277: No Such Thing As An Elephant Polo Rider In A Sombrero

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Speaker 3 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast. This week, coming to you live from Stockholm.

Speaker 3 My name is Dan Shriver, and I am sitting here with Anna Jaczynski, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and James Harkin.

Speaker 3 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 you, Andy.

Speaker 3 My fact is that Sweden has more than 4,000 cyborgs.

Speaker 3 This will be a thing that I'm sure a lot of you know about. Are there any cyborgs in tonight?

Speaker 3 Oh my, really? All 4,000.

Speaker 3 Genuinely?

Speaker 3 Amazing. Yes.

Speaker 3 Cyborg there? That with your massive metal hand you just put in the air.

Speaker 2 You actually, what have you got?

Speaker 3 A chip implant. So you have a chip implant in your hand, an RFID little chip implant.
Cool.

Speaker 2 I need to trash a lot of the abusive stuff I had.

Speaker 3 Oh my god.

Speaker 3 That's so cool. Wow, so we've got cyborgs in the audience.

Speaker 3 This is a different gig to any gig we've ever done before.

Speaker 3 So this is it. Sweden is going cashless.
A fifth of people in Sweden don't use ATMs anymore.

Speaker 3 And so more than 4,000 people in the country have these little microchips and it lets them pay for rail travel and for food.

Speaker 3 And official rail firms, you know, register your hands and you can just pay with your hand. And you can can order DIY kits, and sometimes people do it at parties, they have implant parties.

Speaker 3 Yeah, yeah. It's chip and beer parties, they're called.

Speaker 3 Fish and chips party. You can have...
I don't know if that happens, I just made that one up, but if it doesn't, please start it. You, cyborg, get on it.

Speaker 3 It's been around for a while, hasn't it?

Speaker 2 People have been trying to make this catch on, and it feels like it is happening. So I think there was a girl called Left Anonym, and I can't remember where she was from, but this is in about 2010.

Speaker 2 And she realized that a lot of the technology that people were advertising to have sort of implanted was quite expensive, it cost a few hundred quid.

Speaker 2 And so she was one of the pioneers of sort of biohacking yourself. And she just started inserting random things under her skin.

Speaker 2 At one point, she said she inserted some device that she'd sort of made using a vegetable peeler and vodka to sterilize herself.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 But now she's quite famous.

Speaker 3 Sorry, she didn't put a vegetable peeler inside her body. Because it wouldn't work if it's inside your skin.
No, you won't be able to peel anything with that.

Speaker 2 The first thing that's peeling is your own skin.

Speaker 2 No, it was she, I guess she opened up her skin with a vegetable peeler and then inserted a little techie device.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 2 Well look, desperate times.

Speaker 3 That's amazing. I almost became a cyborg myself.
Did you?

Speaker 3 Yeah, back in England I did a TV thing where I was talking about cyborgs and they said would you be up for having the little, it's rice-sized little RFID chip implanted in my hand and I said yes and I and I went there and the guy came and he had it with him and I got a call from my wife and she said if you become a robot man you are not coming home tonight and

Speaker 3 yeah but you could just bash down the door probably

Speaker 3 imagine

Speaker 3 so I had to fake the the thing so I still got the injection it's a big it's a big scary injection it's like a straw and it goes in in between your forefinger and your thumb, and I had it pushed right in, and I still have a scar from where I should be a sideboard.

Speaker 3 Okay, so what you're saying is, your wife said you couldn't do it. You still have a scar, but you really didn't do it.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 And what powers was it going to give you?

Speaker 3 You can get on a bus and tap it like a Jedi, and it will just go boop, and you can work it out. But it doesn't work in the UK, does it? It wouldn't work in the UK.

Speaker 3 It's not officially recognised in the UK. I think if you cut out the whole chip from an oyster card, it might, I presume.
Yes, it does.

Speaker 3 There was a guy who took out the chip from an oyster card. He didn't put it in his body, but he put it on the top of a wand and he dressed like a wizard.
So, yeah.

Speaker 3 He used to walk up to the oyster and go.

Speaker 3 When you got in Openiosa!

Speaker 3 But there are lots of risks.

Speaker 3 It can't go wrong. So

Speaker 3 obviously it's very safe to do, but there are risks with the human factor. So this last November, a writer for the website, Vice, he got an implant and he wrote it up.

Speaker 3 And one of of the first things you have to do with the one he had, you have to secure it with a pin number.

Speaker 3 Unfortunately, he was at a party at the time and he said he woke up the next day, hungover, and he couldn't remember the pin number for his own hand.

