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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we get going, we've got a quick, exciting announcement, which is that two of our colleagues, Jack and Manu, along with their chef friend, Rosie McKean, have just launched a brand new podcast called Lunchbox.
envy yes it's all the most interesting weird incredible facts about specific foods every episode is based around a food stuff so bananas or garlic or sausages there are a couple of episodes already out now more be released very soon they really are fantastic you might have heard jack and manu the elves on our spin-off show meet the elf they obviously have the bona fide research credentials of qi elves and then rosie really knows what she's talking about in the kitchen
I've learned so many amazing things off the back of listening to these episodes. All the things that they pull out of their lunchboxes make you just go, what the hell is that? Jack, for example, pulls out a chocolate garlic bar, which was used by the British Secret Services in the war. I'd never heard of it.
before you get these amazing untold histories but also good advice on food yes in fact as a result i have started slow cooking sausages find out why the good thing about the good advice is they don't just tell you what to do they tell you why certain things work it is jam packed jam packed yeah very good jam packed with interesting facts from why food tastes better if you eat it with your hands there you go toddlers you've got it right so how you can turn peanut butter into
diamonds and make your fortune. Go and listen to it right now. Go to qi.com slash lunchbox or wherever podcasts are available. That's right. So do check it out. Lunchbox Envy out now. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and James Harkin. 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, that is Anna. My fact this week is that every time your heart beats, your memory gets worse, but you become better at firing a gun. Better at firing a what? Sorry, better at firing a gun.
Better at firing or what? I see, I see what's happening. You see why I'm doing that? Yeah, you've exposed some obvious flaws in the system. Your heart beats a lot. And I don't feel like I lose my memory every second and a bit. You are. I think this is useful information to know. So if you're ever doing certain things, always do it on the offbeat.
other things, do it on the onbeat. And I found this a really interesting study I came across about the cardiac cycle, basically, which is the cycle of how your heart beats, which says that in systole, which is when it's beating, basically it triggers these... baroreceptors, which are nerves in your blood vessels.
which clock that the blood vessel is stretching because the heart's just beat, the blood vessel stretches, the bioreceptors send a message to the brain going, right, the blood vessels have stretched. This is how much, this is what's going on. And it sets off all this activity in your brain.
every time your heart beats. And all that activity in your brain, which is giving your brain all the information about exactly how much your heart's beat, how hard, how fast, how much the vessel's expanded, that drowns out loads of other stuff that's happening in your brain. So you get worse.
at lots of stuff, like your memory gets worse. How do they test this, Anna? That's a very good question. They rig people up to ECGs and they do things like really scare them or they get them to fire a gun. So they have more heartbeats. Is that what you mean? No, so they test exactly whether they're on systole or diastole, if their heart's beating or not beating, and then they scare them with something, and if their heart's on an onbeat...
then their reaction will be slightly slower. And they had people in a rifle range and they logged them up to ECGs and they did the same thing. I've got two questions. One, memory. Is this long-term memory or is it memory in the moment that it's making work?
It's memory in the moment. So I think they'd say, what's Ernzo's name? What's the name of the person who was sat next to you yesterday, Dan? And then on the onbeat, you'd be a bit less. Dan is not going to remember that in any circumstances. Question two was to do with the gun. So I'd read a... study a while ago which is that apparently snipers like to take their shot in between heartbeats how interesting yeah so they've been doing it wrong yeah who's that's why they keep missing
uh yes yeah um well it's a technique that they do which is it's a bit of meditation prior to it slow breathing they time the shot um apparently if you your heartbeat is raised and it's much higher than the blood pressure on your trigger finger like pulses will come in there might make you pull a shot slightly differently if you ever watch biathlon which is cross-country skiing and then shooting
Not at the same time. Not at the same time. And that is the critical point because your heart rate gets really, really high because you're doing this really big exercise and then you have to shoot. And the best players, the best...
people like johannes tingas bohr people like that he would like really lower lower lower his heart rate and you can see it they often have it on the screen it'll say what their heart rate is and you can see it going down down down and they won't shoot immediately they'll let the heartbeat go
and then they'll shoot. That's really cool. And that makes sense to make the heartbeat go down, I guess, because you're more focused, you're more relaxed. I've watched my own heartbeat during surgery. What? Yeah. As in the actual heart itself? No, I haven't seen my physical heart pumping away. I mean, on a screen. I was having a minor operation, which I was allowed to stay awake for. Right.
You can see it. And they sort of accidentally left the screen like pointing a bit at my face. So I was trying to muck around and speed it up and slow it down. It's great fun. Were they inside? They have something inside your body. Oh, yeah.
Oh, yeah. But you didn't have an open heart surgery, did you? I said a minor operation. I like to play it cool, but even I would probably say that's a medium-sized operation. And when they actually put the extension in your penis, did your heart rate go up? It made that noise like a slide. Can I just say the potential reason for this evolutionarily, which I also think is really cool. And just to let you know, so when your heart does a beat.
Your sensitivity to pain goes down. You have a worse memory for words. Your concentration is less good. You've got higher fear response, so you're more afraid, more intense reaction, but your reactions are slower. And then on the offbeat, you have a stronger grip.
So you're stronger, you're more accurate at firing a gun, and your eyes flicker around more. And weirdly, I didn't know, what happens is when you're under threat, what do you think happens to your heart rate? Speeds up. Incorrect. What? Isn't this incredible? Immediately after you're under threat, usually your heartbeat for a second slows down, apparently in an evolutionary sense. And that's because for a second, it needs to be on the offbeat.
more often so when your heartbeat goes slower it's more often on the offbeat um so that you can have fast reactions and process information more so you process everything around you and then it speeds up a lot because as soon as you've done that then it's on the on beat and then
Then you're really good at firing a gun or punching someone or gripping something. I would have thought it would be a part of just trying to be quiet, like more quiet so they don't find you. Not having that pumping heartbeat. Just as psychologically, you'd be like, you can hear, you know, you'd be like.
Can I just ask for clarification? If your heartbeat slows down and you go from 100 beats to 50 beats, that means you also have 50 off beats in a minute. So does that not mean you have fewer off beats as opposed to more? I think it's more time is spent on and off. So you've got a longer offbeat. Because like an onbeat is always going to be the same amount of time your heart takes to go. But.
