69: No Such Thing As The Pamplona Guinea Pig Run

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Alex Bell, Andy Murray, 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, Andy Mari.

My fact is that in Peru depictions of the Last Supper show Jesus and his disciples eating a guinea pig.

That's what they do.

That's what is there.

This is...

There's one particular famous painting by a guy called Marcos Zapata, who painted in 1755 a very large painting, fresco, whatever it is, of the Last Supper.

And Jesus and his disciples are all sitting around a guinea pig, which has been char-grilled and barbecued.

Is there any chance that they would have eaten a guinea pig back then?

Was that food back then?

Yeah.

Well, not in the Middle East, I didn't think.

Did they come from the Middle East?

Oh, sorry, in the Middle East.

Sorry, I thought you meant were they taking it to South America and because they ate guinea pigs in South America, which they did.

Which they did, okay.

Yeah.

And they still do.

They're really popular.

Yes, they're huge, yeah.

They eat 65 million every year.

Wow.

Which is a lot.

Each.

And

they get roasted and impaled on skewers and then they're normally brought to your table hole and they're cut into five pieces.

So they're quartered and then they remove the head as well.

What?

Apparently, the cheeks are really nice because they're crispy.

And presumably because they keep food in them as well, so they can come up free stuff.

Yeah.

Just got some extra seeds.

Yeah.

I was reading that more rabbits and chickens are used as guinea pigs than guinea pigs are.

Yeah.

For science research.

And obviously, mice and rats are the big ones.

But guinea pigs just are not ever really used much for science.

However, I then also read, and I read this was in Squire, the QI database, 23 Nobel Prizes in medicine have been won thanks to guinea pigs.

Wow.

Yeah.

So why do we call it, why did the term being used as a guinea pig?

Was there a time when there were no?

There were a few.

I mean, if 23 Nobel Prizes, there must be a time.

It's from the 1800s, and it's when the, it was Robert Koch, wasn't it, who was a leading germ scientist in the 1800s.

And he did a lot of his experiments on guinea pigs, I think, in the 1880s-ish.

And so he coined the term, or someone coined the term, about him, and people just started using it.

But yeah, they've it's very uncommon to use guinea pigs, I think, at a ratio of about one to a thousand in favor of using mice and rats instead.

Guinea pigs are, I think, the only other animals, the only other mammals except for humans that can get scurvy.

And that was one thing we use them for, is finding out the cause of scurvy, is transferring our scurvy into the guinea pigs.

No, finding out the cause of scurvy, which we did, but yeah, they can get it.

So all other animals are able to create vitamin C internally, but we can't, guinea pigs can't.

Wow.

We're together in that.

And also, guinea pigs, unrelatedly, were the first creatures to have a pap smeared down on them.

What?

You know a cervical smear too?

Yeah, I know what the hell are you doing?

Oh, okay, cool, yeah.

So Mr.

Pap, Pap Papanopoulos, whatever he was called, when he went to America, wasn't allowed to experiment on any humans, and so he just took lots of guinea pigs and had to work out their menstrual cycles, which he found quite difficult, I think, for quite a lot.

Did he have tiny stirrups for their legs?

legs when they sat in the chairs?

And he'd leave them alone in the room to set themselves up and then come in on the gloves.

If you've ever seen a guinea pig hobbling a little bit, that's what they've just been doing.

Big awkward conversation about, oh, yeah, plan till the weekend.

In pre-Spanish South America, in Peru, in a city called Cuzco, I think is how it's pronounced, a thousand white guinea pigs were sacrificed every year in the square to appease the gods

and to stop them harming the crops and things like that.

Wow.

But there is a ceremony today where you go house to house and you collect loads of guinea pigs from people.

It's called Jaka Tsari, I think.

And then you release them in apparently a mock bullfight, which I think sounds brilliant.

In a tiny ring.

You put tiny horns on them.

Wow.

I mean, is it a bullfight in that people oppose them?

Oh, yeah.

Getting flipped over into the crowd.

It's a matador versus a guinea pig.

