No Such Thing As A Fish - 159: No Such Thing As An Edible Jockey

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss falcon sex caps, a 73-year-old superhuman swimmer, and the morning routine of a seahorse.

Hey guys just a quick announcement before we begin this week's show, which is that we are going on tour We are going all over the country and there are tickets available now. We're gonna nodding him We're gonna Manchester London Leicester Dunstable Birmingham Coventry. Yeah, and there are more dates coming up out there There are indeed, but we're not allowed to say where they are yet But they'll be a bit further from the center of England than those places that Dan's just mentioned Yeah, it's gonna be so much fun We're putting together this whole fantastic first half full of stupid games and extra bits and interactive bits And in the second half, we're gonna record an episode of the podcast

Yeah, so if you want to see any or all preferably all of that then go to qi.com Slash fish events and you can get your tickets there. 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 Shriver and I'm sitting here with James Harkin Anna Chazinski and Andrew Hunter Murray 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 James Okay, my fact this week is that in 1966 the Chinese press reported that a 73 year-old chairman Mao had swum 15 kilometers of the Yangtze River in 65 minutes

That's twice the speed that Michael Phelps has ever swum 75 imagine what he could do at 40 73 73 It's amazing that you're given a number and you just remember a different number. No, I confused it with 65 minutes So I took the seven from the year I took the five from the minute maybe I'm 73 kilometers in 15 minutes He swam 1966 kilometers 65 seconds. Okay. Wow. Can you say the numbers again? Yes

year 1966 age 73 distance 15 kilometers and time 65 minutes and the thing is I've read about this and It's possible that he might have been carried along by some very very strong currents, right? But then I wonder if that's really swimming. It's not it's because it could be floating But he had floating bodyguards with him. Yeah, he did and huge portraits of himself So there's a picture of him floating along with these six bodyguards around him And then these like giant pictures of chairman Mao floating alongside him in front of him But wait when you say they were floating bodyguards

What were they where they were swimming to and they managed to keep up with the fastest swimmer? It's maybe that's why there were six they were positioned Strategically further up and off the river an improvement to Olympic swimming would be to have a giant raft with the swimmer's face on it going behind There's often when the water you don't know who it is But if there's a massive raft with Michael felts his face going behind him. Yes, great It's interesting you spent so much time in a body of water because he never bathed chairman Mao In order to wash himself he would have servants wipe him up and down with towels Yeah, yeah, so just wet towels in fact and this is a bit early in the podcast to be going into this territory

But he claimed to like to wash his body in the body of his women That was in what he washes body in the body of his women Yes, I think what that's saying is he liked to have sex with a lot of women and he thought that that was enough of a cleaning process It really wasn't there was it? No, no, I had to wipe them off with towels afterwards I had to go for that really long swim to really get it off Well, it's the most polluted river in the world. Isn't it? It's unbelievably dirty. So I suppose it suited him Oh, I think I think it's got rivals in maybe it was completely clean before he got Mao used to suffer from very bad constipation

And apparently if he actually managed to get a bowel movement out It was like a cause of celebration amongst the staff. It was seen as a as a great I would be celebrating if I was a towel guy Yeah, that's true. That's true He yeah, he used to have two to three enemas a day Maybe when he was saying I'm surrounded by enemies He was actually saying I'm surrounded by enemas and the whole cultural revolution was a big mistake So there's a lot of work for Mao lookalikes at the moment

Because in Chinese television, there's a lot of things you're not allowed to do if you want to write a screenplay I think we might have said before you're not allowed time travel and you're not really allowed word play and puns and stuff like that They have a lot of things you're not allowed to do But one thing you are allowed to do is historical dramas And so basically if you're a talented screenwriter in China You just write historical dramas and usually about Mao because he's like the most famous historical figure And so 44% of all Chinese shows produced in 2013 were historical dramas You say that I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same on the BBC

That's just what you watch Yeah, and so because a lot of these have Mao in them there's a lot of work if you're a Mao lookalike It's it's one of the best jobs you can have. Wow. Remember there's that Chinese guy who's an Obama lookalike Is he? Yeah, so he and he gets a lot of work in in TV shows and stuff. Is he is he Chinese? Yeah, it's Chinese, but he just he just looks a lot like Obama and he gets hired out as Obama exactly like Obama Well, he's a lookalike Just on crazy claims made by dictators. Oh, yeah in 2006 a North Korean publication Called nodong-simon reported that Kim Jong-il had mastered the art of teleporting and that he could move so quickly

