No Such Thing As A Fish - 152: No Such Thing As A Sleepover With Lions

Episode Date: February 17, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss self-consuming breasts, eating lions' leftovers, and why we're thirty seconds closer to the end of the world.

Hey everyone, big news. No such thing as a fish is turning three. Yeah, it's our birthday coming up on March the 9th, and we are going to celebrate it by throwing a big party. Well, actually it's a live recording, but we're calling it a big party. And if you want to come along, it's going to be in London. It's going to be at our regular recording venue, which is up the creek, which is in Greenwich, and we're going to be starting at 7 30 pm on the 28th of February. Tickets are going to be going on sale this coming Monday, the 20th of February, and they're going to be available at qi.com slash fish events, and the tickets will go live at 11 am. It's going to be really fun. There's going to be balloons. I've just decided. I've just decided

there's going to be balloons and cake cake. We're going to have a cake and Andy is going to do a strip tease, and it is going to be packed all together with a live recording. You'll get to see a show recorded live. So please come along, go get the tickets. Again, they'll be available at 11 am Monday, the 20th. Go to qi.com slash fish events. Okay, on with the show. What three year old's birthday party? The strip tease. And also, if you're not interstripping and you're into wearing stuff, then we have a hoodie. No such thing as a fish hoodie. And you can buy that by going to qi.com forward slash hoodie. And we also have t shirts and we have vinyls, but they've just had a big new delivery of the hoodies that come in basically all the sizes

you could want. And it has on the back of the hoodie a huge list of our headline facts that we've done in the first year of our podcast. So celebrate the end of winter and the return of warm weather with a new hoodie. Go at a com slash hoodie. 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 Covent Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chazinski. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, Andy, my fact is the doomsday clock was originally set at seven

minutes to midnight because the artist responsible for it thought it looked good. Those were literally her words. She was a lady called Martyl Langsdorf and she was asked to come up with a cover for a magazine basically. But the magazine was the bulletin of atomic scientists. And she said it looked good to my eye when she drew the doomsday clock at the original thing. So the doomsday clock for anyone who doesn't know is is a sort of theoretical clock saying how near we are to the end of the world. And it's put together by a body of atomic scientists and nuclear weapons experts and they have just moved it. So we're now two and a half minutes to midnight, which is just about the closest it's ever been. I think at one point it might have been on two

minutes. Oh, yeah, I think it was on two at one point. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, it was. It was around Cuban missile crisis time. No, that's the weird thing. They didn't move it for the Cuban missile crisis. Do you know why? Why? They had no idea what was going on. They said we just don't have any data to make a judgment. But it was in the newspapers. Yeah, I don't think they knew whether the missiles were being primed or loaded or whether they were going to get to Cuba or no, but that's one of the times where they didn't change the clock at all. So were they this artist? A, was she an atomic scientist as well by night? No, no, she was married to a guy who worked on both the magazine and was also part of the Manhattan project, I believe he was one of the

scientists who was helping out on that. She was just asked to design a cover. So she wasn't even designing a doomsday clock as such. She thought she was going to do a U, the letter U, for uranium as the cover. But she noticed in the talk that a deadline was sort of looming and she thought, oh, like a clock going to 12, it's just on its way kind of thing. It's an analog clock as well, isn't it? So we don't know for sure that it's not like two minutes to midday. Yeah, absolutely fine. Oh, that's great. We're a whole 12 hours away. I think they gave us not very much wiggle room by putting it at seven minutes too, and I think that's causing problems now, isn't it? Because actually the world could get much,

much more dangerous before catastrophe. And so for instance, now is the first time that they've only added half a minute rather than a full minute to it. Because clearly we're getting closer and closer to midnight, but you don't want to say we've gone a full third of the way closer. It's like a parent saying, I'm going to count a three to a naughty child and like one, two, two and a half, two and three quarters. Do they factor in for when the clocks go forward? I think the important thing for everyone listening is that there is no scientific basis or proper scale to this clock. They just kind of wing it, don't they? There is scientific basis as in it's a load of scientists who come up with an

assess whether the world is more dangerous or less dangerous. Yeah, but it's sort of an arbitrary scale. They haven't actually worked out this is 20% more dangerous than it was yesterday. I think it's just 10 scientists and security experts and they just get together in a room, don't they? And they just kind of discuss things. And then at the end of the day, before they crack open the whiskey, they go, okay, what are we going to say? Two minutes? Pretty much that, isn't it? So the Manhattan Project, when it was underway, so this is when they obviously, Oppenheimer and Co exploded an atomic bomb, they discussed at the time when they were planning

the Manhattan Project, the possibility that it could in fact blow up the entire world. So one of the guys working on it, Edward Teller, did some calculations and he said that it was possible that the explosion they generated would create this fission reaction that generated heat so intense that it would trigger runaway fusion in the atmosphere. Now, I only know what a few of those words mean, but essentially the explosion was going to generate such a huge heat that the fusion in the atmosphere would spread all around the world and the world would explode. We basically become a sun, which is like the sun's energy comes from nuclear fusion, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. I really like that Oppenheimer said at one point, and this is before the Manhattan

