519: No Such Thing As A Noice Computer

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Hey, everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish.

Before we get going, I just want to let you know we have a very exciting comedian joining us on the show today.

So, Anna's away for this ep, but in her place, we are joined by the brilliant Olga Koch.

Olga is the perfect fish guest.

Not only is she incredibly funny, but she's also an absolute thunderdork.

She studied computer sciences, she speaks three different languages, she has a very confused and unplaceable accent, like I do, and she is absolutely blitzing the comedy scene at the moment.

You will have seen her no doubt on shows like Live at the Apollo.

She's done pointless celebrities.

And of course, she's been on QI.

But the best place, the absolute best place to see Olga is live in person at one of her stand-up shows.

And she is currently on tour with her new show, which is called Prawn Cocktail.

She's traveling the UK.

And then for any Aussie listeners out there, she's heading down under.

So Aussies, go and see her.

She's absolutely...

brilliant live and if you want to get a taste of what a full show by Olga is like she's actually got a few specials up online so if you go to YouTube, you're going to be able to see her 2022 show, Just Friends.

The full show is there.

Check it out.

And then on Amazon Prime, she has another special called Homecoming.

Go to her website generally.

Rockandrollga.com.

It has a list of all the things that she's done from podcasts to other bits and pieces.

But for now, here she is on no such thing as a fish.

On with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Olga Koch.

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

And in a particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is Olga.

The world's best prom prawn cocktail eater practices his technique with budget meatballs.

Wow.

I would say that a prawn is different to a meatball.

Different enough that I wouldn't think it was useful for my training montage.

I accept what you've just said and I challenge you to a better replacement to a prawn.

Oh, yeah.

A better budget replacement to a prawn.

Yeah.

Can I give you a better replacement to a prawn?

Please.

There was a guy called Stephan Gates who wrote a book about eating insects And he said, if you don't have any prawns, let's say you don't live near the sea, then a wood louse is a good replacement

that will taste about the same.

And budget, too.

I mean,

it's all over the garden.

Yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

Okay.

I don't think I can even picture a woodlouse.

Is that like a caterpillar?

A pill bug?

No.

I want.

No,

I regret having a sell.

Insect armadillo.

So they're the little grey guys.

Okay, so then if you deshell it, it is still soft on the other side.

Yeah, yeah.

It'd be very fiddly to deshell when

the rest of the stuff.

But the number that you need as well for the challenge.

No, I think maybe I'm running back and saying meatballs are fine.

Maybe crab stick?

Yeah.

This guy probably knows what he is.

Do we know his name?

Yes, his name is Jeff Esper.

Okay, okay.

Also, a very interesting thing about his technique is that he tries to mimic a bronze cocktail as much as he can.

So he does eat them cold and he eats them tossed in cocktail sauce as opposed to like marinara or whatever you'd have

your meatballs with.

There's this amazing video of him online where you see the practice run where he uses the meatballs and it's so weird.

He's just on his own in his laundry with a camera running and he's about to eat eight minutes worth of like meatball in his face.

He says things like so exactly I'm going to use the same source.

He's going 90% in the video.

It's not being 100%.

He's giving it 90%.

No one just for YouTube.

Exactly.

So he's going 90 and then he says, really I should be doing this outside because I think the competition is outside and I need to acclimatize.

So what geographical location is this happening in?

If it's not the equator or the Antarctic, I don't think he needs to acclimatize.

Well, that's the thing.

So it was too cold for him to do it that day, so he didn't.

But that factors into it.

I guess it messes with your capacity to swallow, your speed.

Yeah.

Can I explain one more reason why the meatballs were fine as a substitute?

It's because the sauce is the most important part of this particular competition.

Because it is a seafood sauce, but it's really spicy.

It's supposed to be the spiciest seafood sauce you can get.

Someone who had it said it's like being electrocuted when you eat it.

And so really, he's more about getting through all this spicy sauce than it is about getting through the process.

Oh, his face almost melted right at the end of the video.

I watched all eight minutes and the final mouthful, he's on the brink of vomiting and you watch for about 30 seconds.

Where's the happy?

Yeah, yeah, it's really close.

Can I give you a few of his records, his other records?

Because Jeff Esper, he's a big, big player in what is known as the MLE, the major league of eating.

It's an official body, like you'd have the Baseball League or the NBA, the MLE exists.

So he's the the record holder at certain points you may have been broken since he set them for spam eating uh 9.75 pounds of spam chicken wings fortune bay indian tacos pretzels pizzas jack's donut holes donut holes yeah oh those are a thing aren't they sorry those are

it's the bit that used to be in the donut it's not just he's eaten them all that's why they're not there

yeah

to me it seems like you know in olympic swimming how people people get loads of medals, because you get a medal for 100 meters, for 50 meters, for 200 meters.

It's all basically the same thing.

It feels to me like once you can eat a load of shrimp, then you could probably eat a load of donuts and you could probably eat a load of everything.

It's like he's only got one skill and he's getting all these records.

I think it's all about training, right?

Well, I think in Major League Eating, if you are some plucky kid out of nowhere, the best things to go for are things where you can innovate.

Because there are some which are volume-based.

I see.

Where you just have to drink as much honey as you can into whatever.

And that depends on how big your stomach is.

Exactly.

I mean, just that is just about.

You do have to do that competition in just a top no pants.

But

if you're some like, you know, upstart,

you might be able to develop a new technique.

I see.

So before we started today, you just had a cheese and

a celery sandwich.

You might come up with a new way of eating that, like taking the celery out first.

Exactly.

Improving the sandwich by taking out the celery.

i've already had a lot of slacking off about the salary

but you might have exactly a new way to eat corn on the cob faster you could attach it to like a black and decker so it spins around

so that those are the ones where if you're trying to get into this game and why would you uh that's that's the people

arriving in new york city on a greyhound bus with just a corn in your bag

and do you think that you start by going to like breakfast restaurants that have those like breakfast challenges that put you on the put your photo on the wall and then there's like a Tom Hanks in Elvis agent in a corner watching

smoking a cigar thinking, you've got a promise, kid.

I went to a breakfast place the other day that had a breakfast challenge.

You had to eat this entire huge list of like 40 sausages, 20 eggs.

It wasn't as big as that, but it was, it looked doable.

You had 20 minutes to do it.

And if you managed it, you got the meal for free, or you had to pay for the whole thing.

And there was a leaderboard, right, that had the current champion, Pete Doherty of the Liberties.

What?

Yeah, yeah.

Is that the breakfast?

That was in the newspapers when he had that big breakfast.

Yeah, wasn't it?

Yeah, exactly.

So no one's beat it since.

No one's beat it since.

No.

Wow.

I once went to one of these restaurants for like burgers and stuff.

And my sister ordered the huge sort of challenge thing.

She's quite small, my sister.

And she was really getting through it.

And the waiters are all looking at her, going, Bloody hell, she's doing good.

And I just ordered one hamburger, and it was really small.

And I ate it really quickly.

And I was like, I'm going to get another hamburger.

And then I got my sister to order it.

So she's wolfing down all this thing.

And she went, Can I have another hamburger, please?

I read an interview with Jeff Esper.

Oh, yeah.

