400: No Such Thing As A Pope In A Helicopter

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from the London Palladium.

Tonight is also a very special episode for us.

It is our 400th episode of Six.

My name is Dan Schreier.

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

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 Anna.

My fact this week is that there's a 300 square mile section of america where all microwaves have to be kept in cages

are they living microwaves scary like teethy violent yes um sort of some kryptonite was spilled on them in the 60s and haven't been able to keep control of them um no this is they're kept in specific cages i have misled you there slightly they have to be kept in faraday cages and that's because it's in the quiet zone So, this is that the whole quiet zone is actually about 13,000 square miles.

And across that, radio transmissions and all electromagnetic transmissions are really restricted.

And within this little 300-square-mile section, which is right next to this Green Bank Observatory, which is a few giant telescopes, which are really, really important for like seeing things from outer space, they need to have just no interruption.

And that means no waves of any sort.

And that includes if you're microwaving a burger at two in the morning, that could convince them there's alien life out there so it's got to go in a faraday drink i've had a few burgers at two in the morning that would convince me there's alien life out there

and it's it is because of this um observatory although it also happens to be where the national security agency has one of its listening stations oh just so happens to be in the same area wait so what are they listening to are they listening to well they might need a lot of quiet so they can basically they're listening to any foreign transmissions that come into the eastern side of the United States.

Right.

So it helps them to be a bit quiet as well.

Interesting.

Wow.

It's for anyone who wants peace and quiet, really.

Yeah.

The NSA,

these telescope guys, weird conspiracy theorists, quite a lot of them there.

I know it's a big mix of people, isn't it?

Conspiracy theorists, you've got your people who believe that they suffer from a disease whereby Wi-Fi interferes with them and they sometimes have to sleep in boxes to get away from it.

They should come to the QI office.

Oh, that was a joke about how shit our Wi-Fi is.

We have a a few of the elves in the audience, so they would have loved that joke.

Also, we invited our IT guy tonight.

I played history of this shit.

Sorry, buddy.

It sounds just incredible.

The list of restrictions there are all because of this telescope.

So there are various things that aren't allowed.

You know, like lots of stuff about Wi-Fi is technically banned.

Petrol-driven vehicles are not allowed because they have spark plugs.

Yeah.

So if you fire them up, that might do something.

I thought this was so interesting.

I did not know this, that if you are prone to sort of wearing tinfoil hats or whatever and waves getting into your brain, petrol cars, terrible.

Diesel cars, fine.

Diesel is just compressed.

I guess I never properly understood the difference.

Just really, really compressed until it's hot enough to ignite.

Whereas petrol, you know, it needs to spark and that's giving off waves.

And that's fucking with your brain.

And the, the,

yeah?

It's not.

I just want to clarify, it's not.

And the members of the public who live there, so it's a very small population there.

It's under 200 people that live there.

This is just in the tiny inner bit.

In the tiny inner bit, yeah.

But they take it really seriously about how they have to make sure that nothing is messing with

this telescope to the point where there's almost citizen police officers that go around driving in their car, just looking every day for any kind of Wi-Fi signal or any...

There was a guy called Wesley Sizemore, and he used to just knock on doors and just go and walk in and go, unplug your microwave, turn your Wi-Fi off.

Yeah, he once amazingly tracked down the radio frequency interference of a faulty electric blanket in someone's house.

Wow.

And he went into their house and he confiscated it off them.

Just woke up a poor granny at three in the morning and shook her awake.

There's a woman called Dr.

Karen O'Neill who works at the observatory and she says that she has members of her family who never visit them because the lack of Wi-Fi stresses out the teenagers.

Yeah, that's why they're not getting visits.

I'm so sorry.

We'd love to, but the teenagers have to have their Wi-Fi.

Now, I think a lot of you are probably thinking, like, okay, you have to put the microwave in a Faraday cage.

The first thing I thought was, isn't a microwave a Faraday cage?

Yeah.

I thought that was kind of the whole point of microwaves.

But what it is, is microwaves do have Faraday cages in them, but they often leak.

Yeah.

Okay, so you can test if you have a leaky microwave.

So I tried this today at home.

I put my phone into the microwave and got my wife to call me.

And I still got the call.

What?

And I tried the one backstage.

We have a microwave backstage.

And I put my phone in there, and one of the elves called me, and I didn't get it.

So this one is a proper paradigm cage, but my one at home is a leaky one.

So,

hang on, hang on.

Doesn't that break the microwave?

No, it don't turn it on.

Oh!

Oh!

Well, just well, don't.

We should say.

Just in case anyone else was confused.

Dinner tonight in the Harkin House.

Cooked apple.

Dinner, very nice.

There is a guy who has a van called EMIT, which is the electromagnetic interference tracking truck, which is a very false acronym.

But

that might be who you're talking about, who drives around looking at the signals.

It's got 17 antennae on it.

Yeah.

Well, this might be the new guy.

There's a new sheriff in town.

Yeah, because Sizemore is retired, so there's a new guy who does it.

And you can see photos, and it is like...

like in the X-Files, that van that's just full of computers and stuff.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

And they all think that it's part of the observatory that is messing with their lives in various different ways so there was a mother who called in saying that she was getting interference on her tv because of the telescope so it just said n-r-a-o on her tv and she was like you guys are breaking my tv so someone came round it turned out that that acronym n-r-a-o stood for not rated adults only and it was because

And it was because her son was trying to watch porn.

Oh my God.

What a weird.

Do people get imprisoned, I wonder?

I mean, I know they don't.

You get a small fine, but it's a strange crime to have.

It's a $50 fine, isn't it?

Yeah.

But the truth is that due to the fact that no one has any money anymore, the police are not spending their time going around trying to prosecute people for this.

And that means that actually most of the places in that town now have Wi-Fi and have microwaves because they know that no one's going to do anything.

And the observatory have kind of gone, well, fine, we'll deal with it.

