242: No Such Thing As The Ancient Monty Python Dynasty

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Hi guys, just before we start this show, we wanted to apologise because last week we released the podcast a day early.

No, we didn't.

You're right.

We didn't, did we?

We didn't do anything wrong.

No.

Who did something wrong?

I did.

Yes, you did, didn't you, Alex?

Do you know what his excuse was initially?

What?

Daylight savings messed him up.

Oh, yeah, that one hour set you an entire day back.

It did, yeah.

I just was really confused.

I spent the whole week thinking it was a day before.

And I had Friday off as well, so it was my Friday.

It was Friday for me.

Right, sorry, it wasn't Friday for everyone else.

And I think you spent that Friday off reading a new book that you've been particularly enjoying, didn't you?

Yes, I did.

What was it?

It's the book of the year 2018.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah,

I've been told, I mean, I'm saying of my own volition, that it's a fantastic book.

I think it's better than Harry Potter.

Wow.

That's, I didn't even, well, no, I did tell him to say that, but he delivered it very well, I thought.

Yeah, it has a gun to my head.

It's not a Alex.

Come on.

I'm just pleased to see you.

That sentence is never delivered where whatever's in the trousers is poking the side animal of someone's head.

Listen, Alex, have you got any favourite bits from the book?

I do, actually.

I have this fact that I just found, which is that Stan Rowinka was knocked out of the Australian Open by Tennis Sandgren.

That's a man called tennis who plays tennis and comes from Tennessee.

No way.

That is amazing.

And that would have been even more amazing if it was delivered with any kind of enthusiasm.

Sorry, sir.

Read the one above it.

Come on.

We're trying to suck it.

Okay, okay.

A woman called Crystal Methven was arrested for possessing Crystal Meth.

Better.

What?

Much better.

Wow.

Where do you get this book?

You can get it in all good bookshops or online, and please buy lots of copies because if there isn't a massive uptake in sales, I think I'm going to be fired.

Yeah, that's true.

There will be firing, literally.

Wow.

Pleased to see you.

Okay, guys.

Thanks so much for doing that, Alex, of your own volition.

And on with the show.

On with the show.

On with the show.

No, you do not get to that show.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from our book of the year 2018 tour in York.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, 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 you James Harkin.

My fact this week is that three times memory champion Ben Pridmore is up to his fourth lucky hat as he forgot where he left the other thing.

Wow.

So these memory tests are easier than we think.

Yeah, so this is from a press release for the 2014 World Memory Championships and they're referring to memory champions and they say reassuringly they also lose their car keys and come back from the shop without the one item they went for or in case of three times world memory champion Ben Pridmore from Derbyshire his lucky hat he knows where he left one of them it was on a train but he forgot to pick it up off the train and the current world memory champion actually who's called Alex Mullen who can memorize the order of a deck of cards in 17 seconds says he always loses his car keys so

but apparently it's just slight it's just a different thing these these people don't really have amazing memories they just have kind of worked on their techniques for having amazing memories, if that makes sense.

Yeah, I read about a thing which is called highly superior autobiographical memory

or HSAM.

And HSAM basically are people who have such detailed memory about their own life that they can tell you the exact day that something happened on at the exact hour.

And not many people have this.

In fact, they announced it when it was done as a sort of press release saying we're studying this new phenomenon.

And they've still found less than 100 people off the back of the publicity that they've got for it.

So you're about to say there are more now?

I thought there were only four actually.

Oh, I think the number, yeah, so it's under 100.

Post stories check out.

These guys, the people who have that are not these memory champions.

So the memory champions, they teach themselves how to count cards and how to do things like that, whereas these guys have got an actual innate talent.

Yes, but what's amazing is they might forget basic things like phone numbers and faces.

So they have a personal biography timeline.

They can tell you what day things happened on.

some of them do remember incredible things though so there's a guy called Bob Betrella and he can remember up to half the days of his entire life in detail as in what he did at every stage of the day and he remembers most conversations he's had in the last 53 years we know which half he can remember is it like I don't know if it's the odd or the even

but in 2006 he lost his phone and he didn't worry because he just had all the numbers in his head yeah that's amazing quite a good way to remember numbers is to lose your phone all the time which I do and I know basically everybody's phone numbers off by heart So it's a chicken or egg thing.

The one problem with this disease is that you also retain the exact feeling and emotion that you had about something in really high detail.

So if you were dumped like 20 years ago, you would still be like, oh, god damn it.

It just wouldn't die as a feeling, yeah.

Do you know that you can erase that though?

Can you?

Yeah, so they should all get this done.

So basically, there are two different parts of your brain that deal with memory.

There's the bit that remembers the actual facts of what happened.

So that's the hippocampus, does that, the cognitive part.

And then the amygdala records the emotions that went with it.

And if you, like, if something bad happens to you, you get dumped, you lose a sock.

If you...

Are you always getting dumped or do you never lose a sock?

Or does it always happen at the same time?

You're dumped.

I don't date people with one sock.

I go out with very pedantic people.

But if you take drugs like propanolol, then it limits the amygdala's ability to build up the proteins that are needed to connect it to that emotion.

And so next time you remember about the lost sock or the tragedy of the dumping, you just won't feel anything.

You'll be like, oh, that happened.

That was bad, wasn't it?

Never mind.

But like you say, James, it's that's extremely rare.

There are either four or a hundred people who have that.

Whereas...

Or somewhere in between.

In between.

