190: No Such Thing As A Magic Oven For Chimps

So, what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at ov.coop and taste the difference.

Ready to buy a car, a home, or just want to take control of your money?

Your FICO score matters, and 90% of top lenders use it to make decisions.

Check your FICO score for free today without hurting your credit score.

Visit myfico.com/slash free or download the MyFICO app today.

My FICO gives you the score lenders use most, plus credit reports and real-time alerts to help keep you on top of your credit.

Visit myfico.com/slash free and take the mystery out of your FICO score.

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

This week coming to you from the Stan Comedy Club in Newcastle.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Chacinski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and no particular order.

Here we go, starting with you, Andy.

My fact this week is that Britain exports over 50,000 boomerangs every year

to Australia.

And then imports them again, presumably.

Yeah,

this is just something that happens.

But who knew that the post-Brexit Britain is going to be boomerangs to Australia?

Yeah.

Coal to Newcastle.

Is this a recent thing?

Oh, by the way, the phrase Cole to Newcastle, is that well known here?

Yeah, because we tried it on some people in London, like young people, and they'd never heard of it.

Yeah, that's true.

Actually, anyone under the age of about 25 in London hadn't heard of it, maybe 30 even.

But actually,

they import coal in Newcastle, don't they?

Or don't you?

Well, do you?

Yes, you do.

Right.

Well,

oh my god.

In 2013, Newcastle imported 4.9 million tons of coal.

The second most in the UK after somewhere in Scotland.

Wow.

No way.

What are they doing with it?

Do you you all get some?

I think, yeah, then it's sent around the country for people to burn.

That's what you do with coal.

No, I know what you do with coal.

I just didn't know what Newcastle was doing with coal.

What special thing do you think Newcastle does with coal?

Well, apparently, they just send it back out again.

It's like the boomerangs.

The thing is, Dan, right, the UK is an island.

And when we bring stuff in, it has to go into a pot, and Newcastle is one of the best pots we have.

Now I get it.

I thought you meant like Manchester was sending coal to.

I thought Newport was just collecting coal and then went, now you can have it back.

Newport is somewhere else.

Don't

wait, so what what's happened?

Oh my god.

Can we recap?

What's

Don't worry, I think you've trodden on enough toes.

It's a good thing James just said they've got the best port.

Kiss us.

So we've won a few people over with that.

anyway my my fact this week is that britain exports over 50 000 boomerangs a year to australia i looked at these boomerangs and they don't look very boomerang like

well wait till they hit you in the back of the head james um no well they're they're they're toy boomerangs yeah they got three um three sticky out bits that's true yeah are you sure that's like fidget spinners right yeah they look like fidget spinners big ones

they absolutely do but they're called sports boomerangs or something yeah and they basically fly for miles and they do come back yeah and the really cool thing is the guy who runs the company which sells them, his name is David Strang.

And he moved from Scotland to Australia at the age of eight.

And then at the age of 20, he came back.

Can I just ask, just a bug says, did we all just exclusively look for facts where something went away and came back?

So it's just him, isn't it?

It's just this one guy, this one company that's making them and exporting them, is that right?

So you know the song My Boomerang Won't Come Back?

Yeah.

My Boomerang Back.

It's a song, a co comedy song from the song.

It's a comedy.

Yo, fifties.

My boomerang won't come back.

Everyone else knows it, right?

You guys know it.

It's it's a really famous song.

Like six people are saying yeah.

How many

How many people don't know it?

I mean that's huge.

All right minority, do you know who produced that song?

A certain George Martin, who went on to produce more famous songs by The Beatles.

So the Beatles.

I thought you mentioned the guy who wrote Game of Thrones.

I did not.

That was his big break.

My boomerang won't come back.

And then he went on to make The Beatles.

Yeah.

In the course of researching this, I actually listened to that song on repeat for about two days now.

Did you?

Yeah, it's very good.

It is good.

It's although these days it's a bit culturally insensitive.

So

I am not going to praise it.

Do you know who else owned boomerangs?

Toot and Karmoon.

Oh,

too.

It's full of boomerangs.

No.

It was full of boomerangs.

If we get through these boomerangs, we might find something.

Toot and Karmoon back as soon as you're chucked.

Oh, God.

No?

All right.

I'm sorry.

So, do you know what is the world record longest time a boomerang has been in the air?

