No Such Thing As The Have An Ice Cream Bird

Live from the Royal Institution, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss bird songs, big starfish, basic security and Bertha Suttner. Grey lourie bird media used with permission from @StoriesOfTheKruger | www.storiesofthekruger.com http://www.storiesofthekruger.com Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:11Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you live from the Royal Institution in London.

• 0:27Dan Schreiber?

  My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

• 0:44Speaker 01

  My fact this week is that the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize was Alfred Nobel's housekeeper.

• 0:52Speaker 02

  Oh, wow. A nepo prize.

• 0:55Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 0:57Speaker 03

  Was it kind of domestic peace that she was keeping or making?

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Exactly. She kept him chill. It wasn't, it was sort of a coincidence. This is this amazing woman called Bertha von Sutner. She won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905. She was the second female Nobel laureate after, of course...

• 1:16Dan Schreiber?

  Marie Curie?

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Yep. And, it's not that kind of show, is it?

• 1:22Dan Schreiber?

  I think it is. It is now.

• 1:23Speaker 01

  It is.

• 1:24Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  And bizarrely, before she won the Nobel Peace Prize, aged 30, she had become a governess. So she was a very posh Austrian woman with no money whatsoever. And so she needed to go out and make money. She became a governess to the von Sutner daughters. And that's quite a spoiler alert, because her surname is obviously the same as their surname. But she fell madly in love with the son, who was seven years younger than her. Scandalous. And so, and it was very inappropriate, and the family really disapproved. So she said, okay, I'll go away and I'll become a governess. And she ended up answering an ad from Alfred Nobel, who's looking for someone to fill his lonely life up and be his housekeeper. And so she went and became his housekeeper for one week.

• 2:09Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Because, actually, she wasn't married at that time. And she went to Nobel's house, and then the boyfriend wrote to her saying, "I can't be without you." And she wrote back saying, "I can't be without you." Presumably, that took about a week. Because after a week, she went back and then they got married in secret, didn't they?

• 2:28Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, I was hoping after the two-week period, she'd be like, "Oh, no, I've had two weeks now, and actually, I can, I can do without you."

• 2:33Speaker 03

  Wait, so this was a boy who she'd been governessing?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  No, she was governessing his sisters, because...

• 2:38Speaker 03

  Okay, but how old was he? Because I think that's an important bit of...

• 2:41Speaker 02

  They were both of age.

• 2:42Speaker 01

  He was 23.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:44Speaker 01

  And they had the most amazing relationship. I mean, it really is. I actually read her autobiography, which is available freely online. And they were proper soulmates, you know, madly in love. Parents said, "You can't do it." Within a week, they were both like, "I'm gonna die." He was saying, "I'm gonna commit suicide. I need you to be with me." And they married. And she always says in her autobiography, she went through a lot of stuff, "But throughout it all, I could never be really unhappy, because I always had him there by my side." So, you know, it wasn't like one of the, because you can imagine, everyone was really disapproving at the time. Everyone was like, "It'll never fucking last." Oh, what an idiot. And it did.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  Did you see how her family lost all their money? Because she was from quite a posh family, but they had no money. And that was one reason they couldn't get together, because there was a big social difference. Apparently, her mother and aunt both thought they were clairvoyant, and then went gambling and lost all their money?

• 3:35Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  They were like, "Okay, they're saying to put it all on black. They're saying to put..." Oh, not again.

• 3:41Dan Schreiber?

  And that's how they lost it. What a spirit gave them the wrong...

• 3:44Speaker 02

  It seems that way, yeah.

• 3:45Dan Schreiber?

  The wrong suggestion of, "All on red, all on red." Is that what you mean?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:50Dan Schreiber?

  That is insane. So basically, she, she stayed in contact with Nobel his entire life. But it, as, you know, jokingly said nepotism, it wasn't though, obviously, because the Nobel prizes didn't exist until after Nobel had died. So he never would have known that she would later go on.

• 4:07Speaker 03

  But what peace did she create that got her the prize?

• 4:09Speaker 01

  Well, she had a lot of chats with Nobel. And during the chat, she thought, "You've made a lot of people-killing things, dynamite, namely, and I think that's dangerous." And I think that sort of partly inspired her to go on. And she created two peace organisations, one in Germany, one in Austria, I think, which were, you know, promoting pacifism all over the place. She was instrumental in...

• 4:31Speaker 03

  And how did that work? How did that...

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Well...

• 4:34Speaker 03

  How'd it go?

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Happily for her, she died in June 1914.

• 4:38Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 4:40Speaker 02

  Oh, she sneaked that in, didn't she? Very clever.

• 4:44Dan Schreiber?

  She's gone! Let's go!

• 4:49Speaker 01

  She actually won it for a pacifist book, novel that she wrote, called Lay Down Your Arms, which was incredibly popular. She was instrumental in the founding of what's now the UN Court of Human Justice. So she's very influential. She was at the first Hague Convention, which we still have those today. She was, I think, the only woman present. But yeah, and then, but it didn't, she didn't create world peace in the 20th century, of course.

• 5:11Speaker 02

  But basically, Nobel started the prizes because of her, I think.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 5:15Speaker 02

  Because when she became his housekeeper, they got on really, really well for that one week. And I think Nobel really, really fancied her.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  I think he was in love with her, yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Because he'd invented a new rubber-wheeled coach, and he took her around the city in it.

• 5:31Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, wow.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  That's pretty cool, isn't it?

• 5:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Like inventing a new kind of transport. And then when, like you say, the prizes came after his will, but I think the suggestion is, he expected her to get the, probably the first peace prize.

• 5:44Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Actually, it took about five years before she got it.

• 5:46Dan Schreiber?

  Well, this is the part of the thing about Nobel's will, was that he just said in his will, "Right, I'm gonna leave lots and lots and lots of my money." And he had hundreds of patents. He'd invented dynamite. He'd invented all sorts of things. He just said, "The equivalent in modern-day money of about 200 million quid should go to the Nobel prizes to establish them." And that was chemistry, physics, medicine, and literature. Oh, and peace, of course. But he didn't give any indication of how this was to be administered or set up, and what institutions should award the prizes. His family were a bit surprised.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Do we not get any of it?

• 6:23Dan Schreiber?

