466: No Such Thing As Political Moss

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Hi, everybody.

Just before we start this week's show, we've got an exciting announcement to make, and that is that our half-sister show, our sort of semi-sibling show, the Museum of Curiosity, is is coming back.

Absolutely.

It's a show on BBC Radio 4.

It takes place on Mondays, starting from the 20th of February at 6.30 in the evening.

And even more excitingly, our half-podcast sister, Anna Tashinski, is starring in this year's series.

Yes, that's exactly right.

The show is hosted by John Lloyd, the father of QI.

It's a sort of fictional museum, an imaginary museum, and every week they have brilliant guests submitting strange, wonderful, and imaginary objects to the museum.

John is the director of the museum, and Anna, this series, is going to be the curator.

So that's really exciting.

Absolutely.

If you love No Such Things of Fish and if you love QI, you will absolutely love Museum of Curiosity.

And just to remind you, it's on Monday, the 20th of February, at 6:30 and for the subsequent six weeks.

Okay, on with the podcast.

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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round 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 Andy.

My fact is that there's a type of moss called political moss.

Jesus, is there?

Yeah.

Well, that's a great question, Dan.

No, there isn't.

What?

Thank you for bringing it to the show.

No, wait a minute.

Your fact is that there isn't a type of moss called political moss.

So what this fact is, that phrase, there's a type of moss called political moss, is something that a listener got in touch with.

Okay, a listener called Bo Stookie, and he had been in touch with ChatGPT, which is a new-ish kind of artificial intelligence conversation bot, basically, that's one of the most powerful ever created.

But in fact, I think might be the most powerful ever created.

At times of recording.

Yeah, exactly.

I mean, if you're listening to this after the revolution, it's the second most powerful ever created.

And if you're scurrying through rat holes and, you know, like eating old packaged food and fleeing the robots, then, yeah, anyway.

But ChatGPT is currently best in show.

And he asked ChatGPT to come up with an episode of Fish about that fact of political moss.

And it came up with, I would say, a pretty good transcript.

Okay.

Yeah, do you think?

Yeah, well,

can we read the transcript and just see how it works?

Oh, you've passed them around to all of us, so it feels like we've got no choice.

Okay.

Okay.

So everyone has a name here except me.

I'm a host, I guess.

Yep.

Okay.

Welcome back to the show, which we never say.

No.

Welcome back to the show.

I'm your host, Dan.

With me today, we have James, Anna, and Andy.

So Andy, what do you have for us today?

Well, I've got a real doozy.

Did you know there's a type of moss called political moss?

Political moss?

That sounds like something out of a dystopian novel.

No, no, no.

It's a real thing.

Apparently, it was discovered in the 1800s by a botanist named William Jackson Hooker.

And get this, it's called political moss because it prefers to grow in areas with high levels of pollution.

Hey, funny.

Funny chat GPT.

Sorry, I've gone off screen.

I'm so sorry.

Right back in the game.

Wow, that's really interesting.

So it's like a canary in a coal mine for environmental pollution.

Yeah, I can see how that would make sense.

And I bet it would be a good indicator for scientists studying the effects of pollution on plants.

Exactly.

That's incredible.

I never would have thought that something as small as moss could have such a big impact on our understanding of the environment.

I think we need more political moss in the world, children.

Indeed, I think we all do.

And that's it for today's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Join us next week for more fascinating facts and interesting tidbits.

Or tidbits, not tidbits.

Tidbits is fine.

Titan.

This is not in the chat beat script, by the way.

We should do a podcast called Show Us Your Tidbits, and it's just interesting facts.

That's great.

Written on people's breasts.

Yeah.

Okay.

Great.

So anyway, that was painful.

Did we think it was realistic?

It wasn't.

No, it wasn't, because we're not that worthy.

There was no mention of the word penis in there.

No, yeah.

There was no pun.

Didn't see a pun anywhere.

No mention of golf.

No.

No.

Could we call it a pun that it's high levels of pollution and it's talking about metaphorical pollution in the world of politics?

Really makes sense.

It still doesn't work, does it?

So is political moss real or not?

No.

No, it just might be.

I mean, the details are all here, right?

I think Bo Stookie, our listener, came up with the idea of political moss, and then he saw what ChatGPT could come up with.

I did check if there was a political moss.

There isn't one.

There's some politicians called moss.

And there is a political word, a mossback.

In America, that's an extreme conservative, is a moss back.

Really?

And the idea is that it came from when people tried to dodge the draft in the Civil War.

People from the Carolinas who tried to hide from the draft were called mossbacks because it was as if they were putting moss on their backs and hoping that people go past.

And then it later became to mean sort of reactionaries

and then it later became to mean conservatives.

I'm not quite sure where the link came, but that's a good idea.

Oh, I like that because it's a bit like the Rolling Stone gathers no moss.

You know, and then you've stayed in one place for so long with all your opinions staying the same that now you've got moss on your back.

It could be that, yeah.

Yeah, it would make sense for a conservative, yeah, without that context.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, yeah.

That's their policy.

Yeah.

So ChatGPT is really good at certain things.

And I asked it for ideas for a birthday party.

It came up with some great suggestions.

That was fine.

Oh, no.

Well,

it was just...

It wasn't.

I didn't write them down, but I just thought, oh, those are great ideas.

Okay, I can't remember.

You can't remember any of them.

Was it sort of top of the Eiffel Tower or just tea and cake with your mum?

It was more like the principles behind a birthday party, like invite people.

And, you know, we were like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, actually, I think that is one of the big problems with chat, what's it called?

Chat GPT, right?

And that is that it's really good at making things that are theoretically correct.

It's good at grammar.

It's good at making words that fit after each other, but it doesn't necessarily think like a human thinks.

So if you say to someone, give me a good idea for a party, they might say, pirates, vodka, let's go to the top of the Eiffel Tower.

But the computer thinks you mean...

invite people, you know.

I was quite grateful for that.

In fact, it showed me where I've been going wrong a few years in a row now with my partners.

Pirates and vodka.

When is your daughter's first birthday, buddy?

There's one great thing about Chat GPD, which is it has

it warns you it may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.

So it knows, and it's because it's broad.

It literally has hoovered up trillions of words from all over the internet.

That's quite good, isn't it?

Because I know a lot of humans who don't realize that they're doing that.

Exactly.

