477: No Such Thing As ShatGPT

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

Before we get going, we just want to let you know we have a very, very exciting guest across the pond.

An international sensation.

Someone that if you are a follower of great science and and comedy over in America is going to be a household name to you.

It is the brilliant Hank Green.

Hank is someone that we have been following for years and years.

We watch his videos.

He's very much a fish vibe and we've wanted him on for about nine years.

And finally, the moment happened and he managed to come on.

And

it was so much fun to speak to him.

He himself has a podcast that I highly recommend.

you listen to if you haven't heard it yet called SciShow Tangents.

Very fishy as well.

It's him and his two friends, Serry Riley and Sam Schultz.

And what they do is each week, they try and just one-up each other and amaze each other with weird, funny research.

And it's fun and facts.

So do give it a go.

And

I'm actually going to be on it in a month or so.

I don't know the scheduling of it, but yeah, I'm going to be fighting, fighting facts with Hank Green and Serry and Sam.

So do give it a go.

Check it out.

Check out his books as well.

His novels are absolutely amazing.

And of course, he does all the stuff with his brother John.

You've got to check that out as well if you haven't heard it.

He's just one of those polymaths of nerd comedy.

So, give him a go.

Uh, we really hope you enjoy the show.

One quick thing to mention: if you're listening to us on a platform where you haven't followed us, please can you press the follow button?

Uh, it really helps us to bump up the charts.

Do that with SciShow Tangents as well.

Give them a follow, and otherwise, enjoy Hank Green on No Such Thing as a Fish.

Here we go, on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations around the world.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Hank Green.

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 Hank.

My fact is, the Cactovic number system created by an UP at schoolchildren based on their language's system of counting makes math easier.

Brilliant.

How so?

I should say, to start, it would make math much harder if you were you, unfortunately.

Was that specifically me, Hank?

Because, well, I'm just guessing that you use a base 10 number system, and so converting constantly between base 10 and base 20 would be very difficult.

So, Dan and the rest of us, we count in base 10.

So, that means that if you've got a number, say, let's say 123,

the number 3 at the end is 3 units, the number 2 is 2 tens, and the number 1 is 100s, right?

Right.

And in base 20, we've got got it, so the third number, again, is the number of units, but then the second number would be the number of twenties in a number, and the first number would be the number of four hundreds, which is 20 times 20.

Yeah.

So like, for instance, one, two, three in a base 20 would be one,

the three is the same, and then two would be two times twenty, which is forty, and then the one would be one times four hundred, which is four hundred.

So one, two, three would actually equate to 443.

Is that right?

Yeah, I think that's right.

What I really like about this counting system is it was created, is this right, for a school project in 1994?

Yeah, so

they had a system of counting.

It would be basically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and then 5, 1, 5, 2, 5, 3, 5, 4, 5, etc.

And then once you got to 20, they would start over again with it.

So it's like the base 20 system with a sub-base of five.

So it's like two different bases in the counting system that the people there used.

But they created the number system as a class project.

The teacher was like, okay, like you, you have a counting system, but it doesn't have numbers.

So let's create the number system.

It was the first number system created in the Western Hemisphere in like 100 years.

And every number is actually composed of strokes that represent that number.

So one is one stroke, two is a V, two strokes, three is like a backwards N, three, and then four is like a W.

And then, oh my god, this is so cool and weird.

You strike on the top, and that's five.

So five with nothing under it is five.

And then five with one stroke beneath it is six.

The five stroke with two strokes beneath it is seven, et cetera.

And then when you get to the next five, you do two strokes at the top.

That represents ten.

And then you add more strokes to the bottom until you get up to 20.

And then you start over at one and zero.

And that means that when you look at them, first of all, it's representing exactly what the number is.

But like that becomes very, you know, innate with anything like we know that four means four, even though four doesn't really look like four.

But you can actually just, if you want to subtract or add, you just take the shape away that you're trying to subtract.

So if you've got a seven and you want to take away three, you look.

and the three is in the seven and you take the three away.

That's very cool.

Oh, wow.

Is it being used now?

Has it been adopted for anything?

Yeah, so it spread across a lot of native Alaska communities because they had this counting system and having number systems for it was good.

But then, and so it spread pretty quickly and pretty far.

And actually the math scores for those areas went up to above average for the US.

But then you started to get things like that, like, you know, school funding based on performance on assessment tests.

And that was going to be based in a base 10 system, right?

It's going going to be based with Arabic numerals.

And so

the school stopped teaching it, except in like specifically Inupiat language classes.

And also like you can't type them into a calculator or a computer.

But then recently, like within the last few weeks, it was announced that Unicode is actually going to be putting these numbers into its system.

So you will be able to use Inupiat characters in computers and build calculators that use them and function.

Very cool.

It's incredible.

Very cool.

Do they have any ownership over this kind of new system?

Like these kids?

Are they going to be

the next Bezos and Musk?

Absolutely coiny.

It happened in the 90s when this classroom sort of developed the number system and then kind of started spreading around.

And so now those school children are...

I assume, my age, because

I was in high school in the 90s.

And I do not know where the actual kids are who helped develop this.

It's amazing.

Hold on, Silicon Valley.

It'd be weird to have a royalty on a number system, but I'm for it.

I'm like, yes, please.

It'd be so good.

I find it amazing when you read about kids who notice something that I guess it's just that thing of, oh, it's a kid noticing it over an adult who works in this area.