His favourite movie is Cool Hand Luke.

Oh, I haven't seen that.

Well, in it, there's a guy who has to eat 50 eggs in an hour.

Right.

And that's, I think, why he likes it.

Jeff Paul Newman.

Paul Newman, yeah.

No, hang on.

Paul Newman then opened a very successful line of mayonnaise and salad dressing.

Was that?

To eat with the eggs.

He did the film viral marketing for Paul Newman Ranch.

First ever.

Yeah.

Because the fastest way to eat 50 eggs is actually whip them up on the mayo, emuls them.

Right.

Oh, really?

He doesn't do that in the movie.

He just nums on them.

But in the TV ads, he would.

He would be walking saying, I like my 50 eggs.

50 eggs per bottle.

Come on.

That'll be amazing.

Anyway, this interview then asked Jeff Esper what a movie of his life would be called and he said cool hand Jeff.

So there's a good name.

You know, he's quite a witty guy as well.

Maybe he was Jeff.

We love you, Jeff.

But then in 2023, the second and third place in this shrimp eating competition were Miki Sudo and Nick Wary, and they're married to each other.

Cool.

And did they meet?

Oh,

did they meet doing the lady and the tramp, but it's like an 18-foot-long sausage and they're both slowly eating towards each other?

I think they met in the competitive eating sphere.

That's adorable.

We locked eyes as we were both throwing up 100,000 marshmallows into a bucket.

And they said they have a child, the two of them, and they said the child can do anything they want when they grow up except become a competitive eater.

Why?

I think they're just in it, and they don't feel like it's a good job to have.

It feels like they're worried it's going to be a Delph Vader situation where the child's going to knock them off.

Yeah.

What I will want to say about Mickey Sudo is that she is, I believe, the reigning champion of the Nathan's hot dog eating competitions women's category.

And Nathan's, the Nathan's Coney Island hot dog eating competition is really the biggest competition in the competitive eating league and the one that put competitive eating on the map.

Major league eating.

It was born out of Nathaniel.

There you go.

But it's only been split by gender, I believe, since 2011.

Before that, women used to compete with men together.

And they used to place in the top three routinely.

And then they split them.

And I know all this from a book called Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus.

It's an incredible book.

I recommend it to everybody.

And basically, they were like, it's going to be the same.

It's going to be the same.

But the men's one is televised and the women's isn't.

And women get less prize money.

Oh, that's actually quite true.

The men's is televised and the women's isn't.

Yeah.

That surprises me.

You think it would be the other way around?

Because I think a lot of perverts would be like nothing nothing more than see a woman eating.

It's either non-televised or televised on like ESPN 3 as opposed to ESPN 1.

Like it's something like that.

It sucks.

And it is the only competitive eating, which is gender split.

Sausage eating.

Right.

It's the only one.

All the others.

Yeah, yeah.

All the others are mixed.

Oh, I was like, is that an innuendo?

You're like, no, you don't.

That's up to the audience to make the innuendo there.

I'm just trying to picture you pitching why it should be back on TV and really

isolating the pervert market here.

I was picking up some big bucks.

I would do an incredibly subtle pitch, which made it very, very clear who's tuning in.

Joey Chestnut.

Yeah.

So he's managed 76 hot dogs in one go.

And

I think we may have even mentioned before the thing to do is to dip the bun in the water so it gets all

slides down.

But I love this.

The 1984 competition.

I think this was Nathan's.

I'm not sure.

It might have been a different league one.

It was won by someone.

She was a 17-year-old West German judo.

What do you do?

Judo artist?

Judoka.

Judoka.

And she had never had a hot dog before the competition.

No!

But then that's incredible.

And you were like, oh my God, this stuff is incredible.

I could eat a million.

Yes.

And that was her.

Wow.

That's incredible.

Was it like she looked at it and she'd never seen one?

So she didn't know how to eat it.

And she was like, maybe I just shoved 10 of them in my mouth.

Where did they find a German who's never had a sausage anymore?

Yeah.

Apparently, Chestnut, Joey Chestnut, was saying, once you have that many hot dogs, you immediately need the toilet.

And

the problem, they don't really digest fully.

So you clean up.

I don't shit hot dogs out.

Clean out.

Clean out.

That's what he's saying.

How can you tell the difference, realistically?

I think when you feel a solid hot dog coming out your bunny 75 times.

The bun also comes out.

His shit is inside the bun.

Let me tell you a little something about corn.

Also,

basically, the Nathan's hot dog eating contest was put on the map in the mid-2000s by a Japanese competitive eater called Takero Kobayashi.

Takero Tsunami Kobayashi.

And then he basically made it super popular in America.

And then Joey Chestnut was introduced to him as like the American down-home alternative.

And so it was, again, it's the Nathan's hot dog eating competition is a story of sexism and racism and hot dogs.

When we advertise him, they mostly stress the hot dog part of it, don't they?

Fine print, fine print.

If only we could get perverts into that fantastic strap line.

Oh, dear.

Do you know what chipmunking is?

You might have seen this in your so I would think it's like, oh,

you know, I hadn't thought of it.

And then Dan just did a

storing in your cheeks.

That's it.

Now.

Were you going to say it was like getting naked and dancing?

I just think it's speaking in a very high-pitched voice.

As you might expect, given what we're talking about, it's absolutely dancing.

The press conferences would be great, though, in the lead-up part.

You're going down.

No, it has to be in your mouth, right?

The food, before the count ends, right?

So, if you're counting down, you know, you've got 10 minutes to eat this many whatever's.

The food has to be in your mouth, and then you get 30 seconds to swallow it.

So, often the photo finish bit is just, right, just get all of this in your mouth.

And as long as you get 30 seconds after the clock stops.

There used to be, all you had to do was swallow it in a timely manner.

That's all it said.

And it didn't say it was exactly 30 seconds.

And then there was a guy called Crazy Legs Conte who lost lost a competition because he couldn't eat it in a timely manner and they thought we're gonna have to make a proper time i think that's right it's like i've started so i'll finish or the bell yeah the quiz bell goes well this makes sense of the final few seconds of jeff esper's practice for the prawn cocktail because he goes over eight minutes he stops the clock and he has a mouth that is absolutely and i'm going spit it out and he's so that's what it is

he's using his 30 seconds chipmunking clever and very clever crazy legs just while you mentioned him james he i read an article it's his legal name, Crazy Legs Conti.

He compares, I'm quoting here from the article, compares professional eaters to musicians.

He says the way eaters move and shake is an effort to get breath out of the esophagus, stomach, and lower intestine as trumpeters would with their instrument.

That's interesting.

You know, circular breathing, where you can play like a dideridoo without breathing because you breathe through your nose and out of your mouth.

Do you reckon they try that?

That could be a new innovation.

Is the breath sausage in this?

I mean, you shove as much sausage in your mouth while breathing through your nose, is what what I would say.

Maybe yeah.

Right.

But like maybe the sausage in the nose is the Fosbury block moment that no hero has managed to achieve yet.

Oh right.

You found two more entry points.

Yeah.

Right.

Interesting.

The perverts.

