No Such Thing As Wasted Material 2017

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Speaker 9 Hi, Aroy.

Speaker 10 Happy in the middle bit between Christmas and New Year.

Speaker 11 Oh, very nice.

Speaker 12 Thank you very much.

Speaker 14 I'm trying to get a range of greeting cards out.

Speaker 15 It's going frazzling.

Speaker 17 No one wants to buy greetings cards after Christmas. Very weird.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 19 Dan and Andy here.

Speaker 20 We just want to quickly let you know what you're about to listen to.

Speaker 20 This is a compilation of all the outtakes from the whole of 2017.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 9 78 minutes.

Speaker 20 78 minutes of outtake.

Speaker 22 I could watch a short children's film or a very, very long episode of Frasier in that time.

Speaker 20 Frasier made 78-minute-long episodes?

Speaker 23 I don't believe so, but it was the only thing I could think of that's shorter than than 78 minutes.

Speaker 23 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.

Speaker 24 Have a wonderful new year when it comes.

Speaker 23 I will see you then.

Speaker 16 All right, on with the outtakes.

Speaker 26 I don't have to watch Fraser.

Speaker 27 Did you guys know that anteaters, who have obviously famously long tongues, have got very, very few taste buds?

Speaker 25 Really? Yeah.

Speaker 7 What does one taste bud every meat or something?

Speaker 28 They can hardly taste what they're eating.

Speaker 31 Well, they're eating shitty ants and termites and stuff.

Speaker 20 They're eating ants and they occasionally swallow dirt as well, is the other thing.

Speaker 22 Oh, really?

Speaker 32 So it may be an advantage.

Speaker 29 You don't need to be a. Because all ants are going to taste the same, right? They're going to taste vinegary.

Speaker 15 Oh. Yeah, they are.

Speaker 29 Because they're full of formicas.

Speaker 7 That's so antist.

Speaker 33 Disagree.

Speaker 35 100% disagree.

Speaker 32 Because there are some of those ants, and they, do you remember, they swallow honey

Speaker 32 and they hang upside down, and they're sort of honey repositories.

Speaker 7 Imagine how much you must think you've lucked out when you get the odd honey-tasting ants.

Speaker 7 Such a relief.

Speaker 7 They have, well, pangolins, which look quite similar, have their tongues attached to their pelvis.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 29 So they're attached at the back.

Speaker 42 They're attached to the tongue.

Speaker 7 On the inside of them. There's no way their tongue comes out and then sweeps around.

Speaker 45 That's what I was thinking.

Speaker 46 Yeah. Hang on.

Speaker 47 Yeah.

Speaker 48 It can't be all tongue all the way back.

Speaker 15 It's all tongue, all the way back into a pangolin.

Speaker 7 Their tongues are longer than their bodies are.

Speaker 49 What's the point of that?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 50 They've just, that's the truth.

Speaker 51 That's amazing.

Speaker 29 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?

Speaker 15 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 7 And that helps cushion their skull when they're pecking, doesn't it? As well as being a useful place to store their tongue.

Speaker 20 Do you know what the longest tongue is? And this is relation to body size.

Speaker 29 It must be this pangolin.

Speaker 15 I think.

Speaker 53 No, go on. Go for it, no.

Speaker 25 Have a bat. Is it a bat?

Speaker 20 Yes, it is. Yeah.

Speaker 54 Oh, nice. It's a tube-lipped nectar bat.

Speaker 20 And its tongue can go to 1.5 times the length of its actual body.

Speaker 7 Wow. So that's the longest tongue in proportion to body size.

Speaker 34 Exactly. Enamel.

Speaker 55 I know that it latter.

Speaker 56 It's a longer for that bat. Oh do you?

Speaker 57 Yeah. Anora fistulata.

Speaker 16 How on earth did you remember that?

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 20 Yes. Yeah.
That's true. But maybe they didn't see the tongue for a long time.

Speaker 58 Maybe they're like, whoa, look at that lip.

Speaker 27 Almost no one had ever seen the tongue because it's always in in these massively long flower noses.

Speaker 60 What am I saying?

Speaker 9 Flower noses?

Speaker 23 The flower noses.

Speaker 32 The flower nose.

Speaker 53 It's a trumpet of a flower.

Speaker 7 So did they think that the bat's face was a flower?

Speaker 8 The bat that's got the head of a flower.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 17 Is it only about 30 centimetres before it hits you?

Speaker 60 You panic.

Speaker 7 It's not that. If an elephant has its trunk out, this is according to...

Speaker 15 Whoa, what is the...

Speaker 29 how can it have its trunk in?

Speaker 19 If it's up its bump.

Speaker 64 If it's like coiled up, I guess, and like not in use.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it's if its trunk is like da is facing downwards or coiled up or looks relaxed.

Speaker 29 It's always out though, isn't it?

Speaker 7 It's always out, so it's never sucked into its face, yeah.

Speaker 64 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

Speaker 64 and charging at you, that's when you know it's gonna attack.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Apparently, that's a bluff. And it's when the trunk's down and relaxed that they're doing a proper charge.

Speaker 29 I've never seen an elephant with its trunk straight out like a...

Speaker 7 Well, that's because they genuinely want to trample you down, James.

Speaker 42 Have you seen that?

Speaker 45 I've never even seen a picture of that.

Speaker 9 I haven't really.

Speaker 16 Running with your fist out, ready to hit someone.

Speaker 57 You very rarely get to photograph an elephant charging from the side on, don't you?

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 2 That's exactly what I'm saying.

Speaker 29 I do see that, but I'm just surprised I've never come across a picture like that if it's something that happens.

Speaker 7 I'm surprised I didn't look at Google Image it as soon as I read the facts. So what's the problem?

Speaker 64 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?

Speaker 7 Get up to you and then nozzle you friend in a friendly manner.

Speaker 66 Shove its trunk in your mouth.

Speaker 50 Just thinks you're stressed.

Speaker 7 It's just to scare you away. Oh, okay.

Speaker 29 I think it would work for me. Even if I remembered this conversation and thought, Hannah said that that's not gonna hurt me.

Speaker 39 Imagine if I've got this the wrong way around and how guilty I'm gonna feel.

Speaker 65 Well, I always forget the numbers.

Speaker 51 I always think 99% of elephant charges are bluffs. And then I think, or is that 99% of shark attacks?

Speaker 59 And actually, only 4% of elephant charges are bluffs.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 33 It's just a nightmare.

Speaker 47 Yeah.

Speaker 7 Just run away from them all.

Speaker 60 I think he's always saying.

Speaker 29 Just live in a city.

Speaker 15 Have you heard of Hobart's funnies?

Speaker 58 No. No.

Speaker 46 Good, great.

Speaker 61 So these were tanks that were used in D-Day.

Speaker 23 And there was this whole range, like a range of superheroes, basically.

Speaker 71 They all each had their own special superpower.

Speaker 29 Were they named funnies because they're unusual?

Speaker 54 Yeah, pretty much.

Speaker 23 That was a sort of nickname they were given.

Speaker 17 There was one whose sole job was to carry massive bundles of sticks.

Speaker 15 Ah, fash skis.

Speaker 9 Fashkis, exactly.

Speaker 72 It was called the Faskine Carrier.

Speaker 61 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...

Speaker 67 And these were enormous bundles of sticks.

Speaker 29 And that's where the name fascism comes from.

Speaker 10 Exactly.

Speaker 23 So it was using the Fascine Carrier to defeat fascism.

Speaker 39 Yeah, clever.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 14 It kind of seemed very scary if those were the first things the Germans saw on the horizon.

Speaker 73 The least scary robot wars robots.

Speaker 29 But you would think that the

Speaker 29 like in the end of Macbeth, spoiler alert, the trees, the trees are coming towards you.

Speaker 69 Oh yeah, that's true.

Speaker 14 Yeah, I guess any German soldiers who had done English PCSE

Speaker 15 would have been frightened.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 34 It is.

Speaker 20 Yeah. Is it? Yeah.
Camembert.

Speaker 15 Really?

Speaker 65 Camembert charts.

Speaker 36 I mean, look at this camembert.

Speaker 76 for a pie chart.

Speaker 77 That's awesome.

Speaker 29 Yeah, and that's because the correct way to eat camembert is to slice it into pie shapes, really.

Speaker 59 And then the people who think Theresa May would be a better prime minister get one bit of the cheese.

Speaker 38 They get a tiny little slither of cheese.

Speaker 29 And the don't knows just get a massive amount of cheese.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 And their mum had cut it in not a slicy way.

Speaker 29 And this was a French lady, and they were all saying she should be kicked out of the country for that.

Speaker 7 I've got to say, I can't, I wouldn't cross my mind not to slice it up like a pie.