I haven't actually researched this.

It's just a memory of there's a kid, I think he was a teenage, late teens, who, when he was being taught stuff from Newton's Principia,

he discovered a mistake.

No one had seen it.

He's correcting Newton, which is an astonishing thing to do.

And they all looked at it and went, oh yeah, that's completely wrong.

Or I was reading about, have you heard about the Futurama theorem?

No.

So this is years ago, I went out for dinner in London with a few of the Simpsons writers, a guy called Al Jean and a few other people who

they were in town because there's a great scientist here, mathematician called Simon Singh, who is a, he wrote a book because he noticed that there was lots of mathematics inside Simpsons episodes.

And it turns out all the head writers of The Simpsons are all math geeks.

They all went to Harvard and they all

have written papers and so on.

And so in a lot of Simpsons episodes, there's hidden equations and, you know, Fermat's last theorem and stuff.

I'm presuming you're not referring to the bit where Bart needs to escape a lion cage and he works out the Roman numeral for seven by adding Rocky five and rocky two together.

Are you saying something even more complicated than that?

Just a bit smith.

Very good gag, that one.

But

there was an episode of Futurama, so it was the writers of the Simpsons who went over to that, where they had to solve a problem, which was, it was an episode called The Prisoner of Bender.

And a guy called Ken Keiller needed to have a thing where he was talking about the idea of minds being swapped into other people and how could you get the mind back into someone if the mind could only travel once.

It was quite a complicated thing and he he worked out by adding two extra people, no matter how many people were having their brain swapped, would mean that all the brains could return to the original person, all the memories could go back to the original person.

And that was a new development in mathematics.

It's called the futurama theorem.

Wow.

That's its own thing now, yeah.

So they had to create it to solve a plot problem within the cartoon.

That is really cool.

I have a thing I'd like to bring up about this because I saw people talking about it because this Unicode news is new.

And because this is like countable, like you can actually count the strokes, people were saying, well, that's also true of Arabic numerals.

You just count the angles.

So

with four, there's like, you know, dot, dot, dot, dot, basically.

And with seven, there can't be seven angles in a seven, right?

But if you put the stroke in the middle, then you can make it so that it counts up to seven.

And this has been a myth for a long time that it was created like that way intentionally.

This is a way that you can do, like, use Arabic numerals, and you can count angles and basically make an eight in a certain way where it has eight angles.

But that's not a thing that

like I see people saying all the time that this is like an intentional thing, and it was like, how Arabic numerals happened.

It's not.

People were making weird squiggles, and they were representative of something at some point, and then people forgot what they were representative of and just were like, yeah, that means.

It's called light letters, I guess, the same, right?

Yeah, just starting out with shapes.

Mandarin, I speak a bit of Mandarin from my childhood, and so the counting, when you write out the counting, one to ten, one is a stroke of one, two is a stroke of two, three strokes of it, and then they just give up.

They just let it just...

Yeah, six is suddenly one, two, three, four.

Seven is two,

two strokes.

Eight, two strokes.

Yeah, they're doing so well.

But you got to give up.

You've got to give up at some point with that system.

Yeah.

We have the opposite of that, where most of our greater than 10 numbers have a system, you know, like 21, 35.

But 11 and 12 are just like, I don't know.

Yeah.

We're just going to be different.

We want to be crazy.

And then you can get to 13, 14, 15.

But I want to be 11.

I was reading about 11 and 12.

I was reading about...

It's kind of...

Twelfth, it's all about if you take 10 away from those numbers.

So 12th, 12 comes from 12th, and that means two left.

Oh, does it?

If you take 10 away, you have two left.

Well, where the heck does 11 come from then?

It's an even more tortured etymology, I think, but it's basically one left if you take 10 away.

But I can't remember why you're taking 10 away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, the Hank, I have a question for you because you seem to know a lot about this, right?

So the base 10, is it because we have 10 fingers?

We think that's why we count in base 10.

So

the Kaktovic number system, are we thinking that they counted with their toes as well?

Yeah, I think that that is correct.

I think that's basically the case.

How interesting.

And there were also,

I don't know if it was Babylonian, but like one original number system is base 60, which we still have for degrees and we have it for minutes.

Like it sticks around in weird places.

I wonder what they did.

Because there are some base 12 numbering systems.

There's not that many, but there's like, I think there's one in like Nepal and some in Africa and stuff.

And I think the idea of that is you count between your fingers, right?

Yeah.

It's like the little dip in between each finger counts as one.

Yeah.

What I want to believe is that they recognized that it was better.

Because base 12 is better.

It's just better.

Like, that's why we use base 12 because we have one in two dozen.

Like, that's a base 12 way of counting, kind of.

And because it's more divisible by more things.

And that's why we keep using dozens is because you can divide it up more easily and make different, better shapes out of it when you're shipping stuff around.

That's interesting.

Okay.

In ancient China,

sorry, in ancient Japan, Dan, you were talking about how

in Chinese you had the lines.

In Mandarin, yeah.

In Mandarin, yeah.

So in ancient Japan, they used to actually use sticks to count with.

And in the same way we might use a calculator or whatever, you would use actual sticks.

So you would do one, two, three, four, and then you would take them away or add them or whatever.

And then they came up with the zero because zero isn't a natural thing.