No.

Do you want to have a guess in minutes?

Minutes?

Three minutes.

37 minutes.

37 minutes?

Well, you think a bird flew off with it?

Well, the answer is 1,440 minutes and 9 seconds.

Oh, come on.

Don't, don't!

For listeners at home, Dan's wagging his finger at me like in an I told you so way.

Can you explain?

I can, and you're not gonna like it.

It's space, right?

It's a guy called Jay Perrot, and he was at the South Pole and he threw it so it went through all of the different time zones.

So, technically, it went around 24 hours.

That's awesome.

I'm not the only one who didn't like it.

I actually have

the world, the Guinness World record for the longest distance of you.

Congratulations.

No, no, sorry.

Yeah, yeah.

I can't.

I can't.

You hide your talent under a bottle then.

Imagine if that was true.

This was the first time we'd ever heard of it.

I like to brag.

Yeah, no,

2005, the Guinness World Record was set for the longest throw of a boomerang.

And do you want to have a guess of how far that was?

Oh, like 80,000 miles.

If you could take my question seriously, maybe.

James, do you want to have a guess?

Well, let's say I think it would be about

400 yards.

I've got it written down here, so probably.

Okay, great.

Why don't you have a guess anyway, Anna?

Is it...

Only has 4287 meters.

Well, I've got it in feet, so I don't know what that is.

Yeah, you might be right.

Tell me in feet and I'll convert it for you.

1,401.2 meters.

427 meters.

So Anna was closest.

So this was set in Queensland in Australia, and it was set by a guy called Mr.

Shumi.

And Mr.

Shumi, when he was asked about it, he said it wasn't really a boomerang throw, admitted Shumi,

as it didn't come back.

But weirdly, the Guinness World Records thought we'll just accept because the record should be zero meters, exactly, exactly.

Well, the record for a returning one, which I think is the one that should really stand, is a Swiss guy actually who threw it 238 meters out and then 238 meters back, which is further altogether than Mr.

Shummy, isn't it?

Again, you've thrown numbers that I don't understand.

It is.

We need to move on to our second fact.

From Australia to San Francisco, Cullen Jewelry brings timeless craftsmanship and modern lab-grown diamond engagement rings to the U.S.

Explore solitaire, trilogy, halo, and bezel settings, or design a custom ring that tells your love story.

With expert guidance, a lifetime warranty, and a talented team of in-house jewelers behind every piece, your perfect ring is made with meaning.

Visit our new Union Street showroom or explore the range at CullenJewelry.com.

Your ring, your way.

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

cows.

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

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

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

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the Catalan region does regular checks of websites that end with.cat

to check that they're about Catalonia and not about cats.

Are they the only two options?

Well, no, but it seems basically they want all of the websites that are.cats, because that's the Catalan domain name.

They want them to all be about Catalonia, but actually, everyone else wants to put cats on the internet.

And when you put cats on the internet, what are you going to do?

You're going to put.cat, right?

And so people do it all the time.

And every now and then, they have to do an audit, and they give people six months to shut down their websites or add a translation tool tool to translate their website into Catalan.

So there is a website called, is it Nian or Nyan?

Does anyone know?

Nyan.

So it's Nyan, you'll all know about it.

It's like a little cartoon cat that's got like a rainbow on it and it's a stupid song that happens.

And that was nyan.cat.

And they were told they had to take it down until they put a translation tool.

And so now you can watch Nyan Cat in Catalan.

Wow.

Thank God.

Yeah, but it's really like for them, like for the Catalan people, it's really important, obviously, a lot in the news at the moment.

But I think they were the first sort of group of people rather than a country to have their own top-level internet domain name.

Yeah, there were only eight,

only eight top-level domains were allowed, and then the Catalonian people said, no, we want a ninth, we want it to be our own space.

And it was because one of the guys who organized it was Catalan.

So that kind of helps.

Yeah, he was called Amadou Abriel-e.

Abriil.

And he was a lawyer, and he was kind of part of the top-level internet thing.

But he was Catalan, so he kind of managed to pull a few strings.

They are very active internet users, though, apparently.

Cats, yeah.

It's them that are posting all these pictures of themselves.

The Catalonians, too, though.

So in 2013, Catalan was the eighth most used language on blogs online, which is kind of extraordinary, given that there are

like eight million, eight to ten million Catalan speakers.