Speaker 44 Who's doing it in a slicy way? That's insane.

Speaker 70 This lady.

Speaker 33 Well, this lady.

Speaker 21 Well, they didn't kick her out, I don't think, in the end.

Speaker 29 But someone said, oh, there's a cause for loss of nationality. And another commenter said, take her to the British border immediately.

Speaker 80 I actually cut off the top of the camembert, the whole thing.

Speaker 29 Just the mold.

Speaker 70 Just eat that.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 7 And then the bacteria is the little brownie bits, and you should have some brown bits on it, but not too much.

Speaker 27 Like a banana.

Speaker 7 Yes, like a banana.

Speaker 79 It depends what you like in a banana.

Speaker 29 Also, it probably depends what you like in a camembert.

Speaker 7 No, this is objective facts.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 In particular, there's one called Lupina, and the Latin for that is she-wolf, which was slang for prostitute.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 84 Isn't that weird?

Speaker 3 They had porn on their walls in the brothel.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 9 But yeah, no, it's an extraordinary place.

Speaker 20 Highly recommend. You go there.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 But how annoying is is that? Wouldn't you just, if I saw that, I'd try and unroll one in that case.

Speaker 29 Oh, well, they did try, but every time they tried, they would just fall apart.

Speaker 7 Oh, so they did sample that a few times.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 15 Don't know how that works.

Speaker 45 Wow.

Speaker 29 But yeah, this X-ray stuff is really interesting, isn't it? Because they can virtually unroll scrolls, which is just unbelievable.

Speaker 73 It's so cool.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 And they can unroll it and they can see what's on the next layer, which is just outrageous.

Speaker 7 Yeah, that's super

Speaker 70 amazing.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 22 I would have stopped after about fifty.

Speaker 29 In the 1930s, sociologist Norbert Elias walked around Europe with his shoelaces untied to see what people would say to him.

Speaker 20 No.

Speaker 8 He did.

Speaker 7 What was his real name, though?

Speaker 34 Oh, very good.

Speaker 55 Yeah. Hello, good.

Speaker 14 That sounds like alias.

Speaker 43 Oh,

Speaker 29 that's good.

Speaker 29 He found that in England, most old men warned that he might fall over.

Speaker 29 When he was in Germany, the older men would look at him with contempt. Wow.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 15 Really?

Speaker 33 Yeah, I think I read about this guy.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 9 Yeah.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 83 Happened a lot.

Speaker 14 Or to wait until they stop and then to tie them together.

Speaker 86 So So definitely.

Speaker 34 Oh, wow, yeah.

Speaker 53 If you've got enough time for that, that's the dream.

Speaker 70 Yeah.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 So there's this orangutan called Watana.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And she just find if she finds two threads or two vines or whatever, then she ties them together.

Speaker 29 I think she's trying to escape.

Speaker 37 Is she kept in a very high zoo?

Speaker 7 She's never tried to climb up out of them or hang herself from them.

Speaker 70 She's sorry.

Speaker 9 Are you quoting here?

Speaker 6 That got dark very quickly.

Speaker 7 That was my instinct when he said she was trying to escape, or I realized that I'd got it wrong.

Speaker 86 Escape from the monotony of life.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 15 Everyone in the stadium stood up and respectfully.

Speaker 23 Do you know what the rules are about singing the anthem?

Speaker 17 The government have said that you should dress appropriately, appropriately.

Speaker 15 Right.

Speaker 57 Also, that you should stand still.

Speaker 29 Right.

Speaker 37 And that you should be full of energy.

Speaker 25 Okay.

Speaker 29 That's interesting.

Speaker 42 Yeah.

Speaker 29 Stand still and full. So you're ready to go, basically.

Speaker 21 I think you have to be quivering, basically.

Speaker 65 It's not still.

Speaker 25 It's. No, you're right.

Speaker 18 You're right.

Speaker 29 I don't know how do you. As soon as they finish, everyone's just going to explode in some kind of.

Speaker 10 Yeah. Are you not allowed to whisper during it?

Speaker 21 You're not allowed to talk on the phone during it.

Speaker 29 But lots of countries have weird rules, don't they?

Speaker 52 That's true.

Speaker 29 I think the Philippines, in the Philippines, their national anthem has to be between 100 and 120 beats per minute.

Speaker 29 The Star Spangled Banner, when that was first written, it was supposed to be conspirito, which means with spirit.

Speaker 23 Oh, I thought you meant that it was meant to be called.

Speaker 57 No.

Speaker 42 Conspirato.

Speaker 71 It sounds like a magician.

Speaker 70 Yeah.

Speaker 29 And also, the God Save the Queen, George V, he thought he was an expert because he'd listened to it so many times.

Speaker 43 And he said,

Speaker 29 It was called God Save the King, then as well.

Speaker 53 Just desperate pleading for some kind of skill.

Speaker 20 How many times have you listened to it?

Speaker 7 That is very, he is like, I'm the person who has to hear this more than any of you.

Speaker 15 So please, can you sing it right?

Speaker 29 But if he sings it, it's called God Save Me.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 84 that doesn't scam.

Speaker 27 God Save Our Gracious Meek.

Speaker 89 It was like Prince Philip's joke.

Speaker 14 He jokes that he's the world's best plaque unveiler.

Speaker 90 Oh, yes.

Speaker 67 And there's a great cut of him saying it repeatedly.

Speaker 15 Still, it's still a good joke.

Speaker 29 Anyway, he said that the opening section, you should set your metronome to 60, and then later on it goes down to 52.

Speaker 52 Well, that's pretty slow.

Speaker 7 What sort of is everyone loses energy?

Speaker 20 No, no, that's always that big ending of an American national anthem.

Speaker 25 No, you're talking about God Savo.

Speaker 52 I'm talking about God Savoo.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 55 Is that slow?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 29 So they put loads of extra notes in, like they're on American Idol, don't they?

Speaker 7 Other things that are being played at the wrong tempo.

Speaker 34 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 33 A lot of Beethoven.

Speaker 7 So this is a theory that Beethoven's metronome was broken.

Speaker 45 That just sounds like a sick burn from a reviewer, I don't think.

Speaker 25 Wait, so he wrote his songs at the wrong tempo?

Speaker 7 No, he wrote them at the wrong tempo because his metronome is wrong. So this is some research that's been done by...

Speaker 3 By Brahms.

Speaker 33 You start playing, like, whoa, this is fast?

Speaker 6 No, no, no, that's not.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And everyone everyone thinks, well, why on earth did he write this?

Speaker 39 It sounds awful.

Speaker 7 It's frantic and mad.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 So Beethoven was just writing down the wrong stuff because his metronome was ticking wrong.

Speaker 7 So when his metronome was saying, Yeah, you're playing at sixty beats a minute, he was actually playing at ninety beats a minute.

Speaker 15 That is brilliant.

Speaker 20 That's amazing to know he wrote to a metronome. I I'd never thought of that.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Turns out it wasn't actually quite developed for the year.

Speaker 52 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 29 I suppose it's plausible that you could have a

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 7 Do you think Beethoven's 9th is actually happy birthday? Just miswritten.

Speaker 3 I don't really think that.

Speaker 7 There's a really creepy ant colony that they've just discovered in Poland, which lives in an old Soviet nuclear bunker.

Speaker 7 And basically, there's this ants' nest on top of a ventilation pipe outlet that comes up from the nuclear bunker.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And then they can't get out, so they can't climb up the walls and get back out.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 64 Oh my God, that's like sick sci-fi film.

Speaker 15 It is, isn't it?

Speaker 29 It sounds like a metaphor for the Soviet times.

Speaker 40 It does.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 43 And on that note.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 In my head, I'm imagining it like the big red balls in total wipeout, and you could just bounce from balloon to balloon.

Speaker 29 Now, I can see that working.

Speaker 29 What I think about those big plastic balls is they're in South America somewhere, aren't they?

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 So, if aliens come along, all they'll see really is these big plastic things around.

Speaker 7 No, no, I don't think that's true.

Speaker 15 No, I think that's true.

Speaker 29 If they landed in South America, all of the concrete and stuff would go before the plastic, surely.

Speaker 7 But we've got a lot more plastic than just the balls that are used in this weird TV show.

Speaker 54 Sure, sure, sure.

Speaker 22 But they'd probably think that that was the centre of human civilization or something.

Speaker 21 This is where they built their greatest temple.

Speaker 29 Exactly. You would probably look at it and they probably they're maybe north-south aligned or something like that.

Speaker 29 Or they probably work out that they're aligned with the sun or something and they think that it was a temple.

Speaker 61 Yeah, or they think it's a model of the planets.

Speaker 14 They think it's an early human attempt to understand the solar system.

Speaker 61 Yeah. Yeah.
And that the different sizes represent the different things.

