No Such Thing As Wasted Material 2017

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Hi, Aroy.

Happy in the middle bit between Christmas and New Year.

Oh, very nice.

Thank you very much.

I'm trying to get a range of greeting cards out.

It's going frazzling.

No one wants to buy greetings cards after Christmas.

Very weird.

Yeah.

Dan and Andy here.

We just want to quickly let you know what you're about to listen to.

This is a compilation of all the outtakes from the whole of 2017.

Every podcast, we always chop away a lot of stuff, and James has been secretly collecting it to put together for this big bumper edition 78-minute-long episode.

78 minutes.

78 minutes of outtake.

I could watch a short children's film or a very, very long episode of Frasier in that time.

Frasier made 78-minute-long episodes?

I don't believe so, but it was the only thing I could think of that's shorter than than 78 minutes.

So what we're saying is, please do enjoy it, unless there's a weird Fraser marathon on, in which case we give you license to go and watch that instead.

We hope you enjoy this.

Have a wonderful new year when it comes.

I will see you then.

All right, on with the outtakes.

I don't have to watch Fraser.

Did you guys know that anteaters, who have obviously famously long tongues, have got very, very few taste buds?

Really?

Yeah.

What does one taste bud every meat or something?

They can hardly taste what they're eating.

Well, they're eating shitty ants and termites and stuff.

They're eating ants and they occasionally swallow dirt as well, is the other thing.

Oh, really?

So it may be an advantage.

You don't need to be a.

Because all ants are going to taste the same, right?

They're going to taste vinegary.

Oh.

Yeah, they are.

Because they're full of formicas.

That's so antist.

Disagree.

100% disagree.

Because there are some of those ants, and they, do you remember, they swallow honey

and they hang upside down, and they're sort of honey repositories.

Imagine how much you must think you've lucked out when you get the odd honey-tasting ants.

Such a relief.

They have, well, pangolins, which look quite similar, have their tongues attached to their pelvis.

I don't know if Andy's got the same thing because they have such long tongues and they start at their pelvis.

So I think their tongues are.

So they're attached at the back.

They're attached to the tongue.

On the inside of them.

There's no way their tongue comes out and then sweeps around.

That's what I was thinking.

Yeah.

Hang on.

Yeah.

It can't be all tongue all the way back.

It's all tongue, all the way back into a pangolin.

Their tongues are longer than their bodies are.

What's the point of that?

So you can, I guess, manoeuvre it all the way down the tongue and once it's back at the pelvis the food's practically there.

But you barely need a digestive system.

I don't know.

They've just, that's the truth.

That's amazing.

Isn't it true that I think woodpeckers have them all the way through back into their skull and they wind around their skull?

I've seen like an x-ray of them, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that helps cushion their skull when they're pecking, doesn't it?

As well as being a useful place to store their tongue.

Do you know what the longest tongue is?

And this is relation to body size.

It must be this pangolin.

I think.

No, go on.

Go for it, no.

Have a bat.

Is it a bat?

Yes, it is.

Yeah.

Oh, nice.

It's a tube-lipped nectar bat.

And its tongue can go to 1.5 times the length of its actual body.

Wow.

So that's the longest tongue in proportion to body size.

Exactly.

Enamel.

I know that it latter.

It's a longer for that bat.

Oh do you?

Yeah.

Anora fistulata.

How on earth did you remember that?

It's weird that with it having such a massive tongue and the tongue being 1.5 times bigger than the whole thing that they chose to name it after the lip.

Yes.

Yeah.

That's true.

But maybe they didn't see the tongue for a long time.

Maybe they're like, whoa, look at that lip.

Almost no one had ever seen the tongue because it's always in in these massively long flower noses.

What am I saying?

Flower noses?

The flower noses.

The flower nose.

It's a trumpet of a flower.

So did they think that the bat's face was a flower?

The bat that's got the head of a flower.

It's really weird.

Do you know when an elephant's charging you, when you should be nervous?

It's running towards you very fast.

Is it only about 30 centimetres before it hits you?

You panic.

It's not that.

If an elephant has its trunk out, this is according to...

Whoa, what is the...

how can it have its trunk in?

If it's up its bump.

If it's like coiled up, I guess, and like not in use.

Yeah, it's if its trunk is like da is facing downwards or coiled up or looks relaxed.

It's always out though, isn't it?

It's always out, so it's never sucked into its face, yeah.

If it's like lifting up and it's doing like one of those like charge of the light brigade like fanfares out of it, like

and charging at you, that's when you know it's gonna attack.

No, it's not gonna attack then when it's doing the charge of the light brigade.

So when it's got its trunk protruding out towards you, you can absolutely relax.

You're going to be fine.

Apparently, that's a bluff.

And it's when the trunk's down and relaxed that they're doing a proper charge.

I've never seen an elephant with its trunk straight out like a...

Well, that's because they genuinely want to trample you down, James.

Have you seen that?

I've never even seen a picture of that.

I haven't really.

Running with your fist out, ready to hit someone.

You very rarely get to photograph an elephant charging from the side on, don't you?

Normally, human-elephant contact is rare enough, especially on Safari, that there wouldn't be another group of people photographing the elephant from the side.

So you're saying he saw it face on and it just looked like an elephant without a trunk because it was pointing straight out.

That's exactly what I'm saying.

I do see that, but I'm just surprised I've never come across a picture like that if it's something that happens.

I'm surprised I didn't look at Google Image it as soon as I read the facts.

So what's the problem?

If the trunk is stretched out and it's bluffing, will it just get up to you and then there'll just be an awkward height?

Get up to you and then nozzle you friend in a friendly manner.

Shove its trunk in your mouth.

Just thinks you're stressed.

It's just to scare you away.

Oh, okay.

I think it would work for me.

Even if I remembered this conversation and thought, Hannah said that that's not gonna hurt me.

Imagine if I've got this the wrong way around and how guilty I'm gonna feel.

Well, I always forget the numbers.

I always think 99% of elephant charges are bluffs.

And then I think, or is that 99% of shark attacks?

And actually, only 4% of elephant charges are bluffs.

And then it's also like, but the black bear and the brown bear, but then brown bears can be black, and then which one is wiggle.

It's just a nightmare.

Yeah.

Just run away from them all.

I think he's always saying.

Just live in a city.

Have you heard of Hobart's funnies?

No.

No.

Good, great.

So these were tanks that were used in D-Day.

And there was this whole range, like a range of superheroes, basically.

They all each had their own special superpower.

Were they named funnies because they're unusual?

Yeah, pretty much.

That was a sort of nickname they were given.

There was one whose sole job was to carry massive bundles of sticks.

Ah, fash skis.

Fashkis, exactly.

It was called the Faskine Carrier.

And it basically, if you came to a ramp that was too steep or a hole in the ground that you needed to fill in, it just dropped a few massive bundles of...

And these were enormous bundles of sticks.

And that's where the name fascism comes from.

Exactly.

So it was using the Fascine Carrier to defeat fascism.

Yeah, clever.

They were the first ones, actually.

The first armoured vehicle launched bridges were the ones that just carried a big bunch of sticks and then tipped them into a ditch.

It kind of seemed very scary if those were the first things the Germans saw on the horizon.

The least scary robot wars robots.

But you would think that the

like in the end of Macbeth, spoiler alert, the trees, the trees are coming towards you.

Oh yeah, that's true.

Yeah, I guess any German soldiers who had done English PCSE

would have been frightened.

Did you guys know that, and I'm not sure that this is true, so I'm sort of asking, as well as saying, that in France, camembert is the translated equivalent of our pie chart.

It is.

Yeah.

Is it?

Yeah.

Camembert.

Really?

Camembert charts.

I mean, look at this camembert.

for a pie chart.

That's awesome.

Yeah, and that's because the correct way to eat camembert is to slice it into pie shapes, really.

And then the people who think Theresa May would be a better prime minister get one bit of the cheese.

They get a tiny little slither of cheese.

And the don't knows just get a massive amount of cheese.

And actually on Reddit, I think it was this year, it was late last year, they had a big argument where somebody showed a picture of a camembert that their mum had cut.

And their mum had cut it in not a slicy way.

And this was a French lady, and they were all saying she should be kicked out of the country for that.

I've got to say, I can't, I wouldn't cross my mind not to slice it up like a pie.

Who's doing it in a slicy way?

That's insane.

This lady.

Well, this lady.

Well, they didn't kick her out, I don't think, in the end.

But someone said, oh, there's a cause for loss of nationality.

And another commenter said, take her to the British border immediately.

I actually cut off the top of the camembert, the whole thing.

Just the mold.

Just eat that.

Because that is just solid bacteria, isn't it?

Basically, I think the rind of the camembert, the edible round, a solid mat of mould.

And then the bacteria is the little brownie bits, and you should have some brown bits on it, but not too much.

Like a banana.

Yes, like a banana.

It depends what you like in a banana.

Also, it probably depends what you like in a camembert.

No, this is objective facts.

So, I've been to Pompeii.

I went last year, and there was a lot of brothels there that they found which were still standing.

