the rules of chess.

And four hours later, it was better than the human world champion in chess.

Insane.

So it was given just the rules, no strategies, no examples of chess games ever played between humans and it started practicing against itself.

Did it try any really weird things?

It plays chess in a different way than humans.

One chess player said, I've always wondered if the same game was invented on Mars and without any interaction between the cultures we would have developed our own strategies because everybody learns from the people before them.

And he says, now I know.

Because it takes more risks, for example.

It will offer its queen sometimes without anyone knowing why and then it wins in the end.

So really.

Yeah.

Can I I just say Levin?

I think part of in fact one of the main parts of playing chess is being able to pick up the pieces and move them from one place to the other and until it can do that I think I can beat it.

Yeah, well then you need robotics and some people are afraid of robots and I always tell them if at this phase of technology you're afraid of robots the only thing you need to carry with you at all times is a bucket of water and you're safe.

Well actually we were in the green room just now and there was a robotic dog.

Spot robot from Boston Dynamics, yeah.

Yeah, and also, yeah, there was, and also a real dog.

And I can tell you that real dogs do not like robotic dogs either.

Really?

Yeah.

I'm just wondering, I know, James, I know you like chess.

I'm sure you like chess.

A bit.

And I know you know a lot about AI.

Have you ever played against a man called Martin?

Probably.

Okay.

Who is he?

Martin is a middle-aged Bulgarian man who wears a turtleneck jumper, and he is the worst possible opponent on chess.com.

Right?

So he's an AI, he's a computer chess player, but he has been programmed to be deliberately, unbelievably bad.

That's amazing.

He plays 10 million games every week, and still he sucks at chess.

Does he like call the pawns prawns?

Yes, he's like.

His catchphrase is, my four-year-old son just beat me.

Ouch!

And he's really, really bad at chess.

And they've done experiments with him to test how bad he is, because he's programmed to be a weak chess player.

He has been given 31 queens

on one board, and the opponent only has pawns, and he has still managed to lose that game.

Really?

Wonderful.

See, that feels more in check with where I thought we were at.

The creator of QI, John Lloyd, he always has this line where he says, not only have we not invented artificial intelligence yet, but we haven't even invented artificial stupidity.

Like, that's how far away we are from.

I know we have Martinism.

So, that's Martinism.

So, this robot that we're talking about that beat the record in chess, the way that they trained it was they gave it a bunch of games to play and it had to learn strategy from that and whoever was the best at learning a game would advance to the next level and train the next AIs together.

So it didn't just beat chess, but it beat multiple Atari games.

So as part of this program, the AI set a score on Pong.

The highest score a human has ever set is 56,851.

It scored 407,864 as part of this programming.

The Important thing there is that the only input it gets is what is on the screen.

So, of course, it's easy to program and use the software of all the positions to have an optimal software running it.

But this was only fed what a human can see on the screen and then adapted its own neural network until it could play very well.

They taught it all the Atari games.

It was at DeepMind, Google DeepMind in London, that's where they did it.

All the Atari games, and then Go, the Chinese-Japanese game, Shogi, and chess.

And so, in fact, now they can just give it rules of any game, and then it will practice against itself and improve until it can beat it.

Is there anything that we can win at?

Well, especially when it becomes

a boxing, yeah.

There's one game that we still win, but I don't know how long it will take us.

It's the game diplomacy.

Oh, okay.

It's a bit like risk, so you have to move around the world and capture areas, but there's more tactics, you have different kinds of troops, but between every round, there's a round of diplomacy where the players can go one-on-one and talk strategies with each other.

Go like, if you move like this, then we can attack Italy there.

Kissinger loved it, apparently.

Kennedy played the game.

Really?

And so now they have taught an AI to play it.

It's a bit scary.

You can see these large language models talking to other players.

Like, if you do that move there, then I will come from that way.

So it figured all of this out.

It can't win from the world top yet, but it ends in top 10 at this moment in the game in a game of diplomacy.

I have a feeling that I would be able to beat any AI

because I'm so dumb, it wouldn't be able to guess the strategy that I was playing.

It would be like, why has he done that?

That's probably where it learned to give the queen away first.

I'd be like, yep, you can have that.

Like, I feel like stupidity of human error would be what confuses AI in a game.

Cut to the year 2030.

The war against the machines has gone terribly badly wrong.

Step up, Dan.

But one man survived it and repopulated the earth.

One AI that's been built this year, this is very exciting, this is a new development this year, researchers have built an AI sarcasm detector.

Oh yeah, sure they have.

It was in Holland.

It was in Groningen.

Yeah, it was in Holland.

And they trained it with pieces from the Big Bang Theory and friends.

So it's sitcom sarcasm.

Can they be any more predictable?

But I read about it, and there was, you know, it can be.

What does it do?

Mostly, it can just detect sarcasm.

It can detect if you're being sarcastic, which is useful.