Speaker 29 They're all the same size, though.

Speaker 15 So they'd be like, well, those idiotic humans.

Speaker 45 They thought that Mars and Jupiter were the same size.

Speaker 54 Actually, James, you make a very compelling argument.

Speaker 28 Think of all the temples, the steppe pyramids in South America.

Speaker 26 Think what game show they probably were.

Speaker 29 Yeah, do you remember in Gladiators, they used to have a thing where you had to climb up a pyramid?

Speaker 50 That was probably it.

Speaker 68 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 28 You get to the top, and at the top, you're sacrificed to the gods.

Speaker 7 I think we all know that they'll assume the Disney Plastic Castle in Paris is an ultimate temple.

Speaker 92 That's true.

Speaker 60 We're going to leave such weird stuff behind.

Speaker 80 I was reading an article the other day about what happens first when if all humans disappeared,

Speaker 61 the rough running order of how things wind down.

Speaker 63 And

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 67 And actually, it's quite quickly that you end up with in 10 years.

Speaker 70 It might be a bit more than that.

Speaker 15 Well, I did think.

Speaker 29 Because they don't just rebuild New York every 10 years, do they?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 15 I can't believe they've buried the news.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 40 Yeah.

Speaker 29 Are they made of plastic?

Speaker 69 We assume.

Speaker 65 Or just Wendy houses.

Speaker 42 I think we all lived

Speaker 70 a tiny race of

Speaker 43 poly pockets.

Speaker 18 All the exhibits in their museums will be, you know, little playmobile dolls and Lego people.

Speaker 16 So we think that these were the life forms themselves frozen when the disaster came.

Speaker 40 Why don't we talk about bridges?

Speaker 7 I've absolutely lost it. How does Dan keep this thing together?

Speaker 15 It's so hard to know.

Speaker 17 It's so much fun when teachers are away.

Speaker 29 They used to, in the medieval times, draw elephants with actual trumpets for trunks.

Speaker 33 Did they? Yeah.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 38 It would be very weird if they thought it was the case.

Speaker 7 If they'd seen an elephant and they saw a trumpet.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 And I think maybe a lot of medieval pictures are like this. They're more allegorical than actually literal.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 77 Yeah.

Speaker 33 Wait, you said they thought that the noise came out of the trunks.

Speaker 13 It does, doesn't it?

Speaker 18 I don't know. Yeah, they do.

Speaker 7 It sounds very nasal, the noise. I think it comes out of the trunk.
Sure.

Speaker 16 You're basing this off your own.

Speaker 50 I just tried doing it, yeah.

Speaker 7 And it sounded very elephant time when I did it out of the nose.

Speaker 55 I think you're right.

Speaker 64 And now with a mouth?

Speaker 70 It's not the same.

Speaker 7 Actually, did you read about that woman? I think it was in this country this week or last week, who

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 44 And so, this restaurant brought her medication.

Speaker 30 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.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 29 But you fall in love with it.

Speaker 52 I think that's.

Speaker 25 He said fall in love with those are his words, not mine.

Speaker 29 Alright, okay. Because that would be like a good argument in favour of a robotic wife, for instance, that you build yourself.

Speaker 54 Yeah.

Speaker 77 Or a Lego wife.

Speaker 29 Yeah, either of those.

Speaker 16 It's too painful.

Speaker 3 She will be tiny.

Speaker 77 You get massive Lego people, though, don't you?

Speaker 15 Do you?

Speaker 25 Yeah, Lego but it's not like a six at Lego Land.

Speaker 24 But you'd have to get married at Legoland, wouldn't you?

Speaker 64 But I think if you're going as far as getting a Lego wifeling, that's probably not an issue.

Speaker 19 No one's going to be like, no, that's not really my scene.

Speaker 20 You've put on a lot of bricks since we married.

Speaker 29 Have you guys ever heard of the National Fruit Collection? No. I saw this.
I was reading about apples and I just saw it.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 And they have a living collection of apples, presumably old trees. They have 2,300 traditional varieties of apple.

Speaker 82 Wow.

Speaker 29 Really? Apparently they get 40,000 visitors a year.

Speaker 7 That's so cool. So you get a chance to taste all those varieties that have gone out of public use.

Speaker 90 They haven't ever said you can eat them.

Speaker 25 Yeah,

Speaker 65 I'm not sure if you're allowed to eat them.

Speaker 65 It's like anything in the middle.

Speaker 52 The National Fruit Collection was demolished this week.

Speaker 81 That's what I'm hearing.

Speaker 3 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.

Speaker 64 You're the reason they didn't have the please don't eat the penguin sign up.

Speaker 29 Yeah, well, isn't that cool? Apparently, it's been there since 1952, and I've never heard of it.

Speaker 7 I really want to go and visit that.

Speaker 34 That sounds so fun.

Speaker 12 I found it as well.

Speaker 51 I think we should visit, actually.

Speaker 17 Yeah, let's go.

Speaker 34 Let's go.

Speaker 29 Yeah. If you're listening to this and you work at the National Fruit Collection, why not invite us?

Speaker 83 Give us a discount.

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Speaker 7 Do you know what was the company that was a huge boon for apple eating in the world over the last 15 years?

Speaker 58 Strongbowl.

Speaker 7 Close, but that's they're major in apple drinking.

Speaker 15 Apple eating.

Speaker 80 Is it an apple tart company?

Speaker 39 Is it like Mr. Kipling?

Speaker 7 It is not Mr. Kipling.

Speaker 25 The answer is...

Speaker 29 Oh, I think we can get it.

Speaker 50 Yeah, we can get it.

Speaker 91 I'll give you some clues.

Speaker 64 It's like a lolly company.

Speaker 77 It was like flavouring thing. Smoothie makers.

Speaker 7 I will give you some clues.

Speaker 7 So, basically, when sliced apples started being a thing, consumption suddenly went massively up.

Speaker 52 Sorry, I missed that memo.

Speaker 29 Are sliced apples a thing?

Speaker 43 I have one in my lunchbox pretty much every day as cool.

Speaker 29 I'm still stuck on avocado toast.

Speaker 7 You know, when you buy an apple in the supermarket, some people do, and it's a sliced, and it's in a package.

Speaker 33 I didn't know that.

Speaker 7 No, have you never seen those in the food section?

Speaker 55 I have seen those. I think they're also.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 15 Oh, those.

Speaker 86 It's like why? But you can't.

Speaker 29 It's the answer to McDonald's, aren't I?

Speaker 6 There you go.

Speaker 11 I was gonna tell you, I get points.

Speaker 19 There are no points in the dark.

Speaker 9 Well, I'm gonna wedded out what you just said.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And it's also really helped in schools across Britain.

Speaker 29 People before that were just having one bite of an apple and throwing it away, weren't they?

Speaker 64 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

Speaker 64 in their happy meals one year, they became the the largest literary producer in the world.

Speaker 21 Something for literacy tripled in America.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Then apple consumption went up by almost 100%.

Speaker 34 Wow.

Speaker 64 It's easy in schools though because they can just make you eat stuff.

Speaker 7 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...

Speaker 27 I had an apple this morning. Did you?

Speaker 10 And I'm amazed at my bravery in getting through it without having it sliced for me.

Speaker 64 James has an apple peeling machine by his desk.

Speaker 16 I do.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 15 Everyone has one of those.

Speaker 60 Everyone has one of those.

Speaker 15 What the hell?

Speaker 79 I've never heard of that. Does it actually work?

Speaker 64 It looks like a little torture device. It's made of metal, and you basically skewer the apple, and

Speaker 64 you put it on a skewer, and then you turn it, so it's being like spit-roasted, essentially.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 29 It's also for oranges.

Speaker 7 I only really like an apple on a skewer when it's got a suckling pig wrapped around it.

Speaker 29 So, there is a shaving brush manufacturer around at the moment called Penhalligans. I think they're quite

Speaker 29 an old one with a lot of history.

Speaker 29 On their website, they're asked, do you use badger hair on your shaving brushes?

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 15 Whoa!

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 65 But presumably, they must do.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 29 So, do you think they farm badger for meat in China?

Speaker 9 Maybe they do.

Speaker 29 Maybe. They used to eat badger in Europe,

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 70 Several days!

Speaker 14 You just have to tie it up in the river, I guess.

Speaker 18 Yeah.

Speaker 9 But rank flavour as well, otherwise.

Speaker 7 Or just eat beef.

Speaker 23 Badgers, they don't make a noise, though, do they?

Speaker 70 Do they not?

Speaker 20 Well, do they? They must.

Speaker 15 Go on. Yeah, it depends what you do to them.

Speaker 77 Old McDonald had a badger, E-I-E-I-O.

Speaker 18 Yes. With a.

Speaker 80 What?