The Pamplona guinea pig run would be like that.

All the headlines the next day.

Three more gourd in guinea pig accidents.

Just quickly, back to the original fact.

So, this picture of the Last Supper, was this the Cusco Cathedral one?

It was the Cusco Cathedral.

Okay, because there's a lot more items on that table as well that they seem to have identified as part of the Last Supper.

So, to represent the 12 disciples, they had 12 dishes on the table.

So, that includes prawn soup, quite nice, polenta, salad, corn cake.

There was rice with milk, cake, yellow bread.

It's quite cool.

It's quite a variety.

It sounds like they cooked in, they didn't order out from somewhere.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm also so skeptical that when people claim to be able to identify very specific types of food.

Oh, it's prawn soup there.

One of them is handing the menu back to the waiter,

pointing with his finger at the prawn soup.

There's a specials menu in the background if you look very closely.

Speaking of items on the table, in Da Vinci's Last Supper,

there's lots of stuff again strewn over the table.

The first thing is that

there are oranges there, which is a mistake, as it were, because oranges weren't around in the Middle East until centuries after Jesus was supposed to have been around.

And the other thing is that in 2007, an Italian computer technician announced that he had discovered a secret song that was hidden in Da Vinci's Last Supper.

So all this bread and stuff strewn over the table, if you superimpose this onto a stave,

all of the things are musical notes.

And he says that if you play it, it sounds a bit like a requiem.

But crucially, not enough like a requiem.

The church of the museum said the theory was plausible.

That's a very polite

thing.

There's another theory by this historian called John Veriano, who thinks that he says there is orange on the table, but he thinks that they're eating eel in Da Vinci's Last Supper.

Because apparently that was a popular meal in the 15th century.

in Italy when da Vinci was painting.

So yeah, eel and orange slices.

There was this thing that he was, so he was obviously commissioned to do this, Da Vinci, this portrait.

And it was done in what was effectively a monk's canteen, which I didn't know.

But it wasn't a canteen when it was painted.

It got.

It just looked so delicious on the wall.

And they said, you know what would be great in this room?

It's very dilapidated and basically rubbish, isn't it?

And in fact, I think.

Basically rubbish.

But basically, I could do better.

I think if you asked who painted Da Vinci's Last Supper, the answer would not be Da Vinci.

I don't think there's a single bit of paint left now on it that is Da Vinci's paint because it was so badly done.

Because it was essentially a failure.

He had never really painted murals before, didn't know the right equipment to use or the right substances.

And so they eroded really quickly within his lifetime.

And it kept on having to be redone and touched up.

And it didn't work very well.

And for centuries, it was kind of neglected because it was just like broken bits of stone.

And also the Jesus in the middle used to have feet, didn't he?

Yes.

And then they just plowed a door through the middle of that

painting.

And so the feet are gone.

And that's why there's that weird arch in the middle of the painting that looks a bit out of place and you can't see Jesus' legs.

Did you know that Van Gogh painted a version of The Last Supper?

No, didn't.

Ah, yeah, he did.

It was, you know, his Cafe Terrace?

Most famous Van Gogh painting, probably.

One of the very most famous.

Oh, yeah.

So Cafe Terrace, lots of people sitting out.

Anyway, there was this academic paper written about how Van Gogh had written a letter letter to his brother while he was painting that saying, I really need some religion in my life.

And then he's drawn this picture with 12 diners with a guy walking away, as in the Judas character, who's often shown to be walking away in the Last Supper depictions.

With there's, if you look at the window in the back, it's got a crossed window pane, which isn't just a crossed window pane, it's a crucifix that's hanging b behind everyone in the picture.

That's the latest theory.

There are some other versions of the there are so many versions of like the Last Supper in paint in painting.

And yeah, my favourite is Juan de Juanes, which was the Spanish painter who painted his version.

And it's really easy to

identify which disciple is each person because inside the halos, he's written their name suspended in the same colour.

Because if you all go in somewhere, you all hang up your halos at the door, and then if you leave, you don't want to get someone else's, which is the wrong size.

