Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As Billions Of Checkers Boards About this episode Daniel Sloss joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss Lord of the Rings, North of the Border, and the Father of Electricity.
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0:28 Speaker 01 Hello, I'm Chris Richards, general manager at Safford Volkswagen Richmond. I'm here to announce an exciting new program that I want you to listen to. Here's my friend, Happy.
0:37 Speaker 02 Hi, I'm Happy Harry Turner, special finance manager at SaffordCredit.com. If you're in an open Chapter 13 bankruptcy, recently filed a Chapter 7, or you've been turned down because of credit challenges, don't give up. For nearly 30 years, I've helped people get reliable transportation when others said no. Visit SaffordCredit.com. Remember, I'm not happy unless you are.
0:59 Speaker 03 Happy, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things A Fish, where we were joined by the brilliant Daniel Sloss. Now, anyone who's really into their comedy will definitely know Daniel. He is a Scottish comedian, but he basically tours all the way around the world and really is one of the biggest stand-up names in the entire world right now. We were absolutely thrilled that he came on the show and we had such a great time and really hope you enjoy this show, which I'm certain you will. He has a little bit of a hidden inner geek to him, which I know you'll definitely enjoy. But if you want to know more about him, then the best thing to do is to go to danielsloss.com. That's D-A-N-I-E-L-S-L-O-S-S. And if you go to that website, you will see that he
1:43 Speaker 03 is about to go on tour. And basically, it would be easier for me to say the places where he's not going to be, because he's going to be all over the UK. He'll be in New Zealand, in Australia, in America, in Europe, all sorts of places all over the world. And at the end of the year, on November the 28th, he is coming back to London and doing the Wembley Arena. Oh, my gosh, I have just been there to a gig. That is a big, big Venue, but I'm sure he will do it justice because he is a brilliant, brilliant comedian, which you're about to find out on this show. So really hope you enjoy it. Quick reminder, do go to patreon.com if you'd like to learn more about Club Fish, which is where you can get loads and loads of extras from us. I won't go into it again. Listen to old episodes.
2:28 Speaker 03 We talk about it every week, but no, there is some really cool stuff on there. So do go to patreon.com/clubfish if you fancy that. But if not, then please enjoy this week's show with the amazing Daniel Sloss. On with the fun.
2:59 Speaker 04 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing Is A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Daniel Sloss. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Dan.
3:23 Speaker 05 The first known written reference about Scotland comes from Rome and it said, "Don't go there. It's awful."
3:33 Speaker 05 And even if you were to turn over a bunch of evidence right now that says that this statement is not true, it is still true.
3:43 Speaker 05 It's too plausible to not.
3:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, right.
3:45 Speaker 05 To not be the case.
3:46 Speaker 03 The thing is though, compared to Rome's really nice.
3:49 Speaker 05 Yes.
3:49 Speaker 03 Isn't it?
3:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah.
3:50 Speaker 03 Sunny.
3:51 Speaker 04 Yeah.
3:52 Speaker 03 I mean, sometimes sunny in Scotland.
3:54 Speaker 05 Sometimes, but I mean, now it's getting better. We're the only country that's really enjoying global warming.
4:00 Speaker 03 So do you know who it was who said this?
4:03 Speaker 05 No, I don't. But I know this idea that the Romans never conquered Scotland. And that's the way the Scots like to pitch it.
4:11 Speaker 04 Right.
4:12 Speaker 05 It's that the Romans, they went through Gaul, they went through England, they did all that. They got to Scotland and we were just too. Savage and too brutal. Right. They couldn't be bothered to conquer the last 600 miles. Yeah.
4:26 Speaker 06 There are a few ancient descriptions of Britain, which really make clear how peripheral Britain was. The whole, the whole, every nation and every tribe and every island of Britain was completely extraneous to world affairs. It just wasn't a thing. And so Cassius Dio, ancient writer, um, this is just a description of those who live on the two sides of a, a big, uh, wall. So there's the Caledonians, which is an old name for Scottish.
4:53 Speaker 05 Yeah.
4:53 Speaker 06 And the Maitei, I don't know how that's pronounced.
4:57 Speaker 05 The Maitei?
4:57 Speaker 04 Maitei, that's a.
4:58 Speaker 06 The Maitei.
4:59 Speaker 04 That's an MMA.
5:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or a delicious alcoholic beverage.
5:05 Speaker 06 So the Maiteis all carry around little umbrellas and sparklers.
5:08 Speaker 05 That sounds, that sounds like the English to me. Yeah, that's a fair, accurate description.
5:12 Speaker 06 So the Maitei live south of the wall which divides the island and the Caledonians on the other side. Neither of these groups of people has learned how to make a wall.
5:19 Speaker 05 No.
5:19 Speaker 06 Um, they possess neither walls, cities nor tilled fields, but they live on their flocks, wild game and certain fruits. They dwell in tents, possess their women in common. Um, and they.
5:32 Speaker 05 Very liberal.
5:33 Speaker 06 Yeah.
5:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
5:34 Speaker 06 And I think this, I mean, see if you think this applies to anyone in the 21st century, they can endure hunger and cold.
5:41 Speaker 05 Geordies.
5:42 Speaker 06 Scotland, Geordies. They can endure, okay, okay, keep, hold that thought. They can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship before they plunge into the swamps. And there exist for many days with only their heads above water.
5:55 Speaker 05 Wow.
5:55 Speaker 06 Apparently, um, the thing.
5:57 Speaker 05 Yeah, I can picture my ancestors just like up to their necks in a bog. Just because like that's the only place you can safely fart. It stinks in here. Yeah, it does. We're in a bog. Like, why would it not stink in here?
6:11 Speaker 03 But I think one of the main things is that Scotland and Britain more generally were on the edge of the empire.
6:17 Speaker 05 Yes.
6:18 Speaker 03 And so they used it as like a counterpoint to their civilization. So anything that they thought was civilized, they said that the barbarians living up north weren't doing.
6:27 Speaker 06 Yeah.
6:27 Speaker 03 And they were different than us.
6:28 Speaker 05 And I'm sure you, you. We'll all correct me wrong here, but Barbarian, I learned this in classical studies, came from, Barbar is what they thought we sounded like when we spoke. That was their me me me.
6:42 Speaker 04 I think that's right.
6:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's right.
6:44 Speaker 04 Yeah, right. You were, you were in England.
6:47 Speaker 05 Don, how dare you?
6:47 Speaker 04 I'm just.
6:48 Speaker 05 How dare you? This is not why we came on the podcast to fact check. We're not fact checking my history. We're fact checking Roman history.
6:54 Speaker 03 Dan, I was so surprised.
6:55 Speaker 05 How fucking dare you?
6:55 Speaker 03 I was so surprised when you put that accent on. As soon as the mics came on, the accent came on.
7:00 Speaker 06 Because you've got a lovely Tunbridge Wells going to you.
7:04 Speaker 05 Come this table we flipped.
7:08 Speaker 06 Whereabouts? Where's your secret shame?
7:10 Speaker 05 Oh, right. So through no fault of my own, my parents, the horse, they met at Edinburgh University where they fell in love, north of the Wall, right? And then they moved to London and they accidentally conceived me and they will deny to this day that it was an accidental conception. But if you get them to tell you the story about when I was conceived, they were unemployed, living on a houseboat on the Thames. So either, either I was unintentional or I was intentional and they suck.
7:39 Speaker 06 So interesting because my main concern is whether you're from south of the river or not. And actually you've outplayed me by being.
7:44 Speaker 05 On the river.
7:48 Speaker 06 I don't know. I don't know what class you are. I can't judge you.
7:52 Speaker 05 Kingston upon Thames and then.
7:55 Speaker 06 Very nice.
7:55 Speaker 05 My dad's from the north of Scotland, Thurso. My mum's side of the family from East Kilbride.
7:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
8:00 Speaker 05 So I'm classical, real working class Scots for generations and generations.
8:03 Speaker 04 Yeah. And then you the English.
8:04 Speaker 05 And then me, that's, oh, Dan, I'm gonna fucking listen.