Speaker 29 I don't know. Do they fuff like

Speaker 29 ferrets do? Like fuff.

Speaker 70 Fuff.

Speaker 15 Maybe.

Speaker 28 I imagine them squealing.

Speaker 7 I reckon they squeal if you run them over.

Speaker 31 That'd be a great quiz, by the way.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 How many animals can you get down the line?

Speaker 29 Big ships. Yeah.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 43 Wow.

Speaker 29 It goes at about 16.5 knots, which is about 30 kilometers an hour.

Speaker 29 And its stopping distance is nine kilometres.

Speaker 78 Nine kilometers per kilometer

Speaker 29 if it's going at that speed. And its turning circle in clear weather is three kilometers.

Speaker 29 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

Speaker 29 before we were facing north.

Speaker 83 Wow,

Speaker 29 we're like quite close to Trafalgar Square here, aren't we?

Speaker 20 Imagine in an emergency, like in the way you would in a car, hitting the brakes on a boat, but nine kilometers away.

Speaker 20 Because if you did it just one kilometre too late, you'd be like, we're screwed.

Speaker 53 We just have to watch ourselves plow into this island.

Speaker 36 I have a fact about

Speaker 35 banning songs and rude songs.

Speaker 27 Okay.

Speaker 48 So it's about parental advisory lyrics.

Speaker 90 You know that sticker that you see on albums.

Speaker 69 Do you know who those are partly thanks to?

Speaker 16 You may do.

Speaker 53 Can I actually have a genuine guess?

Speaker 52 Cypress Hill?

Speaker 85 They're one of the early people to have it.

Speaker 18 No. Okay.

Speaker 20 That's not what I've got, although that might be part of the NWA.

Speaker 27 Is it a rap group?

Speaker 50 It's Al Gore's wife.

Speaker 26 You were close.

Speaker 83 Is she part of a rap group?

Speaker 71 Yeah, she is.

Speaker 14 No, she was listening to Prince with her young daughter, and she heard some very explicit lyrics.

Speaker 77 They were things like, I guess you could say she was a sex fiend.

Speaker 14 I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 23 So this contributed to the rise of the parental advisory.

Speaker 29 Filthy 15 is a great name, isn't it?

Speaker 69 It's the sequel to The Dirty Dozen.

Speaker 14 But there was an album once that got a parental advisory label in spite of the fact that it was completely instrumental.

Speaker 16 Why?

Speaker 20 Did it have sex noises?

Speaker 27 No, it didn't.

Speaker 48 No, it was completely instrumental.

Speaker 89 It was by Frank Zappa. It's a Frank Zappa album.

Speaker 69 It was called G-Spot Tornado.

Speaker 67 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.

Speaker 69 Supposedly, I haven't backed this up yet though.

Speaker 67 Supposedly, that cow was originally one of the zebras from Jumanji.

Speaker 45 That's quite a career change, isn't it?

Speaker 29 I'm tired of being typecasted as a zebra.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 84 I like this zebra's CV.

Speaker 29 It says, oh, it says here you can also do cow.

Speaker 59 You need two zebras, one in the front and one in the back of the cow.

Speaker 85 Yeah, no, you're right.

Speaker 14 After every podcast done, I go through verifying everything.

Speaker 29 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?

Speaker 67 I think maybe, because Jumanji came out first, maybe they had the design of a zebra going around in a tornado.

Speaker 59 Yeah.

Speaker 20 And so they just used that

Speaker 59 footage, or not the footage, but you know what I mean?

Speaker 23 That little computer generated thing to be the cow.

Speaker 61 I don't, as I say, haven't backed it up yet.

Speaker 20 Gonna do it as soon as the podcast.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 No, but this is it's one of those things where it's been said, but don't know where the proof is.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 So the company that built that sells Brad Pitt to all these different movies that need a body. That's cool.

Speaker 29 So they can use all the different ages of man as well.

Speaker 70 Exactly.

Speaker 27 So theoretically, in World War Z, the zombie film, would all the zombies that they used have also been Brad Pitt?

Speaker 34 Wow.

Speaker 6 I hope they paid him well for that.

Speaker 9 I bet they did.

Speaker 7 What if there's someone really overweight or something?

Speaker 15 Was there a bit in Benjamin Bucken where he put on lots of two Brad Pitts?

Speaker 70 One in the front, one in the back.

Speaker 29 Have you seen the new thing that IKEA is doing where they're using augmented reality?

Speaker 29 This is pretty cool.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 That is so cool. That's amazing.
That's clever, isn't it?

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 16 Which had hours of fun with it.

Speaker 20 We did that for our new house.

Speaker 90 It was amazing.

Speaker 25 Yeah.

Speaker 15 We didn't go with them at the end.

Speaker 20 But we've got pictures of what it might have looked like.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 90 Ah, but there is a video game as well.

Speaker 20 You'll love this then.

Speaker 20 It's basically a it simulates you building IKEA furniture but on a computer and there's no end to it.

Speaker 18 You know, you don't win.

Speaker 23 No, just you don't even end up with the furniture anyway.

Speaker 9 No, yeah.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 So home improvisation.

Speaker 92 Thanks for the translation done.

Speaker 15 What language were you familiar with?

Speaker 34 I googled that.

Speaker 20 Turns out it translates as home improvisation. And it lets you, yeah, basically through virtual reality exactly what you're doing, Alex.

Speaker 20 So if you want to build stuff outside of kitchens, that's there for you.

Speaker 25 Can't wait.

Speaker 12 There is a thing that's happening at the moment.

Speaker 72 People keep having sleepovers in Ikea shops.

Speaker 23 And IKEA are not relaxed about it.

Speaker 9 They are really annoying.

Speaker 29 Well, surely they could just stop people, like, as in kick them out.

Speaker 67 Well, people go in and they hide in cupboards at the end of the day.

Speaker 50 Do they?

Speaker 67 You can't go through at the end of every working day checking every cupboard in the shop.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 One in 10, yeah. One in 10 is it.

Speaker 15 Wow.

Speaker 29 And were they all in the shop?

Speaker 64 Somebody filmed the soap opera set entirely in IKEA, and they did it all without IKEA's knowledge. And

Speaker 29 yeah, it was a web series. Yeah.

Speaker 9 That's amazing.

Speaker 70 That's awesome.

Speaker 16 So they were in the physical shop, but they just never

Speaker 77 staff never called onto.

Speaker 64 No, they were always filming with sort of handheld cameras and things.

Speaker 64 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

Speaker 70 they were just like living in the homes and stuff.

Speaker 11 Oh, because yeah, because if it's a kitchen, they're like, they're like a set.

Speaker 53 Yeah, they've got a set.

Speaker 64 I think the only awkward thing is that in every scene you've got random people walking around your house and just like

Speaker 2 picking up your kitchen utensils and taking them away.

Speaker 92 So

Speaker 29 the whole concept of the sitcom has to be about a place where you live where there's a lot of burglars.

Speaker 7 Do you know if we ever said that when Nelson died and he famously had Hardy next to him, cradling him in his arms?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 29 Why do you say kismet me hardy?

Speaker 3 Isn't that

Speaker 29 because he wasn't a fake pirate?

Speaker 20 It's a missed opportunity, I think.

Speaker 23 I bet Hardy got a load of those jokes all the way through his name or something.

Speaker 87 Yeah.

Speaker 14 But if the story was that Nelson said kismet Hardy, how do they explain away the bit where Hardy then kisses him?

Speaker 9 Did they say, oh, Nelson said, oh, get off me, you weirdo?

Speaker 20 Can I throw in one Nixon fact before we move on?

Speaker 20 Can anyone tell me what Richard Nixon's middle name is?

Speaker 30 Mill House.

Speaker 60 Yeah, I'd say Mill House. Yeah.

Speaker 53 So it is Mill House.

Speaker 82 However,

Speaker 20 I'm going to put forward the

Speaker 20 reviewed fact that it's in fact a double barrel surname because it is his mother's maiden name.

Speaker 20 Mill House was his mum.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 20 So he took that that on, and I would say that that's not a.

Speaker 7 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?

Speaker 23 Well, it can still be her name.

Speaker 58 She might, yeah.

Speaker 7 Was her name still Mill House?

Speaker 20 I don't know, but it's probably not. It's taken because it's his mother's middle name, sorry, maiden name.

Speaker 7 Interesting. Yeah.

Speaker 53 I didn't know that connection in any case.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 15 Well, that's what I'm trying to put forward here, yeah.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 32 I don't know how many times his name's been written in stone, actually.

Speaker 50 Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 65 I mean, he's not.

Speaker 29 I don't think he's one of Mount Rushmore, is he, Nixon?

Speaker 70 No.

Speaker 63 No.