We'll work out what the background is and we'll kind of deal with that.

The conspiracy theories who think it's fucking with their heads, they are not happy.

Right.

Of course.

No, they're the ones who are really upset about it.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

There's one ski resort which they made an exception for, which seems nice.

Always nice to let the old wealthy skiers have a way around the rules that bind everyone else.

But that's Snowshoe Mountain.

And it calls it, it advertises itself as an oasis of cellular activity in an otherwise total dead zone.

And they just had, they got one of the

cell companies to wire it up specifically so that it wouldn't really radiate any waves, but that you can still cool someone on the slopes and stuff like that.

That's really, it's really annoying because you will have, I guess, reception at the start of the run, but you're like, Yeah, yeah, this run's going really well.

I'm just skiing down.

Hello, hello, as you get further and further away.

I don't think it runs out, does it?

If they don't just put it on the peaks, that would be terrifying.

But I guess also, once you get it in the ski resorts, then everyone's going to want it, right?

It's a slippery slope.

Oh my god.

Yeah,

so that whole area, you've got the ski slope, you've got the neo-Nazi area, which is quite a popular area there.

Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of neo-Nazis.

Because basically, as we were saying before, it's kind of like people are going there for either to get away from technology or they're going to a place where they can be a prepper and effectively get away from all this stuff and just live in isolation.

So you've got the preppers, you've got the neo-Nazis, you've got the sikhs.

So

why are the neo-Nazis being dumped in with the preppers and the people who are afraid of technology?

I know the people who are afraid of technology are a bit silly and the preppers are a bit nuts, but...

And the ski slopers, I'm just listing all the different communities.

Why are the neo-Nazis there?

Everyone's got to be somewhere.

It's so nice to hear someone sticking up for the neo-Nazis, Dan.

It's really good.

I will not.

But my favourite one, just very quickly, is the Gesundheit Institute is there as well, which was set up by Patch Adams.

Do you remember the brilliant movie, Patch Adams?

The Rob Williams.

Yeah, I recognize that's a sentence no one has ever said before.

The brilliant movie.

So is he a real person, Patch Addis?

He's a real person, and he wanted to set up a hospital where it would be, you didn't have to pay, and they used humor instead of medicine to heal.

And that's where that is.

And they just read that laughter is the best medicine and took it literally.

Yeah, he's a...

I have heard of him, actually.

Is he the one who goes around with the world's largest pair of underpants?

That is him.

That is him, right?

Yes.

And I think, like, the president of Costa Rica Rica and the president of Ecuador have been in his giant underpants.

Yeah.

Or something.

You know him.

I know him.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember him.

That's Adam's a legend.

You've seen the sequels.

I don't think that was even in the film.

This telescope, just briefly, the actual Green Bank telescope, it is unbelievable.

Okay, so it.

I don't even really fully grasp this.

It can measure the energy from, you know, billions of miles away, equivalent to a single snowflake falling onto the surface of the earth.

But at a unique size.

That must be tough when the ski season's on.

Yes.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

The energy that they're looking for is the energy from extremely distant stars like quasars, which are very, very bright, but they're a long way away.

And they can pick up

the energy that they give off, or that gets to us here, is a billionth of a billionth of a millionth of one watt per square meter.

Which is why this telescope needs to be so enormous.

It's two acres the dish in capacity, in area, so that it can pick up those signals.

if you find yourself on Saturn and you put your phone on airplane mode, they can still detect it from there.

Even on airplane mode.

Yeah, even in airplane mode, so you can't get away with anything.

I thought airplane mode was absolutely impregnable.

I'm afraid not.

I'm afraid that's what the government wants you to believe.

Oh my God.

I have to go.

How's anyone going to give you a ring on Saturn?

Hey.

I reckon that's the last one of those I can get away with.

Well, I don't know.

All I'm thinking is 2-1 and I

challenge accepted.

What a shame that that's such an amazing fact, but the thing that sticks out for everyone is airplane mode.

You can still find us.

That's the amazing bit, though.

Yeah.

And the Saturn bit, but largely the airplane mode bit, you know, because you're not supposed to be giving off anything.

And it's another cool thing about the telescope is that, so it's made of the huge dish which receives all the radio waves.

It's made of loads and loads of little panels, and it needs to be perfectly smooth.

And actually, over the years, just the force of gravity would very, very slightly deform the panels.

And so, every panel has a tiny motor attached to it, which senses, and as soon as it deforms by a micrometer, by the width of a couple of human hairs, the motor senses it and adjusts the panel to make it smooth again.

It's pretty good.

Another person who had a telescope that needed a lot of work on it was William Herschel.

He was a guy who discovered Uranus.

And he was.

No, yeah, come on.

No.

No, I'm with them.

Say the proper name.

Herskel, is it?

I don't know.

So, William Herschel, he discovered Uranus, or Uranus, and he was really obsessed with his telescopes, so much so that his sister Caroline spent her whole life basically polishing his telescope.

And

I will accept Uranus, but come on.

And also, he was like so obsessed with searching for the stars, she had to feed him by putting food directly into his mouth

because he was so on it.

And she's an amazing person.

She basically was in Hanover, and then the French army came in and they kind of took over Hanover.

And then so William Herschel left there and came to the UK.

He became an organist.

And then she came over and he started giving her singing lessons.

And then before long, she was a superstar in Bath and Bristol.

She was singing five nights a week.

She was massive.

But then, when her brother wanted to become looking at the stars, she had to give it all up to just polish his telescope.

Wow.

But then, in the end, he died in the end, and she took over his job.

And she became famous as the discoverer of no fewer than eight comets.

And for her 96th birthday, Humboldt presented her with a gold medal for science from the king of Prussia.

Wow.

How did the brother die?

Did he die mysteriously as a result of having received no food for several weeks?

We need to move on to our next fact.