But there is a risk that it might start using sarcasm for its own

evil purposes.

Yes, I mean.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Do you think, Levin, there's anything that AI won't be able to do in the future?

Well, that's a difficult question.

Basically, you could say AI is a new kind of software that is good at pattern recognition and recognizing patterns and generating patterns, like generating images and language.

But it does it so amazingly well at this point.

The fact that it can win a game of diplomacy, it kind of makes you think with these large language models, it's not unthinkable that I ask an AI to buy a new car for me.

It can do the negotiations much better.

It's not unthinkable that an AI will sell your house at a better price because it knows what language to use.

It could be coming.

And especially when they start combining it with robotics, which is what they're doing now, then you give the system sensors and a sense of the world and that's what probably the next revolution will.

How interesting.

In February 2023, so just over a year ago, we asked ChatGBT to give us an episode of Fish.

Oh, yeah.

And let's see if they could do our job.

And they were pretty terrible.

Let's be honest.

Anyway, I asked them to do it again this week with one more year of ability with the chatbots.

And they did a pretty good job.

So it begins with Dan Shriver says, hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Things a Fish, blah, blah, blah, weekly podcast, all that stuff.

And then in no particular order, here we go.

James, what have you got for us?

And then James Harkin says, my fact this week is that AlphaGo, the AI developed by DeepMind, learned to play the game Go at a superhuman level by playing against itself millions of times.

Oh my god, you're doing the AI's fact is your main fact here.

No, but Levin's doing it.

So Levin didn't know about it.

It predicted what our fact was going to be.

Are you kidding?

Honestly, literally all I put in was, give me a transcript of Nosis Things.

It's over.

Let's just go home.

We just...

Okay, but some fields, like creative ones, surely they're immune.

Yeah, surely, Andy.

Surely.

Well, hang on, I'm sorry.

Are we just going to let that fly by?

The exact same fact was predicted by the machine?

We're all cool with that?

I'm sorry.

No, that's end of the the world shit.

Shit, it gets worse.

It gets worse.

There's a new podcast.

It's out this year.

It's hosted by a guy called Jake, and it's created by a man called Jacob Redstrom.

But Jake is AI.

It's a podcast hosted by NAI.

Right?

Yeah.

Surely, Andy, I mean, things like beauty, that will never go to AI, will it?

Beauty?

Yeah, yeah.

That'll always be a human trait.

Yeah, of course.

Well.

Oh, no.

Well, there has been this year a Miss AI competition

where a lot of chat bots slash attractive creations online went up against each other to see who was the most attractive.

And not only did that happen, two of the judging panel were also AI-generated models.

Wow.

So, the worrying moment will be in that competition when they say, What do you hope for?

And they say, I would love world peace if the judge goes, Sarcasm detector.

That's when we're dead.

Have you ever asked GPT-4 to write a sonnet?

No.

This is...

Okay, write a sonnet.

I'm going to do it live now.

An animal.

What's your favorite animal?

Chinchilla.

Yeah, chinchilla.

A chinchilla.

Okay, write a sonnet about a chinchilla.

Okay, a chinchilla who really wants to fly like an eagle.

Okay, there we go.

So a chinchilla is kind of rodent.

Yeah,

cute.

I'm not totally clear what it is.

I just said it because James said it but yeah

kind of i'm gonna press start now so i asked it to write a sonnet about a chinchilla who really wants to fly like an eagle this is just this is coming out as we speak it's finished now there we go in twilight's hush a chinchilla dreams bright with fur as soft as whispers of the breeze he gazes high where eagles take their flight and longs to soar above the tallest trees.

His heart so bold defies the earthly bind, For in his tiny chest a spirit burns.

With wings of faith, though not by nature's kind, he yearns for heights, for skies his soul discerns.

He climbs the peaks where shadows kiss the light, and calls to eagles with a hopeful plea.

Their feathers brush the heavens free in flight, while he on ground remains but longs to be.

Yet in his quest a truth begins to rise.

The flight resides in dreams, not just in skies.

That's very good.

I thought it was it was quite long, was it?

But that's Sonners.

Sonny's, the 14 lines.

Can we ask for a limerick next time?

A limerick, I'll try.

I'm not good for haikus if you do anymore.

Here's the thing.

AI has been very big in the news in the movie industry, I would say.

Well, you know, a lot of the strike that happened in America was off the back of how artists artists were having to be asked to sign their voices over as well as the writing to AI.

And a lot of things are coming into place where they're trying to protect the artists' integrity and livelihood.

And in Tennessee, a law has been passed where they are protecting musicians from AI.

So the act is called the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Imagery Security Act, or the Elvis Act, because Elvis is from Tennessee.

And that's happening in places now where they're going to say you can't use the likeness of the voice anymore because it is happening.

It happened with the new GPT system that talks and Sam Altman who runs OpenAI really wanted the voice of Scarlett Johansson

because she was in the movie Her.