So it's aware of itself.

And also, the other great thing about it is it has limited knowledge of world and events after 2021.

And I did try it.

I asked it, who is Liz Truss?

And it says she's the Secretary of State for International Trade.

Oh,

it's just a simpler time.

How many of you guys have

a smart speaker?

Like an Alex, I think.

You've got one.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think you've got.

I've got a Google thing, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Anna, I bet you don't.

I am a smart speaker, Andy.

Brilliant.

But no, I don't have one.

Okay.

Okay, that's roughly where I thought the three of you would be.

Yeah.

Do you, how do you address them?

Do you say, please?

No.

You say, hey, fucker.

Yeah.

Pay me some music now.

And it better be something I like.

Okay.

I'm on the revolution, James.

Goodbye.

Okay, well, that, again, is broadly in line with what you'd expect because men are much less polite to their smart speakers

than women.

Men say please 45% of the time.

Still feels quite high.

And women 62%.

Yeah, I don't say please.

I'm sorry to say.

I've never said please.

Well, there's a school of thought which says you shouldn't say please.

And in fact, you shouldn't teach your children to say please because you're teaching them to respect the machines.

And there's another school of thought which says maybe we should teach them to respect the machines.

And Google recently added a function called pretty please, right?

Which I find a bit sinister.

Where if a user says please or thank you, they will get a delightful response from the speaker, which starts with, it'll say back to you something like, thanks for asking so nicely.

And then it'll say your answer.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I think you're very lonely, aren't you?

If you need that from your Alexa.

Yeah, well, also, I don't say please or thank you in the hope that someone will say thanks for asking so nicely.

I think there should be a slightly nicer tone of voice it uses for you, and you should get a slightly ruder tone of voice back if you don't say please or thank you.

I think that'd be a good way of doing it.

Yeah, or maybe it does things slightly worse.

Exactly.

In fact, the less you say please or thank you, the more you ask for it to play Belle and Sebastian, and it plays Slipknot.

Yeah, it plays Belle and Sebastian, but it also just spits in the middle of the song.

Just a good bit.

It puts you off.

Is this what your one-person parties are like, Andy?

She and a load of speakers.

They're all talking to each other.

It's a social nightmare.

They're all playing each other, Bellum Sebastian.

I'm just wandering around the room with my drink, looking for someone to talk to.

Get busted.

Blade busted.

Come on, someone to be blade busted.

Do you know there's a big split in the AI world at the moment between the, I guess, the deep machine learning proponents, which is most of what we usually talk about now.

So obviously you just feed it, shed loads of data, and it figures stuff out.

And then the other group

called themselves Go-Fi, which I just like.

And the Go-Fi is that stands for good old-fashioned AI.

Oh, okay.

And what's that?

So they're the ones who think that there needs to be more of an element of programming and structure and human input.

And their argument is that you can only get so far with the machine learning because what AI tends to be quite bad at if you do it that way is kind of categories and and hierarchies.

So it can get incredibly good at knowing what a cat is if you show it a billion pictures of cats.

You can spot a cat just by a little hair on its tail.

But it's not very good at knowing, okay, a cat's an animal and a dog's an animal.

So it'll see a dog and be like, that's the same as a cat or an elephant and be like, that's similar to a cat in the sense that it's an animal.

Whereas it'd be more likely to see something which is not like a cat but has pointy ears and think, well, that's the same as a cat because it looks like a cat.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It's kind of like the difference between going to a foreign country and living there to learn a language and kind of being taught the grammar, I suppose.

Phrasebook.

Yeah.

I actually do think that things like Babble are quite good programmes for learning.

You're off the clock now.

No, I think they're amazing.

Does it feel I Elon Musk says we've got to be careful, AI is going to take over.

Is it dangerous?

A.

And what's I?

That'll be like proclamation number one for the robots, wasn't it?

It's not A B anymore.

It goes AI

B C.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I've forgotten my follow-up question now.

Is AI dangerous?

Is AI dangerous?

Yeah.

And will it make us forget things?

Google, what was I trying to say, please?

What was my second question?

Actually, there's obviously a lot of debate as to whether Elon Musk's AI is dangerous, and kind of specifically in driverless cars.

And I read this amazing thing from a few weeks ago, which I hadn't really seen covered until I went to research this.

But there was a famous demo video of a driverless car in 2016, which I think I remember if it's the one I'm thinking of.

And it was really well publicised, launched loads and loads of funding for driverless cars and lots of like excitement.

Like, here's what they can do.

And it's basically a video of a car driving driverlessly on its own, autonomously, and navigating traffic lights and stuff.

But there's a person sitting in the driver's seat.

And I remember we talked about this at the time, I think.

And it says under the video, the person in the driver's seat is only there for legal reasons.

He is not doing anything.

The car is driving itself.

I remember that.

Yeah.

Engineer at Tesla's just come out and said he was driving the car.

Oh, wow.

That's weird.

Isn't that mad?

Because I thought that in 2016, Teslas did drive themselves for shot.

You could go on to a car.

They could, but it was doing stuff that they couldn't do at that time.

So, for instance, it was stopping at a red light.

There was an AI that was programmed to play a video game, a survival video game.

And they just wanted to see what would happen.

And and it got the highest score that anyone had ever got but it got that by having lots of children and then eating them all.

Okay.

Oh my god.

And it's just classic way of the AI just finds a way out that no human would ever think of doing that, right?

Was that a thing you could do in the game?

Well, they worked it out that it was a thing you could do.

You had to eat, right?

And you had a way of making children.

And every time you ate something, you got more points.

And so it's like, well, let's just keep making children.

I've got a fact that seems like it's about AI, but it's actually about cows.

Okay.

Yeah.

Okay.

So there's...

You sort of spoiled the ending there, for it.

There's an AI that can eat grass and make milk.

It's brilliant.

So there are these smart dairy farms now, right?

And what they the point of them is that you can assess the health of your cows the whole time by filming them, right?

And that's it's actually more useful than having a person there watching them, even if you could have a person there working, you know, all the time.

And it's because you're scanning them as they walk and you can see if they've gone a bit lame, right?

Mm-hmm.

Now, the amazing fact is from the person who designed the system or co-designed it, he's called Melvin Smith, who says that cows hide their limping when they think they're being watched.

Wow.

Because they're prey animals.