8:09 Speaker 05 It still hurts.
8:13 Speaker 06 Right. Do you guys want a quiz?
8:14 Speaker 04 Yes, please.
8:15 Speaker 06 All right, here we go. Who said this about the people of Britain? Was it an ancient world writer? Or was it the New York Times in 2020?
8:25 Speaker 04 Okay.
8:26 Speaker 05 Oh, great.
8:28 Speaker 06 How many questions in this quiz?
8:29 Speaker 05 Four.
8:30 Speaker 06 Great. Okay. Andy usually hits us with a one question quiz.
8:35 Speaker 05 Just a question.
8:37 Speaker 06 The sky is gloomy with many clou— I've rephrased these a little bit, but the sentiment is identical.
8:42 Speaker 03 If they were in the original Latin, it would be a bit of a giveaway, wouldn't it?
8:45 Speaker 06 The sky is gloomy with many clouds and showers are frequent.
8:49 Speaker 05 That seems too tame. I feel like that's going to be a Roman general. I feel like that's an old, old timey.
8:54 Speaker 03 I'll take the N Y T then.
8:55 Speaker 04 Okay, I'll go, I'll go old timey.
8:57 Speaker 06 It's Tacitus, 100 A.D.
9:00 Speaker 04 Right.
9:00 Speaker 06 They cavort by the hundreds in swamps.
9:03 Speaker 05 Oh, no. Now, Scotland, they just qualify for the World Cup for the first time since 1998.
9:08 Speaker 04 Uh huh. I'm going New York Times with that one.
9:12 Speaker 05 It's hard not to.
9:13 Speaker 06 You're right. It's the New York Times in 2020.
9:15 Speaker 03 No.
9:16 Speaker 06 Yes. They wrote a piece about a heatwave where they said the people have been taken to the swamps. And what they meant was Hackney Marshes?
9:24 Speaker 03 Not in Scotland, though.
9:26 Speaker 06 No, no, no, no, no. This is Britain.
9:28 Speaker 03 The Hackney Marshes?
9:29 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
9:29 Speaker 03 Not that swampy, really.
9:31 Speaker 06 They basically thought we were living Shrek style.
9:34 Speaker 05 Yeah.
9:34 Speaker 06 Um, the people are taller than our own, although they are also bandy legged.
9:39 Speaker 03 That's gotta be Strabo.
9:40 Speaker 06 It's Strabo, it's first century A.D. Yeah, bandy legged is not in the New York Times.
9:45 Speaker 05 No.
9:45 Speaker 06 Style guide.
9:46 Speaker 04 I can't not picture Strabo as an Aussie every time we say his name.
9:50 Speaker 05 Strabo.
9:53 Speaker 06 Uh, right, one more. You've all done disappointingly well, I'm afraid. Uh, the food in the capital is principally porridge and boiled mutton, but the food is sallow and predictable.
10:03 Speaker 04 New York Times.
10:04 Speaker 05 New York Times.
10:04 Speaker 06 It's the New York Times in 2020. Porridge and boiled mutton was apparently the core of the British food scene until quite recently. That's four out of four for everyone, I think. Well done.
10:13 Speaker 04 Dan, do you, do you own an island in Scotland by any chance?
10:17 Speaker 05 Do I own one?
10:18 Speaker 04 Yeah, because I was doing some Googling about islands generally, um, because one of the initial facts, Dan, that you sent us was about the fact that there's a, a bunch of wallabies that are roaming wild on a little island.
10:29 Speaker 05 The only population of wild wallabies in Scotland is on an island called Incanac.
10:34 Speaker 04 Yeah, and you know who owns that island?
10:35 Speaker 05 I do not.
10:36 Speaker 04 Kirsty Young of Desert Island Discs. She bought her own island and—
10:39 Speaker 06 Her own desert, desert island?
10:40 Speaker 04 It's her own desert island, so she's—
10:42 Speaker 05 And she took wallabies to it.
10:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, they were there already.
10:45 Speaker 06 It's a luxury.
10:46 Speaker 03 Shakespeare and a load of wallabies.
10:48 Speaker 06 She inherited, she inherited the wallabies that are already there, which is very exciting. Yeah.
10:53 Speaker 04 And is that, do we know how they got there in the first place?
10:55 Speaker 05 Yes. So, uh, I can't remember what year it was, but there was like a Scottish or Mr. Cradle lady went to Australia, fell in love with these wallabies. No matter what the locals told her, that they were just farm and she was like, I'll take them home. I'll domesticate them.
11:08 Speaker 03 No.
11:08 Speaker 05 Brought them back to Scotland, very quickly realised that they were just farm men. Didn't have it in her heart to kill them. So it was just like, she's got like her butler or her mansurfer or whatever to like canoe them over to this tiny little like island in the middle of a loch where they've been for like 60 years now, for generations. And because they've got no natural predators, you can rent a canoe and a kayak. My friends have done it, go to the islands and the wallabies will just come up to you and hang out with you. And if you camp there, they'll sit outside around your fire because they've never been eaten.
11:37 Speaker 04 Um, Lamb Island, have you heard of Lamb Island?
11:39 Speaker 05 Lamb Island?
11:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
11:41 Speaker 05 I have not.
11:41 Speaker 04 Okay. Well, that in 2009, that was bought by Yuri Geller.
11:45 Speaker 06 Unfortunately, it's now bent completely into such a shame.
11:51 Speaker 04 He thinks that there's something mystical about it, that there used to be witch trials there. And um, that there's also a crystal orb that once belonged to Albert Einstein buried on the island. These are all the claims, but it's become a bit of a tourist attraction. So people who rent out boats will do tours around the island of this mystical island. But they're going, they're going cheap, you know, if you've got.
12:10 Speaker 06 Islands?
12:10 Speaker 04 Yeah. If you've got money in that territory.
12:12 Speaker 05 Yeah, but with rising seawalls, I mean, you know, it's a false economy. If you're buying an island while sea levels are rising.
12:19 Speaker 03 I think lakes are usually okay, aren't they? I reckon.
12:23 Speaker 06 And I think Scotland is rising in general.
12:27 Speaker 05 Are we?
12:27 Speaker 06 Because of, yes, because of the ice sheet receding at the end of the last ice age. And I think Scotland is still bouncing back.
12:33 Speaker 03 On the islands, they have these incredible beaches in Scotland, right? Whereas if you go to Dover, you have big old cliffs. And that's because the entire country is on a slight slant.
12:43 Speaker 05 But that's because Scottish people are fat. So we're not admitting that it's bringing up the, bringing up England and that.
12:49 Speaker 04 And we've always wondered about that.
12:50 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is impressive because there's less people in Scotland than there are in London. It really goes to show just how how much we love chocolate.
12:59 Speaker 03 This podcast does not agree with that.
13:02 Speaker 05 I'm from Scotland. I can be as racist to my own people as I like.
13:06 Speaker 03 Here's an interesting thing that I found out this week. In the Oxford English Dictionary, there's three meanings for the word Albanian. Okay. Number one, I bet you can guess.
13:15 Speaker 05 Cocaine.
13:17 Speaker 04 From, from, from.
13:19 Speaker 03 Someone from Albania. Right. Number two, someone from Scotland. Cause Scotland used to be called Alba and has been called Albania. In the 12th century, you get British people calling Scotland Albania.
13:32 Speaker 05 Is that so?
13:33 Speaker 03 Yeah. And the third one is someone from Albany, New York is an Albanian as well.
13:37 Speaker 04 Oh, nice. I hope they're twinned in some way.
13:40 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:40 Speaker 04 In a confusing way. Welcome to Albania.
13:43 Speaker 05 Albany, New York also has one of the weirdest venues in the entire world called The Egg. There's a egg shaped building from the outside, which is on like three stelts. So you have to get this elevator up to this egg and it's called The Egg. The Egg Albany. I've played it. It's a lovely venue.
14:00 Speaker 04 Comedy venue?
14:01 Speaker 05 It's a venue.
14:03 Speaker 04 Tell us your best yokes?
14:04 Speaker 05 Great.