In particular, there's one called Lupina, and the Latin for that is she-wolf, which was slang for prostitute.

And it was two levels, had five rooms, and you know that it's a brothel because on the walls, there were still depictions of people in various positions having sex.

And they think the idea behind that was it was almost like porn material to be watching while you were having sex.

It was the equivalent of having a pornographic movie on in the background for them.

Isn't that weird?

They had porn on their walls in the brothel.

It might have been like one of those menus where if you don't speak the language, you just point at the thing you want.

But yeah, no, it's an extraordinary place.

Highly recommend.

You go there.

They also, one of the things I find amazing about Pompeii, or it might be Herculaneum, which was the place nearby that the same thing happened to it, is the scrolls that were found.

So 800 scrolls were found, perfectly preserved, as everything there was, and it's you know, one of the ancient world's best surviving libraries, most extensive surviving libraries, and we can't read it, or we can't read a huge amount of it, because they're in such a delicate state that we can't touch them.

So, we've got all these rolled-up scrolls, and we don't know what they say, and they're sitting in museums and stuff.

And we're just developing the X-ray technology to try and read bits of them, and they've just found out that they use lead sometimes in the ink, and now x-rays can see what the lead shapes are and work out what they read.

But how annoying is is that?

Wouldn't you just, if I saw that, I'd try and unroll one in that case.

Oh, well, they did try, but every time they tried, they would just fall apart.

Oh, so they did sample that a few times.

Yeah, they tried it and they would fall apart.

And then I read an article, I don't know how this would work, but one time they said they tried to open it and it exploded.

Don't know how that works.

Wow.

But yeah, this X-ray stuff is really interesting, isn't it?

Because they can virtually unroll scrolls, which is just unbelievable.

It's so cool.

So they kind of get the x-ray scan of it and then they go, okay, now we're going to take off the first layer.

And they can unroll it and they can see what's on the next layer, which is just outrageous.

Yeah, that's super

amazing.

How many scrolls do you think they ruined that turned to dust in their hand before they went, you know what, this isn't working?

I would have stopped after about fifty.

In the 1930s, sociologist Norbert Elias walked around Europe with his shoelaces untied to see what people would say to him.

No.

He did.

What was his real name, though?

Oh, very good.

Yeah.

Hello, good.

That sounds like alias.

Oh,

that's good.

He found that in England, most old men warned that he might fall over.

When he was in Germany, the older men would look at him with contempt.

Wow.

And he was walking around a Spanish fishing village with his shoelaces untied, and he felt that he was being warned that his laces were untied, but he felt that it was helping him to be included in the village community.

Really?

Yeah, I think I read about this guy.

There's something about, I don't know what country, he was walking and a bunch of girls were giggling at him.

Little girls were giggling at him because of the untying of the shoelaces.

And then he tied them up, and that really transformed how he felt about his connection to the places that he was in when he realized who he was.

Yeah.

That's weird because if I saw someone walking around with their shoelaces untied, I think my instinct would be to go and try and step on one of them to trip them over.

Did we not find that?

Happened a lot.

Or to wait until they stop and then to tie them together.

So So definitely.

Oh, wow, yeah.

If you've got enough time for that, that's the dream.

Yeah.

Do you guys know about the orangutan that can tie knots?

And we don't know why.

And this sounds like it's a bullshit animal fact, but it's genuinely true and it's bizarre.

So there's this orangutan called Watana.

She was born, I think it's a she, yeah, she was born in 1995 in Belgium, and this guy called Chris Hertzfeld has written a book about her, but she ties knots and no one's ever taught her to do it.

And she just find if she finds two threads or two vines or whatever, then she ties them together.

I think she's trying to escape.

Is she kept in a very high zoo?

She's never tried to climb up out of them or hang herself from them.

She's sorry.

Are you quoting here?

That got dark very quickly.

That was my instinct when he said she was trying to escape, or I realized that I'd got it wrong.

Escape from the monotony of life.

There was an article in the New York Times from 1976 which reports an occasion where there was an exhibition game of football between a team from China and a team from Athens.

And over the loudspeaker, a tune started blaring, and both teams stood up and put hands on hearts because they assumed it was the other one's national anthem, and it turned out it was a toothpaste advert.

Everyone in the stadium stood up and respectfully.

Do you know what the rules are about singing the anthem?

The government have said that you should dress appropriately, appropriately.

Right.

Also, that you should stand still.

Right.

And that you should be full of energy.

Okay.

That's interesting.

Yeah.

Stand still and full.

So you're ready to go, basically.

I think you have to be quivering, basically.

It's not still.

It's.

No, you're right.

You're right.

I don't know how do you.

As soon as they finish, everyone's just going to explode in some kind of.

Yeah.

Are you not allowed to whisper during it?

You're not allowed to talk on the phone during it.

But lots of countries have weird rules, don't they?

That's true.

I think the Philippines, in the Philippines, their national anthem has to be between 100 and 120 beats per minute.

The Star Spangled Banner, when that was first written, it was supposed to be conspirito, which means with spirit.

Oh, I thought you meant that it was meant to be called.

No.

Conspirato.

It sounds like a magician.

Yeah.

And also, the God Save the Queen, George V, he thought he was an expert because he'd listened to it so many times.

And he said,

It was called God Save the King, then as well.

Just desperate pleading for some kind of skill.

How many times have you listened to it?

That is very, he is like, I'm the person who has to hear this more than any of you.

So please, can you sing it right?

But if he sings it, it's called God Save Me.

And

that doesn't scam.

God Save Our Gracious Meek.

It was like Prince Philip's joke.

He jokes that he's the world's best plaque unveiler.

Oh, yes.

And there's a great cut of him saying it repeatedly.

Still, it's still a good joke.

Anyway, he said that the opening section, you should set your metronome to 60, and then later on it goes down to 52.

Well, that's pretty slow.

What sort of is everyone loses energy?

No, no, that's always that big ending of an American national anthem.

No, you're talking about God Savo.

I'm talking about God Savoo.

So the American National Anthem was supposed to be quite, you know, conspirato with spirit was supposed to be kind of quite upbeat and whatever.

Of course, these days, if you watch the Super Bowl, you can bet on how long it's going to be, and the average is usually about one minute, 50 or something, I think.

Is that slow?

Yeah.

So they put loads of extra notes in, like they're on American Idol, don't they?

Other things that are being played at the wrong tempo.

Oh, yeah.

A lot of Beethoven.

So this is a theory that Beethoven's metronome was broken.

That just sounds like a sick burn from a reviewer, I don't think.

Wait, so he wrote his songs at the wrong tempo?

No, he wrote them at the wrong tempo because his metronome is wrong.

So this is some research that's been done by...

By Brahms.

You start playing, like, whoa, this is fast?

No, no, no, that's not.

So he played it at a tempo that doesn't sound fast.

But hevan went through a phase of writing pieces of music that are unplayably fast.

So between 1850 and 1820, the timing that he writes, the time that he says he should play it in, is like unplayably fast.

It's impossible.

So no one plays it at that tempo.

And everyone everyone thinks, well, why on earth did he write this?

It sounds awful.

It's frantic and mad.

And it turns out this guy called Peter Stadlin, who's a pianist, did some in-depth research and some mathematical analysis and worked out that the metronome he had was weighted slightly wrong.

So Beethoven was just writing down the wrong stuff because his metronome was ticking wrong.

So when his metronome was saying, Yeah, you're playing at sixty beats a minute, he was actually playing at ninety beats a minute.

That is brilliant.

That's amazing to know he wrote to a metronome.

I I'd never thought of that.

Well, he actually owned the first ever metronome, I think, or he owned a metronome that was made by the inventor of the metronome.

He was really excited by this new technology.

Turns out it wasn't actually quite developed for the year.

Yes, yeah.

I suppose it's plausible that you could have a

pianist who writes music and all of his keys are out of tune.

And then when he writes it down, it's just a completely different tune to what he thought it was.

I think that's like every single time Beethoven thought he was writing happy birthday or something, but then his keys just kept going out of tune.

Do you think Beethoven's 9th is actually happy birthday?

Just miswritten.

I don't really think that.

There's a really creepy ant colony that they've just discovered in Poland, which lives in an old Soviet nuclear bunker.

And basically, there's this ants' nest on top of a ventilation pipe outlet that comes up from the nuclear bunker.

But a lot of ants are falling through this ventilation pipe and they're falling into the bunker below, which is about three meters underground.

And then they can't get out, so they can't climb up the walls and get back out.

And they keep, they do what ants do, so they build nests and they operate as ants, but they have no food, obviously, so they die eventually.

But they constantly are being replenished.

So there's this deadly community where new ants keep falling down onto what is now about a few centimetres thick layer of their dead comrades, and then they just keep working and building at their nests, and they die, and then their stock is replenished.

Oh my God, that's like sick sci-fi film.

It is, isn't it?

It sounds like a metaphor for the Soviet times.

It does.

I'm seeing it as kind of like a metaphor for life, isn't it?

That's really just what we're doing.

Yeah, just falling into a life and dying on top of our dead comrades.

And on that note.