Like most number systems don't have a zero to start off with and then they work out that they need it in order to do like tens, hundreds, and thousands and stuff like that and so they started using a go stone so a stone from the game go as a zero and then as soon as they worked out that they could have a zero they started being able to use abacuses which had come over from china and they stopped using these sticks almost overnight and you can see all this writing of these teenagers who say our parents are using these sticks to do all this counting we can't work out how it works we have no idea what's going on we use abacuses because obviously that's the best way of doing it we have no idea what they're doing.

Oh, yeah, it's like new math, like Common Core comes out in the US, and suddenly the parents are like, What are these kids with their beads?

Yeah,

what are they doing?

They're filling up a whole piece of paper to divide 12 by two.

It's so confused.

You know how if you count to a million and you count a number a second, it takes about 11 days, and if you count to a billion, it takes 30 years.

Right, yeah.

There is someone who's counted to a million.

I think he might be the first person ever to count to a million.

He's an Alabama man called Jeremy Harper.

So, Hank, one of your countrymen.

Counted to a million.

It took him 89 days, but he managed to.

Okay, that seems doable.

It's not you just like you sort of write it down when you go to sleep, and then you wake up and you're like, start up again.

Oh, yeah, he did write it down.

He did, yeah.

But if you're going to take sleep breaks, you might as well take other breaks.

You might as well, like,

I could count to a million over 30 years.

Would that count?

Also, once you've got to a million, do you feel bad stopping?

Yeah.

Yeah, you got to carry on at that point.

Does he ever wake up in the morning and he's like, well, a million and one,

a million and two, a million and three.

And also, like, was he doing it out?

Like, was he actually saying the words or was he doing it in a sound?

Oh, yeah.

No, he was, oh, James, he was definitely...

Anyone could say they counted to a million in their head, but he was streaming.

He was live streaming the entire process

some poor wife sitting at home going fuck i have to listen to this all of it that i remember there was a period in the early 2000s around 2000 and like no so not quite early but like 2007 where counting to a million became a thing i had two friends who were racing each other to count to a million um and and that was really annoying we'd be at the pub and they're just counting out loud and one's like a thousand ahead and i'm trying to have a chat and i don't i can't even remember where they got up to.

I think we just all stopped being friends.

It really got in the way.

That sounds like the right decision.

Dan, if he made a mistake, did he have to go back to the start?

Because I think, under pressure of just counting, I reckon I'd make mistakes.

Yeah, I reckon I'd go from 111 to 119 by accident.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, you would have loved the pub chat there, James.

I mean, I can't count $100 without starting over.

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

My fact is, some people can control their own goosebumps.

That kind of gave me goosebumps.

Amazing.

Maybe.

Like, I got some tingles in the back of my head.

Well, there's a 1 in 1500 chance you are one of the chosen ones.

I'm not.

It's called VGP voluntarily generated pilot erection, and the pilot erection is the term for getting goosebumps.

That's gotta be a better term.

Oh, sniggering at the fact.

I imagine what is the what's the prefix pico mean, Hank?

Because that means very small, right?

At all, tiny.

Yeah.

So you don't want to get your pico erection mixed up with your pino erection.

Yeah, so this so normally normally you get goosebumps when you're cold or you're watching an exciting movie or you're having a big emotion.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, there are a few different things.

Yeah, I've seen this episode of Taskmaster.

Yeah.

And obviously, it's well, not obviously, really, but

what happens is your body is trying to raise your hairs on end, the hairs, the sort of remains of the hairs that were once thick and all over our bodies, to create a fluffy layer all over you, keep you warm.

Andy, sorry, just still thick on Dan's case.

That's what I'm thinking.

I've not progressed from the ancient man.

You actually do get warmer.

You do get slightly warmer if you get goosebumps.

He gets much bigger.

I get way bigger.

Yeah, I inflate.

It's um...

No, that's, I mean,

the wording of that, I read that as well, does make it sound as if a predator's coming, you get scared, you go

like a fluffy-dried dog.

And yeah,

I don't see that being an intimidating size difference to a human.

No, but it makes a big difference.

I mean, it's a bigger difference when it's a tiny bird, for example, fluffing up its feathers.

You know, that is more of a difference.

It makes a difference in a cat as well.

Like, when my cat's been fighting outside one of the other cats, she comes back and she's really fluffy.

She's probably big.

Yeah.

Does your cat fight, James?

Sorry.

Oh, she's a northern cat, yeah, yeah.

Northern cat cat.

I don't, James, I don't mean to cast aspersions, but she looks like the most pampered house cat.

I didn't I can't believe she goes outside.

Yeah, well, you should hear what she says about you.

I won't come around if I were you.

Wow.

Oh, we're learning.

So,

anyway, sorry, there are these.

So you've got the follicle.

God, you've got the follicles all over you, and they have

every follicle has a little nerve in it, which is connected to a tiny muscle

which can contract and haul the hair up on end so that normally happens if you're cold and you can give yourself goosebumps if you think of you know a big emotional occasion or thinking of fingernails down a blackboard that's slightly different to what the one in 1500 people with vgp can do they don't think about something else to give themselves goosebumps they just they just get it they can't they how do you know though are they in an mri machine when they do it because maybe they're just good at thinking about blackboards Yeah, this seems to be going on trust, doesn't it?

Yeah.

The article that you sent round, Andy,

there's the person who's the case study that they're talking to called Travis Carrasco,

and he just sits back and forth, like moving his head back and forth.

And his parents will be like, what are you doing?

And he's saying, I'm giving myself goosebumps.