And he contacted her a few times and asked her it.

She thought about it and she said, no, I cannot do it.

I don't want to relate myself with AI because there's so much criticism of it.

And then the voice came out and it was almost exactly like Scarlett Johansson.

They had probably they say they had found a voice actor who sounded really like her and adjusted it a bit, but well, she filed a lawsuit and it's all taken down now.

But so they're trying to copy the voices of

James Earl Jones has given over the voice of Darth Vader now to AI based on his voice, which is so interesting because that kind of is like the final step in Darth Vader's journey anyway, from going human to android, isn't it?

Yes.

Like a real world.

She's more machine now.

Yes, exactly.

We need to move on, guys.

Well, what's Belgium best at, Levin?

What is Belgium best at?

Yeah, what's one of the most proud things that Belgian produces?

What I just learned at the theme park science show that we just had.

We are world class in the wheels of roller coasters.

I didn't know.

Okay, that's very confusing.

And beer and fries are fantastic.

No, no, no.

Let's hear your roller coaster thanks, I think.

Okay.

No, and AI has just beaten humans at beer.

Drinking or making?

Belgian beer.

Not drinking.

Making.

Coming up with new recipes for Belgian beer.

Of course.

They had 250 Belgian beers, a panel of the best beer experts on the planet rated them on all sorts of metrics, rated them on 50 different kinds of flavor and lab analysis, and then an AI algorithm suggested, why didn't you add a bit of this and a bit of that?

And it came out tasting better, according to the experts.

This is trouble.

Today, beer.

Tomorrow.

I didn't speak up because I wasn't beer.

Tomorrow, the roller coaster wheels will be a new shape.

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It is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that crocodiles can cough up hair balls.

Oh, this was sent in by Colin Cruikshank.

Thank you, Colin.

This is about, basically, I didn't know this.

I knew cats produce hairballs and owls and things, but crocodiles, they have the most amazing jaws, they have the most amazing stomachs, they produce amazing acid to digest things.

They cannot deal with hair.

And normally it's not a problem.

They don't eat a lot of hair.

But occasionally they'll eat a pig, and they end up with a hairball because they cannot deal with the pig's hair or the hooves.

And you'll just see a crocodile on the banks of the river going...

Where do these hairy pigs come in from?

That's good.

They're bristly, I guess.

Wild ones.

Wow, that's amazing.

There are collectors in Queensland, and the biggest one is the size of a football.

Well, that's what's amazing about it as well, because it's not like it's just they've had a meal and they want to cough it back up.

They can store that hairball for like 40 years.

So when they cough it up, it can give you an idea of the diet over decades of what they have eaten.

So it'll be like hairy pigs and

all the other things.

That's so cool.

Human in some cases in Australia.

It is the best option if you see a crocodile coming towards you with its jaws open, that it coughs up a hairball, isn't it?

Yes,

that's what you're hoping for most of the time.

That's amazing.

bowls.

Hair balls.

It used to be thought that they cured poison, hair bowls.

Really?

Yeah, these are bizoas, which are, you know, hair bowls that would come from animals mostly.

But there was a guy called Amoise Parre,

a friend of the podcast, actually, we've mentioned him a few times, and he decided to see if this was true.

So he took a cook at the king's court who had been caught stealing fine cutlery.

So he'd been sentenced to death for stealing these spoons.

And he said, well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to let you off, but I'm going to give you some poison, and then I'll give you this herbal, which we all know this works, so it'll be fine.

And then we'll see what happens.

And it turned out it didn't work at all, and he died anyway.

But that was the first evidence we had that these herb balls don't cure poisoning.

They do, they sound so weird and cool.

They'd be like the beesers or bezoes or whatever.

I don't know how you say them, but they were for the rich, you know, because real bees are really rare.

And if you couldn't afford one, you could maybe buy a sliver of one, or you could rent one for the day.

If I don't know what for, I think they were also thought to be useful in times of plague.

So, maybe if you were visiting magic spells as well,

and if you were very wealthy, you might have one for yourself, but one for your friends, you know, if any friends are visiting.

So, that's nice.

Have a hairball.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, they're very cool.

Lions can get hair bowls.

Oh, really?

Yeah, there was one found in an African lion at the Colorado State Zoo and it was...

How big do you think a lion's hair ball would be?

The size of a cricket ball.

Bigger.

Okay, two cricket balls.

Let's go in sizes of animals rather than balls.

Melon, sizes of animals.

The famous animal of the melon.

But I don't want to.

There's a kiwi, so who knows?

Lee and Will have come here with the latest research proving that melons are actually technically chipped.

Agni was like, I didn't know what a chilla was, and now I'm not sure I know what a melon is.

It was about the same size as a chihuahua.

Wow.

So I'm like the size of a small dog.

Yeah.

Wow.

Do you know why chihuahuas were bred in Central America?

Yeah.

They were religious animals and they were sacrificed to the gods.

No.