Speaker 23 But he should be be a shit Rushmore with Andrew Jackson and Nixon and Calvin Coolidge.

Speaker 14 Calvin Coolidge, Trump.

Speaker 27 Yeah.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 16 That's a sort of an idea that was put out there.

Speaker 20 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?

Speaker 71 What do you have the names?

Speaker 25 Well,

Speaker 9 there are only about three other names.

Speaker 25 Sorry, sorry.

Speaker 20 Three of them carried it, and then there was Francis, who was the name of his dad.

Speaker 28 I think

Speaker 7 isn't Richard the Lion Heart far back enough that everyone is directly descended from him. I think he is.

Speaker 25 I think Edward III is.

Speaker 7 So everyone on Earth is directly descended.

Speaker 20 What? Because

Speaker 7 everyone in Britain.

Speaker 29 Pretty much everyone in Western Europe.

Speaker 7 But everyone in America as well, because.

Speaker 77 But Danny Dyer did Who Do You Think You Are?

Speaker 14 And they found that he was related to Edward III, and it's this huge story.

Speaker 67 And actually, the odds of him not being related.

Speaker 59 It would have been an amazing news story if he he had not been related to Edward III.

Speaker 29 I don't think that's going to sell many papers, is it?

Speaker 86 Daddy Dyette not related to Edward III.

Speaker 23 Display the odds, the odds are that 99% of everyone is related to Edward III.

Speaker 22 It's suddenly a very interesting story.

Speaker 29 I see that, but then people don't usually go much past their headline, do they?

Speaker 9 And if the headline is Daddy Dyette isn't related to Edward III.

Speaker 32 But that's an interesting story because the odds are 99% that he would be.

Speaker 43 In my newspaper, it's going to have very long headlines and very short articles.

Speaker 7 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

Speaker 7 oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, oh, you know, that kind of stuff.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it takes years of study to understand that.

Speaker 7 The example the study used was: country music uses more syllables using words such as cigarettes, tackle box and hillbilly.

Speaker 75 Tackle box.

Speaker 66 Apparently.

Speaker 7 So that's too advanced for an eight-year-old, obviously.

Speaker 26 Yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 29 Also on too big to fit, I googled too big to fit.

Speaker 29 And Dwayne the Rock Johnson is too big to fit in a lot of the cars in the latest Fast and the Furious.

Speaker 15 Wow.

Speaker 29 So there was an interview with him and they're asking him

Speaker 29 why are you always in trucks and not even little cars and he's like I'm too big to fit in there.

Speaker 20 Oh my god.

Speaker 92 Wow.

Speaker 92 That makes sense, yeah.

Speaker 7 They should drill a hole in the ceiling or something.

Speaker 15 Is he too tall?

Speaker 23 He's very muscular.

Speaker 10 He's muscular, yeah.

Speaker 23 But that is extraordinary.

Speaker 52 He's good that, isn't it?

Speaker 69 Does he have could they have an adapted one where he's just got one seat in the middle?

Speaker 77 So it's not a two-seater?

Speaker 29 I guess they could, although they'd have to write that into the storyline of the film.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 73 What storyline there is of the film.

Speaker 29 If you want to collect semen from macaques, it's quite hard.

Speaker 16 Macaques.

Speaker 29 Macaques, little primates, little monkey things. Oh, yeah.
What they used to do is they would stimulate their genitals with electricity.

Speaker 29 Sometimes a little weak jolt, but it would make them ejaculate.

Speaker 29 But one researcher realised that actually they were ejaculating quite a lot anyway,

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 15 What?

Speaker 9 All the time.

Speaker 70 Well, not whether they're asleep.

Speaker 45 No, but they're asleep, the heart just keeps going.

Speaker 20 But do they ejaculate 40 times a day?

Speaker 67 You know?

Speaker 26 Yeah, they do.

Speaker 15 I'm seeing.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 They're going to have some better hours than that.

Speaker 15 In a good hour.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 55 Devious, devious macaques.

Speaker 66 Yeah, they are randy, though.

Speaker 70 So randy.

Speaker 40 You can obviously four times an hour.

Speaker 8 Yeah, they like to masturbate.

Speaker 15 Look, we all like to masturbate, but

Speaker 26 they should get a job.

Speaker 7 You know, when crocodiles die, they bloat and float. They're bloaters and floaters

Speaker 7 because of all these gases being released that keep them afloat. And they float for over a month without sinking.

Speaker 15 Whoa.

Speaker 7 So I don't understand why we don't see crocodiles floating down

Speaker 43 all the time.

Speaker 52 We must do, right?

Speaker 15 Maybe we do in countries with crocodiles. I think they're lugs.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 16 Or crocodiles because they're very stealth, aren't they?

Speaker 43 Crocodiles.

Speaker 53 They don't do much movement.

Speaker 20 So if you saw one going like that, you'd think, oh, he's on a cheeky mission.

Speaker 29 Cockroaches go on their back, don't they, when they die, famously?

Speaker 65 Yes.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 And as they get older, they kind of start to get weighed down to their bum side.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 39 So they're flipping over their head,

Speaker 7 they're not rolling over sideways, they're flipping over vertically because their bum is weighing them down.

Speaker 15 Exactly. They do a backflip.

Speaker 29 Well, I don't know if it's exactly like that. It could be a slightly sideways, slightly back flippy thing.

Speaker 3 I don't know about that.

Speaker 29 But basically, you're walking around with a heavy bun, and as you get older, you're less able to deal with it.

Speaker 7 We know how it feels.

Speaker 15 God gracious.

Speaker 89 Tortoises have that same problem, do they?

Speaker 81 Obviously, because they've got round shells.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 61 But also, if they get too big,

Speaker 93 a bigger shell means that it's hard to write yourself again.

Speaker 61 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.

Speaker 54 Oh,

Speaker 33 it's a trade-off.

Speaker 27 It's basically putting all your eggs in one basket to be really big.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 It's spelt like a gombok, but I think it's pronounced more like gumbuts.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 70 Wow. That's so cool.

Speaker 3 That's awesome.

Speaker 20 Was the inventor of the gombok inspired by turtles or tortoises, or is that?

Speaker 29 I believe he was.

Speaker 16 I've met him and I can't remember. Right.

Speaker 7 Or was it vice versa, you're going to ask?

Speaker 15 Yes.

Speaker 54 The turtles.

Speaker 7 I went to one of his shows and thought, guys, we should try that.

Speaker 20 Yeah, I was so proud of myself for not finishing the sentence.

Speaker 15 You clearly knew where I was going with that.

Speaker 53 I was like, nah, because James started talking.

Speaker 82 I thought, ah,

Speaker 20 that looks like a clever question.

Speaker 7 I wasn't going to let him save you.

Speaker 23 Diamonds are the hardest substance in the world.

Speaker 67 I read a...

Speaker 20 Whoop, they're not.

Speaker 11 James shaking his head.

Speaker 67 Min diesel.

Speaker 34 They're not. What is then?

Speaker 7 They're the hardest, naturally occurring substance.

Speaker 25 Sorry, that's what I meant to say.

Speaker 16 Yes, the hardest, naturally occurring substance.

Speaker 20 You can't scratch a diamond except with another diamond you can. Yeah.
So you can scratch a diamond with a diamond.

Speaker 29 That's what hardness means in this sense. It means that you can scratch something with something.

Speaker 67 So hardness is whether something can be scratched, and toughness is whether it shatters into a thousand pieces if you hit it with something.

Speaker 23 So diamonds, because the layers of carbon are very tough

Speaker 24 internally, but you hit it with a hammer, bang, smashes.

Speaker 25 Right.

Speaker 58 So don't try that. Don't do that.

Speaker 34 Yeah, okay. Yeah.

Speaker 23 And that's, I think, I think we may have said this before.

Speaker 67 That's what traders used to do.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 57 I'll just hit it with this hammer, bang, smashes.

Speaker 32 And then he says, oh, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 14 It wasn't a real diamond after all. It was something else.

Speaker 65 But I'll keep the shards.

Speaker 37 I'll keep the shards, and I'll pay you a nominal sum for them.

Speaker 100 I'll pay you a tiny bit to keep yourself going, you know.

Speaker 14 And then they just sell off a load of smaller diamonds.

Speaker 77 Very clever, very clever, yeah.

Speaker 39 Or you could glue them back together and make a bigger diamond again.

Speaker 29 Oh, god, I think that's where the imperfections come in.

Speaker 9 Come on down to Hannah's shitty diamond store.

Speaker 15 We've got loads of rubbish diamonds full of glue.

Speaker 29 I've got some stuff on quarantine.

Speaker 90 Oh, right, yeah.

Speaker 29 It comes from the Italian for 40, Caranti, which.

Speaker 7 Because you used to have to stay 40 days in quarantine. Yeah.