And so that's how he does it.

But what's really interesting, he's a child.

He's a mechanical engineer.

Oh, he's not a child.

No, he's 29.

He's 29, a mechanical engineer from Las Vegas.

And the article starts by saying, he's a normal individual.

He loves coloring with coloured pencils, likes leadership books, and the colour green.

That's his description.

That's not normal.

That's bad profile writing.

Could you now find something more normal about this man?

Yeah.

Is there anything else you can give me?

Anything else?

No, it's just colored pencils is my leadership.

It's not much of a superhero thing, is it, Dan, really?

Like, you know, if you turn up at the X-Men Academy and say that this is what I get.

Well, it kind of is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's supposed to be autonomic.

Like, it's like being able to decide that your heart breathes, or breathes?

Heart beats faster.

If you decide to make your heart breathe, that is a problem.

Yeah, I saw recently a study from the University of Padava, and they found that the neurons which fire in your brain when you get goosebumps, so it's not a deliberate thing, but there are neurons firing.

The ones that fire are the same ones as make your nipples erect.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So that's interesting, isn't it?

It's like it's the biggest of the goosebumps.

Yeah.

I wonder if these one in 1500 people can also make their nipples erect at will.

Wow.

That would be a better skill.

Skill.

Good question.

Travis!

I have a question about your nipples.

I think it was Travis.

It might have been another person talking about it.

But so when they're getting the rocking feeling, he said the goose bumps will start on the back of his head, the back of his neck.

So sorry, the bottom of his head, the bottom of his neck, and his bottom.

So it's this.

Yeah.

I don't really think about goosebumps on my butt.

Exactly.

I've never thought about goosebump bums.

Yeah, goosebumps bumps bumps.

But apparently that's where he can get it.

And then it kind of just envelopes his whole body.

Envelops, you mean?

No, no, envelopes.

Do geese have goose bumps?

No, they don't.

They don't get them, I believe, because

they've got feathers.

I don't think they have the muscles connected to the...

If you pluck a dead goose or a live goose, then

it'll have bumps.

Yeah, it'll have bumps.

Yeah, let's go.

Actually, they should be called chimpanzee bumps or cat bumps or something.

Or human bumps.

I mean, bumps, yeah.

Just call them bumps.

Hoose bumps.

Yeah.

Well, they should be called pilo erections, clearly.

Oh, yeah.

The OED says that goosebumps is an American word, and British people have either goose flesh, hen flesh, or goose skin.

Oh, because I thought the American was goose pimples.

Yeah,

we thought you said that too.

I've heard goose flesh.

Goose flesh is quite an old-fashioned...

You get that in an old novel, maybe.

I definitely see why you guys are slowly switching over to ours, because goose flesh is gross.

Another one you can have is anserine skin, which I really like.

And ansurine means like a goose.

Like bovine is like a cow, ansurine is like a goose.

It's good to have that word just in case.

Darwin was really interested in goosebumps.

Darwin wanted to see, particularly on animals, what it was, like what was this thing that was happening to them.

And so he used to go to zoos and he used to investigate goosebumps by bringing a stuffed snake with him and just chucking it at animals and giving them this sensation of fear.

And then he would just note down.

This is a man who really doesn't want to finish his book.

Yeah, no,

he loved pilo erection.

He was very into it and he would constantly be looking at it.

And he could see it in dogs and baboons and parrots.

I mean, it's great.

I wish there needs to be more talk about Darwin's sort of like, you know, how he used to play, what was it, bassoon to his his worms, to his plants, and yeah, stuff like that.

There was a team of

scientists in Korea, and in 2015, they developed a thing which was a goosebump detector.

So, hmm, this is very cool.

It's this tiny patch that you can stick on your skin.

And it was developed by Professor Young-ho-cho, and he was watching a reality TV show, a music survival reality show.

And he wondered if you could calculate people's emotional response.

So when people say, I'm getting chills listening to this, you can assess the truthfulness of that statement.

Are they really multiplying?

Is the question?

Are you really losing control?

Better shame up.

Yeah.

There's a guy called Dacha Keltner at the University of California, and he uses this system to measure people's goosebumps.

And he calls himself an ore scientist.

So he checks out when things are awesome

out in California.

That's good.

They found that if you make someone look at like a Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton or a huge tree or, you know, something really amazing, then you sign your name smaller.

And the reason being that you kind of think of how amazing the world is and how small you are in proportion to it.

And you sign your name smaller.

Isn't that amazing?

Oh, man.

Yeah, that's...

I've never noticed that.

I'm going to, yeah, I'm going to write my name next time near a big tree.

That is a very Californian thing.

Which bit of America are you in, Hank?

Montana.

Oh, okay.

It's like California, but not culturally.

Okay, got it.

I just, it feels like, you know, in California, that's the way you get grants.

You say, well, I'm studying how rad things are.

How sweet these waves are.

My favorite goosebumps of all, of course, are the ones in print by R.L.

Stein.

Of course.

Oh, a wonderful series of books.

And something really interesting is that I was watching an interview with him last night, just went down a little R.L.

Stein Stein rabbit hole.

What a career that guy had.

He started writing the goosebump books when he was in his 40s.

He was like 46, I think, when he started.

Prior to that, he wrote like computer joke books.

He did novelizations of you know the movie Spaceballs?

Mel Brooks' movie?

He did the novelization of Spaceballs.

So he had this whole thing.