They love the internet.

It'll never catch on.

I think I heard that blogging is massive.

I'm sorry.

Yes, it is, dad.

Yeah.

And they have this thing, it's called MySpace.

And you go on.

No, it's because

obviously they want to be independent from Spain.

A lot of people in Catalonia, so they blog and they have message boards which are all about Catalonian issues.

And it's a very sort of adhesive identity, basically.

Yes.

Did you read about the guy though who has started a cat based internet thing that is really cool?

He started stalking cats around the world

and then he started posting up where they live online.

So what happens is if you post a picture of your cat on Flickr or like what are the other ones, Instagram.

Ask Jeeves.

You put a cat on Ask Jeeves.

You can put a cat on Ask Jeeves.

and he'll take the cat and he'll scrape all the data from behind all the messages.

What who is this pervert and what are you telling us about him?

He's not a pervert, he's someone who's trying to highlight the security problems online with posting your pictures up because you often accidentally geotag yourself when you put pictures up.

And so he's created this map of the world and you can see all the cats that live in certain places.

So if you've ever posted a picture of your cat up, then you can go to where you live and your cat may well be there.

Or you might go to near where you live and see your cat and then you'll you'll note that it's cheating on you.

And someone else has been posting pictures of your cat.

But that's clever, right?

So he's not posting pictures of actual people because that would be a bit creepy, but he's just posting pictures of their cats.

Wasn't it the case that one of the greatest hackers that the internet has ever seen was caught and they tried to break into his system to work out just to get into his computer to see what he'd done?

And they're like, oh, he's going to have the most intense password ever.

And it turned out his password was his cat's name and 1234.

Yeah, that was.

Scientists in Japan have studied cats recently, and they found that they do recognize their owners' voices, but they then choose to ignore them.

So they tested, they played the cat a recording of the owner shouting the cat's name, and then they played another recording of a stranger shouting the same cat's name.

They found that the cats have a much greater response to the owner shouting their name than to a stranger, but they still do not get up.

But dogs are catching up online, right?

In the last couple of years, I think dogs have become as prevalent online, whereas cats used to be much better.

And I think the idea is that the age of the smartphone has meant that dog is more friendly to dogs because smartphones, I am told, are good at videos and streaming them, and dogs are a bit more video-friendly.

So cats are very image-friendly, because they are still for 99.9% of the day.

But now we can actually do the video thing and post that up easily and watch it, then dogs work better.

And so now it's about 50-50 in terms of how many are being posted respectively.

I did not know that was the reason.

That's interesting.

It's a theory.

There is that place where you can feed a cat that's 4,000 miles away, can't you?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, that's right.

You guys might have heard of this.

There's a webcam set up for a cat sanctuary in, I want to say, Russia.

And you can move a toy remotely.

And you have to wait for ages in a queue while other people get to move the toy around remotely.

We did it at the office.

Were you not there that day?

I was, yeah.

Yeah, that was

a very long afternoon.

Yeah.

So I was looking into all these.something sites.

As we say, like.cat, things get misappropriated for the country that they're meant to represent.

So obviously,.xxx

is for porno websites.

And that one is not a country, obviously.

Or if it is, I want to go there sometime.

I don't know.

I'm married.

I have a kid.

But.xxx is one that is allowed because what they want to do is try and separate the porn so that you can actually identify it.

The problem is no one's using it because then people can say you're definitely using porn as opposed to a.com website.

You could just say, oh no, I thought it was for people who are 30.

And

Roman.

That's true.

So anyway, but there's other ones.

.ac is the Ascension Islands.

They have a population of 806, and that's used largely for academic websites.ac it's also used for and I had no idea this was a big thing air conditioning industries they it's a huge thing air conditioning industries and they they use AC dot LA is for Lao or Laos

and that's being properly marketed as for Los Angeles to use that and then I found dot TV and I remember dot TV is a famous one because it's Tufaloo so I looked at there's a list you can see of the most famous dot TV websites that you can get and I found last night and I was up because I've just had a son, so I was up at about 3 a.m.

after feeding him with a bottle, and my wife was asleep.

And I was doing research for tonight's show.

And I found right there up on the list, there's all these different.tvs, hamsterporn.tv.

Oh, Daniel.

And I saw it, and I thought, there's no way I'm not clicking that.

So

I clicked on it and I was brought to hamsterporn.tv.