Whereas being able to win these memory tests is actually quite easy.

Anyone can do it.

This is the amazing thing that people have sort of re-realized in the last few decades is that training your memory is very easy.

And you basically do this thing called

building a memory palace where there's a specific way you can train yourself by picturing somewhere you know, like you picture your own house.

And then if you've got to remember, let's say, a hundred objects, you just place them in weird places in your house.

So if you have to remember a pineapple and Claudia Schiffer, if you picture her doing a headstand on a pineapple, I don't know why people laugh at that because

I don't know where your minds went.

I think they were laughing at where your mind went.

That's basically the most up-to-date person you could think of, isn't it?

If you're told to remember a series of words,

you can picture the objects.

So you might put, for instance, the pineapple near your front door and then Claudia Schiffer in the front room.

And as you walk through the house, you can see it.

And it's called loci,

which is the plural of locus, meaning location in Latin.

And it was apparently first used by Simonides of Chios.

who was the sole survivor of a roof collapse during a meal.

And he could remember everyone who was in the room and people who had died unfortunately by remembering where they were sat.

And that's according to legend.

And apparently this technique of remembering was thought so dangerous by the church that it was banned in 11th century Europe.

Wow.

It was in fear of it promoting unholy images.

Like Claudia Schiffer with a pineapple, for instance.

Wow.

That must have been so annoying.

I read about Simonides.

And so this awful thing happened.

The roof collapsed on, whatever, 100 guests.

And then he just wanders back in and shows off how well he remembers where they were all sat, didn't he?

Yeah, I can't work out if he was asked to do it or if he had been doing the technique and then it was lucky that the roof collapsed.

I don't think it was lucky though, remember?

No, no, but was it lucky that...

The roof collapsed and he survived because he'd already been memorizing everyone.

Or was he one of these four people who just remembers where everyone was sitting?

No, it was not lucky.

And it also wasn't that he had an amazing memory.

It was that the roof collapsed and then he realized that he remembered them because he realized he had this spatial memory.

Was he doing the place settings for this dinner?

Like, how because I've been to dinner with five people where I don't remember where we were all sitting, maybe he was extremely bored, he had no one to talk.

You know, when you're at a dinner and the person on your left is talking to the other person, the person on your right is talking to the other person, so he was just sat there memorizing where everyone was.

I go to a lot of dinners like that, weirdly.

I can imagine.

So, Dan,

just to go back to the memory champions briefly, this guy Pridmore, I just looked at the things he can do.

So he can memorize a pack of cards in 24 seconds, which is not quite the record.

But he's remembered a binary number.

I think this might have been record-breaking.

So binary number, just ones and zeros.

He remembered every single digit from a 930-digit long sequence in five minutes.

He memorized it and then he got it completely.

There are only zeros and ones, though, so you know.

It's 50-50 guess each time.

You could get unbelievably lucky, couldn't you?

That's true.

Is it

zero?

Zero, yeah.

Actually, I was Googling this guy, and I think he was on Britain Scott Talent this year or last year.

Oh, yeah, he was, yeah, was he?

Yeah, okay.

Doing that, repeating ones and zeros.

We met a guy, James and I years ago, met this guy, an incredible guy called Daniel Tammett, who is a, he has autism, he has Asperger, and he has an incredible ability.

He says it's kind of like his state is almost like what Rain Man, the movie, was, except he has this incredible ability to actually communicate and tell scientists what's going on on the inside.

So he did a few record-breaking number memory things.

He was the guy who learned how to speak Icelandic in a week or something.

Yes, exactly, yeah.

And he has synesthesia as well.

So he memorized pie to something like, you know, 300 decimal places or something like that.

Yeah, but each number, it's only 10 options.

You could get unbelievably lucky too.

But he did it by using synesthesia.

So every number has a colour associated with it, and he memorized the colours.

So

when he had to tell it for the record, he just pictured walking and passing all the colours on the ground of each number.

So he just saw a red and went six and a green.

That's how this memory training works.

It's the same thing.

It's a journey into a visual thing, isn't it?

God, imagine you're like you're about to break the record and suddenly instead of a nine, there's Claudia Schiffer, and you're like, oh, God, what number was that meant to be?

She's definitely a nine.

But I think people's memories used to be better, right?

So in ancient Greece and ancient Rome, like the way the Iliad and the Odyssey were passed down was, we assume, just orally, over hundreds of years.

And, you know, it's this is stuff that would take about 20 hours to read out, I think, the Iliad or the Odyssey.

And yet, people were able to memorize it, and there's some repetition.

But generally, people were really good at that.

And the idea is that when you're remembering one of these stories, you're basically doing that walkthrough, aren't you?

You're walking through the story and you're going to all these different places, and that's how they remember it by using the same technique.

And the person who found that, actually, there's this really cool guy called Milman Parry, who was a Homeric scholar, and he was the person who founded the whole idea of oral tradition.

So, if you ever hear someone talk about the oral tradition of passing stuff down, he invented that.

It was in the 1930s, he was working, and he went to Russia and he found some Slavic people who were still passing down stuff through oral traditions and they had poems that they would recite that were tens of thousands of lines long about, for instance, Franz Ferdinand's assassination or something.

And so he developed this whole theory, but he never got to complete it because he accidentally killed himself when he was unloading a suitcase at his mother-in-law's house and a loaded gun in there fired into him.

Oh, what?

That story took a dark turn.

And a loaded gun in a suitcase.