14:07 Speaker 06 I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be invited back.
14:09 Speaker 04 Are you looking for an opener at Wembley?
14:15 Speaker 05 I'm trying to. There's so many egg puns going on in my head. I'm like, don't do it, don't do it, don't do it. Let's not. Come on now. Come on now.
14:22 Speaker 04 You were just talking about Albanians as a language point. There's a Scottish Wikipedia.
14:30 Speaker 04 Don't know if you've ever been on it, Daniel, but it's where the articles are sort of translated. Existing articles are translated.
14:36 Speaker 03 Into Scots.
14:36 Speaker 04 Into Scots.
14:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
14:39 Speaker 04 And it's, it was getting quite large. And then someone discovered that 49% of all the articles that were written were written by a 12 year old kid from America who had never learned the language in the slightest and was making assumptions on what they'd seen online of how to translate it.
14:58 Speaker 06 So this isn't Gaelic. This is Scots. So they're different things, aren't they?
15:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, that's right. So it's completely, if anyone with a basic understanding would be like, what, what is this? And from 12 till 19, they wrote 49% of all the articles that existed on Scottish Wikipedia.
15:13 Speaker 03 And if you read them, they're just like, someone has written them in like a slightly racist Scottish accent.
15:19 Speaker 04 Yeah. Yeah. And when they were told, they were, they weren't like, got me. They were devastated. They were like, I thought I was doing a really good job.
15:29 Speaker 06 So sweet.
15:30 Speaker 05 They're like, oh, Jings, my cribblings, me Bob. But I know we don't say that. We do not.
15:36 Speaker 06 I've just realised, well, the earliest ever maps of Scotland, Ptolemy, the map of Ptolemy, it was made in the second century AD and it's pretty good.
15:45 Speaker 05 Unbelievably good.
15:46 Speaker 06 Except that.
15:47 Speaker 05 It's on its side.
15:48 Speaker 06 Scotland sticks out to the right instead of going up. And it's as if it's had the Uri Geller treatment. It's really funny. The rest of the mainland goes up, you know, you've got, you can see Cornwall, you can see Kent, and it dapers up and then suddenly it just turns a corner and Scotland just sticks out to the east.
16:02 Speaker 04 And what happened there?
16:03 Speaker 06 An error.
16:04 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:05 Speaker 04 Oh, okay. Shall we move on?
16:07 Speaker 06 Yeah.
16:07 Speaker 03 Yeah, we can do one more thing, actually. So the Romans, often not very nice about Britain, but it kind of carries on. So the first Rough Guide to Britain and the first Lonely Planet Guide to Britain, they were both published for Australian tourists and they were quite insulting to the British, I would say.
16:26 Speaker 05 The Australians were?
16:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, because it was for students a little bit. So, but then the British press really kind of went to town in it. So the first Rough Guide to Britain in 1996 said that the UK had a less than brilliant climate, a laughable indigenous cuisine and an attitude to social class that is ingrained with the habits of feudalism.
16:46 Speaker 05 Still true.
16:47 Speaker 03 It's hard to argue, isn't it?
16:51 Speaker 06 That's typical of someone who was born on the Thames. You'd say that now. I can't believe that.
16:59 Speaker 07 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation. I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table.
17:44 Speaker 07 Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.
17:58 Speaker 04 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.
18:01 Speaker 06 My fact is, the man responsible for harnessing the power of Niagara Falls also had a pigeon girlfriend.
18:08 Speaker 05 Yes, many pigeon girlfriends.
18:10 Speaker 06 Well, we'll get into his love life.
18:14 Speaker 04 But who is he?
18:15 Speaker 06 Who is he? This is Nikola Tesla.
18:18 Speaker 04 Yes.
18:19 Speaker 06 Incredibly important person in world history, basically. The man who really, more than almost anyone else, maybe accepting Edison harnessed electricity, created electricity and, you know, just worked out how to distribute electricity and to transport it across long distances. Like harnessed Niagara Falls, you know, set up the hydroelectric power station to power, I think it was a, was it Buffalo in New York State? It was a, it was a New York city. Yeah, yeah. So he was a really, really interesting guy, born in Serbia, and he was a very eccentric man as well. And one of the things about him was that he seems to have lived as a celibate sort of all his life. No one knows he ever had a close relationship with anybody.
19:02 Speaker 06 He once fell in love briefly with a young woman called Anna, but then they, nothing came of that. And then later in life, he had a pigeon girlfriend.
19:12 Speaker 03 What does that mean, Andy, to have a pigeon girlfriend?
19:14 Speaker 06 He would feed the, the birds outside the New York Public Library.
19:17 Speaker 03 As you do to your wife.
19:20 Speaker 05 Tuppence a bag.
19:22 Speaker 06 And the pigeons would approach in flocks, but there was one special pigeon which came every day. And he said, she was beautiful, that one was different, it was a female, I would know that pigeon anywhere. She understood me and I understood her. I loved that pigeon. I loved her as a man loves a woman and she loves me. And when she was ill, he knew about it.
19:42 Speaker 06 She would come to his room and stay, you know, with him for days. And then this is so sad, this bit, he said, when that pigeon died, something went out of my life. And I knew my life's work was finished. Quite something. I mean, he was, he was very eccentric in his later years, but he had a real attachment to this bird.
19:56 Speaker 05 And that was when he, he lived in a hotel in New York because Thomas Edison hugely fucked him over. When he first came over, he was like, if you ever come to, if you ever come to New York, I'll have a job for you. And then next Tesla came over on the boat and Edison was like, oh, if you can fix this machine, I'll give you this amount of money. So Tesla not only fixed the machine, fixed it faster and made it, and put vast improvements on it. And then when he asked Edison for the money, Edison said, oh, you clearly just don't get the American sense of humor. And that started the rivalry between him and Edison. The problem was Edison, being American, and especially the, you know, the height of imperialism, capitalism, would patent everything. Whereas Tesla refused to patent any of his stuff early doors because he was a true firm believer
20:41 Speaker 05 that all energy should be free, especially if it was harnessed in that way. And it took like him being screwed over by America so many times before he finally understood that some things had to be patented, but he didn't do enough of it. And so when he died, he died penniless. And this is one of the few conspiracy theories I believe in and subscribe to.
20:58 Speaker 03 For the listener, Dan was looking the other Dan straight in the eye there.
21:03 Speaker 05 Like when he died, apparently like the FBI, wherever the backs, but back in the 800 version of the FBI was, went around to his house. And confiscated a bunch of things because there are like rumors that he was inventing a death ray. He predicted telephones, wireless telephones before they were ever invented, like, like almost essentially before. There was a box with a bunch of tubes and wires, which he said just took electricity out of like the ether, like the air just around. And it was able to. Generate this vehicle for like eight hours in a row. That thing was confiscated from his hotel and they've never seen it again. Nobody knows what it was, how it created that. Now, obviously, it could be rumor over time, all this stuff. I'm telling you. It's it's big American government.
21:47 Speaker 06 It's the Indiana Jones warehouse.
21:49 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:49 Speaker 06 It's gone into there.
21:50 Speaker 05 Yeah.
21:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
21:51 Speaker 04 But I think, you know, I didn't know that side of his story, that he went penniless at the end of his life and that he was dating pigeons and that he was he was. He was a bit odd and the New York Times, if you go into the New York Times and you put his name in and you bring it to the years that he was alive. The headlines come out like a really eccentric, he almost sounds very sort of like Trump like with his like claims. I've got a headline here at July 11th, 1933, Dr. Tesla at 77 seldom sleeps. Inventor says his health and mind are better than ever, expects to live beyond 140. Like he was making all the and the death theme thing was.
22:24 Speaker 06 Then he said that he attributed that to drinking very good whiskey, among a few other things. And when prohibition came in, he said, oh, well, now I'm only going to live to 130. Nightmare. He was brilliant. I love him.
22:34 Speaker 04 The year after Tesla at 78 bears new death beam. This is the one you're talking about, Dan. Invention powerful enough to destroy 10,000 planes 250 miles away. He says the apparatus will kill without trace.