To pump the blood out, right? But then between them, there's a longer gap. So the offbeat is actually the gap between your heart pumping and not pumping. Exactly. And this was only in one study that it said usually the fear response causes your heart to immediately slow down and speed.
up and I couldn't find it many other places but I thought that was fascinating. That was very cool. Heartbeats are something that I didn't realise play quite a feature role in the world of music. Heartbeats is a single by Steps. There you go. Is that what you're thinking? That's not what I'm thinking. I mean, artists recording their heartbeats or their of their children and putting them into songs have been used multiple times. You've got them in Prince songs, in John Lennon, very...
sadly released it as part of uh an ultrasound uh heartbeat to a child that unfortunately didn't make it full term um but so many bands um max cavallera from sepultura he did it um interestingly Taylor Swift did it for one of her songs, right?
and uh it was a song that was re-recorded as you might remember taylor swift had this huge moment whereby she had her manager claim all of her music so she went and re-recorded every single album i do remember yeah so one of these songs her heartbeat and so she had to replicate the sound recording of her heartbeat so she's got twice recorded heartbeats into tracks but they all get listed in the song credits on heartbeat taylor swift very nice yeah so he means you get more money
yeah exactly that's like Phil Collins do you remember Phil Collins didn't he do an album where it was all Phil Collins And I think he put himself in the credits as everything. So he played like the kazoo when he played it. Huge kazoo guy. You can't just add a triangle and get paid a whole extra bit, can you?
We can. That's the whole idea. So Simon Cowell, that was a story that he would play a minor instrument, like one cowbell noise, and that would be writer's credits on the songs to all his artists that he would get. And that's why we renamed it the Cowbell. But no one knows. It's so beautiful. Very good. When your heart rate synchronizes. We've briefly mentioned before, I think, that it's choirs, their heartbeats all synchronize. It's pretty cool. That is cool. When...
You go to the theatre, your heart also synchronises with the people around you. And it lasts into the interval.
Everyone goes out into the interval with their hearts speeding up, sort of going at the same rate. I wonder why we all go to the toilet at exactly the same moment when there's like five minutes left before the second half. Because our hearts is the problem, isn't it? That's the problem. But so that's saying that... movie has a heart rate yes basically it does so you could actually probably that you know we talked before about how you could do
cpr singing a certain type of song because it's the right bpm in order to do it there probably is like if you want to go to a movie that puts you on this heart rate no because it'll go up and down so you'd be because if it was titanic you know as the ship cracks in half you suddenly have to double the rate of cpr oh yeah but i'm
sure there's some like how long you have to do movies where you can just sit for if you're like if it's something really tedious like june 2 it's too slow the person would die but if it's something really exciting yeah then I mean, you don't need to do it for, how long do you need to do CPR for normally? I've done 45 seconds now. I'm afraid we've watched the whole of the climactic fight scene in Gladiator, so I am going to be clocking off.
Pig hearts. You know how we were all going to get pig hearts a while ago? Oh, yeah. That's going to be the big thing. I know. I was so excited. It's so complicated, the process. Because basically pigs are very similar to people in lots of ways physiologically. And there was an idea that we were going to be able to trans... plant pig hearts into people and that was
going to be, because there are loads of, I mean, there are hundreds of millions of pigs around the world. Sure. Just sitting there with their hearts beating away and around, oink oink. We're not using them for anything, right? Let's steal their hearts for us.
It's pretty sinister as a species. Anyway, but it turns out you have to do so much stuff. You have to make the pig more human before you do this. How do you do that? Dress it out. Give it a newspaper. Bring it to the movies. My grandma, what big trotters you have. So, no, you can't just take a heart out of a pig and shove it in a person. You have to take a pig, right? Remove three of its genes.
Knock out some growth hormones So you have dressed it up Knock out some growth hormones Add a couple of other genes Then you have to keep the pig nice and clean So it doesn't get any pig bacteria Then you breed from that pig And you make these GM embryos uh you put them in surrogate cells and then you have to give the mummy pig a c-section so that it doesn't get contaminated at all and then those piglets have to be bred up until they're big enough wow and those are then the sort of
a bit more human pigs. They've had no contact with the outside world, no external viruses. Those are the ones. And has anyone ever had this? I think two people have and they both didn't survive. Well, one of them built a house out of straw and the other one built a house out of sticks and they never made it. No wonder we don't use it.
you gotta it's like we found a match we now just have to get it pregnant um buy it dinner first let it birth some and then take their hearts and that's right a couple of people have had it but i think that didn't it didn't um i think the reason is like hearts in all mammals are kind of the same, aren't they really?
right they're all work the same way with electrical impulses and they have sodium and potassium that make the electricity happen and they're all kind of the same so that's the idea is it right that we have a billion beats all mammals three billion we've got roughly the same We do. Humans get about three billion. Humans get a bit more, basically, because our life is longer because we have invented indoors. And indoors is a more relaxing environment.
But like we're similar enough that we have roughly the same. You do, but it's not like you have that number. Like Donald Trump thinks that you have a certain number and if you use them up, then that's when you die. And that's why he doesn't like to do any exercise apart from play golf. And I think a few other famous people. thought that maybe neil armstrong thought that
I think, I think, yeah, yeah, no, there's a quote. I think, I think they've looked into it. Maybe as a joke, he said, you only get a certain amount and I'm damned if I'm going to use all mine running up and down the street. Oh, well, that's fair enough. That's a funny line. That's interesting. When you're playing golf, because it is reduced, is it better to play in the game?