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

My fact this week is that the musician Ray Charles, who was blind, used to fly to gigs because he thought it was safer than driving.

However, he also insisted on flying the plane himself.

This is an extraordinary claim and it's come up countless times from his friends, from his biographers.

Supposedly there was a plane that he used to, that he owned and he would charter and he would bring all his band on.

He had a few planes in his career and he used to have a pilot who was a friend of his called Tom McGarrity and when the plane had gone up and was at cruising level he would get really bored and needed to pass the time.

So there's reports of Ray Charles going into the cockpit, sitting down at the controls and being handed over the controls from the pilot and just flying the plane there for hours.

There's even stories that maybe he landed the plane once or twice himself.

It's why they invented in-flight entertainment, I think, isn't it?

Just

save pilots' lives.

Do you believe the stories?

My question is.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You believe he landed in there?

No, I don't believe he landed it.

I do believe that he might have flown it.

It's so funny.

I mean, but I don't know enough about planes to know that, but there's Bobby Womack, for example, who didn't know that he would do that, was just sitting on the plane, and suddenly Ray Charles runs to the cockpit and takes over.

And he's going, Is everyone cool with this?

And they're like, It's an incredible anecdote.

He says, Oh, Jesus, me, oh, dear Lord, he started praying, Bobby Womack.

He said, There's a blind man flying the plane, this is nonsense.

And the trumpet player of Ray Charles's band just told him to relax and said, You don't need eyes to fly a plane.

Everyone was on a lot of heroin at this point, other sectors, by the way.

Including Ray Charles.

Including Ray Charles, yeah.

They got there really quick.

Yeah.

What I find is that the closer you get to Ray Charles Charles for these anecdotes, the more it gets to less that he was flying or landing the plane and more that he knew how to do it, but he didn't necessarily do it.

So it's interesting.

I don't know.

If one of those inflatable things can fly a plane, then I reckon Ray Charles can.

Are you talking about the movie Airplane?

Yeah.

That documentary.

That's pretty true to life, yeah.

And I read his autobiography over the last couple of days.

He doesn't mention it in there, but again, he does say that he would know how to do it.

If worst came to worst and everyone else on the plane died, he would be able to land it without killing himself.

That's what his claim was.

It feels like he's done it.

I mean, what else has he done?

Memorized it in a book?

I don't think anyone would say they knew how to fly a plane if they'd memorized a textbook.

Okay, can I tell you his technique that he was going to use then to land it?

Oh, God.

Oh, yes, it's awesome.

Yeah, yeah.

So, his technique was that he was going to get all the dials, because you need the dials to land as well as your eyes.

But you need the dials, and he was going to smash all these dials and he was going to use his hand to feel the way that the dials are moving on well no no because there's one specific dial i don't know if this is still in airplanes which is the shape of an airplane it's like literally an airplane so he was like i'd smash the glass and i would hold the airplane and just feel it as we're going down because that would tell you about the balance of the airplane and so on yeah so yeah so he would just he would hold a toy airplane basically in order to land it but he was he was someone who if you were looking at other vehicles he was someone who took charge of other vehicles so his son said that there was one day where he was coming home in his Corvette, and the driver got to an intersection.

He suddenly said, Get out, I want to drive it.

And the valet said, I can't let you do that.

And he said, It's my car.

And he went, Oh, okay.

So he got out.

And so his son said they were sitting at home and there was this huge crash.

And they went outside, and the car had totaled into the side of the house.

In fairness, what happened there is that he was on the clutch and he'd accidentally let the clutch go and it kind of jumped forward into a car that came past him.

So it's not even because he's blind, he's just a shit driver.

Yeah.

He starred in car adverts in the 90s.

Have you seen that?

Oh, yeah.

It's a gorgeous car advert and it shows him driving on the, in like the salt flat, Utah's great salt lake.

So he's not on a road.

There are no other vehicles around.

But he's having a whale of a time driving away.

It's lovely.

And his driver, by the way, guess what his driver's name was?

I know.

Clarence Driver.

He had a long history of doing this.

So the first time he took control of a car was when he was about eight.

And this was when he was at primary school.

And his teachers remembered him as kind of a pain in the arse, I guess, kind of rebellious.

And he, one time at primary school, he managed to break into one of the teachers' cars.

He went to a deaf and blind school.

It was quite groundbreaking.

It was the only one in Florida.

And he was sent there as he was about five when he was sent there, five or six, wasn't he?

Or maybe seven.

He only went blind then.

He went blind at the age of about six.

Yes.

And then his mum just sent him to this school.

And yeah, he went there.

He he got controls of a teacher's car, and he had one of the deaf kids sit next to him, or sit on the hood of the car, I think, and bang with either his left or right hand to tell Ray to go left or right.

This is a Gene Wilder film by Richard Pryor called See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

It genuinely is.

Yes, that's the plot of the film.

Do they end up like he ended up, which was crashing into a tree?

Yeah, I think that happens quite a lot in the film.

It's pretty

he also drove motorbikes from time to time.

Definitely, this is in his autobiography.

So, when he was about 14 or 15, he was in Tallahassee and he would ride his motorbike.

And the way that he did that, he would be in a big sort of area with nothing else around, in the same way as the advert.

But in Tallahassee, he would ride in this area, and his friend would be alongside him, so he could kind of feel him next to him while he was motorcycling.

So cool.

He was better at music than he was at driving vehicles.

Oh, he was quite good.

Like, I don't believe that he was in the airplane.

I believe he was in the airplane, but I don't believe he drove the airplane personally.

Yeah, yeah.

But if you read the biography, there's loads of stuff where he said at one stage and the pilot forgot to pull the flaps down on the plane and they weren't climbing properly and he could sense the problem and he said you need to put the flaps down the pilot

or is he Yoda yeah

there was another time when they were flying at 11,000 feet okay the traffic controller had told them they need to fly at 11,000 and he said but I had 13,000 in my head So I asked the pilot to check and sure enough, the controller had made a mistake.