I know, don't do it.

I don't know how it got through security.

Wow, Wow.

You know who this guy, Pridmore, is worse than in memory terms?

No.

A chimpanzee.

Oh, come on.

Okay, so this is about 10 years ago.

He went up against Ayumu, who was a chimpanzee at Kyoto University, and it was a specific memory task where you had to recall a random series of nine numbers.

They would flash up, and then they would disappear very quickly, and you had to tap them in the right order.

Chimpanzees have photographic memories in that regard only, so they can remember patterns and sequences really well.

They're good at writing 90% of the time.

He could at right 33% of the time.

Wow.

Wow.

Wow.

But if this chimpanzee is clever enough to get into Kyoto University, you must be.

Do you know someone?

Another animal that has a really good memory is the hummingbird.

And I just love to say the hummingbirds have one of the biggest brains proportional to body size in nature.

And they remember the location of all the flowers that are in their general area.

So many hundreds and thousands of flowers.

And how much nectar they had in them.

And they also remember when they last took nectar out of each one, so they remember when they're likely to refill, so they know exactly how full with nectar all the flowers are going to be.

Smart, that's awesome.

We need to move on to our next fact very shortly.

Okay, um,

so you know, your first memory.

What was your first memory, Dan?

Um,

personal, yeah,

no, I don't, I can't actually.

Okay, well, they did a study where they asked 6,641 people what their first memory was, and they said, if it's something that someone might have told you, then don't do that.

If it's something where you might have seen a picture, don't do that.

It has to be something you actually remember.

And it turned out that 38.6% of them remembered things from before the age of two.

And almost a thousand people claim to have remembered things from before they were one.

And people reckon that that's completely impossible.

And actually, you don't really start forming memories that you can remember in adulthood until you're three.

And so it means that about 40% of people have a fake first memory.

Wow, it's amazing.

Also, can we just pause for a moment on the fact that Dan can't remember his first memory?

I mean, do you remember your second memory?

Yeah, yeah, we're on a boat in Hong Kong.

Yeah.

I love the idea of when you get older, memory sort of plays with you a bit.

But also, there's a lot of people in the entertainment industry who's obviously done a lot of drugs in the 70s and 80s, and they've fried their brains.

So memory is sometimes questionable.

And I was reading a story about Aerosmith.

Stephen Tyler did a lot of drugs in the 70s.

And he was sitting in a cafe with Perry who was in his band and they were listening to a song on the radio called You See Me Crying.

It was from that album.

And Stephen Tyler was like, this song is amazing.

We need to cover this.

And Perry went, it's us, fuckhead.

No.

Wow.

Should we move on to our next fact?

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

My fact is that before he was executed, Walter Raleigh delivered a 45-minute improvised speech telling the crowd about his life.

I do like the idea that he was trying to do a bit of a go-slow.

And another important thing that happened

that year

was the person with the axe just sort of kept on being about to slam it down.

I remember something else.

I was one year old, didn't I?

My third memory.

I'll get back to my first, but my third.

Yeah, so this is interesting.

The day we're recording this, the 28th of October, is the day before the 400th anniversary of his execution.

The 29th of October was when it happened in 1618.

And he had an amazing sort of closing ceremony.

Basically.

Basically had a closing ceremony.

Where, you know,

he did a great speech.

He made everyone laugh.

He made people think and cry.

And then he kissed the axe, I think,

and told the executioner to get on with it.

And he really, you know, went with style.

In the morning, he had a good breakfast, a pipe of tobacco, and a cup of wine.

Nice.

I think that's how I'd like to start my closing ceremony.

It sounds like his uncle was too long.

I've been to shows like that, and I feel like people went away saying that actually we were hoping to get the last bus home.

And

someone said, Poor Andy.

Yeah.

I'm all right.

We haven't told you you're going to be executed at the end of this watch.

Yeah, drag it out, mate.

So

there's a new biography out of Waterley called Patriot or Traitor, and it's by Anna Beer, and it's got amazing facts.

Because one thing we do know about is what happened to his head.

Or we think we know that his wife carried it around in a bag for 29 years.

And there's a story from.

Not everywhere she went.

I think largely.

I think it was, yeah.

What, like to the shops for milk in the morning?

Head in a bag.

And they've just found a bag in the attic at his son's former home.

Although, Anna Beer, the biographer, is very skeptical.

She says it's almost definitely not the bag.

So, because she said there's a lot of people at the time that said that the head was put in a leather bag, and this bag is not leather.

There we go.

Why haven't they looked inside the bag?

Just people stroking their chins gathered around this bag.

So, the head was later taken and buried, wasn't it?

Yeah,

But not with the rest of his body, though, right?

No.

Yeah.

Weird, eh?

It was pretty common, wasn't it?

I mean, when you were beheaded, I think you often

gave the head to someone.

And well, quite often the head would be erected on London Bridge, wouldn't it?

And, you know, so that everyone could see this terrible traitor.

And then if that failed, you'd give the head to a loved one, which is nice.

He had such an interesting life in jail because it doesn't sound like people were cross with him.

It actually sounds like quite a nice lifestyle he had in there.

So he had an annual budget of £208, pounds um which he could buy food with um he had his wife and son move in and live with him he had he had he had three servants in jail that was when you were um when you were really rich you were allowed to do that weren't you so you're basically under house arrest yeah but the thing is he was put in there by james i yeah and while he was in the tower of london he tutored the royal children which i think is quite trusting isn't it that he's got no hard feelings yeah and lots of so he invented he was an apothecary as well as a sailor and a courtier and all of this stuff.