And if they've got a bad foot,

they think, oh, I better conceal this.

And they walk, no, I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm just walking.

That's really interesting.

You know, some humans, like, there are some humans that if you twist your ankle, you'll just kind of carry on walking and you don't want anyone to know.

And there's some humans who will make a right song and dance about it.

Thank you.

Yep.

Those ones who make a song and dance about it are the predators.

And the ones who hide it are the natural prey.

I didn't think I was a predator before.

I make such a fuss whenever I've slightly turned an ankle or something.

Shows how powerful you are.

Wow.

This is actually a power move.

Have a bite to peas now, please.

That's really interesting.

I was chatting to someone on email for something else about

an AI which has learned how to tell whether sheep are sad

or sick or something like that.

Because if you look at a sheep and you look at another sheep, it's really hard to tell anything about them because they just look like sheep, right?

Yeah.

But there are very, very sort of micro expressions that they have when they have sore rudders or they have, you know, sore feet or whatever.

But the AI can scan them and can tell with 80% accuracy which ones are sick and which ones aren't sad.

It's like a gambling thing, isn't it?

Like if you were playing poker against a sheep, you could use that.

Yeah.

It's like a gambler's tell.

But I presume you could use use that in poker i presume that if you had that kind of technology and you programmed it for people you could easily tell who had what i suppose it's possible that humans have micro expressions must be a tiny tiny fuck and then you know yeah that has to be like

woohoo

but so short that we can't see it

certainly poker players think that there are certain tells that people have like maybe your your pupils slightly dilate if you've got good cards or bad cards or stuff i don't know how

no i think most people are good at poker who basically hide any semblance of that.

And I don't think.

I think AI is better.

You're better off making an AI that has X-ray vision to see through the cards.

With the farm stuff, though, with pigs, if you get sent a photo as a farmer of your pig if it's feeling unhappy, it'll be like pig number eight is feeling down just by

the machines.

Yeah, by looking at the market.

It's incredible.

Do you think the machines are trying to get the animals on their side before the apocalypse?

Old McDonald had a farm AI.

AI.

Oh.

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

My fact this week is that snails use trails like we use roads.

Do they get their mucus from a shell station by any chance?

Wow.

See, it's because we have it in real life.

Where we get petrol from is called shell station.

We're doing so well with that.

AIL trailer.

Look, anyway, snails leave this slime trail, which obviously we've all seen and know about.

And if another snail gets into that first snail's slime trail and follows it, it takes way, way less energy for it to move.

And when snails are moving, a huge amount of the energy that they're using goes into making this slime on which they kind of move.

So I think the mucus production, the slime production cost of moving outweighs the metabolic cost by 35 times.

Right.

You know, that's what it is.

What does that mean?

So that means, like, you know, if you're respiring and trying to move the way we we move, that's the metabolic cost.

But then, on top of that, they're using 35 times more energy on just making slime to move.

Basically, this is why snails have never made anything of themselves.

It's quite tragic, really.

What?

What?

Some snails, I read this, spend 60% of their energy making mucus.

Right.

And it's just, there's no time.

There's no time to do that.

You spend so much of your life making podcasts, and I don't think snails think much of that.

That's why I've never made anything of myself.

Well, that's what they do.

They're snails.

They make mucus.

I know.

But if they didn't have to make all this mucus, I just wonder what kind of stuff they'd have going on.

But they can, as a result of the mucus, yes, it's a a terrible amount of wasted energy when they're just trying to walk on, say, a flat surface, but they can climb walls.

They can go upside down.

That's the purpose of it.

They're Spider-Man.

We're just podcasters.

They're also making roads for other snails.

So they're, you know, utilitarianistically, it's actually quite a good thing for them to make mucus.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah, but I bet there are some snails who just get dumped with all the mucus making.

And there are some real coasters, aren't there?

Who's just like, fucking Barry again in my mucus trail and he's literally never seen him make his own mucus

but he is you know he's doing very well for himself and the uh this podcast is going brilliantly oh my god you rarely see uh a sort of a you know gridlock of of snails sort of travelling do you I always see snails sort of quite isolated and alone.

I think they've got very long stopping distances on the roads.

They're much longer than us.

Yeah, you're right.

I know.

I do agree with that.

Because like if you see trails in your garden garden or whatever, it's not like you see a trail and then you see another snail following it.

You don't tend to very much true, and I don't know why because the obviously they're more effective at reducing the amount of energy it takes to move on them the newer they are.

So if you're on a newly laid trail, you know, your heart, you're reducing your energy levels cost by about 50%.

Yeah.

And that's within a day you've got to get on that trail.

Right.

That's interesting.

Wow.

If we humans had this ability, you could effectively lay a trail.

So I could if I had my family to go out on a walk, I could go like, I'll go out an hour early.

Let me just walk ahead.

And then conveniently.

And

they all get on.

Let's go on a nice walk.

Well, I'll go at different times.

But they could catch up with me because it'd be like walking on a travelator.

I'll get back.

I'll be just as you finish your three-hour walk.

Lovely.

Oh, thanks, darling.

That was really great.

That was a great walk.

How are the kids?

Where are the kids?

I really like the fact that snails leave dotted trails.

This is cool.

Sometimes they do.

And basically, there are lots of different theories I've read about why.

One is that

there's a kind of snail called the rosy wolf snail, which is a predator snail,

and it hunts other snails by their trails.

Oh.

Obviously, if you get on the trail, you just follow it, and then

you eat the snail.

So that might be the reason.

Or there's another guess that they're going over very rough terrain and it would actually require so much slime to properly slime all the ground under them that they make a little economy there and they just proceed without making slime for every behind them.

I like the idea that they're leaving gaps so that people can't follow them.

That's a cool idea, isn't it?

That's a nice idea.

Because there was a thing, wasn't there, last year in the news, where they found some, someone was smuggling snails in an airport or something.

Yes.

And they found one snail.

Yes.

And then they just followed his snail trail back and they found like a hundred more or something like that.

That's exactly what.

These giant, the giant African land snails, they're absolutely mega, and people import them to eat them.

Yeah.

They really vilified the African land snails.

And in fact, they have a close relationship with the rosy wolf snails, who I I think are the most vicious snails on the planet.

They're known as cannibal snails, and honestly, look up a video of them eating other snails.

It's so frightening.

Time-lapse, it must be.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll put it on at least two times speeds.