Project, that in an interview he said, my two great loves are physics and desert country, it's a pity they can't be combined. And then he actually had the chance to marry his two great loves. Yeah, but marry them by blowing one of them up. My third love, of course, is tiny uninhabited islands in the South Pacific. So on the end of the world, there are lots of stories recently about preppers and people. So there's been a recent news story that everyone is buying a house in New Zealand, everyone who's anyone and has a billion pounds is buying a house in New Zealand. My buddy Resport house in New Zealand recently.

But he's from New Zealand, isn't he? Yeah, he lives there. I don't think he counts as a prepper in that case, because they think it's less likely to be bombed because everyone basically likes people from New Zealand, you know, they're pretty innocuous people. But what about Mordor? That's there. That's very dangerous. That's true. That is a rogue nation, if ever there was one. But did you know before the American election in November, prepper meal firms, a lot of them saw sales triple in the three weeks leading up to the election? Wow. Yeah, which is substantial, because people were thinking

it's all going to kick off once we've had the election. Did they think that would be his first move? Literally get into the White House red button. I was reading a prepper's list of things that you take into your bunker with you, should the apocalypse happen, do as they arrive. This was actually a cracked article, and they were saying that one of the things that's on the list that sticks out as quite odd is non-lubricated condoms. And they say you should have lots of non-lubricated condoms. Non-lubricated condoms.

Yeah, so cracked, they start saying, okay, it kind of makes sense. Imagine if there's a big group down there and suddenly STI starts spreading. So you want to make sure that in any sex that that's happening. But then you think, okay, why non-lubricated condoms? Turns out that condoms are incredibly practical as a thing to have. It almost like if you were out in a bear grill situation with nothing. You can carry water in them, can't you? You can carry water in them, where it's called...

What, you can't? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can carry two leaders. It was non-lubricated as well. I'm just going to put a bottle in the bunker and carry my water in that. You'll be toting around your condom. You can put them around your head and blow it up with your nose, like for fun. For fun, yeah. Because you need entertainment in these bunkers, very dry places.

You can make a slingshot out of them? No, you can't. Yeah, you can. So there's the prepper's journal, and they have 11 ways a condom can save your life. And one of them is make a slingshot, and it acts as the actual bit of rubber that you pull back on. So you can... And they show you how to make it, so you carve out the wood, and then you strap two condoms and tie them up.

That's going to save your life. Save your life. If there's a giant coming, and you need to send a small boy to defeat him, and in the post-nuclear landscape, there probably will be giants walking around doing harm to people, so... Yeah. Any other ways that a condom can save your life? Yeah, starting fires.

Starting fires. Starting fires. Of course, starting fires. That's why sex is such a dangerous business. That's the song. This sex is on fire due to this non-lubricated condom. It's not friction. Does it say how you might start a fire with a condom?

Yeah, it does. Well, actually, it's not about starting the fire. It's about protecting tinder from moisture. Not your tinder app. It does feel like that list is compiled by completely insane people. Well, no, it's on this amazing site called prepper's.com. Yeah, I think they're completely insane people now. And they're really secretive as well.

So, the New Yorker did a profile, and the journalist writing the article was approaching possible preppers to interview them, and one prepper wrote back saying, asking to see my prepper stash. You just asked me one of the most personal things I've ever heard. That is effectively like going to someone's house, meeting their new girlfriend, and then... Have you got any condoms? Yeah, he said.

It's like saying I'd like to see her naked and have sex with her. So, they are very, very secretive about it. That's because I think the other kind of people whose prepper stash does contain 100 blow-up dolls. We should say that this is genuinely really quite widespread in America. So, there was a study done recently that found 22% of Americans believe that the world will end in their lifetime. Another study the National Geographic did that said 40% of Americans,

so almost half, think that stocking up on end-of-the-world supplies, is a more sensible idea than getting a pension scheme or getting a work pension scheme. Right. If you don't get a pension, but you do have a lot of canned food and water, you can, once you retire, just go and live in your bunker anyway. It doesn't matter that the world's not ended, does it? It doesn't really affect you whether the world's going on or not. It's the retirement everyone's always dreamed of.