They're tuning in.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious, organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

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Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

Sucks.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is in the Archie language of southern Russia, a single verb can have have 1 million five hundred and two thousand eight hundred and thirty nine possible forms is that normal for most languages or it is not normal how i would say what's a close second so if you think about in english like to podcast right so you podcast she podcasts yeah i was podcasting I podcasted, and there's not much else because they're all I would have been podcasting.

Yeah, I guess, but then that's kind of the same ending.

No, this is tenses as well.

Okay, okay.

So in Russian, obviously, you would have I, you, she,

they, all that kind of stuff.

But also, you have the past tense, which would be different for masculine and feminine.

You would have the future tense, you have gerunds, you have participles, you have all sorts of stuff in Russian, but it's manageable because I've studied it, it is manageable.

But in Archie, it just goes crazy.

You have, as well as masculine and feminine, you have different terms for domestic animals, for wild animals, for young animals, old animals.

So if you say the pig podcasted, you would need to know if it was a wild pig or a domestic pig to know how to...

Who's always my number one pig?

You have a different ending.

If it's insects, it's a different ending.

If it's mythical beings, musical instruments, serials, abstract concepts, they all have different endings.

Everybody's got a podcast these days.

How does anyone

learn it?

Or get anything done?

Yeah.

I think you just, mostly you just naturally pick up these kind of things things if you if you live in it.

But also because before you get to that word, you'd have to stop and investigate.

All right, wild or domesticate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Alive or dead.

But also, like the number of things.

So if it's one thing or two things or many things, it's different.

Like similar in Russia.

It's just solving a crime based on a phone call because you know that the verb was referring to a thing and you can investigate what that thing was.

That's good.

We know that they have a wild insect

who has a podcast.

Oh, that's nice.

And also it's different depending on how you know it's being done.

So if you know it's happened, it's different.

If you're speculating it's happened, it's different.

If you're admiring something that's happening, it's different.

If something's forbidden, it's different.

And you can mix and match all of these different things to get to 1.5 million.

I admired the forbidden, tame, young locust podcast.

Podcasting.

But you think about that.

You had to use so many words to say that, right?

But they would be able to say it in one word

because they would know all of the endings.

They'd be like, well, that's implied by the way you say that.

So locust stays the same, like all of that stuff.

You could just say the locus podcasted, so just a verb and a noun, and you would get all of that information by all the different endings.

It's like anti-German.

It's the most consistent.

Yeah, yeah.

As a result, has this language become hugely popular and spoken by tens of many years?

It's spoken by very, very few people in Dagestan, in Russia, and it's about 20 kilometers away from the village of Sovkra Adnarya.

Who do you remember?

It was the place where everyone knows how to tightrope.

Oh, no way!

Yeah, there's a village in Russia where everyone knows how to tightrope, and it's just over the mountain from there.

What an amazing pocket of the planet this is.

This is incredible.

And I should also say that, Andy, once you've learned all of these one million different forms of standard verbs, that helps you with about 170 of the most common verbs, but there are more than a thousand exceptions which you then have to learn on top of that.

Oh, and the language can be written in Latin script or in Cyrillic, and in either way, the language has got 74 letters.

So you need to learn 148 letters.

I was going to ask how many letters can there be for there to be this many endings?

Because you would just run out of letters for even combination.

Yeah, this is why I failed my Archie GCSE oral.

This is it.

That's why.

I'm so annoyed.

So yeah, it's just a very, very complicated language.

Have you heard of the Foreign Service Institute?

I think they're an American outfit.

And basically they sort of rate languages on how hard they are to learn.

Oh, yeah.

So, like for English speakers, sorry, native English speakers.

So like French is category one, you know, like Romance languages because they're.

English borrows a lot of we derive a lot.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And you already know that's easy for English people.

Completely, yeah, yeah.

And then category three is Indian, various Indian languages and Swahili.

Category four, it takes 44 weeks to learn.

It's sort of going up in the number of weeks.

So Russian, Hindi, Tamil, Greek.

How many weeks is it supposed to have taken me to learn Russian?

Don't worry about it.

Well, it's taken me five years and I'm intermediate.

Yeah that's about right.

Category five is Mandarin, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic.

Category two only contains German.

It's completely different.

Wait, but English is a Germanic language.

I know.

I think they decided it's a bit harder than French, but it's the only one.

It's just there on its own in their category.

Actually, German does have quite a lot of conjugation, doesn't it?

Because you speak German a little bit.

There's still four basic cases.

Like it's not.

It's all right.

It's a bit because like French and Spanish Spanish and Italian they're all kind of debased Latin if you like because they just cut out all the complicated endings and you know and it's because as Latin spreads I want yeah I guess it's like they're like how to speak it correctly because I speak fluent German but I can't conjugate shit.

I'm just I'm all I'm always like you know what I'm saying but but do you get

it right even though like sometimes I'll be like I'll know a noun but I won't remember its article so I'll like gender it just on a guess alone and I'm sure that I'm sure whoever I'm speaking to will kind of guess.

But I always get worried about that because if I get the gender of a noun wrong, they won't know if I'm saying das table or whatever.

I know it's not table, I can't remember the word for table either, but like I think people

are just

das tisch d'Artichech.

It's not doesn't change the fact that it's a tish.

It's fine.

Relax.

It is handy.

Because I read an article where they interviewed 56 native French speakers and they asked them to assign the gender of 93 masculine words and they agreed on only 17 of them.

And they were asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words and they agreed on only one.

Wow.

It's just vibes.

I love that.

This is you fixed German basically for anyone struggling.

I think that's a good thing in all languages really is that if you just try, people will accept it.

Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, a Russian language has three genders for any noun, but if you get it wrong, I'll still know what you're talking about.

Okay.

Sorry, maybe I'm making a lot of German and Russian people really angry.

Where is Archie on the list?

Archie is not on this list.

I think there's a secret category.

But Russian is difficult because the stress can matter, right?

In words.

And that can make a big difference.

So you can see it written down and you wouldn't know necessarily the difference between, say, muka and muka.

Right.

Where one of them means flower and the other one means torture.

Yeah.

Oh.

So if you just see that written down and they don't have the stress.

Because you have celiac.

So that kind of flower.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was thinking that kind of flower.

Again, oh my God.

Sorry.

Oh, flower, flower.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don't think, is there any way of telling verbally flower?

No, clouds only, I think.

Flower.

We don't know.

Maybe Irish accent.

I always say floor.

People mistake it for the thing we want.

Valentine's Day is always very disappointing, though, for your wife, isn't it?

There was a woman.

Oh, I wish I could remember this now.

Oh, God.

There was a woman in America who was arrested for throwing a pancake at an American president.

And I can't remember which president it was, but when she was arrested, they asked her about it.

And she said she couldn't find any flowers, but this contained flour.

And she thought it would be just the same.

Was it real?

Was this remotely?

That was the guy.

100 years ago.

Easy.

Do you remember when I made a Karate magazine news article for spitting on someone?

And that was a misunderstanding of words as well.

Yeah.

This is in Hong Kong.

I was in Karate Monthly.

I think

that's a good story rather than news.

That's like one of those little things.

That's where I know you.

What?

Is this real?

Yeah,

I was studying Kempo at the time, which is a former martial art.

And I was sparring with a kid.

And the guy who's training me, he used to call me Danny.