And annoyingly, it was just a regular human porn site.

There were just a bunch of

so it was all these just screen grabs of videos of humans doing porn.

And as I was looking through it and just slightly upset, my wife woke up

and she looked up and she saw the screen and she looked at me and went, What are you doing?

Are you looking at porn?

And I said, No, honey, sorry, I thought it was going to be a site of hamster porn.

And

she literally said nothing and turned around in the bed and went back to sleep.

I can't believe you have roped us all into your lie here, Dan.

A week on Friday, you're going to make your wife listen to it and go, see?

The new top-level domains, though, just to get nerdy, that's a new thing.

So the.xxx is a new thing.

And so it used to, and you be the country, the dot coms, the.co.uks.

But now we can register stuff at things like, there's a big long list you can read, but.hair,

dot wow,

dotweirdly, dot.

That's good.

Dotweirdly is lovely.

We should do ice at dotweirdly.

Sorry, there's no dotweirdly.

I was interjecting myself.

But there is.Ferrero and dot roche, but there's not.ferrero rochay.

And there's also dot off, which is just feels like you need to start registering the sods and the buggers and the

x.off

before they get snapped up.

Just a really quick, geeky top-level domain name fact.

Yeah.

For Montenegro, the country of Montenegro, it was Yugoslavia and then it went to Montenegro.

And so the top-level domain went from.you to.me.

Hey, cool.

Oh,

God.

That's awesome.

That's a sort of like Bruce Forsyth kind of website thing.

Why, no, like a Chuckle Brothers website.

Yeah.

I think you were thinking, nice to see you.

That's what I was saying to you.

Nice to see me.

To see you.

Thank you, James.

Yes.

We should move on.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski.

Yeah, my fact this week is that when Walmart opened in Germany, it scrapped its policy of making employees smile at customers because the Germans found it too weird.

This is a genuine problem.

So, Walmart started opening up stores in Germany in 1998, and they ended up in 95 stores opening.

It was just a disaster, really.

And Germany didn't really get along with Walmart very well.

And one of the main reasons was these golden Walmart rules that they have in America.

And they are: if a customer comes within 10 feet of you, you have to smile sweetly and offer help.

And this is known as the 10-foot rule.

And other things like: if a shopper made a complaint, it needs to be dealt with by sundown.

That's called the sundown rule.

And customers' bags have to be packed at checkout.

And it turned out they did this in Germany, and they did various studies.

Researchers looked at how it was playing, and it was playing badly.

So smiling was interpreted as flirting or creepy.

And the head of the Walmart trade union said in Germany, just said, Germans don't behave that way.

We don't do the smiling.

And then the biggest German research institute said, in Germany, if people try putting stuff in a bag for you, the customer will just think, Hey, I just paid for that.

That's mine.

What are you doing putting it in a bag?

So it didn't work.

And it was just very interesting.

So they had to cancel the policy just because it's very different customer service in America to outside of America, it turned out.

Amazing.

I don't think of Germany as being unsmiley, though.

I think it's that America is very smiley.

Yeah.

The 10-foot rule thing.

Yeah.

Does that apply even if there's

a shelf in between you

and the customer?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, you have to run all the way around.

Yeah, and so Walmart's not in Germany anymore, is it?

No.

They all closed down.

I read one other thing that they thought maybe was one reason why it didn't work, and that is because Walmart employees are required every morning to stand in formation and chant Walmart, Walmart, Walmart.

And they thought maybe the Germans didn't really like standing in a row chanting things

for obvious reasons.

They also would always make them do the chant, which is like, give me a W, W, give me an A, A,

and apparently lots of staff used to just hide in the toilets for that part, as I think a lot of us would, if you were forced to do that every day.

And also, they had to chant every morning at the morning meeting.

At the end of every meeting, the boss would say, Who is number one?

And all the staff would have to chant, the customer, of course.

So I think staff spent a lot of time in the bathrooms.

Imagine going to work and just chanting,

no such thing as a fish.

No such thing as this.

Well, if you turned up on time a bit more often, you'd see.

In fact, that goes for all three of you, may I say?

So, in some countries, I read the New York Times said that

they've had trouble in various places.

In Korea, apparently, they ran into trouble because they had taller racks than those of local rivals.

And so it was just a bit harder to reach the stuff, and customers would have to get on ladders.