That American satellites could not track him Hey, have we ever mentioned the ex-president of Turkmenistan almost certainly what I feel like we must I'm nears of yeah Nears of yeah, it's just he was one of those characters as well claimed crazy things did crazy things He changed the names of the days and the months In the country to the names of his family members Didn't he name bread after his mother was that him was he renamed bread to his mother's name? Yeah Very cool. Um just on on Mao so a statue of chairman Mao was unveiled in 1993 and It was a really big deal. It was to commemorate him. It was the I think it was the 120th anniversary of his birth or something

Does that make sense? And it was in December so and it was in the Hunan province So it's cold and dark and it's constant rain and sleet And you can now if you go to China you can buy photographs of the moment where the sheet was pulled off this giant statue The six meter high bronze statue and at the same time the sun suddenly came out and the moon came out And they both shone upon the statue at the same time. Wow. And if you go, I mean you'd look very as if you're believing it I mean, that's plausible, isn't it? It is plausible. I think it was just the fortuitousness of the event

I don't believe at all Why start on the moon coming out at the same time? Sun and the moon are always out at the same time but half the year they're out at the same time That's not always No, but it bears credence that this might have been in that half of the year I just think it sounds suspiciously like a propaganda quote rather than I think you guys are and also it's very trusting No, but also this is what last year or the year before. I mean china has a lot 1993 1993. Okay. Sorry 25 years ago

Regardless china has been scientifically They would know basic things like when the sun and the moon is going to be out and might time it also don't forget the trump When he was doing his inauguration speech and the rain just mysteriously stopped No, he very clearly remembered afterwards it a bit of sunny day So that's nice Just quickly on mal he initiated a campaign where you were supposed to murder all the sparrows It was called the four pest campaign

He started in 1958 and the idea was to exterminate mosquitoes flies rats and sparrows And it was really really successful So lots of people went out there and were supposed to form these kind of people's armies to try and kill them It was successful in the sense that it achieved what it was supposed to achieve And then it caused enormous problems like these things do so for instance The sparrows all being gone meant that there was a plague of literal plague of locusts Which now weren't being scared off by the sparrows and they ate all the crops and had Incredibly devastating consequences where many, you know millions of people died in as far as what it was trying to do

Was get rid of pests. It didn't really work No, it worked as in it got rid of those pests But it's just such a strong lesson in how we definitely shouldn't be just trying to randomly wipe out something that's annoying us Yes, also if you're on the side that's telling you to go out and massacre the sparrows It feels like you know that you're not on the right side, don't you? The others are quite bad rats mosquitoes sparrows are so adorable They're like the epitome of a sweet innocent not when they're eating all of your grain Of course not but the word sparrow and the image of a little sparrow if someone's telling you to trample it down

But without grain, how can you make a loaf of the president of turtmanistan's mother? Okay It is time for fact number two and that is andy my fact is that seahorses greet their partners every day to make sure they are still alive Top tip for all you couples out there What does that mean exactly because you'd greet them anyway, wouldn't you? Every day know their intentions. Well, if you're a seahorse, you might not, you know, I don't know that's why I'm asking What do they what do they? How do we know because most likely a seahorse is going to say hi to another seahorse if they're married every day

I'm completely with that You're completely with that. Are you so that the married seahorses you're with him on that bit? Are you what partners it says? I've just jumped in with both feet I decided when married seahorses get up in the morning, obviously they greet each other How do we know it's to make sure they're still alive? You're right What they do is they do this courtship dance every day before dawn for a while, which is for two different reasons one is To check that the other one is still alive and the other is to also

synchronize their mating because you know the male carries the Young in his pouch and then he sort of yeah, he's pregnant That's a that's a thing that is we've you've just said quite casually, but is incredibly amazing seahorses the male carries the child Yeah, um, but apparently the ritual that they do the sort of ritual they move around and sing is designed to synchronize their movements So the male Will receive the eggs well when the female deposits her eggs in his pouch Okay, because otherwise they will they won't dock properly And just this keeping a live thing. Is it really common for them to die in their sleep?