And he had a bit of a lisp.

And he was yelling, spin on him, Danny, spin on him, to spin kick him.

But I heard spin on him, Danny.

And I literally just

spat on his face.

No.

Yeah.

And they paused the fight.

And they were like, what was that?

Is this true?

Yeah, yeah.

How old were you?

10, 11.

I can't believe.

Like, honestly, Dan, I've known you for 20 years.

Every week

is an insane thing you have done.

It was, yeah, it was in Hong Kong and it was.

You were in a karate-based newspaper.

In magazine, yeah.

Sorry.

I guess it's one of those, like, the funny stories kind of bit of it.

It wasn't like international karate news.

It wasn't heavy.

No, I like it.

Yeah.

What was the easiest word on the planet?

The easiest word.

So is it the most universal?

The most universal.

Not bad.

But I think.

Hey,

nearly closer, Olga.

Huh?

Bingo.

I knew it.

Sorry, I knew it.

She speaks three languages.

Of course, she knew it.

It'd be incredible if you would just, you genuinely hadn't heard the question because you weren't listening.

Yeah, we can edit, edit, fix it in post.

Huh?

Yeah, huh?

Every language has a version for, can you please quickly clarify?

And in every language, it's

because it would be very annoying if you had to say a sentence to say, can you quickly clarify?

So that's it.

And it means that, you know, it can de-escalate tension between you and someone else, even if you don't speak the same language.

But also, does that also mean that that the inflection of a question is the same in every language?

No, because it's not really a sound, much, it's much more, it's literally, in my mind, it's just the sound of a question mark.

I think actually that's not true because some languages have question words, don't they?

Like English and Russian do, like who, what, when, all that kind of stuff.

But some languages, it depends on the inflection about whether it's a question or not a question.

But English has that a bit too, doesn't it?

You can say, I live here, and that's a question.

Whereas

that's an Aussie Aussie inflection as well.

That's true.

I live here in Australia.

We had that thing, David Crystal, the linguist, said that the Aussie inflection at the end was a useful thing because it was both a, I understand the statement, but I also am asking you, it's up to you.

You don't need to pick it up as a question, but it works as a question.

You can if you like, yeah, which is like a mind game you'd play in like a corporate interview,

yeah, exactly.

You got the job

just as they're walking out of the dark.

We find them guilty?

I need to get something off my chest.

So the closest so far, so far I've ever been to getting canceled is thanks to a joke that I wrote about the word empathy in Russian.

And so the setup of the joke is the Russian language doesn't have the word for empathy.

Can you imagine what that feels like?

I couldn't.

And so I posted this joke online and the avalanche of Russian people going to to correct me to say that there is actually a word in Russian for empathy and you're actually stupid and dumb and not a patriot.

But I would say 90% of the corrections were the word for sympathy, obviously, that is very easily checked through Google Translate.

Basically, the word that they keep suggesting is sympathy, which is sympatia,

which is close to empathy, but not quite.

Then they'd say sastradania, which is compassion, which again is close, but not quite.

And then very rarely they will say impatia, which is essentially the same sort of like, I guess, Greek root for it, empathy, empatia, which is a word that has not been widely used in Russia up until I want to say two years ago.

And I know this because there's loads of articles in Russia that are essentially titled, what is this word empatia?

And what does it mean?

And so the joke, the setup of the joke, I feel like I'm in court right now.

The setup of the joke is that I...

Why do you think this is funny?

I don't even know where I'm going with this, but I just think that it's really funny because they think that I'm sort of trying to smite the Russian people or say that Russians don't understand what empathy is.

And surely that's something that you can explain in more than just one word.

And to sort of, I guess, make right with the Russians, I'll share a Russian word that we have that you don't in English.

Oh, okay, yeah.

And that's listapat, which is the word for falling leaves.

So it's like rainfall, we have leaf fall.

Oh,

and you don't say the word leaves.

You're stupid.

Yeah, but we can actually have have some feelings about it when you see it.

If you're speaking to a Russian, you can tell whether they're a virologist or not by the way they talk.

And that is because in Russian you have animate and inanimate nouns, right?

The endings can change up whether something's alive.

And so virus, virus, in Russian, is most people would say it's inanimate, but virologists always think it's alive, a virus.

Because virus, is it alive?

Is it not alive?

Actually, nobody really knows.

But virologists think it's alive and normal people tend to not say it's alive.

So if you say

on dalminiere coronavirus,

then that would mean he gave me coronavirus, but that would be a person who's not a virologist saying it.

But if you said on dalminier coronavirusa, that would be animate and it would be a virologist saying it because they think viruses are alive.

And how useful have you found this change in your life?

Again, I think that you could use that to solve a crime.

Yeah.

Who was the murderer?

It was, it was a virus.

Virologist in the library with a candlestick.

Probably with the anthrax.

Do you want to know a fun fact?

Yeah.

So you know how like.

Not on this show.

You've come to the wrong place, ladies.

So do you know how like French kiss is making out?

Oh, yeah.

Or like Irish goodbyes leaving without saying goodbye.

Or French exit as well.

But in Russian, a buffet is a Swedish table and a family of three, which is like two women and a man or whatever, whatever combination of genders in a thruplet is a Swedish family.

Get away.

Interesting.

So ménage à trois, which is what we would call it.

I don't know, because like three people living together.

It's not a threesome.

It is like, it is a relationship of three.

A thruple.

I thought I'm the only one still saying menage a trois.

Everyone else said thrupple.

I'm about that all the apps.

All the pervert apps.

Loves ESPN, nostril-based dogging competitions.

This is for Olga and James.

P.

Hole Dandrov.

Is that a...

Don't speak.

I'm not a native Russian speaker.

But you love dirty words.

So that's true.

Yeah.

I've never heard of that.

I went on a site where it was sort of like weird, rude words from Russia and

this bottom.

Have you ever heard of that that word before?

I have never seen this in my life.

I did move from Russian when I was 14, so maybe like it's a sort of high school word.

That word is a 15 certificate, so

you wouldn't have known about it.

See, I don't think it's a real word, but it was on a site.

What does it mean?

Yeah, sir.

It kind of doesn't really mean anything.

It's just

a beautiful word for when the pollen falls from the trees.

I can't believe we don't have this word in English.

Do you know the Bicol language of the Philippines doesn't have it has swear words but people don't really use them because it has a complete other vocabulary if you're angry.

So you speak normal Bicol, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But as soon as you're angry, you just change all the words that you use so that people can tell you're angry.

Oh, that's great.

I think you're saying the same stuff, but it's different using different words.

Using different words, yeah.

So it's a bit like with my daughter when she does something bad.

I normally call her jelly, but if she does something bad, I go, angjel.

So angry.

But it's a completely different vocabulary, Eve.

I hate to bring it up, but again, such beautiful evidence in a court case.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's like, was it a crime of passion?

I don't know.

It's so good.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is Andy.

My fact is, if cars had improved at the same rate as computers since 1971, they would now be able to travel at nearly the speed light.

Wouldn't that be cool?

And if my grandmother had wheels.

She would also be traveling at the speed of light.

They would also be smaller, the carts, right?

Yes, they would be about half an inch long, unfortunately.