In 1850, there's an article that I found it in the English Civil Engineer and Architects Journal, and it states that the Academy of Sciences in France was considering an idea for a suspension bridge between England and France, so going from Dover to Calais.

Four barges would be sunk at equal distances apart across the channel, and then they'd have chains going up from the barges to the surface, and then the chains would be affixed to the bridge, which would run from England to France.

And then, above the bridge, would be these huge balloons.

It described them as giant balloons of elliptical form and firmly secured, which would support in the air the extremity of these chains.

In my head, I'm imagining it like the big red balls in total wipeout, and you could just bounce from balloon to balloon.

Now, I can see that working.

What I think about those big plastic balls is they're in South America somewhere, aren't they?

If mankind kind of collapses quite soon, and then the whole of the world just kind of becomes grown over by plants and stuff like that, they're made of plastic, so they won't really biodegrade.

So, if aliens come along, all they'll see really is these big plastic things around.

No, no, I don't think that's true.

No, I think that's true.

If they landed in South America, all of the concrete and stuff would go before the plastic, surely.

But we've got a lot more plastic than just the balls that are used in this weird TV show.

Sure, sure, sure.

But they'd probably think that that was the centre of human civilization or something.

This is where they built their greatest temple.

Exactly.

You would probably look at it and they probably they're maybe north-south aligned or something like that.

Or they probably work out that they're aligned with the sun or something and they think that it was a temple.

Yeah, or they think it's a model of the planets.

They think it's an early human attempt to understand the solar system.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that the different sizes represent the different things.

They're all the same size, though.

So they'd be like, well, those idiotic humans.

They thought that Mars and Jupiter were the same size.

Actually, James, you make a very compelling argument.

Think of all the temples, the steppe pyramids in South America.

Think what game show they probably were.

Yeah, do you remember in Gladiators, they used to have a thing where you had to climb up a pyramid?

That was probably it.

Yeah, yeah.

You get to the top, and at the top, you're sacrificed to the gods.

I think we all know that they'll assume the Disney Plastic Castle in Paris is an ultimate temple.

That's true.

We're going to leave such weird stuff behind.

I was reading an article the other day about what happens first when if all humans disappeared,

the rough running order of how things wind down.

And

it was fascinating because it was talking about actually concrete lasts a lot less time than you would think because freezing and thawing in, let's say, in New York, actually, in about 10 years, lots of plants will have grown in between the cracks in the concrete and it'll all be working loose.

And actually, it's quite quickly that you end up with in 10 years.

It might be a bit more than that.

Well, I did think.

Because they don't just rebuild New York every 10 years, do they?

I mean, if this is predicting the apocalypse and they're like, well, all the concrete's going to disappear in 10 years, that should have been headline.

I can't believe they've buried the news.

But it is a fair point, perhaps, that in 1500 years or 2,000 years, that only the Disney Tower in Paris, the one in Disneyland, the one in Disney World, these are going to be the only buildings left because they're made of plastic.

Yeah.

Are they made of plastic?

We assume.

Or just Wendy houses.

I think we all lived

a tiny race of

poly pockets.

All the exhibits in their museums will be, you know, little playmobile dolls and Lego people.

So we think that these were the life forms themselves frozen when the disaster came.

Why don't we talk about bridges?

I've absolutely lost it.

How does Dan keep this thing together?

It's so hard to know.

It's so much fun when teachers are away.

They used to, in the medieval times, draw elephants with actual trumpets for trunks.

Did they?

Yeah.

So the idea, they think, is not that they actually thought this was the case, but it was kind of an allegorical way of drawing.

It would be very weird if they thought it was the case.

If they'd seen an elephant and they saw a trumpet.

But the idea being that they did make loud noises and they thought the noises came from the trunks and the only way you can show them on a picture is by showing the trunk as an actual trumpet.

And I think maybe a lot of medieval pictures are like this.

They're more allegorical than actually literal.

Oh, that's kind of like, so whenever you put anything that has notes coming out of it, like to symbolise music, like animals actually know musical notation.

It's not actually.

Yeah.

Wait, you said they thought that the noise came out of the trunks.

It does, doesn't it?

I don't know.

Yeah, they do.

It sounds very nasal, the noise.

I think it comes out of the trunk.

Sure.

You're basing this off your own.

I just tried doing it, yeah.

And it sounded very elephant time when I did it out of the nose.

I think you're right.

And now with a mouth?

It's not the same.

Actually, did you read about that woman?

I think it was in this country this week or last week, who

ordered a takeaway and she put a note on the takeaway when it said, are there any delivery instructions saying, I feel so ill, I've got terrible flu, can't get out of bed.

Please, could you stop the chemist on the way and bring me some Benadryl?

I don't even want the takeaway, I'm only ordering this, so you can do that.

And so, this restaurant brought her medication.

There was a Chinese restaurant near me that used to deliver cigarettes as well.

So, people just used to order a bag of prawn crackers and ten boxes of cigarettes.

There was a guy at Harvard Business School who did a study and came up with this thing called the IKEA effect, which is that you place more value on IKEA or self-assembled furniture, which IKEA furniture used to do.

Yeah, because you made it yourself, yeah, and you kind of get attached to it and fall in love with it as you're building, and then by the end of it, you've got a shitty bookcase that doesn't really stand up right, but it's yours.

But you fall in love with it.

I think that's.

He said fall in love with those are his words, not mine.

Alright, okay.

Because that would be like a good argument in favour of a robotic wife, for instance, that you build yourself.

Yeah.

Or a Lego wife.

Yeah, either of those.

It's too painful.

She will be tiny.

You get massive Lego people, though, don't you?

Do you?

Yeah, Lego but it's not like a six at Lego Land.

But you'd have to get married at Legoland, wouldn't you?

But I think if you're going as far as getting a Lego wifeling, that's probably not an issue.

No one's going to be like, no, that's not really my scene.

You've put on a lot of bricks since we married.

Have you guys ever heard of the National Fruit Collection?

No.

I saw this.

I was reading about apples and I just saw it.

And I've never heard of it, so I don't know anything about it apart from what I saw in this article.

But apparently it's in Brogdale in Kent.

And they have a living collection of apples, presumably old trees.

They have 2,300 traditional varieties of apple.

Wow.

Really?

Apparently they get 40,000 visitors a year.

That's so cool.

So you get a chance to taste all those varieties that have gone out of public use.

They haven't ever said you can eat them.

Yeah,

I'm not sure if you're allowed to eat them.

It's like anything in the middle.

The National Fruit Collection was demolished this week.

That's what I'm hearing.

There's a zoo with the most rare and wonderful animals in all the world, and you can try all of them in our restaurant.

You're the reason they didn't have the please don't eat the penguin sign up.

Yeah, well, isn't that cool?

Apparently, it's been there since 1952, and I've never heard of it.

I really want to go and visit that.

That sounds so fun.

I found it as well.

I think we should visit, actually.

Yeah, let's go.

Let's go.

Yeah.

If you're listening to this and you work at the National Fruit Collection, why not invite us?

Give us a discount.

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Do you know what was the company that was a huge boon for apple eating in the world over the last 15 years?

Strongbowl.

Close, but that's they're major in apple drinking.

Apple eating.

Is it an apple tart company?

Is it like Mr.

Kipling?

It is not Mr.

Kipling.

The answer is...

Oh, I think we can get it.

Yeah, we can get it.

I'll give you some clues.

It's like a lolly company.

It was like flavouring thing.

Smoothie makers.

I will give you some clues.

So, basically, when sliced apples started being a thing, consumption suddenly went massively up.

Sorry, I missed that memo.

Are sliced apples a thing?

I have one in my lunchbox pretty much every day as cool.

I'm still stuck on avocado toast.

You know, when you buy an apple in the supermarket, some people do, and it's a sliced, and it's in a package.

I didn't know that.

No, have you never seen those in the food section?

I have seen those.

I think they're also.

I've never met anyone who's done this, but you can go to McDonald's and exchange your fries for sliced apples or cats.

Oh, those.

It's like why?

But you can't.

It's the answer to McDonald's, aren't I?

There you go.

I was gonna tell you, I get points.

There are no points in the dark.

Well, I'm gonna wedded out what you just said.

It is McDonald's.

So they introduced sliced apples in the 1980s into their restaurant fair.

I think it was the 1980s.

And overall apple consumption tripled within 10 years.

And it's because children especially, but all of us, we are more willing to eat more of an apple.

If it's sliced, it's just easier to eat.

And apple consumption shoots up.

And it's also really helped in schools across Britain.

People before that were just having one bite of an apple and throwing it away, weren't they?

But but I think it's also partly to do with just the size of McDonald's as a franchise, because when they started giving away free books

in their happy meals one year, they became the the largest literary producer in the world.

Something for literacy tripled in America.

Yeah, so those 10% of apples sold in the US are, of sliced apples sold in the US are from McDonald's.

But exactly the same thing happened in the UK when they introduced them into schools.

Then apple consumption went up by almost 100%.

Wow.

It's easy in schools though because they can just make you eat stuff.

I was like, oh no, but they tried to make you eat full apples and it didn't work.