Maybe we would have had enough height to get over the mountains anyway, but I ain't want to take chances.

Oh my god.

You got me slightly wrong.

It's 30,000 feet in the air.

I have.

So he was really, really into aeroplane.

Like, he really knew a lot about them.

He was properly into them.

But yeah,

he really didn't like the idea of trading on being a blind musician.

This is something I find really interesting.

And in fact, it has to do with the instrument he played, the fact that he was a pianist instead of a guitarist, was because there were so many

blind blues musicians, particularly, who

played the guitar.

So there was blind Lemon Jefferson, blind Willie Johnson, blind Willie MacTell, blind Blake, no other name.

This is nominative determinism, isn't it?

Blind Gary Davis, blind boy Fuller, and blind Joe Reynolds.

All of them, you know, were guitarists.

And so he said, I don't want to be associated with that.

He said it was as much an association with blindness as a cane to walk with the guitar.

Although he did, he loved the piano from the age of three, which really makes me think I've missed the boat in finding my life's passion.

If that's when you've got to get it, he was three years old and he grew up in extreme poverty.

You really read about his early life and you think, God, I suppose I'll never complain again.

You can imagine like a single mother, dad's run off, very, very poor black family.

And he heard someone playing the piano in the shop down the road and he ran through.

He was three years old.

He sprinted across, pushed his way through the door, jumped on his lap, and that was it and started banging away and knew he loved it from then on.

And when he went to school, when he was sent to this school, they were taught braille, obviously.

And it was so hard to read piano music because, of course, you can only ever play while sight reading with your left hand.

So he'd have his right hand fumbling away, feeling the music while his left hand plays, and then he'd have to swap and then he'd have to memorize it.

And he could memorize thousands of pages like that.

He was amazing.

He was incredible.

The Braille stuff is really interesting because he was very proud of the fact that he could get on normally while being blind.

And so everything that he got was in braille.

If a contract was sent to him and it wasn't in Braille, he would refuse to sign it.

I think that's fair enough.

Feels like someone's trying to do one over on you if that's what they're sending you.

Good point.

No, but like, you know, he got to see Ray, the movie, with Jamie Fox, and they turned the script into Braille for him so that he could read it and sort of fact-check it and so on as it was going on.

He should have made a 3D film where he could feel the screen and they're all bulging out of it.

Why don't we have that?

Why don't we have that?

I wonder.

Could it be cost-effective?

I don't know.

I don't know.

It's not very COVID secure.

Everyone in the cinema, especially, everyone just groping forward at the screen.

And if you've got the seat that's the top left corner of the screen, you're not getting any action.

He was really good at chess, wasn't he?

And he had his own chess set where the black squares were all raised slightly and all the black pieces were pointy and all the white pieces were round so he could feel which was which.

So it's really cool.

Did you read about him playing Willie Nelson at chess?

Go on.

He played Willie Nelson, another great musician at chess.

He challenged Willie Nelson to a game back in his hotel room or wherever he was.

And obviously, Ray Charles was blind, so he kept the lights off.

So.

You got to save electricity, right?

To save electricity.

What's the point of lighting it?

So he thrashed Willie Nelson at chess because Willie Nelson couldn't fucking see what was going on.

That's so good.

Dude, you had this really weird thing, which I didn't believe for ages, but I've found enough sources, and the guy seems legit.

During the 90s, he got really bored of of giving interviews, but he had to give interviews for promotional purposes.

So instead, he got a white guy from New Jersey to be him in all the interviews that he does.

Yeah, so this is a producer and writer guy who interviewed him and knew Ray Charles Inside Out.

When they had their interview, Ray was so impressed.

He just thought, this is incredible.

We have to meet up again.

And then there was this interview that was going to happen with a guy.

The interviewer came over and Ray called him up.

He calls him his white Ray Charles, this this guy.

And so he comes over and he says, I want you to do the interview as me and give all the answers because I can't be bothered doing it.

So he said, okay, I'll do that.

So he sits there and he starts doing it.

And the guy asks a question and he says, well, Ray would say that.

And Ray said, no, no, no, no.

Don't say Ray would say.

Say, I would say you are me in this interview.

And they did this whole interview where he was Ray, and it went so well that Ray said, we must do that again.

And for a decade, virtually.

Not on television.

Not on television.

television this were all print interviews and people if they were calling up over the phone he would do the interview as right this white guy from New Jersey that's amazing yeah so funny and after Ray died there was even a book photography that was taken by a personal friend who said to him Ray can't write this book now would you mind writing it as him post his death He said no, but yeah.

Is this where did they have a fight at one point Ray saying what's all the shit about me driving a plane?

I'm like stupid

He did one really fun thing when he was a kid.

He, like I say, he was a bit of a lovable troublemaker, is the impression that I got.

And he used to love playing the piano at school.

And there was another kid from, so the school was segregated.

And there were a bunch of white kids who got a better education.

And then the black kids basically got less good, got less good equipment, all of that.

And one of the white kids really wanted to come and play the piano, which was in the black kids' part of the school.

And so this kid came up to Ray and said, I need to use a piano.

You need to let me, you need to get off the piano.

I need to use it.

So Ray said, fine, you can have it.

Just give me 15 minutes.

And this was related by his best friend at the time, who was a guy called Joe.

And Joe said, I thought that was weird because Ray would never give up without a fight.

And lo and behold, they were in their dorm, like, you know, half an hour later, and the white kid comes up furious.

And Ray spent that 15 minutes unscrewing every single key on the piano and putting it in his bag and going, you said you're only one of the piano.

That's amazing.

That's so funny.

We've got to move on in a sec to our next fact.

I just found one other guy who can fly their own aircraft.

But an unusual one.

Yeah, like, there's a lot who can fly.

Oh, yeah.

What a few.