Are they constantly dropping dead overnight I don't know. Is it so necessary? I don't know. I don't know why it's so necessary. Well, I looked at this is the case I looked into the lifespan of seahorses and In the wild between one and four years in captivity four years and they say they just almost always make it to four years They have a really consistent Sort of oldest age a seahorse gets to lifespan That's interesting. Is it so you know basically you when you're three years old, you know, you've only got a year left

Yeah, that's good. You can plant stuff. Can't you like the pensions world is very stable Because you you know roughly how long you've got. Yeah, um, I did not know that they were fish Yes, yeah, I thought I thought there was something Did you think they were horses? I didn't think they were horses exactly But you thought they were maybe like mussels and and yeah, I thought all like a lobster isn't a fish, you know And so they're called hippocampus, which means horse sea monster And they eat super quick They have to use in order to actually see them eating food high speed cameras in order to catch it because they can eat

Stuff in like six milliseconds. Oh really they're sucking they suck it in don't they? And also they kind of flick their head Because they got this horse neck and they catch the copepods that they eat about 94 percent of the time Which the article I read said might be the most successful in nature, but we know that actually Uh dragonflies are slightly better than that. We think dragonflies in 95 percent But they're similar kind of but it very much depends on the prey It's like it's all gone tech. So, you know a lion will be terrible at catching a copepod But a seahorse will be terrible at catching a zebra. That's true

And if I was to go to mcdonald's and I wanted to get a big mac I would have a hundred percent success rate Yeah, so we are the best Hunters now I suppose if we are calling that hunting I like That's when james is like go to mcdonald's we hunt for the burgers We sort of tiptoe up and make sure it doesn't see us coming So the the copepods which they hunt there's the reason the seahorses have to have to be so good at hunting Is because the copepods can flee unbelievably fast. They can move at 500 body lengths a second

Which is the equivalent of a human swimming at 2,000 miles an hour, which is roughly as fast as channel And seahorses swim incredibly slow. There's one that's called the Lined seahorse If you put it into a bathtub just your regular length bathtub to swim that length would take five minutes Seahorse racing would be quite a cool thing to watch though, wouldn't it? Yes You could paint a little like a little escort put little jockeys on top and tiny copepod jockeys And they have to jump over things in the water with their be styles and be hedges and things like that I don't think you want the jockeys to be the things that the seahorses are going to try and eat

No, you're right. You want the copepod to be going round like a hare in a greyhound race. Exactly Yeah, that'd be amazing if in real horse racing. There was a chance that the horse would eat the jockey Halfway through the race And the tories come off and he's being eaten James and I know a seahorse expert by the way. Yes, we do Helen scales. I know her too I think we know her better. We probably introduced you to her once. Yeah, you did. Yeah. Yeah, okay. I don't know her Good Well, she's great. She's written the book called Poseidon's Steed, which is

unbelievably good Yeah, I have a feeling most of the stuff that I'm saying right now is taken directly from her book But it was stuff taken from her book by James and put into a script which I've been just lifted Um, and uh, I looked through the script by the way So she was on our show Museum of Curiosity as a guest about six years ago seven years ago almost even This was the opening question. We asked her in the show Helen as someone who's spent the past 15 years learning everything there is to know about fish Perhaps you can answer this for me. Is it true that there is no such thing as a fish?

Yeah, that was our open question. What did she say? No, that's rubbish Um in 2009 there was a woman in Dorset who found a seahorse on her Drive and she lived three miles inland And it was alive How did it get there? Well, they think a seagull dropped it That was a really rare endangered seahorse Wow, it could be that thing, you know that riddle about the man who's found in a diving suit in the forest

It could be that someone was trying to put out a fire in her house by scooping up water from the sea into a helicopter And then dropping it onto her house and they scooped up a seahorse I was thinking of that one where there's a guy found hanging in a room with a puddle of water So I was wondering if the seahorse was trying to hang itself and he was stood on an ice cube Or a man arrives into town on a seahorse on thursday and then leaves again Friday, it's called friday. The seahorse is called friday. Yes I think it's that a seagull dropped it I just think that's amazing finding an endangered animal a lot of them are quite endangered