The windowless, canned food dependent, 30 years post-working life. Okay, it's time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that some villages in the Central African Republic deliberately allow lions to live nearby so they can steal their food. So, what would normally happen if you lived in a village and there were lions nearby, you would always try and shoo them away? Yeah. But these guys kind of allow them to live nearby.

They don't try and get rid of them because what they know will happen is these lions will catch bits of meat or whatever and then they can shoot them away or they can sneak up on them and they can grab the meat and they'll be able to eat it. Have you seen the video of people doing this though? No. With the lions? Yeah.

I saw the, no. What were you about to say? I brought up the YouTube page. Yes, I've seen the crown. Great, it's a 10-part series, amazing. Oh gosh. I brought up the YouTube page and I saw all the videos but I didn't press play on them.

So, I saw the screen grab that holds the video. I saw the advert before it came on. Yeah. There's a new Nokia. Anna, you've actually seen the videos. I have, they're really good. So, basically, I think I saw a video that was of the Derobo hunters in southern Kenya.

So, as James says, this happens in various places. And what they do is they're about 10 lions gathered around a corpse. I think it's a gazelle or something. So, 10 lions, males and females and there are three hunters and they're, you know, scrawny little humans and they just go up to them. I think two of them had little spears, just wouldn't sticks essentially. And the key is confidence. And if you just stride up and look like you definitely own the show,

then the lions just leave. So, it's kind of a staring contest in a battle of wills. They walk towards the lions and the lions look up at them and sort of meet their eyes and size them up. And then for some reason, this pride of 10 lions thinks, no, I can't handle these three small, skinny men. And they go away. But they know they have to cut the meat off the animal really quickly

because if the lions stay and watch them long enough and size them up properly, then they'll realize that actually I probably can take those guys and go back. So, how do you do it at the end? You just walk off. Just walk away. Just casually stride away. It's like these guys have read the game, but with lions.

Just this is completely off subject, but about staring people out. Dan, what do you think is the record in the world staring someone out competition? So, is this the same as a no blinking competition? So, if you and I are kind of who's going to blink the latest, what do you reckon, the two people who were in the final? The person who went out, how long do you think it was? I can't imagine in reality. Is it 1962 between Kennedy and Khrustrov

at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis? That is pretty old satire. It's because we were talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was timely. It was weirdly topical. But just going from my own eyeballs. Your own record. Yeah, my own record.

I'd say no longer than half an hour. Or, no, no, no, no, no, sorry, sorry. I'm like half a minute. How do you think someone's not blinking for half an hour? That's what I'm saying. Well, James is asking what I think the record is. So, and I know it's got to be more than half a minute. So, I'm saying half an hour.

I'm saying half a minute. Okay. I believe it's about 40 minutes. No. Was one of them dead and they haven't realised? That's amazing. Did you know that in Nepal, they do the same thing that James is talking about, but with tigers.

So, this kleptoparasitism, humans do this with tigers. But it's very often in Nepal, elephant trainers who do it. And they do it by they'll lead their elephants into the undergrowth to feed them and things like that. And then if there's a tiger nearby, then they take the elephant with them and they use the elephant to scare away the tiger, to scare the tiger off a carcass.

So, they employ the elephants as their henchmen. In order to get the tiger to scarpa. Wow. That's very cool. Here's the thing. So, the worst time for being attacked by lions, as in the time it's most likely to happen, it's always bad. The time it happens most often is just after the full moon.

And that's because lions hunt best when it's dark. And when it's light at night time, there's a full moon. They tend to not really hunt that much and so they don't eat that much. And so, just after the full moon, they're really hungry. And so, they're more likely to attack you. Oh, really? Do you know how you lure a lion to you,

if you want it to come to you? With some meat? Yeah, you could do it. Put on a gazelle costume. I keep frowns around looking incompetent. No, it's an interesting trick that's used by a lot of photographers when they're trying to lure them to camera traps to set off to take photos for jaguars and for lions.

It tends to be men's aftershave. So, with lions, a photographer that I was reading about said that they use old spice. And what they do is they just spray it all over, say, the leaves of the area where the camera is and that tends to lure them in. So, the Masai obviously are known for lion killing. They're lion killing ways.