Well, you know what? I'd never thought that before, but I'm going to try that next time on the course. Yeah. I think it is why small animals don't live as long, isn't it? Because as a small animal, your heart beats faster and so use them up. And I've got one last thing before we move on. Have you guys heard of the Intimacy 2.0 dress? No. No? Okay, let me guess. It's a dress you wear. Correct. And two people wear it, and it syncs your heartbeats, and it changes colour.
with the heartbeat so you can see that each is flashing at the same time and that you're in sync. Is it like a dress version of... paddles, basically. Aggressively stops your heart and restarts it. Does it change colour? Does it go transparent if your heart rate rises? Is that what Kanye West's partner was wearing? She was just so excited to be at the Grammys, her heart was going 10 a second. But it's basically that, so it's a dress that you would wear, obviously no one is wearing it.
this as far as i can tell and it's got a neckline that plunges to the midriff which if your heart rate rises and you're out on a date it slowly makes the dress more transparent around these yeah sort of like the cleavage area and so on in order to
Yeah. So it's just enhancing. In the woods, you're wearing it and you're threatened by a lion. Now the lion's seen your naked flesh exposed. That makes the situation even worse. Well, fortunately, when you're panicked, your heart rate goes down. So you should be fine. Good point. Have you learned nothing from this section? Where did she go?
Stop the podcast Stop the podcast Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Monzo Yes, that's right So it's like Kenny High Street Bank, but Unlike many other banks, Monzo has pots.
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On with the show. Jesus, on with the show. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is... James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 2023, a team mapping the ocean floor announced they may have found Amelia Earhart's plane. In 2024, they announced it was actually a plane-shaped pile of rocks. Could they not have looked a bit closer the first time round? Got a second opinion. It's at the bottom of the sea, Anna. It's amazing they found...
Such a plane-shaped pile of rocks. It would have been cool if they had just announced we found a wicked pile of rocks shaped like a plane down there. But they had to go a bit further and say it's one of the most famous lost planes ever. Yeah, so this is Amelia Earhart. We've mentioned her once or twice before. She was flying around the world in 1937, and she was about 100 miles from a place called Howland Island, which is in Carabas.
And she started running out of fuel and we never heard from her again, basically. She gave one last radio call and then disappeared. And for the subsequent 90 years, people have been wondering what's happened to her. Yeah. And she was really, she was world famous, wasn't she? An incredibly celebrated aviatrix. Yeah, prior to the disappearance as well, which is often sometimes these things make you.
She'd broken so many records and things like that. And she'd done a lot of trips, which was the first time a woman might have made those flights and things like that. She was amazing. And this is a group called Deep Sea Vision. The CEO, Tony Romeo, who's a former US Air Force intelligence.
officer said that they'd found these rocks said that they found this plane or what they thought was a plane and then they've done a bit more work and they realized that it is some rocks and tony said talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature yeah and i can only agree because it was yeah it's 100 miles from howland island right so if you see a plane shape
I don't mean to be morbid, but when a plane hits the water, it often, especially a 1930s plane, it might not stay looking like a pristine plane all the way to the ocean bottom, you know? Absolutely. So what were they using to see it? Was it like a sonar thing that sent back a vague shape?
It does look pretty good. Is it very plainly? It's even got a little tail fin on it. It looks very plain-like. It was a huge search for her at the time. The US Navy did a lot of searching. They even sent, I think, an aircraft carrier to the region.
which had 63 aircraft on it. So, you know, all those planes can go out making trips. I thought you meant like an empty one, optimistically hoping to carry her aircraft back. Yeah, and it cost them about 4 million US dollars at the time, which is about 90 million US dollars. as today um this and of course they didn't find her and actually that became kind of the end of celebrity aviation because at that time
There were loads of celebrity flyers who were doing loads of crazy stunts and everyone, they're on the front page of all the newspapers. But when Amelia Earhart disappeared, Congress decided to make it illegal for the Navy to spend any money on search and rescue. And when they did that...
Everyone just stopped caring a little bit. Yeah, there were all these psychics who were claiming that they were in touch with her. And the family were looking for anything. So they were going to see psychics and hoping to follow up on things. There was this story that we mentioned briefly, which was the Tokyo Rose story.
It's the idea that the Japanese had got hold of Amelia Earhart, she was captured, and she was putting out propaganda, radio news about what was going on in the war. So Tokyo Rose was real, right? Yeah. But they were saying that that was her. They were saying it was her, but what's interesting...
interesting is her husband, because she was married, Emilio Hartz, a guy called George Putnam, he actually made a three-day trek through a Japanese-held territory so that he could get to a U.S. Marine radio station to confirm whether or not it was her voice. So it was taken really seriously.
by the immediate family some of these some of these theories i think that was one of the ones that vaguely sane people believe yeah the person who was in charge of the island i have to say i find that amelia airheart searches i have a real blank like with jack the ripper on them i'm like god get her life guys a lot of them no
offence. Also, welcome to the podcast. We appreciate you listening. It's so interesting you've made these people your bête noire, Anna. Relatively benign-minded people trying to solve a classic mystery. New enemies of the podcast. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry.
You can buy stuff from their website. Look, I'll advertise for them. They sell little, they sell t-shirts, they sell badges if you want to help fund their expeditions. Each trip costs up to $500,000 to go and uncover another rusty jackknife or compact mirror.
the ocean that you say belong to Amelia Earhart sounds good okay hey I've got um so just on sort of the ocean and the mysteries of the ocean yeah uh something that I read about which is a big problem for a lot of boats out in the open sea now is UFOs. Oh no.
Unidentified floating objects. So this is to do with container ships. And container ships, when they're in rough seas, they can lose. So many containers have gone missing. There was an estimate between 1985 and 2007, five to six million containers.
units would be floating. Wow, that's mental. Yeah. Do they all float? They do for a while, so they can for a few weeks. If a container is up to 80% full, then you've got enough air in there for it to... But they're not airtight, so they will eventually seep water and go...
down so a lot of ships just say that if they're out these come out of nowhere because they're not mapped right so you're dodging ufos all the way through the ocean when it's yeah we're just constantly losing giant containers off the back of ships um other mysterious things in the ocean. Well, one big ocean mystery is, you know all the plastic in the ocean? Yes. Where is it?
Not nearly enough there. It's in the garbage patch, isn't it? Well, not nearly enough, James. What do you mean? Let's get going. Let's get more in there, guys. Yeah, what is the problem you're trying to solve here, Anna? Wash this plastic. It's in animals. No, we don't know. So you, well. We're starting to find out, but basically 99% of the plastic that should be in the ocean is not in the ocean.
We keep on looking and most of what is there is in the garbage patch. But a lot of that is kind of old plastic and we don't know where the newer plastic's gone. Whereas you'd think the older plastic would be the stuff that degrades, if anything, and is getting smaller and disappearing. So when you say it's not there, sorry.