Speaker 20 That makes sense.

Speaker 29 Incubation period of the Black Death, supposedly.

Speaker 29 They put astronauts in quarantine

Speaker 29 when they come back down. Do you know why?

Speaker 20 Yeah, because of radiation and in case in space they were given some sort of flu disease or something.

Speaker 16 It was to do with diseases, wasn't it?

Speaker 52 Well, it was

Speaker 7 aliens with smallpox.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 So when they come back down, they need to go in quarantine so they don't pick up bugs on Earth.

Speaker 15 Isn't that technically

Speaker 57 technically that you're putting the entire rest of the world in quarantine?

Speaker 43 Yeah, yes.

Speaker 31 That was just true of all quarantine things.

Speaker 100 Just flip around the exit and entrance sign.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I suppose that is true. Yeah.

Speaker 20 There was, you know, just picking up on that quickly, when the Apollo 11 astronauts came down, they had to do that.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 16 Wow.

Speaker 20 And what ended up happening was if a scientist accidentally kind of was infected, as it were, with

Speaker 20 the room that they were kept in because they were delivering stuff and so on, I guess in some ways.

Speaker 29 And for them it was for possible space cooties, wasn't it?

Speaker 25 Yes, yeah.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 29 And then the next people came along to give them some food, and they got infected.

Speaker 64 Exactly.

Speaker 15 It's like a horror film. It's like, oh,

Speaker 7 where's Sarah? I better go and find out.

Speaker 39 Oh, no.

Speaker 66 Where's Bernard gone now?

Speaker 29 It's in the game of sardines.

Speaker 73 It is. It is.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 who made made their way into there and had to live out.

Speaker 37 I don't even know what the implication you're making is.

Speaker 10 Prostitutes.

Speaker 44 Wait, were they prostitutes?

Speaker 20 No, because it's back on Earth now.

Speaker 29 But also space prostitutes don't exist.

Speaker 15 Oh, yes.

Speaker 27 But it really was another time, wasn't it?

Speaker 53 The 60s. Yeah.

Speaker 20 I mean, it literally was, yes.

Speaker 29 I looked at some skillful number people

Speaker 29 and I was looking at like the world record for memorizing numbers and stuff like that.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 7 That makes sense, what, because of no distractions?

Speaker 29 I guess so, right?

Speaker 20 But you can close your eyes. How do you see the number to memorize?

Speaker 84 Maybe that's another reason.

Speaker 29 But yeah, maybe you're allowed a little torch or something. I don't know.

Speaker 7 Perhaps they give you an audio recording of it.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 29 And the record for most zeros and ones memorised in one minute with the light on is 107.

Speaker 29 And with the light off, it's 273.

Speaker 15 Oh,

Speaker 15 wow.

Speaker 29 Isn't that amazing that it makes that much difference?

Speaker 65 That's incredible.

Speaker 7 So all maths exams should be held in the dark, shouldn't they?

Speaker 29 I guess so if they were all in binary.

Speaker 41 Mine will work.

Speaker 7 Did you, just quickly, quickly, one thing on chocolate?

Speaker 66 I think it's quite funny.

Speaker 7 Bernie Madoff, remember him?

Speaker 7 Is now running a chocolate racket in prison.

Speaker 50 Who's he again, sorry?

Speaker 7 You know, he's the guy who it was just a moment.

Speaker 29 He ran a massive Ponzi squeam, didn't he?

Speaker 7 Ponzi squeam.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 53 How does it work?

Speaker 23 Because it sounds like that should be illegal, right?

Speaker 37 It's unusual to have people committing a very similar crime in prison to the one they were put in there for.

Speaker 34 Yeah.

Speaker 20 And then to announce it, I mean, do prison guards not read news?

Speaker 79 No, that's not, it's not

Speaker 55 illegal.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 9 It's immoral.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 70 Okay.

Speaker 20 Well, good luck to him.

Speaker 9 I think that's what you're saying.

Speaker 43 Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Speaker 52 I'd love to know where the boxes are from Deal or No Deal.

Speaker 45 You'll notice I said nothing in that whole bit because I was busy thinking, God, yeah, did they

Speaker 18 wear?

Speaker 29 Noel Edmonds has got them in his house. Yeah.

Speaker 29 He probably, I reckon he uses them to wrap Christmas presents.

Speaker 7 Oh, that would be such a good idea if he doesn't and he's listening.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 7 I would be still unhappy with a Deal or No Deal box as my Christmas present.

Speaker 2 I'm just sitting there. about it.

Speaker 7 If it was a real one that was used on the show, I really intentionally do not want that as a present.

Speaker 15 Great.

Speaker 52 Okay, well, I'm sure someone else will have it.

Speaker 86 Bought it now.

Speaker 53 Sorry, Noel, we thought you'd love it.

Speaker 85 Or he might use it for storage.

Speaker 33 Yeah.

Speaker 29 Or if he goes shopping, putting his shopping in the boxes.

Speaker 40 Yeah, he just goes everywhere.

Speaker 20 If you look at every photo of him these days, he's actually got a box with him.

Speaker 32 If he gets fired,

Speaker 69 once he got fired from a job, do you think he cleared his desk in those boxes?

Speaker 90 Oh, yeah, when it got cancelled.

Speaker 50 Yeah.

Speaker 91 How do you move them though?

Speaker 15 Has you put handles on them or wheels?

Speaker 92 Yeah, because they don't have handles, do they? No.

Speaker 27 Not very easy to carry.

Speaker 35 How many items of checking luggage will do you have today, sir?

Speaker 20 I've got 15.

Speaker 21 I read a thing, there's a basketball player called Jimmy Butler.

Speaker 20 He plays for the Chicago Bulls. I think he's just been traded, but I'm not sure to where.

Speaker 85 But he, I read an article, this is in the headline.

Speaker 20 It says that Jimmy Butler took out his car rearview mirror as a reminder to never look back.

Speaker 15 Awesome.

Speaker 66 Was promptly arrested.

Speaker 23 Have you heard of the North American Walnut Sphinx Caterpillar?

Speaker 25 No.

Speaker 43 That's a goodie.

Speaker 54 It pretends to be a bird to freak birds out.

Speaker 74 Birds freaks out with other birds.

Speaker 29 The one thing they're most used to, right?

Speaker 85 They're used to hanging around with birds.

Speaker 14 Sorry, I should clarify.

Speaker 32 They make a noise like a freaked-out bird.

Speaker 20 Oh, to scare the other incoming birds away.

Speaker 32 Exactly. So, what they do, it's amazing.

Speaker 37 To make the noise, they have not quite lungs in the sense that we understand, they have these holes along their sides called spiracles.

Speaker 83 Exactly.

Speaker 23 And to make the noise, they squeeze themselves shut like an accordion.

Speaker 43 Yeah.

Speaker 15 It's amazing.

Speaker 32 And that, when they do that, it makes a noise that goes eee!

Speaker 32 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.

Speaker 21 And so the other birds all fly off as soon as this caterpillar makes it.

Speaker 29 Are they doing it to scare the birds away.

Speaker 14 They're doing it to scare the birds away because the birds really prey on them.

Speaker 20 Is that evolution or is that a coincidence that the note, the specific note? That's evolution.

Speaker 91 Everything's evolution, technology.

Speaker 66 Is it? Yeah.

Speaker 9 That's what we all are a product of.

Speaker 29 What was the other option other than it could be evolution?

Speaker 15 It's a coincidence.

Speaker 46 Well, yeah.

Speaker 29 It could be evolution by coincidence.

Speaker 61 It probably started as a bit of a coincidence.

Speaker 15 That's what I was looking at.

Speaker 7 But that's how evolution works. Evolution always starts as a coincidence, which then evolves into being a pattern.

Speaker 50 Does it?

Speaker 15 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 7 Yes, it is. It's a coincidence that there was someone who was born with a really long neck.

Speaker 9 No, but don't you grow your neck.

Speaker 7 No, oh my god.

Speaker 86 That's Lamarckism.

Speaker 20 That's Lamarckism, the original evolution.

Speaker 34 And in some people's eyes, the best.

Speaker 32 One individual gets born with a slightly longer neck.

Speaker 59 Slightly, not one individual is born with 50 vertebrae.

Speaker 55 That's a coincidence.

Speaker 69 And then it has a million children because it's got all the leaves.

Speaker 35 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.

Speaker 46 Yes.

Speaker 16 I knew that bit.

Speaker 76 Right.

Speaker 7 Did you, though?

Speaker 7 It just sounded a lot like you didn't.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 So they're just, their whole life as a caterpillar is just to feed themselves in order for that.

Speaker 20 Like, like how I moved house the other day, it'd be like as if my whole life was just collecting boxes for catering.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 67 No, yeah, they're effectively just like, I just need to just eat and get myself away from the business.