  I think they got a bit, but they did not get the full whack. And it all fell to his secretary, 25-year-old Ragnar Solman, who had to fight for three years to get the will approved, signed off, start establishing the institutions. And he did a lot of work. He was, at one moment, he was taking Nobel's millions through the streets of Paris in a horse-drawn cab. And he had to sit on the, whatever it was, the bonds or whatever it was, in the horse-drawn cab, with a revolver, in case someone tried to do a heist of the Nobels, basically.

• 6:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:52Dan Schreiber?

  Very exciting.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Can I just give you one more fact about Bertha, quickly, which I think is sort of a gift to you, Andy, because this is right up your street. She, aged 11, her cousin Elvira came to live with her, and they became best friends. She absolutely loved her. And they spent all of their time playing puff. And you won't have heard of puff, because they invented this game. But it sounds so great. So the game starts, you decide a place for the action to take place, you decide what characters you're both going to be, you decide, like, descriptions of the characters, a bit of the plot, and then you say, "Puff." And at that point, you have to fall into character, and you continue acting as those characters for as long as it takes. Sometimes it would go on for days. One game of puff would go on for days. Bertha would always be a princess and heiress, usually called Bertha. And Elvira would always be a...

• 7:38Dan Schreiber?

  Right, sorry, what, and what...

• 7:41Speaker 02

  It's improv. It's improv.

• 7:43Dan Schreiber?

  I understand, sorry.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Isn't that the original improv game?

• 7:46Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, I just thought you found my princess wardrobe, and I was getting a bit...

• 7:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so like Nobel was like, he's a man of like, different side. There's a lot of different sides to him, wasn't there? Because he's done the peace prize, but he was also a massive arms dealer.

• 7:59Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, was it arms?

• 8:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, he really, he made his millions with arms dealing.

• 8:03Dan Schreiber?

  To get him off this charge a bit, he invented TNT, but it was mostly being used in industrial uses, or in mines and things like that. So it wasn't, he wasn't designing it too...

• 8:12Speaker 02

  And also, he came up with ways of making it safer. They would always put the factory on the hillside, so that the nitroglycerin would flow down, and they wouldn't need mechanical pumps to move it around, because it might explode.

• 8:24Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Well, that's one, you know. And his workers always had to sit on stools with one leg, so that they couldn't fall asleep while they were doing the work.

• 8:33Dan Schreiber?

  That's good. I love that, because, yeah, because they were looking at the reaction vats. They were in charge. So the idea was, if you fall asleep, there can be explosion. Because this is one of the things with his factories, they quite often blew up, like, more than once. I think like, three times. The first time was when they were doing it at home, and he lost his brother and five other people. But obviously, he was like, "But we're trying to make this safe, so there are gonna be mistakes." So as James says, there was...

• 8:56Speaker 01

  What a way to respond to killing your own brother.

• 8:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  Well, these things do happen, of course.

• 9:00Dan Schreiber?

  These things happen.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Mum.

• 9:01Dan Schreiber?

  These things happen. Were you sitting on a three-legged stool? That's your fault, mate. So he invented this stool, which is a wonderful idea. You fall asleep and you go off. That was like with Edison, when he used to sleep with some silver balls in his hand, because he thought the best ideas were on that little grey area between sleep and awake, where you would just have these thoughts. And he would fall asleep, drop the balls, and whatever thought he was having would be the killer thought, and he would write it down. That's what this was, except you'd blow up if you bucked up.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  He also was a poet and a playwright, Nobel.

• 9:34Dan Schreiber?

  Was he?

• 9:35Speaker 02

  He made only one published work. It was called Nemesis, and it's a four-act tragedy about incest and murder, which features a drug-induced vision of the Virgin Mary, a conversation with Satan, and ends with a 40-minute torture scene.

• 9:50Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 9:51Speaker 01

  And it's playing at the National Theatre next year. Get tickets now.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  Well, in fact, it has been put on once. It was put on once in 2005 in Stockholm. And the theatre director, Torens Rasmann, said, "He's not a very good playwright."

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:06Speaker 02

  So they put it on just because it was by him, but apparently it's even with all that amazing stuff that I just listed, it's not very good.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, it sounds pretty gross. Do you know, one of his main enemies, in fact, I think his main enemy, the main enemy of Nobel, was Abel?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  Isn't that cool?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Alexander Graham Bell?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Uh, no, just Abel, Frederick Abel.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  He was a British explosive expert who actually was a bit of a douchebag because he picked Nobel's brains about an explosive that he'd invented, this propellant called ballistite. And he said, "Oh, Nobel, tell me how you did it. Hmm, that's very interesting." And then he basically went and made the same thing, patented it, and then they ended up in these big court cases. And weirdly, Nobel protested and what's called a friendly suit was begun in the British courts, which I didn't know existed. And I don't think it has to be friendly at all because Nobel was really pissed off, but the suit, the lawsuit is a friendly suit.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  What, as in there's no consequence?

• 11:04Speaker 01

  I think it means basically there's no consequence. Exactly, we're just trying to find out the truth here. But they remained enemies for the rest of their lives, Nobel and Abel. And also bizarrely, there's no Nobel Prize in maths, but there is Abel Prize in maths.

• 11:17Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  Named after another guy called Abel.

• 11:20Speaker 02

  What are we saying about the world here?

• 11:23Speaker 01

  It's something huge.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Something huge, yeah. Do you know the best thing you win if you get a Nobel Prize?

• 11:28Dan Schreiber?

  A million dollars?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, you get a million dollars and you get to go to the big party in Stockholm or Oslo if you win the Peace Prize.

• 11:33Speaker 02

  And the medal.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  And the medal and the certificate and you know.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  Something else?

• 11:37Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Goody bag?

• 11:38Speaker 03

  You get free parking at the University of California, Berkeley. There are special Nobel laureate reserved parking spaces.

• 11:49Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, they, because they've got such a huge number of Nobel winners in there.

• 11:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:54Dan Schreiber?

  I read into that ages ago and what they don't tell the Nobel laureates is that it's not lifelong, so they, it lapses. You've got to renew it yourself.

• 12:04Speaker 01

  What?

• 12:04Dan Schreiber?

  So these Nobel laureates come by and they've got tickets and they're like, "I'm in the Nobel." And they're like, "Well, yeah, you were last year, but you're not anymore."

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Well, you don't have to win another Nobel Prize to renew your parking.