You look like an idiot for the rest of the day.

It looks like when you look at the tags on a Facebook photo and everyone's names come up, and it's got this exact moment.

That's brilliant.

He was tagging.

He was tagging them.

He's literally tagging them.

It's the best thing ever.

He's literally literally just written them in.

It's hilarious.

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Okay, time for fact number two and that is Alex.

Okay, my fact is that there is a skyscraper in New York with a 400 tonne weight in the top which moves around to stop the building from falling over.

That's so cool.

Okay, so this is actually one of loads of buildings.

This was just the first one to have this technology in the US.

It's the Citigroup Centre.

I mean everyone has probably heard about how tall buildings often are built on flexible foundations.

They've got they're basically sitting on big springs so it insulates them from earthquakes and it makes them sway slightly.

But another problem with really tall buildings is not just earthquakes.

it's that the wind might blow them over because they're so big.

So there's this technology called tuned mass damping, which is basically a really heavy weight, usually several hundred tons heavy, that's installed in the top floors of the skyscraper and the weight is attached to pneumatic supports or cables or something.

And the building has a computer system which works out which direction the wind is coming from and it shifts a weight into that direction so that the building leans into the wind slightly.

And it can reduce the amount that the building is swayed by the wind by about 50% or sometimes more.

Wow.

I'm never going into any building which has this stay.

But this is the thing, when you start looking into how these buildings stay up and technology we use, you don't want to go in any of these skyscrapers because they just don't seem...

You wonder how any building stays up, even a couple of stories high, because it's just so sort of scary.

Have you seen how they demolish skyscrapers in Japan?

No.

It is so cool.

They start with the ground floor and they work their way up.

Sorry?

Yes.

They've also marked the levitation.

Yeah, does it just drop down one floor and then they get to the...

What do you mean?

Genuinely, they do this.

So what they do is they take the ground floor and they replace all the building supports with hydraulic jacks, right?

So really really enormous steel pillars to the height of the first floor

and they put those in place of the proper supports and then they remove all the internal walls and supports and then very slowly and carefully they lower the hydraulic jacks over a period of a couple of hours and then boom you have now a building which is one story shorter and then you do it again and you do it again and you do it again and it's a way of very slowly dismissing

it.

Isn't it amazing?

That's a bit like how cranes, big cranes, put themselves together and dismantle themselves.

You build the top bit, and then you, you know, they're all built in segments, like bit like Lego, and it slides in the bottom segment and shifts itself up and slides in.

And obviously, you're using the actual, you know, the cables in the crane to move this stuff around, so it's literally building itself.

I've been asking that question for years without ever thinking to Google it.

I've always wanted to know how a crane gets there.

Yeah, it's amazing.

That's awesome.

I'm sorry, go on.

I was going to say, talking of cranes, I was looking at the the difference between building in different places,

one of which is

this law called Protected View Laws.

And it's basically the idea that there are lots of views from one place to another in London which you can't obstruct.

Do you know the cheese grater skyscraper?

It's basically, it looks like a giant cheese grater because it just looks like it has a whole huge slice chopped off it.

The reason it's that shape is because there's a pub on Fleet Street from which you can see St.

Paul's Cathedral.

And when they tried to build the building, they were told they weren't allowed to impose on the view.

So they've had this huge skyscraper now sort of leans one way.

Wow.

Isn't that ridiculous?

There are 13 of the main protected view laws from one park to another landmark, which you can't put anything in front of.

Anna and I went to Greenwich very recently to the museums there, and we saw Greenwich meantime, the meridian line

and the laser.

There's this big green laser that shoots out.

And so at night, that's what you see.

It shows you time.

It's the line of time.

And basically,

what happened was a new building structure had gone up across the river and the laser went directly into one of the rooms of this apartment block and they complained and so they've had to change the line of time.

It's just pointing up it higher now because that's so funny.

Because the residents were getting slightly nervous.

He was signing someone's bedroom, right?

And just hitting his bedroom walls.