So I was like, oh, maybe the average height in in Korea is a bit shorter.

I looked it up.

Koreans are exactly the same average height as British people.

So it just apparently they slightly overshot the shelf height in Walmart.

Yeah, but Walmart's ladder sales went hugely through the road.

It is like a cult though.

I was reading a blog by a guy called.

Sorry, Andy, a blog is where

people just put thoughts and stuff.

I was reading a blog by an ex-Walmart employee who was saying that they get really obsessed with box cutters.

So they get given a box cutter when they join as a member of staff.

This is in America, and he said staff go ape shit for these box cutters.

And every

at staff meetings, they would have Sam Walton trivia contest.

Now, Sam Walton is the guy who founded Walmart.

I don't know how much trivia there is about Sam Walton, but apparently enough to have a trivia quiz on him every staff meeting.

And where the answer is always Sam Walton.

Yeah, is Sam Walton the best person ever?

Yes, correct!

Walmart, Walmart, Walmart, Walmart.

And then the winner of that quiz who clocked onto that would get a slightly better box cutter.

And then this member of staff said they used to taunt the other staff with their slightly better box cutters.

But that's quite aggressive.

Yeah, with a knife?

So I was looking at like smiling around the world, happiness with different countries.

You always get these things where all the countries are ordered by how happy they are, don't you?

And usually the same people in like Costa Rica or something um but denmark has won it for the last few years and this year they were beaten by norway into second place

um but actually the guy in charge of happiness in denmark said he was he was very happy for them

a lying bastard

said we don't have a monopoly on happiness

that's i mean but that's the ultimate happy sentence to lose the happiness competition that's almost we're gonna have to take the prize off you.

That guy just went uber happy.

That's insane.

Yeah, and that's obviously why he did it, the cynical bastard.

He said that, and then he went, Are we back at the top spot?

Yeah, great.

When McDonald's opened in Russia, in fact, where

the service industry has cited different cultural norms, staff were taught how to smile.

The Russian staff were taught how to smile because it's not a particularly normal thing.

And actually, there was a study that was done looking at how different countries view smiling.

And in Russia, most people view someone who smiles a lot as quite stupid.

Whereas in America, and actually in Britain, we view them as a bit more intelligent.

In fact, if someone smiles at you and they engage with you.

It all depends, I would say, on context.

If there's someone smiling at you on the bus

and they won't stop.

It is true, though, actually, in Russia, because my wife's Russian, so I go to Russia occasionally and they just don't smile in photographs.

They do a bit now, but in the olden days, they really wouldn't smile in photographs.

And it was very much frowned upon.

Oh, I'm sorry.

I almost bottled out of that joke, halfway,

and I thought there's nowhere to go with it.

But it is actually true.

It is.

Yeah.

If you see old pictures of Russians from the, even from the 80s and 90s, they're just very

serious.

Americans used to be really serious.

They used to have a reputation for being serious until the mid-19th century.

Really?

Yeah.

Well, didn't.

So I was just thinking thinking of the very old photos that used to get taken when nobody's smiling.

And you often read that the reason that no one's smiling is because

that just was the thing.

You just don't smile.

I didn't realize it's because of the long exposure of the photo.

So it takes so long for the photo to be taken, and you don't know exactly what point it's going to be.

You just had to keep a normal face.

I mean, not in the 1980s.

Camera technology had come quite a long time ago.

No, no, yeah, no.

I mean, the super old school.

We're talking like, I guess, 1950, you know, BC

before cameras.

Yeah.

But so, because, yeah, it was just the exposure was too long.

So to hold a smile, to hold the cheese, it would be so long that you would just look pained and it would be.

I have read a debunk of that, actually, just for the record, that maybe the exposure wasn't quite as long as we thought.

Maybe it was only about 30 seconds, and anyone can hold a smile for 30 seconds, but I don't know.

No, but they were just getting used to smiles back then, so it would have felt a lot longer.

They could have had a happiness hat.

This was something in the news a few years ago.

And the happiness hat was a hat, obviously, and it was made of metal, and it had like these kind of metal bits coming down the side, and then it had a metal spike.

And whenever it sensed that you were frowning, it would stab you in the head with a spike and remind you to smile.

Oh, God.

Really?

Sorry, which shopping chain was this?

Where was this?

It was just one guy who invented it.