I think the novel is better than the film in that case, isn't it?

Yeah,

everyone reads the novelizations of comedy films.

There are actually some people who can consciously give themselves Spaceballs.

So that's another.

But he was saying just

within the Goosebump books, he says, they're not really scary.

I could have made them really scary, but I keep real life out.

That's what's really scary.

So he says, there's no divorce, no divorced parents in goosebumps.

There's no child abuse.

There's no real world life.

It's fantasy.

The scare is a kind of subtle.

They are scary.

I've read more than my fair share of Goosebumps when I was a small boy, and they were terrifying.

Yeah, but you didn't read that one where the whole story is just two parents going through a messy divorce, did you?

That's real scariness.

I think it turns out he was wrong.

He has put it in and not realised it, but that was his ambition.

Okay, you said that he wrote them, he started writing them in his 40s.

I think he kind of almost finished writing them in his 40s, right?

Because he wrote 62 books in five years.

It's insane.

He was pumping out one a month, I think.

Oh, my God.

He said that he could write them in six days, one of these books.

it's incredible

the opposite of Darwin

can I tell you can I tell you one more thing about skin oh yes please skin in general

yeah

so this is really interesting growing skin is really uh difficult because you it's well actually growing skin flat is easy but it then if you're grafting skin that you have artificially made it's very hard to stitch it around a body part you know right because we're not flat so this year this is very exciting scientists at Columbia University they've worked out how to grow skin in very complicated shapes so one of the first things they did they they've made a human glove a hand made of skin if you like

I know and you can just Andy can I just ask sorry Andy because I can see your hands now but I can't tell whether or not you're wearing one of these skin gloves I'm wearing

I'm wearing a whole skin me actually

I'm in a full bodysuit of my skin.

Sounds comfy.

Yeah, but it's genuinely very exciting.

They scan the hand.

Let's say I need a full hand skin.

I say I've burned all the skin on my hand.

They can scan your hand, they make a model of it, they grow the skin on that scaffold, then they remove it from the mold and they can just put it on for the surgery.

And I just love this so much.

They tested this.

They haven't done a human trial yet.

They tested this by grafting skin onto mice.

With human hands on a mouse?

Just a giant human hand sticking off the back.

No, it's better.

It's better than that.

They put, I think, a pair of human skin shorts on the back end of the mice.

Yeah.

Wow.

Would a mouse wear human skin pants like this or like this?

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that early ideas for communicating with extraterrestrials included digging massive holes in the Saharan desert, filling them with oil, and lighting them every night so that passing aliens could see it.

Also, building a mirror so large it could send a beam of light to Mars to burn written messages into the ground for the Martians to read.

For the Martians to read and not like feel as if they are being lasered from space.

Yeah, imagine if like a huge laser came down from space and just burnt a massive hole in the earth and then everyone's screaming and someone goes, oh, wait a minute, it says hi.

Yeah, it's one of those smiley faces.

Yeah.

Yeah, and just by chance, the Martians speak and read English.

Yeah.

Great.

Yeah, there wasn't great thinking behind it.

This is a fact, by the way, that I found in probably my favorite pop science book that I've read in a very long time.

It's called Is Anyone Out There?

And it's by the late, great, he only died last year, it's so upsetting, Frank Drake, who people might know from Drake's equation.

He was very much a part of the greatest push for searching for ET.

He's the founder of SETI, along with Carl Sagan and numerous other scientists.

And a lot of people for a very long time, up until quite recent, thought that there probably was Martian cities and that there were Martians living there and we couldn't quite see them.

So plans have been as big as building a a mirror that can beam a laser down to burn into the ground, all the way through to sort of almost crowdfunder things to raise money to cover the entire Eiffel Tower in mirrors so that every night at sunset, as the light was beaming off it, it could be bounced in the direction of Mars, just to let them know we know you're there and we're just trying to say hi.

Wow.

I suppose rather than putting words, a lot of them thought we would put like, you know, a right-angle triangle or a, you know, something that people would recognize.

the math thing Yeah, yeah

something that the aliens would go ah these guys like maths.

That's yeah, well, that's right the one particularly the Saharan desert one the idea it was a guy called Johann von Littro

who wanted the shapes of what they were digging to be a triangle and a square and a circle it would look like a giant PlayStation Symbols on the on the game sort of as you were passing Earth it was it was all of these shapes there was another person who thought what if we did Pythagoras's theorem because that would then display that we know advanced math, that we understand that, and they know there's an intelligent civilization down here.

Yeah, that was Gauss, wasn't it, who thought that?

Yeah.

Who was that?

Gauss is one of the best mathematicians in history.

I thought there were about 300 different ways of proving Pythagoras' theorem, though.

What if, and so if you put one up, you don't know that the aliens will know that particularly?

I don't think we were necessarily going to put the proof up so much as an example of it.

Okay.

You know, it's always seemed to me a little bit much that here on Earth, some people just sort of can unilaterally decide, like, hey,

I want to send this message to that star.

And then they do that.

Or I don't know that it was a ton of people who decided to put like a golden record on Voyager to be like, here's what we are and where we are and what we look like.

It seemed like it was a pretty small, small group kind of unilaterally making that call.

Yeah, because it might prompt a terrible, it might prompt a very bad reaction from whoever receives it.

I mean, in the case of Voyager, it seems pretty symbolic.

I don't know.

They find out and think these people are peace-loving.

They're chumps.

They will absolutely roll over as soon as we invade.