I read something I think it was on mother nature network May be saying that they could be extinct within about 30 years, which seems radically pessimistic, but because they use so much in asian medicine So 25 million seahorses a year are used in traditional chinese medicine or some actually the seahorse trust claims that it's 150 million a year So it's somewhere between those two which is a lot because they thought to help impotence, aren't they? Yes in china. Yeah, which kind of makes a lot of sense. No, it doesn't stop saying it makes sense Yeah, killing them don't say that sentence. It doesn't make sense. It's a terrible idea

I can see where culturally it happened because as the only males that give birth Perhaps that has some connection to the fact that men now think if they eat ground up seahorse, they'll get fertile It starts spewing out babies. I know it doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't make any sense, Hannah. No, it doesn't Um scientists tested seahorse relationships About 10 years ago They did an experiment where because everyone thinks that they're monogamous and they wanted to see maybe they're not And so they put little wire labels on them colored wire labels and sort of matched them up with their partners And then they asked the public to spy on them to see if they were sleeping around

Um and the scientists one of the scientists responsible for it said When people hear that this might not be true after all i.e The monogamy their curiosity is immediately aroused and they seem quite happy to watch for long periods to see if there's any hanky Panky going all out aroused so they are an aphrodisiac Sorry fish this week is sponsored by ground up seahorses They found out that they flirted with both sexes up to 25 times a day So it's hanky panky all over the shop. Oh, yeah quite a lot. There's a lot of flirting going on every day every day

Yeah, it's a lot. I mean that's a lot wake up check your partners alive damn damn it Well might as well do a bit of flirting anyway And their flirting is pretty intense, isn't it? Their mating rituals last for days and days sometimes and the way they mate is they like interlock their tails And they just bob along together with tails interlocked for hours on end or they dance around a kind of invisible maypole and Yeah, it's just very romantic kind of animal. It's very sweet. It's adorable. It's weirdly sweet. Yeah Um, the eyes move independently of each other as well, which is actually much because they're trying to check out all the other male and female

Horses He's got a roving eye. Yeah, but they all do Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three and that is my fact My fact this week is that falcon experts put on a special hat when they want to collect semen Basically falcons have been going extinct or endangered in the wild And so what they were trying to do was to force them to mate with each other They had to do artificial insemination and this guy in america called les boyd Worked out the best way to do that was to wear a special hat

Which he would then walk into a room the hat would excite the falcon who would then land on his head And hump his head until it ejaculated into this guy's hat and then he would wait for the next falcon So it's on to the hat really because I imagine that into a hat means it's you turn the hat upside down and ejaculate into the No, no, no, no, it's no no the hat looks like a waffle So it's got all these little holes on it And so I think what happens when the ejaculate comes out it sort of seeps through the holes like swiss cheese We should say they're not wearing these hats Are they because they're particularly sexually attractive to the falcons the hats are specifically there to collect the semen

But why does the falcon? I mean, this is this is an amazing fact Why does the falcon want to Have sex with the hat? I think it is and correct me if I'm wrong They introduced the falcon to the hat very early on in life and it did sort of Develops a mother complex with it It imprints it and then when they see the hat come back in all those years later It thinks I've got to have it and lands on it

But wait are they introduced to the hat there because yeah, I think when falcons are raised by people They are more attracted to people than they are to other falcons because they are imprinted So it's whatever raises them. They become attracted to I thought it was the humans and then the humans put on the hat They introduced the baby falcons to the humans. So what happens if the human walks in without the hat? Then they shag their heads So there's a real debate in the falconing community over whether it's better to buy a collecting hat they call it a copulation hat Or whether it's better to make your own because obviously it's much cheaper to make your own

But sometimes you just want a professional hat, don't you? Because it looks better I guess so, but there's I don't think anyone's wearing this for fashion actually They're not very fashionable things. They've got waffle stuff on the top and usually a bird shagging You can see it being a hipster thing. Yeah, I could imagine walking around shoreditch with No, I've just really I've just remembered. That's what they do. They imitate the falcon's voice Yes, so they imitate the falcon's vocalizations to sound like a lady falcon. Yeah I think that's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible and you can see footage of this online, by the way

They sort of land on the head and they're they're just going at it flapping their wings This guy's head is just being jutted around all over the shop and then it ends and and he walks out And then he takes it through a tube, doesn't he? And he brings it to to inseminate it into the female falcon and that in itself is another whole process He has to put on a special chest wig or something In the video that I saw he also looked like a glove and goss hawks were mating on that the the copulation hat began as A copulation glove I think because it definitely happened on the hand before And I think some some genius