So

he invented herbal remedies when he was in there.

And he invented a thing called, oh my goodness, where is it?

Yeah.

It's called the Great Cordial.

And it was a cure for everything.

It had 40 ingredients in it.

You needed deer horn, viper flesh, cinnamon, orange and lemon rind, and 35 other ingredients.

And

lots of people visited asking for medical advice for some.

That's amazing.

There was another thing that he made, which was, well, the recipe is take a gallon of strawberries, put them into a pint of aquivite, which is basically pure alcohol, and then leave them for a while, take the strawberries out, and drink the alcohol.

And that was another thing that kind of cured everything.

Yeah, I'm sure.

Yeah, you can believe that.

He was in prison a lot, though, wasn't he?

So it was good that it was nice for him.

He was kind of

a bad boy.

He probably would have been today.

He was always getting into scrapes.

You know, like a Pete Docherty.

He was like a.

He was the Pete Docherty of his day.

I think he got involved in various spats.

One with the Earl of Oxford

over whether or not the Earl of Oxford should leave a tennis court.

Much like Pete Docherty does today.

It was that kind of thing.

But yeah, he was sent to prison when he got married.

In fact, quite famously, he fell in love with Bess Throckmorton.

And Queen Elizabeth probably fancied him in some way or was attracted to him.

And so was kind of annoyed when he married Bess behind her back.

She was one of her maiden maidens.

Ladies and waiting.

Right.

So she kind of felt betrayed because they'd gone behind her back.

Yeah.

And the amazing thing, and this is where I think those Tudor dresses came in very useful, is that before marrying her, he, like a lad, impregnated Bess Throckmorton.

I don't mean like a lad, guys.

No, he got Beth pregnant and she had to conceal it.

So she stayed at court, like, you know, waiting on Queen Elizabeth the whole time, but managed to conceal that she was pregnant.

And she only went and stayed with her brother two weeks before giving birth.

And then, as soon as she'd given birth, she had to go back immediately.

They had roughs those days, didn't they?

So maybe her ruff just got bigger and bigger and bigger until it was to the ground.

Like the neck thing.

Yeah.

Drooping down over her belly.

Yeah.

What a weird place to start with your disguise for pregnancy.

Andy, we need your help.

I've got an idea, guys.

Are you going to go rub your pregnancy?

I don't know.

I might use my shoe.

We'll make the pointy shoe point upward and upward and upward.

So a lot of people hated him as well, because he was really popular with Queen Elizabeth.

And he was also extremely handsome, apparently.

He was one of the most handsome men in the whole age.

And so...

People had it in for him.

There was a popular song which called him a damnable fiend of hell.

Yeah.

And even his friends didn't really like him either.

Genuinely, a lot of people just really didn't like him.

He then, when Elizabeth died, he got on the wrong side of James I.

Or basically James I didn't want anything to do with him because he was to do with Elizabeth.

And then he got sent to prison because of that.

And then basically the whole opinion of him changed and everyone kind of really liked him after that.

And some people said this is the quickest that anyone has ever gone from being completely hated by everyone to being like roundly loved by everyone.

And when he did that 45 minute speech, straight afterwards, loads of people printed it and started handing it out as like a pamphlet so you could read about this thing because it was all about how he should never have been sent to prison and how contemptible James I was and stuff like that.

So then James I's government started setting about its legal case at tedious length with more pamphlets going out to everyone.

And every time they sent out a new pamphlet, people just went, nah, I'm on this guy's side.

And actually a load of these printouts of his final speech, you can see there's still like a hundred of them out there.

Still being circulated.

That's like, well, he was let free for one last caper.

So he was put in prison in 1603.

Not the food of caper.

That was his final meal.

And everyone said, how humble Sir Walter.

He just wants one caper.

No, but he was in prison for 13 years, 1603 to 1616.

And then he managed to win James I round and he said, look, give me permission to sail to Guiana and have an adventure.

Well, he said basically, can I go and find the lost city of El Dorado?

Yes, that's true.

James I went okay

and unfortunately he did not find the lost city of El Dorado and then he attacked the Spanish who James was trying to suck up to at the time so when he got back he was put in prison again and then when he was on his little caper in Guiana

He was one of the first people I just like this it's not really to do the rest but he was one of the first people to write about the Amazons you know the female warrior people

and he said that he went to a village in Guyana and he was told by the people there that every April the Amazons came to the village and cast lots for the men of the village and then they would have their way with the men like a bunch of lads

and then nine months later they would return all of the male births and keep all of the females.

Wow.

And he wrote about that as if it was completely true.

Is it true as well on his travels that he named

America?

Is that right?

And he named...

He never went to continental North America.

Oh, okay, so Virginia.

He never set foot.

But he organized the trip.

He organised a trip and he named it.

And he named named Virginia after Queen Elizabeth.

Yeah, I'm just going to name a state after your sexual history.

What about it?

Isn't that incredible?

Isn't that insane from a distance?

Just going, Virgin!

It's a good thing that I guess it's not called Slagerdonia or something like that.

Lucky.

The Slagedonia National Park, though.

I mean, it's worth a visit.

Next to Lads, Lads, Ladsville.

Can't believe I've just accidentally brought back Lads.

I feel like society had just about stamped it down.

What have I done?