So they'll catch up with the snail by following in its trail, the rosy wolf snail.

They'll sort of climb over its shell, and then the snail obviously retreats back into its shell trying to get away.

And the rosy wolf just sticks its head.

Imagine how frightening that is, this huge head coming into your shell and sucks it all out.

It's grotesque.

This is actually a question that's been.

I saw it online.

There's a meme question the other day.

So the question is, you can have 10 million dollars.

Yeah.

10 million quid.

I don't want this bloody Malcolm Gladwell question.

Sorry.

You can have 10 million quid, but if you accept it, there is a snail always chasing you somewhere around the world.

It doesn't ever stop moving.

It always knows where you are and it doesn't ever die.

But what do you accept the money?

But it's a killer snail.

Sorry, if it touches you.

Sorry.

And if it touches you, you die.

Oh, okay.

okay so yeah

i missed up the only important bit of it um crunch problem

it's um it's it follows the movie as well it follows but with a snail yeah and i don't i don't

i don't think i take the money right

no because i like peace of mind can you just live half the year in australia and the other half the year in the uk so just as he's kind of getting over the tasman sea you get on a plane is he is he or she a clever snail in that respect if I boarded a flight to Australia.

Or could it board the next flight?

Could it board the next one?

Was that what these guys created in the air park?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it could.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a clever snail.

Oh, okay.

Well, that's a bit different because I think the whole point of it being a snail is it's going to take forever to get to you.

Oh, sorry, and it's got legs and it runs.

And a knife.

And it's six foot.

So yeah, snails are frightening, I think, is what we've learned here.

Yeah.

But actually, sorry, I did mention a connection between the African land snail, which is a big, bad guy because it's this big snail and it destroys invasive species, and the rosy wolf snail.

And that's because, so in Hawaii, there's loads of kind of endangered species of snail, lots of types of tree snail.

And the African land snail rocked up and started threatening them.

And so in 1955, we did the classic, and we thought, what we'll do is we'll introduce a bigger snail

to eat the African land snail.

I went to Hawaii a few years ago.

If you go, there's just one massive snail.

That's the island, isn't it?

So they introduced another bigger snail.

Yep, and it decided, the rosy wolf snail decided it preferred the taste of all the delicious tree snails that were really endangered to the African land snail, and it's now responsible for the extinction of at least eight native species.

Oh, gosh.

We've got to stop doing that.

We've got to stop it.

So, some

winkles, which kind of snail, that you can read the slime trails of other snails, and they can get all sorts of data from the slime, the sex, the species, the direction it was going, and how attractive it is as a mate.

It's slime.

Yeah.

And if you're a lady snail and you're free of parasites, which is

to a male, there's a base, basically the Benny Hill show happens where you've got a load of male snails chasing you.

And this happens so much that there are some, they're called rough periwinkles.

The females, they can change the composition of their slime and basically turn on a cloaking mode where...

To hide their parasites.

Well, to hide the sex.

Oh, they leave a sex-neutral trail because they've got so many bloody male rough periwinkles chasing after them.

I'm sick of this.

I'm not interested.

And so they change the slime.

How cool is that?

That's clever.

That's amazing.

Like a phone box.

Like a sticker in a phone box.

A phone box.

Snail trail.

I don't know.

I was just trying to think what the human equivalent is of leaving a trail behind you advertising how sexy you are.

Oh, those things in the phone boxes.

Yeah.

Oh, there's a dated reference.

I don't think the way they work is you go to one phone box and they say, right, now to the next phone box, and you keep going down the phone boxes until you eventually reach the prostitute.

That's why it works.

Is it?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

More and more clues every time.

Yeah.

One more number added to the phone number.

She's been here.

But she doesn't then conceal her trail by leaving a gender-neutral card in a phone box.

No, no, she doesn't, not that kind of thing.

What an average time?

We should move on in a sec.

I just have some things on slime that I quite like.

Did you know that to most of the inhabitants of the ocean, the ocean is slime?

It's thick and viscous.

Slimy, viscous, slimy.

To fish and things.

This to things smaller than fish, so I think to like plankton and microbes, and I don't think we know how it actually feels to them.

But basically, this was an article.

It was a new scientist in the year 2000.

So look, maybe it's been completely disproven.

But basically, they found out that there are way more sugar molecules in the seawater than we thought there were.

It's like this whole mesh of sort of saccharide molecules, and they trap water in their mesh, and that creates this kind of gel, and it's cobwebby, it described it as.

And so, if you're a small animal going through that, because you're so tiny, that feels like really thick and viscous.

And we think it must feel like that to them, because if you look at how

microorganisms are distributed in the sea, or like plankton or tiny things, they're not evenly distributed or randomly distributed, they're sort of in clusters because I guess some bits are thicker than others in this weird cobweb, and so they can't plow through them.

And you know, you're just a little kind of bit of plankton going down the sea.

You can't really swim because you're plankton, that's the whole point of plankton.

But then occasionally, you just get to a bit and you're like, oh, great.

This is all slimy now.

Yeah, you mean great sarcastically?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

How can you climb through the water?

If you're plankton, you can't do it at all.

You're just

whatever the fur is.

Whatever happens.

Yeah, whatever happens, happens.

No wonder they've evolved sarcasm as a race.

What's plankton's most powerful weapon?

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Italy's defense minister was once hospitalized for smoking 150 cigarettes in a day.

What?

Was it a challenge?

What was it?

Was it a

very stressed?

It was during an election in 2013.

It's a guy called Guido Crossetto.

And anyone who follows follows Italian politics will know that quite recently the Brothers of Italy have

won an election or become the biggest party and they've formed a government.

And they're kind of like the UK

nationalist party of Italy.

And Guido, who I think was the leader of Brothers of Italy at the time in 2013, he was electioneering and apparently had one cigarette every six minutes from 8 a.m.

till 11 p.m.

Wow.

And started feeling not very well and had to go to hospital.

Wow.

Wow.

But then after a few days, he was fine.

Okay.

What does that do to you, that level of intensity?

What did they diagnose him with?

Well, he felt that it was stress-related as well, I think.

Oh, yeah.

So

do you drink?

Oh, I just have a sherry at Christmas.

Do you smoke?

Well, you know, just 150 a day.

Just every six minutes.

Yeah, I think it's a good thing.