Wait a second. Yeah, what if I wear the glove on my head? I think probably because if you have if you have a falcon land on your hand You can only stretch it so far and they are moving about a lot I mean, it's a vigorous activity and so you might get a wing in the face So maybe that was a protection point so that yeah, yeah possibly but does that mean that they can be Collecting goss hawk on the hand and falcon at the same time. Yeah, do you know the other method for doing this? It's called stripping It's a more old-fashioned method

Not none of this high-tech digital equipment that you're using So what you do is you get a little pipette And you you have to put it it's a sort of tiny suction pump into the birds the male falcons cloaca the sort of genital opening And then you have to use an automatic pipette to just you know, you just put it one notch And it just extracts a little bit of semen from the falcon, right? Before the invention of the automatic pipette

What you would have to do is Someone on the team would have to suck the open end of the pipette to get the falcon semen going and This is from the book how fast can a falcon dive? Peter capai nolo had some experience performing this procedure as an undergraduate Despite keeping an eye out for the rapid movement of seminal fluid up the tube He occasionally learned the hard way that while falcon semen looks like a nice lager it tastes rather bitter Because it's amber falcon semen so it looks like but he discovered and he's the co-author of this book

So does falcon semen look like beer like if I if we went to the pub and I accidentally swapped dan's beer for a Bait of falcon semen. He might not notice if I saw the hat if I was like What are you doing wearing that James? It's just fashion Daniel. We are in shortage Okay, I can definitely see there being a beer in shortage called falcon semen. That's a really good beer name It is that should be our no such thing as a fish brewery. Yeah release But I put in falcon jizz into google in order to uh To make sure that there isn't already a beer called falcon jizz But what came up is that there's a a club in america called falcon jazz, which is what it ordered corrected it

You have to wear a special hat to go in It sounds like a really fun jazz club and it's run by like this environmental scientist Um, why is he running a jazz club? I don't know and his name is tony falco So he's just missing the end to be tony falcon and he's in the falcon jazz club And it's in new york. So if you're in new york, go see go see the falcon jazz An astro pint of falcon jizz exactly linger beer there Falco jazz presents falcon jizz I think what's really interesting about this fact is it's the current method probably the most successful falcon breeder in the world

His name's brinn close He specifically breeds falcons who fly incredibly fast because falcon racing is a thing that happens a lot in the middle east To buy an abadabi specifically Do it and the shakes and the super rich out there buy these falcons He is the number one breeder of these falcons and that's how he collects Uh, the seaman of all these of these um different falcons But anyone listening to this might remember ages ago There was an image that appeared online of a commercial airplane

Um, and it was the economy class of the airplane and it was just packed with falcons sitting there and to brinn That's a very regular thing because that's how they fly all the falcons out to abadabi and zibai Was there a business class on the same flight full of humans? As people were coming in like, uh, yeah, just this way. So just this way falcon you'd need to turn right So airlines have specific rules for this, right? There are a lot of airlines that will the only animals that allow in the cabin are Uh guide dogs for the blind and falcons for falcon racing So emirates is one of those airlines where it it says they're the only two animals that are allowed But if you buy a first class seat, you're allowed two falcons. So I think this is

This is with eti had that's what it's with Yeah, if you're going to dubai or abadabi or somewhere like that you buy a first class seat You're allowed two additional falcons Um on the seat next to you I get eti had an emirates a lot because my sister lives over in abadabi. I have never Well, you're never in first class down that's where they're all hanging out I thought you said you can have one in economy. You can't have one in economy. Yeah, maybe Um, so just very quickly on brinn close. He raises these falcons in donkaster near an industrial estate

He's been doing it for years He says that his falcons can get up to 75 miles an hour the average falcon can get up to 60 miles an hour So he doesn't know what he's doing right except that he knows that he's spending a lot of money on their daily meals And so on in order to just build them up to be the strongest that they can be and what's interesting is he lives in an industrial town Um, I read an article a year or so ago about pigeons Which is that pigeons can fly faster through noxious air than they can through clean air If you get if you have racing pigeons they always go faster if you put them through horrible air And no one knows why it might be because they just want to get out of it or it might be something to do