And this is based on something that Gordon Moore, who was the co-founder of Intel, huge computer company, said in 1965.

He noticed that the number of transistors you can fit on a chip, a computer chip, had been roughly doubling every year for the previous 10 years.

And he said, this is amazing.

And he thought it would keep going.

He thought the principle would apply, maybe it would be every two years the number you could fit on a chip doubled.

But he said, I think it's good for at least 10 more years.

And it actually has stayed true for about 50 years at least since he wrote that.

And it's slowing down a bit now, but cars would be able to travel at the speed of light because the number of transistors you can fit on a computer chip now is so huge.

The numbers are just mind-boggling of how much things have improved.

I suppose the thing was that we got to a speed with cars where we thought there's no point going much faster.

Is that right?

Because of safety reasons and stuff like that?

I suppose so.

Obviously if we moved to the speed of light that we'd also go infinite mass and oh that would slow you down.

No, it wouldn't slow you down.

Well it would yes it will break through the car door.

You'd be well no because that's the thing I saw an interview with Lewis Hamilton the other day and he was talking about how when you're driving a Formula One car

everything about your the structure of your body needs to be as strong as possible because when you take a turn at 180 miles an hour, your body does not go with the car.

They have strong necks and they yeah, but yeah, I mean like there's no point getting faster than you know, you get cars that can go 200 miles an hour or faster, but there's no point having them because you can't go faster than

spaceships are useful though.

Yeah, again, it's just it's really just about transistors.

I feel like I was completely but am I correct in understanding that like I remember this distinctly as an example in a textbook that at some point it becomes imperceptible to humans.

So like they tried doubling the amount of pixels in like computer graphics, but at some point once you double it, a human eye can't see that it's double.

That's really good.

That's true.

Yeah.

I think a computer screen now can show more colors than the human eye can perceive.

Yeah, so who's that?

That's a really good one.

Yeah.

If you were traveling at near speed of light, this is kind of a physics question, really,

and you had to take a left, right?

You're in space.

If you needed an exit sign, but I'm traveling at close to the speed of light,

how would you do that?

As in, you won't be able to see it.

Yeah.

At what point, how big and how far away would it have to be?

That's a really good point.

Leave it with me.

Writer Randall Monroe.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

He is way more qualified than me to do that.

All right.

You want to hear something about transistors?

Sure.

This is...

No, genuinely.

Yeah.

They're unbelievably interesting.

Transistors.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay.

The light would still come to you.

Oh, my God.

Yeah.

Sorry.

Sorry, Andy.

Because you're going in the opposite direction to the sign, right?

So you're going towards the sign.

Going towards the sign.

So the light will still get to you just as quickly.

Ah, so just as far faster, if anything?

Well, to the point where you're at at any moment, it would just get to you at the same speed.

I think it still needs to be a big sign from that distance.

Yeah.

Saying left here.

I think it's always got to be a big sign in space.

It's always got to be a big sign, in space.

Happy with that then?

Yeah, yeah, that was great.

Back to your transition.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Okay.

I just, here's the thing: right, 1971, Intel released their first ever microprocessor, right?

I know absolutely not.

The chip was 12 square millimeters, right?

Picture that.

12 square millimeters, really big at all.

It's 3 millimeters times 4 millimeters.

They had 2,300 transistors fitted onto that space.

It's pretty good, right?

The gap between each transistor was 10,000 nanometers, which is the size of a red blood cell.

Just to give you an idea of what the, okay.

Today, the most advanced chips can fit into that space, not 2,300 transistors, but 130 million.

What does that mean?

What does it mean?

It's insane.

The gap is 14 nanometers between them.

Very, very, very swift.

I think the

transistors are so

tiny.

They're so sort of impossibly small.

Basically, and the transistors, we should say, they're like the taps.

As in, like, they're either on or they're off.

They make up the ones and zeros.

They're little switches which change their state depending on whether an electric current is flowing through them or not.

And your phone has millions of them in it.

Your phone will have so many millions.

And it's quite, it's obviously really hard to get your head around because the numbers are just so mind-boggling.

Like, in 2015, I mean, nearly a decade ago, the world created 13 trillion transistors every second.

Wow.

What?

We're more.

This is basically a transistor planet now, isn't it?

There's so many of them.

Yeah.

And they're now kind of printed directly onto the chips.

It's not like there's a big pile of

shoe or fan for these.

I've dropped it.

Nobody moves.

Just one old man in a cave in Turkey who's just pulling each one together.

It's just mind-blowing.

And this stuff is what the entire world is made of.

Everything you're listening to this podcast through is transistor-based.

It's all based on this stuff.

And it's so far beyond most people's comprehension.

Yeah.

Unless you spend years on it, you know, it's insane.

I guess each are so big, aren't they?

It's just hard to really get your head around any of the numbers.

Like, for instance, the new Google computer, the quantum one that they're supposed to have made, and no one's sure if they've made it or not.

If they have, then

that's so funny for a quantum computer.

Yeah, exactly.

It exists and it doesn't exist at the same time, yeah.

It can do as many calculations in two seconds as if you got the entire population of India to do a sum every second since the beginning of the universe.

That would be the same as this computer can do in two seconds.

And again, that's...

It's so hard to understand.

It's amazing.

Wow.

And the reason the transistors have been getting so much smaller is partly is a really good thing, partly because when they get smaller, you get less electricity wasted and less heat wasted.

Obviously, the process generates a lot of heat.

So actually, making them smaller means you save huge amounts of energy, which is part of the reason they can do it and that it's a good thing.

Because I think Moore said at the very start, he said, one of the problems is going to be we're going to get more and more transistors, but everything's just going to get hotter and hotter and hotter.

Yes.

And if you've got a million transistors in your phone, you just won't be able to pick it up.

It'll just set fire to the table as soon as you put it on the table.

But then they found out ways to counteract that.

Yeah, yeah.

But now they are so small.

Again, this is mad that quantum effects are starting to come into play, and the gates are no longer functioning properly because they're so small that you get some electrons leaking through even when it's supposed to be off because they're now down to kind of electron size.

Right.

The barrier and the gate.

So they're having to work out new shapes of transistor to re-exert some control over this gate because it's too leaky for individual electrons.

I've got a question for Dan.

Oh, yeah.

You're traveling on an electron,

and there's a neutron on your left-hand side.

How big would the sign have to be in order for you to for me to

well, I'm glad you brought that up because I did have an additional question I wanted to ask earlier, which is how if you saw the sign saying take a left, you're traveling near to the speed of light, you're going to have to slow down.

How far away does the sign need to be for you to de accelerate?

Decelerate.

Decelerate.

Where you go slow enough that you can take a left?

I mean, it depends how fast you're going.

Because you say close to the speed of of light is it 99 the speed of light is it 98 is it 97

that's a classic follow-up question of a person who does not know the answer

i've just suddenly remembered this is to do with cars but also to do with transistors and i remember that there was a guy the co-creator of the transistor won a nobel prize for it I'm going off the top of my head here, but he's one of the only few people to win two Nobel Prizes, right?

So the second time that he got announced as the Nobel Prize winner, there was a party that was going to, because you know, they kind of know that something's coming up, was being thrown for him.