It's definitely the stress thing, though.

And I live quite near a main road.

Can I unpack the six minute thing though because is that including is that post finishing a cigarette with a six minute break no so every six minutes he would have had to have started and not ended for the mouth to work

a few minutes you have to go quite quite quickly to get through one in three or four minutes he might not have got to the to the filter in all of them right right yeah because you're busy it's stressful you're campaigning here i tried to find any evidence anyone had ever smoked more than this in a day oh yeah yeah and i don't know if you guys found stefan sigma oh yeah No.

Right.

But he's called Sigman.

Oh yeah.

Oh yeah.

Wow.

Stefan Sigmund.

Sigmund, Sigmund.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's close enough.

Anyway, in 1996, what he did,

he was trying to get a Guinness World Record, apparently.

And there are some people who say it didn't happen, but there is a photo of him doing it.

It happened.

He jammed 800 cigarettes into a wheel, rigged them all up to a pipe, and smoked 800 cigarettes in six minutes.

Yeah, and it was a rotating wheel.

And the idea was that he'd be able to get a little bit of all the cigarettes.

The people who say I think it definitely happened.

I think most people who say that it didn't happen are more saying that he couldn't have got much from the ones on the outside of the wheel.

Oh, right.

Yeah, yeah.

That surely wasn't accepted as a.

Well, Guinness said it was not environmentally friendly.

Yeah, which is one good reason why it's not.

But no, it's not.

I read a newspaper article about him because at the same time as doing this, he also ate 29 hard-boiled eggs in four minutes.

And he leaped into a lake from 135-foot cliff, all in order to get into the Guinness Book of Records.

But Carol Jones, a Guinness spokesperson, said, We do discourage this sort of thing and suggested that he tried the record for collecting cigarettes instead of smoking them.

Okay.

So, yeah.

I wonder if he got any, I wonder if he holds any for any of those events, because it sounds like these ones that he did.

It was almost like an advert, because it was in quite a lot of newspapers during the day.

And it was almost like it was an advert for Guinness saying, Don't do these stupid things because you won't get in the Guinness Book of Records.

Because it listed a few things you couldn't get records for.

That's mad.

I was just looking at tips for quitting if you're the 150-a-day kind of person.

Oh, yeah.

And I just came across an article that I really enjoyed in The Guardian because it asked for other people's ways that they'd found to quit smoking when the normal stuff didn't work.

And so, if the patches and the gum haven't worked for you, here's what some people recommend: there was Pete who got all

you're going to say, you smoke Pete instead.

Just bury yourself in it.

Yeah.

You can't.

And on top of that, you won't be drafted into the war.

It's a win-win situation.

Sorry, Anna.

Peter.

Peter, Peter, yes.

He had all of his teeth removed.

He smoked for about 40 years, and he went to the dentist and said...

Did they stop you from being able to smoke?

Because,

not that on its own, but he had them take out all of his smoking yellow teeth, and then he had them all replaced with fake teeth, which look really good.

And then he was like, well, I don't want to do anything to damage these fake teeth.

That's a good idea.

Incentivizing.

Great way to quit.

Pull out all your teeth.

Well, there's, okay, here's a different method then.

Because they do lot, obviously the warnings on the packet.

And then I think some countries have considered warnings on each individual cigarette.

And in case you haven't got the message from the pictures on the packet, which previously...

It's in your mouth, you can't read it.

Unless you could create a cigarette that gives smoke signals

that say stop smoking.

That's good.

Like Gandalf kind of breathing out that shit but he'd breathe out a picture of a diseased lung

director's cut yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah um well they kind of so in 2013 there were some researchers at Sterling who kind of did this they made a packet of cigarettes which shouted at you

when you opened the packet it played an audio clip warning about the dangers of smoking I think that's quite good I have a um I've got a musical biscuit tin do you yeah yeah and does it it say, stop eating biscuits, fat self?

It was a Christmas present, and I'm still working my way through it because it's got loads of biscuits in it.

But every time you open it, it's very hard not to play a bit of the tune because

you move it and it's quite delicate.

And it does, it's more made me stealthy about opening the tin because

I don't want to give away the fact that I'm

eating biscuits.

It's quite clever.

I don't want my neighbours to hear and come over and say, hey, can I have a biscuit?

Well, so you think you're going to be like an ice cream man?

Your neighbours are going to hear

the song of biscuits.

Very close to my neighbours.

We're great friends.

But, you know, you've got to keep something's private.

You've got to have some boundaries, yeah.

I think that was one of them.

Just one guessing game for just one other way to quit smoking.

One woman said, convert from, when you're drinking tea, convert from mugs to a cup and saucer.

She said, this is what made her quit.

So she would have had a ciggy with a mug of tea.

Very good.

Yeah, but it's good to put your cigarette in the saucer because you've got something to rest it on.

It's like a mini ashtray.

Yep.

A mug.

A mug.

A mug.

What's the difference?

Does the mug have, like, because they can have writing on them?

Does it say, mmm, a lovely fag?

Yeah.

She only had pro-smoking mugs, you know, they used to do

big business in them.

I actually think she might be using a cup and saucer differently to how we might use one for this to work.

Oh, she holds them in both hands and you've got those third-hand free for your team.

That's clever.

That's the object of a cup and saucer.

She got rid of all the tables in her house.

So she had to hold them.

She moved to a mountainous region with no flat surfaces at all.

Just one cup, one saucer.

It was a huge sacrifice, actually.

She only smoked one a week.

Right.

That's amazing.

So there's a big movement these days, obviously, for trying to stop people from smoking almost altogether.

So a lot of people, on top of that, are trying to erase their relationship with cigarettes, particularly for big companies.

So the example I have, Walt Disney.

Walt Disney supposedly used to smoke about three packs of ciggies a day.

And if you used to go around Walt Disney World, Disney World, you would see pictures of him holding cigarettes.

And so many shots.

It's just he's got a ciggy in his hand.

And what they've done is they've photoshopped out every single cigarette that's ever found in a photo of Walt Disney at Disneyland.

So wherever you go, the photo is still the same photo, but the cigarette is now missing.

Do they put something else in his hand?

No, they don't.

So that's the thing.

You've got this weird little point thing.

Make it a pencil.

It's so easy.

What they've done instead is every member of staff is trained to do the Walt Disney point with their two fingers.