Speaker 3 But luckily he had it tattooed on his other hand.

Speaker 3 That is amazing. Yeah.
But actually some people think that it is the mark of the beast to have these things.

Speaker 3 You know from the Bible the idea that there's a mark which tells you if you're the devil or something.

Speaker 3 And apparently the passage in Revelation 13, 15 says, also it causes all, both small and great, both rich and poor, both free and slave to be marked on the right hand or the forehead so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark.

Speaker 3 And that's kind of the idea that these people want us to have everyone to have these things and you will be able to buy things without it.

Speaker 2 So what Satan's come to earth to do is make sure we can get a free bus ride with our fingers.

Speaker 3 And also.

Speaker 2 He's got to start small.

Speaker 3 Also, I haven't seen evidence of anyone paying with their forehead.

Speaker 3 I mean, you'd feel pretty stupid.

Speaker 3 Well, that's what I was reading in FAQ by someone called Kyla Heffernan because this person was talking about a, it was a company that was getting the people to have these chips.

Speaker 3 And one of the questions was, do you have to lose your hand if you lose your job?

Speaker 3 Which the answer is no.

Speaker 3 But then she also said to this thing about Revelations, it says it's in your right hand or your forehead, but she says, Actually, many people get the microchip in the non-dominant hand, so it can't be to do with the devil.

Speaker 3 Well, I'm glad we finally cleared up whether or not it's the mark of the beast.

Speaker 2 You do get some hacks in the head, though.

Speaker 2 There's one of the another sort of pioneer of this biohacking is a guy called Neil Harbison, and his device is mostly in his head, and it's actually quite useful.

Speaker 2 So, sometimes these things can correct problems that people have. And so he has a chromatopsia which is like extreme color blindness.
He can't see color at all. He sees everything in grayscale.

Speaker 2 And so he's had this antenna sort of implanted and then it kind of comes over his head. So it looks like he's wearing one of those big reading lights or something.

Speaker 2 It's called an eyeball

Speaker 2 and it's mounted into his very clever, yeah.

Speaker 2 And it's mounted into his skull and basically it receives signals from the visible and the infrared light spectrums and then it translates them into sounds that he can hear and so then he can because he's an artist so he needs to be able to paint in the right colours and so he can match up the colours that he's got labelled with the exact colours that are around him and it's very cool and he also says that seeing in grayscale is more of a gift than a curse because you see much better at night apparently so he sees better at night he has a good memory for shapes and they're very useful in the military he claims because they don't get fooled by camouflage so they actually get employed sometimes in the military to be able to detect stuff.

Speaker 2 Because you're not fooled by camouflage if you're not seeing colour, because you can't see that that green, leafy-coloured thing looks a lot like all the other leaves.

Speaker 3 But surely, absolutely everything looks like absolutely everything else.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I don't know if I trust Neil at all, but that's his claim.

Speaker 3 There are smart gravestones these days. So in Johannesburg, sometimes thieves will steal slabs of marble because they can be very valuable.

Speaker 3 So these days, the smart graves, they have a microchip in them, and if someone tampers with the smart grave, it sets off an alarm, it calls security, and it texts the relatives of the deceased.

Speaker 3 I think

Speaker 3 I would just make it go, Woo!

Speaker 3 Get off my gravestone!

Speaker 3 You can't text the robber.

Speaker 3 That only works if the

Speaker 3 relatives have turned up.

Speaker 3 Oh, you mean

Speaker 3 the grave, as soon as it gets tampered with,

Speaker 3 that's even better. That's even better.

Speaker 3 It couldn't be that hard to rig up just a single hand about a foot below the soil to just go,

Speaker 2 That is a brilliant idea.

Speaker 3 So good.

Speaker 2 Although it is going to freak you out every time you visit your grandma's grave.

Speaker 3 Oh, God, I knew I shouldn't have step on that bit.

Speaker 3 It's very hard to put a chip, a microchip of of this kind into a starfish, bizarrely.

Speaker 2 And are they crying out for this biohacking as well?

Speaker 3 That's why, that's why you never see a starfish on the train. It's because it doesn't have the chip.
Very sad. That's because you can't get the oyster in there, is that what it is?

Speaker 3 No, this is so this was in um it was in uh a university in southern Denmark and they put a microchip inside a a starfish and they came back to the tank a few days later and it was laying there at the bottom of the tank and they thought that's so weird it's expelled the chip from

Speaker 3 how did how did this happen?