Speaker 7 Yeah, but they are also using the food, a lot of it, for energy as a caterpillar.

Speaker 65 Yes, totally. Yeah.

Speaker 27 But what's the point of using all that energy?

Speaker 51 It's so that you can turn into a butterfly.

Speaker 3 Exactly.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 60 Yeah.

Speaker 29 But eventually he's been saving up for this house.

Speaker 11 Got it.

Speaker 7 They're putting something aside, is what you're saying. They've got a little savings account on the side.

Speaker 20 Yeah, but it defines their whole existence because then they're a new thing.

Speaker 20 It's a whole new account.

Speaker 7 Who are you to say what defines the existence of a caterpillar?

Speaker 20 I don't know. I read it in an article.

Speaker 7 I don't know if a caterpillar would agree with that.

Speaker 38 They probably wouldn't be able to argue me to.

Speaker 29 Probably don't even know they're caterpillars.

Speaker 94 Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

Speaker 6 cows.

Speaker 96 Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

Speaker 44 But there's so much nature.

Speaker 40 Exactly.

Speaker 97 Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Speaker 44 Extraordinary.

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Speaker 97 Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Speaker 4 Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

Speaker 20 Do you know auctioneers watch videos of other auctioneers at their best? Sort of like the greatest hits of auctioneering.

Speaker 15 So

Speaker 7 auctioneers have to do that as part of their training.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Some people acknowledge him as the greatest auctioneer

Speaker 54 of all time.

Speaker 15 What a thing.

Speaker 43 What a thing.

Speaker 52 I think I've slightly made that up.

Speaker 88 But

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 Averaging more than $1 million a minute in sales up to his retirement in 2012.

Speaker 7 No, it can't be true.

Speaker 15 Can't be true, right?

Speaker 30 That's per minute across his sales, isn't it? So if an auction takes 50 minutes,

Speaker 30 then his average was 1 million a minute.

Speaker 20 Oh, in the 50 minutes.

Speaker 11 He's got 50 million auctions.

Speaker 59 So, if he sells one painting for $25 million in one minute, he can then sit around for 24 minutes.

Speaker 39 Yeah, really not trying.

Speaker 65 Yes, that makes sense.

Speaker 55 That's amazing.

Speaker 20 But so, there's a video of him that auctioneers love to watch, and

Speaker 20 he sold the 10 most expensive works ever sold at auction in the world.

Speaker 26 Wow.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 7 Well, I mean, I listen to other podcasts.

Speaker 74 So it's the same kind of thing.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 I just didn't know that they existed, that, you know, that there's the greatest hits out there.

Speaker 54 There are DVDs and things you can get.

Speaker 70 There must be. There are greatest auctioneers.
Yeah, there must be.

Speaker 32 There probably I don't think that's the biggest auction of all time, though, even the Waterlilies one.

Speaker 101 I've got one that was bigger.

Speaker 40 Go on.

Speaker 57 The entire Roman Empire

Speaker 3 was auctioned.

Speaker 57 Was auctioned off in 193 AD.

Speaker 76 Yeah.

Speaker 37 It was auctioned off by the Praetorian Guard, who took bids from a couple of people.

Speaker 49 It was a closed auction.

Speaker 23 It wasn't anyone could bid.

Speaker 43 And

Speaker 72 this is according to Cassius Dio, who wrote a history of Rome.

Speaker 57 Two people were bidding, Saul Piccianus and Marcus Didius Salvius Julianus.

Speaker 23 And he made the maximum bid.

Speaker 49 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.

Speaker 30 But it was past its best in 1938.

Speaker 9 Yeah, it's a true game.

Speaker 57 Some damage.

Speaker 71 But then several careless owners.

Speaker 32 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?

Speaker 61 Now, there is a kind of butterfly in Britain called the swallowtail.

Speaker 32 It's the largest native British butterfly and the caterpillars only eat milk parsley.

Speaker 27 And these plants in Norfolk had swallowtail caterpillars on them.

Speaker 37 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.

Speaker 32 And they're very rare these butterflies because they only feed on these plants.

Speaker 3 Right.

Speaker 7 So someone's stolen the plants in order to get the caterpillars that they can sell to collectors. Yes.

Speaker 37 Well, no, to turn the caterpillars into butterflies to be killed for collectors, yeah.

Speaker 14 Yeah.

Speaker 7 But then you're breeding caterpillars, I suppose, so you are making more of the species.

Speaker 32 Then you're immediately killing the butterfly as soon as it comes out of the thing.

Speaker 27 Right.

Speaker 7 Swings and roundabouts is it?

Speaker 63 No, it's not.

Speaker 84 It's all swings.

Speaker 66 Crap playground.

Speaker 29 Do you know they used to play cricket on the ice in the fens?

Speaker 29 This was in North, in what's it called, in East Anglia, in England.

Speaker 7 Was that not quite confusing if if they're all wearing their white?

Speaker 29 No, this would take place in the 18th century in the 19th century.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 15 Really?

Speaker 29 So apparently playing cricket on ice is better.

Speaker 23 Were they in skates or were they just running ice?

Speaker 29 I think they were on skates, yeah.

Speaker 22 That must be amazing.

Speaker 85 Yeah, I mean the ball will go so far.

Speaker 77 If you hit it, it goes out Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 89 Standing on skates to bat.

Speaker 39 Hang on, why would the ball go far?

Speaker 29 Because it was skid on the ice.

Speaker 74 Oh, once it hit the ground.

Speaker 7 I thought you meant it gave you superhuman power of hitting something.

Speaker 101 Just quickly on the Dutch and how good they are at skating.

Speaker 29 Oh, they're amazing at speed skating, aren't they?

Speaker 65 This is the thing.

Speaker 14 Okay, so they're now so good that other countries are refusing to play against the moment.

Speaker 43 There's no point. There's no point.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 51 Actually, it's just because they knew they'd get marmalised by the Dutch.

Speaker 36 And Norway loves skating as well, so that's a big thing.

Speaker 89 So the women's 1,500-metre team, they came first, second, third, and fourth in that event.

Speaker 56 And out of 36 medals, the Dutch got 23.

Speaker 24 No other team got more than three.

Speaker 7 Maybe it's unfair, because they're the tallest nation, aren't they? So perhaps it's unfair because their legs are too long.

Speaker 14 But they will have a higher centre of gravity.

Speaker 18 Yeah. Meaning

Speaker 23 It's easier for them to fall over.

Speaker 29 Are we sure that being tall is an advantage in ice skating?

Speaker 74 I think we are certainly not sure of that.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 64 I don't know.

Speaker 29 I would suggest that if Jamaica

Speaker 29 were to take part in this event, they might be as good as, if not better, than the Dutch.

Speaker 60 I think we've just come with a sequel to Cool Runnings.

Speaker 64 But the fastest skater, the world record holder for the fastest skater is a Russian called Pavel Kulesnikov.

Speaker 31 And he's, whatever, how would you say it then, James?

Speaker 84 Kulesnikov.

Speaker 16 Kulesnikov, yeah, there you go. Called Pavel Kolesnikov.

Speaker 64 And to be fair, I didn't even read the name until just now.

Speaker 33 I should have run the Fernando spelling down.

Speaker 64 And

Speaker 64 he was registered going at 53 kilometres an hour, registered going, not by like a police camera, but like

Speaker 19 he, but like 50.

Speaker 64 I just think that's astonishingly fast for a skater.

Speaker 64 And he was in a 500-metre race, so he picked up speed fast.

Speaker 7 How many is that in miles an hour, please? I can't be bothered with this.

Speaker 19 32.91.

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 12 Is that fast? That's fast, isn't it?

Speaker 50 30 miles an hour, yeah. Can you say bolt run at 30 miles an hour?

Speaker 81 It doesn't normally happen in miles an hour, does it?

Speaker 51 They do it in seconds per 100 metres.

Speaker 36 I think it would be nicer if it was miles an hour for the spectators.

Speaker 29 He can run at approximately 9.9 seconds per 100 meters. I'm not sure what that is in miles per hour.

Speaker 7 Someone at home can work it out.

Speaker 29 I think it's less. I think it's about 20 that he runs, isn't it?

Speaker 25 No, that's not very good.

Speaker 77 That's like a built-up area.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 And it turns out all this

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 But you can make it mature by poking it with a feather.

Speaker 7 So, yeah, and that convinces them that they're having this physical contact with their fellow cockroaches and they grow properly and they mature.

Speaker 90 Yeah. That's amazing.

Speaker 20 Does it have to be a feather?

Speaker 79 It could probably actually be any kind of slightly ticklish device.

Speaker 9 Is there a limit to how big a cockroach grows? Yes. Because they can maintain it, right?