So that normalizes it.

Yeah, and this is even used in the movie where Tom Hanks plays Walt Disney with the Mary Poppins movie that was done.

Yeah.

It looks a bit like he's doing gun fingers.

It does.

Gun fingers, doesn't it?

It's more like you're swearing at someone if you leave a gap in your cigarette.

Exactly, if you have a tiny gap.

But so members of staff are specifically trained to do the Walt Disney point, which he never did.

Because he had a ciggy in it.

When do you do it?

Do they tell you when to do it?

Or is it just every five minutes you have to do it three times?

I think probably if you're pointing somewhere maybe it's like it's just over there maybe um if you're a bit stressed after sex

with a cup of tea

um so cigarettes don't smell very nice to a lot of people agreed yeah they smell pretty horrible to a lot of people agreed to a lot i suppose it depends if you're a smoker yeah yeah yeah okay but have you heard of nice cigarettes

these were launched in 1989

they were called the the that wasn't the official brand name i can't remember the official brand name but it was basically the first cigarette to smell good, was the idea.

Um, and it was they burned with a vanilla smell, and they were advertised under the slogan, you shouldn't have to leave the room, you shouldn't have to apologize.

Well, that's just gonna smell like a vape, which I must say, I'm not a big fan of either.

Well, it sold terribly, and they're like, there have been a few attempts, but they were all the kind of proto-vape things.

So, Premier Smokeless Cigarettes was another kind, they were tested in 1989.

And smokers didn't like them.

Well, customers who tried it complained that it smelled bad, lacked flavor, and it was too hot to touch.

And industry experts noted that it could also be used to smoke crack.

So

it didn't make it off the testing line, really.

But apart from that.

That's the thing.

Smokers like the smell and taste of cigarettes and have never liked stuff that doesn't really taste like it, really, except the occasional eccentric smoker who used to smoke some menthol cigarettes.

Just lest we think that smoking is on its way out, ASAP, it's going up worldwide in terms of number of smokers.

And that is related to the population going out, but still it's the biggest cause of preventable deaths in the world.

And by quite a long way, because I actually didn't look up the second biggest, but I always thought of like things like car crashes are really big and other things are around.

Alcohol even.

I wonder how I wonder if they can measure alcohol, yeah.

You've got snails that

follow you around for your ten million quid.

That's actually

ironically hot on the heels of smoking.

The whole point of that is it's not preventable.

That's like literally, you just can't stop it.

It leading inevitable cause of death.

Obviously, smoking has been banned in various places over the years.

And in New York, it was banned in 1908, smoking, but only for women.

Okay, right.

Unladylike?

Pretty much, yeah, pretty much that.

They hadn't invented that Audrey Hepburn long long cigar thing.

Absolutely.

That came down later.

Yeah, it was a very short-lived ban.

Basically, in 1907, there was a cafe, a very trendy cafe in New York, that allowed women to smoke.

Because usually, people, women didn't really smoke in public very much because it was seen as unladylike.

But this bar decided, actually, we don't care about that.

Anyone can smoke if they want.

And then it was really, really popular.

And so a load of other bars started to let women smoke in there.

And the politicians didn't like it.

There was a politician called Timothy Little Tim Sullivan and he decided that he was going to ban smoking even though he had personally never seen a woman smoke.

Right.

He still decided he was going to ban it and they did ban it.

And there was only one woman, Katie Mulcahy, who was the only person who was cited for violating the crime because a few weeks later, the mayor of New York vetoed it and said, actually, this is ridiculous.

We're going to stop this.

Really?

For two weeks and for one woman in New York it was illegal that's cool for Katie I bet that got her a good reputation

did you guys see we were just mentioning Audrey Hepburn had you know those those beautiful what were they called

the cigarette holders yeah did you see the inventions of Robert Stone who this is in the 1950s he just tried to come up with new innovative ways to make smoking a more pleasurable experience

so he invented these holders there was one brilliant one where it was for if it was raining and you wanted to have a ciggy.

It had just a little umbrella that hangs over the cigarette itself off the back of its holder.

Yeah, it looked really, really clever.

There was the periscope ciggy, which would go upwards.

No specific purpose, as far as I can see, for the periscope ciggy.

If you're in a submarine and you want a fag, what do you do?

Because you can't go outside.

Yes,

you had a massive pipe going up there.

Well, we didn't see the approaching war chip because Perkins was using the periscope to have a quick gasp.

Ironically, they found us through the lit tip of the cigarette.

Actually, weirdly, until 2010, you could smoke in a submarine as well.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, it was.

Yeah, there was a room, there was a smoker's room in submarines, and you could smoke down there.

Spaces at a premium on submarines.

Yes, it's amazing how geared everything was towards smokers' needed spaces because so many people smoked.

Yeah, the interesting thing is the Beatles had a white submarine, but it just got stained by all the nipples

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

My fact this week is that actually we've all been pronouncing Covent Garden wrong.

Okay.

All right.

What are you on about?

All of us, or have you been doing it right all along?

I've been doing it wrong as well.

A different kind of wrong.

Different kind of wrong.

Still wrong.

So I was looking into Covent Garden.

I love where we work.

I love this area.

It's full of incredible historical significance.

And while looking into it, I discovered that the word is actually a bastardization of the word convent.

It should be convent garden.

That's how this started.

The very first mention that was ever made of convent garden was in the 1200s.

And it was in reference to the fact that this area was, a lot of it was garden.

And for Westminster Abbey, they had lots of vegetables and so on here.

So this is prior to the big market and the reason it became a market.

That's almost a...

But wait, you've explained why the garden bit's pronounced garden, but the convent bit is the garden of a convent, right?

Yeah, it was garden of a convent.

There were lots of monks here and so on, and they were running it, and so it was known as convent garden.

This was basically a big old monastery around here that was kind of attached to Westminster Abbey, which is not that close to here, which makes you think, wonder how that works.

But actually, a load of monks lived here, and it was the dissolution of the monasteries famously under Henry VIII that sold it all off, and then it became what it is today.

Yeah.

Is it I think I read I read this too long ago to be absolutely sure of it now but basically this was quite under underpopulated bit of London because there were two main bits of London which were the Westminster, the seat of power, and then there was the city which is over further east and actually the bit in between was not really populated at all.

Not really.

It was this sort of two bits of system.

I think so.