Speaker 3 So they put chips into 53 other of these starfish to see what would happen and they monitored it and they noticed that it took days but it just moved it slowly out the body but not through the point of entry which is the most obvious place for it to go back out.

Speaker 3 It went almost in the opposite direction and it would move 10% of the distance from where it was put in every day to be expelled.

Speaker 3 And it has no problems problems doing it, no pain as far as they can tell.

Speaker 2 Maybe they thought that the people who put it in were guarding the entrance.

Speaker 3 Gotta go out the back. I have a really quick fact about microchips and about the inventions of microchips.

Speaker 3 So this is a fact from the Times newspaper, and it's about transistors, you know, the tiny switches that you get on microchips. So you used to be able to get thousands on, then you could get millions.

Speaker 3 These days, you can get 30 billion switches on an area of microchip the size of a fingernail.

Speaker 3 30 billion. Wow.
Yeah. So, this is the fact of the times, because obviously, you know, transistors have had to get a lot smaller over the years for this to be possible.

Speaker 3 The fact is, if a house had shrunk at the same pace that transistors have, you would not be able to see the house without a microscope.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 3 That's how much they've shrunk over the years.

Speaker 2 And that is actually a lot like the most expensive flats in London these days. So

Speaker 2 I just,

Speaker 2 one tiny thing I wanted to say about biohacking is that it really serves a purpose for people who have had certain problems, as I said before, and it serves a particular purpose if you've had legs amputated or arms amputated and you have prostheses.

Speaker 2 And this kind of smart technology means that they can be really advanced. So I was looking at some people who've had smart technology implants like that.

Speaker 2 And there's a personal trainer called Jack Ayres. And he was talking about the different prosthetic legs he has.
So there are these companies which provide prosthetic for every occasion.

Speaker 2 So you can buy a whole bunch.

Speaker 2 And he said, I've got my my water leg that I wakeboard in I've got my sports leg which is just a rufty tufty smash it up and it won't break he said he's got an electric leg which is just for walking but you don't really run in it I've got a spare mechanical leg and then there's a pause and then he says of course I've got my most important leg I've got my wooden pirate's leg

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Speaker 3 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Speaker 3 Okay, my my fact this week is that Queen Elizabeth I's ladies-in-waiting would try on her underwear every morning to make sure it hadn't been poisoned.

Speaker 3 What a quick thinking excuse from that maid when the queen came in.

Speaker 3 I wish I'd thought of that when my wife caught me that time.

Speaker 3 That didn't happen.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 how would that work? How long would they have to wear the underpants for before they knew? Oh, good question. So,

Speaker 3 first of all,

Speaker 3 it's quite controversial what kind of underwear Queen Elizabeth wore, because it wasn't very common that women would wear underwear in those days, especially not very wealthy women.

Speaker 3 But we do know, we know according to her accounts, that she did have some drawers or knickers, but she definitely had stockings, she definitely had corsets.

Speaker 3 And in 1560, there was her Secretary of State, who was called William Cecil. She was worried that the Catholics were coming to poison her.

Speaker 3 And he realized that the back doors of the chambers were kind of places where servants came in and out, and no one really paid attention to the laundresses and to the tailors and the wardrobers.

Speaker 3 So he thought this was a perfect way that someone would be able to poison her. And so they decided that they were going to do this.

Speaker 3 And so the ladies in waiting would try on the royal underpants and they would wait to see if there was any burning sensation.

Speaker 3 They didn't know about thrush back then, so

Speaker 3 that would be the worst thing, wouldn't it? If, you know, if they had thrush and then just someone gets executed.

Speaker 3 Some laundress. Actually, I always think that with food tasters, what if you get your food taster who's allergic to peanuts or something?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Well, this was the weird thing. The food tasters, they went way further than we would think of a food taster now, just trying it a bit.
So

Speaker 3 they would sometimes kiss and lick the plates and the cups and the cutlery of the king. All his cutlery was pre-licked.
All his plates, everything.

Speaker 3 Apparently, they would have to go kissing everything. They had to kiss the tablecloth, the seat, the cushion on the seat, everything.

Speaker 2 So, I think, yeah, because Louis XIV employed 324 people specifically for that, didn't he?

Speaker 2 It takes a big team of people if you've got to lick every bit of cutlery.

Speaker 3 Dinner's going to go cold if it's one guy.

Speaker 3 Edward VI of England had servants test his chamber pot to see if it was poisoned. But I don't know how they tested that.

Speaker 3 Was it splashback that's going to get him? How would that work?

Speaker 3 Maybe contact. No.

Speaker 2 I think it was that you sneak in, you

Speaker 3 powder a toilet lid.