Oh, really?

But he hit the news.

Yeah.

Wow.

Should we move on to our final plan?

Yeah, we should.

So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.coop and taste the difference.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that it is really easy to beat chimpanzees at the game Rock, Paper, Scissors.

Yeah, they're shit at it.

It's chimpanzees have recently been taught to play stone, paper, scissors, rock, paper, scissors, rush ambeau, whatever you call the game.

And

they actually,

you know, the flip side is they actually know how to play stone, paper, scissors.

It's amazing.

And they can learn it to the level of what a four-year-old would learn it.

So you could actually, at the moment, they've only been playing with computer simulation, so playing against a computer or an iPad.

But if you were to play them, you could actually have a genuine game with the movements of rock, paper, scissors and beat them.

The reason you can beat them is they're really bad at learning from their mistakes.

So whereas four-year-olds will make a mistake and go, I need to adjust, chimpanzees will be like, I'll use paper again.

And

then afterwards, when they're beaten again, they'll be like, I'll go for paper this time.

And then when you beat them again, like, he's not going to see what's coming next.

Good old trusty paper.

And if I was playing against them, I might think, they're not going to be stupid enough to go for paper again.

And I would probably lose.

You're still sore about the match you lost a couple of weeks ago.

Actually, they're a lot better than you'd think, Dan.

It's interesting, because it took them a hundred the chimpanzees to learn, they tried it, I think, on seven chimpanzees and five of them managed to master it.

It did take them a hundred days to learn it.

So it's a very, very long time for them to learn about it.

Yeah, they're idiots.

It's a simple game.

I mean, I don't want to brag, but I got it in about 30 days.

Anyway.

But the really tricky thing that the chimpanzees didn't get was the circular nature of it.

So they understood rock beats scissors and then they understood, okay, scissors beat paper, but they found it hard to get their head around paper then beats rock.

Really?

That makes it even more weird that they went for paper every time.

But actually, I'm with them.

Why does paper beat rock?

I mean, I know it covers it, you're wrapping,

but that's not beaten, is it?

I mean, scissors is actually demolishing the paper, isn't it?

Yeah.

And then rock is demolishing the scissors.

Yeah, but if you hide a rock in some paper, you can smuggle it into a recycling bin.

Got it.

Yeah.

In Japan, it's a tiger, a village chief, and the village chief's mother.

What?

Right?

And that's that circular thing.

So the village chief's mother kills the village chief because she's angry with him.

The village chief kills the tiger, and the tiger kills the village chief's mother.

Do you know the Indonesian version?

No, it's called ant-human elephant.

So the human tramples the elephant.

Those tiny elephants they have in Indonesia.

I think I got confused between ant and elephant

and it foxed me.

Sorry.

The human tramples the ant.

The human tramples the ant, then the elephant squashes the human, but then the ant beats the elephant by...

Tramples it.

Yeah.

It's that the

ant gets into the elephant's ear and it tickles it.

Really?

I read that the ant crawls up the elephant's trunk and eats its brain.

Maybe I was really

sick.

I had parental guide locked on.

So I am very confused by the chimp fact.

I didn't realize they were less good than us because there's no such thing as being good at rock, paper, scissors.

There is no strategy.

You can't learn from your mistakes because we all basically make the same mistakes and we can't really predict each other.

Particularly, I mean, if you're really a pro, then maybe.

If you've obviously not been on the rock, paper, scissors website, they have a lot of tactics on that.

One thing is if your opponent pays scissors in the first go, you can tell by how wide their scissor is what they're going to do in the next go.

No, you can't.

Well, no, you can't.

I mean,

they say you can.

They have another, apparently this is a trendy strategy.

It's the exclusion strategy.

Okay, so you never play, say, rock, and you keep doing different ones.

You keep doing paper or scissors, and your opponent just gets obsessed by the fact that you've never played rock, and it just fucks with their mind.

That's great.

It's a good idea, right?

And that's the trendy strategy.

That's a trendy one.

That's how it'll be cool as someone who subscribes to rockpaper scissors.com.

You don't actually have to subscribe to a website.

You can just go there and then go away.

Some of them you do, like hamsterporn.com.

Children are very hard to play at rock, paper, scissors.

As in that they're very good at playing it because their choices are genuinely random.

Yeah.

They haven't yet mastered the yambits that James is discussing.