And it's the right of passage in Masai culture to... Is it? Yeah, when you hit adolescence, then you go out and you kill a lion and that means you're a man and it means you're very brave and you come back and the person who killed the lion gets to wear the mane on his head at special events and the tail's all bejeweled by the women in the tribe.

And they've started cutting down a bit now because lion populations are under threat. So, it used to be more individuals that went out. Now it's more groups. But because there's a kind of increasing awareness about how lion populations are in trouble amongst Masai people, I was in Kenya 10 years ago and even then I met a couple of Masai guys

who were campaigning in their tribes against killing animals because they don't think they should do it. So, because there's this increasing awareness, they've started the Masai Olympics as an alternative way for men to prove their kind of status in society. And they have all the same kind of skills that it would take to hunt a lion, like sprinting or long distance running,

jabbing, throwing, but they don't have to kill lions anymore. I watched just thinking about humans living with lions. I was watching a video of, do you remember that? Melanie Griffith, those pictures came out that she grew up with lions. Who's Melanie Griffith? She's an actor, very famous, but you might know her through,

she was married for years to Antonio Banderas. And she was, who's daughter was she? Tippi Hedrin. Yeah, Tippi Hedrin. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so... That's more your era, isn't it, Andy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

The 1962 Good Old Days. Hitchcock was alive, the Rolling Stones were still good. The Cold War was still going, so all your jokes still made sense. Hey guys, what about those missile bases in Hungary, huh? Yeah, so Melanie Griffith, the actor, she, when she was growing up, lived with lions and there's all these photos of them playing in the pool,

sleeping in the same bed and so on, but her parents made a movie called Rawr, which is a very, very famous movie in which they used actual lions and tigers in the movie. And a few of them, I think Melanie Griffith actually got a bit mauled in it. She had like 100 stitches off the back of it. You can see that footage on the DVD that they've released,

but you can watch the sort of collected clips from Rawr on YouTube of all the lion and tiger attacks in the movie and it is nuts. Then they lived with like 100 lions, the family itself. So Melanie Griffith grew up with these lions. A hundred lions? Yeah, I promise.

It was like a hundred lions and tigers and you can see in the footage, because they went all in the house, like it was an outdoor area. Oh, okay. Just the sleeping arrangement sort of, I don't know. Yeah. We'll put you in the 98th bedroom.

Yes, exactly. It still has got a lion in it, obviously. We have a hundred lions. Well, it's not one of the two rooms that have got two lions in it. No. You'd never say yes to a sleepover, would you? Okay, it is time for fact number three,

and that is my fact. My fact this week is that there is a Victorian time capsule buried in London that contains photographs of the 12 best-looking women in England. So the 12 best-looking from Victorian times. Yeah. Well, yeah, not future. It would be amazing if it had pictures

of Kim Bessinger and stuff in it now, wouldn't it? Still an incredibly old reference. You're getting closer. Yeah, so here's the thing. I'm not fully sure, and I don't know if anyone does properly know who these women were. So the phrase I kept coming across is 12 best-looking women in England

or 12 English beauties of the day, and no one says any more about it. So this is buried as part of a time capsule which is buried underneath Cleopatra's needle, which if you've ever been to London as on the embankment, it's on along the Thames. Yes, only down the road from here. Down the road from here.

We could almost see it from our office. Can we get to the pictures to see who they are? They're buried obviously underneath in a time capsule. That's the point. Well, when do we get to open it and have a look at these English beauties? They haven't said. But that's what's amazing to me.

This is what I find very interesting about the fact is that there is this box buried underneath the Cleopatra's needle, which was brought and erected in 1896. Things that were included in it were a box of cigars, as a portrait of Queen Victoria. There's a written history about how Cleopatra's needle actually got transported to being on the embankment. And then there are 12 photographs

of the English beauties of the day and no one has seemed to have gone, and said, who are they? Why is that? They just treat it like it's a normal thing you put in a time capsule. Well, it's a lot of really weird stuff. Like there's also a three-foot-high model

of Cleopatra's needle, under Cleopatra's needle. Is there then underneath that is a three-centimeter one? It's the original Russian doll. It's really weird. That is strange. Yeah, and they've also inserted under there one of the hydraulic jacks used to lift it up,

because it was lifted by just four men using four hydraulic jacks, and it was hugely technologically advanced for the time. They consulted Joseph Basilgette. He was the person that they asked about how to get it onto the shore and whether it would be safe, because people were worried that it was so heavy it would cause the embankment to collapse.