It's not much of a sacrifice.

I've got to say, if I was one of the gods looking down and they're bringing me this tiny...

And you were hungry?

I'm hungry.

You would want a Dane.

Big dog.

What was the sacrifice, though?

Because if it's burned at the stake, very easy to light.

That's a...

What?

Well, they're going to just go right up, aren't they?

Yeah, that's when they say woof.

So they were sacrificed to the gods, and I love it when I walk in the street and I see people with a shihawa to go and go, oh, sweet dog.

What are you going to ask from the gods when you sacrifice it?

Well, do you know, this is a tangential story, but there was a thing in the UK.

I don't know if you guys in Belgium heard about it here, but there was a, what looked like a giant hairball was found by a lady, but she went, oh, it's a hedgehog, and so she brought it home and she put it into a box and she gave it a hot water bottle and some food.

Then it didn't recover, took it to hospital, and it turned out it was the bubble on the top of a hat that people wear, those teeny bubbles.

And apparently this happens a lot.

Zoologists and also vets are saying, we've got to start understanding what animals look like again because

we're losing a lot of time when you're calling us out to help a drowning swan and it's a chair leg upside down.

We can't do that.

Someone brought vets to their house to help them revive what they thought was a hedgehog, but turned out to be a fruit loaf.

Now, a fruit loaf doesn't look like a hedgehog, but apparently it had been pecked at by a lot of birds so that it looked very spiky.

And even then, they were like, oh my god, it's dying, and they called out people to come.

So, this is a big thing at the moment.

That's amazing.

Wow.

Sounds like cheap tamagochis in a way.

Yeah.

Just take cotton balls home and care for them.

Or like chia pets, remember those?

No.

Chia pet, the pottery that grows.

No one?

Wow.

No one's seen Wayne's World?

Okay.

Imagine the size of a room like this, and you're the only one who gets that.

That's a pretty special moment.

That's like me playing a move to AI.

And then it's like,

what was that?

Do you want to know the record for the largest ball of hair ever created?

Okay, so this is not an accidental in your stomach.

This is not an animal product.

This was someone with a weird fetish.

I would not

disagree.

But for legal reasons.

Well, it was created by a hairstylist from the USA called Steve, and he said, I got more spiritual as I've aged, and I wanted to leave some kind of legacy when I'm gone

and it hit me I'm going to build a giant hair ball and he made a hole in the wall in his hair salon like a and he put a slide down to the basement of the building

and every time he had hair he just shove it down the slide and then he glued it all together so how big was it

Oh, so it's the biggest ever, so it must be quite big.

It's quite big.

Shall I go by the size of an animal?

Yes, please.

Okay.

Large horse.

Oh,

not far off, actually.

A bison.

Smaller than a bison.

Wow, what is that difference?

I can't even work.

What's an in-between animal to that?

Look, I don't know what animals are, it turns out.

I don't know what animals are and look like.

I actually saw this and I thought it looked like a really, really big hedgehog.

Yeah, it was that.

It was a bit, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was actually a fruitcake.

It weighed 102 kilos.

Oh, well, 225 pounds.

It is disgusting.

It is so It's horrible.

How big is that, Andy?

I can't actually picture that.

Well, it's genuinely clear.

It was, I mean, it was on a wagon when I saw it.

Like a large-ish man would be about 100 kilos.

Okay.

Yeah, and

it's maybe eight feet high because it's made of hair.

It's not very dense.

And it's half glue.

Anyway, you can go and visit it now and add your own hair if

you too have got more spiritual and you want to leave a legacy behind.

Do you know a cat coughing up hair balls is responsible for one of the great voices of nerd culture?

Whak, wham, whack, whow, whap, whack.

That one.

That's a duck.

Daffy duck.

Yeah, James does a better daffy duck.

Still a duck.

But that's a nerdy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, no one's.

Is it like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park?

That was a good idea.

No, no.

So it inspired the voice of something that's very big in the dork nerd world.

So what does it sound like a good cat coughing up a hairball?

Oh.

Gollum!

Gollum.

Really?

Really?

Andy Serkis, when he was going to the audition of Lord of the Rings, was going, How am I going to portray Gollum in my audition?

And his cat was next to him going,

and he was like,

What a disgusting hairball Gollum would produce.

That would be awful.

That's the whole time.

That's all it is.

He's just got that in his throat.

Interestingly, though, cats, when we think of them coughing up a hairball, according to vets, they get pissed off when you say coughed up a hairball.

They don't cough up a hairball, they vomit up a hairball,

or they're really kind of just trying to thrust it out.

But they're not coughing.

It doesn't matter.

Whatever it is, Steve will take it and he will glue it onto his big ball.

Do you know we've just missed National Hairball Awareness Day?

Oh gosh.

Yeah.

By how long?

Anyone else observe it?

That's terrible.

It is bad when you're the only one.

How long, Andy, since it was...

It's the last Friday in April.

