99: No Such Thing As Bread Civilians
Live from the Birmingham mac theatre, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss sexy robots, samurai hairdressers and the world's oldest drive-through.
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Hi guys, just to let you know, it is our hundredth episode coming up this Friday.
So, to celebrate that, this Thursday, the 11th of Feb, we're going to do an AMA on Reddit and Ask Me Anything, where you can rock up and ask us anything.
We'll be there for a couple of hours.
Whatever you've ever wanted to ask us, do it there.
It's going to be 5 p.m.
this Thursday, 5 p.m.
GMT.
That is midday Eastern Standard Time.
And if you go to QI.com forward slash Reddit, you'll be able to find it easily.
See you there.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.
This week, coming to you from the Birmingham Mac.
My name is Dan Shriver, and please welcome to the stage.
It's the other three elves, Andy Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Chacinski.
And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.
And in no particular order, here we go, starting with you, Andrew Hunter Murray.
My fact this week is that a New Zealand firm has developed an irrationally angry robot to train telesales staff.
So?
So
it calls the telesale staff.
Yeah, I mean, it has to be programmed to do it.
It can't just ring you up at night time or something.
Oh, okay, right.
So
yeah, the firm is called Touchpoint, and basically they've developed this machine which can simulate an angry customer.
And it takes data from all the worst customer calls where people are really furious and then they sort of determine the factors which you could be set off by.
And then the telesales person who's being trained has to try and calm the machine down.
And that's the mission for that.
Yeah.
Do we know how the anger manifests itself?
Does it start attack physically, physically assaulty?
It's nothing physical.
It's mind games.
I think it's a lot of fun.
It's mind games.
It's a lot of passive aggressiveness.
How twisted are people?
I think it's a lot of shouting and insults, basically, from the computer.
Does it sound like a robot?
I don't know.
I suspect not.
Because that would negate the point of it being a training thing.
But then so they must have someone recording all the audio to then.
Yeah, I think so, yeah.
Wow.
Yeah.
it is irrational anger right and people go mad about cold callers and the thing apparently so there was a survey done recently and cold calling was voted the most annoying thing about the uk uh which i mean there's some bad stuff going on in this country everyone calm down um and
but the most annoying thing about cold calling is uh cold caller chumminess the false chumminess that you get i got a cold call this morning did you did you from someone who said did you have an accident uh in the car that wasn't your fault okay Okay, did you?
Well, I played along for a moment.
I said, yes, I did.
Oh, okay.
And she said, did you?
And she said.
You're literally the first person out there who said that.
Yeah, she was really, it took her ages to say anything because she was so surprised.
And she said, did you?
And I said, no, not really.
I got one last night.
And
so it said, hi, we understand that you've had an accident recently and you should be making a claim on it.
And I thought, oh, this is a robot.
So I just went and stayed silent.
And then it went, hello?
And I went, nah.
And then it went, hi, you still there?
And I thought, oh, God, it's an actual human.
I went, sorry.
And then it started talking.
And I was like, it got me.
AI is so good now that it, yeah.
Yeah.
They predicted that moment.
Yeah.
So it's like the Turing test, where if you can have a conversation with a machine, but you think it's a human, then the machines have won.
Is that it?
Well, thank God I'm not the bar.
So there is a software that can tell from my voice when I'm on the phone whether I'm angry or not.
Okay, and they use these in telesales.
And so they'll have a computer in front of them, and I'll ring them up and get really angry and passive-aggressive.
And then their computer will say, He's getting angry.
He's getting really angry.
You've better do something about this.
Oh, wow.
And then they have to keep it below a certain level.
As if they don't know that you're angry.
Yeah, well, I can hide it quite well, actually.
Can you?
The telesales person on the floor just sobbing,
and the computer's hopefully saying he's a little bit pissed off with you?
But it's amazing that computers can tell if you're angry.
Yeah, that's very good.
Apparently, you can tell if someone's angry by the way they use their mouse.
To an 80% accuracy, you can tell.
Or like smashing you around the head with it.
But I think just how you click on things and stuff like that, they can tell.
If you click on IamReallyangry.com.
They can tell frustration, sadness, fear, and depression with more than 80% accuracy just by the way you use your mouse.
Wow.
Wow.