I don't know. Yeah, but that's a secret is what you're saying Maybe maybe the donkaster air is the one secret. Maybe it's not anything else. He's doing Do you know how stuff at marine parks get uh seeming out of a killer whale? No, go on. They used to use a cow vagina Used to they lost it Some real and some artificial although where you would make an artificial cow vagina, I do not know I could think of a worse way Wearing a swimming cap

Another marine biologist had his neck broken today Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show and that is Anna My fact this week is that Mayan women had to prove they could make cocoa with the right amount of froth before men would marry them This is something I was reading in the Smithsonian and it's something that's claimed by this guy called Hayes Lovis and I've no idea if that's how you pronounce his name, but he's a cultural arts curator at the Smithsonian And he said the early records of Mayan marriages in Guatemala Indicate that in some places a woman would have to make the cacao So she'd have to make the chocolate drink and prove that she can make it with the proper amount of froth

Before she was able to marry the man and this is a thing froth was incredibly important So I hadn't realized that the froth on the chocolate drinks in Mesoamerican civilizations was a bigger deal than the actual chocolate drink a thing And why for do we know I guess because it was part just part of the ritual, right? So you'll see lots of mesoamerican art which shows the women making the froth And they'd stand up really really high above the vessel that they were pouring the chocolate drink into And they'd pour it in from really high above and it would splash down onto the ground like two meters high And that would sort of froth it up and they'd do that a few times

So you just pour back and forth and back and forth. So it's just like a ritualistic thing I guess it's just showing that you're not a complete idiot Can you pour some stuff into a pot and then back and forth? Okay. Well, I'll marry you. That's fine from quite a height I'd struggle I would have been a spinster. I don't know. So, um, Jose de Acosta who was a spanish jesuit missionary He said that the scum of froth had a very unpleasant taste Oh, really? So I think to european taste it wasn't that tasty because it's hot chocolate, but it's not that sugaring I'll pass on the chocolate. I'll just have some of that fulcan seamen. Thank you very much Because they didn't have um cane sugar or anything like that

They could have put honey in it, I suppose, but mostly it was a bitter and spicy drink. It wasn't sweet and Yeah, they more than put chili in it, didn't they? Yeah, and yet it was really really popular in spite of not being delicious and sweet like we now have Um, you know when old chocolate goes white? Mm-hmm. You know that no Yeah, when it goes off when you leave chocolate for a while. Yeah, white. Do you know what that is? No, it's called a fat bloom So it's liquid from the cacao bean Gradually moving towards the surface of the chocolate and breaking out on the surface like a rash. It's not bad Yeah, I wouldn't eat it. I would would you yeah, what about green bacon? Yeah, love it. No, sorry. No

You know bacon goes a little bit off It gets that shimmery sheen on it. I think that's probably still all right. I still eat that. Yeah, it's nitrate burn that It's um the nitrates that they use to cure the bacon with and preserve it That's just that reacting with the oxygen. Great. So does that that implies it's on the turn, right? Yeah, but it's fine. It's still okay to eat good. Otherwise. I'm in serious trouble. I mean if it's green and furry probably not They used to the the Mayans and the Aztecs used to use the cacao bean as currency That would be their equivalent to money not exclusively, but it was it was a traded

Thing so and you would know what it was worth. So one bean might be worth according to this expert Sorry, 200 beans might be worth according to this expert. Um the price of one turkey for example Okay, yeah, I think they know that don't they because so they A lot of this stuff we kind of have to guess at because we don't have written records for A lot of these cultures, but they think they know that because they found counterfeit beans, right? So The archaeologists keep finding what look like cacao beans And then they go up close and their little beans made of clay to look exactly like cacao beans And they think it must be counterfeit currency

But or it could be you know, they use them in this pot chocolate tastes like shit Is it their equivalent of chocolate money is non chocolate money? One of the suggestions was that the counterfeits were to use in ceremonies because a lot of religious ceremonies Involved cacao because it was such a valuable thing but The point of religious ceremonies is to give offerings to the gods, right? And you would have thought if you're offering a god what looks like a cacao bean, but when he tries it It's a bit of clay

Yeah, but ceremonial things don't you like like in ancient egypt. They would have made Fake slaves or fake this or fake that fake slaves for the afterlife And in china like traditionally they would do paper Versions of things you want in the afterlife because they knew that you couldn't necessarily take your ipad It's in the next life because it's a it's a solid thing But you could take a paper one and it they still do that. Yeah, it's amazing. Yeah, I think we have mentioned this What is it? Yeah, um, they do money So you just burn money and you burn items that you think they would like to take into the afterworld

