No Such Thing As Dwayne Johnson's Hare

0:04Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things A Fish, where we were joined by one of my actual heroes. We had one of Andy and Dan's heroes, Michael Palin, last week, but this week we have one of my heroes, and that is Adam Chase from Jetlag the Game. Now, Andy, do you know who Adam is? I do. I'm not as big a fan of Jetlag the Game as you, but I quite like that he's got nominative determinism, because it's all about chasing all over the place, isn't it? You're absolutely right. It is absolutely huge in the QI office. All the QI elves watch it. It's available on YouTube or also on Nebula, which is like another platform for creators.

0:40but basically what it does is Adam is with his friends Ben and Sam and they play board games but instead of on a board they use the entire world so Andy you would love it it's all about infrastructure it's all about getting on the right train or the right plane but they do challenges there there's so much jeopardy involved in this show every single week it genuinely is my absolute favorite bit of content that comes out in the world wow and having Adam on the show was so exciting it's really good i have actually had a sneak preview i've already heard the episode i can confirm you're in for a treat he's such a nice guy and yeah it's a great episode adam has also done a documentary about the world's biggest scavenger hunt that's called scav that's available on nebula but if you want to find out more about him then go to youtube and search for jet lag the game yes and the other thing we know is christmas is coming up if you are looking for a present to give someone why not give them membership of club fish this is our members club where you can get bonus bits of fish for the fish fan in your life you can get extra shows you can get and free shows if you want to experience even more fish or give that to someone else who you know who likes the show then why not do that just go to patreon.com slash no such thing as a fish but in the meantime really hope you enjoyed this show with adam chase from jet like the game on with the podcast on with the show.

2:21Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from four undisclosed locations around the world. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin and Miller and Adam Chase. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Adam. My fact is that every map of China is a little bit wrong. And I would like to say that it is not for any of the controversial reasons that people might interpret that statement.

3:05This does not have to do with any disputed territories. I'm not delving into that issue at the moment. But nonetheless, every map of China is a little bit wrong. Okay. Why, if not for the first reason? Okay. So basically, all of the maps, pretty much all the maps in the world, like the digital maps, right? You know, your Google Maps, your Apple Maps, your whatever. They all use this system called WGS 84, which is a system that was made in, you're never going to believe this, 1984. World Geodesic System, I believe. 84 it is. And this is, you know, just like a system that is able to store and keep and communicate coordinates of all the different things.

3:47So it knows that the post office is at this exact set of coordinates and it, you know, these are how maps work. Now, China does not use this system. Since 2002, they basically have very tightly controlled the ability to make maps of China. Only Chinese companies can make maps of China. And they have to put it through this system called GCJ02 instead of WGS84, which basically takes in accurate data of where everything is, and it randomly adjusts it anywhere between 50 to 500 meters in a kind of random direction just to make the map all be a little bit like skewed in various ways, but in random ways that you can't predict.

4:35Because obviously if they moved everything 20 meters left, you would say, okay, great. Well, I can fix it. I'll move everything 20 meters right. What this does is it just sort of like turns it all so that nothing is quite right. And you can see this if you go on Google Maps and you compare the satellite view to the non-satellite view. You'll see there's all kinds of things that don't line up. You'll see that there are like banks in the middle of a river and there are like... Banks were the edge of the river, of course. Well, no. But it's Adam, it's... Why? Just to mess with us. I looked into this.

5:09The one thing I just couldn't understand was why is this the case? Who does this help? So to my understanding, it is a national security thing for the most part. I can read you the exact wording of Article 1 of this law, which just says it is enacted to strengthen the administration of surveying and mapping undertaking, promote its development and ensure it renders service to the development of the national economy, the building up of national defense and progress of the society. So the answer is, of course, they're doing it for the national economy, the building up of national defense and the progress of the society.

5:49Yeah, come on, Dan, that's obvious. Well, that makes sense. Kind of a dumb question because that's an obvious answer. Yeah, it's just pretty astonishing. How does anyone get around in China? Well, one of my favorite things about how they do this is that so on like U.S. Google Maps, we have an accurate satellite image, but an inaccurate data. So the satellite and the data don't line up. If you go to, at least when I did this last, when you go to Google Maps China, then the satellite and the data do match up. So you go, oh, did they just mess it up for like the US versions, but the China Google, it works fine.