So there is a thing about computers being angry and whether they should be made, whether we should make angry machines, basically, because
one school of thought is that it's quite a good idea to make computers that can simulate anger, and that the ones you would need to worry about are the ones that don't simulate anger.
That's not what the movies tell me.
When the robots take over the world, they're usually pretty angry.
Think about the Terminator robots.
They're not angry.
They're just doing a job.
Are they?
Whereas if Arnie was really emotional in Terminator, then you'd know that he's vulnerable.
You've got a weakness you can play with.
Yeah, but we can't really make them angry at the moment because we're just programming angry sounding responses into them.
And it doesn't swear at you when you're not telling it to.
It doesn't send you poo in the post or something unless you've programmed that.
Which is the only reason I can assume that I keep receiving it.
There was a really creepy robot telemarketer that lots of people are writing online about called Samantha West, and this was in the US.
And I think she was selling health insurance, and she denied vociferously that she was a robot.
And so Pete, these g and I think it was uh the Washington Post or one of the uh US newspapers got hold realized this, got a call from her, and they all called and said, Are you a robot?
and she kept on saying, No, I'm a real person.
Maybe there's something wrong with the line.
Can you hear me okay?
and they'd go, You really sound like a robot and she'd say, I understand, but perhaps there's a fault with the line and they eventually called and like pressed all the buttons until they got through to a real person and said, look, there's a robot claiming to be a person working with you.
And I'm not into that at all.
It's really weird.
And the person said, we do not have any robots here.
There's no robot working here.
And the next day, the number of hers had been discontinued.
But I do wonder.
Maybe that just was a real person on their first day who was like not didn't want to deviate from the scripts and was really, really nervous and just had all these people going, you're a freaking robot, okay?
Own up.
And that's why she quit the next day.
Well, there was a guy who got fired because he put on a robotic sounding voice to get through his calls faster.
Because people assume if they're talking to a machine, they'll just say yes, no, and option C.
And he didn't want to do any of the fake chumminess, so he basically put on a metallic voice.
Yeah, but he got fired for it.
So ironically, his job will have now gone to a machine.
So you can get therapeutic robots.
Have you seen this?
There's one that in particular is called Paro, and they've made this robot to help people who are suffering from they've had some trauma.
And it's shaped like a seal.
And the reason it's shaped like a seal is because the guy who invented it says people are unlikely to have had bad memories of real seals.
It's fair enough, I think, but seals are quite, you know, they can attack people.
So it's just that most people don't come up against seals that often.
There are so many things that fall into that category.
Very few bad memories of octopuses or the planet Mars or
Arnold Schwarzenegger, actually.
I mean, while we're on robots, there is one subject I think we've been dancing around, which is sex with robots.
Just
all right, maybe I'm the only one who's been dancing around it.
I just wanted to tell you about a story from Malaysia.
This is from the newspaper Free Malaysia today from October.
And it goes like this.
This proposed conference on love and sex with robots is illegal, Inspector General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar told a press conference in Kuala Lumpur and action will be taken against the organizers if they go ahead.
There's nothing scientific about sex and robots.
It's an offence to have extramarital sex in Malaysia, especially with robots.
It's true.
It was called the Congress on Love and Sex with Robots.
And I think people just saw the title and just saw the last three words, sex with robots.
And the word Congress.
Yeah, Congress.
That's true.
There's a group called the Campaign Against Sex Robots.
They're a growing group to stop people from actually having sex with robots in the future.
And there are people who are saying, you know, we should make laws against this right now.
And there was an article about it, and there were some people who commented on the bottom of it.
One person, Chrysler Harper, said, if I want to have sex with my robot, then I will.
My husband is always willing, but he isn't always there.
This idea is stupid.
The most advanced robot most people have was a Hoover, which I bet was what she was talking about.
And then someone called Manjeet replied to that, saying, sex robots would at least not be as destructive as an atomic bomb.
Very true.
A lot of scientists do say, oh, we'll be having sex with robots in
a couple of hours.
As soon as you guys leave the press conference, actually.
It's true, though.
There was a very famous book, Sex and Robots, or Sex with Robots.
And they say roughly the year 2050 will be when we'll be properly getting into bed with robots.
So there's a reason to stay healthy for all of us.
Just hold on tight, guys.
Only 35 more years.
Another creepy robot is this robot called Pepper, which was made in Japan, as most of the most advanced robots are.