Well, this guy was Pope Benedict XVI, Dan.

Is that unusual enough for you?

Thank you.

You've got to work on the lead-in to that.

Yeah.

No, look, this.

I mean, James, if you're sceptical about Ray Charles, the idea of Benny XVI flying the papal chopper, I've only found it on a website called Catholic News Facts, and it's only there.

And I feel like they'd have given it more airtime if the Pope could fly a helicopter.

How implausible is it?

Was he one of the sort of 17th-century ones?

I always find it hard to keep track.

Was it at least the last but one?

Got it.

The last button.

The previous one, yeah, yeah.

When he resigned.

So, what?

So, what's the story?

He can fly a helicopter.

That's the story.

Well, thank God we didn't move on before you got that story in there.

Wow.

Now it's time for fact number three, and that is

Andy.

My fact is the Pope can fly a helicopter

Thank you

Solid gold.

No, my fact is there is a zookeeper in America who cannot change job because the bird he looks after is in love with him

It's this is such a sweet story.

I don't think it's very sweet.

Well, we'll get on to the real details in a minute, but the broad brush strokes are very sweet.

This was sent to me by a guy called Ali Bobson, so thank you very much, Ali.

It's this brilliant Washington Post investigation.

There is a crane.

Cranes are these very tall, very elegant birds.

And this one is very endangered.

It is a white-naped crane, unbelievably rare and endangered, and it lives at the Smithsonian Conservation Institute in Virginia.

There's a breeding center there.

They had this bird.

It was a female bird, needed to be bred with to preserve the species, but it was a deadly bird.

It allegedly had killed at least two previous partners rather than mate with them.

It wasn't taking any shit.

Yeah.

So, problem.

And they realized maybe it has imprinted when it was a young chick,

it thought a human was its parent rather than a crane bird.

So it is programmed to love humans.

And so they got this keeper who is called Mr.

Crow.

Amazing.

Chris Crow.

And.

Jump!

Jump!

Sorry, it just sounds like it.

Chris Cross.

Chris Cross.

Don't get it, don't get it.

But they loved it.

And so they, so they, and Chris Crowe and Walnut are now basically an item.

And

they have done a lot of work, breeding work together.

Now, this is where it gets a bit icky.

Yeah, this is where it gets a fraction icky if you're squeamish.

Yeah.

So he slowly earned the female crane's trust

by sitting with her and touching her and all that stuff.

And dancing, like dancing with Dancing is the main thing.

Like, a lot of the cranes, before they get together, they do this kind of head-bobbing dance and stuff.

And he did all that with her as well when no one was looking, he said.

And now, basically, she will let him inseminate her.

Because previously, if you had a crane and you needed to artificially inseminate them, you'd probably have to use anesthetic, all that kind of stuff.

She is well up for it.

Yeah.

And he doesn't, we should clarify, inseminate her with his own seed.

Yes.

And he does remain fully clothed throughout this process he puts a different crane sperm into her cloaca actually interestingly the other crane is called ray no

it's a different one different ray different ray yeah

the article you sent round though andy it does like as james says it reads a bit bizarre so like literally taking the words it says kneeling behind the bird oh don't put that tone of voice on it if you can read it like that you'll make anything sound mucky

Crow rests a hand gently on her back.

Then he starts rubbing her thighs rhythmically.

30 seconds elapse before Walnut steps away.

It's called Walnut, by the way.

Walnut steps away from Crow, fixes a few out-of-place feathers, and then stretches out her wings, asking for another go-around.

Dan, if this is your audition tape for my dad, Rhoda Porno, it needs a lot of work.

It then says, Crow then takes the opportunity to inject walnut with a syringe of crane semen

like every beautiful relationship but she keeps on but she keeps on wanting to mate with him even though at the moment they don't need any more eggs from her yeah but she but sometimes he will just keep her happy by doing the massage

and he gives fake eggs doesn't he he's yes because you can't give her so she'll create eggs but they don't need to be inseminated anymore so they'll just sit and rot so they have to chuck the eggs out and put fake eggs underneath her to convince her that she's doing a good job.

But then she gets tired.

She gets tired looking after the fake eggs which he has switched out.

So he sometimes has to stand over the eggs and watch them for her, even though he knows they're fake, so that she can have a break from looking after these rubber eggs.

It does feel like he's got himself into a bit of a bind, doesn't it?

It's so funny.

Last we heard he was single.

As far as human partners is concerned, he said in one interview, Walnut sets the bar pretty high.

I'll never find a woman that's so happy to see me that she just starts dancing.

Oh, it's so sweet.

It's like a roller coaster of sweetness and ickiness, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah.

He has cheated on her, though.

What?

Yeah.

He's inseminated two other cranes.

Okay.

He's got a type.

I'm not denying that.

Are they in the same zoo?

Yeah.

Yeah, they are in the same zoo, but I don't think Walnut knows about...

I hope she doesn't listen to this.

Yeah, but that would be terrible.

But no, he's now a kind of love guru for the cranes in this place.

Really?

He knows it, yeah.

Yeah.

And he apparently the way that cranes flirt most effectively, aside from this dance, is by picking up nesting material.

Because showing that you want to build a home together.

Ah, again, we're back into sweet.

Sort of in a 1950s kind of way.

Have you ever tried going on a date around John Lewis?

It's very

sexy stuff, yeah.

It's much like that, except if John Lewis saw the sticks and twigs, bits of grass.

Yeah, there are, I mean, this is not the first, Chris Crowe did not invent this, in case anyone was looking for it, you know, this is not the first human-crane marriage, as it were.

The real

daddy of this, I regret saying daddy already.

There's a scientist called George Archibald who is a don of the crane world.

He founded the International Crane Foundation.

Just to give you an idea, he's pretty big in Crane Town.

And he, in 1976, there was a bird called Tex, which again needed to be mated with to preserve the species.

And he moved in next to her for three months.