We're going to have to move on soon to our next fact.

Some stuff about

executions.

Executions were pretty weird back in the olden days.

So

being pressed to death.

was quite odd.

I didn't

like an iron.

So you would just lie down and so this is if you went to court and you asked if you were innocent or guilty and you refused to say either.

You got pressed to death, which is just having stuff stuff gradually piled on top of you, and it could last for days before you actually perished.

But yeah, apparently, often, so people will come and watch this, as you did with executioners.

That's quite a slow one.

That's like watching a test match, isn't it?

Yeah.

But also, how are you,

if stuff's going on top of you, as soon as there's a first layer, what are you watching?

You're just watching a spectator.

You're watching more layers go on top.

It doesn't cover you up, it's a weight.

But apparently, bystanders would often take pity and sit on them.

Oh, really?

Yeah, to speed it up.

That's very wow.

I was reading that in ancient Greece, there was a way of execution witches that you used to take the person and put them when it was in a sort of a boiling sun deserty bit.

And you would...

To the boiling sun deserty bit.

This is during the Monty Python dynasty in ancient Greece, wasn't it?

Yeah, so you would smear them with milk and honey, and then you would leave them to all the stinging insects that were out there.

So if they came back and they would leave you for something like 20 days, if they came back and you were still not dead, they would then take you, dress you up in women's clothing, if this was a man, and they would walk you and everyone would walk with you to the edge of a cliff and then they would just throw you off the cliff.

Then why the women's clothing?

Just one last caper.

There were three men who were executed.

They were called the Cato Street Conspirators, and this was in 1820.

They were called Brunt, Ings, and Thistlewood.

And they really kind of faced down their own death.

So Brunt, he refused to be blindfolded.

He took a pinch of snuff and said some, like a little speech.

James Ings, he started to really, really loudly sing Death or Liberty.

And then Thistlewood said, be quiet, Ings.

We can die without all that noise.

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

My fact this week is that, according to a new scientific study, the single most convincing word a human can use to prove that they are human and not a robot is the word poop.

It's not that robots can't say poop, is it?

No, it works.

So what is it?

What it was is basically this is a sort of what they call a minimal Turing test.

So you got your classic Turing test where the idea is you're trying to find whether or not a computer is a computer and a human is a computer.

So I have a conversation with a computer and it's whether or not I can tell whether it's a computer or not, right?

Yes, exactly.

So in this study, they tried to reduce it from a conversation to a single word.

And what they then asked over 936 people was

specifically 936 people.

Well, weirdly, I thought it was 1,089 people.

Which admittedly is more than that.

This is so weird because I've got four.

Yeah, okay, so yeah.

Somewhere between four and

all the people in the world.

And what they were asked was to say one single word that they thought would represent the word that a human could use to say, I'm human.

And in the version of number of people I have, 936 answered, but only 428 unique words came out of it.

So it was a lot of doubling up on words.

They then took the 10 most popular words and in a sort of World Cup setting, like a football World Cup, they paired each word against each other and saw which ones came out as the best.

And the single one word...

Sorry, by

best.

What you mean is, so they showed both to humans, even though they were both human words, they showed them both to a single human and that human said, which one of them was actually from a computer.

Actually, neither of them were, but they were like, I think that the human one is poop.

Or I think the human one is love.

Or I think the human one is pineapple or whatever.

I see.

So it was humans working out which word they thought was a human.

They were picking what they thought was most likely chosen by a human.

Exactly.

What's most likely machines?

And the ten words, the ten finalists, were love, please, mercy, human, compassion, empathy, robot,

clever.

They're clever.

They wouldn't pick the word robot, would they?

That's what they're expecting us to be.

Banana.

They wouldn't think of banana.

Alive, and poop.

And then and poop came out as the winner.

Poop's the number one word.

I guess it's because is poop just like too stupid a word to think that anyone would program it into a robot?

Is it like if we're creating robots, let's make them forget our cock-ups?

But if robots listen to this podcast.

This is the problem.

The scientific paper has been uploaded to the internet, so they now will have learnt it if there is an AI.

So we're done.

We're done.

We just need to look for the human-looking robot that's just going poop, poop, poop, poop, poop, poop.

The next terminator will be a lot less scary, won't it?

So robots and poo have been related in the past, haven't they?

Yeah, in fact, one of the earliest robots was a pooing robot.

No.

I don't think we've mentioned this before, but this is in the 1700s.

And a French engineer called Jacques de Valcanson or Valcanson created this robot duck.

And he did it to show off the fact.

He created a robot duck that you could feed, and then it would process the food in its stomach, and it would poo it out the other end.

It was gold-plated, it could quack, it could like sit up really high on its legs, on its tiptoes, it could drink, and he would feed it grain, and then it would pass through its stomach, have chemicals added, and come out of its anus all digested as a digested thing.

1700s.

Yeah, it was later revealed that it was a duck.

It was a duck, he'd cover the duck in gold-plating.

It was incredibly cruel, actually.

It was revealed that

he was just making it up.

He fed this robot one thing, and then he had another compartment that spat out other stuff.

And this is only discovered a century later when a clockmaker found this robot shitting duck in a cupboard somewhere

and looked at it.

And then bizarrely, it ended up in the hands of Houdini.

But yeah,

this is one of the earliest robots.

And this is a thing that I think scientists had to do quite a lot.

So it wasn't really his fault that he'd been a bit fraudulent.