And Basilgette was, of course, the guy who designed the London sewer system. So he knew a lot by that point about what was underneath the earth in London. And he said, look, it's fine. It's made of London clay. It's safe. Dump it on there.

And so they did. So we should say what Cleopatra's needle actually is before we go any further. So it's an obelisk. It's a huge ancient Egyptian stone pillar covered in hieroglyphs, and it's got nothing to do with Cleopatra. It should be called Foot Moses' needle,

because he was the pharaoh who actually commissioned it. You know, way, way, way longer ago than Cleopatra. And there are three of them. One of them is in New York. It's in Central Park. One of them is in London. And there's another one in Paris, but it's from somewhere else.

Yeah. So that's what they are. Yeah. And Anna is saying the worries about how placing it there was it going to go through the ground. The initial proposal for where it was going to be was outside the front of the Houses of Parliament. That's where they wanted to stand.

And the Metropolitan District Committee said you can't do that because it's directly over one of our tube lines, and it's going to be too heavy. And it's going to fall. The rumbles are going to topple it over. And then the weight of it, once it topples over, it's going to break through the ground and stab a train.

It's not that big. Stab a train. Come on. Wasn't there exact words, but it's a needle point at the top, isn't it? So it's... It's not that pointy. I don't know if it's pointy enough to penetrate.

But it's not so big. It's much less weight than, say, a building. Yes. Like, that's the thing. Yeah, like, you would think that Big Ben would be more likely to fall over and stab a train than that. Oh, yeah. Very pointy, Big Ben, at the top.

That's very true. Also, it's got these two sphinxes which are facing it. And they are, firstly, the wrong way round, these massive bronze sphinxes. They should be facing away from it, protecting it. And actually, they're looking towards it like idiots. And the other thing is that they were actually made in 1881.

They're so fake. No way. Yes, they're completely knock-off Victorian things. Yeah, they're replicas. I went down there this morning to look at them and just see if I could see the... You were looking for the 12 beauties, weren't you? I was looking for where...

I thought they might even have acknowledged that maybe there was a time capsule somewhere, but they don't. But what you do see is there's a lot of things they tell you about the people who died in the process of bringing it over, because there was a whole ship container that was built for it, called the Cleopatra to transport it, and it got disattached during a storm, so they lost it for five days.

Fell over and stabbed a ship. It just stabbed a fish. It came out like a sort of lovely kebab. This was insane. I think you're underselling it a bit, Dan. Like, they literally built an iron capsule with sails on top, exactly slotted Cleopatra's needle into it, and then towed it behind a ship.

Unsuccessful. Really unsuccessful. What? The men... Several men died, didn't they? Because there was a storm arose, and it was... Was it the men going from the main ship to try and steady the needle that were lost at sea?

Yeah, there was another ship that realised that there had been a big storm and they were in trouble, and they sent some people on a little boat to try and rescue the people, and those people on the boat died. But then, I think you were saying, Cleopatra's needle itself inside this massive container just floated around, lost at sea.

No one knew if it had sunk, and then someone just stumbled upon it. Yeah, and I think they gave up. I think they thought, well, it's gone. It must have gone down in the storm. Absolutely terrible when they thought, we've lost Cleopatra's needle. Because the thing is, before it was brought over, right,

it was given to the British by the ruler of Egypt. It was called Muhammad Ali, incidentally. To say thank you for winning the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Alexandra against Napoleon. But the British governments said, well, we can't really afford to bring it over. It was 1819. So they then waited 60 years, 59 years, until 1878,

when they said, I suppose we'd better bring it over, then they've given it to us. It seems childish now. And then as soon as they try and bring it over, they lose it. Yeah. Do you think when they lost it, they felt, well, we have this three-inch version? Should we just put that on display instead?

We can only fit one photo of a beauty underneath it, unfortunately. So yeah, I was going to say, so it has the names of the guys who died in that process, on the back of it, facing the water, facing the Thames. And then underneath one of these sphinxes, you can see a little sign that says, the shrapnel holes that you can see in here,

are little holes that were made as a result of nighttime bombing in 1917 over London. And the bombs hit a tram, and it shot off metal and so on into it. And so you can actually go up to the sphinx and put your finger through a bomb hole in the... God, that's out of control today. Well, we've lost Dan, everybody, listening.