As in, he put his bed next to her area where she lived, mimicked her dance moves from 5 a.m.

every morning.

Wow.

Was truly dedicated.

And they built a nest together.

And they worked together for work together.

She's my colleague, darling, honestly.

I just have to be in the office early again.

I think he might have invented the practice of dressing up as a crane, which you now have to do

to feed chicks so that this problem doesn't perpetuate itself, so that the chicks don't imprint on humans.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you dress your hand up as a crane for the feeding, don't you?

You get like a golf puppet.

You're in like a full white hood, aren't you?

And then you have like the burnt hand.

You're not like Rod Hull.

If he joined the KKK, that's what it would look like.

He moved to that little community in Green Valley, the observatory.

And you can never say a word.

You can't speak words to them when you're in the row with the crane.

You have to make crane noises, obviously.

Do you know how they sound?

Just out of curiosity.

I don't know.

I didn't realize I didn't know cranes that well up until this fact.

They're massive.

They're huge.

They can be up to six foot six tall.

Like, that's a big ass bird, right?

Yeah.

That's...

They're the biggest.

Biggest flying ones.

Tallest flying ones, aren't they?

Obviously, you've got the shit ones like the ostrich that don't count anymore.

Yeah, that's right, they fly so high.

Yeah.

They can get like 30,000 feet in the air.

Well, they're very tall.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Their legs are still on the ground for a lot of them.

Yes, that's true.

That's amazing, isn't it?

And there's a lot of mythology around them because they can fly so high that they disappear from your actual eyesight.

You can't see them, but their voices, still at that height, are so booming that you can hear them.

So it was a sort of like, oh, there's a crane in the air.

They make a lot of noise, don't they?

Their track here is as long as they are.

Yeah,

But it kind of winds around a little bit, but they make this huge booming, not like Andy's.

It's more like

neither of you is successfully seducing a crane, is my judgment.

We'll get less.

Yeah, so they need to fly high to migrate.

They're big old migrators.

And

there's an issue now, because a lot of them are very endangered, like you said.

And I think certain cranes, like hooper cranes, were down to almost single figures in about the 1940s.

But their populations have gone up.

It's been like quite a success story of conservation.

But the way they've gone up is by humans raising them.

And this has a slight problem where if their parents aren't raising them, they're not really evolving to know their migration routes.

So there's been a couple of people who have had to migrate with them.

And they do this by, I don't know if anyone's seen the film Fly Away Home, but it's basically that.

So you get a microlight for anyone who hasn't, like a little light aircraft, and you still have to be dressed up as a crane.

So I don't know what the crane fucking thinks now.

I think the Pope did this once, didn't he?

Benedict XV.

Yeah,

so do you have to stay in costume when you're flying?

The microlights are fine.

Yes, so now the cranes all think that their leading crane knows how to fly a microlight.

And the first person who did this was a guy called Kent Clegg, who was

very much cooler, older brother,

biologist and a craner in the 90s.

And yeah, he flew with them.

It's an 850-mile journey.

And he flew with them down from basically Idaho, which is on the Canadian border, basically, basically to New Mexico.

And others have been doing it still.

I think in 2015 the US decided that they were going to try and stop doing it because of the problem of

the cranes learn better from other cranes basically.

So now that there's quite a lot more of them, they're in the hundreds now.

They're thinking, let's phase it out.

Yeah, well, they basically weren't mating.

The whole point of migrating is to go up and mate.

So you fly to have kids up in Canada or wherever.

And so they flew them there, but then the humans didn't know how to show them how to mate.

Just awkwardly making conversation with each other for three months and then going home.

There's a really prosaic example of that, teaching the crows what goes on.

It's what, like, you're raising them as a person in a costume with a glove puppet, a weird glove puppet on your arm, but and you're not allowed to speak.

But also, they are taught to be afraid of foxes because that's not instinctive to them.

So, they have to be taught.

And the way you teach them is to dress up dogs as foxes and get them to harass them.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

This is so the humans are dressed as cranes.

Who's dressed as a fox?

The dogs are dressed as foxes.

Who's the cranes dressed as?

They're all dressed as the Pope.

It's the weirdest nativity ever.

It's here.

They're amazing.

But they're back.

They're back in the UK.

This is a huge victory for conservation.

The first crane egg laid in Britain since about the year 1600 was in 2013.

And it was given a 24-hour guard because it was so precious and now there's there are the numbers are rising in the in the uk and it's a huge success story so it's really good yeah it's great yes they've done a fabulous job in it um yeah so hooray for chris

yeah

okay it is time for our final fact of the show and that is james okay my fact this week is that bill gates is responsible for putting chips in up to 80 of americans

all right get to that quiet zone in america james where you belong.

What websites have you been on, James?

Well, I learned this fact from an anonymous video posted on Facebook.

No, of course not.

That's why I got the Pope helicopter thing.

No, of course not.

So this is a story from a few years ago that Bill Gates has bought up hundreds and thousands of acres of land in America.

On that land, he grows potatoes.

He sells those potatoes to McDonald's and they sell chips and Americans put them in their face holes.

And so 80% of Americans up to have got chips from Bill Gates.

So good.

There you go.

Yeah, it's incredible.

And of course he does it in the vaccines.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah.

But yeah,

he's one of the few people in the world who has a McDonald's gold card.

And I don't know if it's connected to this.

What's that?

McDonald's gold card is where you can go to any McDonald's, you hand it in, and no matter what you've you've ordered, they give it to you for free.

Oh, thank God, because otherwise, how would he be able to afford a Big Mac?

Well, they do that, so we don't have it in the UK.

What we have is the Nando's black card, which is quite a famous card, which I've experienced a couple of times.

It's like, what?

I have, yeah.

A couple of friends of mine have had it.

So Tom Davis, who is King Gary, he once had it.

He applied for it.

He got brought in front of the Chicken Council.

Stop.