He was trying to sleep with this enormous laser coming in.

Huge laser of time.

Laser made of time.

And related to that, 20 Fenchurch Street, which is the huge bulbous skyscraper, the Walkie-Talkie in London, it hit the headlines in 2013 because

it has a big curved front and it was focusing all the sun's rays and melting a bit of the pavement and cars on it.

The architect is called Rafael Vanoli.

He's done it before.

He designed a massive hotel called the Hotel Vedara in Las Vegas, which also has a massive curved front and would heat up the swimming pool and melt people's plastic cups.

So knowing that he'd done that several years before, they A hired him a tool, and then B, he came up with this design for a new massive curved building.

They're like, yeah, that's probably going to be fine.

I read that that's called the Vedara death ray.

Yeah, yeah.

Ridiculous.

So, yeah, he keeps designing buildings that end up being called the death something.

Yeah, it isn't the death ray, is it?

No.

Okay, that's cool.

Just speaking of things being on one side or another of a line,

this is kind of not relevant to the fact, but I found out recently, and I like it so much.

There's a hotel in Europe which is half in France and half in Switzerland.

Genuinely.

It's called the Hotel Abbez, and it was that France and Switzerland were trying to swap a bit of land because the French wanted a particular bit, so they had to concede a bit.

And they just conceded a bit of land in 1862, and yeah, the border shifted, but the building stayed where it was.

So the international border goes across the dining room and supposedly across the bed in the honeymoon suite

so you will there's like a passport guard right in the middle of it you can have a honeymoon in two different countries yeah yeah which countries france and switzerland

i love the idea of a passport a border control yeah i presume there's a massive fence going through the honeymoon suite well you know how like you name your child sometimes after where they were conceived

um so i was reading uh those kind of classic things that you hear about skyscrapers and one of the things is if you throw a penny off the Empire State Building, it'll drill through your head, is the myth.

And it is a myth,

and so it won't actually do any harm to you.

It will kind of float down like a leaf, is what they say.

And a guy actually did an experience.

Well, obviously, he basically said if it hit you, it would feel like a flick on your head.

Because it's a flat surface, it kind of catches the air, and like a leaf, it kind of just oscillates in that way.

And he did tests in wind tunnels where he was having coins pelted at his head.

And he said, oh, a few hit, but it felt fine.

But, so this is interesting.

I think most people do know now that a penny falling off will do nothing to you.

However, if you throw a pen off the Empire State Building, that can definitely kill you.

Because that ends heavier, so it stays penny.

It shoots down like an arrow.

Streamlined.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

So if it went into the ground, it would absolutely just chip the sidewalk.

That's how much force it comes down.

Wow.

Yeah, 200 miles per hour is what it would travel down as, like an arrow.

Did you know that fish live in skyscrapers in a way?

Is this the one that's been accidentally overwhelmed by fish?

Or oh?

They live in towers, basically, beneath oil rigs.

So you get floating oil rigs, and marine biologists have studied the...

effect it has on sea life and they live in a huge column stretching all the way from the oil rig right to the bottom of the sea floor.

Life is so much more abundant but only in this one column.

Wow.

Isn't that cool?

Yes.

That's really cool.

Because I suppose you get lots of things falling down from above.

So lots of bottom feeders and things use sediment from animals which have been living closer above that.

And then at the top, there must be more things growing there, which are for fish to eat, which live near the surface.

So it has a whole effect all the way down.

I love it.

I wonder which,

would it be the opposite that in a normal skyscraper, you want to be on the top floor because of the view.

In their one, do you want to be closer to the bottom?

Is there a better view down there?

There's not much light, I suppose, and there's loads of pressure depending on how deep it gets.

So there's no view at all, basically.

Where was it?

Where was it?

Because there's no light.

Yeah.

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My fish are going to hate me.

Speaking of fish and buildings,

the National Fisheries Development Board, which is a branch of government in

Hyderabad in India, is shaped like a huge fish.

And I think that for all government departments, we should have the buildings shaped like what they are.