It was to impress your patrons, who were the ones paying you in order to make genuine scientific discoveries.

You had to do impressive stuff, like make a robot duck have a poo.

And so he did that.

But actually, from the 17th century, we have managed to get to the 21st century, and we have now invented robots that do poo.

So this is the EcoBot 3.

And it's made by Bristol Robotics Laboratory in the UK.

What's wrong with these scientists?

I like the idea that a number three is a robot poo.

Which one have you done?

I think I've done a number three this time.

I've switched sides.

That's the cheering test.

That's how you find out.

You were in the long ones having a number three.

Robots!

No poop!

Sorry, go on.

So, EcoBot, number three, yeah, there's not much more to say.

Basically, it picks up leaves and it picks up detritus from the ground and it turns it into energy.

And then it actually does make, and you can see videos of it.

Or if you really want to, you can see it kind of making little poos.

Wow.

Is this the one that the there's one that was made in the last couple of years where they think it could be used to clean up the oceans at some point?

Basically a robot that is able to feed itself.

Because at the moment they have to be powered by humans.

So it's actually a really good idea.

If you can get a robot that can just use organic material to power itself then you don't need batteries anymore.

But at the moment it's just a robot that sits in a bath and just about the organic matter gives it enough energy to open its mouth again to swallow more organic matter as well, isn't it?

It's a degrading life for future robots who are looking back.

It's going to be a really embarrassing part of their history.

There is another robot poo connection.

It's a semi-connection.

So there are farms where even now they've deployed robots in the hen houses and they're sort of flat low robots.

They look a bit like those vacuum cleaning robots, you know, the room bursts, those things.

They're sort of a big disc.

And they move through the hen house pushing birds out of the way

like bullies, basically.

But this is a thing that farmers normally have to do because you have to keep the birds slightly well exercised when they're in a barn.

So every so often you just walk through moving them all out of the way and they shuffle around a bit and they

stretch their legs.

But this robot has now taken that role.

And the other thing it solves is it solves the problem of floor eggs, which is when birds lay eggs not in the assigned nesting areas.

Sometimes they just lay an egg on the floor.

If this robot's around, the birds are so freaked out by it that they don't lay any floor eggs.

So it's cruel and kind.

I was on Twitter and I found this one tweet, which is kind of slightly related.

Do not, under any circumstances, let your Roomba run over dog poop.

Because if that happens, it will spread the dog poop all over every conceivable surface within its reach, resulting in a house that resembles a Jackson Pollock poop painting.

Bit of public service.

Yeah.

There was a news story about that.

Was there?

Yeah, this couple woke up in the morning.

Their house was just, as you say, poo everywhere.

And her husband immediately said, I think the rumba must have gone under control tonight.

To run out and buy a rumba and a dark

this is about about the Turing test, right?

And robots overtaking us maybe one day.

And people keep on trying to subject robots to the Turing test,

which has been going it's actually called the Leubner Prize.

I think it's been going since about 1991, which is where people compete, they make robots, and they compete to see if their robots can convince the judges that they're actually human.

And still, no one's been able to come anywhere near close.

So, the reigning world champion for it, which has still never convinced anyone that it's a human, it's just come kind of the closest, is this robot called Mitsuku, who claims to be an 18-year-old girl from Leeds, and who is

don't really know why.

And she's won four times running.

But she was made by this guy called called Steve Warsik, and he was just a techno DJ who had, like,

he wanted to be mixing tunes online.

And he was uploading all this dance music that he was making and techno music.

And he developed this kind of complimentary teddy bear chat bot just for the site as like an extra thing.

And he realized everyone way, way preferred the chat bot to any of his music.

And so he focused on that, and he's gone on to massively win this.

So online, you can talk to Mitsuku.

And I thought I'd give it a go to see if I could tell if she was a robot or not.

I mean I knew she was but.

So she said, how are you?

And I said, I'm pretty good.

How's things there?

And she said, I know you are good.

And I said, how do you know that?

And she said, because everybody knows things about themselves.

And then I said,

but you said you knew it about me, not you.

And then she said, what I said earlier is irrelevant.

irrelevant.

And then I said, actually, if I'm trying to work out if you're a robot, then I'd say that weird things like that are quite relevant, actually.

And she said, yes, I am a robot.

So I think I kind of worked out then at that stage what the kind of flaw in Mitsuki was.

So I reloaded it and she said, how are you?

And I said, are you a robot?

And she said, I certainly am.

I actually, I've just remembered, I've spoken to Mitsuku as well.

Yeah, I did a, and this is, this is bizarrely, it's online, I think it's on YouTube.

I interviewed not only Mitsuku, but the creator, what's his name?

Not of Mitsuku, but Lübniks.

Steve Rorsik.

No, no, the other one, who the prize is named for.

Oh, the Leubner Prize.

Yeah, Lerbner.

So I interviewed Lerbner, Mitsuku, and like three other chat bots over a Skype.

They were all in different locations, and we had this big chat with each other for like half an hour.

It was so silly.

Wow.

Was it coherent or was it?

No, that was not coherent.

You know what I'm like?

Like, the chat bots are like, I don't think this guy's real.

This is fucking weird.

I don't think a robot would say the boily hot, deserty place.

Let's make our excuses and get out of here.

I'm going for a number three.

I'll be at another.

You know that Zuckerberg now has his own AI sort of HAL, 2001 Space Obviously HAL.

He has it in his own house that he...

Like an assistant kind of thing.