6:30But it's actually something way crazier, which is that you're not looking at an accurate satellite map with accurate data. They've taken the inaccurate data and then they have made the satellite map also wrong, but in a way that matches the inaccurate data. So they have warped the satellite map in the same way that they warped the other stuff so that things do line up, but it still is all wrong. So it tracks, but it tracks incorrectly. Yes, exactly. Amazing. That's very funny. So the bank is still in the water, but it's in the water on both versions. I guess the accurate satellite map is the best way to know that the bank is not there.

7:12I guess there are some things that aren't on the satellite maps either, right? Oh, well, all kinds of things. So the world's second largest island that's inside a lake wasn't on any maps until very recently. In fact, it's never been on any maps because it currently isn't an island anymore. This is a place called Vozrozhodyenia, which is in Russia. And it's mentioned in Call of Duty Black Ops, so some people might know it from that. But basically, it's where they had their big smallpox factory in Russia. It was on this huge island in the Aral Sea, but it was on no maps. It was always blurred out when you got there.

7:48And then before they could put it on any maps, because eventually this factory was closed down, it stopped being an island anymore because the Aral Sea dried up. And now it's just part of the land. Well, there's lots of weird national security things that have to be dealt with with maps. One of my favorite stories is that, do you know Strava? Yeah, the running app. Yeah, it's like a running app. And Strava was accidentally giving away the location of like secret US military bases and the exact parameters of their shape because, you know, soldiers would be running with Strava and they would run along the wall of the base.

8:30Basically, they would make a full loop along the wall to, you know, get the, you know, for their lap to be the longest period. Right. that it could be in the space. And so you could see on Strava, it was literally just outlining, here is the exact shape of this military base. Here's exactly where it is. Here's exactly what it looks like. The super secret military base. Yes, exactly. You know what they should have done? Like in the Second World War, when the bombers were coming over, we made fake cities. So they would put like fires and lights and stuff just outside the city. So the bombers would go to the wrong place so what they could have done is leak out this strava thing and then get the soldiers to run maybe 200 meters away from the base oh yes they didn't think of that yeah yeah you know your fake world war ii cities are a significant plot point in the recent film now you see me now you don't has anybody been to the theater to see that one yeah adam now you're talking about a friend of the podcast we've mentioned this on this show recently how much we unironically love that it's the best it's unbelievable those movies there i love those movies i would watch you could i would watch the number of heist movies that i would watch before i got sick of them is unbelievable and they're not good right they're not preach my friend my friend i was talking to my friend literally last night he's i mentioned he asked me if i wanted to see it i said oh i already saw it he said is it good i said of course not i said but it's amazing i think i've watched the first one about 20 times in the last few weeks it's just so moorish i've just had it on in the background uh just while i'm doing research it's there's a there's a great fact which uh john lloyd from qi um either mentioned on this show or was going to mention on this show which was as part of google earth making all of these amazing maps of the world there was also sort of a lot of unfortunate discoveries for people who were trying to hide things from authorities.

10:33And in Athens, they have a thing whereby if you build a pool in your backyard, there's a special tax for the pool. So only 324 pools were declared in Athens suburbs. But after Google Maps came around and Google Earth, it was discovered 16 ,974 pools were in the area. So yeah. Well, do you remember like, I mean, I was a kid when this happened, like when Google Earth first started to be a thing. And I remember being like at school on like the computers in the library and someone telling me like, if you put in your address here, it'll show you a picture of your house. And I remember being like, surely that's illegal.

11:16I was like, you're telling me that people could see what my house looks like i remember it being like it's just funny how things that are so mundane now like when that first became a thing i was i mean i was also a child so maybe i didn't have a lot of perspective on it but i was like this is the most crazy outrageous thing i've ever seen in my life yeah i can say as someone who was not just an adult but quite an old adult when that happened we also thought it was yeah everyone did and also um it did lead to a great game, which was, can you spot yourself standing outside your house? I mean, I wonder, Adam, with the amount of travel that you've done in different countries, if you and your jet lag crew have ever tried to work out who has appeared in most Google Earth images for the Street View.

12:04We are on Street View. We are on Street View. We know that we're on Street View. In season three, we were in France outside, I believe, Massey-Palais-U station, and the Google Street View car came through and we did get on Street View. It's a weird thing where different portions of that street use Street View images from different years. So you have to be on a really specific part of the Street View to see us. It may be the case that we're not on there anymore, but at least there was a period where you 100 % could see us on Street View. That's very cool. Which was very exciting to us. I happen to know the world record for the most numbers of times a person is on Google Street.