Yeah.

There was a guy called Joe Davis who in 1986 sent the first art piece into space.

And he did that pretty unilaterally.

Well, he had a little bit of help because his piece was called Poetica Vaginal.

And he recorded the vaginal contractions of Boston Ballet Ballerinas and then sent that recording that radio recording into space okay

and can we hear it now

I don't have any ballerinas with me I'm afraid trying to think of what it sounds like okay again it's a very sort of peace-loving artistic message to send I do think we should invest in sending threats into space I think if someone sent me through the post a CD and I put it into my CD player and it was the vaginal contractions of ballet dancers I would find that quite threatening.

I don't think I would find it as threatening as a space laser, but I hear what you're saying.

Yeah, but like, yeah, it's a warning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The other thing is, like, they sent music into space, like, recordings of music, right?

The first one that they did was a load of Russian teenagers who sent a theremin concert.

You know, these theremins is like a big stick, and the more you put your hand next to it, it goes, woo!

And then there was no more music sent into space deliberately towards a star for seven years, at which time NASA sent across the universe by the Beatles.

And I just wonder, if aliens just got those two messages, they must have thought we had a hell of a good run after the theremin music to the Beatles.

Wow, they really cracked music with their second song.

Yeah, it's very exciting the way that there's so many different hypotheses about why we haven't made communication with any aliens.

There's a guy called David Brin, who's a fiction writer, but he also has this great collection of all the different theories and his thinking behind why that might be or might not be possible.

There's a really nice one that I love, which is the water world hypothesis.

And the theory goes that...

The aliens have seen that movie and thought, we're not going there.

Yeah, they just talk about, yeah, it really went over budget, apparently, and all sorts of issues with the script.

The water world hypothesis is that the idea that there is plenty of life out there, but much like dolphins, who are seen as sort of the other great intelligent life on our planet, they're also stuck underwater and they can't get above it because we're living in.

What do you mean they're stuck underwater?

Well,

we're living on a planet which is very much in this idea of a Goldilocks belt, right?

Where we've got a lot of land mass and we've got a lot of oxygen to breathe and so on.

We're in a beauty spot, and it's very rare to be in that beauty spot.

So the thought is that there is life, but it's underwater.

With a surface, just go up to the surface.

Have you not seen the little mermaid?

It's dangerous up there.

Well,

it definitely creates a huge problem for space travel.

So like if you're a wet, if you need wet to walk around in,

then you got to carry that wet up with you to space.

And that's much, much heavier than carrying a bunch of air up with you.

Sloshing around.

But John Lilly, who we've talked about on the podcast before,

who you, Dan, you have talked about on the podcast before.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I read a whole chapter of him in my book.

I love the guy.

He

tried to create cars that would be driven on the road, which were filled with water.

So you'd be on the road, you'd turn to your left, and there'd be a dolphin sort of swimming away in his car.

Yeah, he was a genius, guys.

Dan, you mentioned SETI earlier on, and they're looking for, I think, radio waves.

They are, yeah.

But they've like, they're, they're checking various different parts of the universe at different times.

But I read one comparison that so far the whole of SETI since they started has checked so little of the universe that it's the equivalent of checking one hot tub worth of water compared with all the amount of water in all the Earth's oceans.

It's a big place, James.

Famously.

Yeah, it's a wow.

Famously large pot.

But no, that's incredible.

It's like getting one hot tub of water and going, oh, there's no fish in here, so there's no fish at all.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you're more likely to find the wristwatch you dropped in your hot tub than in all the oceans in the world.

That's true.

That's true, no.

Well, I'm glad that we didn't do the burning lots of oil in the desert thing because one of them would be maybe destroying Mars, but the other one would be definitely destroying Earth.

Yeah.

They like us better.

And it would be no use because I think someone worked out that if Neil and Buzz were standing on the moon looking back at Earth from Apollo 11 missions,

they just would have no view of it whatsoever.

Like, it's just not practical.

The Earth is so tiny even from that distance that you wouldn't be able to make that out.

Those stupid people.

I read them.

In fact, I worked this out a while ago.

If you wanted to write the word high on the moon in such a way that you would be able to see it from Earth, even,

well, just as in, you would look on the moon and in one of the eyes of the man on the moon, you'd be able to see the word high, then the cross of the H would have to be the distance of about, I think it was something like Cardiff to Edinburgh, something like that.

Just that one H.

Yeah, Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Exactly.

The moon is bigger than I thought it would be.

The moon's quite big, yeah.

Yeah,

you always think of the moon as being tiny.

You know, get around it in half an hour.

That is very big.

I imagine you seeing Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong after they get back.

You saw the whole thing then.

What do you mean you stayed near the ship?

God, you're such tourists.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Joey Helpish and Kristen Muir have made more than $10,000 from their song Poopy Stupid Butt.

Sounds like a banger.

I'm sure any record label will be happy to have it.

Yeah, I mean,

you could make more from a song called Poopy Stupid Butt.

I think what it is is that they accidentally made $10,000

without recognizing it.

That's awesome.

In that case.

That's a good way of wording it.

Yeah.

The reason being, they've made that money because children shout the words poopy stupid butt or play poopy stupid butt into Alexa and Alexa just plays it.

And the reason they know this, I read this in an article on BuzzFeed by Katie Notopoulos and she spoke to a lot of these people who do these kind of things and they realize that when they look at all the revenue for all their songs, it's all coming from Amazon Music.