Yeah.

I think it definitely went down population wise.

Like it was a thing in about the eighth, ninth century.

Then it went down and then it came up again.

But I think technically Dan, you could argue you've been pronouncing it more right than us.

Really?

Well, you're pronouncing it with an extra R.

Yeah.

And what is R except half of an N

in Covent Garden?

Well, he puts the R towards the end of the word.

You say Covent, don't you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Is there any other Covent?

Do you get Covent anywhere else?

Coventry?

Yeah.

Should that have been Coventry?

Oh my god.

Or was it a place where witches lived?

Coventry.

The Coventry.

Yeah.

And that's why Hitler went for it.

Didn't like the witches famously.

Fair enough.

Not fair enough.

My grandma lived in Coventry.

We won't be tiring in Coventry anytime soon then.

Yeah, Common Garden Market is the main thing that Common Garden was famous for, wasn't it?

Yeah.

For centuries.

And, oh, man, it was so interesting.

Such a cool time.

What period are we talking?

Oh, centuries.

Which particular centuries?

I think it started being officially a market in 1670, didn't it?

But it had been used as a market before that.

And in fact, still is today.

If you wander out into the market from the office, you'll find.

And it's not your big fruit and veg.

It's not the biggest fruit and veg market in the country anymore, like it was from whatever year Anna said it was.

But they sell knockoff football jerseys.

That's true.

And those are sort of the vegetables of today, aren't they?

In a way.

Yeah.

But the market porters were a huge thing.

And

there's amazing footage, footage from the 20s and and 30s, of them carrying stacks of the baskets on their heads because that was how everything was transported in the market.

And they were slightly domed in the base, so they fit on your head very neatly, and they stacked really well.

And have you heard of Basket Jim?

Basket Jim?

Is that a person?

It's a person.

He was called Jim Sainsbury.

I don't know if any relation, but he worked at the Coven Garden Market in the 1920s and 30s.

And there's footage of him doing 25 baskets in a stack on his head.

Wow.

That's the stuff in the baskets, yeah.

I don't know if they're full or not.

I think maybe for the show, for display purposes, they they might have been empty.

Yeah, yeah.

That's still a lot, though, isn't it?

It's the balance, is the main thing.

Yeah, yeah.

It must be a different family, otherwise, surely Sainsbury's baskets would have that head-shaped.

If you walk around Sainsbury's now, I think you have to put it on your head.

Do you know the first Sainsbury's was in Covent Garden, actually?

Interestingly enough.

Yeah, it was on Drury Lane, just down the road from here.

Oh, there we go.

And they sold like, what was it called?

Railway milk.

That was their big seller.

It wasn't disgusting.

Railway milk.

You have to get up so early in the morning to see the trains being milked, but it's a beautiful sight.

The idea was that it came from like Devon and Cornwall, but it came on the railway, so it's still fresh.

Okay, right.

The square was built for the fourth Earl of Bedford by Inigo Jones, the famous architect.

For international listeners, Inigo Jones, I always feel sorry for, because he's gone down in history as not Christopher Wren, essentially, in England, wouldn't you say?

He's basically the other architect that's not Christopher Wren.

Yeah, he was a very famous architect.

Yeah, but he's just the second most famous architect.

Sure.

He was.

I'm sorry, Inigo.

I just wanted to say.

Fair enough.

Christopher Wren, who designed St.

Paul's Cathedral, we should also say for international listeners.

Yeah, I don't think Christopher Wren is that famous outside the UK either.

No.

Or in the UK, to be honest.

And Inigo Trones is less famous than him, but still very cool and has a cooler name as well.

He does.

Well, he actually has a less fun name than one of the people he worked with.

So he was, he worked under James I and Charles I

alongside the official royal stone master who was called Nicholas Stone.

Cool.

That's amazing.

It's really good.

Stone Master.

Yeah, the Stone Master.

What would the Stone Master do?

Well, he would have worked with Stone.

He was nicking stone.

He was a sculptor, for sure.

So nicking it.

Nicholas Stone.

Nick Stone.

Very good.

Yeah.

And Inigo Jones was more famous.

No, less famous, but quite famous for being the first person to do a survey of Stonehenge.

Speaking of Stonehenge,

but he did say that it was a Roman temple,

which it wasn't what it was.

And that's why he's only the second most famous.

Because Christopher Wren would have got that straight away.

I love Roman stuff.

Actually, the sad thing, another sad thing about Inigo Jones is that the main thing he had to do, really, in this square, he was asked to build a square fit for gentlemen with ability

by the Earl of Bedford.

The ability of being able to carry baskets on your head.

It's just for the basket carriers, yeah.

And the living statues.

No, it's basically for really posh rich people.

And so the only thing they wanted, they wanted a completely bare square.

So it was the first time London had had this, a huge expanse with nothing in the middle.

So, you know, you could promenade about it.

And then with a church in it.

And it was St.

Paul's.

And the church still is St.

Paul's.

So Christopher Wren designed St.

Paul's Cathedral, big, f off, beautiful cathedral down the road.

And then he designed little St.

Paul's church on Covent Garden.

It's still there today.

But St.

Paul's Covent Garden is better in some ways, in some ways, because

it's a reverse church.

It's a reverse.

It's where God comes to worship me.

Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The church authorities aren't very happy about it, actually.

A bit sacrilegious, but it's no, it's the wrong way church, isn't it?

It's the wrong way around church.

What do you mean?

Well, basically, churches have their doors at the west end, and then the east end is the bit that faces towards Jerusalem.

That's how churches are laid out.

Yeah.

right now.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, that's just how churches are.

But he, because he wanted the doors to open onto the piazza, the first ever piazza that we were going to have in the UK, very exciting.

He wanted these huge, great double doors, so he built them like that.

And then the church said, absolutely not.

You're going to have the altar at the east end, and you're going to have the door at the west end like normal.

And so the doors are kind of false doors.

But

yeah, yeah, that makes so much sense because the back looks so much like a front kind of thing with that church.

It's a bit confusing.

Yeah, it's a reversely pursued church.

So do all churches face Jerusalem?

Not all of them, but the idea is that they face east because that's where you're looking and that's where

you're praying, you're sitting in church, facing the front, you're facing towards Jerusalem.

If you're ever lost in a town, go to the church, whichever way it faces.

Just walk in that direction.