What do you mean? So in the surveys that we've done of the ocean, looking at how much ocean plastic there is, we haven't found nearly enough to equate with how much we estimate we've been flushing into the ocean. And it's called dark plastic and they equate it.
with dark matter. I knew, I knew that climate change was a hoax in this whole environmental push. I knew it. It's actually not, it doesn't equate with climate change, but it's not quite the same. No, but that's crazy. So is this, is this scary, Anna? Because like,
it's somewhere bad. No, it's actually somewhere good. Well, I think the latest research shows, and this is great news. Anna, this is a rollercoaster of a fact. I like to keep your heartbeats fluctuating. The latest research has got... a guy called Laurent Le Breton, who's an oceanographer who ran this big computer model looking at how the plastic that we know about gets distributed, where it lands in the ocean, where it floats to and stuff.
He's concluded that the vast majority of macroplastics and microplastics, so big and small bits, rather than being lost in the middle of the ocean or deep down where we don't know, they actually all wash up.
on beaches and are buried in shorelines or are right on the coastline. Interesting. Which to me says, great, I always thought we can't get that plastic back. I can't row out to sea and get it back. But if all you need to do is go to a beach. That's great. We just need to pick up the baby turtles that's choked to death on the beach.
It's not under the beach. It's the lugworms who are getting it. Oh, no. I know the lug. The poor lugs. No one talks about them. And it's going to turn out the lugworms were the keystone species keeping this whole thing going. And we'll be sorry. That's really interesting, though. It just seems more accessible, doesn't it? Well, does it make sense? it easier for us to deal with if we
if we can work out technologies to do that. I understand animals will die, obviously, but like... I think really the problem is stopping it from entering the oceans in the first place. But I mean, I think once it gets to the coast, to me, I mean, this is new research, but it seems like it would be easier to access once it's not in the middle of... nowhere feels like it so get to your beach people with a bucket and speed yeah nice um have you guys heard of dark oxygen
Dark oxygen. So by extension, there's not as much oxygen as we thought there should be. And some of it's missing. This is stuff that's found on the ocean floor. And it's produced... This dark oxygen by Battery Rocks? These are the nodules, metallic nodules, that are all over huge chunks of the ocean floor around the world. And they make oxygen without light. They do it chemically.
so they split the water molecules around them into hydrogen and oxygen so that's insane i mean that's that's the source of electric it's like we would make on Oh, for no chemistry lesson. Electrolysis. It's crackers. Yeah, yeah. Are these connected to ocean farts? No. Sure, we'll come onto those in a minute. I just love the idea of Andy doing a lecture and Dan sitting on the front row with questions like that. If you could put your hand down until we end up.
We will have a question and answer session in writing. Please go on. How can I possibly continue talking about something really interesting about ocean farts? And that's how the disruptive kids do it. Yeah. This is why no one learns anything. No, it's just interesting because there's a... huge debate at the moment, I'm sure you're all keeping up with it, in the International Seabed Authority about mining the ocean floor. Are we going to do it? Should we definitely not do it? And...
Well, the problem is, one of the big problems is, obviously, logically, you say we shouldn't do it, but it contains so much stuff like lithium that you need. If everyone's going to have an electric car, you need these minerals and where you're going to get them from. So it's like this weird sort of balance, isn't it?
them from land which we know causes some damage do we get them from the ocean where we really have no idea what effect it would have might be none might be absolutely like why not just do it assuming it'll be done that's really big the ocean oh it's huge yeah so but it is a really big debate at the moment so wait these batteries how are they are we mining these big these big ocean floor batteries these are the nodules that people
want to mine because they contain these metals and so it's being debated at the moment and it was found in a study which was funded by a mining firm which is desperate to mine the ocean. And then it turned out, oh, these might be a really important source of oxygen for all kinds of life. And so they were furious that they'd accidentally funded this study. One of the problem is that they are mostly found in something that's called silicious ooze.
Silicious ooze is this kind of really low sediment at the bottom of the ocean, but it accumulates about one to three millimeters every thousand years. Wow. So once you dig it up, it's going to take a while to get back. Oh, because we're probably going to dig faster than that. Because we dig faster than one to three millimeters, don't we? My company is suggesting that we will do faster than that. And I'm invested.
interesting well there is one kind of ocean drilling which is good and that's the scientific research kind And the first mission was really cool. It was in 1957 and it was organized by this group called the American Miscellaneous Society. I love them already. They are so cool. They're like the Ig Nobel's of their time. They were a bunch of geologists and oceanographers.
who just wanted to get together and have weird ideas. Anyway, there was this thing called Project Mohol, which they started, which was to investigate the Mohorovicic discontinuity. It sounds sci-fi, doesn't it? Yeah. Savage itch discontinuity has been producing dark oxygen. It does sound like someone who thought, I'm going to write it as a Russian name. And they go, no, no, that's not Russian enough. Let's put another itch at the end. There are too many O's and too many itches in it for me.
to be honest but that's this bit between the crust of the earth and the mantle where suddenly seismic waves start moving much faster and it was the only reason we knew back then that there was an earth's crust so these guys the miscellaneous society were like well let's go and dig into the ocean
and find out what's happening. It ended up being a failure, but it started off this thing that happens today a lot where we dig into the ocean floor and pull up all these cores and find out loads of cool stuff. And the person who came along with them to write about it and to report about it... was oceanography fan and big lover of the sea. Taking a guess? James Cameron. Ah, he, I think in a former life, maybe this is who he was. Oh, Jack Cousteau. In 57. Ooh. Jack Cousteau. Yeah.
No. I can give you a clue by saying one of the letter books he wrote was called Steinbeck and Ricketts Sea of Cortez. So John Steinbeck. So it was John Steinberg. He absolutely loved the sea and oceanography. Really? So he hopped on board this research boat and reported on it. That's so good. Mentioning Jacques Cousteau, the calypso.
and his efforts of ocean mapping as some of the greatest that we've ever had. On his ship. Was the Calypso his ship? The Calypso was the ship. It was a very famous ship. And he had three tanks that would be there to take out to sea. So you had the diesel to run.
the ship you had the water to drink what do you think his third tank was probably ocean farts which he's bottled yes along the way thank you for reminding me we didn't we didn't pick up on my question it's just like bilge water to keep him waste water So to not pollute the sea? No. Is it just whiskey or something? It's wine. He had a giant wine tank attached to the ship in order to... For drinking? Of course for drinking. Right, not for some kind of fuel purpose. It's Jacques Cousteau.