And most musicians would get most of their money from Apple or from Spotify or whatever.

But these people who are getting it from mostly from Amazon Music, because it's attached to Alexa, they're pretty certain that the reason they're getting it is because people are shouting things into their Alexa.

And now there are people who would deliberately make songs.

Well, I mean, shouting.

Maybe they're politely saying.

Maybe they're politely just children politely asking to hear.

It could be polite, yeah, in fairness.

I'm giving the children a bad name there.

But yeah, there are people now who go out there and deliberately make songs that children will say to Alexa just so they can make more money.

Okay, what about things that grown-ups will say?

So, for example, where are my keys?

Like, if you're going,

or have you seen, you know, do you know what time they're coming round?

You know, that kind of stuff.

I just ask, Andy, how often do you ask Alexa where your keys are?

I don't have an Alexa.

At a certain point, you're panicking, right?

You'll ask anybody.

There is a guy that Katie, who wrote this article, interviewed.

It's someone she knows called Matt Farley.

And exactly what you're saying, Andy, he composes songs.

He's composed more than 23,000 songs.

They're really short, but he uses phrases that might be asked by Alexa, therefore generating him an income.

So he'll use any kind of phrase or he'll use a celebrity's name inside a song so that accidentally the song will be played.

His biggest hit, by the way, is a song called Poop, Poop, Poop, Poop Song.

That's been streamed 8 million times on Amazon Music.

That's where he makes his money, but he makes the point that he didn't get into this to sort of hack the system.

He was doing this back in the day, back in 2013.

He was like, I lucked out because smart devices weren't even a thing when I wrote Poop in my fingernails.

But it turns out I was biding my time unaware.

He was selling it on a cassette, wasn't he?

Yeah.

You know, in a nightclub.

Saying, well, you listen to my new take.

The Joey Helpish and Kristen Muir one, this song, which is called Poopy Stupid Butt,

they ran a music school in Oregon and they worked with autistic kids.

And they were kind of just trying to come up with songs.

And it was just a part of the playtime almost.

And they asked this four-year-old to it's weird they asked a four-year-old for a five syllables which I don't know if four-year-olds know what syllables are but they asked them for four syllables and this girl shouted out poopy stupid butt and they decided to write a song with the suggestion it's almost like an improv game yeah and he said all the kids because they have a bunch of songs all the kids are sort of co-written the songs um and i don't want to i don't want to cause shit here but i don't i don't know if these kids are getting their royalties i don't think they've seen a piss that's a good point you know we were talking royalties at the beginning with the counting system.

You know, that is harder to get, but should these kids be reimbursed?

These are definitely co-writers.

Like, there's no way that

that's not a co-writer.

So

we thought we were going to have a fun time here.

Yeah.

But now it's time for legal action.

I was looking up novelty songs in general.

I think country music is very good at kind of not novelty songs exactly, but like

country music songs have incredible titles, and I just made a list of my favorite ones.

There's Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Life.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, that's America.

That's country.

That's not even novelty.

That's just down the line country.

Somebody named Travis wrote that song for sure.

Get your tongue out of my mouth because I'm kissing you goodbye.

Love it.

Beautiful.

And final, I wouldn't take her to a dogfight because I'm afraid she'd win.

Okay.

Hell yes.

Yeah.

You know, a bit sexist, that one.

Just a bit.

Well.

No, she's just great.

She's a strong woman.

She's got big teeth.

That's all.

I haven't listened to the song.

It's entirely possible that's the message of it, and I'd like to think it is.

Yeah.

Who do you think you would say is the greatest novelty songwriter alive?

Alive.

Alive.

Tom Lera.

Tom Lera, yeah.

Tom Lera.

Okay.

Okay.

Maybe parody is where I'm sitting.

I think of him as a sucker.

Like Bill Burnham, maybe?

But he is.

I'm thinking Weird Al Yankovic.

Oh, Weird Alvo.

Because he's made an entire career of doing these novelty parodies, and he's had number one albums.

Well, he's had certainly one number one album, which was his last album in 2014 or 13.

Oh, interesting.

And what's interesting is he suffers hugely from people misattributing other people's parodies to being him.

So

if you go on Torrent sites to download songs, there will be so many songs that are under his name.

And it's a huge problem for him because a lot of these songs have terrible attitudes about them.

You know, they're racist, they're sexist, they're promoting things that he doesn't agree with.

And so fans have sort of backed him and tried to separate the non-real songs from the real ones.

There's a website called The Not Al page where you can look at all the songs that are supposedly his songs and then telling you who the real person is.

So he really hates it because he says he puts a lot of work into his songs.

He did one song about a duck.

He spent a week in a library researching ducks in order to get, you know, the right kind of...

R.L.

Stein could have written an entire Goosebumps novel in the time it took him researching ducks.

But there's one thing he's really going to hate which has been developed in his name, which is there's now Weird Al Yankovic AI, which can generate parody lyrics that then be attached to existing songs, which then you can sing as karaoke.

So he is now effectively an AI.

It's going to happen to us all.

That's how it works.

Will that happen to us all?

Yeah, it will, except that all of ours will be way less good and interesting and fun than that.

Yeah.

Because actually, you know, computers could already count to a million, but that guy still did it and still got popular for counting to a million, right?

Jeremy.

Did he get popular?

I mean, we mentioned him on a podcast, so there's that.

Jeremy Harper,

he's still out there.