Sorry. You didn't see it coming, did you? You just said you could put your finger in a bomb hole. All innocence. I'm on time capsules while we've got that subject open. Loads of them have been lost. So there's an international body called the International Time Capsule Society,

which set up in 1990. And it reckons that there are 10 to 15,000 capsules worldwide, but that most of them have been forgotten and lost. Unfortunately, the International Time Capsule Society now says, we are not open anymore. We're not open for business. We'll be open in 2153. Did you see they accidentally dug up

a Blue Peter time capsule at the end of last year at the start of this year? It was under the Millennium Dome, and they accidentally dug it up and damaged it. And they've taken all the bits out and put them in the office, and they're going to rebury them. Yeah, and it was buried in 1998

to sort of go under the Millennium Dome, and it is the most 90s collection of things you could find. So here's what they thought was worth saving. I bet you could guess some things. Is it one of the dogs? Yeah, one of the dogs. One of the Blue Peter badges.

So there's got to be newspapers of the day. Richard Bacon. Is it loads of cocaine? It's bear in mind this was selected by children who were watching Blue Peter in the 19s. Okay, was it not much cocaine? It's a small amount of cocaine. Oh, right, you want actual guesses.

Yeah, I think of some things to do with the 90s. One of those badges. Yeah, Blue Peter badges, absolutely. But like really 90s things that children's things from the 90s. A Spice Girl. A Spice Girl, correct. A Spice Girl CD, not bad, was it? Yeah, absolutely.

It's got a Tamagotchi. It's got a picture of Tony Blair in a high vis vest. And it's got one of the great beauties of the day. It's got some felt from the roof of the Millennium Dome. What I think strange is, like this Blue Peter one, for instance, we know what's in it, and they were only planning to open it in 2050 or something. Yeah.

Presumably, we're still going to know what was in it then. I think what they should do is put stuff in and keep it a secret. Like the 12 beauties. Who are they? See, that would be a huge reveal. Yeah. Yeah. You know the New York one?

So there's a clear patch of needle in New York. Yeah. Egypt has asked for the one in New York back because they're not taking good enough care of it. So this was a couple of years ago, the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities wrote a letter to the mayor who was Bloomberg at the time saying, I've seen some pictures of the obelisk

that we kindly gifted you in the 19th century, and we've noticed that you're not taking good care of it at all. All the hieroglyphics have rubbed off. It's chipped away at. If you don't remedy this. Bomb holes everywhere. The weird guy sticking his finger in it of various types of day. And he said, we're going to have a duty to come and remove it

if you don't sort your shit out. One of the first things they did when it arrived in New York was they gave it a thorough cleaning. They said, this is too mucky, and it did a huge amount of damage to it. Really? Yeah, that was pretty much on installation. Oh, come on, guys.

I think we think there are only about 28 left, aren't there? And they were all in Egypt obelisks. And I think Egypt only has six left because it seemed to keep giving them away as thank yous constantly. The Romans stole loads. I think there are as many in Rome as there are in Egypt now. Yeah. Did we steal ours, or?

No, we were giving it. We were giving it for winning those battles. Yeah, I think we found it, though, as well. We uncovered it. It was British archaeologists over there who uncovered it, and so I said, can we have that? Oh, I didn't know that we found it. Yeah, it was found by a circus strongman.

Come on. Yeah. Why did he not just carry it home? He might have been able to. He could carry 12 people up on a... That was part of his act. He would hold people up on stage, 12 people on a sort of platform, and walk across the stage.

Really? But he studied hydraulics initially, and so that was his thing. So he was one of the most successful archaeologists of his time. I don't need hydraulics with these arms! Yeah, I'm pretty sure he was the one who found the obelisks itself. If not, he definitely was very much involved with Cleopatra's needle.

I can't quite remember why, though, and he was quite strong, so he ruined a lot of things. So to get into... Well, just kind of lent against a pyramid in his time. Why? Mr. Strong for the Mr. Members. Actually, all the pyramids used to have square sides. So strong.

His name was Giovanni Battista Belzoni. He was born in Italy, but he lived over in England. He was six foot seven tall, and he was known as the Patagonian Sampson when he was a strong man. And he found the tombs of Ramsey's the first. So he made some mega discoveries, but he used to battering Ram his way through

in order to get destroyed a lot. Is that why he wanted the obelisks, so he could batter some tombs down? He just used it as a toothpick. OK, it is time for a final fact of the show, and that is Juzinski. My fact this week is that after women stop breastfeeding, their breasts eat themselves.

And this is something we've just found out about human women. And it's that... So what happens is when we're breastfeeding, then we have to produce loads of extra cells which produce the milk for the babies. And so our breasts have suddenly become full of these cells. And then when you stop breastfeeding, then you're just full of useless cells which die.