And then when you get sliced apples...

I had an apple this morning.

Did you?

And I'm amazed at my bravery in getting through it without having it sliced for me.

James has an apple peeling machine by his desk.

I do.

I've never used it.

I bought it for QI because for the opening show, I was going to put it in there as a weird opening thing, and then I bought it, and everyone went, that's not weird.

Everyone has one of those.

Everyone has one of those.

What the hell?

I've never heard of that.

Does it actually work?

It looks like a little torture device.

It's made of metal, and you basically skewer the apple, and

you put it on a skewer, and then you turn it, so it's being like spit-roasted, essentially.

And then there's a kind of little arm that comes down with a little knife on it, and you sort of turn it, and it peels peels it off the it takes off the peel in like a little big, big spiral.

It's also for oranges.

I only really like an apple on a skewer when it's got a suckling pig wrapped around it.

So, there is a shaving brush manufacturer around at the moment called Penhalligans.

I think they're quite

an old one with a lot of history.

On their website, they're asked, do you use badger hair on your shaving brushes?

And they say, yes, we do, but they take them from parts of the world where badgers are not endangered and, in fact, are primarily farmed for their meat.

Whoa!

And I don't know where that is because I can't see really many places in the world where they farm badgers for the meat.

But presumably, they must do.

Well, I was on a forum, I think it was a Gillette forum, about whether the badger hair on razor on brushes was ethically farmed, and they got theirs from China.

So, I think it was Gillette wrote a really good email saying, you know, we make sure that we source only the most ethical badger badger.

So, do you think they farm badger for meat in China?

Maybe they do.

Maybe.

They used to eat badger in Europe,

and old European recipes for badger would tell you to lay it in running water for several days to get rid of its rank flavour.

Several days!

You just have to tie it up in the river, I guess.

Yeah.

But rank flavour as well, otherwise.

Or just eat beef.

Badgers, they don't make a noise, though, do they?

Do they not?

Well, do they?

They must.

Go on.

Yeah, it depends what you do to them.

Old McDonald had a badger, E-I-E-I-O.

Yes.

With a.

What?

I don't know.

Do they fuff like

ferrets do?

Like fuff.

Fuff.

Maybe.

I imagine them squealing.

I reckon they squeal if you run them over.

That'd be a great quiz, by the way.

Just sing the old MacDonald song and put in a new animal, and the person has to respond.

And if they're wrong, they're out of the quiz.

How many animals can you get down the line?

Big ships.

Yeah.

The Seawise Giant is pretty much the biggest ship.

I think it is the biggest.

It's longer than the Empire State Building, it's tall.

Wow.

It goes at about 16.5 knots, which is about 30 kilometers an hour.

And its stopping distance is nine kilometres.

Nine kilometers per kilometer

if it's going at that speed.

And its turning circle in clear weather is three kilometers.

So that's like, imagine we're standing outside our office facing south and we wanted to face north, we'd had to go all the way around to around where Madame Two Swords is

before we were facing north.

Wow,

we're like quite close to Trafalgar Square here, aren't we?

Imagine in an emergency, like in the way you would in a car, hitting the brakes on a boat, but nine kilometers away.

Because if you did it just one kilometre too late, you'd be like, we're screwed.

We just have to watch ourselves plow into this island.

I have a fact about

banning songs and rude songs.

Okay.

So it's about parental advisory lyrics.

You know that sticker that you see on albums.

Do you know who those are partly thanks to?

You may do.

Can I actually have a genuine guess?

Cypress Hill?

They're one of the early people to have it.

No.

Okay.

That's not what I've got, although that might be part of the NWA.

Is it a rap group?

It's Al Gore's wife.

You were close.

Is she part of a rap group?

Yeah, she is.

No, she was listening to Prince with her young daughter, and she heard some very explicit lyrics.

They were things like, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend.

I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine.

And she was very angry about this because she was listening with her daughter and she thought it was very inappropriate.

So she wrote a book called Raising PG Kids in an X-rated Society.

And as part of this drive, she set up the Parents' Music Resource Center and they released a list of artists called The Filthy 15.

So this contributed to the rise of the parental advisory.

Filthy 15 is a great name, isn't it?

It's the sequel to The Dirty Dozen.

But there was an album once that got a parental advisory label in spite of the fact that it was completely instrumental.

Why?

Did it have sex noises?

No, it didn't.

No, it was completely instrumental.

It was by Frank Zappa.

It's a Frank Zappa album.

It was called G-Spot Tornado.

One of the other bits of trivia from the movie Twister was that there's a cow which goes through at some point, and that was a sort of early CGI cow.

Supposedly, I haven't backed this up yet though.

Supposedly, that cow was originally one of the zebras from Jumanji.

That's quite a career change, isn't it?

I'm tired of being typecasted as a zebra.

I also like that you say, I haven't backed this up yet.

Like, as soon as we stop this podcast, you're going to be out there.

I like this zebra's CV.

It says, oh, it says here you can also do cow.

You need two zebras, one in the front and one in the back of the cow.

Yeah, no, you're right.

After every podcast done, I go through verifying everything.

What did they, um, what do you mean by that?

Did they paint the stripes off the zebra or did they paint stripes onto a zebra for Jumanji?

I think maybe, because Jumanji came out first, maybe they had the design of a zebra going around in a tornado.

Yeah.

And so they just used that

footage, or not the footage, but you know what I mean?

That little computer generated thing to be the cow.

I don't, as I say, haven't backed it up yet.

Gonna do it as soon as the podcast.

So, my friend Dan, who works in CGI, told me a fact he learned a London film school.

And again, I haven't been able to back this up.

So, possibly, if someone's CGI is listening, if you guys could start doing your research before the podcast in future, that would be ideal.

No, but this is it's one of those things where it's been said, but don't know where the proof is.

Um, anytime CGI has been used, I don't know if it's now, but let's say movies of the last 10 years, roughly the last maybe five years predominantly, CGI has been using, if they have a person in it, they've been using Brad Pitt.

Because when Benjamin Budden was made, they made a full DNA, as it were, a CGI of Brad Pitt, the full motion of him.

And rather than needing to replicate that, you just use that.

So the company that built that sells Brad Pitt to all these different movies that need a body.

That's cool.

So they can use all the different ages of man as well.

Exactly.

So theoretically, in World War Z, the zombie film, would all the zombies that they used have also been Brad Pitt?

Wow.

I hope they paid him well for that.

I bet they did.

What if there's someone really overweight or something?

Was there a bit in Benjamin Bucken where he put on lots of two Brad Pitts?

One in the front, one in the back.

Have you seen the new thing that IKEA is doing where they're using augmented reality?

This is pretty cool.

So if you want to get, let's say you want to get a sofa and you you want to have it in your front room, but you want to know what it looks like, they've got a new app where you can take a photo of your room and then you can kind of augment a sofa in the place where it would be so you can see what the room would look like with that sofa.

That is so cool.

That's amazing.

That's clever, isn't it?

Because they already had, they had like a build your own kitchen in your website.

It was like a budget version of The Sims, but without the people in it.

Which had hours of fun with it.

We did that for our new house.

It was amazing.

Yeah.

We didn't go with them at the end.

But we've got pictures of what it might have looked like.

This thing, you've got the happy ending of you you then going to pub a kitchen, whereas I'm just like, well, I can't do this because I own money and don't actually own anywhere to put a kitchen into.

Ah, but there is a video game as well.

You'll love this then.

It's basically a it simulates you building IKEA furniture but on a computer and there's no end to it.

You know, you don't win.

No, just you don't even end up with the furniture anyway.

No, yeah.

And the idea is that it basically simulates the frustration of what it's like to build IKEA furniture and you can do it with up to four friends.

It's a game called Home Improvisation.

So home improvisation.

Thanks for the translation done.

What language were you familiar with?

I googled that.

Turns out it translates as home improvisation.

And it lets you, yeah, basically through virtual reality exactly what you're doing, Alex.

So if you want to build stuff outside of kitchens, that's there for you.

Can't wait.

There is a thing that's happening at the moment.

People keep having sleepovers in Ikea shops.

And IKEA are not relaxed about it.

They are really annoying.

Well, surely they could just stop people, like, as in kick them out.

Well, people go in and they hide in cupboards at the end of the day.

Do they?

You can't go through at the end of every working day checking every cupboard in the shop.

There's an old stat, isn't there?

Something like it might be 1% as well of people in Europe were conceived in an IKEA bed.

One in 10, yeah.

One in 10 is it.

Wow.

And were they all in the shop?

Somebody filmed the soap opera set entirely in IKEA, and they did it all without IKEA's knowledge.

And

yeah, it was a web series.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

That's awesome.

So they were in the physical shop, but they just never

staff never called onto.

No, they were always filming with sort of handheld cameras and things.

And presumably they must have got asked to leave a few times, but as in they filmed an entire web series and you know, it was just

they were just like living in the homes and stuff.

Oh, because yeah, because if it's a kitchen, they're like, they're like a set.

Yeah, they've got a set.

I think the only awkward thing is that in every scene you've got random people walking around your house and just like

picking up your kitchen utensils and taking them away.