And so a thousand versions of Pepper went up for sale last year.
They went on for sale for a thousand pounds each equivalent.
And they sold out within a minute.
So very sought after.
And I was watching a video of the woman who was explaining what's so good about Pepper.
And it's a robot for your house who can be your friend.
So it's an emotional, social robot who can kind of respond to your emotions, sense your emotions, calm you down, make you feel better.
And she said, one of the things she said was, it will introduce games into the family that you can play together or take pictures of your children when you're not at home.
One of the games it plays is, so then there's an example of this robot interacting and it decides to play a game with someone.
So it says,
on three, we each take a deep breath and see who can hold it the longest.
Evil robot.
Wow.
I saw when I was in Australia, there was an ad on TV for a new tracking device called Traku.
And the idea is that Traku can be put, it's got magnetic little bits that you can put on the inside of a car, or you can put it in your grandfather's pocket, or you can put it.
Basically, it was an advert saying you can stalk.
You can stalk and no one will know.
But they kept going, Traku, as if it's like this little cute thing.
And there was a grandfather going, Where am I?
It goes on cars, you can put it in a wallet, you can put someone's hair, you put it in a fish tank.
That's on commission.
You can put it in a fish tank
just in case your fish goes missing.
In case your fish goes missing and takes the tracking device with it,
look what happened to that poor dentist in Nemo.
Such a good point.
That would have been a much shorter film if they'd had your ingenious trash track device.
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Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is Chaczynski.
Yep, my fact is that a fifth of America's meals are eaten in cars.
That's so interesting.
Yeah, it's really interesting, isn't it?
Yeah.
But yeah, it's a study done.
And another thing that either this study or another study at the same time found was that 31% of people in America say they have never eaten a meal in their cars.
So there's obviously some people really bringing up that average who are just like every single time they cook a roast, they go to their car, lock themselves in.
Well, it's a big drive-through nation, isn't it?
Yeah, I think it's that, yeah.
Do they say if that's actually what it is?
That is what it is, yeah.
So it's eating fast.
That suggested I was like, okay, so it must be the the roasts going into the gnar
there's a national drive-through day in america
yeah it's uh july 24th and it's it's one of those ones that isn't obviously officially recognized but it's one it will sort of trend on twitter and everyone will be going hey national they celebrate it like international potato day or whatever i think it was made up by i can't remember what the first uh the company that pioneered drive-through was but it went out of business in the 80s but i think it was them that made up national drive-through day in order to boost their business wasn't it yeah was it the In-N-Out chain?
No, I think that's one of those robot dolls.
So this is the thing.
This is in the UK, actually.
Two-thirds of motorists say they've eaten while driving, and 55% of motorists think that eating while driving should be illegal.
So obviously most of the people who are eating while driving are going, I wish they'd banned this.
I hate myself.
I think it kind of is illegal, isn't it?
I think it might be, yeah.
I think if you're not in full control of the car, it's up to the police, really, but if they see you eating a Kit Kat or something or a banana, and then I'm sorry.
Just two of the many wonderful foods you can enjoy in this great nation.
James, I genuinely yesterday read a story of a lady who got a ticket for peeling a banana while she was driving, so you're on it.
Thanks, Dan.
Yeah.
Yeah, so if they think that by doing that you're not in full control, then they can pull you over.
It depends on how you're
peeling it.
Or it depends on if you're going at 90 miles an hour on the motorway and you think that banana is looking a bit too wrapped for my liking, then fair enough, you're not.
Do you know the bananas used to come wrapped in foil?
Did they?
Yes.
Considering they have their own wrapping already.
Yeah, when they first came over here, they were wrapped.
Oh my god.
Yeah.
That's kind of like past the parcel then.
Well, the worst game pass the parcel.
There's only two wrappings and it's always a banana.
Maybe people used to eat the skin until we saw monkeys taking it off and then they realized.
A few of the drive-through things.
Oh, yeah.
So the first ever drive-through, do you know what it was?
What?
It was a bank.
Ah,
it was in Chicago.
It was in 1946.
I have another one from 5,200 years ago.
Well,
okay.
So, I'm going to say that's the second ever drive-through.
No,
there's like an old kind of place in Iran called Godin Tepe.
And they're not 100% sure that it was a drive-thru, but they think it was because of.