It'd be amazing if you get to the afterlife and you you've got a paper ipad there I thought when I walked through this door it would all transform into the real thing Everyone in the afterlife has all wandering around with paper ipads. Yeah, mine doesn't do anything either That's ridiculous. We've no we've no way of communicating to the others Maybe that's what ghosts are trying to do So I didn't know this but Cacao bean stocks are running lower and lower and all the crops are being Converted to corn and west africa where they grow a lot of it and chocolate's going to get way more expensive in the next few years

And erica mccalister mentioned this a few weeks ago. Yes, um, but there was a guy Uh in 2010 because you get traders who buy and sell loads of cacao beans. He bought seven percent Of the world's cacao beans 658 million pounds worth mountains of them and he was nicknamed Chockfinger Chocolate finger it should be just Um, his real name's antony. He's just a trader who's specialized in cacao his whole life He knows all about the market movements and you know, he's just spent his whole life buying and selling it on what he thinks the market will do

Just on the Mayans very quickly not to do with cacao, but um to do with those massive Amazing pyramids that they built. Um, so back in the 30s. They discovered a pyramid within a pyramid So is it in russia? Um, well No, but what's amazing is last year. They've just found another pyramid inside that pyramid Inside the pyramid. Yeah, and they think there may be a few more inside. So yeah, it's like a russian doll effect Very very middle as a topler Yeah, this is only last year that they announced it that they found this new smaller pyramid I would have looked outside

Yeah, first pyramid for a massive pyramid. It could be that we're all living inside a massive Yeah, kind of solar system sized pyramid and that one first one they found is actually the second one exactly Why would you make the second russian doll so much smaller than the outside layer? You just wouldn't doesn't make any sense Yeah, that's a huge scaling difference between Well, they're hard to make when they get that big The first one took a lot of effort and then the next one they're like, oh, we should make one that big Just very quickly The we've never mentioned before that the first atm machine

So the first cash machine was based on a chocolate bar dispenser And so that it was invented by this guy called john shepherd baron in the 1960s and 67 And he I was really an interview with him What I just imagine in like fivers on one of those chocolate machines where it just about to fall down It doesn't quite fall down. That would be the worst thing ever, wouldn't it? Yeah, and they wouldn't fall properly. I don't know. Yeah, it would be a nightmare Um, it was done with using checks in the olden days. So you'd write a check and it had a bit of come off it You would want to get some chocolate out of a chocolate machine. You'd write a check

And six days later once it's cleared Who should I make it out to? Just a nine Please deliver this check to a nine You're sincerely mr baron Danny don't sign off checks. You're sincerely I am so lost with what's happening at the moment Clear up number one. No, you didn't ever put checks into chocolate

I'm sorry give that impression what I meant was he based the cash machine on a chocolate bar machine But to use cash machines in the olden days you put a check in and it had a bit of radioactive carbon 14 isotope Which interacted with the machine and he used to get in trouble and people would say oh, we reckon this is dangerous It's radioactive. So he said I later worked out that you'd have to eat 136,000 checks for it to have any effect on your health So is that you put that's how cash machines used to work with radioactive Yeah, a radioactive system that triggered it to give you some cash. That is unbelievable. But that's not how the Chocolate the chocolate dispenser works because it would melt. It would melt Yeah, you did used to get radioactive chocolate bars when they first invented radium or discovered radium

They started putting them in chocolate bars. So technically you could have actually put a chocolate bar into a cash machine and got cash But he'd have to get his chocolate from the original machine. So it's just a system that's just working back and forth He's still stuck between two vending machines So this guy this inventor Said he then moved up to scotland to the coast and the next thing he invented and the only other thing he invented As far as I can tell is a device that played the sound of killer whales to ward seals off his fish farm And he said to the bbc it only succeeded in attracting many more of them Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts

Thank you so much for listening If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast We can be found on our twitter accounts. I'm on at schreiberland james at x8 andy at andrew hunter m and jasinski You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account Which is at qi podcast. You can also go to our website. No such thing as a fish.com Remember our tour tickets are now on sale. Do come along. We'd love to see you there. We will be back again next week. Goodbye You