And in normal circumstances, if you've got a bit of your body that are full of totally useless dead cells, that would create a huge immunoresponse to try and clear them up, which would be extremely painful. There'd be loads and loads of bruising, there'd be tissue damage,

because that's just all this dead stuff hanging around in your body that your white blood cells then have to come and eat up. So it would be really painful. So we've never quite known how it is that once we stop breastfeeding, we're able to get back to normal without any serious problems until now.

And it turns out that they thoughtfully kill each other, these milk-producing cells. So once you stop breastfeeding, then there's a hormone release, which means that they stay quite close next to each other, the dead cells, and the live ones just swallow them. And they just keep eating each other and eating each other until there are few enough left

that the white blood cells rock up and swallow the rest. Crikey. But yeah, our breasts devour themselves. That is amazing. Breasts are really intelligent when it comes to producing milk for babies. I asked Ash, so my best friend Ash, he has become a dad recently.

And he'd been telling me a few things while Jackie, his wife, was pregnant about what breastfeeding, how it works. And he said that basically the nipple sort of listens, listens not being, obviously it has no ears, but it analyzes baby saliva to give the appropriate milk. And I looked into it and this is true. So what it does is little bits of saliva

when the baby is sucking on the nipple, makes its way into the nipple. And they say that the breasts and the body of the mum actually manages to sort of diagnose what kind of milk the baby needs in terms of if it's actually a bit ill, it might need these, like the extra antibodies in order to make the baby healthier.

So it kind of produces whatever kind of compulsion of milk. It's really controversial that. Is it? So there's not been any studies done on it and it's also just very possible and some people think it's much more possible that if you're producing more antibodies, it's just because whatever's making the baby ill

is also making you ill, you've caught the virus and so you're producing antibodies. But there's a lot of anecdotal evidence. Mothers say that my milk looks different when my baby's sick and stuff like that. Famously a mother put a picture up on Facebook which said, look at the color of my milk because it's kind of changed.

And the suggestion was is that it was changing because it was adding more stuff into it. But weirdly science sometimes requires more evidence than a mom's picture on Facebook. It's so weird. Honestly, I'm not going to lie in 70,000. Oh, well, you know. Oh, well then that does sound unequivocal.

One thing that's true and this is not from a mom's Facebook post is the past. No, one thing is that babies can smell breasts very accurately and then home in on them because after a woman's given birth, women give off from the breast these kind of secretions which babies can smell very clearly and babies can smell them and react to them more strongly than they react to the smell of actual milk.

Oh, wow. So it's like a homing beacon saying there is a breast here make your way towards it. And then it's frustrating because most babies can't really move at all. So they just breast nearby get really frustrated there's nothing they can do about it. When they smell these secretions, they get more interested

and they sort of make more head movements and suckling gestures and things like this than they do even when they smell milk. So that's how they sort of, yeah. I thought that was really interesting. I was reading about this for the O-series research actually I was looking into ovulating. But very interesting and this is related to lactation

that in the olden days when we were a hunter gatherer society we menstruated far, far less. I hardly menstruates, it's hard now to be honest. So we had far fewer menstrual cycles back in the olden days because women were breastfeed for much longer. So the average in hunter gatherer societies now and then the average length of time you breastfeed for was about three years whereas now varies a lot

but I think it's about six months here. And so you'd either be breastfeeding which suppresses your periods or you'd be pregnant where obviously you don't get periods. And so someone worked out that back then you'd have about 50 menstrual cycles in your lifetime which is hardly any. And now we have about 420, 430 menstrual cycles.

And we're just not evolved to be able to cope with these constant wild fluctuations of estrogen and progesterone because we're not supposed to be doing that. It's supposed to be kind of an occasional thing between being pregnant and breastfeeding. Because and then you're dead at the age of 25 or 30 so. Exactly. And then everything really drops off in all departments after that.

I was reading about let down. It's a phrase called let down and I think that. I've heard it before Dan, I've heard the phrase 70 times. But it's obviously four people around the microphones right now who don't have children. So what we might be saying a lot of very obvious things to parents in this chat but I'd not heard of this. Just check it on Facebook and see if anyone's mentioned it.

So it's the fact that lactating can happen not just when the baby latches on to the breast but things can spark it off. For example, if you show a mum a picture of her baby she might let some milk loose just purely by seeing the photo. Isn't that incredible? Wow. Yeah.