Yeah, no.

Stop.

And he had to.

Are they dressed as chickens?

Yeah.

And he had to make make his case to the chicken counter.

First of all, he stands behind the chicken.

Caresses the thigh.

And then I had another friend who, and bear in mind, like Anton Deck had to share one.

That's the story goes.

It's how rare that they're...

They go everywhere together.

What's the point of that?

What's the point of getting given to?

Oh, that's true, yeah.

Well, that's what keeps them together.

It's just the Black Nando's card.

They've hated each other for 20 years.

But so he has this gold card, and only quite a few Americans have it, the McDonald's card.

I think it's not related.

I think that's just because he's really rich.

Fair enough.

Fair enough.

He gets involved in some funny old games, doesn't he?

Because since he became the richest man in the world and then started, he just started investing in lots of things, but also obviously huge amounts of

very worthy stuff and trying to beat malaria and this kind of thing.

In 2009, he paid $50 million to circumcise 650,000 men.

Okay.

You've got to give that some context.

Otherwise, it feels like it's it's not fair on him.

It was a project attempting to curb HIV because there are studies that, some studies, that show that circumcision lowers the risk of becoming affected.

And he funded the program.

So he wasn't literally there.

No, he was doing it.

He insisted as part of it.

He said, I'm going to give you $50 million, but I want to do them all myself.

And he asked to keep them.

It was weird.

Yeah.

There were a lot of protests against this.

I mean, various people saying this is not the way to defeat HIV aerades.

And and also the Canadian Foreskin Awareness Project

got in touch and they campaigned against him saying no one on earth is more detrimental to foreskin than Bill Gates.

And

they called him foreskin enemy number one.

It was incredible.

Their leader is a charismatic man called Glenn Callender.

He challenged Bill Gates, right?

Because Bill Gates was paying for this thing.

He said, if you put Bill Gates in a four by four meter room with me and my foreskin for exactly 44 minutes, he will emerge convinced that circumcision is wrong i would like to see him put in a room with him but his foreskin isn't in that room how do you do that

have to be through a letterbox or something yeah wow anyway he's a hero yeah foreskin awareness project no you're aware yeah yeah i am aware he was um he was asked about the the potato farms on reddit because they said is this part of your climate push and he was saying no no it's just part of investment because he's made so much money outside of microsoft microsoft is obviously a big part of his wealth, but a huge amount really is the other investments.

And it's someone else who does the investing for him.

So he has what he calls the gateskeeper, who is someone

who turned,

so there was $5 billion that he had, which

turned into $82 billion in the time that this guy has made investment.

So all these different companies and stuff.

Easier, isn't it, when you're starting with $5 billion?

Let's face it.

Yeah, yeah, it's true.

His farm is 100 Circles Farm, or one of the farms that he has is 100 Circles Farm, I think is the one that supplies McDonald's.

And it's really cool in America.

We don't have this, but when you look at America from above, from the ISS, in fact, the farms are all circles, aren't they?

In that particular, I think it's like a Great Plains area.

Then it's perfect circles.

It looks like giant crop circles.

Wow.

And it's just, it completely transformed American farming, I think, when it happened.

It's basically centre-pivot irrigation, which is like those, when you get one of those things in your garden that spins around in a tiny garden, it's like a giant, giant version of that.

And yeah, it basically transformed a completely unfertile, useless bit of land into McDonald's.

It is amazing when you fly over it.

And they reckon that, okay, that it's not the climate change thing, but he is saying that he's financing them to find more productive seeds and try and improve agriculture to maybe help people to farm in Africa.

That's his one of his excuses.

Yeah, yeah.

Do you know, this isn't the first time that he's worked with French fries?

Okay.

In the 90s,

he, do you remember Microsoft Bob, the little system?

Bob!

Bob was a disaster of a product.

It was meant to be something that hand-walked you through every single moment.

And Clippy was invented for it.

Was it like, it was like a room or something, and you clicked on that little bit and it would take you to the word process, and you click there and it take you somewhere else?

Exactly.

And there was a dog called Rover, and there was Comic Sans was created for it.

We've mentioned it on the podcast before.

This is actually giving me no impression of exactly what it was,

but it was just a very easy way to navigate basically Microsoft Windows.

And the leaders on that project, on that failed project, was two people called French and Fries.

No.

So Melinda French, who then became Melinda Gates,

his now ex-wife, and Karen Fries, who was the leader on the project.

And yeah.

Wow.

That's really cool.

Do we know if that's what inspired him to do the whole McDonald's thing 40 years later?

He's not commented, no.

When you've got Gates money, you can do whatever weird shit you like.

So in 2016, he offered 100,000 chickens to various countries, including Bolivia, and he got a rare

refusal.

Oh, really?

Yeah, Bolivia said, we breed 195 million chickens a year.

We do not need a share of 100,000 chickens that Bill Gates is providing us.

This is incredibly patronizing.

I don't know.

That's kind of locking the gift chicken in the mouth, isn't it?

Well, you know, I kind of understand.

If you've got that many chickens already, already, it feels like, yeah, yeah, going over chicken.

Um, has anyone seen this?

This is about Microsoft, and it's something that our colleague Alex showed me recently.

But if you have an hour and you're so you've never been more bored in your life and you've watched everything else on television, it's the Windows 95 instructional video.

Have you seen this?

It's a sitcom.

It's a sitcom.

Yeah.

Really?

But the Microsoft guys wrote it and it stars at the height of, as their fame was just starting, Jennifer Annison and Matthew Perry

basically as Rachel and Chandler.

It's like the most excruciating hour of your life.

Well to be fair the second half hour is just like instructions for how to use it.

The first half hour is a script that really makes your genitals shrivel back up inside yourself as you're watching.

It's I mean there's some quite sleazy moments where quite a lot of people perview on Rachel.

There's a classic line from Chandler.

They're ordering Chinese food and someone suggests they order mushu pork.