Speaker 85 Like

Speaker 20 if they were touching another cockroach, they're like, I just want to grow a bit today. And so they'd touch a cockroach.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 20 Exactly.

Speaker 50 That's my question.

Speaker 33 Maybe. Try it.

Speaker 15 I think Andy's sceptical. I am skeptical.

Speaker 10 And I'm surprised, Anna, that you're encouraging this live inquiry.

Speaker 7 Andy, we've clibotted all of the stupid things he said today.

Speaker 9 I thought we'd just let this one pass.

Speaker 29 So for many years, in many places, collecting flies and giving them to the government has gotten you money.

Speaker 29 So in China, officials in Luayang offered $125 per 2,000 dead flies during a campaign.

Speaker 29 Each fly was worth about 7 cents.

Speaker 53 Was that a massive amount for a fly?

Speaker 44 Was this recently, sorry?

Speaker 29 That was quite recently, yeah.

Speaker 15 Wow.

Speaker 16 A cent

Speaker 3 is quite a lot bigger than a fly as well.

Speaker 29 Yeah, that's not really how money works.

Speaker 64 It's interesting, but usually the money's licer than the thing. thing.

Speaker 29 It goes to the shop with loads of flies and they say you can't pay with that.

Speaker 15 And you're like, well, it's heavier than the £10 no.

Speaker 10 It's weird because the sandwich weighs a lot more than the £20, but the £20 note is heavier.

Speaker 23 It doesn't really make sense. Does it?

Speaker 33 Sorry, I completely retract that.

Speaker 2 That's a ridiculous thing to say.

Speaker 29 So in.

Speaker 9 Because then you wouldn't be able to buy anything.

Speaker 70 You have to look like diamonds or anything.

Speaker 2 I just bought my first house.

Speaker 69 Oh, man.

Speaker 14 That must be tough.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I had to find a coin as big as a house.

Speaker 29 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.

Speaker 58 Yeah, that's where I was going with that.

Speaker 10 Salvador Dali, he was obsessed with

Speaker 3 breasts, wasn't he?

Speaker 56 And lots of his art depicts breasts, but his ultimate obsession was with the udder.

Speaker 67 Because he said it's a very weird sexual thing.

Speaker 32 It's half penis and half udder.

Speaker 15 What? Sorry, it's all what udder.

Speaker 68 Sorry.

Speaker 15 It's half penis, half breast, all udder.

Speaker 79 In what sense is an udder half penis?

Speaker 70 It's incorrect.

Speaker 9 Salvador is incorrect.

Speaker 27 You went out on a limb. He was wrong.

Speaker 20 A UFC fighter called Justine Kish.

Speaker 20 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

Speaker 20 she got offered a bum wiping product as her sponsor for future.

Speaker 9 No, it's it's wipes. You go to the shop you write it.

Speaker 86 Yes, can I have some bum wiping products, please?

Speaker 70 Yeah, the

Speaker 87 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.

Speaker 63 Without the chocolate on top,

Speaker 29 but actually, this wasn't toilet paper.

Speaker 86 No, no, it's wipes.

Speaker 20 It's it's bum wipes.

Speaker 70 Wet wipes.

Speaker 20 Wet wipes for adults as opposed to babies.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 55 Did she use it?

Speaker 7 It's very nice. Did she use it as a weapon in the fight?

Speaker 15 I mean no holes barred.

Speaker 2 There's no weapons in UFC.

Speaker 15 But there's no rules, right? Yeah.

Speaker 90 There's no rules.

Speaker 29 It's not eye gouging if you rub your shit in someone's face.

Speaker 20 That's true. Oh, do you mean did she use the poo in the fight?

Speaker 34 Not her wipes?

Speaker 65 Right, I had to wipe the flow in you.

Speaker 64 Have you heard of the uh in Holland? There's a race in Holland called the Elfstaden Tocht.

Speaker 64 Lee Vin Skyro told me about this, actually.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 64 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

Speaker 64 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

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 25 Yeah, or

Speaker 15 anything like that.

Speaker 9 Any sporting events, massive sporting events, but everyone watches it.

Speaker 33 Yeah, I have heard of that, but I think global warming means it hasn't happened for a while.

Speaker 92 It hasn't happened for a while.

Speaker 64 There was one that was going to happen in 2012, and they called it.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 64 But then it didn't happen, even though they called it because the ice just wasn't thick enough.

Speaker 10 So exciting.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 20 It's like a skin transplant, but yeah, isn't that really cool?

Speaker 57 Because it has to be six inches thick along the entire 200 kilometers of the course.

Speaker 67 And obviously, that's very seldom going to happen.

Speaker 101 Yeah.

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 7 Surely, if we know that this canal ice race is going to end,

Speaker 43 I reckon people would step up for the plate.

Speaker 25 If Donald Trump has a secret passion for ice

Speaker 64 racing, I don't think he does.

Speaker 2 Who wouldn't for this?

Speaker 15 Yeah.

Speaker 51 It is incredible.

Speaker 16 It's so cool.

Speaker 23 Do you mind if I ask why people are monitoring the koala populations? Do we know that?

Speaker 16 Yeah, I think.

Speaker 15 Do you mind if I ask?

Speaker 79 It wasn't that personal a question, Andy.

Speaker 7 Sorry, stop me if I'm being really invasive.

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 20 He was stopped at Seven Sisters Station.

Speaker 20 Sitting right there on the platform were seven nuns.

Speaker 20 Seven nuns, seven sisters.

Speaker 85 And he took a photo of it.

Speaker 7 Do you think an eighth nun wanted to come on that trip, but they were like, guys, we can't. There is.

Speaker 72 No, this is like the moon landing is being fake. If you look in the photo, there is an eighth nun.

Speaker 20 Well, there's an eighth man. No, there's well, there's one man, but he's an eighth in the party.

Speaker 32 Oh, I thought I saw an eighth nun when I looked at the photo.

Speaker 15 Oh, really? And so, was there an eighth night?

Speaker 20 Oh, you're right, there's an eighth nun.

Speaker 18 Oh, my God.

Speaker 16 Ruined.

Speaker 46 Oh, man.

Speaker 15 I'm sorry.

Speaker 61 I feel like I've killed Christmas.

Speaker 20 God, did you do it that easy with the moon landings as well?

Speaker 89 Have you heard of open source seeds?

Speaker 29 No.

Speaker 100 Okay, so...

Speaker 7 Is that seeds that don't charge you to read them?

Speaker 34 Kind of. Okay.

Speaker 66 No.

Speaker 64 I think these are the seeds that are in these libraries, these open source seeds.

Speaker 89 Well, so in the 1930s, the USA started applying patent law to plants.

Speaker 89 So there are various plants

Speaker 67 where the intellectual property is owned.

Speaker 29 Like you can own an avocado.

Speaker 27 Well, you can own an avocado, but you can own...

Speaker 48 the whole avocado.

Speaker 18 The whole concept of the avocado.

Speaker 71 The whole species of the...

Speaker 67 Yeah.

Speaker 77 They've got this new kind of rice called golden rice, which is

Speaker 14 hardier and it grows faster and better and therefore has prevented starvation.

Speaker 101 That is owned by someone, the intellectual property for it.

Speaker 7 Does that mean you're not allowed to grow it or you're not allowed to give it the name?

Speaker 57 I think you're not allowed to then...

Speaker 12 I'm not sure about this.

Speaker 51 I think you're then not allowed to breed it, develop it, and then make money selling your own extra strain of it.

Speaker 36 But I'm not certain. So anyway.

Speaker 64 No commercial use, basically. And I think that's because that specific breed of rice was grown in space.

Speaker 64 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.

Speaker 89 Well, I don't think it's the specifically the space thing.

Speaker 26 I just think

Speaker 64 that specific rice thing is the effort that went into making that new breed of rice.

Speaker 89 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.

Speaker 57 But they've now got this thing called open source seeds.

Speaker 51 German breeders are experimenting with it.

Speaker 100 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.

Speaker 77 And

Speaker 15 isn't that weird?

Speaker 7 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.

Speaker 100 It might not incentivise people to develop new strains if you can't own it.

Speaker 67 So there's a bit of a

Speaker 52 capitalism versus communism.

Speaker 43 Wrapped up in one simple sentence.

Speaker 27 I imagine you'd like everybody to have enough to eat, Anna.

Speaker 26 Well, well, I'm sorry.

Speaker 29 I suppose it's not a million miles away from patenting a Mars bar.

Speaker 64 Or a strain of apple that is in like a Granny Smith or something.

Speaker 12 If Anna was in charge, it'd just be formless lumps of chocolate and nougat that we'd be eating now.

Speaker 7 And everyone would get one, wouldn't they?

Speaker 9 It's a better world.