So

the whole concept of the sitcom has to be about a place where you live where there's a lot of burglars.

Do you know if we ever said that when Nelson died and he famously had Hardy next to him, cradling him in his arms?

And the person who wrote the account who was there at the time said that Nelson said, Kiss me, Hardy, and then Hardy kissed him.

And then, have we ever mentioned that for about 80 years during the Victorian era, that story was changed so that he said kismet Hardy, because they were too squeamish about the idea of two men kissing each other.

And kismit was Turkish for fate, and so they said that he'd said kismet Hardy, and this guy must have misheard it.

No one would have said kiss me, Hardy.

Why do you say kismet me hardy?

Isn't that

because he wasn't a fake pirate?

It's a missed opportunity, I think.

I bet Hardy got a load of those jokes all the way through his name or something.

Yeah.

But if the story was that Nelson said kismet Hardy, how do they explain away the bit where Hardy then kisses him?

Did they say, oh, Nelson said, oh, get off me, you weirdo?

Can I throw in one Nixon fact before we move on?

Can anyone tell me what Richard Nixon's middle name is?

Mill House.

Yeah, I'd say Mill House.

Yeah.

So it is Mill House.

However,

I'm going to put forward the

reviewed fact that it's in fact a double barrel surname because it is his mother's maiden name.

Mill House was his mum.

Okay.

So he took that that on, and I would say that that's not a.

That's quite.

So my brother has the same thing with my honest maiden name.

That's quite common.

And I would say that's not double-barreled because it's not the mother's name anymore, is it?

Well, it can still be her name.

She might, yeah.

Was her name still Mill House?

I don't know, but it's probably not.

It's taken because it's his mother's middle name, sorry, maiden name.

Interesting.

Yeah.

I didn't know that connection in any case.

It's a huge, huge news, if true, though, that Richard Nixon's middle name isn't Mill House.

It might just be a part of his surname.

Yeah.

Well, that's what I'm trying to put forward here, yeah.

It is a relatively common thing.

I think, especially in Scotland, they do that a lot, don't they?

They use Mother's Maiden name for middle names.

Dan, if that is correct, then there are presumably a lot of times his name has been carved into stone, but they're going to have to go back and do a really botched squeeze of the word Mill House into it.

I don't know how many times his name's been written in stone, actually.

Yeah, that's true.

I mean, he's not.

I don't think he's one of Mount Rushmore, is he, Nixon?

No.

No.

But he should be be a shit Rushmore with Andrew Jackson and Nixon and Calvin Coolidge.

Calvin Coolidge, Trump.

Yeah.

Just another thing about his name.

He was named after a British king.

So there's a thought that his family tree actually goes back and he descends from King Edward III of England.

That's a sort of an idea that was put out there.

But he's named after Richard the Lionheart, and he is one of four brothers, and all of them also carry English king names.

Really?

What do you have the names?

Well,

there are only about three other names.

Sorry, sorry.

Three of them carried it, and then there was Francis, who was the name of his dad.

I think

isn't Richard the Lion Heart far back enough that everyone is directly descended from him.

I think he is.

I think Edward III is.

So everyone on Earth is directly descended.

What?

Because

everyone in Britain.

Pretty much everyone in Western Europe.

But everyone in America as well, because.

But Danny Dyer did Who Do You Think You Are?

And they found that he was related to Edward III, and it's this huge story.

And actually, the odds of him not being related.

It would have been an amazing news story if he he had not been related to Edward III.

I don't think that's going to sell many papers, is it?

Daddy Dyette not related to Edward III.

Display the odds, the odds are that 99% of everyone is related to Edward III.

It's suddenly a very interesting story.

I see that, but then people don't usually go much past their headline, do they?

And if the headline is Daddy Dyette isn't related to Edward III.

But that's an interesting story because the odds are 99% that he would be.

In my newspaper, it's going to have very long headlines and very short articles.

Country music has the most intelligent lyrics, apparently, because one of the measures, which sounds like not a great measure, is the number of syllables in words, and it doesn't have filler words, so you don't get a lot of

oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, you know, that kind of stuff.

You get I see what you mean, but if you say that the most advanced songs are the ones with more syllables, then the most advanced song in history is super califragilistic XBLIDOS.

Yeah, it takes years of study to understand that.

The example the study used was: country music uses more syllables using words such as cigarettes, tackle box and hillbilly.

Tackle box.

Apparently.

So that's too advanced for an eight-year-old, obviously.

Yeah, fair enough.

Also on too big to fit, I googled too big to fit.

And Dwayne the Rock Johnson is too big to fit in a lot of the cars in the latest Fast and the Furious.

Wow.

So there was an interview with him and they're asking him

why are you always in trucks and not even little cars and he's like I'm too big to fit in there.

Oh my god.

Wow.

That makes sense, yeah.

They should drill a hole in the ceiling or something.

Is he too tall?

He's very muscular.

He's muscular, yeah.

But that is extraordinary.

He's good that, isn't it?

Does he have could they have an adapted one where he's just got one seat in the middle?

So it's not a two-seater?

I guess they could, although they'd have to write that into the storyline of the film.

Yeah.

What storyline there is of the film.

If you want to collect semen from macaques, it's quite hard.

Macaques.

Macaques, little primates, little monkey things.

Oh, yeah.

What they used to do is they would stimulate their genitals with electricity.

Sometimes a little weak jolt, but it would make them ejaculate.

But one researcher realised that actually they were ejaculating quite a lot anyway,

because they do it like four times an hour or something like that.

Wow.

Yeah, they average four times an hour ejaculating ejaculating when they're just having fun and just on their own.

What?

All the time.

Well, not whether they're asleep.

No, but they're asleep, the heart just keeps going.

But do they ejaculate 40 times a day?

You know?

Yeah, they do.

I'm seeing.

So, what I'm seeing here on this bit of paper is on the island, the males masturbate on average four times an hour.

So, that's on average four times an hour.

They're going to have some better hours than that.

In a good hour.

And so, what she realised, this researcher, is what she could do is just kind of hang around because it happens so frequently, and then when it happens, just quickly get in there with the pipette and suck it up.

And she does that, the main problem being that they often lick the ground or their hands clean before she can get close because semen happens to be highly nutritious and they don't want to waste the nutrients.

Devious, devious macaques.

Yeah, they are randy, though.

So randy.

You can obviously four times an hour.

Yeah, they like to masturbate.

Look, we all like to masturbate, but

they should get a job.

You know, when crocodiles die, they bloat and float.

They're bloaters and floaters

because of all these gases being released that keep them afloat.

And they float for over a month without sinking.

Whoa.

So I don't understand why we don't see crocodiles floating down

all the time.

We must do, right?

Maybe we do in countries with crocodiles.

I think they're lugs.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or crocodiles because they're very stealth, aren't they?

Crocodiles.

They don't do much movement.

So if you saw one going like that, you'd think, oh, he's on a cheeky mission.

Cockroaches go on their back, don't they, when they die, famously?

Yes.

The reason being that they have long legs for an insect, and they have a high centre of gravity.

Their centre of gravity is quite near their bum kind of thing.

And as they get older, they kind of start to get weighed down to their bum side.

And then when they kind of eventually die, they flip over and they don't have enough energy in their arms, they don't have enough strength in their legs to put them back over.

And the same thing happens if you give them kind of pesticides, they spasm and they'll flip over, and then they won't have the energy left in their legs to flip them back.

So they're flipping over their head,

they're not rolling over sideways, they're flipping over vertically because their bum is weighing them down.

Exactly.

They do a backflip.

Well, I don't know if it's exactly like that.

It could be a slightly sideways, slightly back flippy thing.

I don't know about that.

But basically, you're walking around with a heavy bun, and as you get older, you're less able to deal with it.

We know how it feels.

God gracious.

Tortoises have that same problem, do they?

Obviously, because they've got round shells.

But they have this really weird balancing act that they need to strike because bigger animals obviously do better because they're stronger and they can fight other males and they can compete more.

But also, if they get too big,

a bigger shell means that it's hard to write yourself again.

So you have all the advantages of being big, but if you lose one fight and you then get rolled over onto your back, it's much likely that you won't be able to write yourself again.

Oh,

it's a trade-off.

It's basically putting all your eggs in one basket to be really big.

There's a really interesting thing about tortoises, which we covered on QI years and years ago, and that is that it's possible to invent a shape that you put it on a table and it always flips over to a certain side just due to the shape of the thing.

It's spelt like a gombok, but I think it's pronounced more like gumbuts.

Anyway, so this shape has been invented by computer scientists and it took us decades to do it and they managed to do it through using computers.

But tortoise shells, some tortoise shells have this exact same shape.

And so if they flip over, they naturally kind of roll back onto their feet.

Wow.

That's so cool.

That's awesome.

Was the inventor of the gombok inspired by turtles or tortoises, or is that?

I believe he was.

I've met him and I can't remember.

Right.

Or was it vice versa, you're going to ask?

Yes.

The turtles.

I went to one of his shows and thought, guys, we should try that.