12:50Really? It's not as high as you would think, but it is high given it was taken on one single dog walk.

12:58Go on. I'm going to say a dozen, 12. All right. Any more bets? I'm going to say 48. And Schreiber? Six. 43. Whoa! Apparently. Very close. um yeah apparently she is seen as looking quite suspicious because it was crawling really really really slowly down the street and so she says they has got her every few meters that's amazing i got a random message the other day from a friend who sent me a picture of a parking fine that he got and in order to give you your parking fines they should send you two photos of when you entered the place and when you left and he was like is this your family and in the shot as my wife and my kids I was Now their heads are blurred So you'd think How would they possibly know That that is my wife and kids But he knew Because for the last few weeks My son has refused to get out of his Halloween pumpkin costume So he's just been walking the streets Dressed as a giant pumpkin And that has appeared in the parking photo That is an incredible bit by your son That's awesome dude That's so funny

14:11okay it is time for fact number two and that is and my fact is that german train station tannoys are so bad that an idiom for i don't understand in germany is ich verstehe nur Bahnhof or i only understands train station what does that phrase specifically mean what would you when would you use that in response um so if someone if you sort of lost a train of thought you're not following it's kind of like um i'm wary of roking any other country into this but it's like you say that's all a foreign language to me. Well, we would say all Greek to me in English, but then different countries say, like, I think in Russia, they say it's all Arabic to me.

14:46Someone said it's all Dutch. We've done this on QI, so I've completely lost track of who actually uses them in which country. In the US, we would say Greek. We would say it's all Greek to me. There's also, there is an alternative explanation that the train station comes from the fact that during World War I, soldiers just were so fixated on getting home, they would say, I'm just thinking about the train station. I only understand train stations. There's sort of two takes on it. But I only understand train station. Adam, we thought of you and your long suffering times with Deutsche Bahn. Do you have any opinions about the German train network?

15:19Look, here's the thing about the German trains is that in a lot of our games, you know, there's three competitors. There's me and then my colleagues, Ben and Sam. And when you get into Germany, a fourth competitor enters the game, which is Deutsche Bahn. um who which really is able to impact the game in a way that's much greater than any of the uh other players can deutsche bonn can give and deutsche bonn can take sometimes you'll be able to get on a train much earlier than you thought because you'll be getting on a train that was supposed to leave an hour ago but that's been delayed an hour and other times your train will get hugely delayed and so and a lot of our you know our the game we've played most in germany is a tag game where you're chasing after somebody and it's like when you enter deutsch bonn territory I would say that just you enter a world of extraordinary variance, but it's like it's completely observable.

16:15Like it is the case that Deutsche Bahn trains are delayed way, way more than any of their contemporaries. Oh, wow. Like only about 60-ish percent of the high speed Deutsche Bahn trains reach their destinations on time. It's crazy. Which is defined as being within five or six minutes. Because you know what? We have a stereotype of Germans being very efficient. Exactly. Yes, and it's very strange. And we would have thought, if you asked someone who didn't know this, who probably hadn't seen your show or hadn't been to Germany, they would expect that the German trains would really run on time, but they absolutely don't.

16:51And I think the Germans know it as well. There was the professor of transport policy at Berlin, Andreas Knie. He recently said that the Deutsche Bahn and our failing football team are proof that we aren't making great things anymore. Wow. So I also would have thought they were super reliable. And so when it kept happening on jet lag, I was like, what's going on with these trains? And then I was looking into it and there was a big piece in the Washington Post in August this year about the absolute identity crisis happening in German trains. And basically, in particularly bad news for you, Adam, it's basically been getting bad since the 90s and it plummeted since 2020.

17:25It just got worse and worse and worse to the point that in April this year, Switzerland actually banned some German trains from coming across because it was so embarrassing. the delays they kept bringing. It was just causing knock-on chaos onto their trains. Wow. So they were like, no, we've had enough. What's so sad about it though is I'll have lots of people be like, you know, oh, don't you hate the German trains? Don't you whatever? Your friends will be visiting and they'll be like, well, I know I shouldn't get on a train in Germany. And what I always say is like the thing about the trains in Germany, the high-speed trains is once you're on the train, It's lovely.