Speaker 2 Henry VIII had a similar thing.

Speaker 3 So the idea is that there are poisons that can leach into your skin if you get your bare skin on them. So he might sit down on the chamber pot and it might come.
Yes.

Speaker 3 I remember ages ago on the podcast, we spoke about a, I think it was a king who sat down on the toilet, but there was an assassin underneath who put a sword up his bum.

Speaker 3 That's a slightly different thing.

Speaker 3 Like, you're not going around. The king has been poisoned.

Speaker 3 You're not getting like a taster who goes around and then he's got a massive sod through his tongue and he's going, oh, try to lick the toilet again, did you?

Speaker 2 It's true, that's why they call it arsenic, I think.

Speaker 2 But she was she was paranoid, Elizabeth. Oh, actually, she wasn't paranoid, but it was Cecil who was paranoid, and so he was the person who looked over her final years.

Speaker 2 And he does sort of sound like a pervert, and I'm sure he wasn't, but when he makes this rule, he's not going to sue us now.

Speaker 2 He is, you're right, he's a bloody pervert.

Speaker 2 So, yeah, he ruled that all garments that touched her body bare would be circumspectly looked into.

Speaker 2 And he used to warn her about all these poisoning threats, which there were coming from all around the continent. She had lots of enemies.

Speaker 2 At one point, he warned her that they'd been threatened by the prospect of a poisoner who was going to be a burly Italian man with a black beard called Stefano.

Speaker 3 Look out for that.

Speaker 3 So, do you know the method that they had to detect poison? Because, as well as testers and like the king's 300 official liquors,

Speaker 3 they had unicorn horns, or what were supposedly unicorn horns. Obviously, they weren't.

Speaker 3 But you would wave it over your food, like a wand at an airport, or a security wand. Or a tube station.
Or a tube station.

Speaker 3 Imagine a... Oh, yes, I got it.

Speaker 3 Nice. So they would wave it over food, and allegedly, if there was poison in the food, the unicorn horn would sweat and start shaking.

Speaker 3 And we now know what these were. They were the tusks of gnarwals.

Speaker 3 You know, the gnarwalds of the...

Speaker 3 Yeah. And Pope Boniface had a stash of knives allegedly made from narwhal.
Well, they were made from narwhal. And so if you touched your food and it had poison in, your cutlery would start to sweat.

Speaker 2 Yeah, and they would fully disintegrate if you poured something into them and they just fell to pieces or exploded. Then it was thought that was signified that something was poisoned.

Speaker 2 But they were sought after and royalty loved them.

Speaker 2 So there was a British explorer called Martin Frobisher, and he did a big expedition and he came back in 1577 with a six-foot-long tusk and he said it came from a unicorn of the sea which again was a gnarl

Speaker 2 and the way he tested if it had the ability to neutralize poison is he put a whole bunch of spiders inside it and he said all the spiders had died and therefore

Speaker 2 it's a poison tester and

Speaker 2 very cool but Queen Elizabeth kept it next to the crown jewels as like she really valued it that highly.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you know Cleopatra? Yep. She killed herself supposedly with an asper snake biting her.

Speaker 3 But the story about her death is that she experimented first with the idea of poisoning herself with deadly nightshade, the plant. And apparently she asked a slave to try the juice.

Speaker 3 And she then observed the slave and found that the death was not as quick and painless as she would like.

Speaker 3 So she then went with the snake instead.

Speaker 3 Amazing.

Speaker 3 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski.

Speaker 2 My fact this week is that the world champion polo player builds swimming pools for his horses whenever they get injured and it's so sweet actually.

Speaker 3 Sorry he builds a new swimming pool every time it gets injured.

Speaker 2 I think he builds one for each new horse that gets injured because you can't share a swimming pool as a horse.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 not to contradict you, but I do think it's just one swimming pool that he gets them to swim in because he has a lot of horses. He, in fact, I think has the most privately owned amount of horses.

Speaker 2 He does, although you do have to have multiple pools. And in fact, so this is a guy called Adolfo Cambiazo, who's this amazing Argentinian guy who's been the world leader in polo for 20 years.

Speaker 3 Actually, I was just wondering, do you think he has misunderstood how to play water polo?

Speaker 3 Another team drowned again today.

Speaker 2 Amazing. He's world champion, yet he's never understood the rules.