22:47 Speaker 03 But he also thought that that was going to like be world peace after he invented that, right?
22:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, defensive weapon only, he says.
22:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, he called it a peace ray, I think. And the idea is like, what's the point of having a war? If Tesla can just press a button and all your planes blow up.
23:00 Speaker 06 Yeah.
23:01 Speaker 03 So everyone's going to become friends.
23:02 Speaker 04 Yeah, it's a peace ray, guys.
23:06 Speaker 05 Also, all of this will be anti Tesla propaganda because, who was the other guy? Edison deeply wants to discredit him because Tesla's alternating current was infinitely better than direct current. It could because it requires less generators over distances. Tesla's electricity was vastly superior and Edison didn't like that. So what Edison did to smear Tesla was got like a full size elephant, got Tesla's alternating current, ran it through the elephant and killed it in front of like 10,000 people. Being like, this is how dangerous all of this stuff is. So then as a rebuttal to that, I think it was like a couple of months later. That was when Tesla did like a literal festival of lights and light bulbs throughout New York City.
23:51 Speaker 05 Where there's that famous shot of him like walking through the Tesla coil.
23:55 Speaker 04 Yes.
23:55 Speaker 05 Where it's touching him because that was him proving that you can touch electricity. And that Edison's understanding and picture of what direct current was, was, uh, was a lie.
24:04 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:04 Speaker 06 Edison comes across as a bit of a hand.
24:06 Speaker 05 A piece of, piece of poo, if you don't mind saying that, will you?
24:10 Speaker 06 Well, we don't use strong language on this podcast then, but I think that's. Yeah, he, he, I mean, I, I'm almost going to propose him as an enemy of the podcast along with Mark Twain.
24:17 Speaker 04 Are you?
24:18 Speaker 06 Yeah.
24:18 Speaker 04 Okay.
24:18 Speaker 06 Almost, I don't know. I mean, obviously he was very important in lots of ways, but he electrocuted a lot of other animals as well to prove supposedly that Tesla's stuff was dangerous.
24:26 Speaker 04 Really? Okay.
24:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, he was, he was like the first, for me, the first thing of like what America really is. Which you can say it's about freedom, you can say it's about opportunity. What it is, is it's somebody getting rich the fastest and they're doing everything they can to stop anyone else competing with that.
24:42 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:42 Speaker 06 There, there is a Twain link actually. Uh, we don't like Mark Twain on this show then, just so you know.
24:47 Speaker 04 Okay.
24:47 Speaker 06 Um, but one thing Tesla designed was an oscillating electrotherapy machine. And the idea was it would, it would help people digest their food from the outside. So it's a, it's a.
24:59 Speaker 05 A poo juju.
25:00 Speaker 06 A poo juju.
25:02 Speaker 05 From the outside.
25:02 Speaker 06 Have you been reading my notes? That's what.
25:07 Speaker 06 Yeah, poo juju. And Tesla let Mark Twain try this and sort of strapped him into it and did not tell him that the need to relieve yourself comes, comes quite quickly.
25:19 Speaker 03 Basically vibrates you, right? Is that what it was?
25:21 Speaker 06 It shuggles you, it drudges you. And Twain had to rush off in some distress to the nearest loo.
25:27 Speaker 03 Can I do a poo Tesla fact then?
25:29 Speaker 06 Yeah.
25:30 Speaker 03 This is modern. So 40% of Tesla owners, so people who own Tesla cars. Um, think that birds deliberately poo on their cars.
25:40 Speaker 04 Interesting.
25:42 Speaker 03 They did a survey of, they asked people whether birds deliberately poo on the cars. And they also did a survey of all the cars and saw how often or how frequently birds poo on all the different cars. And they found that 40% of Tesla people think that the birds deliberately poo on there. But actually, they don't feature in the top 10 of brands most pooed on. So it is all in their heads.
26:06 Speaker 04 Oh, okay.
26:07 Speaker 05 Good. You think that's just like guilt from?
26:09 Speaker 03 I think so. That's what I think it is.
26:11 Speaker 05 Buying your toothbrush from a Nazi.
26:14 Speaker 04 Did you say you have a Tesla?
26:15 Speaker 05 Yes.
26:16 Speaker 04 So do you, have you ever noticed an abundance of pigeon shit on your?
26:19 Speaker 05 No, but.
26:20 Speaker 03 And the pigeons, is the pigeons?
26:22 Speaker 04 That's what I'm saying. Is it a mark of respect? Is it sort of saying?
26:25 Speaker 05 Yeah, for my old boy.
26:27 Speaker 04 Yeah, exactly.
26:29 Speaker 05 For the, yeah, for the only human man that loved us the way we deserve to.
26:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. He did, um, the, the pigeon thing with Tesla, like he, he didn't just date them. He nursed them as well. He spent a lot of money inventing sort of braces if they hurt themselves. So one broke a wing, he, he invented a sort of brace to make sure that the injured bird was okay. Um, yeah, big, big old fan.
26:49 Speaker 06 Such an interesting man.
26:50 Speaker 03 He likes it.
26:51 Speaker 05 Pigeons are just, don't get me wrong, like in terms of birds, like they're not seagulls. If you're looking after seagulls, I think you should, you should, you should go to jail. Nobody's, nobody's rescuing the bastards of the coast.
27:04 Speaker 05 Pigeons I sort of get, but they're not.
27:06 Speaker 06 People do get into pigeons though, in quite a way. So sometimes I walk through St. James's Park, which is in the middle of London, and there are a lot of pigeons there. And it's where people congregate and put food on their heads or their shoulders or their knees or their toes.
27:19 Speaker 03 Well, so do the pigeons land on them?
27:21 Speaker 06 Yeah.
27:21 Speaker 03 Do they?
27:22 Speaker 05 That's people watching Home Alone 2 too much.
27:24 Speaker 06 Yeah, I don't, I don't love it. And there used to be loads in Trafalgar Square. It used to be pigeons, hundreds of pigeons flocking around the place.
27:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:32 Speaker 06 And then I think the mayor, was it Ken Livingstone, introduced hawks.
27:36 Speaker 03 Yeah.
27:37 Speaker 06 Dealt with the problem pretty quickly, I'll tell you that.
27:40 Speaker 04 Yeah.
27:40 Speaker 03 But a lot of places think they're vermin, don't they?
27:42 Speaker 06 Yeah.
27:43 Speaker 03 But I just recently was in Cappadocia in Turkey and they have pigeon lofts everywhere. Cause they wanted the pigeons to live there, cause they would use the poo for fertilizer. And they also used it to make frescoes in their churches.
27:57 Speaker 04 That's cool.
27:57 Speaker 03 But yeah, they would deliberately have them there. But a lot of places like in Regina, California, it's illegal to own more than 90 pigeons. And of your allotted 90 pigeons, only 50 of them may be more than a month old. It's very specific.
28:12 Speaker 05 Whoa, so the rest you have to like row out to an island and leave them there.
28:18 Speaker 05 They're flying, following the curve back. Famously, famously homing bird. Take these pigeons into the woods.
28:28 Speaker 05 Maybe I have to move to the woods. Maybe that's the only way.
28:31 Speaker 03 The thing is, 90 is quite a threshold. Yeah, but you can't really cull them. Like you can use hawks and stuff, but in Basel in Switzerland, they had 20,000 pigeons. And then from 1961 to 1985, they killed around 100,000 every year. But the population stayed stable because when you kill them, they just reproduce and get more and more until they get to the nice level, which is the amount that they have enough food for.
28:55 Speaker 05 There you go.
28:56 Speaker 03 Tezal, when he was a child, he once fell headfirst into a vat of boiling milk and.
29:01 Speaker 05 It fell a lot.
29:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, he was like really clumsy, you would say.
29:05 Speaker 04 So was he like a genius? But if you watched his life, it was like Mr. Bean?
29:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think so. Yeah, he was quite dyspraxic, I guess.
29:13 Speaker 05 I went to his childhood home.
29:15 Speaker 03 Did you? Really?