Wouldn't that be cool?

Oh, Oh, right.

So like the Department of Defense would be a machine gun or something.

Do we use machine guns in war?

Probably not.

But Department of Housing would just be a really small shitty house.

This is a country where lots and lots of the government buildings are like this.

And I think it's one of the stands and I think it might be Turkmenistan.

But that's also a very awful dictatorship in lots of ways.

Still.

I don't think it is still, is it?

It used to be, what's his face?

Crazy guy who named his bread after his wife and stuff.

Sapamurat Niyazov, I think, was his name.

Yeah, you're so right.

And

the building that's shaped, it is in Turkmenistan, the building that's shaped like a book, is called the House of Free Creativity in Ashgabat.

And it was opened in 2006 under the previous ruler Sapamurat Niyazov.

And all the journalists who worked in it worked with the state-run media.

There are no foreign media allowed, or there weren't at the time, and there was also almost no free internet access for the population.

So that that was the house of free creativity.

That is one of the most Orwellian free arrivals of evercrown.

Unbelievable.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Chasinski.

My fact is that one of Canada's leading crime writers lost the ability to read without losing the ability to write.

So it's this guy called Howard Engel.

He's a really famous crime writer in Canada.

He's created this detective called Benny Cooperman, who is the private eye with the hard head and the tender heart.

And he was one of the founders of Crime Writers of Canada.

He's been the first person to be awarded the Grand Master Award for Crime Writing by the Crime Writers of Canada.

And in July 2001, he woke up,

felt fine, went down, made himself some breakfast, went to pick up the newspaper off his doorstep, looked at the newspaper, and it looked like it was written in complete gibberish.

So he couldn't read any of it.

He said said it looked like it was written in Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next.

He said he was remained totally calm, thought, I've probably had a stroke.

Went and woke his son up, said, I can't read anymore.

Can you take me to hospital?

He went to Hossel, had lots of tests, they confirmed he had a stroke.

But it turned out, he realized after a while of nurses looking into what had happened, that he could still write absolutely perfectly.

So

what?

Isn't this mental?

So he's quite an amazing case.

He's worked incredibly hard, and Oliver Sachs has written an amazing piece on him.

He's worked really hard to teach himself to read again.

So basically, he's lost the visual ability to read, but he has, so he's turned into a sensory ability instead.

So when he's trying to read, he'll shape out the shape of letters either with his hand in the air or actually he reads with his tongue.

So he makes the shapes of letters on the top of his mouth as he's reading them because he recognizes the shapes, like the touch of them.

Oh, wow.

Because he can't recognize it with his eyes, like the visual cortex part has died.

Yeah.

And so he said that he bit his tongue recently and he said that rendered him illiterate for weeks and weeks.

But he's taught himself to read again very slowly, but he does go now back over his books and properly try and edit them as much as he can.

Now he's doing it fast enough that he can almost keep up with subtitles on a foreign film.

Like that's how fast he could write with his tongue on top of his mouth.

He can read half the subtitles.

He said almost.

I can almost call it the film.

I read that, yeah.

Just quickly, Oliver Sachs.

So Oliver Sachs wrote about him in his book, The Mind's Eye.

He also wrote an afterwards to Engels' book, which was called The Man Who Forgot How to Read.

So Oliver Sachs, who's very sadly very ill at the moment, you know him as the man who wrote all those great books like Awakenings and the man who mistook his wife for a hat.

All these people with these amazing psychological, I guess, a disability.

Yeah.

He has one himself and I had no idea.

I think that's where he started.

Is that how he started?

He's got face blindness.

Yeah, yeah.

He can't remember faces, including his own.

And he says that he will often be looking into a mirror, apologizing to this man who's in front of him, going, I'm sorry, who are you?

And you realize, oh, no, that's a mirror.

That's my own face.

He just doesn't recognize his own face.

Wait, but surely he recognizes a mirror.

Yeah, he should have to.

If he's got like wall-length mirrors, so he thinks there's someone in there.

He should get smaller mirrors.