Speaker 2 But yeah, he loves his horses and so he like breeds he breeds them all all the horses that he competes with he breeds personally and he grows special grass for them and feeds them this special diet on his massive farms and he says if they have a little bit of pain or if they have a pooled muscle then I dig a swimming pool for them where they do laps and in fact I was I emailed today our producer at QI who is called Piers Fletcher and he is very into polo so I was asking him about this and he was saying this is actually quite common to give top-end horses hydrotherapy So it's kind of these small pools which are basically like a lock in a canal and with a treadmill at the bottom of them and they just walk along them and they exercise against the resistance of water.

Speaker 3 Wow.

Speaker 2 Or in Piers' case he used to just pull horses through the middle of a river because that's the poor man's virtue.

Speaker 3 So that's the way we're doing it. Yeah.

Speaker 3 This guy also, he's very big into cloning horses. He's done it many times.
He's got one horse that he's cloned 14 times.

Speaker 3 And because he loves these horses and what's amazing about this, it's said that this particular horse that he's had done 14 times, that during matches, he'll even swap to a different cloned horse.

Speaker 3 That's like a tennis player changing a racket for the exact same racket. This with the horse swapping.

Speaker 2 So I didn't realise that in polo, you just swap horses constantly. So it's split into these sections called chuckers.

Speaker 2 And it's sort of between four and eight, about, I think it's about seven and a half minute periods that are called chuckers that constitute a match in polo.

Speaker 3 And if you're a professional, you'll use at least one horse per chucker, sometimes two, and you'll just quickly go and swap a horse so yeah he's got all these clones and he's constantly like you know number one number seven number five of the same same variety that's amazing he's supposed what was his name that guy uh he's called adolfo cambiazzo oh yeah he's supposed to be is he the best polo player in the world yeah the last 22 years i read i read that sometimes um he can gallop at 40 miles an hour for the entire length of the polo field bouncing the ball on his mallet with no one able to get anywhere near him before he just hits it into the goal.

Speaker 3 And the other players like him so much and think he's so great that they'll just watch him play instead of tackle him.

Speaker 3 That's incredible. Imagine playing against Federer and just standing there and being like, that's fantastic, sir.
That's a great shot.

Speaker 3 This guy, Cambiaso, he's quite humble because is he Argentinian? I think he grew up in a farm in Argentina.

Speaker 3 And he was interviewed by the Financial Times in 2011 and he said, I will never be a millionaire and I don't want to be. And then the reporter pointed out that he is a millionaire.

Speaker 3 Many, many, many times older.

Speaker 3 So, well, there is another kind of polo where you, I don't think, can change your animal halfway through, and that's elephant polo.

Speaker 3 So, I spent a bit of today, this happens a lot,

Speaker 3 particularly in Southeast Asia. So, it's different in some ways.
The mallets have to be a lot longer. That's one element of the game.
Of course, of course. Or the bowl would have to be massive.
Yes.

Speaker 3 Or the elephant's tiny.

Speaker 3 Yeah,

Speaker 3 so they chose that workaround with the long mallet. Probably simplest.

Speaker 3 But I just started reading the rules, the official rules of elephant polo today, and they're just quite nice, you know.

Speaker 3 So they obviously have to have a rule for what happens if you fall off your elephant halfway through.

Speaker 3 They just stop.

Speaker 3 But also, you have to wear a traditional hat while you're playing elephant polo. That's really important.
Can it be any traditional hat?

Speaker 3 No, no, it's... Like some people in a sombrero and then some...

Speaker 3 No, they're really strict. It has to be a solo topee or...
Oh, sorry, or any other polo hat. There you go.
It can be any hat.

Speaker 3 You just have to wear a hat. You've got to wear a hat.

Speaker 3 But if you're... It says here, should a player's or elephant driver's hat fall off, the game is not stopped, but the hat must be recovered immediately.

Speaker 3 Players and elephant drivers must not continue play without a hat being worn. I don't know why it's so important.
What? Are you joking?

Speaker 2 You don't know why you need to wear a hat if you're riding in a quite violent and very fast-paced game on the back of an elephant.

Speaker 3 I think it's a protection. It's like a helmet, isn't it? I think it's a helmet.
I didn't realise that. Okay, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 Are you going to look like a right dickhead when you come up with your sombrero?

Speaker 2 But so they stop play if they come off, do they? Because in horse polo, you don't stop play if you fall off, but you did used to. So, this is actually something that our friend Piers told me.

Speaker 2 That it used to be that as soon as someone falls off, you have to stop. But in 1936, a British player called Humphrey Guinness,

Speaker 2 so he was playing a match and he thought they were literally about to score.

Speaker 3 The opposition was about to score a goal.

Speaker 2 The ball was heading towards a goal. And so he just hurled himself off his horse.
And you have to stop.