And he almost didn't make it to the party because he couldn't open his electric garage because the transistor had broken that allowed for it to switch open.

Lovely.

And so someone had to come and pick him up and take him to the party.

Nice.

Moore, Gordon Moore, he was a very cool guy, very interesting guy, co-founded Intel.

He, I mean, gave, he became incredibly rich, obviously, and gave loads and loads of his money away to protect the Amazon, protecting salmon rivers, because he's a very keen fisherman.

But he founded Intel with Robert Noyce, was his colleague.

Noyce.

And they wanted to call that company.

They invented Brooke with 99, didn't they?

They wanted to call the company more Noyce.

This is more Noyce than anything else.

And sadly, they thought it wouldn't be right for an electronics company, it wouldn't be appropriate or something.

So they called it Noyce Computers.

Intel, I know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I also love that his sort of contribution to managing is just coming to his team every year and saying, double it.

Yeah.

That's it.

Because actually, quite a lot of it with Moore's Law became like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

They knew that it was going to have to double in a year or in two years.

And so that's what they did.

They could have gone faster, but they were like, oh no, it has to do this.

Right.

It's still holding up, I think.

It depends who you speak to.

People have been predicting that it's going to...

We can't possibly keep on doubling it every two.

Maybe it's now close to every three or something, but it's.

Have you heard of Bremerman's limit?

No.

Bremerman's limit.

So there was a guy called Hans Bremmermann, and he said that there was a limit on the maximum rate of computation that could be achieved in a self-contained system in the material universe.

So we would get to a limit of how much

could be.

And he used, I don't understand the mathematics of it, but he uses Einstein's equations in order to make sense of it.

So Bremerman, who was born in Bremen in Germany,

to Bernard Bremen and

Bertha Bremenen.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

So cool.

Do you know what the fastest supercomputer in England is called?

In England?

Is it a classic English name like Nigel?

Yeah, it is.

I think

less patriarchal.

Betty.

Betty.

Betty is the 457th most powerful computer in the world.

Have you got a list that goes up to 457?

Because it's 500.

I'll say Elizabeth.

No.

Oh, okay.

I mean, it's almost impossible to guess.

Oh, no, okay.

Well, but it's a woman's name.

It's a woman's name.

It's a woman's name.

It's quite an an old-fashioned woman's name.

Apologies to any of the people with this name.

Oh, Margaret.

Aggie.

Maud.

Agatha.

Dotty.

Dotty.

No, it's Dawn.

Dawn.

Dawn is the fastest supercomputer in England.

And other supercomputers.

Robert is the 103rd.

Alex is the 187th.

Jean is the 288th.

And Henry is the 293rd.

Some of the most uninspiring names.

It feels that way, doesn't it?

Dawn is really good because you can say it's the dawn of a new age, whereas you can't say this is the robot of a new age.

When do supercomputers stop being super?

Like, surely supercomputers from 20 years ago are no longer super.

Great point.

It's all the number of calculations per second, isn't it?

Or the number of millions of people.

And surely the bar keeps rising, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We had using old computers a very big problem a couple of years ago, four years ago.

So while the pandemic was breaking out, one thing that went a bit unnoticed is that hundreds of places got hit by the millennium bug, Y2K.

In 2020?

In 2020, yeah.

Why?

Because what happened was at the time, so Y2K was a big problem, right?

The problem was that when we hit 2000, the computers thought it was 1900.

So it was jumping backwards, and that was

1997, 1998, 1999, 1900.

Exactly.

And that was going to mess up loads of stuff.

And I was going to mess up everything.

That's the best setup for a rom-com I have ever heard in my life.

A singleton in 1999 at a New Year's party travels back in time and falls in love with someone from 1900.

Oh, guys.

That's very nice with a computer that glitches and gets them.

Yes.

But yeah, so what ended up happening was in that period where everyone was desperately trying to fix a Y2K bug, they changed the coding so that was 2020.

And they thought what would happen is, so 2.0 became the number, right?

And they thought in the 20 years subsequent, they're going to become obsolete.

We'll have new computers.

This is not going to be an issue.

I see.

So computers thought it was 2.020, but actually it was 2000.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So

then we got to 2020 and everyone went,

like Brexit, we've been kicking it down the road.

We kicked it down the road.

Now, a lot of places had changed their systems, but a bunch hadn't.

So there was, and it was weird things.

Like there was a version of a game of WWF, which crashed because it was an online download.

So they had to.

What did we do?

Because I thought like planes were going to fall from the sky and stuff.

Not people won't be able to play WWF on the PlayStation.

We now work out how Dad knows about this problem.

His plans for lockdown were completely wrecked.

It's a huge issue.

We couldn't download WWF.

Also, other things, I imagine.

Oh, yeah, and 5,000 players fell out of this guy.

Yeah.

No, and it was like things like grocery stores that had TIL systems that were automated.

Suddenly, those were crashing.

So you couldn't buy the game in the first place.

Exactly.

It was a nightmare.

It was horrible.

There was a website called Splunk, which suffered from it.

Not Splunk!

Splunk is a website that looks for errors in computing.

How did you accidentally end up on that website?

Can I tell you one more thing?

Yeah.

Okay, this is about how your phone CPU is made.

What is that central processing unit?

Yes.

Okay.

This is from an interview with a guy called Chris Miller, who's written a book called Chip War.

I'm quoting him directly.

This is what gets into your modern phones, right?

A ball of tin falls at a rate of several hundred miles an hour through a vacuum.

It's only about 30 millionths of a meter across.

Small ball of tin.

It is pulverized by two shots from one of the most powerful lasers ever deployed and explodes into a plasma measuring several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

This plasma emits extreme ultraviolet light at exactly the right wavelength of 13 and a half nanometers, which is then collected via a dozen mirrors, which are themselves the flattest mirrors humans have ever produced.

The mirrors reflect the light at just the right angle, so it hits the silicon wafer and carves the circuits onto the chips that make your iPhone possible.

What?

And that's so that Dan can play WWF games on his phone.

It's the biggest step down for this system.

Isn't that nuts?

That's how I don't think I understood any of that, I'll be honest.

I'm clinging on.

I mean, it's incredible.

Oh, we should say Kenny Stoltz, a listener, sent that in a little while ago, that interview with Chris Miller.

It's just, it is nuts, isn't it?

And these machines, they're so accurate that it's like shooting a laser from the moon and hitting an individual coin on Earth.

That's all precisely.

They deserve every penny they get, don't they?

Especially the podcasting team.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that on the same day that Joni Mitchell released the greatest hits album, she also released a greatest Mrs.

album.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

That was so good.

I know.

Is it terrible?

Is it absolutely not a good full bad song?

A case of you is on it.

What's that?

It's the most popular song.

Okay.

But I mean, it's a collection from other albums, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So her favorite ones that weren't commercially successful.

Exactly, that's right.

Okay.

And she was so happy with it, she tried to release Mrs.

2.

But the record label rejected that.

The only reason it came out, the record label didn't want to do it, but it was like a compromise.

It was a bargaining.

She said, you can do the greatest hits if I can do the greatest Mrs.

Yeah.

I don't know much about Joni Mitchell.

She's an incredible artist.

I mean, you know,

she had a really nice moment a few weeks ago at the Grammys.