He's going to be, and his French buddies, drinking as their... Amazing. Have you guys heard of, while we're talking about weird rock formations, do you guys know about the Ararat anomaly? So Mount Ararat. Mount Ararat, yes. Above land.
It's above land. Oh, is it that there are loads of fossils that should be ocean things on Mount Ararat? There are those, but that's not what this is. This is, if people have taken photos of the snow near the summit of Mount Ararat, there's something that looks very much like Noah's...
arc brilliant uh and if you see the pictures you can kind of see where they're coming from i mean they're very fuzzy but the interesting thing is this was classified as secret for the u.s air force from 1949 until the 90s wow And it's in snow. It's like a snow arc. It's kind of, it's basically just a jagged bit of rock. It's an arc shaped pile of rocks. Precisely. Yeah, why do you think it was classified as secret for so long? Because it might provoke religious conflict.
interesting because obviously a lot of believers think that this is evidence that the bible is true yeah but no that wasn't it okay uh it's much more quotidian much more boring than that people might visit and they didn't want to Basically, it's on the border of the Soviet Union. And so there was lots of things happening around there between America and the Soviet Union. So they didn't want any photos coming out.
But obviously the conspiracy theorists were like, oh, what are you hiding? What are you hiding? Yeah, Noah's up. Noah's in there. You're keeping him prisoner. I've got one last thing. It's very silly, but I was looking into people and how they managed to survive. the ocean once they've been lost and people are out looking for them. So there was a group of people, eight men and seven women, and they were stuck out on a sort of life raft situation. No one there to save them. They have no water.
How do they survive? And they manage 12 days. Huge barrel of wine floats up. How long did they manage? I think they were out there for 12 days. Like drinking turtle blood. So we're in that territory. They've got to find a source of food. Drinking the little... of liquid you get in a fish's eye we've said that before where were they we covered turtle blood enemas in the past yeah turtle blood enemas uh they were on a journey to puerto rico okay so
one of the people on the boat was faustina mercedes she had back at home a one-year-old daughter which meant she was still lactating she was lactating and so she offered up her breasts to everyone on the boat. And every day... How many people were on the boat? There were a lot. There was a cruise ship. 2,000 people queuing up every day. Eight men, seven women. Every day they would take a quick couple of sips and then that was just keeping them at bay. And in order to feed herself, her sister.
would go on the breast and then pass the milk back to her oh clever yeah wait does that keep her going does that it feels like it certainly wouldn't it doesn't make any sense it doesn't make any sense i know many people have pointed this out but it's producing milk out of nowhere but it's what it deals with your dry mouth you know it's basically they're very very slowly cannibalizing this woman yes yeah yeah that's motherhood she must have been
quite saggy by the end was she when she got back she said she was unable to feed her own child because of the um it was pretty traumatic it was pretty unsurprising it was weird yeah well it is weird it is weird i'm with her on that one It's also the ending of, loop it right around, The Grapes of Wrath. It is! The Grapes of Wrath ends with a lady...
It ends with a young lady suckling an old man who's starving to death. It's the Dust Bowl America. That is the final scene. That's an incredible full circle. I am only 100 pages into The Grapes of Wrath. 10 years ago, fine. I never got any. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that when the Forbidden City in China had its first telephone installed, it was first used by the Emperor to make prank phone calls.
This was the last emperor of China, known as Puyi. And after having the phone installed, he went through a phone book. He found one of his favorite opera singers, a guy called Yang Xiaolu. And he called him up and he said, is this the great operatic singer? And he said, yes. And then he just giggled and hung up. He hadn't developed the pranks.
That's not Bart Simpson level. The second one is closer to sort of teenage pranking. He would call up local restaurants and he would order a bunch of food to an address that wasn't the Forbidden City. Here's a question. It sounds like everyone in the country had telephones apart from him.
Yeah, possibly. I mean, well, you know, the Emperor was kind of isolated from the rest of the world. They were sort of, no one was really allowed into the Forbidden City who weren't part of the system. Okay, you should probably explain who he was then. Well, yes. So he was the, he was no longer really the Emperor by the... time we're talking about when he was a teenager. So he was born in 1906, he became the emperor in 1908, and he was deposed in 1911.
Because he, you know, he'd done such a terrible job. Yeah, and he screwed everything up. He'd thrown his ties out of the pram or something. It's like having Boris Johnson in charge over there. Yeah, but he was allowed to stay in a palace. and keep living as though he were the supreme authority even though he wasn't so it's really strange well he's a figurehead wasn't he that is a bit like boris johnson and dominic cummings isn't it
Yeah, exactly. It's exactly that. I'll let you stay. But when he asked for his phone in the first place, he was told there is nothing in the ancestral regulations to provide for this. Because obviously his ancestors hadn't had them saying, well, I've got to have a phone. You've got to predict these things. It was a really weirdly old-fashioned...
His father said it would upset imperial dignity if outside voices could ring in to the palace. So there was controversy about it. There was, absolutely. And this was, he only really knew about the phones because he had a British tutor who was a guy called Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston. Not a sir at the time, I don't think, but he became the English tutor to Puyi.
And he was the one who mentioned it. He was like, you've got these things called phones. And he said, I'd love one. Dronson got pranked all the time by Puyi. Puyi was constantly ringing up the man who'd got him the phone. Because kind of he was his only friend. I got the impression. So that's kind of sad. And I'm sure Johnston pretends to be really upset or amused every time. I think what we're going to find is that this is a pretty tragic story, isn't it? This guy, very young, made an emperor.
turned out to be an utter, utter arsehole, but probably a victim of circumstance because he was left on his own the whole time. That's the thing. The whole thing feeds on itself. It's like no one comes out good in this story. I just want to stick up for Puyi. Oh yeah. Because I've got this book out of the library. Yep. It's From Emperor to Citizen. Oh yes. And it's his memoir. Oh yeah. And I've been reading it.