Speaker 3 So they had to disqualify the goal. And then after that, they said, maybe we should change that rule because these fucking British dickheads are involved.

Speaker 3 We're gonna have to move on in a second guys to our final thing. If you really wanted to reclaim the traditional polo image you could play Kokburu which is Kyrgyzstani traditional polo

Speaker 3 so the ball is a dead goat

Speaker 3 and the whole game is basically everyone's on a horse and you're just it's really tiring to play obviously because especially for the goat

Speaker 3 most of the game is just you and your team trying to pick up the goat and the other team is also trying to pick up the goat so you're just wrestling it weighs about 40 kilos this goat you just have to pick it up and carry it on your horse to the you have to sort of shove it under your leg in the saddle that's a hard that's

Speaker 3 that's a real sport

Speaker 2 that's a really silly idea

Speaker 2 there's also you can if you want to stay in the UK you can play penny farthing polo which is a har actually quite a hardcore sport because the world leader, I think, in penny farthing polo is a guy called Neil Lawton, and he's the guy who trained bear grills.

Speaker 2 So he went up Everest with bear grills, he's been up Everest a few times, I think.

Speaker 2 He's gone around the whole of the UK on a jet ski, he's flown a June buggy from London to Timbuktu, he's been on a Shackleton memorial expedition to Antarctica, and now he is competing in Sussex in penny farthing polo championships.

Speaker 3 Sad decline.

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Speaker 3 Okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is to prevent spoilers getting out, some Game of Thrones scripts were built to self-detonate.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's why they all have such bad injuries if you watch it. They just exploded in their hands.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this was revealed by the guy who played Jamie Lannister in the show. The idea was, unfortunately, it's not as exciting as a Mission Impossible explosion of a a script.
Oh I haven't seen that.

Speaker 3 God's sake Doug.

Speaker 3 Oh damn it. Yeah that's the big bit of the movie when Tom Cruise's script explodes.

Speaker 2 He didn't know any of his lines after that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But yeah, so

Speaker 3 it is a digital script that they all get and as soon as the scene has been shot, a button gets pressed somewhere and every single copy disappears, explodes into the cyber web. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Sorry.

Speaker 3 Wow. I'm in a room full of cyborgs and I used...

Speaker 3 Cyberweb. Cyberweb! Load down.

Speaker 3 Yeah, you're right, it's all digital now, isn't it? So it means that the only paper on set is Starbucks Cups.

Speaker 3 I assume

Speaker 3 I assume that's some sort of spoiler, but I can't work out how. So they have a real problem with their stuff being spoilered.
So

Speaker 3 people fly drones very near where they're filming. And this is a massive problem because they can just spot scenes being filmed and you know they can find out that way.

Speaker 3 So what Game of Thrones did when they were making it, they filmed some of their scenes, they were in Northern Ireland, they filmed some of their scenes very close to Belfast Airport because it's a designated no-drone area.

Speaker 3 But surely it's also a designated no-dragon area.

Speaker 3 That's true. Wow.

Speaker 3 So, are there some shots where where EasyJet just comes flying past?

Speaker 2 They also do have drone zappers for when they can't fly near Belfast. So it's a drone killer that can intercept, like it's a digital thing.
It can intercept drones and immediately force them to land.

Speaker 3 Wow. That's scary.

Speaker 3 So I haven't seen Game of Thrones has now finished. I have been trying desperately to avoid spoilers.
You both have seen it, James and Andy.

Speaker 3 And I thought... It was amazing at the very end when they're.

Speaker 3 Well, so today I was, again, looking, we're talking about Game of Thrones and spoilers, had to be very careful looking, and I found that, in fact, in America, there is a thing whereby if you don't like someone, you can have this website called spoiler.io send a spoiler anonymously to someone that you hate.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's terrible. Yeah.

Speaker 3 It costs 99 pence, sorry, 99 pennies American to do this, and you give them the number, and and there's an FAQ that I read on the page for you know how does this how does this work and so you know what would what what inspired you to do this they said that it was a lady who had done this with an ex-boyfriend who she hated so much that she just kept texting him Game of Thrones spoilers

Speaker 3 and he thought that was amazing I just need to do that and the final question of the FAQ is how do you sleep at night and the guy wrote pretty well actually I have a machine that simulates the sounds of the ocean.

Speaker 3 He's fine. Now here's the shit thing: I went to check out the site, and right at the top was the spoiler of how it all ends.

Speaker 2 I didn't set up the site, and I guess you weren't going onto the site in order to spoil your what? You know, that's fair enough. Yeah, that's on them.