He's probably on five million by now.

Yeah.

I think it must be so hard to count to a million because once you're in like 364 927 i've already forgotten the start of what i just said you know 300 something yeah well exactly yeah it's tough

maybe you just get into a groove alexa count to a million that would be a good way of like keeping alexa busy you know

that's what we need

stop listening to me just count this this isn't for you to hear i don't want to be listened to i don't want to be spied on in my home no thank you go to your room and count to a million.

The process of training Alexa was very strange because they needed a load of human voice samples to train people on, right?

And so I think Amazon hired a load of flats and houses in Boston and Seattle, and they got people in to read scripts of the sort of things maybe that you might ask an Alexa.

And the scripts were bizarre.

I wonder if it was those same Boston ballerinas as did the other thing.

Definitely, definitely.

You need to get an appointment now if your vagina's sounding like that.

But no, well, the problem was that obviously the houses and flats that Amazon had hired, they had this string of strangers turning up at a random house all of a sudden.

And so on, I think more than one occasion, the police were called.

because they thought there was either drug dealing going on or there was, you know, that suddenly, like it was suddenly become a brothel.

And the police showed up and they just saw these actors and some rather sheepish Amazon staff saying, oh, there's nothing going on here, nothing to see here.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

we, they keep it secret who Alexa is, but a journalist did find out.

It's a lady called Nina Roll.

Uh, she lives in Boulder, Colorado, and um, she's basically signed effectively like an NDA.

You know, she got called up, she said, I can't say anything.

They make sure that she doesn't say anything in return, but you can hear other ads that she has done where you can identify the voice.

So, she's on her website, you can hear her doing an ad for Mott's Apple Juice or a Volkswagen ad, and you know, it's definitely her.

But the original, original Alexa voice was for a system that was called Ivona and that was a Polish thing and it was a sort of voice synthesizer and that originally had a male actor who was the voice behind it called Jasek Labijak

and he had a horrible time because when it was being used in Poland the voice synthesizer was being used for everything so he'd pick up his phone and he'd be receiving calls from an automated voice which was him urging him to vote for a candidate in an upcoming election

and then people would say really racist, random things using his voice and putting it up online.

So he suddenly was hounded by his own voice wherever he went.

But it just ruined him.

This happened with TikTok as well.

TikTok had like a thing where you could type in some text and then it would have a person's voice say it.

And it was tapping into an actor's voice thing that had been created, but the actor had not given permission for it to be used in this use case.

And

it was used to say many terrible things that the actor could hear herself saying, and she sued TikTok about it, and you can no longer get that voice.

Then they launched a bunch of other voices, and they actually did like a partnership with Disney so that you can have the voice of the Mandalory and say things or Yoda or I think Chewbacca also was an option, but it just made Chewbacca noises.

Hank, are you worried that?

Because there's so much of you out there on the internet.

Are you worried Tom is going to make a replacement you?

Yeah, I was just thinking about this.

Like, how far in the future is it before like I could be dead, but also still making YouTube videos?

Like already authors die and then they keep making books somehow because like

you know what the vibe is.

You know what the kinds of books.

And even before they're dying, they're working with co-authors and they just keep making books after they're dead.

Yeah, Tom Clancy, Virginia Andrews.

There's so many examples.

But like at what point am I just going to keep tweeting after I die?

Like how hard would that be?

They're not that good.

Well there was someone recently on Twitter who said that people should be collecting lots of audio of their loved ones so that in 10 years' time, we'll be able to have virtual loved ones where it'll be their voice saying things that they might say to you, which yeah.

Didn't William Shatner did a whole thing where he's recorded himself saying so many things, and there's a virtual hologram of Shatner now that can basically interact with a kind of chat GBT response, but it's Shatner.

The plan is that you're, for example, your grandmother, let's say your grandmother's passed away she can still read your children a bedtime story or or or dj for you if you like do they you know

granny's dj dan do they call it shut gpt oh

they shouldn't

uh i'm worried that they're gonna create an ai me but base it on like 2007 me because i kind of hate that guy

What's wrong with him?

He sounds all right.

I don't know.

He's just got a lot of energy.

I don't have anymore.

what's peak you what's peak hank to just so we know just just within the last few years please oh you always think that i'm sure that i'm sure that uh in the future i will also consider my current self cringe yeah no it's it is it is weird thinking about yourself a few years ago they have things where you can like send yourself an email in the future can't you yes stuff like that um maybe you can do that where it will be your own voice and your own face and everything in the future.

Just send yourself a message saying, I'm not a jerk, honestly, I'm cool.

No, block and delete.

Block and delete that guy.

No, he's emailing me all the time.

I don't want to hear from him.

He's a wanker.

Oh, 2006 Andy, mortifying 19-year-old.

Could you imagine that, like, you from 2006 parenting your current child?

No, never.

I think my 2006 me would have a lot more energy than 2023 me.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think that is correct.

He could certainly drink more.

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James?

At James Harkin.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

And Hank?

I'm at Hank Green.

Yeah, that's right.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or our website, no such thingasafish.com.

All of our previous episodes are there.

Do check them out.

Hank, what else should people check out with yours?

Yeah, I'm at SciShow Tangents.

It's a comedy science podcast game show trivia thing.

It's fun.

And it features current Hank, the best Hank available.

So do check it out now.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Bye.

It's been very funny, you guys.

You guys are so funny.

Oh, thanks.

That's

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