So it's an annual thing.

Do you know the date?

The specific date?

Well, it's the last Friday in April.

So like Easter, it moves.

Which is convenient because what if it's at the weekend and people are not enough people come and celebrate?

Yeah.

And what did you do to celebrate?

Well you know just pop and visit Steve and this great big ball.

You know it was founded by a vet who wanted to raise awareness of

hairballs.

I guess they can be bad for a cat's health maybe?

Yeah yeah I know it makes them sick.

If your cat is coughing up a hairball it is a sign of some bigger issues gutturally that is going on.

Because theoretically it should be able to process the bit of hair that it eats naturally.

So that's been building up inside of them in ways.

We're going to have to move on in a second.

Should we do a bit on crocodiles?

Oh yeah, yeah.

Yeah yeah.

If you give someone a crocodile to hold when they're in the casino, they'll make bigger bets.

What what what size of crocodile?

I mean like as big as a chinchilla or as big as a melon?

I think it's the bigger the crocodile, the bigger the bets.

So it's like apparently it's a sense of heightened arousal makes you want to gamble more.

And if you think the crocodile might eat you,

that puts you in that state of the world.

You're aroused, but not in the way you're thinking.

No, no, no.

I'm not thinking anything at all.

I'm just thinking, how do I get rid of this crocodile?

If I win another $50,000, maybe I'll get someone to hold the crocodile and take it away from me.

Yeah, maybe that's it.

Do you know that

sometimes in the States you have frozen lakes with crocodile snouts peeping out of the ice?

Oh, really?

It's when crocodiles hibernate and there's an ice layer on the lake.

They just pop out their nose.

So it looks like little green pebbles on the ice.

And it's actually when you pull the pebble, it's attached to a crocodile.

And they're completely hibernating, so they're in standby mode, they don't react if you wiggle with the snout around.

That's a good prank, though.

Yeah.

So let's see who can pick up that pebble first.

Actually, the word crocodile means pebble worm.

Really?

Yeah, the croco is the pebble and delos is the worm.

But in Greek, delios also means circumcised man.

Right.

So it could be the crocodile means pebble circumcised man.

Okay.

Not sure.

Either way, how misleading if someone says, can you go and collect the pebble circumcised man over there?

And you come to a crocodile.

That is, yeah,

that's bad naming, I would say.

All right, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that in the 14th century, there was a rumor among Europeans that all Englishmen had tails.

Now is the time to prove otherwise, guys.

I've basically come here to see if it's still a rumor.

Oh, yeah.

Is this still a thing that people in Belgium think that English people have tails?

Wow.

Oh, there we go.

So this

idea basically comes from the idea that Saint Augustine had visited the people of Kent and he was mocked by the locals and they pinned tails of fish to his robes to kind of kick him out of the town and he turned round and he cursed them with their own tails.

And this became a thing in Europe to such the extent that when there was a siege in 1436 in Paris and the English were kicked out, they were taunted by the locals saying, Were your tails, worry your tails?

And the Scottish before a battle in 1332 said they would make ropes from the tails of the English to tie them with.

They thought we were basically more close to beasthood, more close to the devil, it was said the English were.

And there is a thing in French where the word for tail, which is couée, and the word for hatch, which is couve, apparently, I don't speak French, but they're so close together, they had a theory that English people sat on eggs to hatch them.

So yeah, that was how we got our eggs.

We all sat on them.

I think we're getting off quite lightly now with just you've all got bad teeth as a reputation.

That is quite.

And by the way, we don't all have bad teeth.

Just to say, almost all of us have some teeth.

So

I just want to say.

We have the best teeth.

They're the best teeth ever, ever seen.

So do you have in Belgium then, are there any things that if you were talking talking about an English person you would say a certain thing?

Like I was I just suddenly remembered that Michael Palin when he went out to the Amazon they were describing to him how many trees are chopped down per day.

They would say a Belgium and it was it was the size of Belgium.

So that would be a unit of measurement out in the Amazon for saying how much was chopped down.

One Belgium of trees was chopped down again.

Yeah exactly.

Yeah.

Do you have anything here where it's like, oh you English people.

We chop down one England of trees.

No.

No, no, no.

No, just like we smell or we saw you know that kind of thing no no no not really by the way Dan's just saying this because he's not English

Dan is Australian and he wants to get in on this bullying well you know when when when you're a child you you read comic books and like asterisks going to England and then you have all these oh oh really oh dear and they're all very ooh polite

polite cutting cutting the grass really upper class you're describing Andy you're just

but you get you get this you get this upper class image of what England is.

And then you go there as a tourist.

And

you spend a Saturday evening.

Okay.

You spend a Saturday evening in a city centre and you go, oh my god.

I had no idea.

Can I just...

Well, okay.

It's fair.

There is research on this, which is people around the world were asked what

the worst habit of the British is.