29:16 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I get to perform out in Croatia and Serbia. And there's a big argument between Croatia and Serbia about where he's from. Because obviously that was back in, I don't even think it was Yugoslavia back then. So there's a debate about whether he's Serbian or whether he's Croatian. One of them has named an airport after them. He's on another one. Those are the ones, their currency and stuff. So we went to his childhood home, which they need to, when I say they need to do it up, I'm not suggesting doing the house up. But like, it was like this really small, tiny town, nothing near it. And they'll take you around and be like, yeah, he fell off it. He was struck by lightning allegedly, fell off that roof, came down there, was in a coma for a couple of days. And that's where he had a lot of like visions and stuff, a lot of his creations, he would say, came from visions he was having in his head.
29:58 Speaker 05 And then he would invent these things, which is where the conspiracy theories come in of like, you know, when he was nine years old, he said he was going to invent this thing. And then 30 years later, he did, and it's all from the visions. So when he was 30 and he was having these visions for things he was going to create 30 years, people are like, well, he was obviously going to do that.
30:15 Speaker 05 Just like the original, and I, the reason I love him is I think there is something deeply, deeply fucking honorable for like this man who did not want to patent anything.
30:25 Speaker 06 Hmm.
30:26 Speaker 05 He was like, all of this stuff deserves to be free. This would benefit society. There's no benefit to charging people from this. And the fact that the first place that that idea was kicked out of him was he arrived on the shores of America. And they went, no, no, no, no, no, no, absolutely, absolutely. Here, let us introduce you to capitalism.
30:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
30:45 Speaker 05 To the nth degree. You're gonna die alone in the richest city in the world.
30:51 Speaker 06 You will have a girlfriend.
30:52 Speaker 05 Yeah. And we've got to have a lovely pair of breasts.
31:03 Speaker 04 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the first Swedish translation of Lord of the Rings inspired two follow-up works. The first, by Tolkien, was on how not to translate as books. And the second was by the Swedish translator on how Tolkien was actually a dark wizard Nazi.
31:24 Speaker 03 Jeez.
31:24 Speaker 04 Yeah, it was a...
31:26 Speaker 03 Get on then.
31:26 Speaker 04 It was really bad. So this was, this was a translation that was done by Orca Olmark. He was a Swedish translator, did really big books in his time. Um, so he was a very respected translator, took on the job of doing Lord of the Rings. And it came out and it was just panned. Locally, it was panned. People thought that the translation just added descriptions that shouldn't have been there. The way he phrased certain sentences just didn't run nicely. When you read them in isolation, they don't seem like big changes. But apparently when they're all smashed together in these gigantic books, it really becomes obvious. And so Tolkien took issue with it to the point of writing a guide called Guide to the Names in the Lord of the Rings,
32:08 Speaker 04 and actively used examples from the Swedish translation to show what you shouldn't do.
32:12 Speaker 06 Well, it's interesting because Tolkien was a philology world master. He was a linguist. He just studied language deeply for 50, 60 years before writing these books. So of course he's gonna have thoughts.
32:25 Speaker 03 He wouldn't have spoken Swedish, would he?
32:27 Speaker 06 I don't think so, no. But he knew when the names had been changed. That was one big bugbear.
32:32 Speaker 04 Yeah.
32:32 Speaker 06 He wrote, "In principle, I object as strongly as is possible to the translation of the nomenclature at all, brackets, even by a competent person."
32:42 Speaker 03 But then if you're translating, you don't necessarily need to change the names, do you?
32:45 Speaker 06 That's what, that's what got him so angry. But what if someone has a really silly sounding name? They're meant to have a grand name in English and they've got a silly sounding name.
32:53 Speaker 03 That makes sense.
32:54 Speaker 06 And actually, this is the, I didn't know this, and I did read all the books as a teenager and I loved them. They're supposedly a translation, like the whole Lord of the Rings.
33:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:02 Speaker 06 He has to explain why it's in English.
33:04 Speaker 03 Were they in like hobbit language before?
33:06 Speaker 06 Yes, it's the story the hobbits told. It's something like called the, the Red Book of Westmarch, which was written by the hobbits.
33:12 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:12 Speaker 06 And it is kind of the, I love a framing device where someone says, I've just translated this from the, from the original, which is all in hobbit. That's why we have words in here like sausage or whatever.
33:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
33:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's clever.
33:22 Speaker 04 It's, it's really interesting.
33:23 Speaker 06 He was a clever guy.
33:24 Speaker 04 He was a clever guy.
33:25 Speaker 06 I think he was clever.
33:26 Speaker 04 Well, Olmarts doesn't think so.
33:27 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry.
33:29 Speaker 04 Wrote a book called Tolkien and Black Magic. It didn't get a big distribution, so you have to go into certain libraries in order to get it out. And it was never translated into English, but the blurb reads roughly, it comes to the attention, especially during the last few years. The multitude of Tolkien societies have denigrated to a kind of Ku Klux Klan with a worship of open violence, crude orgies, alcohol and drug abuse.
33:51 Speaker 06 Crude orgies?
33:52 Speaker 04 Crude orgies.
33:53 Speaker 06 Oh, that's the worst kind of orgy.
33:55 Speaker 04 Oh, well, yeah.
33:57 Speaker 05 Pinkies up, boys.
34:00 Speaker 05 Have a bit of class near the ass.
34:03 Speaker 04 So I've, I've found someone who's got a Tumblr account called Upon the Foremost Ship, who went to read the book. And this is the only thing really that I can find out about the details. They say that the first chapter of the book is quite frankly unreadable. All he does is list a bunch of evil or cultish organisations and claim that the Tolkien fans and Tolkien are like that. The next chapter is called the half-witted old man Tolkien, never refers to him just as Tolkien. He always calls him old man Tolkien. And then he starts having a crack at the book itself. So in the later chapter, he starts saying that the hobbits are forever children with no adult supervision. That walk around barefoot in the woods. Um, and he says Bilbo specifically has this never ending birthday party. So, uh, so crap. Um, he's, yeah.
34:47 Speaker 05 It's such a violent way to not be able to take criticism.
34:50 Speaker 04 I know, right?
34:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, but I think, I think Hallmarks, the translator, was so annoyed because, I mean, I'm not to excuse it, but he, obviously for years and years, people were telling him over and over and over what a bad job he'd done, which I think he probably had. And then at one point, some years later, a fire happened at his house.
35:09 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:10 Speaker 06 And he blamed the Tolkien fans. He said that it was arson by.
35:15 Speaker 04 Really? He really, he really became, I mean, and it's possible that he got a lot of flak to make him paranoid to think that. But he, he even put conspiracy theories into the book itself. So as you go further along, he says, oh, it's all very obviously Tolkien for the first bit. But then the kind of style changes and he thinks C.S. Lewis wrote the rest of the book.
35:34 Speaker 06 Interesting.
35:34 Speaker 04 The Lord of the Rings. Yeah, yeah. He thinks you only get to a certain point.
35:38 Speaker 06 They were mates, weren't they?
35:39 Speaker 04 They were mates and they were part of, uh, they were in, yeah, the Spread Eagle in Oxford. They would sit and read these things out at the pub.
35:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
35:46 Speaker 04 Um, so it's a wild book. Are you a fan, Daniel?
35:49 Speaker 05 Eh, I'm a massive fan of fantasy.
35:52 Speaker 04 Yeah.
35:52 Speaker 05 Eh, but I, I, and the reason I am is from Lord of the Rings movies. They came out when I was like 11 years old and they blew my mind. And then I tried reading them when I was 14 or 15, which at the time, they were so different from the movies that, that annoyed me. And I, it's something I'm going to revisit now, but now that I have a four-year-old son, where I'm just like, we're getting close to being allowed to show him. I know they say 12, he's saying it when he says.
36:17 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, no, my three-year-old did all of the Avenger movies. Uh, like, it's fine.
36:22 Speaker 05 Well, I guess, but my question with that is like, I, it's not about, I don't care about the content, but the first time he watches Lord of the Rings, I need him to have the attention span for it to be two and a half hours and for him to understand that it is the, it is the greatest movie series ever.
36:37 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah. Oh, you'll be showing him the abridged versions then, the, uh.
36:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
36:41 Speaker 06 Rather than the.
36:42 Speaker 05 I'll be doing the most boring stuff, being like, did you know that, uh, Viggo Mortensen broke his foot while kicking the helmet of the Uruk-hai in, uh, The Two Towers? And that scream is genuine. It's a real fact from the movie that every Lord of the Rings fan knows, yeah.
36:57 Speaker 06 That's very good. I didn't know that.
36:59 Speaker 05 I didn't know. It's such a mean fact now that it's the most, if you watch, if you watch that movie with anyone, he genuinely breaks his foot and the scream is real.
37:08 Speaker 06 Because I remember him kicking a helmet. I don't remember the scream.
37:11 Speaker 04 Was it him as well who had to climb all the mountains to do the shoots because he was afraid of flying?
37:15 Speaker 05 Sean Bean.
37:16 Speaker 06 Sean Bean.
37:17 Speaker 05 Sean Bean refused to get, refused to climb up to the top of the mountains in Fellowship of the Ring. So they've got lots of footage of just Sean Bean by himself climbing up a mountain in full Boromir gear through the snow. And they're like, well, this is actually, this is actually rules.
37:33 Speaker 06 Wait, he climbed up because he was afraid of flying?
37:35 Speaker 05 Yes.
37:36 Speaker 06 But climbing is, bears its own risks.
37:39 Speaker 05 Yes, but it's more the, it was the helicopters. So he's in the helicopters.
37:43 Speaker 03 I was gonna say, how did he get to New Zealand? From Yorkshire.
37:48 Speaker 06 But if you get your cloak and the rotor blades, I completely understand the peril.
37:51 Speaker 05 Also, when, when the hobbits were like, why don't we just get the eagles to fly us to Mordor? It was actually Boromir being like, no, no, no, no, I think we, I think we should walk there. I think we should, I think the eagles is a stupid idea.
38:04 Speaker 06 That's so funny.
38:04 Speaker 05 And also to any, to any nerds, to any non nerd nerds, the people who say, why didn't they fly the ring to Mordor? What were the last words that Gandalf the Grey said before he died?
38:20 Speaker 06 Oh, he says fly, doesn't he? Before he goes down into the thing with the Balrog.
38:24 Speaker 05 It was a secret plan that he had.
38:26 Speaker 06 Yep.
38:26 Speaker 05 That he was taking them through to get the, to the eagles. He couldn't tell anyone because Saruman is everywhere.
38:31 Speaker 03 Dad, dad, can we just watch the rest of it, please?
38:35 Speaker 06 I'd like to be there to see you absolutely ruin these films for your boy.
38:42 Speaker 05 God, I'm my dad with Star Wars. No.
38:45 Speaker 06 You could have cheered up your son by getting him a little present, uh, because in 2021, some developers attempted to launch the J R R token, a cryptocurrency based, not based on, but lamely, lamely punged after Tolkien, but it was blocked by the estate. Despite the fact they got the actor who played Pippin in the movies to make a video endorsing.
39:07 Speaker 03 What about the refuse firm from Brighton called Lord of the Binns? Who were told to change their name.
39:15 Speaker 04 They do get, obviously they're protective because people will take the mick otherwise.
39:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, there was also like this year, there was a company who were making, it was like a burger van thing called Lord of the Fries. And Tolkien's estate took them to court, even though it's obviously based on Lord of the Flies by Guriyev Golding. But they said that they might be trying to pass it off as a Lord of the Rings because people are more familiar with Lord of the Rings than they are with Lord of the Flies. They lost.
39:41 Speaker 04 How did they? Okay, so it is, because Golding, I don't know when he died, but I think he will still definitely be in copyright.
39:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, no, they're, well, they're not bothered.
39:49 Speaker 04 Okay.
39:49 Speaker 03 Lord of the Flies people. There's another, not like a translation, but a different version of Lord of the Rings by a Russian guy called Kirill Yaskov. And it's called.
39:59 Speaker 04 Where Saruman's the goodie.
40:00 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely right.
40:02 Speaker 04 Is it?
40:05 Speaker 03 It's called Posledny Katsiana Ssetz, which means the last ring bearer. And it's about that basically Mordor is a rational, progressive industrial society. And they're being crushed by the elites of the West who come over and take over.
40:20 Speaker 04 Oh, wow.
40:21 Speaker 03 It's actually like in Russia, you can get it for sure. And in other parts of Europe you can, but they've never made it in an English speaking country because they think they're going to get sued.
40:29 Speaker 04 Well, they've, from what I've read, they've, they've never released it. There's been a translation done and if you dig online, you can find it.
40:35 Speaker 03 Did you? Right. Yeah, yeah.
40:37 Speaker 04 But yeah, it's never been commercially released. Apparently it's really like, it's a good parody. It's apparently it's a pretty good book, a pretty good fantasy, alternative reality, interesting kind of thing.
40:46 Speaker 06 Do you know why Tolkien came up with The Hobbit in the first place?
40:50 Speaker 04 The whole book?
40:51 Speaker 06 Yeah, it's through boredom. So he was a teacher at the time and he was not well off. He and his wife didn't have much money at all and he took on the job of marking school exam papers. You could do that if you were a teacher at the time, you could just say, right, I'll sign up for a batch and you got paid per paper that you marked. And the boredom prompted him to write the sentence just on a scrap bit of paper, in a hole in the ground, there lived a hobbit. And he later said, I did not, I did and do not. Not know why, just sort of.
41:19 Speaker 03 Wow.
41:20 Speaker 06 And he had obviously studied languages a huge deal.
41:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
41:23 Speaker 06 Because hobbit is an old word and, you know, all the names are sort of ancient words. And he'd read a lot of myth from his early childhood. He had a really tragic early childhood, but it just sort of happened, wrote that.
41:32 Speaker 03 I do like the idea that he writes hole in the ground was a hobbit and the rest of it just writes itself.
41:36 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. He had a big problem, I think, because a lot of the way he wrote it was trying to make certain things sound archaic and ancient.
41:46 Speaker 03 Right.
41:47 Speaker 06 But in some European languages, that's just the way sentences work.
41:50 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
41:51 Speaker 06 Like the German, you know, German sentences are the other way up. And it's been ages waiting for the main verb.
41:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
41:56 Speaker 06 And so if Tolkien has written, wise are the ways of the blah.
42:00 Speaker 03 So does that mean that Yoda doesn't work in German?
42:02 Speaker 06 Yoda's probably, Yoda's the only normal talking guy in those films.
42:06 Speaker 05 German, everyone else. Germans love him, like he gets straight to the point.
42:12 Speaker 05 Nine nine feeling, we love that.
42:14 Speaker 03 Easy to comprehend, Yoda is.
42:18 Speaker 06 That's very funny.
42:19 Speaker 03 Interesting.
42:20 Speaker 04 You know, it's weird with all the litigations that go on and we had Ella Al Shamahi on this show. She's an anthropologist, paleoanthropologist. And there was a hominid that was found that it was very short. And so they were known as the hobbits and the estate got in touch saying, you can't call them hobbits, even as part of it. Yeah, it's pretty wild, like for the length that they go, which is surprising then that for the last 50 years or so, still in print is the book Board of the Rings, which was the Harvard Lampoon book. So the creators of National Lampoon started in Harvard. And they wrote this book, which was an outright, yeah, I think I read it when I was, or I read bits of it when I was younger. So you've got Bilbo and Frodo were dildo bug end and fritto bugger, goddamn for Gullum.
43:04 Speaker 04 And it's, they've never been out of print.
43:07 Speaker 06 Is that?
43:07 Speaker 04 They've sold millions globally, it's been translated.
43:09 Speaker 06 Is that American laws or parody laws? You know, sometimes you're protected if a guest.
43:13 Speaker 05 Yes, yeah, because it's so clearly a parody, man.
43:15 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:16 Speaker 04 I guess so, yeah.
43:17 Speaker 06 Interesting.
43:18 Speaker 03 We mentioned C.S. Lewis earlier.