I'm going to be all over this, James.
I'm going to give this fact a very hard time indeed.
Well, it's because of the height of the window and because the room seemed to have been used as a place to keep things, and it was for bullets and ammunition that soldiers would go through.
5,000 years ago, they had bullets.
Yeah.
What?
Bullets were invented way before guns because bullet is just
well before.
Oh, wait till I have something to put this in.
You're a tall.
Well, before they invented guns, the word bullet was just a projectile.
A stone.
It was a stone.
Check out my brilliant mate.
It's a pebble.
So they made room noises as they threw them?
There's a room with some stones in it, and you're claiming it's drive-through.
That sounds like an archaeologist who needs more funding and has got nothing in his brain.
We found some bullets for a drive-through.
Okay, let's hear about your bank.
They found a room with a load of money in it.
That's it.
You just drove drove up and took money out or deposited it, but it was in Chicago.
Did you have to show any identification or anything or it was just a free
went out of business very fast?
The first restaurant was in 1947.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
And they used to, instead of driving through, you would just drive up.
Well, you would drive through, but they would have...
waiters outside taking your order and carrying them inside
and bringing your food out to your car.
It's quite nice.
Just a way of getting your staff cold, basically.
I found a few weird drive-thrus that actually exist in America at the moment.
I think a couple of them have gone defunct, but if they have, it's only in the last few years.
So these are for people who just wanted to make life easier for everyone.
There's a drive-through funeral parlor, and this is genuinely real.
You drive up and the person
who you love is just in a window as you go by, and you pay respects as you go by in the window, and you form a queue with the cars, and you just sort of go by and then drive on.
So there's a drive-through.
I swear to God, it's real.
Are they wearing one of those McDonald's outfits?
Held up by strings
with chicken sandwich in one hand.
So, yeah, it's a funeral parlor drive-through.
There's an emergency services drive-through.
So, you just come up in the car, and a doctor quickly comes and helps you with any problem that you have.
So, you're sick, but you're still driving.
Well, no, no, you're so badly sick that you had to go to each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So, you drive through and they can quickly just help you out.
And while you're still really bad, they put you in the funeral on streets.
And this one's amazing.
There's a drive-through bar that serves you alcohol that you could take.
Really?
And I think they've thought that one properly through.
Yeah, you just buy, I'll just have a pint of vodka.
Just a normal drink.
This is when they want more.
You know, when the police want to get more ticks on their people arrested, they just plant policemen two yards up the road, presumably.
And then they've got some arrests under their belt.
Yeah.
I was just looking at fast food.
Have you guys ever heard of a yolk?
No.
A yolk?
I've just got why it's called that and it's a yolk.
Is it a part of an egg?
Because yeah, I did come across them.
No, no.
No, with a W.
So this is the latest fast food and it's a runny pre-cooked boiled egg with pre-cut soldiers in it and a spooth, which is a spoon that includes a tooth to help you crack the shell.
And you say, wow, this is what you have to do.
You buy the package with the egg in it.
You open the egg, you pour boiling water on it, leave it for five minutes, and then you've got your egg.
It's amazing, because that takes longer to make than an actual egg.
It literally takes longer to make.
Yeah, the guy said, all you need is access to boiling water, and now you can enjoy a delicious yolk wherever you want in just five minutes.
That's, yeah, that's just a boiled egg, isn't it?
Yeah.
It just comes with toast soldiers.
It does come with soldiers, yeah.
But do you have to toast them?
I'd think the soldiers are not toasted.
But I don't toast my soldiers anyway, so that's not a problem for me.
Well, then they're not toast soldiers.
I call them soldiers.
They're bred civilians.
Okay, it's time to move on to fact number three, and that is James.
Okay, my fact this week is that the most dangerous job in Britain is that of a hairdresser.
Why?
So this isn't the most people that die.
It's most kind of accidents or injuries.
And hairdressers and beauticians are by far the most likely to suffer an accident, most commonly cutting themselves.
But it's construction, which kills most people.
Yes, definitely.
Definitely by the most by absolute numbers.
I would say, like, if you're a trawler man or something, probably a lot of people die with that as well.
But I'm going from accidents only, and that is hairdressers.
There is actually one genuinely quite dangerous hairdresser called Albert Almedo, and he's in Madrid and he only cuts hair with samurai swords or a blowtorch.