Yeah, so it runs the house.

So it's, you know, turn the light.

Kind of like what Amazon Echo and so on has become.

It's called Jarvis, which is actually a dedicated name to...

Does anyone remember it?

Iron Man.

Iron Man, exactly.

So it's called Jarvis, but he has it voiced by, and he asked the internet for suggestions, Morgan Freeman.

Oh, wow.

Morgan Freeman is the official Jarvis voice for his house, recorded specifically for his AI, we can turn the lights on, you know, kind of thing.

That was absolutely uncanny.

That is unbelievably unimaginative of him.

He just went for the obvious voice.

I would have gone for Um Whitticom.

It's imaginative.

You know, there's a robot psychiatrist in the world.

It's a woman called Dr.

Joanne Pransky, and she's been a robot psychiatrist since 1986.

And she has actually trademarked the term robot psychiatrist, so she's the only one who's allowed to be one now.

But yeah, the reason she became one is because she said she knew that one day someone would take a robot to see a shrink.

So she was the formal psychiatrist of Val, who was a robo-receptionist developed in 2004.

And she went through this long email correspondence.

So sometimes therapy is done over email.

And apparently, she counseled Val on issues related to humans, the workplace, and her future goal of becoming a lounge singer.

Poor old Val.

That's very cool.

I really thought you meant that she was a robot who performs the role of of a psychiatrist.

That's what I thought at first.

Rather than somebody who psychiatrizes for

so because that would be quite effective because you could just program it to say hmm

No, I did that that was the first ever robot who talked back to you and had conversations called Eliza and she was developed in the 60s and you can still have conversations with Eliza online So they put her up online now and she is not a good therapist

So well first of all the website says imagine you're a really depressed or anxious person and then type your question in so I just like made some stuff up so I I said, my earlobes are so big I get paranoid about them when I go out in public.

Really?

I do.

And she replied, never, ever.

She showed she wasn't a member of all saints.

I said, nobody loves me.

And she said, please continue.

Wow.

Please continue is a stock and trade line.

That's good.

It is, isn't it, I suppose.

Yeah.

I was hoping for a little bit more of a sympathetic response.

We're out of time.

So humans, we do better on tests if we are being watched by robots that we perceive as cruel.

Okay.

So

it's not a very comforting result, but basically they tested different groups of people.

They tested one big group of people, I guess.

And they They both had a little conversation with a chat bot and the the chat bot was either quite friendly to them or said things like, I do not value friendship, and had a slightly mean face.

And

all the people taking the test were then asked to complete a task, and the ones who were being watched in the corner of the screen by the cruel robot worked faster and made fewer mistakes.

Wow, really?

Wow.

Is that because you're not distracted by trying to socialize with them?

I think it's because you're absolutely terrified.

Yeah.

I'm afraid so, yeah.

I do like that as a response.

In conversation, next time I'm trapped in one, I'll just say, I do not value friendship.

Enjoy this party.

We're going to have to move on shortly.

I have one last fact.

Yeah, yeah, go for it.

Okay.

The final proof fact is about a suburb in Madrid, which was called Brunette, and it was trying to deal with dog poo.

And they had an incredible method of dealing with it.

When the owner didn't pick up after the dog, they have volunteer detectives all over the town.

And the volunteers would spy on dog walkers.

They spotted a dog walker not picking up after their dog, and they would just approach them and get into a conversation and say, Oh, he's a cute dog, what's his name?

And they'd get the dog's name, and then all the dog's names are in a register because when you buy a dog in that suburb, you have to register it.

And then they would pick up the poo and mail it to the owner of the dog.

This happened in a suburb in Madrid in 2013.

So they and they would get a gift box.

Wow, if you live in Madrid, do not buy a Roomba.

The mayor said it improved things massively by 70%.

And it just word got around that you'll get poo sent to you in the post.

And the previous method they had was having a lifelike remote-controlled dog poo and using it to follow around dog owners.

That's amazing.

That detective, that is a rough gig to get as a detective, isn't it?

If you've read Arthur Conan Doyle and you've fantasized about being Sherlock Holmes your whole life.

It's what happens when you like you upset the chief is going, I'm firing you back down to doppoo.

Give me your gun, your badge, and your scoop.

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Time for our final fact of the show, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that if you shake your keys at a moth, it thinks you're a bat and drops out of the sky.

It's just.

Wow.

And I have to say, so I found this out a few days ago, and I've been desperately looking for moths and I haven't

been carrying my keys everywhere and I haven't seen one.

So I haven't been able to try it.

But apparently this is definitely true.

And it's because

so bats track down their prey by using echolocation.

So they send out sound signals that bounce off the things that they want to eat and that tells them where they are.

And moths have learned to detect these bat noises.

And the sounds that your keys make when you shake them, they emit a very high frequency sound that we can't hear.

So as well as making the key shaking sound, they're also emitting the higher-frequency sound that the moths can hear that sounds exactly like a bat when it's trying to eat them.

So, what they do is they plummet into the ground, or they have various evasive mechanisms.

So, they do loop the loop sometimes to try and get away.

That sounds cool.

Yeah,

if you can make a moth do a loop-the-loop on command, yeah.

That is a Britain's got talent, I would watch

James Harkin and his amazing moth,

But yeah, that's it.

It's very amazing.

You know, you glossed over it, but the fact that if you wave keys at any of us, you're going to make sounds that we can't hear.

I find that amazing as well.

That's...