• 12:13Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's why Marie Curie got her second one. She was like, "I can't, can't lose this spot."

• 12:19Speaker 03

  I love the process of how you get the prize. And there was an interview about maybe a decade ago with the, the permanent secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, who at the time was a guy called Stefan Normark. And he said, because you know, you're just ringing, you're cold calling basically, to say that you've won a Nobel Prize in whatever, and you've won, what is it, about a million quid?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  So as in you get your phone and it says unknown number?

• 12:43Speaker 03

  Right.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  Then you answer it and they say, "Woody, woody, woody."

• 12:45Speaker 03

  Woody, woody, woody, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 03

  Well, it's basically that because he rang, he said, "We ring up." And if you get, you might get through to a front desk or something, or, or you know, like someone in, an assistant or whatever.

• 12:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  And he said, "We tell them, this is a very important call. A very important call." And then he pauses and he says, "From Stockholm." He's always been put through so far because he just makes very clear.

• 13:14Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Good.

• 13:15Speaker 03

  But if you're in the second week of October and the Swedish phone code comes up, that's what it is.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a really good scam, isn't it?

• 13:23Speaker 03

  It's such a good scam.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Like, we just.

• 13:24Speaker 03

  I know.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Just go to Stockholm.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  Ring up a load of like scientists.

• 13:29Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  And say, "Oh, we can't give you the prize."

• 13:32Speaker 03

  We just need the long, we just need the long number on the, on the back of the card.

• 13:36Speaker 02

  On the, on the certificate, we have to write your mother's maiden name and the name of your first pet.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  I think it works and you can, you can do it by days as well. So Tuesday, you ring the chemist, because that's when the Nobels ring the chemist. Wednesday is physics, economics the following Monday, because it's a bit of a, kind of a late add-on. And they don't, they never tell how they get your number. They never reveal. They probably just ask someone you know, but.

• 13:58Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, is that because no one's ever asked? "You've won a Nobel Prize, how the hell did you get my number?"

• 14:10Speaker 03

  All right, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is, the Sasquatch may not be real, but the Sea Squatch is.

• 14:22Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  This is a thing, it's called the Sunflower Sea Star, uh, starfish. It's an American, they call starfish sea stars, don't know why. Well, I don't know why, it's obvious, but anyway.

• 14:35Speaker 03

  Because it's not a fish, right? Yeah, it's not a fish, but it's shaped like, anyway, the point is, they're amazing, they're amazing things. They have up to 24 arms all around them. They, they can get up to three feet across. They're massive things and they're very fast moving as well. They can move about a meter a minute, which if you are a starfish, is quite fast.

• 14:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's not fast if you're most other things.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Okay, all right. And they used to be, you know, living in vast numbers off the coast of California. And then in 2013, there came a thing, which I think we've mentioned before, which was this, they got a disease, basically, sea star wasting disease. Literally six billion of these things died of the disease.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 15:12Speaker 03

  And it was just a real crunch. They live among the kelp forests off the coast, where you get these gigantic, like 100-foot high strands of kelp. And there was a problem with the kelp as well. There was a big heat wave underwater which wiped out the kelp forests. And then these urchins started growing, you know, sea urchins, which they just eat so much stuff that it's hard for the kelp to grow back.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the sea stars would normally eat the urchins, right?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  And then the urchins weren't being eaten, so that meant the urchins ate the kelp.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:39Speaker 02

  As bad news.

• 15:39Speaker 03

  So you get no kelp, loads of earth is a disaster.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  But good use for algae, because when there's no kelp there, the algae can grow.

• 15:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's not a zero-sum game, there's some winners.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  The algae do tend to win this quite a lot, this game.

• 15:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, they do.

• 15:50Speaker 03

  Algae, boo. Anyway, so the, the reason they're called the Sea Squatch is that scientists spent a long time looking for any survivors that might have, you know, somehow lived. And last year, for the very first time, they found a colony of wild survivors. Very exciting. And they've worked out the bacteria that killed them and they've set up a lab, the Sunflower Star Laboratory in California. They're raising babies, they're working out how to reintroduce them into the oceans. And I think they've got thousands, millions of sperm on ice, the Sunflower starfish sperm, hundreds of thousands of larvae. They've got a bloke called the Starfather, who's a guy called, he's just a guy called Vince, but he was the first to kind of get, it's not just a guy called Vince, he's an

• 16:32Speaker 03

  amazing scientist who works out, you know, how to restore these, because if you restore the starfish, you get the kelp forest back.

• 16:38Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 03

  Because they love chowing down on the urchins.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  I imagine Vince turns up at parties with a big sort of cape covered in starfish.

• 16:45Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. They work at a place called Moss Landing in California.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  How I found this whole fact out.

• 16:50Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, okay, that's what you were Googling, now we know, yeah. What I like is, so, once we thought that they were gone, any scientists that were looking for it were technically cryptozoologists. Now, usually you would say a cryptozoologist is someone looking for Yetis or Loch Ness Monster, but an out of place animal, something that is not said to be there anymore is the technical description. So the person who found it was Rachel Carm, and she's been looking for it for years and years and years, and she couldn't believe it when she saw it. She screamed and she immediately came back up to tell everyone that she had seen it, but she'd forgotten to take a photo, which is the number one rule of cryptozoology. Always forget to take the photo of the Yeti. So she played exactly into it. Now fortunately, she went back down and they were still there.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  She went back a minute later and it had moved a meter.

• 17:35Dan Schreiber?

  And she wears it gone.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  They were to find it, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 17:38Dan Schreiber?

  But yeah, they're extraordinary things.

• 17:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're not protected under the Endangered Species Act in America, strangely enough. They were supposed to have been, there was a federal deadline for that protection. Then, under the Trump administration, the deadline has passed and they've not put them under the Endangered Species Act. They're basically the Epstein files of the sea.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  I'm starting to go off the Trump administration. Many more stories like this.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  We're not trying to conserve all, all starfish, of course, slash sea stars. We're trying to kill some of them. We're trying to kill the Crown of Thorn starfish.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  Why's that?