Wow,
does he give you the option when you come in?
What will it be today?
The blowtorch or the samurai sword?
I think maybe you have to pay extra for the blowtorch.
I don't know, but he swipes, it looks really cool, actually.
He swipes, he has two samurai swords that he cuts your hair with, and he swipes them in opposite directions at the back of your head.
And he says it's useful because you can do both sides at once.
Wow.
Sounds incredibly dangerous.
Yeah, it does, does, isn't it?
Yeah.
Because what if you misjudge someone's head under the hair and they have a really protuberant back of the head?
It's when you ask for a bit off the top and he literally takes the amount of time.
I think there might be a slightly more dangerous hairdresser out there.
He's a Chinese hairdresser called Tian Hao.
And how he does it is he likes to feel the energy of the hair and not have any influence of, say, sight.
So he closes his eyes and he starts chopping hair with his eyes close so he'll just feel it and he's very popular in China he's yeah yeah he does really well yeah Jedi hairdresser yes exactly yeah
so there was a rumor going around Cambodia
a few dozen years ago and that was that the president who's called Noradam Shihunuk he'd had a dream in which all the long-haired virgins in the country will be taken to hell by an evil god.
He was kind of quite revered, or at least feared at the time, and everyone kind of half-believed this thing that all the long-haired virgins would be taken to hell.
And so, all the virgins with long hair cut all their hair.
And all the people who wanted people to think they were virgins and had long hair, they had their hair cut as well.
Okay, so there was a massive kind of epidemic of women having the hair cut in Cambodia.
And according to the police at the time, they said that it was a rumor started by corrupt hairdressers.
Very clever.
So, yeah, hairdressers are very widely trusted, supposedly.
This has been in the news in the last two days.
There's been a big survey by Ipsos Murray, so it's a legit one.
And it's their Veracity Index, which they do every year.
And apparently, the most trusted profession is hairdressers.
69% of people would trust their hairdresser to tell the truth.
Really?
68% for the police.
And newsreaders are only on 65%.
And then journalists and politicians are way down.
They're in the 20s of percent.
That's so weird.
I don't think I trust my hairdresser to tell the truth.
Really?
Well, they've been saying I look great.
Their job is to get to the end of a cut and go, yeah, it's fantastic.
You know, it can't, they can't have got it right every time.
Yeah, you never hear them going, oh, I've really cocked this up.
There's actually a hairdresser in Cardiff now, Bauhaus hairdressers, I think it is, which offers a special quiet chair that you can nominate to be in if you don't fancy the terrible hairdresser small talk.
If you don't have a holiday book that year or...
Yeah, yeah, didn't go on one last year.
Yeah.
And the manager is, so he's very relaxed about it.
He says they can change their minds at any time, halfway through the cut, if they feel, suddenly feel like a chin wag.
But if you're in that chair, they will not say a word to you.
The owner of that one, I think he's called Scott Miller.
And he said, I always say, if you're asking your client where they're going on a holiday, you've lost.
So
I think there are quite high standards for the hairdresser conversation these days.
Yeah.
God.
Yeah.
Where am I going to get to brag brag about my holidays?
The last time I had my hair cut, it was by,
I was in a city that I don't live in, and the woman who cut my hair was a regional finalist in the National Hairdressing Championships.
Really?
Yeah.
Yes.
Really?
I mean, she was a finalist, she wasn't a winner.
But she told me all sorts of stuff about the history of hairdressing, and she told me that there's a UK president of hairdressing.
Oh, is there?
Yeah.
And there's a fellowship of British hairdressing, which I didn't know either.
Yeah, there's also a
male hairdresser of the year.
There's also female hairdresser of the year.
It's the big hairdresser awards that happened at the end of the year each year.
And in 2005, I was looking through the list of all the people had won.
2005, the winner was a guy called Brent Barber.
Whoa.
Cool name.
Really cool.
And
this is interesting.
I was reading about different kinds of hair that get done that aren't on human heads.
And Madame Two Swords have hairdressers that actually do the hair of the waxworks.
And in fact, the Twiggy wax work that was done, the hairdresser who does Twiggy's hair came in to do Twiggy's waxwork hair as well, to give it the cut to make it look like it would on Twiggy, which is quite cool.