17:58Like the actual trains, the high speeds at least, they're really, really nice. The food is I think some of the best of like European trains. The trains are really, you know, nice. It's just that they're so delayed. But the delay flies by in comfort. Once you get on the train, you're doing great. I mean, they used to be real leaders in the world of trains. They, in 1933, had a train that was called the Flying Hamburger. And it was said to be the fastest regular railway connection in the world for its time. But yeah, it sounds like things have gone down. Interesting. I was looking into what trains were like during the wartime period, during World War II.

18:41And there was a really fascinating thing that the Americans tried to do as part of a propaganda push that involved trains in Germany, which was an operation called Operation Corn Flakes. and Operation Cornflakes. So on the 5th of February, 1945, American bombers attacked a German mail train that was heading towards the Austrian city of Linz and they blew it apart. And minutes, just minutes after that attack, there was a second wave of planes that came over and they dropped off eight mail bags. And the idea is that all the letters that scattered that they dropped would be collected by people coming to see the train wreck.

19:19And the idea was that they would then be taken into the houses and inside would contain pure propaganda of how Germany was losing the war and how Hitler was not as strong as you thought he was. And so it wasn't just this one event. Between February and April of 1945, 320 mailbags with over 96 ,000 forged letters were dropped during 10 missions over southern Germany and Austria. Operation Cornflakes, the idea was that you would read these letters while eating your cornflakes in the morning. That's really cool. I've never come across that before and who were these letters purported to be from about how the war was going badly?

19:55I don't think that overly mattered, I think it was I think as in some of it might have been just as it were a leaflet talking about propaganda I think in some cases they wrote them as if they were like pen pals from America Germans who happened to get away saying I'm sending you a random letter They could have pretended that they were from Hitler and Hitler's like, oh, dear Mr. Schmidt, I'm writing to tell you that things aren't going quite as well as I imagined and I'm not as strong as you might think I am. Yes. I love that idea. Dear Schmidt, Hitler here. And Schmidt going, oh, hey. Like that's perfectly normal letter from the Führer.

20:36But can you imagine being like Hitler's teenage pen pal? You'd just be like, this has taken a real turn. well there's actually a film uh that is about this well not have you seen jojo rabbit which is about oh yeah perhaps not pen pals with hitler but is um you know who is his best his imaginary best friend is hitler who made that dan was that that yeah very cool movie one of the issues they found in the end was a lot of these letters couldn't get delivered to the houses they wanted to because the americans had done such a huge blitz of bombing the areas that most of these houses didn't exist anymore and so people had moved on to other places so um going back to tannoy's on german trains there was an announcement in one of these newspaper articles about deutsche ban that said the train driver has not yet arrived because of another delayed train unfortunately we are currently blocking the track for his train we are curious ourselves to see how this will be resolved.

21:36That's brilliant. But there was a kind of train that existed in Coney Island in 1909. This was just like, it was just to try it out to see if it would work. And what it was, it was a train that had tracks that went over the top of the train. So if you ever wanted to overtake it, you could kind of drive over the top of the train and get ahead of it. They never made it, probably because how often are you going to want to overtake a train and you can't just go around it and whatever but it did exist for for a short amount of time in 1909 clever idea well you know this brings up of course one of my um hobby horses which is you know we're talking a lot of you know we're talking a lot of smack about german trains but i i i don't really uh i'm not really in much of a position to criticize given uh the state of trains in my country.

22:29Because Amtrak is even worse than Deutsche Bahn in terms of its on time percentage when you look at long distance trains. I think that on average, long distance Amtrak trains tend to be delayed by around an hour and a half. It depends on the route. But the reason for this is actually largely not Amtrak's fault, at least not directly. It's because for the vast, vast majority of rail in the United States, the actual rail is owned by freight companies. And so all these long distance trains that are always so delayed, it's because the Amtrak's have to stop and wait for freight rail to pass through.

23:15And even though technically, legally, as part of Amtrak's original charter, they are supposed to have the right of way over all of this rail. That law is just pretty much straight up not followed. Here's a thing from the early days of US rail. There was a thing called snake heads. Can you guess what they are? Is it where it goes off in two directions? Ah, junction, no. This was something that would be in the train itself. A snake head. So like imagine what a snake does like when it's... It slithers. It slithers, but when it's attacking, it goes... Oh, is this when... Is this when a train stops, it's the brackets in between lift up to bring it closer?