Speaker 2 The worst people for spoilers are the actors in these shows, aren't they? Yeah. They are not to be relied upon.
So, apparently, Robert Downey Jr. is a particular bad one.

Speaker 2 So, he was involved when he was writing on a a film a couple of years ago and they actually made fake scenes for him to help write without his knowledge so that he wouldn't give away the actual plot spoilers.

Speaker 2 There's a guy called Tom Holland who I think plays Spider-Man and well, you're not going to like him so much after this.

Speaker 2 He's so not trusted because he's given away so he's leaked so many plot twists in the past that he's never given full scripts to act out.

Speaker 2 He's just given the scripts bit by bit and he's also made to act out a whole series of fake scenes so that he doesn't know which is real and which isn't.

Speaker 3 No, but it's not, it's not even that. Even in the real scenes that they're filming, a lot of the people that he fights are CGI characters.

Speaker 3 They don't tell him who he's fighting in the CGI, in the real scene. He'll be like, Who am I fighting? They're like, You don't need to know.
And he'll say,

Speaker 3 Well, what shall I do? Just make some kick moves and stuff. But how big is he? They'll give it away.
We can't tell you. So he has no, because he's very famous for

Speaker 3 consistently. He says that he has to act opposite a tennis ball sometimes.
That's just what they use to show him where it is.

Speaker 3 They're all terrible. The Avengers, they're basically terrible at spoilers, aren't they? Because even so, Mark Ruffalo, for instance,

Speaker 3 complained that he had to do five different endings for Avengers Endgame so that he wouldn't know which one was the real one.

Speaker 3 Although, in fairness, he did once accidentally live-stream the first 20 minutes of Thor Ragnarok on Instagram.

Speaker 3 So, you know,

Speaker 3 am I allowed to spoiler Star Wars? No, yeah. Like

Speaker 3 the original trilogy, guys. You've had time.
You've had time to see it. So, this is the really weird thing.

Speaker 3 About two years before the second Star Wars film was released, Dave Prouse, who was the huge guy who was the physical body of Darth Vader, he was speaking at a sort of fan event.

Speaker 3 He was speaking to over a thousand fans, and he started just imagining what's going to happen in the next few films.

Speaker 3 And he joked that at the end of the third film it would be revealed that Luke and Delpheda were father and son. He revealed this two years before the film came out.
No one knew at this point.

Speaker 2 Wait, so he that wasn't a coincidence. He had to tell him.

Speaker 3 He didn't tell me. He didn't know.
He had no idea.

Speaker 2 Wait, so was it possible that they stole that idea off him?

Speaker 3 Probably. It's amazing.
He wrote an autobiography which was called Straight from the Force's Mouth.

Speaker 3 Which is good. I thought a better title would have been The Empire Strikes Hardback.
That would have been.

Speaker 3 And I told that to someone who met him, and he went, uh,

Speaker 3 apparently.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Token attempt at being polite from him there.

Speaker 3 Spoilers, obviously, can be, it's hugely irritating if you follow something and you have a spoiler get told to you. And it can really bring up anger.

Speaker 3 And in fact, there was a story that was in the paper a few years back where in Antarctica, two Russian science researchers who were living there, there was a stabbing incident.

Speaker 3 and the reason was because one of the science colleagues kept revealing the ending of all the books that this guy was planning to read

Speaker 3 and it got so aggravating that he stabbed him.

Speaker 3 The guy survived, but yeah, that's...

Speaker 2 Well, things get pretty tense on Antarctica, don't they?

Speaker 3 Yeah. Unspoilers, the first use of the word spoiler to mean what we mean it today, what it is today, was in 1971.
It was in a magazine called National Lampoon.

Speaker 3 And the idea was they were going to put the spoilers of horror movies so it would reduce the risk of unsettling and dangerous suspense in their viewers.

Speaker 3 So if you didn't really want to be shocked by a movie, you could read these spoilers and it would tell you what was going to happen.

Speaker 2 Oh, really? So you're actually doing someone a favor? Yeah.

Speaker 3 That was the idea, yeah, yeah. Well, there have been studies which have claimed different things about whether spoilers

Speaker 3 affect your mood and your enjoyment of the thing.

Speaker 3 Some studies say that spoilers make you enjoy a story more because you sort of know what's going to happen, you don't don't know how they're going to get there and another study has claimed that it makes you enjoy a story much less and that you get really consistently you find it less fun if you know what's going to happen but the ones who say that you enjoy it more I think are complete bullshit I have to say because they make you read a short story and they just tell you at the start what the end is whereas the whole thing is that it's something that you've been invested in and built up to over weeks and weeks, isn't it?