43:19 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
43:20 Speaker 03 And the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is dedicated to someone called Lucy, who was the daughter of his friends. And he sent the copy to. To her mother and father Owen and Maud Barfield. And Maud was so worried that people would read it and then kids would go into wardrobes and get stuck.
43:36 Speaker 05 That is such.
43:37 Speaker 03 She made him change it. So if you read it, whenever the kids go into the wardrobe, they're always really careful to leave it ajar for when they come back out again.
43:45 Speaker 06 Oh, that's so. So you changed it within it.
43:47 Speaker 05 I really like the fact that somebody in C S Lewis's life was like, you need to change the story so that kids don't lock themselves in cupboards. Whereas everyone in J K Rowling's life was like, yeah, and then they just run into a fucking wall at a train station. Just keep that in. Not only keep that in, put that in every book and make it like a really big part. It's for nine year olds. It's for nine year olds. Make sure Stephen Fry does it in audiobook and describes that happening every time.
44:21 Speaker 07 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel. People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood. And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone. One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies. So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table.
45:06 Speaker 07 Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.
45:19 Speaker 05 Okay, it's time for a final fact of the show and that is James.
45:23 Speaker 03 Okay, my fact this week is that in the 1950s, the Alabama drafts champion proposed to the twin sister of the world drafts champion with the aim of creating a family of drafts geniuses.
45:36 Speaker 05 Yeah.
45:37 Speaker 03 She declined. So I've been reading about this guy called Marion Tinsley and I think he is better than anyone else in the world at one thing, which is drafts. More than anyone in history has been better at anything than everyone else in the world.
45:51 Speaker 05 That's a big claim. Wow.
45:52 Speaker 03 I reckon.
45:52 Speaker 06 I think you might be right.
45:53 Speaker 05 I, I think I can outdo you. This is gonna sound like, like a stretch.
46:01 Speaker 06 We know you're good at comedy, Dan. This is not like...
46:06 Speaker 03 We just think the person who's second best is not far from you.
46:13 Speaker 05 Tiger Woods.
46:14 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
46:15 Speaker 05 Tiger Woods, my favourite star about Tiger Woods. So the way golf works is there's budget tournaments, there's four majors, the big ones, there's four of them a year. In a 10-year period, if you were to total up Tiger's score in all four of these majors every year, four tournaments over 10 years, his score was 112 under par. So 112 shots under par. In second place was Phil Mickelson over those same 10 years with a score of plus 121.
46:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
46:47 Speaker 05 That was second place.
46:48 Speaker 03 Wow.
46:49 Speaker 05 So like that's, Phil Mickelson was like the greatest player of his generation. Unfortunately, he played at a time when the greatest ever to...
46:58 Speaker 03 100% I agree that Tiger Woods was by far the best golfer of his era. But this guy, from 1948, when he took up checkers or drafts, until he died in 1994, he only lost nine games. And two of them were against a computer.
47:16 Speaker 06 Yeah.
47:17 Speaker 03 And by the way, when he played the computer, who could calculate three million positions per minute, and looked 21 moves ahead and had been loaded with every game he had ever played, he played the computer 49 times and he beat it 4-2.
47:33 Speaker 06 Right.
47:33 Speaker 03 With all the rest were ties. This guy is just unbelievable.
47:37 Speaker 04 He's so great.
47:38 Speaker 06 And you know, of those, of those defeats, where you said he lost nine games, so two of those were to the computer, two of them were trivial errors.
47:47 Speaker 03 Yeah.
47:47 Speaker 06 He just, just, oh, you know, sort of like, we call it a fat finger error, you know?
47:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
47:52 Speaker 06 There's one time between 1950 and 1992 that he was outplayed.
47:57 Speaker 04 Right.
47:57 Speaker 06 He was probably a bit poorly at the time or something. It's just, it's unbelievable.
48:01 Speaker 04 Do you know what drove him to do all this? What the fire was inside of him to get there?
48:06 Speaker 06 He loved a pigeon.
48:08 Speaker 05 His parents could only afford a chessboard, but not the chess pieces.
48:13 Speaker 06 We've got some pontefract cakes, but they've gone off, so we're not going to eat them, but.
48:16 Speaker 03 Half of them have gone off and turned.
48:21 Speaker 04 The origin story, it all comes back to him being absolutely furious and pissed off with an old lady called Mrs. Kershaw, who beat him in a game and beat him game after game. He still talked about it in interviews afterwards. Oh, how she'd cackle. He would like be seething about it. And he went into a local library in America and he found all the books and he learnt all the things and studied the hell out of it. And that's, that was it. That was the moment for him.
48:43 Speaker 05 He was causing masculinity, baby.
48:47 Speaker 03 And he used to do blindfold checkers. So you've probably heard of blindfold chess, like Magnus Carlsen could play chess blindfolded amazingly well. As can they all really? Blindfold checkers is way harder because, like, you're only using half the board because you only use the white squares, right? And there's fewer pieces, but they're all identical. And so you can't say, well, the horse is here and the castle's over here and the queen's over here.
49:11 Speaker 06 Yeah, yeah.
49:11 Speaker 03 They're just blobs on a board. And to remember where everything is.
49:15 Speaker 04 Wow, yeah.
49:16 Speaker 03 It's just absolutely incredible.
49:17 Speaker 04 That is incredible. There was a guy who was one of the greatest at the time, some say the second best while he was still playing called Derek Oldbury. And he says, this guy Tinsley was to checkers what Leonardo da Vinci was to science, what Michelangelo was to art and what Beethoven was to music and what Daniel Sloss is to comedy. That's.
49:38 Speaker 05 I'm sorry, I had that foresight.
49:41 Speaker 06 No, it's crazy. He was such an interesting man. He retired for 12 years because there was no competition at one point and they kept having world championships, but they sort of said, "Well, obviously Marion is the best." You're sort of playing to be...
49:55 Speaker 05 Not yet, the second best.
49:56 Speaker 06 Well, effectively, yeah.
49:58 Speaker 04 It's what David Letterman said about Robin Williams when he suddenly went into movies and stopped doing stand-up. He was like, "We all collectively as stand-ups just went, 'Well, let's just pretend that didn't happen.'" Because he was so good, he was such a whirlwind. It was like, "That's just changed the game."
50:13 Speaker 03 But in 51 years of play, he won about $100,000 in prize money in total.
50:19 Speaker 06 Yeah.
50:19 Speaker 03 There's not that much money in drafts.
50:21 Speaker 06 It's not big, is it?
50:21 Speaker 03 It's weird, isn't it?
50:22 Speaker 05 I would have thought that he would have been a multi-billionaire, yeah.
50:26 Speaker 06 This thing with the computer, where he later on was playing against a computer called Chinook. It was developed by a young computer programmer called Jonathan Schaefer, who was fascinated by two things, drafts and computers, you know. When Tinsley played against Chinook, he loved it. He said it made him feel like a young man again.
50:44 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:45 Speaker 06 Because he just, he could play so well that playing against a human was so...
50:50 Speaker 04 Boring.
50:50 Speaker 06 Trivial, yeah. He first played Chinook in 1992. They had a set in 92 and then another set in 94 and then very sadly he realised he was terribly ill during the 94 games and he died not long after that.
51:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
51:00 Speaker 06 But in 1992, when they first played man against machine, it made some clever little move and he said, "You're gonna regret that." And to see that, to see that that was an error on the board, a human would have had to look, as Tinsley did, 64 moves ahead.
51:17 Speaker 04 Wow.
51:17 Speaker 03 And the thing about checkers and drafts is, it's quite simple. If you look one move ahead and your opponent looks two moves ahead, they'll beat you.
51:26 Speaker 06 Right.
51:26 Speaker 03 But then if you look three moves ahead, you'll beat them. Because it's quite a simple game, it's all about looking what happens next, what happens next, what happens next.
51:33 Speaker 06 Right.
51:33 Speaker 03 So if he can look 64 moves ahead, you'd have to be able to look 65 to beat him.
51:38 Speaker 06 Right.
51:38 Speaker 03 And when he beat this computer, people said, "You know, how on earth did you beat the computer?" And he said, "Well, humans programmed the computer and God programmed me."