Chandler says, you know what's interesting about Mushu pork?

It's only good when it's together.

Because Moo, not good, and Shu, definitely not good.

But Mushu, that's good.

You made Dan laugh there?

That's something.

I think it's on your level, actually.

You might really like it.

Classic Chandler.

It's pretty painful stuff.

Wow.

Never heard of that.

He was in Fraser as well.

It's the

second big, huge 90s sitcom he's apparently ruined.

But we talked about on the internet.

Yeah, but I don't think we mentioned that on the

episode, actually.

Yeah, and he was like, was he a fan of Frasier stuff?

He's a fan, and he turns up to do an interview with Fraser, but then people just call into the Fraser Crane show asking for technical support with Microsoft products.

It's pretty funny, actually.

He did do that once, didn't he?

In 1989, when Microsoft, they weren't massive, but they were getting pretty big.

And he was quite famous at that time.

He walked into a support facility and he just sat down, put the headphones on, answered a call.

Hi, this is William.

How can I help you?

And sure enough, he managed to fix the problem because he's Bill Gates.

And according, and this is on a blog on the company's website, so you know, but apparently, he was so good that when the customer called back later, they said, I'd like to speak to that nice man called William who straightened it all out.

Well, why were they calling back?

That's an excellent question.

He stood out from a really early age, his abilities, coding abilities.

He was a super smart guy.

People often point out that he didn't get a university degree, so hope for everyone.

But he did go to Harvard and was basically too smart to bother finishing because he was starting to build his own company.

But even when he was at school, he went to one of the only schools in the area which had its own computer, one computer, and the teacher spotted he was super good at coding, and so they asked him to write the school's computer program to schedule all the students' classes and put them all in the right classes.

And so he modified, this is him, age 15 or whatever.

Yeah, maybe a precious thing's to come.

He modified the code in order that he was placed in classes with a disproportionate number of interesting girls.

Feels like interesting's not being used in its traditional sense.

Wow.

Actually, another school that just had one computer,

another kid once asked, sort of tried to kick him off the computer, and he said okay you can have it in 15 minutes and then

it's a keys joke isn't it's a keys joke

you know Microsoft Minesweeper any Minesweeper fans in any wasted hours

Minesweeper crew are in

he it was it was put on Windows in 1990 and everyone at Microsoft was addicted to it everyone loved Minesweeper because it's great and

he uninstalled it from his computer but he was so addicted that he would sneak into the vice president's office after work he was so addicted he had the company record he could do the beginner mode you know but it's little like 10 by 10 yeah beginner mode in five seconds can't you just luckily press on one and they all just kind of just luckily is in the right place

occasionally you can do that i think if you get lucky five seconds is pretty good five seconds amazing but the firm's product manager was bruce ryan and he wrote a computer script which could do it in four seconds And Bill Gates is not a good loser because when that happened, he sent out an email to all the staff saying, when machines can do things faster than people, how can we retain our human dignity?

Do you know he's only got one scientific paper that is published under his name, Bill Gates, and it is a it's a possible solution to a mathematical problem about flipping pancakes.

Mmm, tell us more Dan.

Well because this is quite complicated.

It's so complicated that I was hoping to just lob it your way and then bring it back.

But basically, it is a mathematical problem which is very intense and it involves how can you flip a a number of things that are out of order and make them flip.

Yeah, so if you have a big pile of pancakes, they're all different sizes, and you can put your spatula under any one of them and turn them upside down.

How many times can you do that so that when you're finished, they start with the biggest one and they end with the smallest one?

Yeah.

And why are you doing this?

I'll send that back over to you, Dan.

Yeah.

Are they sweet or savory?

Oh, yeah.

Sorry.

Back to James for that one.

There is one version that they worked on called the burnt pancake problem,

where again, we don't know if they're savory or sweet, but we know that on one side they're burnt.

And apparently that makes a big difference to the problem.

It certainly does make a big difference.

But not only are they the wrong size, they're now burnt on one side.

I'm contacting the kitchen.

So he did this while he was at Harvard and the professor, he was one of the names on the paper with a few other.

And it was a couple years before the paper was accepted and published.

And he called Bill Gates, the professor, and he said, good news, our pancake flipping paper has been accepted and it's going to be published.

And he said, Bill Gates seemed really disinterested in the fact that this was happening and that he was now working in a company in New Mexico that was writing code for microprocessors.

And the professor said, I remember thinking, ah, such a brilliant kid.

What a waste.

So good.

We're going to have to wrap up in a sec, guys.

Can I just tell you about his house quickly?

Yes.

Known as Xanadu 2.0.

Yes, it's semi, semi, isn't it?

Semi-detached.

Three-bedge.

Yeah, it's nice.

It's very humble.

It's a shared garden.

One of those situations.

It's got, I just don't understand this.

It's got seven bedrooms and by one count, 18.75 bathrooms, and by another count, 24 bathrooms.

It also has, well, according to a book you wrote in the 90s, one of the elements of which was describing his ideal home,

it has guests get a badge when they enter that they wear and they put in their temperature and lighting preferences on their badge.

And then, whenever you walk into a new room, it automatically adjusts the temperature and lighting.

I don't know what it does if two of you walk into the room at the same time.

That's unlikely.

I would hack the badges to murder people, and that would be my plot.

What?

What?

Why?

Why?

Who likes having guests, really?

I'd set it to a thousand degrees.

Yeah.

A little paperclip turns up.

It looks like you're trying to kill.

Okay,

that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you.

If you would 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, Andy, Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

There's everything up there from upcoming tour days of our nerd immunity tour.

Check it out.

There are all of our previous episodes.

But hey, guys, listen, in all honesty, our 400th episode.

we can't believe we're here we can't believe we're in the London parade

thank you so much everyone for coming tonight selling this gig out for us anyone listening at home we will be back again next week with another episode we'll see you then goodbye