• 18:14Speaker 01

  It's killing other things. Very harmful. It loves coral, it eats coral, and we love coral more than we love Crown of Thorn starfish. So in a French Polynesian island a few years ago, I think 2008, 80% of the reef was live coral before they arrived, 3.4% afterwards. And so we've built robots to get rid of them. And they've been trained to identify them by looking at lots of pictures online, by scouring the internet. And it's really hard to kill them because, not much kills them, and they discovered that cow bile kills starfish. I don't know how many things they went through before they got to bile from a cow's stomach.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  But now, they basically have to give these robots called Cotsbot and Rangerbot, this bile from the stomachs of cows, send it down to the bottom of the ocean, injects the Crown of Thorn starfish, and abracadabra, the corals are back.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Apparently they have, after AI learning that they've done, they have an accuracy rate now of 99%, where 99% of the time, they correctly inject a Crown of Thorn starfish. And what are you going to ask, Andy?

• 19:20Speaker 03

  And the other 1% of the time?

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Well, presumably it's just somebody who's going swimming and gets cow bile injected into them.

• 19:28Speaker 01

  Don't wear your hedgehog diving outfit.

• 19:31Speaker 03

  But those things, so they are tricky Crown of Thorns, because also you can, if you're a fisherman trying to get rid of one, you cut a limb off. Unfortunately, it can then grow a whole new Crown of Thorn starfish from the limb that you've just cut off.

• 19:41Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, that's amazing.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  I know, but the thing that could be done to get rid of them, this is very exciting, because that is, the robots are great, but they're quite labour intensive, you know, you need to send it back and forth and back and forth and all of that, and you need, I guess, fresh cow bile all the time.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  So one idea is to release artificial pheromones that we've made for them, to lure them all to the same place, basically saying, "Crown of Thorns orgy here tonight."

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  And then you'll be able to wipe them all out in one go.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  Doesn't seem very fair, does it?

• 20:09Speaker 01

  No.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  What, is it because of the orgy thing?

• 20:12Speaker 02

  Well, I'm just saying, if you got a letter through the post saying orgy tonight in this, you know, community centre, and you went there and you got injected by bile and you died, that's, it's a double disappointment, is what I was saying.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  If someone said to you, "I'm going to kill you, do you want me to kill you just at random one day, or do you want to have a massive sex party and die in the middle of that?"

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  What are you going to go for?

• 20:33Speaker 02

  Do they get to do some before they get?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  No, you're just, you're just being, you're just being leered to the place.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Oh, they don't provide lovely females wearing bikinis?

• 20:42Speaker 03

  No, it's a big sign saying orgy, that's all it is.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  Oh, wow, no, that's, that's me. I think that is not playing fair.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  If I got a letter like that through the post, I'd just clarify, I'd shred it.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  After copying down the address.

• 20:54Speaker 03

  Well, in case I needed to report it later on for a noise violation, yes.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  We said it's labour intensive, it used to be done by hand, getting rid of these.

• 21:05Speaker 03

  What, sorry, I'm still on.

• 21:07Speaker 02

  No.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  I think in many places it still is done by hand.

• 21:12Dan Schreiber?

  What?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  So killing Crown of Thorns starfish. Um, the robot is quite labour intensive. Um, but in Okinawa, about 40 years ago, a load of them were collected and killed, but it was all done by hand. And it was all specialist divers who had to go down with specialist tools and really thick gloves. And they got rid of 1.5 million of them.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  What?

• 21:36Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Isn't that amazing?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  No, they work harder than I do.

• 21:39Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 21:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:40Speaker 03

  That's incredible.

• 21:41Dan Schreiber?

  We were talking about starfish and then we were talking about cryptids. Um, and we're talking about Japan. Well, Japan has a cryptid that they are trying to find currently. So much like this one, uh, which is called the Kappa. You guys heard of the Kappa?

• 21:55Speaker 03

  No.

• 21:55Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, Kappa, very interesting. Uh, it's roughly the size of a 10 year old boy. Um, yellow, green in colour. Uh, it has on the top of its head, a hollow indentation which water gets to sit in. So when it goes out of water, it uses that water to keep its magic powers. But if it leans forward, the water will drip out and it loses all its supernatural powers.

• 22:18Speaker 02

  When you say people are trying to find this, is it scientists?

• 22:23Dan Schreiber?

  Are cryptozoologists scientists?

• 22:25Speaker 02

  No, they're not.

• 22:27Dan Schreiber?

  Then no.

• 22:29Speaker 03

  What are its powers?

• 22:30Dan Schreiber?

  Um.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  Its magical powers you mentioned?

• 22:32Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I'm not quite sure. It likes eating cucumbers. Um.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  I like eating cucumbers, Dan, but if forced to list my powers at gunpoint, I wouldn't include it.

• 22:42Dan Schreiber?

  It's, it's, it's a, it's a.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Hobby of best.

• 22:45Dan Schreiber?

  It's a kind of demon. It's, uh, and, and what you have to do is trick it into bowing because if it bows, it loses its water and you can get away from it. Cause what it's trying to do, and actually this is an old friend of the podcast, it's trying to steal your soul, which is a little ball hidden up your anus.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  According to people who also believe in this.

• 23:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I feel like.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  No, it's all holding together so far.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  Dan, this room has seen so much science over the years.

• 23:10Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 23:10Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 23:12Dan Schreiber?

  It's time to humble it.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  We're a bit like starfish.

• 23:17Dan Schreiber?

  Are we?

• 23:17Speaker 02

  A bit like starfish babies especially because we are both Deuterostomes, which means when we are first formed, the little embryos and stuff, it's the anus that is formed first and then we turn into a tube. It turns the anus, then into the mouth, and then everything else. And starfish are also Deuterostomes, which means that they are one of our closest invertebrate relatives.

• 23:43Dan Schreiber?

  But one of our closest invertebrate relatives.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Huge caveat, isn't it?

• 23:46Dan Schreiber?

  They're off, they're off the Christmas card list. It's like, I'm gonna do all my vertebrate relatives first.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  But what's really interesting about that is we can see them grow because they're transparent, these baby starfish. And so you can see the little tube growing and then the tube branches out and turns into their organs. And that's how it works with us as well. And so we can see how it works with the baby starfish and then maybe infer that with humans it'll be kind of similar.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 24:16Dan Schreiber?

  So cool.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  It can't be that similar because we don't turn into stars at some crucial point in our adolescence, do we?

• 24:22Speaker 02

  It's true, but like the, the babies are, they have bilateral symmetry like us.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  You know, they have two arms, two legs kind of thing. And it's only when they sort of get, like you say, to kind of childhood, they sink down, they stick to the ground and then they sprout all these extra arms.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  That would be freaky if your kid did that.