Or even if she hears another baby cry because of a primal urge to soothe a child knowing that soothes might just release some milk. Again, obviously most mums and fathers around the world are going yeah we know this but I'd never heard that before. Wow. I remember reading the year or two ago about the idea there was a study done that a lot of babies

especially mammals I think all kind of cry similar frequencies and I can't remember why that would happen. Maybe you would look after other species. Yeah that's what that would imply, isn't it? So if you're a baby stout you cry in the hope that there'll be A, your mum, B, another stout or C, a weasel person cry. Or any mum or like an elephant. Did you see that thing this week?

Speaking of nursing other species the woman in Peru who was being interviewed about floods in Peru at the moment which are devastating agriculture things like that and she was holding a piglet and as the interviewer was interviewing her she lifted up her shirt and just started suckling the pig on her own breast and the cameraman so tactful over the camera swings away from that image faster than you can blame him. He just suddenly takes a real interest in the surrounding scenery.

Very weird. So there are obviously loads and loads and loads of stories about breastfeeding. You know saints who miraculously started lactating when they were starving in the desert so one of them is the christian holy woman Christine the astonishing. I seem to remember could Christine the astonishing fly as well? From her name I wouldn't be surprised by anything she could do. I have a feeling she was in a church once and she flew up into the eaves of the church. So also in the bible they used to depict the Virgin Mary breastfeeding Jesus

but sometimes they didn't want her breast to seem sexy so they put her breasts on her collarbone instead of her breast level. Yeah so there are all these pictures. Is that less sexy? I suppose it is less sexy isn't it? It's more weird isn't it which makes it a bit less sexy. Yeah yeah that's really funny. So there are all these pictures of her having her breasts way up here and Jesus feeding on them. Did you know that opossums so you know opossums like possums but american

their nipples grow up to 35 times their original length when they're being suckled. Do they start off really small or do they go really really long? They're quite normal size they're getting incredibly long so baby opossums climb up into their mother's pouch when they're very undeveloped and they have to latch on immediately and if you don't find a nipple really quickly you die straight away. So you latch on and they latch on and then the nipple swells up inside their mouth so they're locked on and they stay locked on for two months. So it becomes like an umbilical cord.

It grows up to 35 times its own length down into the body. Yeah yeah. What is that? Is not sexy. Oh my god yeah. It's weird isn't it and because it's so it's swollen up inside it so latched on if you try to detach one from the other then you tear you know you tear the nipple because they're locked they're locked tight.

No no no no no no thank you. Do you know the effect that breasts have on men? Yeah. Well they have done experiments on men who they divided men into two groups normal men and pervert no um they asked them to do the experiment like you know the experiment with children we have a marshmallow now or two marshmallows later. So they said you can have one breast now or two breasts later. No they they asked them if they would be willing to delay gratification to get a small

cash amount now or a large cash amount later right and then they show the two groups of men two different films one of them was a woman running along a beach in slow motion like in Baywatch and the other was some countryside right um and the men who watched the the other countryside was there anything was it just cut was there a piglet? There were no rutting boars. No so just like boring countryside and the men who watched the Baywatch style video were much likelier to take the small payout now rather than weight and defer that gratification so it's believed that there's sort of the neurochemical circuits of the brain get hijacked

and they're basically saying pleasure now take pleasure now yeah that makes a lot of sense yeah okay when I was researching this I remembered a scene that I watched in a movie called The Last Emperor which is about the Chinese the final Chinese emperor before Mao Zedong kicked him out of power and there was there's a scene in it where he's quite old and he's being breastfed by one of his nurses and he's like eight nine something like that in there so I quickly looked into it and that was a thing of Chinese emperors that you can actually see um this really cool um looking device which is a big steel thing with a hole in the middle and women who were basically auditioning their breasts for the emperor would come to have their breasts checked yeah and to see if they were

giving enough milk and so on so they would they would audition people and be like you've why would you have it's the breast factor basically why would they need the steel with the hole in the middle why you don't need to put your breast through a hole in order to breastfeed unless it was like the voice where you're not allowed to see their faces no so it wasn't a full steel door it was just it was just for the breast and there was a hole at the front where presumably the how big how big was it um I would say uh the uh a hardback book like the private eye annual like the like no smaller than the private eye annual oh okay but the third book of general ignorance whereas the previous books of general ignorance were a smaller format addition this is all available at qi.com

slash shop that is the worst plug for anything one of our books which are of different sizes to the breastplates formally used to feed the emperor okay that's it that's 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 twitter accounts i'm on at shriverland james at eggshaped andy at andrew huntam and chasinski you can email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our group account qi podcast or you can go to our website no such thing as a fish.com we will be back again next week with another episode we will see you then goodbye