Don't live in a house of mirrors, and you can't recognize your own face.

Yeah, maybe he's maybe he's exaggerating.

That's almost a proverb.

Just one more thing on Oliver Sachs quickly before we go away from him.

His mother was a surgeon and she studied under Mary Curie.

Really?

Yeah.

Wow.

That's quite cool.

Has some other weird stroke effects.

Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Myatt, who's a retired lorry driver, he had a stroke.

He lost the ability to feel sad.

He said, I'm never depressed.

Being sad wouldn't help anything anyway.

I would definitely rather be happy all the time than the other way around.

It's an advantage, really.

But I mean, he would say that.

I was thinking

it's the only time when you go to the doctor and they'd be like, How are you feeling?

He'd be like, oh, can't complain.

And that's actually like,

no, you don't understand.

There was a Swiss woman in Geneva who had a stroke, and it gave her a phantom third arm, which her body completely thought was real.

So if she was asked to move it, her brain would look like it was moving.

It if she was asked to scratch herself, if she had an itch, her body would think it had been scratched.

So that's actually quite useful if you, you know, if you have an itch and you're doing something with your hands, you have a third arm that you can scratch.

Or you can give people the finger and they won't know.

On amazing brain stuff, you know, you can have like acquired savant.

So, you know, there are all these savants in the world who like have an extraordinary ability to retain knowledge or some extraordinary mental ability that goes beyond what the brain can normally achieve.

And there are actually only 330 of them in the world that we know of.

30 of them acquired their abilities after a head injury.

So you can have a head injury and it's thought that in these cases it unleashes a bit of the brain that a lot of us don't have access to.

And that's what causes people, for instance, there's this guy called Derek Amato who hit his head on the bottom of a pool and now he's a master pianist.

There's another guy called Orlando Serrel who was hit with a baseball when he was 10 and he's been able to remember the weather for every single day following that accident.

So it just knocks a bit of the brain that like allows these pathways to connect which couldn't before.

But is there any concomitant damage that means he can't remember other things or does it not seem to have a I think there might often be yeah.

Yeah.

There's a...

This is an interesting thing.

There's a British journalist called A.

A.

Gill, if you don't know him, he's massive in Britain.

He is completely dyslexic to the point where he can't actually write.

He has to dictate every single bit of journalism he's written to someone.

And I never heard that before.

It's very pleasing to think that A.

A.

Gill and Barbara Cartland have something in common.

She did sort of one-sentence paragraphs, really.

That was, you know, Barbara Cartland's style.

Was it?

Yeah.

But, I mean, Proust did that as well.

Again, I think there's a web of talent here.

And I'm not.

Yeah, I don't want to criticize Barbara Cartland.

Should we set them all up?

Barbara Cartland, A.A.

Gill, and Marcel Proust.

What do you say, Sarcel?

Sidelicit com.

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

My fact this week is that Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, and the inventor of the personal computer, met his wife on a dial-a-joke call.

Now, dial-a-joke calls used to be massively popular.

They were effectively, you called up a phone line and the phone just told you a joke.

So

it would just have a recording of.

Amazing.

Yeah, and then it got a bit more advanced.

So initially, it was just a bunch of jokes that were spoken into a tape recorder, and the tape recorder was the answering machine.

So the answering machine was just playing over and over.

So it would tell you a knock-knock joke, and then it would tell you three men walk into a bar joke.

And then it got to the point where someone physically picked up the phone and started telling you jokes and that's so Steve Wozniak before he got into working in creating personal computers yeah he's one of the Apple founders he is the co-founder of Apple with Steve Jobs he's he's the other he's the other guy and actually he's the guy who created the personal computer Steve Jobs was the genius who marketed it and helped get it out there but was as he's known is the guy who actually invented it so he's a he's a big name in our in our modern time

so speaking of people talking robotically on the phone things like this,

recently there was a guy at the New York City Health Department and he was suspended for 20 days for answering the phone in a robotic voice.

And

he sued them over it or they sued him possibly.