So they're much likelier just to go with whatever, and that makes them quite hard to beat.

Right.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

You don't want to overthink it.

Hey, I found a cool thing out about chimpanzees.

Chimpanzees can recognize each other by face, like we do.

But if they're just walking along and a chimpanzee is facing the other way and the butt is showing, they'll see the butt and be like, Greg,

they have an understanding of bums that they can just, if you put like a lineup of bums in front of them, they'd be like, Mark, Sonia, Alice, John.

Isn't that what chimp lineups are?

Is it like, were any of these people the people who pickpocketed you the other day, Mrs.

Chimp?

And then she's like, that bum there.

Yeah, possibly.

It's good because once you've robbed someone, you run away, don't you?

So you're likely to see the butt.

Perfect.

Yes, exactly.

Oh, there was, I heard an amazing burglary.

Burglary.

Burg burglary.

Robbery.

Robbery act.

We did the audiobook the other day for the book that we've done, and it took forever for me to say basic words like that.

The best one was when you misread February as January.

It was truly bizarre.

Yeah.

Yeah, so there was this fact that

we found the other day, which is that a burglar is always most likely going to knock on your door before they burgle you.

Isn't that weird?

Is that so they can check if someone's in?

Yeah, basically.

And then if you're going to get robbed, they're just always going to knock first, like in a polite fashion, as opposed to just breaking a window or whatever.

Yeah, I don't think it's out of politeness that they're doing it, but yeah.

Is that so?

Have you read the thing about chimps that they, according to the New York Times, have the ability to cook if only someone would give them an oven?

This is what scientists do.

I'm like that.

This is something that scientists have just concluded.

And they did this in a study where the researcher involved said, we invented a magic cooking device to test on the chimps.

As he explained it, it's two plastic bowls, and the chimp puts a raw potato in one of the plastic bowls.

And then in the other one, there's a cooked potato.

And you maneuver the bowls to make the chimp think that his raw potato has been cooked.

Why this guy didn't just use the already existing oven that we have, I don't know.

But it turns out that chimps do prefer, if you give them a bit of raw potato, they prefer to put it in the plastic bowl that will then magically cook the potato and then to eat the cooked potato than just to eat it raw.

And so that kind of shows that chimps have self-control, like they're willing to postpone the potato to make it taste nicer.

And also, according to the scientist who did the experiment, he said, it shows they have the causal understanding to make the leap to cooking.

Which I would argue, believing that you're putting a raw potato into a plastic bowl and then leaving it for 10 seconds before getting a cooked one is not having the causal understanding.

Yeah, that's true.

I didn't know they preferred cooked food.

Yeah, neither did I.

There you go.

But I don't know how my microwave works.

If you told me that some scientists just replace it with a cooked risotto,

I'll buy it.

Okay, shall we wrap up?

Okay, that is it.

That is all our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

You, Andy, or at

me, me, Andy,

Chuckle Brothers.

No,

sword that was Bruce Poor Sydney.

It's an anticlimax now, but at Andrew Hunter M.

James?

At James Harkin.

And Czaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

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

You can also go to our website, no such thingasofish.com, and there's every episode that we've done that is up there.

You can get links to every bit of our tour.

You can also buy our new book, The Book of the Year.

It's out November 2nd, and we're about to give one away actually to one of the members of the audience who sent us a fact.

James, you've got the facts.

I have.

It is from Scott Robinson.

And the fact is that cleaning your teeth is the only time you get to clean your skeleton.

That's so cool.

So creepy.

Is that true?

That's our story.

Is that quite true, you just said?

Whoa, we've not had this on the show before.

Who shouted fight?

I think what we can do is a game of rock, paper, scissors.

Yes, yes.

Yes.

So, this guy here,

who the quibbler, I'm going to call you,

if you show in front of your chest what you want to do for rock, paper, scissors, and then we'll get Scott to shout out what he wants to do, and we'll see if there's a winner.

Oh, wow.

This is so exciting.

I can't see it.

Yeah.

I can see it.

I can see it.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay, Scott, shout out.

What have you got?

Scott's the winner.

It was made up.

Scott, come and grab a book from us.

We'll be here.

You went for paper.

Let's do it again.

He'll never do paper again.

Oh, man, he won't do paper again.

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

Thank you so much for being here, everyone.

Thank you so, so much.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.