And he, you know, it's actually a lot funnier than we're all giving it credit for. Does he mention all the stuff about constantly whipping eunuchs just for the sake of having fun of watching that? And beating them to death. Does he mention it when his wife had a child with another man? And then he had that baby stolen and killed Is that in there? Is that part of the funny stuff? Okay, I haven't read the whole thing Yeah
He's a bad dude. No, he does mention the eunuch stuff, though, because that was his whole big repentance thing, his memoirs, at the end of his life, was when he said, I'm sorry for all this. There's an entire chapter called The Eunuchs, because he lived surrounded by eunuchs.
There were a few hundred and even that was a substantial cut down from the glory days Substantial cut down to make those eunuchs in the good old days there were thousands and thousands of you look just look eunuchs page 61 just a great section on you know the eunuchy life he lived that's pretty funny until he was 10 years old he only played hide and seek with his own eunuchs
He was very isolated growing up. He had siblings, but he didn't see his own mother for years and years and years because he was taken away to live in the... He wasn't the... child of the previous emperor. The previous emperor was his uncle. That's right. So there was the Empress Dowager, who's a very famous character in ancient Chinese. Yeah, Su Shi, who's this amazing person. And she, when the emperor had passed away, there was no child in order to take over.
So this was the nephew. But there were moments of levity in his childhood. I just think there were a few. So just get this. If you ever went to the park, this is the process of how it would happen. He would have a eunuch walking ahead of him, basically honking with his mouth to say, everyone keep away. He was like a sort of...
one-man beep-beep-beep system. Well, they hadn't invented the klaxon horn, had they over there yet? Not yet, no. So you needed the eunuch. A rare example of China not inventing something first, just because the eunuch system works so well. Then there would be two chief eunuchs going kind of...
crab wise sideways just keeping an eye on everything then there would be junior eunuchs with him there would be a eunuch with a canopy then more eunuchs holding a chair a change of clothes some umbrellas some cakes some hot water
Then there were the medical eunuchs who came behind them. We've all been to the beach with our kids. We know how much you have to take, how many eunuchs you need. And then at the end is the eunuch with the... the loo or the eunuchs several eunuchs with commodes and chamber pots and things and but when he was a kid he would just run around and this caused absolute mayhem because the whole procession was trying to keep up with
A five-year-old boy who was just running around in a park. Can I do an incredibly quick This Is His Life? So on the throne at two, kicked off the throne at six, but got to be pretend emperor until early mid-1920s, at which point he was booted out. by a warlord, hung out being a playboy who used to be the emperor, shagging around a bit.
Until 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, thought, we'll pluck this former emperor, put him in charge, apparently, but he's our puppet. He had no power, but he got to keep living this weird, fake royal life. So he continued being pampered and... petted, having people wait on him. No power. Then Japanese surrender 1945. He's...
He's fucked because the Soviets come. They put him in prison for five years. Then they hand him over to the Chinese who re-educate him. The communists at this point. Who are communists, re-educate him. He comes out, bona fide communist and ends his life for Gardner. Mad life. It is a mad life.
And re-education is like being in a jail cell, right? Like it's your... It's like going back to school now. You're being conditioned. Yeah, it's like a British boarding school. Maybe that's why I think all this sounds absolutely par for the course. We were constantly firing air guns at the...
eunuchs at my school And the final bit of life where he became a gardener, it's fascinating just reading how useless he was in day-to-day activities where he would sort of forget to flush a toilet or know any directions or all these basic things that you would... Shoelaces. Yeah, shoelaces. Someone's just done his shoes for his whole life. I found it...
I really question this, but I mean, all the historians say that when he was being re-educated by China, it was partly to say, be a communist and apologise for uniting with the Japanese. And it was partly to say, here's how to look after yourself. And they taught him to tie his shoelaces and brush his teeth. was breastfed until the age of eight yeah and at that point the dowager the powerful dowager said i think
Probably time we removed your wet nurse from you, which made him very sad because he, I believe, was still enjoying it. But he was stranded out in the Pacific at the time, wasn't he? Had no other sustenance. If you... were the Empress Dowager in this weird fake palace situation. First of all, what is an Empress Dowager? So she's the widow of the Emperor who...
is now in a senior position, kind of like a regent. She's got a lot of authority, but she's not technically... So she basically runs everything. Exactly. But she's putting in little puppets to do her work for her. Because arguably this guy, even though he was emperor three times...
he was never really in charge at any stage absolutely he just wasn't in charge so yeah the dowager would have been the one really controlling things saying i think maybe we should stop breastfeeding you now that kind of thing um
Or more like, I think maybe we should invade Mongolia now. Yeah, exactly. They had this... thing in the palace and again this is after the first revolution so they're not really in charge anymore but they're still treated with a lot of respect there was an as you wish lodge which was one of the 48 offices that the staff were working in and if the empress dowager decided she wanted to do some painting
The staff at the lodge would make her the painting already. They basically made her a paint by numbers and she just had to fill in the colours and put a title on it. What a great service. How cool was that? Wow. I want that. He married five times. which was easier to fit in when you're allowed multiple marriages at once, as you were. But again, this seemed like an unfair trick. This is in 1921. So when he was being like pretend emperor with no power, he was shown five...
photos of women. It used to be that the emperor had women paraded in front of him and got to choose. But because he's been downgraded, he just got photos. And he was asked, choose who you like best. He picked one. And then they chatted amongst themselves. The other people at court went, no, she's not fit enough. No. And they made him marry the other one. So he did get a second wife from a different photo. But on the day of marriage, he then also married...
This first choice. He had two marriages on the same day? On the same day. That's a sitcom ready to be written, isn't it? Do you know what? It sounds so unfunny, their lives. I want you to inject some gags in those movies. If anyone has any objection and you're hoping the concubine hasn't...
turned up to your wedding or your wife hasn't turned up to the concubine marriage i think this is yeah they were really young weren't they these young women who were brought in uh the last one who was called lee yuchin She was, I think she was 14 or something when she became the last imperial consort and the emperor was quite old at this time.
comparatively old at this stage. But she said in an interview, she said she didn't even know how children were made at that stage. She believed what she was told by her mother that we were picked up from the rubbish bins.