• 24:39Dan Schreiber?

  That's so cool.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  They are, they are kind of magical. There's one which, there's one which, um, some starfish can see with their skeletons.

• 24:48Dan Schreiber?

  Whoa.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  This is very weird. So they have, it, it's been observed that certain starfish have light guiding structures inside their skeletons, right? At the, uh, uh, in each of their limbs. And it concentrates these tubes, they concentrate the light towards a tiny internal cavity. And we don't really know what they do with it yet, but they are guiding the light all towards a particular bit of themselves.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  So it seems like they might have some kind of internal.

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Laser.

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Laser.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Cool.

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some kind of internal light sensing thing that they're able to use for survival.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  That's cool.

• 25:24Speaker 02

  That's very good.

• 25:25Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. They, they've also, since we're in this room, they've also won a Nobel Prize.

• 25:30Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 25:31Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 25:31Dan Schreiber?

  Starfish?

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, they won the 1908 Nobel Prize.

• 25:35Dan Schreiber?

  Literature or?

• 25:37Speaker 01

  No, this was, uh, well, it was actually a Russian zoologist, Ilya Mechnikov, but he did it with the help of starfish. It was in 1881 that he did this experiment, but he won the prize for it in 1908. Nobel Prize for Medicine, I'm going to assume. And basically he's at home with his family. His family all want to go to the circus to watch some performing apes. He doesn't want to do that. I don't know if it was on animal rights grounds, but he said, I'm staying at home to watch these starfish under my microscope. He stayed at home and while at home, he thought, I wonder what will happen to their larvae if I poke them with a thorn. And so he went outside. You know what? He should have gone to the circus. That's what he's thinking at this point. But he goes outside, he breaks a thorn off a rose in his garden.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  He comes back, he covers the thorn in indigo dye and he pokes the starfish larvae with it. And he saw under his microscope, all of these cells swarm towards that bit of thorn and all that dye and engulf it and destroy it. And that was the foundation of immunology. That was the first time we learned about the immune system and immune response. So well done, starfish.

• 26:42Dan Schreiber?

  Well done, starfish.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  That's brilliant.

• 26:44Dan Schreiber?

  Um, I'm gonna have to move us on, guys, to our next fact. Um, they're good at sumo wrestling as well, by the way.

• 26:49Speaker 02

  Starfish?

• 26:50Dan Schreiber?

  No, the Japanese folklore thing. Um, so, yeah, so when it comes out of the water, it will challenge you to a sumo match.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  And I was thinking what we should do with that guy is we should bring him up from Sweden in October. Tell him he's won a Nobel Prize. Then when he comes all the way over to Sweden and you get the medal, he bows down to put it on. Water falls out, bish bash bosch.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Really good.

• 27:14Dan Schreiber?

  That's why he's the brains on this show.

• 27:21Dan Schreiber?

  It is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in the 1980s, the way to stop hackers from breaking into your computer was to lock it with a physical key. Now, this.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  You know what? You sent that fact over and I was like, wow, that's really amazing. And then I saw this picture and I reckon my computer had one of those when I was growing up, right?

• 27:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, exactly. I have a memory of it as well. So this was from about 1984 to the early 90s and like 94, so a good 10 year period. IBM were the leaders in this. Um, the idea was is that early computers just didn't have any good security. And if you had an office computer or you had one at home that you didn't want anyone going into, you had no way of protecting it. So the key was literally to lock it in two senses. One, you could lock the keyboard from functioning altogether. The second one is to lock the casing itself, because these computers back in the 80s and 90s were really easy to unscrew from the back and so on. So this was literally, you had a physical key to lock hackers out of your computer. Companies, including IBM, started inventing exterior locks, like the ones you almost

• 28:32Dan Schreiber?

  get where you put them outside your house to leave, you know, if you're doing an Airbnb, often a key.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:37Dan Schreiber?

  You would attach that to the side of your computer.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  To keep your keys in?

• 28:41Dan Schreiber?

  No, you would put it over the on off switch. So it was, it was a barrier to someone getting to that switch.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  So they couldn't turn it on?

• 28:49Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, they couldn't turn it on.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  People should have just locked their houses.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:53Dan Schreiber?

  That's, that's a good idea.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Ah, it was the 80s, it was a different time.

• 28:56Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:57Dan Schreiber?

  There were so many inventions. It's so weird. There were certain PCs where there was a thin, it looked like a USB port, but what, what came with the computer was a giant long metal rod that you would stick in through the entire computer and then you would padlock it on the other side. So it was all about physical locking of your computer.

• 29:16Speaker 03

  That's the, the Kensington lock or the K-hole, because there's a little hole and then a, and it's got a, and it's got a K next to it. It's a K and a hole. And so, and you just slide in this massive Kensington lock. That's very useful.

• 29:27Speaker 01

  Seriously weird if you went to Cafe Nero now, whipped out your laptop and then got out your huge rod.

• 29:31Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  They thought it was a golf bag.

• 29:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. But they got, they got the locks made by this company called Chicago Lock. And the locks, they're quite cylindrical and they're thick and it's quite hard to describe, but not a classic key. And so the issue was you can't get much nuance on that key. So it kind of turned out that if you owned one of these keys, not only could you get into the computer you're breaking into, but every other product basically fits in the same key. So in fact, what they created was a master key to break into every computer out there.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Does anyone want to celebrate World Password Day?

• 30:03Speaker 01

  I'm not gonna tell you.

• 30:04Dan Schreiber?

  Not even, do they not? We heard a boo. I don't know if you heard that.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  Wow. That is advanced stuff because yeah, it's a very controversial holiday. It's first Thursday in May. I don't need to tell you. Um, but it's become controversial in recent years because it's become so clear that passwords are rubbish, you know? The average person now, I think, has something like 255 passwords.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  Really?

• 30:27Speaker 03

  Between work and personal stuff. I mean, it's horrendous. You know, you have so many passwords, so you simplify the password that you end up using for most things or you, you know, which is a big no-no, you use the same password for everything and the password gets simpler and you, you know, you're not changing it every 90 days like they say you're meant to, because no one has ever, ever, ever done that. So there's a theory that this might be, this year might have seen one of the last ever World Password Days, which would be very sad, you know, because we won't get the day off work if it doesn't happen anymore.