She performed for the first time.

She's 80 years old.

She sang a song.

Not for the first time.

Yeah, for the first time out.

How's she ever?

Yeah, she's never, she's won, I think, 10 Grammys, but she's never performed at the Grammys.

Oh, at the Grammys.

Yeah.

Sorry, you said she performed for the first time.

I think I said where she performed.

Right, right, right, okay.

Regardless, she's 80 and she sits, you know, in a chair.

She sings this beautiful song.

She wins a Grammy for Best Folk Album for a live album that she did, which is a bit annoying, I think, for the other folk artists, I would say.

Okay.

More controversial.

Okay.

And yeah, and yeah, she's someone who was a part of the whole scene with Dylan, Bob Dylan, and Leonard Cohen and all that.

For listeners that don't know her, you won't find much of her stuff on Spotify.

She's one of those artists where you probably have to go to YouTube or.

She took it off because of Joe Rogan, right?

Did she?

Yeah.

Really?

I think, yeah, Joe Rogan was a Spotify.

Yeah, exclusive.

Exclusive, right?

And he was saying some things that people didn't agree with.

I've got to to say, I'm a big fan of Spotify, as I am with Apple and all podcast providers.

I'm so glad that the end of that sentence wasn't Joe Roman.

I understand, I'm a big fan.

Yeah, but a load of people took their stuff off Spotify because of that.

And she was one of them.

I mean, do we know it wasn't because of us?

Because we are on Spotify.

Yeah, but we're not on exclusive Spotify.

Maybe it was parenting hell with Josh Wickham.

Wow.

But yeah, she's amazing.

She's pretty cool.

She had polio when she was nine years old.

Yeah.

And interesting thing about that is I was reading about other people who had polio around the time.

Mia Farrow had polio when she was nine.

And she wrote that she was taken to an isolation unit because it's catching polio, obviously.

And she was taken away from all of her family for months and all of her belongings were burned.

Is this Mia?

Mia Farrow, yeah.

Right.

Blimey.

Isn't that amazing?

Like, you basically, at nine years old, you've got this disease.

They take you away and they burn everything that you own.

And is that the case with polio that if your toy had, if you touch your toy, toy, you could get it from that?

Or was that a we weren't sure what it was?

Well, no, it can.

It can go through bodily fluids and stuff like that.

Obviously, we have vaccines for it now.

Joe Rogan told me to say that they don't want it.

No, we have vaccines for it now, so it's not as much of a problem, obviously.

But yeah, it can go through feces, through spits,

and the speed with which we went from Joni Mitchell to feces.

Wow.

That's our pipeline, I'm afraid.

That's how we roll.

That's our pipeline, yeah.

No, Ian Dury of Ian During the Blockets had polio as a child.

Did he?

Yeah, yeah.

So a lot of musicians.

Yeah.

How interesting it is.

It supposedly gave her an edge to how she tuned her guitar.

It's her polio.

Joanne.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So she got into guitaring about 15 years old at school, and she was recovering from polio.

And it just meant that it must have been harder to tune a guitar for her.

Yeah, it kind of changes the way that your bone structure works and stuff like that.

There was a footballer called Grincher who had polio as a child, and it made his legs bandy, but it meant that he kind of ran in a way that no one else ran and it kind of helped him to play football supposedly.

Right.

She started smoking at the age of nine and she started singing because she wanted to get smoking money.

So she was in a cafe in Calgary in Canada and she was the resident artist and she was drawing people and they would pictures would go up on the walls.

And then she needed a bit more money so she started singing and everyone said, you're a pretty good singer.

and so she went home and asked her mum if her mum would buy her a ukulele

and her mum said who do you think you are kitty wells

good one

which i think it was a different time so no

that was probably a really sick band

kitty wells she was the first female country singer to get to the top of the us charts With her song, It Wasn't God Who Made Hunky Tonk Angels.

This is the kind of song I would like to listen to, actually.

So was it that she started singing at the age of nine?

And then people thought, you know what would make this nine-year-old's voice even better?

20 Benson and Hunters a day.

And then she got into it that way.

No, it wasn't that.

Okay, okay.

She started smoking at the age of nine.

Oh, okay.

And then at the age of like 14 or 15, she was like, I need money for cigarettes.

So let me write a masterpiece.

Yeah, exactly.

Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

That's where Brett the Hitman Hart is from, as you would know if you had the WWE wrestling game.

Oh, you would also know that if you spent any time with Dan over the last 20 years.

And then she started dating David Crosby from Crosby Stills and Nash.

Oh.

And Crosby sort of invited Eric Clapton over.

to kind of check out this Joni Mitchell.

And he said that Clapton sat mesmerized by her playing and her different tunings of her guitar.

Although he also said that it might have been slightly due to the fact of all the weed that he'd smoked.

Afterwards, he said, I mean, she's no Kitty Wells.

She is, I mean, to watch footage of her in that period is spectacular.

Her music is extraordinary.

The songwriting is incredible.

And Blue is just consistently voted as one of the greatest albums.

That's an album.

Yeah, it's one of her albums, which is always, you know, very near the top of greatest albums of all time.

If you're a millennial, you know Joni Mitchell from the heartbreaking scene in the film Love Actually, where Emma Thompson receives a gift from her husband, Alan Rickman, and she thinks it's a necklace, but it's really just a Joni Mitchell CD.

And then she's displaying it.

I know you're saying that actually, that's quite a good present to give because she's an incredible chanter.

Better than a necklace.

Yeah.

But then it turns out he gave the necklace to his mistress.

That's the thing.

But if you're going to find out that your husband's taken on a mistress, that's a good present to receive.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Joni Mitchell is a great soundtrack for

they split up because of that moment.

I don't remember.

I don't think they don't.

So she takes her.

He takes her back.

Basically.

He very generously

takes her back.

She takes him back.

She says, oh, he's just been a bit silly.

And, you know, it's all fine.

She doesn't quite do it like that.

Well, it's not far off.

Joni Mitchell split up with David Crosby by singing him a song at a party.

Oh, really?

He has been cheating on her.

And she wrote this song, which basically, I haven't heard the song, but I imagine in the middle it goes, you're fucking dumps, mate.

Yeah.

Whatever.

But she played it once, and then he was like, oh, that's really good.

And she went,

and played it again because he didn't get it.

Do we know what it's called?

Do we have lyrics?

It's called The Song About the Midway, but I haven't seen the lyrics.

I would have called it something like Nicka's on the back seat or something, something that really makes him worried even as you're starting to hear the song.

Oh, I see.

When you overdo it on the metaphor so much, people can't quite.

The Midway.

Sorry.

Is that the river that goes through Chilling Guns that you're talking about?

You're talking about the Battle of Medway.

People who've never done a Greatest Tets album.

Okay.

ACDC.

You know the reason why?

Because they're all greatest tets albums.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Is that what they said, or are you saying that?

I think we agree.

I and ACDC agree on this.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I think a lot of artists fear the slight kind of creative death of, you know, here are your best songs and that's it.

But you can just do another, you know, Aaron Carter, his most requested hits.

Aaron Carter?

Aaron Carter?

Aaron Carter.

Aaron Carter.

Yeah.