I just think that's an unusual way of telling kids that that's where babies come from. It's good parenting and it's a story I've maintained. Well, I just think because we have like the stock comes and drops a baby at the front door. Cabbage patch is nice and fertility and growth.
Rubbish bins? Yeah. To be fair, this is an almost entirely eunuch-based society. It's very hard to actually get a handle on where children come from in this world. But he doesn't seem to have been especially actually interested in women. No. Well, he used to have blazing rounds with his wife. both wives and all five wives about. They would sometimes refer to him as a eunuch because of his lack of prowess in the bedroom on the honeymoon night.
He had both of his first wives, so the wife and the consort, in the same bed waiting for him. And when he went in, the story goes he ran out of the room. And they don't know if there was much... With any consummation happening. I'm hearing sitcom. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. The running in and running out certainly has an element of farce. His last wife seemed like quite a sweet story. So this was in the 1960s.
He started off working as a street sweeper. So the Chinese re-educated him, then pardoned him. He became a street sweeper. And there's a very sad story of him getting lost. And he has to approach his former subjects and say, hello, I used to be the emperor. I don't know how to get home. He should just follow the clean streets.
If he goes back in the direction that all the clean streets are, he knows that's where he came from. The thing is, James, he was so bad at all these tasks, he hadn't actually effectively cleaned the streets. I think it's like the reverse of following the breadcrumbs. Yeah. That's beautiful. Follow the lack of breadcrumbs.
But then he married this woman who was a nurse and they stayed together forever. And I think she didn't die until 1997. And she said he was just desperate for someone to love him, which after that life. Yeah. Yeah.
It's wild. So you find the story very depressing, Dan, which is fair. But actually, when he did write his memoirs at the end, which were heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and his free education, he did say he was... They come in for some very good press at the end of this book, I've got to say. He was at least contented with his current status as a repentant and devoted communist who loved the party. I did notice, Andy, that it is a little red button. Yes, it is.
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Because when it comes to your business, it's not just about keeping the lights on. It's about keeping everything secure. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is that the film Spider-Man once cast two crowds of identical twin extras so they could film the same scene at the same time in different places. That's amazing. Why? You know what? The first thing that comes into my head is that meme of all the Spider-Man points of each other.
this is a really weird thing that just happened to happen once in the annals of filming history and i got this because i was looking into um casting and how people are cast and how extras get cast in films and there was a woman called
jennifer bender who was the vice president of an extras firm about 10 years ago and she was being interviewed about her business and she said that this film they had two units shooting uh you know you have two unix uh there's a main unit and a second unit and they needed that yeah due to
just the nature of film it's so weird when you ask anyone about the world of film why that the the stuff is so weird they just say well it's just filming isn't it yeah it's basically they had to shoot this scene um
in two places at the same time because of the schedule they were on to get this filmed so they said well let's just cast twins so they got 25 sets of twins so one lot to one set so one lot to the other set dressed them the same that's really good that's really cool and one of the thing is that the twins they
like telepathically communicate to each other right so they can tell them what's happening in the other place. So when he said this fact and we were like wow why and you said you'll have to wait and see but what the answer is just Because they're really shit at making film schedules. Schedules. It's just, you know. I mean, surely it's easier to revamp the schedule. I've got to say, Andy's sort of amazing mystery is always going to end up, it was a matter of scheduling. Exactly.
Anna, you don't understand the nature of film. There are producers on your ass all the time saying, we've got to get this ready for the Hong Kong market in two weeks. There aren't that many identical twins in the world. We've got to do the reshoots. Get Chalamet now. I want five Chalamets.
On my desk tomorrow morning. You know, it's hard. That's film. Incredible. Yeah. So good. That's really cool. It's hard to be an extra. Oh, it sounds it. I've done extra work a couple of times. Have you? Yeah. Well, in this podcast. Wow. What did you do? I can't remember. It was a film with James McAvoy, which is quite exciting. Because you often don't know before you turn up what it's going to be. Yeah, right. Are they looking specifically for people with...
quite normal looking faces. Bland. Ideally, they want balloons on sticks. Oh, that is a thing, isn't it? Yeah. You can buy it like inflatable crowds for movies. No. Yeah. I think Seabiscuit famously, like that's where it started. I think that was the first one. Yeah. This guy called Joe.
who suddenly realised rather than organise loads of extras and have to pay them, you can just make inflatable people. Really? I think you've got 10,000 in the back of a lorry, which you can't do with extras. That's against you. union rules yeah it is i'm very annoying about that i really hope like in the background of like a movie like gladiator if you look carefully there's just a slowly flopping deflating floating away unfortunately
Weirdly, appendages cost extra. So he charges $50 for the bod, the torso. So is this from a big distance that you're shooting? Of course, because it couldn't be a scene where you've got people walking around. It's like crowd scenes, really. So Seabiscuit, they're running around a hotel. lost track, haven't they?
And what you do is you get loads of them and then you get some humans in between them and your eyes are naturally drawn to the humans. So the rest of it is just background. That's brilliant. It's amazing what we don't notice. I read about a movie that was made by actually an old buddy of mine.
called Anthony Ng, where he tracked down the lady who has the Guinness World Record for the most... extras appearances in movies so her record was 1951 and they're everything from she said she was on 80 percent of the carry-on films she was in the very first episode of eastenders she remembers
being on a set one day with a guy having a great chat at the lunch hall and then he's the lead in a movie years later it's david bowie who says hey we had a great chat and they reconnected through that so she sees people go up so her name's jewel goldston and
we know that she has appeared in 1951 movies certainly she had at that point for the record because her husband is an accountant and he marked down every time he just got obsessed with making sure that he had lists of what was going on yeah so there's a whole documentary about her and all her little
things that she learned along the way. Don't look at Tom Cruise when he's on set. Are we saying because her husband's an accountant, therefore sort of a really boring guy who loves tallying up mundane information? He just happened to do it. Yeah, he liked making Excel spreadsheets. Fair. Full respect. Yeah. That points at me. When you talk about a boring guy, it's offensive. When we say someone comes from Central Casting. Oh, yeah. That's a phrase, right?