• 30:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're basically, I think pretty much everyone says you should not be changing your passwords that frequently.

• 31:00Dan Schreiber?

  No, because then you simplify them.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 31:02Dan Schreiber?

  Then you just make it sausage instead of sausage 123, which is a much better password.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Sausage 123 exclamation mark.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Oh, and then the computer gives you a little bit of approval. That's a strong password.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  Is it? Is it really?

• 31:15Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, I fucking hate that Strongometer. As you're adding another exclamation mark.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Woo! Oh, wow, you've really, you've really buffed up the security, sir. Have I?

• 31:24Dan Schreiber?

  They'll never suspect. A further exclamation mark.

• 31:29Speaker 03

  So, this is, okay, so there was a study a few, like, this was many years ago, 2010, so much earlier in internet history, you know, even though, 16 years ago, so computers have come in a lot since then, 32 million passwords were leaked from one particular website, right? Okay. But that was a treasure trove of data to analyse, as well as a big security breach, because you could see what the most popular passwords were. Have a guess as the most common?

• 31:51Speaker 02

  Password.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  Password. Uh, that was in, that was in fourth.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  123456.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Correct. Alright. Second place?

• 31:59Speaker 02

  12345?

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  I'm giving a lot away about my own security.

• 32:04Speaker 03

  123456789 was third, password was fourth, then the name of the site came in seventh, you know, the actual name of the site, whatever it was called. Um, so, right, now, obviously, that was 2010, things have moved on a lot. December last year, what was the most common password?

• 32:19Speaker 01

  Password.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  It was admin.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Ah. And then, second most popular, 123456. Wow. Disaster.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Admin.

• 32:30Speaker 03

  Admin.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  I don't know anyone who's got that, and I always ask people what their password is before I get started. Wow.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Admin, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  The first antivirus, maybe?

• 32:40Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Um, so that was invented by a guy called Ray Tomlinson, uh, and there was a, a friend of his called Bob Thomas, had invented something called Creeper, uh, which was a programme that went through the early internet, it was called the ARPANET, and it was like, uh, a load of computers, sort of, in a network, but Creeper went from one computer to another, and it said, "I'm the creeper, catch me if you can." And then Ray Tomlinson, uh, made another programme, which would go around, called The Reaper, and it would be able to get rid of this, uh, thing. And they didn't really care about it, they were doing loads of other stuff, but this was the first example of a programme going from one computer to the other. And Ray Tomlinson, he also did another thing, he invented the at sign for emails.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  Without him, there wouldn't be an at sign. Uh, so, he basically did the first email that you could do between different computers. Previously, if you wanted to send an email to someone, they'd have to come onto your computer and read what you'd written before, uh, but he did the at sign, uh, when he...

• 33:37Speaker 03

  That's not a good email system, is it?

• 33:39Speaker 02

  It's basically passing a computer...

• 33:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Uh, but when he was working on that, uh, email, he showed it to a colleague and said, "Don't tell anyone, this isn't what we're supposed to be working on." Just kind of emails what they became, isn't it, really?

• 33:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Uh, but then, these things were called worms that would go from one computer to another, uh, and one famous one was a programme called Worms Against Nuclear Killers, uh, which went on...

• 34:06Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  Some acronym fans in the audience. Uh, Worms Against Nuclear Killers, which went into NASA computers. Oh, Dan's got it!

• 34:15Speaker 03

  A delayed explosion, yeah. That took ages, but I got there.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Well, we've said before on this podcast that that word is not rude in America, so in America, they perhaps didn't know that it was something rude. They went into NASA computers, and it would go onto your screen, and it would say things like, "Vote anarchist," or "The FBI is watching you," and it was like, um, pacifists who were sending it around. And as a result of this Worms Against Nuclear Killers programme, NASA had to make a anti-wank procedure, which it gave to all of its employees. And they, all it meant was, they put a little programme on their computer which stopped the worm from going from one computer to the other.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Right. Just a picture of your grandmother, or something like that.

• 35:06Speaker 02

  Too far, Dan. Too far. I've got one more thing on acronyms, actually. Do you know, um, SQL or SQL? You'll have heard of it, right?

• 35:16Speaker 03

  Seen of it, yeah.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a database programming language. So, there is another programme called MySQL or MySQL, uh, which is an open source database management system, so you can use it yourself because it's open source, so anyone can use it. Uh, do you know why MySQL got its name?

• 35:34Speaker 03

  No.

• 35:35Speaker 01

  It's a sequel for you.

• 35:37Speaker 02

  Well, would you believe that the "my" is the name of the daughter of the co-founder Michael Windenius?

• 35:43Speaker 03

  Yes! Into the book it goes! First chapter, stunning.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  Isn't that good?

• 35:52Speaker 03

  No, really, why?

• 35:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Wonderful.

• 35:55Speaker 01

  Unbelievable, you're encouraging it.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  That's so funny.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Unbelievable.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  I do have one good, uh, one example of a good thing about AI. AI has a very bad reputation for all sorts of reasons, uh, but there was a recent story of AI actually coming through and delivering the goods on something, and it's password-related, computer security-related. In 2015, uh, there was a guy in America, he was at a Starbucks, he bought five Bitcoin on his phone for about, I think it was a hundred dollars each, um, then he, uh, he got stoned, and he forgot his password to the wallet which he'd just created. Oh, yeah. In fact, he had, he had three passwords to this thing, two of them he could remember, the third one he couldn't, and he, all he could remember for the third one was the mnemonic phrase. He couldn't remember the actual password, he remembered the mnemonic. Okay. Does that make sense?

• 36:41Speaker 01

  Do you know what the mnemonic is, though?

• 36:42Speaker 03

  No.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 36:44Speaker 03

  He u, he did eventually use, all he had was the phrase, he used an AI tool to say, "Can you help me figure out the password based on the phrase?", and the AI did, and he managed to get in, and I think it was several hundred thousand, something like four hundred thousand dollars that he was able to get, and the password that he had failed to get was lol420fthepolice exclamation mark asterisk smiley face. Smiley? He can get it. He tried brute forcing three and a half trillion password strings, and that hadn't come up with it. Wow.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  What did he do, just miss off the last smiley face when he was trying?