51:46 Speaker 06 Yeah.
51:48 Speaker 03 Which was quite religious.
51:49 Speaker 06 He was very religious, wasn't he? And he was a... Did he...
51:52 Speaker 05 Yeah, that checks out. Like, yeah, if you're getting that good at checkers, you're not getting laid.
51:59 Speaker 03 You know what, he said, he said to a newspaper reporter that he read, he said, "I haven't seen a checkers marriage that worked out. It's a very rare woman who could be married to a real student of checkers."
52:10 Speaker 06 Well, that's being polite at least, it's saying the problem is probably more with me than...
52:14 Speaker 03 I think which is fair.
52:15 Speaker 04 I do love that someone who's thought of themselves as so good that humans were not part of the scene anymore for them.
52:23 Speaker 05 It's so funny, he's like, "I'm gonna have to start banging pigeons." "I'm so, I'm so unbelievably good at checkers."
52:31 Speaker 04 My favourite fact about him is that he died in a town called Humble.
52:35 Speaker 03 No.
52:36 Speaker 04 Humble, Texas.
52:37 Speaker 06 Well, he was, in a way, he said there's a sort of Christian concept called the fellowship of suffering.
52:42 Speaker 04 Ooh, I hope the Tolkien estate didn't hear about that.
52:48 Speaker 06 He said there was a sort of checkers fellowship of suffering, you know, it's grinding to go through it. And also, he said he couldn't have much of an ego because every time he said, "I play drafts," to an adult, they would say, "Oh, my little boy plays drafts, you should give him a game, that'd be nice." And he's saying, "Well, I think I'll win."
53:08 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's like being really good at FIFA.
53:10 Speaker 03 Yeah.
53:10 Speaker 05 I'm sure the greatest people player in the world is 37 years old, and that's sad.
53:17 Speaker 06 Master players, of which we've established there are a few, one amazing sort of Don Champion, they develop these things called "cooks," which are moves which throw your opponent off, apparently, and they've all got names. I love this, because you don't start, you know chess, you start with...
53:33 Speaker 03 An opening.
53:34 Speaker 06 An opening.
53:34 Speaker 04 The Queen's Gambit.
53:36 Speaker 03 Precisely.
53:36 Speaker 06 Gambit. In checkers, I think you don't do that.
53:40 Speaker 03 Well, did you say they were called?
53:42 Speaker 06 These are called "cooks," which people do.
53:43 Speaker 03 As in C-U-C-K?
53:45 Speaker 06 Uh, no.
53:47 Speaker 03 Like, cuckold?
53:49 Speaker 06 Cooks, like a person who cooks food.
53:52 Speaker 03 Oh, a cook.
53:53 Speaker 06 Like a cook.
53:53 Speaker 04 Like cook.
53:54 Speaker 06 Yeah, because I'd say cuck for what you're describing.
53:57 Speaker 03 Oh, sorry, in my hearing, they're the same, like cuck and cock are the same word.
54:01 Speaker 06 Um.
54:02 Speaker 05 Ready, steady, cuck.
54:08 Speaker 06 But basically, you don't start in the starting position when you play competitive checkers. You draw a three-move opening from a stack of approved openings, and that gives one player a tiny advantage. And then if you make a mistake, your opponent compounds. Because this thing that Jonathan Schaefer, the computer guy, worked out in 2007, he solved checkers.
54:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:28 Speaker 06 Do you want to hear? There was a mystical story about what happened.
54:30 Speaker 03 So, sorry, did he work out that whoever goes first wins?
54:33 Speaker 06 He worked out that if both players are perfect, they draw.
54:37 Speaker 03 Okay, great.
54:39 Speaker 06 But if you have these approved openings, then one player has a tiny advantage.
54:42 Speaker 03 Understood.
54:43 Speaker 06 So, he'd been working on this for many years, running hundreds of computers around the world, playing through all the permutations to work out, basically to finish checkers. And in 2007, they knew the end was pretty near, and they were getting closer and closer to having completed the calculations for it. And there'd been some kind of power outage. And he was furious, because if that's happened, you need to restart them all, you need to do everything. It's just really a laborious process, he said. And he opened the screen, and he saw the word, "Tada!" And it's what he'd programmed in way ago, years ago, when he'd started working on these calculations. And that was the sign that you've finished it, you've worked it out. It's just so nice that he programmed it in. And it turns out it was a draw.
55:25 Speaker 05 It's all eureka moment that he programmed it himself.
55:28 Speaker 06 I know. And he'd forgotten that he'd forgotten he'd done it.
55:31 Speaker 03 Wow, that is very cool.
55:33 Speaker 04 Checkers, as I know it, hugely popular game, over in the States particularly. Yeah, there's lists that you can read of like the most popular board games that you can get. And it usually comes in second, at least according to fun.com.
55:48 Speaker 03 After...
55:49 Speaker 04 Maelstrak. Yeah, what do you think it's after?
55:51 Speaker 03 Maelstrak.
55:52 Speaker 04 Maelstrak, booked in.
55:53 Speaker 05 Board game for Americans? Their favorite board game?
55:55 Speaker 03 Shoots and Ladders.
55:57 Speaker 05 Oh, maybe sick in the mouth. Yeah, I would say Monopoly.
56:01 Speaker 04 Yeah, it comes in, according to fun.com, it comes in third underneath checkers. The top is chess, right? And they say that over 50 billion units have been sold of checkers games going back, because it's a very ancient game. It's thousands of it.
56:18 Speaker 03 50 billion?
56:19 Speaker 06 That's a big number. That's everyone alive on the planet today owning eight sets each. Yeah, yeah, we've all got eight sets.
56:27 Speaker 03 I don't, I'm not sure how many humans have been alive because population is.
56:31 Speaker 06 Yeah, I think that's one for every person who's ever lived.
56:34 Speaker 05 Yeah, but that makes it, I've, I've definitely owned more than.
56:36 Speaker 03 That's true.
56:37 Speaker 05 You've got to remember back in the days before we had phones, you know, when you went to the airport, you would get like a magnetic checker set there.
56:43 Speaker 06 Every pub would have one.
56:44 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah. So that's like, you know, three or four.
56:46 Speaker 03 That's one per pub.
56:47 Speaker 05 Right?
56:48 Speaker 03 I, I would, I reckon I've had at least three or four as a cat.
56:51 Speaker 05 I, yeah, in my childhood, I would even say like, given Christmas presents, birthday presents before Xbox and stuff, I probably owned up to 10.
56:59 Speaker 06 Come on.
56:59 Speaker 05 Yeah.
57:00 Speaker 06 This is, we would be waiting for checker sets. We would notice there would be a commission to deal with the problem. This is crazy. 50 billion, just numbers pouring out of you. Take it up with the buffins at fun.com because this is a solid number.
57:25 Speaker 06 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we're all online. I'm on at tribaland on Instagram, James.
57:36 Speaker 03 My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
57:38 Speaker 06 Andy? At Andrew Hunter M. Dan, where are you?
57:41 Speaker 05 Hey, I'm on Instagram, I'm telling you, I'm sure I've got other stuff, just my name.
57:45 Speaker 06 Yeah.
57:45 Speaker 05 On whatever platform.
57:46 Speaker 06 Just post name in. Yeah. And if you want to go see Andy and Dan play live at Wembley, uh, this November. Yeah.
57:53 Speaker 05 28.
57:54 Speaker 06 Yeah. What, give us the details, 20th of November.
57:56 Speaker 05 20th of November, uh, Wembley Oval Arena, uh, obviously biggest gig of my life.
58:03 Speaker 06 Well, you can also get to us as a group on podcast at qi.com. So send us any emails there. If you send us some facts, that's going to make its way to our Monday show, Little Fish. If you send any thoughts about new ideas that we should be incorporating into our shows, any just general bits of feedback, Andy's going to bring that to drop us a line. You can find drop us a line as part of Club Fish. So go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish. You'll find all the different tiers that you can get involved with there. Or just come back next week because we'll be back again here with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.
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