Yeah, I was so proud of myself for not finishing the sentence.

You clearly knew where I was going with that.

I was like, nah, because James started talking.

I thought, ah,

that looks like a clever question.

I wasn't going to let him save you.

Diamonds are the hardest substance in the world.

I read a...

Whoop, they're not.

James shaking his head.

Min diesel.

They're not.

What is then?

They're the hardest, naturally occurring substance.

Sorry, that's what I meant to say.

Yes, the hardest, naturally occurring substance.

You can't scratch a diamond except with another diamond you can.

Yeah.

So you can scratch a diamond with a diamond.

That's what hardness means in this sense.

It means that you can scratch something with something.

So hardness is whether something can be scratched, and toughness is whether it shatters into a thousand pieces if you hit it with something.

So diamonds, because the layers of carbon are very tough

internally, but you hit it with a hammer, bang, smashes.

Right.

So don't try that.

Don't do that.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

And that's, I think, I think we may have said this before.

That's what traders used to do.

If someone had mined a diamond, there were some unscrupulous people who'd say, well, okay, let's have a look and we'll just give it a quick test to see if it's a real diamond.

I'll just hit it with this hammer, bang, smashes.

And then he says, oh, I'm so sorry.

It wasn't a real diamond after all.

It was something else.

But I'll keep the shards.

I'll keep the shards, and I'll pay you a nominal sum for them.

I'll pay you a tiny bit to keep yourself going, you know.

And then they just sell off a load of smaller diamonds.

Very clever, very clever, yeah.

Or you could glue them back together and make a bigger diamond again.

Oh, god, I think that's where the imperfections come in.

Come on down to Hannah's shitty diamond store.

We've got loads of rubbish diamonds full of glue.

I've got some stuff on quarantine.

Oh, right, yeah.

It comes from the Italian for 40, Caranti, which.

Because you used to have to stay 40 days in quarantine.

Yeah.

That makes sense.

Incubation period of the Black Death, supposedly.

They put astronauts in quarantine

when they come back down.

Do you know why?

Yeah, because of radiation and in case in space they were given some sort of flu disease or something.

It was to do with diseases, wasn't it?

Well, it was

aliens with smallpox.

Yeah, so you might think if you were a sci-fi fan that it was to stop alien diseases coming to Earth, but it's actually because their immune system is lessened due to them being in space.

So when they come back down, they need to go in quarantine so they don't pick up bugs on Earth.

Isn't that technically

technically that you're putting the entire rest of the world in quarantine?

Yeah, yes.

That was just true of all quarantine things.

Just flip around the exit and entrance sign.

Yeah, I suppose that is true.

Yeah.

There was, you know, just picking up on that quickly, when the Apollo 11 astronauts came down, they had to do that.

They had to be in quarantine in this room where they had a sort of kitchen in there and living quarters and so on, and they had to stay in there for ages before they could do any of their parades around the world.

Wow.

And what ended up happening was if a scientist accidentally kind of was infected, as it were, with

the room that they were kept in because they were delivering stuff and so on, I guess in some ways.

And for them it was for possible space cooties, wasn't it?

Yes, yeah.

Those scientists then had to move in with them.

So there was a whole batch of people that subtly got, or might have been infected, so therefore needed to be corrected.

And then the next people came along to give them some food, and they got infected.

Exactly.

It's like a horror film.

It's like, oh,

where's Sarah?

I better go and find out.

Oh, no.

Where's Bernard gone now?

It's in the game of sardines.

It is.

It is.

Exactly.

And there was a suggestion, and I'm not saying this is truth, but there was a suggestion that some of the people who accidentally had to go into the quarantine looked like ladies of the night

who made made their way into there and had to live out.

I don't even know what the implication you're making is.

Prostitutes.

Wait, were they prostitutes?

No, because it's back on Earth now.

But also space prostitutes don't exist.

Oh, yes.

But it really was another time, wasn't it?

The 60s.

Yeah.

I mean, it literally was, yes.

I looked at some skillful number people

and I was looking at like the world record for memorizing numbers and stuff like that.

And the world record for most digits memorized in one minute has two different sections, one with the light on and one with the light off.

Because apparently it's miles easier when the light's off.

That makes sense, what, because of no distractions?

I guess so, right?

But you can close your eyes.

How do you see the number to memorize?

Maybe that's another reason.

But yeah, maybe you're allowed a little torch or something.

I don't know.

Perhaps they give you an audio recording of it.

Maybe.

I don't know.

So this is for binary digits, so it's zeros and ones.

Okay, the one, the specific one I'm looking at.

And the record for most zeros and ones memorised in one minute with the light on is 107.

And with the light off, it's 273.

Oh,

wow.

Isn't that amazing that it makes that much difference?

That's incredible.

So all maths exams should be held in the dark, shouldn't they?

I guess so if they were all in binary.

Mine will work.

Did you, just quickly, quickly, one thing on chocolate?

I think it's quite funny.

Bernie Madoff, remember him?

Is now running a chocolate racket in prison.

Who's he again, sorry?

You know, he's the guy who it was just a moment.

He ran a massive Ponzi squeam, didn't he?

Ponzi squeam.

Yeah, so he was a businessman who, it turned out, was stealing lots of people's investments.

So he got millions and millions of pounds and stole lots of money.

And he's running this chocolate racket.

And in prison in America now, he's really respected because he's stolen more money than anyone else in there.

So he wrote this letter to his daughter saying he's quite the celebrity in there.

Other inmates treat him like a mafia don and call him Uncle Bernie.

I can't walk anywhere without people shouting their greetings and encouragement.

It's really quite sweet.

And he's bought up all the chocolate in the prison and now he runs this racket where the only person you can get it from is him.

And so he makes a big profit.

How does it work?

Because it sounds like that should be illegal, right?

It's unusual to have people committing a very similar crime in prison to the one they were put in there for.

Yeah.

And then to announce it, I mean, do prison guards not read news?

No, that's not, it's not

illegal.

No, what?

Just to buy up, to get in there first and buy up all the stuff so you can sell it on for a profit.

That's okay.

It's immoral.

Right.

It's a bit of a monopoly, but I don't think there's like anti-monopoly rules in prisons.

It's touting.

It is touting, yeah.

Okay.

Well, good luck to him.

I think that's what you're saying.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

I'd love to know where the boxes are from Deal or No Deal.

You'll notice I said nothing in that whole bit because I was busy thinking, God, yeah, did they

wear?

Noel Edmonds has got them in his house.

Yeah.

He probably, I reckon he uses them to wrap Christmas presents.

Oh, that would be such a good idea if he doesn't and he's listening.

But that's a great Christmas present.

So you unwrap it, there's a box, you open the box, there's nothing inside, and you're like, oh, this is terrible.

And he says, actually, it's one of the boxes from Dealer No Deal.

And you're like, that's the best present ever Noel Edmonds.

And Christmas is saved.

I would be still unhappy with a Deal or No Deal box as my Christmas present.

I'm just sitting there.

about it.

If it was a real one that was used on the show, I really intentionally do not want that as a present.

Great.

Okay, well, I'm sure someone else will have it.

Bought it now.

Sorry, Noel, we thought you'd love it.

Or he might use it for storage.

Yeah.

Or if he goes shopping, putting his shopping in the boxes.

Yeah, he just goes everywhere.

If you look at every photo of him these days, he's actually got a box with him.

If he gets fired,

once he got fired from a job, do you think he cleared his desk in those boxes?

Oh, yeah, when it got cancelled.

Yeah.

How do you move them though?

Has you put handles on them or wheels?

Yeah, because they don't have handles, do they?

No.

Not very easy to carry.

How many items of checking luggage will do you have today, sir?

I've got 15.

I read a thing, there's a basketball player called Jimmy Butler.

He plays for the Chicago Bulls.

I think he's just been traded, but I'm not sure to where.

But he, I read an article, this is in the headline.

It says that Jimmy Butler took out his car rearview mirror as a reminder to never look back.

Awesome.

Was promptly arrested.

Have you heard of the North American Walnut Sphinx Caterpillar?

No.

That's a goodie.

It pretends to be a bird to freak birds out.

Birds freaks out with other birds.

The one thing they're most used to, right?

They're used to hanging around with birds.

Sorry, I should clarify.

They make a noise like a freaked-out bird.

Oh, to scare the other incoming birds away.

Exactly.

So, what they do, it's amazing.

To make the noise, they have not quite lungs in the sense that we understand, they have these holes along their sides called spiracles.

Exactly.

And to make the noise, they squeeze themselves shut like an accordion.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

And that, when they do that, it makes a noise that goes eee!

And it sounds exactly like a bird's alarm call saying there is a bird of prey nearby, or get out of here, we're under attack.

And so the other birds all fly off as soon as this caterpillar makes it.

Are they doing it to scare the birds away.

They're doing it to scare the birds away because the birds really prey on them.

Is that evolution or is that a coincidence that the note, the specific note?

That's evolution.

Everything's evolution, technology.

Is it?

Yeah.

That's what we all are a product of.

What was the other option other than it could be evolution?

It's a coincidence.

Well, yeah.