Speaker 2 So you can't really simulate that.

Speaker 3 Then you love Dickens, of course, which, and they have spoilers at the start of every chapter, don't they? They tell you what's going to happen.

Speaker 2 They do, yeah, but it's not, I don't, I don't love him like for the thrill, I don't love him for the big reveals at the end of every chapter, although that used to be such a big thing.

Speaker 2 So, spoilers, sort of the idea of a spoiler came about in the mid-19th century, really, and the concept that that might be a really bad thing to reveal the ending.

Speaker 2 But just before that, Dickens was writing the old curiosity shop, and there's, and I'm really sorry if you haven't read this, but I'm afraid you're too late.

Speaker 2 So, there's this little Nell is perilously ill at one point in the old curiosity shop, and you probably know it was released in installments.

Speaker 2 And the instalments got to America after they had been released in Britain.

Speaker 2 And people were so desperate to know what had happened to Little Nell, because they just knew that she was ill, that whenever the British people arrived in the New York docks and started disembarking the ships, they would riot.

Speaker 2 They would literally write at the docks, begging them to tell them what had happened to Little Nell. And they'd be screaming, is she alive?

Speaker 3 Is she alive? Wow. And you actually, you didn't give anything away about whether she was alive or not.

Speaker 2 No, I didn't. You're right.
You're right, she dies.

Speaker 3 We're going to have to wrap up very shortly. Just a couple of really quick things about Game of Thrones.
Yeah, yeah, let's go for it. So this is,

Speaker 3 I can't quite believe this, but so a lot of it's filmed in Northern Ireland because it has the right kind of terrain and stuff.

Speaker 3 According to the LA Times, almost 1% of the population of Northern Ireland has been an extra in Game of Thrones. Wow.

Speaker 3 And there's 1.9 million people who live there.

Speaker 3 I've got a friend who was in Game of Thrones.

Speaker 3 And he was there the whole time, and literally, you cannot see him at all in the movie. Because they just have so many extras, and they're just the battle scenes are so massive.

Speaker 3 So I've seen him dressed as a Dothraki, but we just never saw him on screen at all.

Speaker 3 Believe me, we tried.

Speaker 3 In China,

Speaker 3 it's very common that people will download it illegally. And that's because you can watch it legally, but China disapproves of all sex, violence, and supernatural horror.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 in 2014, one internet person said that, okay, they've cut all the fight scenes, all the nude scenes, all the dragons.

Speaker 3 I guess that's okay if all you want to watch is a medieval European castle documentary.

Speaker 3 That was so good.

Speaker 2 And you're playing it pretty fast and loose with the word documentary, I think.

Speaker 3 I like that initially it was meant to be a short story. No, really? When he started writing it, he thought, this is going to be a great short story.
And then he's like, oh, this is still going.

Speaker 3 What's going on here? And here we are, all these years later.

Speaker 3 One of my favorite things is that during the filming, this is just a little filming fact about it, Amelia Clark, who played Mother of Dragons,

Speaker 3 she was doused in so much fake blood during a scene where she has to eat a horse's heart.

Speaker 3 That during a break, when she went to the toilet, she was so covered in this blood that she couldn't get herself off the toilet.

Speaker 3 She was stuck there.

Speaker 3 yeah, the blood had sort of just congealed.

Speaker 3 If only she'd had a toilet tester.

Speaker 3 Yes.

Speaker 3 Does she die in the end by a sword up the bun by any chance?

Speaker 3 Don't tell me, don't tell me, don't tell me.

Speaker 2 Imagine if the answer was yes.

Speaker 3 That's how they all die.

Speaker 3 That would be amazing. That would be incredible.
There's just one character that you'd never see, but he's just a serial sword up the bun murderer.

Speaker 3 The liquor. He's the only other guy who survived.
Never see him because he's busy licking shit all over.

Speaker 3 Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 3 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 Shriverland, Andy.

Speaker 3 At Andrew Honduran, James, at James Harkin, and Shazinski.

Speaker 2 You can email podcast at QI.com.

Speaker 3 Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing.

Speaker 3 Or you can go to our website, no such thingasofish.com. We have all of our previous episodes up there.

Speaker 3 Yeah. We have tour dates, all the links to our upcoming tour dates, and we also have a few bits of merchandise.
Thanks so much, Stockholm. That has been amazing.
That has been awesome.

Speaker 3 We'll see you again. Good night.

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