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. The insane password. That's a good password.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Really good, after sausage, you should go with that.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  It is strong, yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 01

  The big news story this week, but it will have been forgotten by the time this goes out, because AI will have moved on about a billion light years, has been insane, and I, I spent a long time getting to grips with it, so I think everyone needs to get to grips with it, it's so exciting. So, it was that OpenAI, obviously the, one of the biggest AI companies, was just doing an in-house test of its model to see how good it was at hacking, and the way it does is it puts its model in a sandbox, which means it just locks it in a virtual room, which it can't get out of, it's not connected to the internet, got no way of connecting to the internet, it's got no way of really connecting to any other computers, and it just says, "I'm gonna give you a hacking test now, AI model, do it." And what this AI model did was, it not only hacked its way out of this room, out of this

• 38:10Speaker 01

  sandbox, so it managed to link up to a bunch of other computers on the network it wasn't meant to connect to, um, it found one that connected to the internet, it got onto the internet, and it found a website called Hugging Face, which is basically, uh, a startup where people collaborate on AI, and it thought, "I bet this Hugging Face website is where they've put the answers to the test they're setting me." And it went, and it stole the answers to the test that the OpenAI was setting it, and it went back, and it passed the test, and Hugging Face said, "Oh my god, someone's hacked our software, what the hell's happened?", and OpenAI said, "Yeah, it was us, but we've got no control over that." And they're both having a lovely love-in now, saying, "Oh, they're being so helpful and nice, that we've got no control over this AI now."

• 38:50Speaker 01

  So, it's literally like, if I did an escape room, it's if I broke out of the building that had the escape room in it, found the person who designed the escape room, broke into their house, woke them up in night, and asked them, "How do I get out of the escape room?", that's what it did.

• 39:07Speaker 03

  Wait, how did you get out of the escape room to begin with?

• 39:10Speaker 01

  We don't know! That is what is so terrifying.

• 39:14Speaker 03

  That's the problem. Holy shit. Yeah.

• 39:17Speaker 01

  It's so incredible, but very cool, if you're on their side.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is James.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that the grey lowery bird attracts mates by shouting, "Go away!" Um, so, I was reading a substack called Bird History, uh, and this was an article on there called "The 100 Greatest Bird Names of All Time," and I was drawn to number 19 because it was the bare-faced "go away" bird, and I wondered, "How did it get that name?", and it turns out that it gets a name for its call, like a lot of birds do, they get the name from what they sound like in English, and like most birds, the call is partly to get rid of people, so it is actually a "go away," but it is also partly to attract mates, so effectively, it's trying to get female by saying, "Go away, go away." And I think, Ethan, can we hear the, the sound to see if you can?

• 40:21Speaker 03

  That's amazing.

• 40:25Speaker 02

  Yeah? You buy that?

• 40:26Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Go away!

• 40:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  That's what I heard, but I think if you told me it said have an ice cream, I also would have heard that.

• 40:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I see that, yeah. But the amazing thing about the go away birds is not only does it scare away sort of other birds, or attract other birds, other bird species and mammals seem to react to it. So when small mammals will hear that go away, they will go away. And so a lot of hunters and photographers have been going to try and find animals, and then this bird will start going, "Go away, go away", and then they'd lose the thing they're trying to photograph.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  What?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  So is that to create some privacy for the mate that it wants to shag?

• 41:10Speaker 02

  We're not really sure why it happens, but there is a thing about like a lot of animals, the calls have very similar, there's certain similarities between them. So like a baby crying is quite similar to some kind of bird songs, which is quite similar to certain other things. And all animals seem to react in similar way to certain noises.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  This, okay, I really like this theory because there's a related thing. Is the bird saying "go away" in human language, or do we speak bird? Right? So, please, please. This is science, so let's just... So do we call crows crows because they crow? Yes. Cuckoo's the same thing, they say cuckoo, we say call them the cuckoo.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  They have taught us their name.

• 41:53Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  We have not named them, they have, they...

• 41:55Speaker 02

  I just think it's a case of like, the word in English, the word in cuckoo is the same, right?

• 41:59Speaker 03

  But they had it first. Like, we partially speak bird. You know, you say, "Oh, there are X words in English from Thai", we had a few weeks ago, but how many words in English are from bird?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:10Speaker 03

  Loads, loads, and different languages have different versions of it, of course.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Wow, that's a thinker, isn't it? I just think...

• 42:18Speaker 03

  Is it beyond...

• 42:19Speaker 02

  I thought so.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  I like it, I'm in, I'm in. Is it beyond birds? Do we have any other animals that we have named? What else? What have we got?

• 42:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:28Speaker 02

  Well, I'm sure there are some.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  You know, like an elephant, when it poops out of its trunk, it goes, "Elephant!"

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  The ancient Egyptian for cat was meow.

• 42:39Speaker 01

  Aye, nice.

• 42:40Speaker 03

  So we speak Egyptian cat, that's cool.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  And I think maybe in some other languages, it's meow as well.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  You don't speak much, though, do you? It's one of those awkward like, "Bonjour", and they go, "Blah, blah, blah, blah", "I'm so sorry, I only know cuckoo."

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I've got holiday cuckoo, but nothing more than that.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  There are quite a lot of birds that speak other bird. So like the superb fairy wren and the hume's leaf warbler have some words that are the same in both language. Scientists have found this kind of little alarm call, it's a little bit of a whiny alarm call, and there are 20 species of bird that make it, and they all make it when there's a cuckoo around.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Yes!

• 43:22Speaker 02

  So they all know the same word for cuckoo, which is...

• 43:26Speaker 03

  But it's not cuckoo.

• 43:27Speaker 02

  No, it's not cuckoo.

• 43:28Speaker 03

  They don't speak cuckoo, but they have the same word for cuckoo.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Well, they have to kind of do it on the slice, or the cuckoo doesn't understand it.

• 43:34Speaker 03

  If you say the cuckoo, the cuckoo will come over here, and that's the whole thing you're trying to avoid. Yeah, yeah. I read about them, they all live in areas where there are lots of brood parasites, they call them, which are cuckoo-style birds. So it's basically like NATO for birds. And they can get involved, and they all sort of get involved, and they do mobbing and all of that. There is a thing about bird communication. Have you heard of the Collar Do Little Prize? This is a real prize.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 43:58Speaker 03

  It's very cool. So it's, I think it's an annual award, maybe, and there's $100,000 up for grabs for decoding a little bit of how birds communicate.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 44:07Speaker 03

  So it's set up by a British billionaire and vegan activist called Jeremy Coller, who just, this is his special interest, and he's established this prize. There is a grand prize, if you crack the whole thing of bird communication, you get $10 million. So this is worth doing, and...