It could be evolution by coincidence.

It probably started as a bit of a coincidence.

That's what I was looking at.

But that's how evolution works.

Evolution always starts as a coincidence, which then evolves into being a pattern.

Does it?

Yeah, yeah.

No, but if you were an animal and you were living on the Galapagos and the trees were too high and the leaves were too high on the tree, it's not a coincidence for you to grow your neck to try and.

Yes, it is.

It's a coincidence that there was someone who was born with a really long neck.

No, but don't you grow your neck.

No, oh my god.

That's Lamarckism.

That's Lamarckism, the original evolution.

And in some people's eyes, the best.

One individual gets born with a slightly longer neck.

Slightly, not one individual is born with 50 vertebrae.

That's a coincidence.

And then it has a million children because it's got all the leaves.

Slightly longer neck, and then can get one or two more leaves, and then it's a bit more likely to pass on its genes.

Yes.

I knew that bit.

Right.

Did you, though?

It just sounded a lot like you didn't.

That, yeah, when I was reading about caterpillars, I read this statement that said that basically all they're doing is collecting food for the moment where they go into their chrysalis stage.

So they're just, their whole life as a caterpillar is just to feed themselves in order for that.

Like, like how I moved house the other day, it'd be like as if my whole life was just collecting boxes for catering.

I mean, in order to live and breathe and for their processes to work, they have to be metabolizing some of the food.

They can't just all be.

I mean, they're just creating a situation.

No, yeah, they're effectively just like, I just need to just eat and get myself away from the business.

Yeah, but they are also using the food, a lot of it, for energy as a caterpillar.

Yes, totally.

Yeah.

But what's the point of using all that energy?

It's so that you can turn into a butterfly.

Exactly.

It's the same as Dan saving up for his new house.

Like, he has spent some of the money on, you know, Coke and prostitutes and whatever.

Yeah.

But eventually he's been saving up for this house.

Got it.

They're putting something aside, is what you're saying.

They've got a little savings account on the side.

Yeah, but it defines their whole existence because then they're a new thing.

It's a whole new account.

Who are you to say what defines the existence of a caterpillar?

I don't know.

I read it in an article.

I don't know if a caterpillar would agree with that.

They probably wouldn't be able to argue me to.

Probably don't even know they're caterpillars.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

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Do you know auctioneers watch videos of other auctioneers at their best?

Sort of like the greatest hits of auctioneering.

So

auctioneers have to do that as part of their training.

No, no, they watch it to marvel at the complexity of what certain auctioneers have done.

So there's a guy called Chris Burge, who's acknowledged as Christie's greatest auctioneer.

Some people acknowledge him as the greatest auctioneer

of all time.

What a thing.

What a thing.

I think I've slightly made that up.

But

he basically, so he joined Christie's in 1970 and he averaged.

Now, I'm just going to read this sentence as it's written.

I didn't fully understand it because I can't believe it's true.

Averaging more than $1 million a minute in sales up to his retirement in 2012.

No, it can't be true.

Can't be true, right?

That's per minute across his sales, isn't it?

So if an auction takes 50 minutes,

then his average was 1 million a minute.

Oh, in the 50 minutes.

He's got 50 million auctions.

So, if he sells one painting for $25 million in one minute, he can then sit around for 24 minutes.

Yeah, really not trying.

Yes, that makes sense.

That's amazing.

But so, there's a video of him that auctioneers love to watch, and

he sold the 10 most expensive works ever sold at auction in the world.

Wow.

Yeah.

And the video is of him selling Monet's water lilies in New York.

And in it, he's taking bids from three people in the room and two people on the phone.

And what they're watching is the magic of him being able to juggle between it all, be charming and witty.

And it's a sort of masterclass in auctioneering videos.

Well, I mean, I listen to other podcasts.

So it's the same kind of thing.

Yeah, I mean, you want to, yeah, if you do love auctioneering and you're an auctioneer, of course you're going to watch videos.

I just didn't know that they existed, that, you know, that there's the greatest hits out there.

There are DVDs and things you can get.

There must be.

There are greatest auctioneers.

Yeah, there must be.

There probably I don't think that's the biggest auction of all time, though, even the Waterlilies one.

I've got one that was bigger.

Go on.

The entire Roman Empire

was auctioned.

Was auctioned off in 193 AD.

Yeah.

It was auctioned off by the Praetorian Guard, who took bids from a couple of people.

It was a closed auction.

It wasn't anyone could bid.

And

this is according to Cassius Dio, who wrote a history of Rome.

Two people were bidding, Saul Piccianus and Marcus Didius Salvius Julianus.

And he made the maximum bid.

Supposedly, it was the equivalent of about five million quid in today's money, which I think surely someone else could have stumped up more.

But it was past its best in 1938.

Yeah, it's a true game.

Some damage.

But then several careless owners.

So at the moment, British police are investigating a caterpillar thief who has stolen from a nature reserve in Norfolk some milk parsley plants, right?

Now, there is a kind of butterfly in Britain called the swallowtail.

It's the largest native British butterfly and the caterpillars only eat milk parsley.

And these plants in Norfolk had swallowtail caterpillars on them.

So the police think that they've been stolen and the plants will be kept alive and then eventually the caterpillars will turn into butterflies and then collectors will kill the butterflies.

And they're very rare these butterflies because they only feed on these plants.

Right.

So someone's stolen the plants in order to get the caterpillars that they can sell to collectors.

Yes.

Well, no, to turn the caterpillars into butterflies to be killed for collectors, yeah.

Yeah.

But then you're breeding caterpillars, I suppose, so you are making more of the species.

Then you're immediately killing the butterfly as soon as it comes out of the thing.

Right.

Swings and roundabouts is it?

No, it's not.

It's all swings.

Crap playground.

Do you know they used to play cricket on the ice in the fens?

This was in North, in what's it called, in East Anglia, in England.

Was that not quite confusing if if they're all wearing their white?

No, this would take place in the 18th century in the 19th century.

And I read one account saying that the fielding and batting of many of the players was considered to be far superior and more graceful than any cricketing on the green.

Really?

So apparently playing cricket on ice is better.

Were they in skates or were they just running ice?

I think they were on skates, yeah.

That must be amazing.

Yeah, I mean the ball will go so far.

If you hit it, it goes out Yeah, yeah.

Standing on skates to bat.

Hang on, why would the ball go far?

Because it was skid on the ice.

Oh, once it hit the ground.

I thought you meant it gave you superhuman power of hitting something.

Just quickly on the Dutch and how good they are at skating.

Oh, they're amazing at speed skating, aren't they?

This is the thing.

Okay, so they're now so good that other countries are refusing to play against the moment.

There's no point.

There's no point.

In Sochi, in 2014, the Norwegians dropped out of the 10,000-metre speed skating race, ostensibly because they said, oh, we want to focus on the the team event.

Actually, it's just because they knew they'd get marmalised by the Dutch.

And Norway loves skating as well, so that's a big thing.

So the women's 1,500-metre team, they came first, second, third, and fourth in that event.

And out of 36 medals, the Dutch got 23.

No other team got more than three.

Maybe it's unfair, because they're the tallest nation, aren't they?

So perhaps it's unfair because their legs are too long.

But they will have a higher centre of gravity.

Yeah.

Meaning

It's easier for them to fall over.

Are we sure that being tall is an advantage in ice skating?

I think we are certainly not sure of that.

Having really long legs might help, I guess, if you're trying to if you're propelling yourself forward because you can go further from each stroke, maybe, and it's like a more efficient use of energy, perhaps.

I don't know.

I would suggest that if Jamaica

were to take part in this event, they might be as good as, if not better, than the Dutch.

I think we've just come with a sequel to Cool Runnings.

But the fastest skater, the world record holder for the fastest skater is a Russian called Pavel Kulesnikov.

And he's, whatever, how would you say it then, James?

Kulesnikov.

Kulesnikov, yeah, there you go.

Called Pavel Kolesnikov.

And to be fair, I didn't even read the name until just now.

I should have run the Fernando spelling down.

And

he was registered going at 53 kilometres an hour, registered going, not by like a police camera, but like

he, but like 50.

I just think that's astonishingly fast for a skater.

And he was in a 500-metre race, so he picked up speed fast.

How many is that in miles an hour, please?

I can't be bothered with this.

32.91.

Yeah.

Is that fast?

That's fast, isn't it?

30 miles an hour, yeah.

Can you say bolt run at 30 miles an hour?

It doesn't normally happen in miles an hour, does it?

They do it in seconds per 100 metres.

I think it would be nicer if it was miles an hour for the spectators.

He can run at approximately 9.9 seconds per 100 meters.

I'm not sure what that is in miles per hour.

Someone at home can work it out.

I think it's less.

I think it's about 20 that he runs, isn't it?

No, that's not very good.

That's like a built-up area.

I was looking up lonely insects and I was looking up cockroaches, and they suffer from isolation syndrome if they're left on their own, and they die, so, or they are not able to mature properly.

And this is really weird.

So, the way that cockroaches are really affectionate physically, so you know, if you see them, they're always crawling all over each other and stuff and touching each other.