But he basically during the trial he told the judge he wasn't a people person and he was doing it to avoid banter with people because people talk very differently to a robotic service.

If you can give options and answers, you just do it quite quickly and you get through it.

So yeah, that's the reason he did it.

It was interesting.

The people who voice Siri.

So there's a guy in the UK who voices the male voice, and a woman called Susan Bennett in the US.

And they were specifically chosen to read out and record all the words for Siri because they have very monotonous voices.

So, they might have trouble anytime they ring someone up, they get hung up because they're seeing their PPI.

One of those guys is called John Briggs, and his voice is everywhere.

He's been a voice artist for 30 years, so his voice is really everywhere by now.

So, once a friend of his was walking past his daughter's bedroom and heard John Briggs' voice coming from inside, and it turned out the child was playing a game with animated penguins who all had the voice of their friend John Briggs.

At one point, Briggs himself got a phone call from himself trying to sell payment protection insurance.

Can you imagine?

So, on Steve Wozniak, so he sounds like the most annoying college student.

He built this little circuit.

I don't even know how the technology would work at all, but he built a circuit that would jam TV signals.

And then, when they were in college and all watching TV with friends, then he would like trigger the circuit that he built in his pocket so that the TV signal would jam, and then someone would go up to try and fix it.

And as they fiddled about with the aerial, then he'd stop it from jamming so the TV would be okay.

Then the person would go back and sit down, he'd put the circuit on again, so they'd go and fix it.

And eventually, it got to the stage where, whenever him and his friends got together and were watching TV, they'd have to have one person all the time holding the aerial because he'd convinced his friends that that was what was required.

Yeah, how annoying is that?

I saw Steve Wozniak talk in Edinburgh a few years ago, and I thought I'm listening to one of the greatest, happiest, most enthusiastic.

He was a prankster.

He did a lot of pranks, and

there's nothing sinister about what he was doing.

He's obsessed with pranking.

Wasn't he one of the people who developed one of the first universal remotes?

Or was that someone else?

Yeah, that is him.

That sounds like he was kind of basing it off.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean,

he absolutely loved pranking.

And that's kind of the thing that when Steve Jobs and him were introduced to each other, that was one of the sentences that said, you guys will love each other because you're pranksters.

Because they did freaking, didn't they?

They did do freaking.

which is basically pranking.

Yeah.

So, just with the dial-a-joke thing, he was the first person to set that up in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So, he ran dialer joke in the place.

And then he eventually went to the phone calls.

When his wife called him, or his future wife, rather, his opening words were, I bet I can hang up faster than you, and hung up on her straight away.

That was her phone call.

She called back immediately, and then they started talking.

Hard to get.

Yeah, exactly.

Hard to get straight away.

It was like the opposite of you hang up, you hang up.

Yeah,

me hang up.

No, me.

Hello.

So was the Apple computer just a massive prank then?

The battery life certainly is.

Whoa.

Speaking of Apple computer, have you heard about the San Francisco Recycling Center that's had to put a big call out asking for the owner of an Apple computer?

Because this elderly woman, so I think 70-something-year-old woman, her husband had recently died and she got a bunch of stuff out of his attic and she handed it into the recycling center to sell on.

And it turned out that one of the things that she handed in was an Apple I computer, which is made by Steve Rozniak himself.

There are about 200 made.

I think there are about 60 left in the world.

It's worth $200,000, for which they've sold it.

And now they owe this woman as part of the You Give Things into the Recycling Center agreement.

They owe this woman $100,000 and they don't know where she is.

So Facebook and Google and loads of different internet companies have put out.

She's given away a computer.

Maybe have you put a sign-up somewhere?

Such a dick.

They don't want to give her the money.

While we've got a lot of people.

We've tried emailing her.

Yeah, we've written to her.

MySpace page.

But one of the reasons all the Apple I computers are so scarce is because when Apple II came out, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak gave all the Apple I owners incentives to give them back.

You know, they would give them money off the Apple II because Steve Wozniak was the customer support, and when anything went wrong, they wanted it back to find out what was going on wrong.