• 44:23Dan Schreiber?

  That doesn't seem enough to sort of cross the species barrier of language.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Do you not think so? Well, there's...

• 44:28Speaker 02

  Andy, if you got in there and going, "I know the word for cuckoo",

• 44:32Speaker 02

  do I maybe get 10 grand for that?

• 44:35Speaker 03

  I'll get a coffee and a handshake, yeah, yeah. But he says, he thinks it's inevitable that we'll soon be able to communicate back and forth with animals, because different bits of it are being cracked. So this year's prize went to Dr. Judy Ely, because she worked out the 11 main zebra finch calls. So she's, she's got that nailed.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Wait, and what does she get? She doesn't get the full 10 mil for that?

• 44:54Speaker 03

  No, she gets 100 grand, 100,000 dollars.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  But it's bit by bit.

• 44:58Dan Schreiber?

  Very cool.

• 44:58Speaker 03

  This list that you mentioned, the 100 greatest bird names, was it by this guy, Robert Francis, bird writer? So he's got this substack, Bird History, as James says, and for, as preparation for it, he read all 11,000 bird names.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Why, hero?

• 45:14Speaker 03

  And he said it was just a nightmare job to pick 100. And he had 100, and then he had a supplementary list of bonus ones beneath it, which were just too good to leave out. But I thought maybe a few of just, a few of his picks. So you've got the middle American leaf tosser, the handsome fruit eater. Very nice.

• 45:32Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  The banana antbird, lot going on there. The oleagenous hemispingus.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  It's an incantation.

• 45:41Dan Schreiber?

  Andy, did you find the predicted ant wren? That's my favourite. There was a man who was studying birds out in an area, who went, "I bet this bird exists", and it did, as predicted, hence its name. So it was either...

• 45:54Speaker 03

  He sort of noticed the ecological niche, right?

• 45:57Dan Schreiber?

  There was a niche, so there's two stories. One that is, there's a niche, so he thought the ant wren must exist here. Or the other one was that he heard the call, and he spent years trying to identify it, and he predicted that it would be an ant wren. So that's how it has its name, the predicted ant wren, yeah.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  That's very cool. There are a few that sound a little bit rude on there. The mouse-coloured penduline tit, that's named because the tits make pendulous hanging nests. The hoary puff leg. And Mrs. Marose warbler, which definitely feels like a euphemism for something, I think.

• 46:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Can I ask, are these, all these humorous bird names, are they hyphenated or are they not hyphenated?

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Not many, I don't think any of them are hyphenated.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Hmm, okay, because that's a very controversial issue in bird naming, of course. So if they were hyphenated, I'd have to storm out.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  I think the, I'm so sorry, Anna, I mean, you might stand up now. The fluffy-backed tit babbling is doubly hyphenated.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  That is bullshit.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Why?

• 46:52Speaker 02

  The mouse-coloured penduline tit.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Oh my god, right.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  Why, why?

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Well, the International Ornithological Congress is going mad, because it has ruled that past enthusiasms for hyphens was excessive and unnecessary, and no bird name should be hyphenated.

• 47:05Speaker 02

  How would you spell mouse-coloured, though? Mouse-coloured has a hyphen in it.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Sorry, it's mouse-based coloured. For no particular reason, except that as far as I can tell, the South American Classification Committee aggressively is pro-hyphen, and they seem to have beef with each other, and they've published various articles and papers about why there should or should not be a hyphen. The latest one was the 3,000-word pro-hyphen rebuttal of the anti-hyphen IOC's ruling, which was titled "Hyphenated Bird Names: A Response to the American Ornithologists Union's Rejection of the IOC Congress Guidelines". So be very careful who you're with when you're writing down certain bird names.

• 47:45Dan Schreiber?

  I'm really into the African grey parrots. I think they give the best stories.

• 47:49Speaker 03

  The talking ones?

• 47:50Dan Schreiber?

  They're talking parrots, and they can, they can mimic so many. I believe that the lead singer of the metal band Hatebeak, who's called Waldo, is an African grey parrot.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 48:00Dan Schreiber?

  Do we all know this, the metal band that has a parrot as its lead singer? They've got multiple albums, they've got Bird Seeds of Vengeance, The Things That Should Not Beak, Roost in Peace. It's death metal with a bird just going "Wahhh" over the top of it. But then I read another amazing story about a Californian-based African grey parrot that was called Nigel. And Nigel went missing for four years, but Nigel was microchipped, so eventually he was handed in. And when he came back, he no longer spoke with a British accent when he said words, he spoke Spanish, and he could hum the opening lines of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  No!

• 48:38Dan Schreiber?

  That's amazing, they can just suddenly change language.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Spanish-speaking Nigel, that's the rare thing about that.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  Do you want to hear some different bird songs?

• 48:49Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  I've got a book by a guy called John Beavis, which is all the different sounds that all the different birds make, and then they're written in sort of English, so you can read them. So if something's shouting "Frank", then that's probably a great blue heron. If they're shouting "Peter", it's an olive warbler. And if they're shouting "Rick", it's a snowy owl. If they're shouting "Git", it's a warbling virio.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  Sure is, James, I can't stop that.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  If they're shouting "Poo poo", it's a least-bitten, and if it's a "wee wee", it's a Clark's grebe. And "wink, wink, wink, wink", is a black-billed magpie.

• 49:29Dan Schreiber?

  Nice.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  There you go.

• 49:30Dan Schreiber?

  That's very good.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  If you hear a bird and it goes "oink", then that is a Virginia rail.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Or old MacDonald has been up to his experiments again.

• 49:41Speaker 02

  If it goes "pew, pew, pew", it's a tufted tit mouse. And if it goes "whaka, whaka", it's a Virginia rail or Shakira.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  Or fuzzy bear, I suppose.

• 50:00Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you want to get in contact with us, we're all online on Instagram, and you can find us there, or you can email [email protected]. Do that, because Andy gets all the emails, and he picks out the best for our Little Fish show, as well as drop us a line. But otherwise, we will be back again next week with another show. We'll see you then.

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Now, go away!