23:55That's pretty close. What it was, it was bits of the iron rails below being jolted up and then coming through the bottom of the train and then sometimes impaling the passengers. Oh my God. This apparently happened in the South. There was a guy called Henry Whipple who wrote in 1844 that you would just be sitting down in the train and a huge bit of iron would come up and hit people. Wow. There was actually one occasion where someone actually died from it as well. I always think if there's a list to be done of what would be the most surprising deaths to witness sort of in front of you, that surely has to be a top ten.

24:33You're just on a train and someone has a bar of iron. It's like Final Destination, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. There's a big issue in New York City with subway surfing. Have you heard about this? that like kids and teens, they'll ride on the top of the subway car. And it's extremely, yeah, and it's extremely dangerous. And like many, it's very tragic. Like it's really, you know, there have been people who died for it. I was going to say, is it jumping the barrier? But that's way more. No, you ride on top of it. And if you ride the New York City subway, especially in certain areas, there are many subway announcements where they've gotten like people who are famous and cool among like young people who like, it's like a celebrity doing like a an announcement and they're like hi i'm nigel sylvester don't subway surf it's stupid and you shouldn't do it like yeah can i i mean as famous as nigel sylvester is do you mind just explaining who for some of us who don't know who he is is you could have picked any name adam i have to be honest with you i mostly know nigel sylvester from his role in this awareness campaign because I am not the target demographic.

25:42I wasn't subway surfing. But I can tell you that he is a BMX athlete. So I think the idea is that it's like, he is like a extreme trick stunt athlete guy. And he's telling you, don't do this. We should say that we all knew who that was. We were just saying it for the listener. Yeah, yeah. Right, no, for the listener. Oh, I've got a Nigel Sylvester tattoo. Like I am all in on that guy. Can I tell another train tannoy music fact? Yeah. So I share a desk with Joe in the office, and he told me that if you listen to David Gilmour's Rattle That Lock, so he's the guitarist from Pink Floyd, he has sampled the beginning of the French train station tannoy announcement.

26:25Really? And so, yeah, he's on a loop. It plays through. And I played it for my French husband, whose eyes suddenly went, I know that noise. Well, you know, in Billie Eilish's song Bad Guy, the thing that sounds like a hi-hat is actually the sound that is made in Australian walkways when it's telling you to walk. And it goes like, and then they sampled that. And that's the thing that sounds like it's the percussion element of that sound. Oh, wow. So Adam, in the UK, we have a very brilliant, very impossible quiz show called Only Connect. I'm familiar, of course. Oh, brilliant. I feel we've got two transport-based musical facts.

27:06So we just need like two more and we can slip that over to those guys. I've got one more story that I'd love to just shove in here because it made me laugh, which is it's back to Germany, back to the German rail. In 2015, members of Germany's neo-Nazi National Democratic Party were on their way to Freiburg because they were going to do a protest. The police stopped them from getting on. There was about 20 of them who were getting on as part of this neo-Nazi party. But it just so happened that that train was full of a far left ultra football support group. So they went, OK, we'll get the next train, actually.

27:43And so they did get the next train. But confusingly, that platform just had a train going to a completely different place in a completely different direction. And so they ended up in Mannheim and ended up having to cancel the protest altogether because they just were in a different bit of the country. So yeah, I just love that idea of is there any worse group of people to jump on a train with if you're the opposing side than a group of ultra-left supporter football fans. I feel like they would just sort of get together and gel over the state of the Deutsche Bahn. Yes, me. And eventually the entire political problem will just disappear.

28:19Yeah, it's the unifier.

28:25okay it is time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is that female london marathon runners are 20 slower than boston marathon runners but they urinate 170 quicker quicker okay how did they find this out well this is due to the fact first of all the boston marathon is overall downhill so it's not even you can't even use it for world record attempts because it's theoretically slightly easier than the other marathons and it's all relative because it's not easy but like easier than some of the others but the urine thing is due to a company called Pequel, which is a women's event urinal company.

29:14And they've come up with these new urinals, which are at the London Marathon. And they are basically, you go in, shorts down, squat, and then leave. And so they're much quicker than using the previous portaloos that they had, which means people can pee much quicker. And the great thing about them as well is that they take the urine and they can turn it into fertilizer and the 2024 London Marathon could theoretically have fertilized enough wheat to bake 3 ,142 loaves of bread according to this company NPK Recovery who do that. So it's like a great story of urine and saving the planet and running.