Like the American Plain Street Boys.

He was the younger brother.

He passed away very sadly not too long ago.

Did he?

Yeah.

I didn't know that.

But his, because most, I was looking up huge lists of Greatest Hits albums.

You know, a lot, long list.

And they're almost all called Greatest Hits, which I think is quite good.

You're looking at this list and then you've stopped at AA run.

Yeah.

Anything about ZZ Tottenham?

That's why you keep coming up with crime things, Olga.

It's like, I've been busted by the alphabet, the English alphabet.

I'm gutted.

But his is called Most Requested Hits, which I think is a nice slight twist on the formula.

And then the second one is called Come Get It, the very best of Aaron Carter.

It must be one of his songs or something.

Followed by Too Good To Be True.

So I just think he's all greatest hits, every single one of them.

He's got three albums of greatest hits, so I think that his.

Wow.

According to Reddit, and it does seem to be true when I checked it, Kiss have had more greatest hit compilations than they have studio albums.

Okay.

There you go.

They've had 20 studio albums and as far as I could see they've either had 21 or I counted 23 greatest hits albums.

They did a farewell tour in 2000 and 2001 and since then they've done 13 tours.

Hell yeah.

Isn't that amazing?

Do you know the biggest selling album in America of all time is the Greatest Hits?

I'm going to guess.

ABBA Gold.

Well, that's because you've only got to AB and the alphabet.

No, it's happened again.

It's the Eagles, isn't it?

That's correct.

Yeah.

It's the Eagles.

Now, so this is their Greatest Hits album.

Who here can name a song by the Eagles Hits album?

That's not on the Greatest Hits album.

No!

Yeah, isn't that incredible?

This is from a period where they hadn't yet written that song.

They must have felt like chumps coming up with that song after they've done it.

We've already done a Greatest Hits album.

Oh, man.

So this is now not technical.

Canon, this is not a greatest hit.

And honestly, I've listened to a few Eagles albums.

It's their Greatest Hit.

The best-selling album in the UK is Greatest Hits.

Oh, Queen.

Queen, you got it.

At the same time, they released Greatest Flicks, which was a video of all their best songs.

Oh, very cool.

And Greatest Pics, which was photographs.

That's really clever.

Who here owns Queen's Greatest Hits?

Yeah.

I've got my hand up.

Oh, I got two of us.

On cassette and then CD and then yeah.

So I own it and Dan owns it.

And that is, it makes sense because one in four British households owns Queen's Greatest Hits.

Really?

It's still, really?

I think probably still.

There probably is some generational turn happening.

But in 2021, Abba Gold, which is the other huge Greatest Hits album

after Queen's, it got to 1,000 weeks in the top 100 chart.

That's amazing.

It's a perfect, perfect album.

Yeah.

Perfect band.

Well, it's no highway to hell, but it's

by the way, AA,

AB, and then A C D C.

Anything about Adam and the Ants.

There was an album that was released in 1977 by the BBC called Death and Horror.

Basically, you know how you can just buy incidental sounds, right?

You know, sorry.

Door creaking.

Yeah, door creaking.

Sorry, the BBC would have like an archive of incidental sounds.

So this was all sounds of horrific things.

Tracks included head chopped off,

assorted creepy creaks,

red hot poker in the eye.

That was it.

And it was a top 100 charting album.

Goths went crazy

yeah exactly

and then this is this is the one i'd love to get but i don't think it necessarily would have charted but there was an album called recorded delivery by a guy called yannick schaefer So basically what he did was he put a dictaphone inside a package and he put it through the Royal Mail and he recorded the entire journey that this dictaphone went on as it was traveling through the parcel, going through the mailbox, being picked up, put in the van.

And so what you hear is whistling postmen just sort of walking along.

You get sliding van doors.

There's lots of clunks.

You get early morning mail workers talking about their dirty sex lives.

There's a sudden unexpected shout of Anus.

And

that was me.

And 500 of them were printed.

Brian Eno said he wished he thought of it first.

It was a

Eno, isn't it?

It is very, very Eno.

Yeah.

The first Greatest Tits album ever.

Johnny Mathis.

Johnny Mathis.

In fact, if you look in the Oxford English Dictionary, it's the first use of the phrase greatest hits.

Did he write a sing a song called Chances Are, which was in Mad Men?

Well, chances are he did if you remember it.

He was late 50s, wasn't he?

So it's perfect timing for Madman.

He was.

I looked him up.

He's still alive, Johnny Mathis.

Yeah.

He's

mid-90s, I think.

Cool.

He's old, but he's still kicking around.

He was a high jumper for the U.S.

Olympic team before he became a singer, but he was kind of singing in the clubs and stuff.

And the head of popular music at Columbia was on holiday in San Francisco and heard him singing and sent a telegram to the company saying, Have found phenomenal 19-year-old boy who could go all the way, send blank contracts.

Oh, that's great.

And he was Olympian at that time, at 19?

He'd been trying out.

He kind of got the call to go to the trials.

This is a cool thing.

In 1956, he got the call to go to the Olympic trials, but he had just got his recording contract he said to his dad should i become a high jumper or should i become a musician it's annoying isn't it when people are really like world class at not one thing but you could do both vanilla ice as a rapper and a real estate agent

you could do both

well cody simpson the australian um

singer actor also swam for their olympic team oh yeah

and also is it gina davis who almost qualified for archery fighting oh that's right yeah get away you could do both yeah okay you could do both and it's fine that i've done neither um

Johnny Mathis, it wasn't actually any greatest hits.

It was just something they rushed out because he was about to go on tour in the UK.

He didn't have time to record any new tracks.

So they just bundled together his first four recordings.

Oh, is that right?

They called them Johnny's Greatest Hits.

It was in the charts for nine years.

So they manifested it.

Pretty much.

The greatest hits?

Australian inflection.

And there's a reason why you'd love him, James.

He used to play golf 300 times a year.

Oh, he sounds great.

He's a great guy.

And he has a cookbook library.

He loves cookbooks so much.

He bought thousands of them.

He had off his kitchen his own library of cookbooks.

And in 1982, he wrote his own cookbook called Cooking for You Alone, which is all about meals for one and how you can make them delicious and lovely.

I just think he seems like a really nice, sweet guy.

He's so sweet.

That does sound nice, but if you think that you're going to get a necklace for Valentine's Day and you get the meals for one book,

that's a real sign.

That's how Joni Mitchell dumped her next boyfriend.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on Instagram using the name Schreiberland.

Andy?

I'm at Andrew Hunter.

I'm on Twitter.

James.

My Twitter is at James Harkin.

Yep.

And Olga?

I'm at Colga300 on Instagram.

Nice.

And also do make sure to go and see Olga live.

Prawn Cocktail.

You're on tour.

Prawn Cocktail is the name of my show.

You'll just be eating it non-stop.

And I promise it's going to be 100% high-quality prawns and never a cheap meatball.

Yeah.

Or if you want to get in contact with us as a group, by the way, you can go to at no such thing on Twitter.

You can email us on podcast at qi.com.

Or you can just go to our website, no such thing as a fish, if you want to check out all the previous episodes because they're all up there.

So do that.

Otherwise, just come back next week.

We'll be back with another another episode and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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