So, people in Brazil, China, Germany, India, and the USA, they were asked what's the worst habit of the British.

27% of young adults said it's that they drink so much.

But not all people

say that in Belgium, they wouldn't know.

Not all of those people had visited the UK, actually.

So, this was a preconception.

And of the people who had visited the UK, 34% of them said.

Well, it's amazing.

I was looking at some other stereotypes of the English from the 14th century, and sure enough, drinking was one of the things that Britain was most famous for all the way back then.

There was also the stereotype that British people took excessive faith in the dreams of old women.

That is so me.

I was thinking it was maybe Theresa May and Brexit.

And they also, the Italians and Germans thought that the British were great lovers of themselves.

Very nice.

Levin, do you think British people are emotionless?

Like reserved, calm.

That's what the cliche is.

How dare you!

Well,

apparently British people are not the most emotionless in the world.

So again, people have been asked around the world, how many emotions did you experience today?

Which is very...

Or did you feel anything today at all?

And Britain was sort of in the middle of nations.

It was not especially interesting.

So, the most emotionless country in the world, according to this survey from Gallup, which is asking people from these countries, is Singapore, right?

The number of people who reported on any given day feeling any positive or negative emotions was 36%.

Oh, they were literally neutral.

And the rest of people said, nope,

nothing occurred today in my mood.

I didn't have any feelings today.

It sounds rather Swiss to be so neutral.

Could that be that their sort of normal level of emotion could be they could be always really happy, but they're not getting the highs and the lows?

Yeah, possibly.

Yeah, that might be it.

I mean, it's a really strange finding.

That's amazing.

Are we close to where the Flemish live around here?

We are in Flanders.

Yes.

Sounds like you're pretty close, James.

Yes.

Not a preconception.

British people know where everything in Europe is.

Here's a question for you with that in mind.

16th century French scholar Jean-Baptiste La Bruyère Champier wrote that whenever you go to see the Flemish, you should always carry a knife.

Yes, it's to join us for dinner, that's why.

You will always be welcomed.

Any thoughts, Dan or Andy?

Now you've been here for a day.

Why you might need a knife

among the Flemish.

They only have the plastic disposable ones, and it's very actually hard to cut through your food.

In the 16th century, you're right, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, because we're staying at Lebanon's house, and on his kitchen table, there were like 16 different peanut butters on it, and I feel like you need multiple knives.

You're pretty much there, Dan, actually.

They had a reputation of consuming the most butter in Europe.

And so, you should always carry a knife with you so you can spread the butter wherever you go.

That's not a knife.

This is a knife, but it is a butter knife.

So,

this guy said, Not a day, not a meal has gone gone by without me eating butter.

I'm surprised they have not yet put it in their drink.

It's brilliant.

Working on it.

But we also use kind of a knife-shaped thing to clear the head of a beer.

So

we always want a bit of foam on our beer.

And so the foam is a bit over the glass.

And we have this knife-like thing to scrape it off.

For us, it's very normal.

The first time I went to a bar with an Australian in Belgium, we went to order a beer, and then

preparations are going, and this guy pulls out a knife.

He was really startled.

What's it called?

I don't know.

Does it have a name?

No, nobody knows the name.

We don't bother with names, we want the beer.

But interesting fact, that is actually how the French Revolution started.

It was a simple misunderstanding in a bar, which then just escalated.

Just please remove the head from this one.

Wow.

The kitchen knife was, I think, invented or put in as a law that you had to use it.

I think it was by Richelieu

and the number of deaths at the dinner table dropped down to one tenth because people use daggers.

You would eat with a dagger and cut your meat with it and everything.

And of course it's a dinner table, it's where you have discussions and there's drinking and so quite often there was a knife fight at the dinner table.

And so by simply inventing this this kitchen knife, this simple knife that is not sharp, he cut down like the lethal fights over dinners.

It happened in 10 or something.

200,000 people fawked to that.

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Okay, I'm going to move us on to our final fact of the show.

It is time for the final fact, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that toilet paper testers have to train for six months before they are allowed to apply for the actual job.

That is wow.

This is not because obviously there's multiple different companies that hire people to test out toilet paper for them.

This is very specifically an article I read to do with Procter and Gamble, who do make toilet paper.

And basically the idea is that you need, in order to understand what a perfect bit of toilet paper is, as a tester, you need to do, you need all your senses.

In the article, it says outside of literally tasting it, you need to know how does it feel in the hand?

What is it like to wipe, you know, if you've had, you know, a couple of Belgian beers the night before, or what is it like if you've had a lot of peanut butter at Leevin's house.

Like, it's going to be different viscosity of poos each night.

So basically you spend six months doing that and then when you get to the moment where they're saying, okay, now let's give you the actual test to see if you can get the job, you can fail it.

You can fail it if you haven't prepared for that.

How do you fail it?

Do they get do they I'm imagining

your finger goes through

but I'm imagining that they give you a single sheet of toilet paper and you have to you have to know where it's from.