And then they destroyed them afterwards.

Just on robots, Just going back to robots very briefly.

Did you know that Samsung has a robot shaped like a bottom?

What?

And

it repeatedly sits on phones to test them.

Oh, it's the...

And it's got a pair of jeans on.

It's designed to test what happens when someone sits on their phone.

And you can see videos of it working.

It will be cheaper to hire someone to do that rather than spend millions developing an artificial art.

World phone is in progress.

It's so funny.

No, I haven't seen that.

That's amazing.

What I've seen is what I thought you were talking about was someone has, you know, how like in video games, if you're playing a car racing game, you can now obviously buy the wheel.

You could have years ago, or you buy a gun to shoot at the screen.

There's one which is for trainee doctors, which is for giving rectal exams.

And it's just a pair of butt cheeks that you're meant to put your hand inside to simulate.

And on the screen, you can see the patient's room and the patient's reaction.

That's really cool.

You know, I'm not showing up on your Amazon history

for work, I swear.

Yeah, I wonder if you have to show your medical ID before they actually sell it to you.

Yeah.

Just to prove.

I was looking into how certain people met.

What I wanted to look into was the kind of tech giants and see how, because that's Steve Wozniak, that's how he met his wife.

I suddenly thought Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs.

So Steve Jobs met his wife when she came to a talk that he was doing.

And at the talk, she was trying to get in but it was completely packed up so she started sitting in the aisles and then she got told she couldn't see there she saw that there was a row of empty seats in the front row so she thought let's just go sit there and they were obviously reserved so she um she went she sat down in these seats and then in comes steve jobs to sit in the seat to get ready to go up on stage so she sat right next to him and she said that she'd won a competition to go out on a date with him and he said oh really and um and they kind of just got chatting a bit more and at the end of the evening he was off to go to to a dinner and he thought, Do you know what?

I'd rather go to dinner with her.

So he went back and found her and said, How about that competition date?

And that's how they met.

And they ended up going out.

Yeah.

Did she ever come clean as to the whole look?

The competition thing was a ruse by the base team.

He immediately divorced her.

Yeah, this whole thing was

with Bill Gates.

This is how it happened.

Bill Gates was working with

this lady called Melinda, who became his wife.

And he basically, she was at Microsoft.

He eventually built the courage up to ask her out.

So he went up and he said, could we go out two weeks from this coming Saturday?

Not the most romantic of.

And she said, what?

So she said, like, just, you know, why don't you ask me closer to the day so it seems a bit more spontaneous.

But then that night, late that night, he called her and said, how about late tonight?

And she went, ah, no, that's.

No, that's too soon.

Just sort of say three days from now.

That's nice.

So, yeah, so, but then she did go out on the date and they got together.

Yeah, it's very nice.

Hence, Bill and Melinda Gates.

Exactly.

There you go.

We should wrap up very soon because we've been going on way too long.

Does anyone have anything before we wrap up?

No.

I've got one last thing, just very quickly.

Steve Wozniak is part of a sports team.

And he's part of the Silicon Valley Aftershocks.

Can you guys guess what that team is?

What sport he's playing?

So it sounds like an earthquake.

It It does sound like an earthquake, but it has no bearing on what the actual sport is.

Quidditch, then.

No, that would be a good thing.

Apple bobbing for apples.

Oh, that would be very cool.

But no, it's a Segway polo team.

So they played a lot of people.

Yeah, he's like Segway Mad, isn't he?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That's so Silicon Valley.

Yeah.

I thought by Segway Polo team, you just meant you had to subtly skip the conversation, get into the conversation that you wanted to play polo.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Alex.

At AlexBell underscore.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Anna.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep.

And you can also get us on at qi podcast.

Or you can go to no such thing as offish.com where you can find all of our previous episodes.

There's also a link to all of the live shows that we're doing.

So go check them out.

See if you want to come to any.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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Visit washablesofas.com to upgrade your home.

Right now, you can shop up to 60% off store-wide with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Shop now at washablesofas.com.

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