Is it? It's a sort of, oh, he's straight out of Central Casting. I mean, someone's a bit of like a stock carrier. Or like if someone turns up and they're an accountant and they're wearing a grey suit and they're carrying a grey briefcase and they've got a rolled up umbrella. Central Casting is an actual company, which I didn't know. Yeah, that's so cool. And it's 100 years old this year because it started in...
100 years ago. 1925. You can do the math as well. Are you an accountant? Yeah, and that was the firm that Jennifer Bender was the vice president of. They place hundreds of that, even now. These days, they place hundreds of thousands of people a year. American-based or here? Certainly in America. And I think all over. And lots of people started out there. David Niven started out there. He's a famous actor. He was registered as Anglo-Saxon type number 2008.
And in the 1920s, extras were categorised into groups because you just needed a job lot of people who looked a particular way. And the groups included blonde, beautiful, Latin, nurses, swimmers, and toothless. Sometimes you could take a few boxes, didn't you? Beautiful but toothless. You know, I've got two gigs. The Lord of the Rings films have got a lot of extras in, haven't they? Famously. In fact, they pretty much...
cast everyone in New Zealand in those movies, I think. In Return of the King, they brought in some members of the New Zealand army. uh and apparently they were way too enthusiastic and kept breaking all the wooden swords and stuff but in the two towers they had a group of
apologies to people who like Lord of the Rings because I've never read any of them, but there's a group called the Uruk Hai, which is the orcs. Flawless. And they needed to get people to play them, so they put a casting call out for everyone over six foot tall.
in new zealand to come and play the uruk high and they couldn't find enough people so they said okay everyone who's over five foot can come in and they brought in all these like slightly shorter men and they were known on set as the uruk low Brilliant. Out. Out. Out. Having a fun day out as an expert on a movie. Can we get the oracle in? We would.
Do you know how many extras were used on those movies? It'd be in like the tens of thousands, right? Tens of thousands for sure. Yeah, so the one that gets cited as the movie that possibly will never get broken for most extras is Gandhi, which had 300,000... extras uh which is pretty extraordinary and that was for Gandhi's funeral scene um they weren't all paid though
no extras like 200 000 of them were just people who are milling around yeah yeah that's true and that's often sometimes the case it's just actual people in the background um there is a big list of movies of the most extras ever used lord of the rings is in there as well
well and another one is the last emperor movie which was filmed based on based on puyi it was filmed in the forbidden city it was an extraordinary achievement of british filmmaking because they managed to get access to the forbidden city itself to film inside so even when the queen was over there she couldn't visit it because they had priority access over filming in there it was a big deal it was a big collaboration if she applied to be an extra yeah is it uh is it a comedy
Yes, it's just hilarious. A raucous view that fades to comedy. Have you guys heard of Waller Groups? Wallo? Walla. W-A-L-L-A. Walla. Yeah. No. Rick Walla was a singer from the early days of Pop Idol. Fats Walla was a blues singer. Yeah, no, I mean, we're talking extras in movies here. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Oh, the prequel to Wall E.
Wall A. Wall A. Yeah. Yes. I'm in the film area at least. You are. That's very good. No, this is to do with the fact that if you were filming extras in the background, you're miking up your main characters who you're recording. You haven't necessarily...
mic'd up the extras but you need that background noise so they often hire people to come in and make the sounds of the extras so they're sort of actors who are acting as the extras and so they stand in and there'll be a group of them who will stand in a studio
and they just have to make murmur sounds. And they're called wallahs because wallah, wallah, wallah, wallah, wallah. Exactly, yeah. And so they're called wallah, but it's obviously changed. But so that often happens where you just have a group of people having to make the sounds of the people in the background. Do mention short extras.
Oh, the Uruk-hai being the... Yeah, the Uruk-lo. So there's another film which had short extras for a very specific reason. So can you guess? It's one of the most famous films of all time. Chocolate Factory. Yeah, that was my first thought. Not Chocolate Factory, not Wizard of Oz. Those probably both did do exactly that.
But please, let's just move on. Okay. It's something with lots of children in it. It's not. It's something where you need to make something else look a different size. Oh, okay. A film about a giant. Golliver's Travels. Very good. Very nice. No one's so sure they can be a Lilliputian. We need a bunch of three-inch high people. Kanye shrunk the kids. Guys, no. I think we've still got the same problem here. You've built a prop, but you need the prop to, but the prop is only like...
Three quarters of the actual size of the actual thing it's representing. So you need to make it look bigger. Okay. What's the one where the monkeys come and it's Earth all along? Planet of the Apes. So there's the Statue of Liberty, but they couldn't get a full size one. So they had to get small apes.
That's right. I mean, it's not right, but that's a brilliant guess. Oh, great. But it's right in that it's good. Yeah, it's exactly that kind of thing. But it's something else like Stonehenge or the Eiffel Tower. Leonardo DiCaprio is actually four foot two. Titanic. Titanic. No, is it Titanic? James Cameron only... used people under five foot eight on the actual ship.
Okay. To make it look, to make the ship look bigger. Wow. Because it's a pretty big ship already, isn't it? It is pretty big, but the ship was a bit smaller than the real life Titanic. It was 15% smaller. So if you cast a load of like six foot nine people, it's going to look tiny. You're right. Why have they started the movie in the lifeboats? What's going on?
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've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts. I'm on Instagram, on at Schreiberland, Andy. I am on Blue Sky at AndrewHunterM. James? I am on TikTok. Knows who's thinking it's James Harkin. And Anna, if they want to get to us as a group.
We are on at no such thing on Twitter or no such thing as a fish on Instagram or you can email podcast.qi.com. That's right. What enthusiasm. I always forgave. Please do email podcast at qi.com because we love hearing from you. Have you ever been an extra?
Are you Ridley Scott? You know, like, write in. Are you a eunuch? But I actually do write in because we use that material for our bonus episodes, don't we? We do. You can get a mention. You can be an extra on our show. You can. You'll get a mention on Drop Us a Line, which is...
part of club fish which is our very secretive community of bonus episodes and stuff it's it's great it's check it out and you can find out more about that by going to no such thing as a fish.com and you'll find all of our previous episodes up there as well or you can just come next week. We'll be back again with another episode. We will see you then. Goodbye.