This is a single origin.

How many ply.

It might be a combination of that stuff.

They're quite secretive in the toilet testing world.

So it's a bit hard to get into the clandestine world of what's going on in those factories.

But they do say that in that particular moment, after six months, only half of the people will make it through to the job itself.

Can you become a toilet paper sommelier?

You're like...

Sorry, last night I had steak and red wine.

Oh, then I recommend this one for you.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, there has to be, right?

There must be.

That doesn't have to be done.

This is just a little bit of whimsy.

I think if you've spent six months of your life and then you failed the audition, the least you can do is have at least three toilet papers in your house.

You hear the boots approaching your stall.

It's someone standing outside with the silver dough.

No, it's not.

I hear the sound of soft ply going in there.

Let me...

They do have a lot of robots as well.

I mean, I don't know if this is an AI thing, too, or maybe it will be soon, but they have a lot of robots because they need to test the qualities of the paper.

they need to test how easily it tears, the angle that it hangs at if it's on a roll, you know, or and they they do they have um a range of finger probe robots to test how sheets break.

Really?

They're mishandled or they're sort of tear or yeah.

And AI robots have eight fingers so that's easy.

Actually do you know if you are in one of these facilities how you test a toilet paper against a butt, a bottom.

So do they have like a an AI AI bum as well?

No, it's to do with you.

You're the person who's doing it.

Me?

Yeah.

So, you're in there, you're given a fake bit of poo that they have created with NASA.

So, it's because they say poof because they don't want to.

Why haven't we been back to the mood?

Well, to boldly go.

So, here's the thing: if you're working in a factory that's testing toilets and testing toilet paper, you don't want to have real feces in there because it can cause lots of disease and so on.

So, they, for years, it used to be dog food that they would use to flush down toilets.

Then, they created like bean curd and a lot, and then there was like a like how KFC and Coke have a secret ingredient.

There was a secret ingredient poo that they would use that they didn't tell anyone about.

And then they created this thing with NASA.

And so, what you would do is you would put your arm tight so that your elbow would have a little bum bum basically in the corner, and you would put the poo in there, and you'd squeeze it out, and then you would wipe your bum.

That is very good.

That is the most disgusting thing I've heard all year.

I don't know why.

It just

bum bumps.

I know it's fake poo.

I know it's your elbow.

There's no actual poo evolved here.

I'm still revolting.

I feel worse about this than I do about Steve and his big old ball of hair.

How many listeners are going to try this at home?

Don't know.

Send your photos to Andrew Hunts and Murray.

Certainly not.

Podcast at QA.

Don't know.

Oh, God.

Not to give you any ideas, but I have 12 kinds of peanut butter at my house.

You know, like, it's very trendy to get bamboo toilet paper these days.

It's very environmentally friendly.

Well, they did a lot of tests recently, and they found that some products contain as little as 3% bamboo.

So you think on the packet it says this is bamboo toilet paper, but actually it's mostly just old paper.

And they just put a tiny bit of bamboo in.

This has been a big, sort of big deal in the toilet paper world recently.

Yeah, and I worked out that if you were a panda and you wanted to live entirely on these toilet rolls,

you would have to eat 7,200 toilet rolls every day

to get enough bamboo, and that's how many I would use in 50 years.

That's almost a Belgium

during lockdown.

Somebody figured out how to make moonshine alcohol from toilet paper.

No.

Really?

Yeah, because there's cellulose in it, and of course, we cannot digest cellulose, and I think the yeasts that make the alcohol need sugars.

That does feel like you're solving one problem, but creating another one.

Probably, yeah.

But

you can use certain enzymes that can dissolve the cellulose into sugars.

And so he actually did it.

It's on YouTube.

He documented how he did it.

And so this might be the reason why everybody was herding toilet paper

don't take my booze away that's funny we actually looked into the kind of lockdown hoarding and we thought that actually a lot of it did kind of make logical sense that you would hoard it and that's because everyone was suddenly at home and you weren't in their office anymore and the factories that make office toilet paper are different from the ones that make home toilet paper because you know the office ones are often those really big sort of rolls so there was actually going to be a massive shortage of home toilet paper because no one was in the office anymore and everyone was going to the toilet at home.

Obviously, there were crazy people just buying loads of them as well.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's true.

That makes sense.

Do you know if you go into a toilet paper factory, where do we get individual rolls of toilet paper from?

From the packet.

No, before that.

From the short?

Is it a long one?

It's a long one that is cut off.

No.

From the mother reel.

Oh, it's called the mother reel.

It is a ginormous, ginormous toilet roll.

That's amazing.

Wait, is it is it long?

Yeah, it's long.

Or is it

because you're gesturing, you're saying it's like it's tall.

I know.

I sort of thought because it says audio for the listener at home, it didn't matter what I did with my hand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll tell you what, you've had a bad day if the sommelier comes with that, haven't you?