And it turns out all this

physical contact stimulates them to grow.

So if you isolate a cockroach, even if you give it food and water, then it won't grow and it won't molt properly and it won't mature.

But you can make it mature by poking it with a feather.

So, yeah, and that convinces them that they're having this physical contact with their fellow cockroaches and they grow properly and they mature.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

Does it have to be a feather?

It could probably actually be any kind of slightly ticklish device.

Is there a limit to how big a cockroach grows?

Yes.

Because they can maintain it, right?

Like

if they were touching another cockroach, they're like, I just want to grow a bit today.

And so they'd touch a cockroach.

So you're saying if you get a cockroach and you tickle it for, like, let's say seven weeks, it might be the size of a dog.

Exactly.

That's my question.

Maybe.

Try it.

I think Andy's sceptical.

I am skeptical.

And I'm surprised, Anna, that you're encouraging this live inquiry.

Andy, we've clibotted all of the stupid things he said today.

I thought we'd just let this one pass.

So for many years, in many places, collecting flies and giving them to the government has gotten you money.

So in China, officials in Luayang offered $125 per 2,000 dead flies during a campaign.

Each fly was worth about 7 cents.

Was that a massive amount for a fly?

Was this recently, sorry?

That was quite recently, yeah.

Wow.

A cent

is quite a lot bigger than a fly as well.

Yeah, that's not really how money works.

It's interesting, but usually the money's licer than the thing.

thing.

It goes to the shop with loads of flies and they say you can't pay with that.

And you're like, well, it's heavier than the £10 no.

It's weird because the sandwich weighs a lot more than the £20, but the £20 note is heavier.

It doesn't really make sense.

Does it?

Sorry, I completely retract that.

That's a ridiculous thing to say.

So in.

Because then you wouldn't be able to buy anything.

You have to look like diamonds or anything.

I just bought my first house.

Oh, man.

That must be tough.

Yeah, I had to find a coin as big as a house.

That's what happens happens on the island of Yap in Micronesia.

Oh, yeah.

Because they have massive stone coins with holes in them, and the bigger, the better, really.

Yeah, that's where I was going with that.

Salvador Dali, he was obsessed with

breasts, wasn't he?

And lots of his art depicts breasts, but his ultimate obsession was with the udder.

Because he said it's a very weird sexual thing.

It's half penis and half udder.

What?

Sorry, it's all what udder.

Sorry.

It's half penis, half breast, all udder.

In what sense is an udder half penis?

It's incorrect.

Salvador is incorrect.

You went out on a limb.

He was wrong.

A UFC fighter called Justine Kish.

She was in a fight, and halfway through the match, she was held in, I think, in a stranglehold.

And as a result, she pooed herself.

mid-fight in the octagon.

Nice.

Still won the match, and

she got offered a bum wiping product as her sponsor for future.

No, it's it's wipes.

You go to the shop you write it.

Yes, can I have some bum wiping products, please?

Yeah, the

Tesco is like equivalent when they're not allowed to call a Jaffa cake, so they're calling my orange-filled biscuits with chocolate on top.

Without the chocolate on top,

but actually, this wasn't toilet paper.

No, no, it's wipes.

It's it's bum wipes.

Wet wipes.

Wet wipes for adults as opposed to babies.

So yeah, so she thought she was going to do it.

And she was really good because she won the match anyway and she came off and they asked her about it and she said, shit happens.

Did she use it?

It's very nice.

Did she use it as a weapon in the fight?

I mean no holes barred.

There's no weapons in UFC.

But there's no rules, right?

Yeah.

There's no rules.

It's not eye gouging if you rub your shit in someone's face.

That's true.

Oh, do you mean did she use the poo in the fight?

Not her wipes?

Right, I had to wipe the flow in you.

Have you heard of the uh in Holland?

There's a race in Holland called the Elfstaden Tocht.

Lee Vin Skyro told me about this, actually.

So it's this race that happens, well, it happens whenever it's able to happen.

So sometimes it doesn't happen for 20 years, sometimes it'll happen in consecutive years.

And it's apparently a massive event in Holland when it does happen.

And it is an ice skating tour that is about 200 kilometers long and goes through 11 cities.

And that's what the names mean.

It's the 11th city tour.

And and apparently it's just a massive event and what happens is every year everything gets cold and freezes in winter and they go around they the

the race the the racetrack is uh goes uh along a network of canals yeah exactly and they have to make sure that the ice is thick enough because it's an amateur contest and the professionals and amateurs take part and so they're loads and loads of people

take part in it and then pretty much the rest of the country all call in sick and watch it on television and apparently that's like a thing like if it's like they stay home like watch it it's a bit like like I know the Grand National here, but everybody watches it or something.

Yeah, or

anything like that.

Any sporting events, massive sporting events, but everyone watches it.

Yeah, I have heard of that, but I think global warming means it hasn't happened for a while.

It hasn't happened for a while.

There was one that was going to happen in 2012, and they called it.

And what happens is they decide they're going to call it, and then it has to happen within the next 48 hours, so everyone has to rush to get prepared.

But then it didn't happen, even though they called it because the ice just wasn't thick enough.

So exciting.

And there was actually, speaking of ice preparation, they do this thing called ice transplanting, which is taking thick ice from one place and moving it it to, say, a bit under a bridge where the ice isn't very thick and to kind of fusing it to the ice.

It's like a skin transplant, but yeah, isn't that really cool?

Because it has to be six inches thick along the entire 200 kilometers of the course.

And obviously, that's very seldom going to happen.

Yeah.

Why aren't the climate change lobby using this more in their PR?

I really think that might persuade the likes of Donald Trump and other such people.

Surely, if we know that this canal ice race is going to end,

I reckon people would step up for the plate.

If Donald Trump has a secret passion for ice

racing, I don't think he does.

Who wouldn't for this?

Yeah.

It is incredible.

It's so cool.

Do you mind if I ask why people are monitoring the koala populations?

Do we know that?

Yeah, I think.

Do you mind if I ask?

It wasn't that personal a question, Andy.

Sorry, stop me if I'm being really invasive.

Did you guys see that photo from March March of this year?

There was a guy sitting at a train station.

He looked up and he just couldn't believe what he saw.

He took a photo to prove it.

He was stopped at Seven Sisters Station.

Sitting right there on the platform were seven nuns.

Seven nuns, seven sisters.

And he took a photo of it.

Do you think an eighth nun wanted to come on that trip, but they were like, guys, we can't.

There is.

No, this is like the moon landing is being fake.

If you look in the photo, there is an eighth nun.

Well, there's an eighth man.

No, there's well, there's one man, but he's an eighth in the party.

Oh, I thought I saw an eighth nun when I looked at the photo.

Oh, really?

And so, was there an eighth night?

Oh, you're right, there's an eighth nun.

Oh, my God.

Ruined.

Oh, man.

I'm sorry.

I feel like I've killed Christmas.

God, did you do it that easy with the moon landings as well?

Have you heard of open source seeds?

No.

Okay, so...

Is that seeds that don't charge you to read them?

Kind of.

Okay.

No.

I think these are the seeds that are in these libraries, these open source seeds.

Well, so in the 1930s, the USA started applying patent law to plants.

So there are various plants

where the intellectual property is owned.

Like you can own an avocado.

Well, you can own an avocado, but you can own...

the whole avocado.

The whole concept of the avocado.

The whole species of the...

Yeah.

They've got this new kind of rice called golden rice, which is

hardier and it grows faster and better and therefore has prevented starvation.

That is owned by someone, the intellectual property for it.

Does that mean you're not allowed to grow it or you're not allowed to give it the name?

I think you're not allowed to then...

I'm not sure about this.

I think you're then not allowed to breed it, develop it, and then make money selling your own extra strain of it.

But I'm not certain.

So anyway.

No commercial use, basically.

And I think that's because that specific breed of rice was grown in space.

And it was like the means that it took to do that then means, well, therefore, those people deserve a kind of a cut of any profits.

Well, I don't think it's the specifically the space thing.

I just think

that specific rice thing is the effort that went into making that new breed of rice.

Yeah, so if you it's kind of like developing a medicine in some ways, that if you develop the medicine, you then get the rights to it because you've spent money developing it.

But they've now got this thing called open source seeds.

German breeders are experimenting with it.

You're not allowed to patent anything that you get out of it, any new great strains that you get, but you don't have to pay pay anybody to do the developing.

And

isn't that weird?

Yeah, that's truly bizarre.

And it doesn't seem morally great, surely, if you're not allowed to let anyone grow this thing that could be a great food source that you can propagate.

It might not incentivise people to develop new strains if you can't own it.

So there's a bit of a

capitalism versus communism.

Wrapped up in one simple sentence.

I imagine you'd like everybody to have enough to eat, Anna.

Well, well, I'm sorry.

I suppose it's not a million miles away from patenting a Mars bar.

Or a strain of apple that is in like a Granny Smith or something.

If Anna was in charge, it'd just be formless lumps of chocolate and nougat that we'd be eating now.

And everyone would get one, wouldn't they?

It's a better world.