Did she know it was waxwork or did you go away like Twiggy's in a bad mood today?
I said, We're all going on your holidays.
But just as a sideline fact, I discovered that when Madame Toussaud waxworks are made now, and I think this has always been the case, they make them two inches bigger, the whole body two inches bigger, because the wax shrinks over time and that brings them to the actual size of the person.
Andy, you were telling me today that after the age of 30, you shrink by one sixteenth of an inch every year.
Every year, yep.
So they'd have to shave bits off the waxworks as well every year.
Another one sixteenth 16th off.
Yes, although I learned that on Oprah about 15 years ago.
And it's just one of those facts that stays with you.
Yeah.
And I haven't checked it
then or now.
I think it's true, though.
It's the discs in between your back vertebrae.
It could be true.
In ancient Rome, they had a job called an ornatrix.
And this was a lady who would look after the hair of another lady.
And it would be colouring.
A lot of the thing that they did was colouring.
So if you wanted black hair, then you had to put a mixture of bile rotten leeches and squid ink in your hair.
Oh, wow.
That would make it go black.
Cool.
And if you wanted blonde, it was a mixture of pigeon poo and ashes.
I think I'll stay with the natural do.
Barbers used to offer castrations as well.
Is that true?
Well, there's medieval China.
Oh, okay.
So, yes.
For a good value of true, yes.
No, it was they did eunuchs.
Yeah.
Surely eunuchs are the ones that don't need it.
Sorry.
um we say that have we said before that chinese eunuchs would carry around their testicles to
be reunited with them in the afterlife yes yeah i think so there was the one of the most famous eunuchs who was one of the last eunuchs um to punish him for something they stole his um they stole his bits and it was like he just thought it was the end of the world for him because he would never be able to be brought back
as a whole
that is mean yeah real mean do you know uh the the first ever proper proper QI fact that I ever found when I was working on the TV show had actually to do with Chinese hairdressers, and it was Moussi Tong's hairdresser.
Yeah, I was reading a biography, and it turned out that his hairdresser was called Big Beard Wang.
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This is Bethany Frankel from Just Be with Bethany Frankel.
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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.
My fact this week is that Elvis Presley once started a riot at the end of his show by saying to the crowd girls, I'll see you all backstage.
Wow.
Yeah, and they all went.
They all went in that moment.
So this was back in 1955.
This was kind of just as he was reaching
his first sort of wave of popularity.
And
he didn't realize that that would be the reaction once he said it.
So he just said this line, girls, I'll see you all backstage.
And they literally just fled onto stage.
Just like they just went right on.
And he got scared and he had to run off to his little green room.
They were ripping off his clothes.
He was missing a shoe.
He was missing the side of his shirt.
And they locked him inside
the back room, and no one could get to him.
And eventually, when it calmed down and he went to his car, his car, in the side metal of the car, there were names and numbers scratched into the side, and they couldn't see through the windscreen because so much lipstick was on it with names and numbers for him to call.
And also 500 trackus.
And that was the moment that his manager went, okay, we've got a massive star on our hands here.
And yeah, and that's when he got really promoted.
Wow, I remember when we were filming QI once, and Justin Bieber was
in the studios.
He was doing something next door.
And it was crazy.
There was just, it was unbelievable.
They had so much security there.
Every time you walked past a window, all they had to do was see a little bit of hair and they would scream.
It was great fun because you just kind of peek your head around and then they go out.
And you bear a powerful physical resemblance to Justin Bieber.
This was this with Justin Bieber.
They did experience serious problems with that when the concerts would happen because if he arrived late or if they told that they were told it was too chaotic, because actually so many fans were coming to the show, they would say, okay, we're cutting this short or Justin's not going to be able to appear.
And they would start rioting.
And unlike a normal show where people would riot who are of adult age, the police just had no idea.
What do you do when you're being attacked by children?
You can't do anything.
You just have to accept it.
That's why you need the robots, probably.
Take photos of them.
I don't know.
I'll just shut him up.
Did you guys hear about David Spargo?
I bet you must have done that.
Okay,
he's a super fan of the Australian band Peking Duck.
who I assume is some kind of popular beat combo, obviously.
But they were playing in Melbourne, and he decided that he wanted to get backstage and meet his heroes.