Yeah, it's going to deafen all the moths in the York area.

So the bats versus moths is the great battle of our time, I think, isn't it really?

Very much so.

Because they've just been trying to out-evolve each other for so many tens of thousands, if hundreds of thousands of years.

And as soon as one overtakes, the other one overtakes back.

So moths didn't used to have ears a long time ago.

And then moths have evolved ears because they realized that bats were letting off these sounds and they needed ears to detect them.

And so 50,000 species of moth have ears.

They have them in various places on their belly or their legs or in their mouth.

Some of them.

It sounds like a meeting where it's like,

do you know what's screwing us up with these bats?

No ears.

What are we going to do?

We're going to get ears.

In the normal place?

Everywhere.

A thing about deaf moths,

actually, is that there is a parasitic mite that loves living in moths' ears, and it's the only place they can live, but ingeniously, they're never found in both ears.

And so

why is that?

Is it to keep the host alive?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So one mite will go into one ear.

It doesn't matter, left or right.

But as soon as it's gone into one, it lets off off a bunch of pheromones, telling its other mites to go into that ear.

Because if the other mites go into the other ear, the moth goes deaf, it gets eaten by a bat, all the mites are dead.

Plan failed.

Caper ends.

That is really

cover.

So the next thing you do after you've evolved ears, and then the bats kind of get wise to that, you evolve echolocation.

And that means that you can kind of jam their signal.

So their single signal comes across, but you can send other echolocation at the bat, and it confuses it.

And there's quite a lot of species of moth that do that.

A lot of them do it by rubbing their genitals on their abdomen.

A convenient excuse, if

caught?

Oh, I thought I heard a bat.

There is.

Wait, sorry, what does that do?

It scrambles there.

So So basically, you're a bat and you're sending your signals across, but now you're getting weird kind of signals that aren't the ones that you're sending back.

So that kind of confuses you.

Okay, so it's not like you don't want to eat something that's fiddling with itself.

So

there are some called tiger moths, and

they make sounds which help bats to find them.

This is very weird.

But the reason that they do it is because when they're caterpillars, they feed on a lot of toxic plants, and these these toxins remain in their bodies after they grow up and after they turn into moths.

So they make a sound to say to bats.

They basically run around shouting, I'm disgusting, I'm disgusting.

And then there are other moths which do impressions of tiger moths.

Even though they are not toxic themselves, they're bluffing, thinking that the predators won't want to eat them because they think that they are.

So that's actually the next level after the playing with yourself doesn't work anymore.

Then you go into mimicry, which is what you're saying.

And then you go into the final thing that they found quite recently, which is your tail structure.

And that is basically they've got these bats that have got these really long tails and then they've got a wiggly bit at the bottom.

And the bat's infrasound comes at it and then comes back, but it only really reflects off the tail bit.

So it thinks that it's a much smaller moth than it actually is.

And the bat goes and eats the tail, but leaves the rest of the moth free.

Oh, wow.

I think that's where we're currently at in bat versus moth.

Wow.

Do you know how they found out the tail thing, though?

No.

It's classic scientists.

They took a bunch of moths with long tails and they just cut some scissors and they cut them into various shapes.

They were okay.

They just, well, they got preyed on much more easily.

And then they got a bunch of moths with short tails and they glued on kind of tail-shaped stuff to them and found out that they lived much longer.

So actually, if you want to do a moth a favour, you can cut out a little bit of extra tail and glue it onto them and then they'll escape the bats.

I don't think, I think I'll just stick to helping old ladies across the road.

We're going to have to wrap up shortly.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Do you know?

I actually didn't know this, but no one knows why moths are attracted to light.

I just find that bizarre.

It's the only thing they really do in front of us.

And we've got no idea what they're doing.

There's a theory about the moon, but that's been disproved in the last few years.

So science thinks that's not the deal.

There's one other theory, theory, which is that the light that's given off by female moths' pheromones.

So, I find that amazing in itself, that female moths give off these pheromones, which slightly glow.

But the light that's given off by them is quite similar to the light that's given off by candles and light bulbs, but it's the same frequency but not the same wavelength.

So, we're not sure.

Basically, why are they all smashing into light bulbs?

This was the problem I had when I went on Britain's got talent, actually, because

there's lights everywhere.

I went through about 300 moths, I just kept flying into the lights.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Lads Lads Lads.

Andy?

At Andrew Hunter M.

James?

At James Harkin and Jaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

You can get us on our group account at no such thing.

You can also go to our Facebook page, no such thing as a fish, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

We have everything up there from our tickets to upcoming dates.

Upcoming dates.

Just a list of dates.

We've got links to our upcoming tour dates.

We have,

you can get our new book, which everyone here in the audience has.

Woo, this is

not going well.

Can I get you out of this with our prize?

Yes, we have a prize to give away, yes.

Okay, so the best fact that we found, also you guys sent in, and the fact is, my dad, not my dad, the dad of the person who wrote in, my dad once held the world distance record for leapfrogging, two-person team.

They managed nearly 17 miles

from Hull to Wibonsea, East Yorkshire.

Set in the early 80s, I think they were probably drunk.

Wow.

Who was that?

Who was it?

Up there.

Well, we only have your word for that.

So come to us for the buck afterwards.

Come to the front of the queue and we'll test that it's you because I assume it's genetic, isn't it?

Lead to you.

Exactly.

Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

Thank you so much, York.

That was so much fun.

Good night.

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