If I'm on my way to Jerusalem.

You'll get to Jerusalem, actually.

The squeezy gif lemon.

Do we go to Covent Garden?

Squeezy Jif Lemon.

Sorry, there's a lemon juice product called Jif, and it comes in a bottle that looks like a lemon.

It was invented by a man called Edward Hack in 1957.

Not an original idea, but no, no, no, it was.

That's just a joke.

Supposedly, he looked at the whole, every lemon there was in Harrods and Selfridges at Fortnum and Mason's, and then he looked at 900 individual lemons at Covent Garden to find the perfect lemon to base his.

Oh, I see, because it's in the shape of a lemon.

It's in the shape of a lemon.

Okay.

Yeah.

I thought you were going to say you looked at them all and made an average of all of those shapes.

No, I think he just found one unbelievably nice lemon.

See, I must admit, I don't actually find any one lemon more attractive than any other lemon.

But that's just me.

James, you've got no heart.

There was a place called the Rose Tavern, which I think was the best place to hang out in the 1700s.

And

it was where criminals, highwaymen, prostitutes,

but then actors, poets, artists, Samuel Pepys spent a lot of time there.

He said he really liked the food.

Are you going to the brothel again, Samuel?

No, no, no, I'm going for the sausage rolls.

Fish and chips is honestly done.

I just like that simple pub grub

and the topless woman who serves it to me.

There's Rose Street up there.

Is it there?

I think it might be.

I think it is still there.

Rose Street, and then just off it, there's some floral passage or something.

Yeah, yeah.

Floral Lane or something.

Probably.

And they had the people who sort of performed there had amazing tricks.

So there were topless women who would wrestle there

as a thing.

and you could put bets on it.

It employed lots of posture moles, which I never heard of.

Posture moles.

Posture moles.

I don't think you're going to guess what this is.

Well, it's obvious, isn't it?

You dig down a hole into someone's garden, and then when you come out, you sit straight.

Oh, that's right, though.

It's like this, like the conductor, Ethel Smythe, tying herself to a tree to improve the posture.

Okay, I don't think it would have got as much custom in the pub if it was your version, but it would have been closer to.

Mole is a prostitute of some kind.

Oh, mole.

I see.

Mole, yeah.

Oh, because I heard that Postra Women was a nickname for the women plying their trade.

It probably is the same.

Maybe it's Postra Mole's Postra Women.

But these people used to emphasise it.

They were not prostitutes, but what they did was they would be paid by the clientele, your Samuel Peeps, either to be flogged or to flog them.

One of those in public, in front of people in the pub.

In public?

Yeah.

Ooh.

Yeah.

I know.

Sexy.

That is saucy.

Well, I guess

a strip club these days, it's all in the open, isn't it?

As well.

Yeah,

they don't have a cat of nine tails.

Dan always asked for the whipping.

It's been 300 years, Dan.

300, has it?

Okay, sorry.

But the way they advertise who they were, to say, you know, I'll whip you if you want, was they would lie naked on a table and a waiter would bring a lit candle on a tray over to them and they would simulate kind of having sex with it with the climax being that they would snuff the candle out.

So wait a minute, until that had happened, you just think it's a normal naked woman lying on your table.

And then, as soon as she blows out the candle, having pretended to have sex with it, you're like, oh, you're a prostitute.

Exactly.

You weren't just passing and felt like a lie-down.

It's a bit like when you go to TGI Fridays and you tell them it's your birthday.

They do that in some branches.

No one's.

Oh, they've told them it's my birthday.

They're going to do the thing, aren't they?

Oh, it's so embarrassing.

He's only six.

That was not what Chat GPT suggested as a good idea for a party.

Are you saying they snuffed out the candle?

I think with their

nether regions.

Apparently they...

In fact, the quote was: snuff out the candle in a highly obscene and hazardous manner to roars of approval from her audience.

It's quite, you know, like if you have a candle and you manage to put it out with your fingers because you lick your fingers.

It's a bit like that, isn't it?

I always feel really hard when I do that, like Danny Dyer or Russell Crowe or something.

Well, imagine doing that with your fanny.

Oh, maybe it's sort of like a downstairs sneeze.

Possible.

Yeah, that's what it is.

Gosh, it took 20 minutes.

All my other Covent Garden stuff is so tame.

I found a record that was broken at Covent Garden, but

most candles snuffed that with a vagina.

Yeah.

This is how you'd end the night there.

Put out all the lights, honey.

Pick up a naked woman to slowly dip her over every single.

Sorry, which record?

Most medium hamburgers eaten in one minute.

Medium-sized?

I don't know if they were medium-sized.

I don't know if they were medium-sized or medium-cooked.

Or had they come from the

world?

They were medium-sized ghost hamburgers that have been cooked somewhere between rare and well done.

Anyway,

how many was it?

Four.

It was four.

Which in one minute?

In one minute.

That's impressive in one minute.

By a bloke called Furious Pete from Canada.

Furious Pete.

Very nice.

TGI Fridays was mentioned a second ago.

There's a road called Maiden Lane, and right at the bottom of Maiden Lane on one end, opposite on the corner of Bedford Street, there is a building there.

And if you look up on the building, you'll see a plaque.

And that plaque reads that Charles Dickens used to live here in the workhouse when he was a young boy.

And I was looking into it, and that building was, it was a sort of a working house, and he used to work downstairs putting black polish into tins and you know you would sell that and I'm pretty sure it's where there used to be a TGI Fridays on the bottom there was yeah that's that's that would have been the spot where Charles Dickens as a young man was put in the front window of the building because what they used to like to show was how boot polish was going in fresh so it would look like you're getting the best sort of stuff

and he was he would sit in the window with his best friend at the time and they would both do it together and his best friend was called Fagan so Fagin and Dickens used to sit in the window

doing the thing right.

And that became a TGI Fridays.

And that became a TGI Friday's.

That's what he would have wanted.

It was the best of foods.

It was the worst of foods.

Predominantly the latter.

It was the best of foods.

It was

happy birthday.

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 Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, James, at James Harkin, and Anna, you can ebo podcast at qi.com.

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

All of the previous episodes are up there, so do check them out.

And also, check out Club Fish, our private members' club.

There's lots of fun behind the scenes, extra shows, and all sorts of little bits up there to check out.

So do that, or just come back here next week.

We'll be back again with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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