And so he went backstage, and
the security said to him, No, you can't come in.
And he's like, No, no, I've got to come in.
I'm the lead singer's stepbrother.
And they're like, Well, do you have any proof?
He said, Yeah, yeah, look, on Wikipedia.
And he brought it up and he just changed Wikipedia two minutes earlier to say that he was that guy's stepbrother and he got in and he got to meet his heroes.
Cool.
Smart that, isn't it?
Very smart,
yeah.
Um have you heard of uh there's a Beatles fan called Jan Myers, and she was a super fan in the days when they were first becoming popular.
And she crawled through the sewers under Abbey Road to hear them recording Rubber Soul through the floor.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
I think she's writing a book now about being a super fan.
But at the time she was a fan, they weren't super famous yet.
And the first time she got an autograph from Paul McCartney, he wrote Paul McCartney, brackets, the Beatles.
Yeah, so they really weren't well known.
They actually met Elvis once, didn't they?
And it sounds
like the most awkward occasion ever.
So, yeah, yeah.
And apparently, they just had nothing to talk about.
Their press officer wrote about it years later and said it was incredibly awkward.
They had this weird small talk.
There were long, long silences.
And eventually, someone obviously freaking out, maybe the press officer freaked out and thought, I've got to do something.
So he brought in a load of guitars, and the Beatles just started playing some music, and everything calmed down a bit.
And then later on, Elvis bitched about the Beatles, I think, to Nixon.
Yeah.
Oh, that's what?
Yeah, he didn't bitch to Nixon about the Beatles.
He's a big bitch.
He said he thought the Beatles were un-American because of their stance on Vietnam.
Yeah, it's true.
He's bitching.
Yeah, I guess so.
He didn't mean un-American, and that's a good thing.
He's talking to the president of the U.S.
I found this fact, by the way, about the backstage thing with Elvis.
Weirdly, not in an Elvis Presley book, but I've been reading a biography on David Bowie called Ziggiology.
And
big influence on David Bowie was Elvis.
And there was incredible facts in this book.
I just kept coming across amazing little nuggets about Elvis.
This is my favorite one, and this is the exact wording.
Elvis's conception was so seismic, his father blacked out after the moment of climax.
Do you mean fell asleep?
No, apparently he just blacked out and
fell and had to be sort of brought to
I think it was Elvis' mother that said that, and she should know.
Yeah, that's crazy.
So So he was mental.
I didn't quite realise how mental Elvis was, although I guess maybe everyone else did.
But for instance, the time he met Nixon was because he was determined that he wanted a badge.
He collected police badges and he wanted a badge from the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs.
And I think he thought that meant that he could cross any borders with any substances at all.
And he's wearing the badge, so that was fine.
So he got one of those off Nixon.
That's his only reason for meeting the president.
He used to visit one of his favorite pastimes, apparently, was visiting the Memphis morgue to look at corpses.
Was that a drive-through one?
He once, oh, I like this image.
He was once with Tom Jones backstage, and he serenaded Tom Jones while Tom Jones was naked in the shower.
So Tom Jones said, I think he was checking me out.
So that could have been a romance that never happened.
Wow.
We need to wrap up fairly soon-ish.
I've got just a couple more things that are slightly sidetracking, but as I say, I got this fact from a Ziggy Stardust book, and I found out this really great fact that I think people should know about.
David Bowie, that's not his real name.
His real name is David Jones.
And the reason he had to change his name from David Jones to David Bowie is because of the monkeys.
David Jones from the monkeys.
David Jones from the monkeys.
So he was trying to make it big as a musician.
Didn't work.
So he went to David Bowie.
But David Bowie wasn't the first name that he went to before he went to David Bowie.
The first name he picked after David Jones was Tom Jones.
And then a couple of weeks later, this new singer came along and he went oh jesus christ and then had to change it to david bowie
tom jones would come along yeah they do a weird name
now booing no
and the riot begins
okay that's it that's all of our facts thank you so much for listening uh if you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our twitter Twitter accounts.
I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at Egg Shaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.
And Chasinski.
You can email podcast at qi.com.
Yep.
Or you can go to no such thingasoffish.com where we have all of our previous episodes.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you guys so much for being here.
We really appreciate it.
I hope you enjoyed it and we'll see you again sometime.
Okay, goodbye.
Let's be real.
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