So each mother reel, as they call it, contains, when chopped up into individual rolls, 25,000 individual rolls.

What?

Right?

Yeah.

So there's a guy called Greg Wallace.

We've mentioned him on the show before.

He makes a show where he goes around looking at how they make things in the UK.

It's a documentary series, each show, different factory to show you how it's done.

So he was in a big warehouse where they had 2,000 mother rolls in there.

And they worked out that if you were an average family,

you would have four toilet rolls a week in an average family.

That's how much is used, right?

So the amount of toilet rolls in that room would mean that your family could be wiping your bum for 96,000 years

just from the collection of 2,000 mother rolls that they had sitting in the warehouse.

Do you know these toilets that squirt water on your bum?

Bidea?

A bide?

No, the toilets as an inside the toilet.

The Japanese.

Oh, well, I was going to ask you, do you know where they were invented?

Japan.

No, they weren't.

Nat, nat, nat.

They were invented in America.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

They were invented in America and they were supposed to be for like care homes and stuff.

Okay.

And then they sent a few over to Japan and this company who got them thought, everyone's gonna want these.

Let's start making them for everyone.

And so they did.

But the problem was that the ones in America were kind of prototype-y and they were very good at measuring the temperature and they were very good at measuring the angle of squirt.

And so they quite often fired boiling water straight into people's anuses.

And there was a market for that tube.

So we were talking talking about.

Are you too busy to drink tea the normal way?

Well,

that's a couple of English stereotypes together, isn't it?

But

then this company called Toto decided to start making these.

But we were talking about testing toilet paper and stuff.

They needed to get the angle right.

And so they asked all of their staff members to test these toilets.

And to be honest, it took quite a lot to get people to cooperate, but eventually they did.

And all the members of staff would take it in turns to sit on these toilets and have water fired up at different angles.

And they found that the golden angle is 43 degrees.

So it just cleans you the right amount.

And for women at the front, it's 53 degrees.

So that's a bit of information you never wanted to know.

Yeah, wow.

I read about the founder of Toto.

I didn't read any of that, but he was an amazing guy called Kazuchika Okura.

And he sort of had had been to the West I guess and he also helped introduce the car to Japan.

This guy was a big deal

and he also created his own new musical instrument the Okuro Okurolo a kind of vertical flute.

What?

A vertical flute.

A vertical flute.

A recorder.

He invented the recorder.

And he was president of, linking it back to AI, the Japanese Go Association.

Wow.

Yes.

That's very good.

This guy was a big deal.

While we're on inventions,

there's a British word.

I don't know if you know it here, but we often call the toilet the throne.

So

the throne, the toilet, it's attributed as an invention to a guy called Sir John Harrington.

And he built it.

He was the godson of Queen Elizabeth III.

And supposedly...

Okay, we've only had two Queen Elizabeths, so we'll stop you right there.

What did I say?

Queen Elizabeth III.

Yes, so Sir John Harrington invented it in the year 3000.

And

no, so sorry, Queen Elizabeth I, yeah.

So he invented it for her.

And it basically, what I'm talking about is a toilet whereby it had valves,

it had a flush, and she tried it.

And she was like, this is fantastic, I'll take one.

So it was a big deal.

So he invented the throne, and a descendant of his is Kit Harrington, Jon Snow, from A Game of Thrones.

Wow.

So this is a series about everyone wanting to get on the loo.

Yeah.

One more thing on Pooh.

There's a famous biologist in the Netherlands who's called Midas Deckers who writes great books about science.

And one of his latest books is The Story of Shit.

So he's a biologist and he just explains the entire gut system, how it's produced, what is happening there biologically.

And they asked him in a talk show, they asked him like, why did you want to write a book about Pooh?

And he said, well, i was walking around in these bookstores you see all these cookbooks nobody ever tells you how it ends

look we need to wrap this up uh thank you so much everyone for coming to this live recording we really appreciate it um

that is it that is all of our facts if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

My Twitter is at James Harken.

Andy?

At Andrew Hunter M.

And Leibniz?

At Leibenschere.

Good luck with that.

It's the one country you can say that to, and it's fine.

If you want to get to us as a group, you can go to at no such thing or no such thing as a fish on Instagram, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

You can also get tickets to our live tour.

We're about to go on tour around the world.

So please check that out.

For everyone here, thank you so much for coming.

We're going to be back again next week, and we hope we're going to be back here again next year for another awesome Nerdland adventure.

We'll see you again next week, everyone else.

Goodbye!

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Let's listen in on a live, unscripted Challenger School class.

They're reviewing the American Revolution.

The British were initiating force, and the Americans were retaliating.

Okay.

Where did they initiate force?

It started in their taxation without representation.

Why is that wrong?

The purpose of a government is to protect individual rights, and by encroaching on individual rights, they cannot protect them.

Welcome to eighth grade at Challenger School.

Learn more at challengerschool.com.