No Such Thing As A Fish - 205: No Such Thing As The Number Six

Episode Date: February 23, 2018

Andy, James, Anna and Alex discuss ski lift thefts, the world's largest wine cellar and what would happen if all the bacteria disappeared in the world.

Hey everyone, before we start this week's show, we just want to remind you that we have a little documentary on the internet, don't we? We sure do. It's not quite as hard-hitting as Louis Theroux, but there may be a couple more gags in it. It's the behind-the-scenes look at our tour from last year, when we were stalked with the camera and they filmed us doing Japs and stuff. Yeah, there's loads of behind-the-scenes bits and pieces, there's loads of interviews with us, there's little bits from the show.

It's really, really fun. You can get it on the internet. It's called Behind the Gills. You can get it on Apple, Google, Amazon, Astjeeves, MySpace, and all those places where you get stuff from. Yeah. Okay, I'm on the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of None Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming

to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden. My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Tajinski, and Alex Bell, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite fact from the last seven days, starting with James. Okay, my fact this week is that if all the bacteria in the world disappeared, we wouldn't notice for about a week. When scientists notice in a lab, if they were studying bacteria, would they just think, oh, they must be down the other end of the Petri dish today?

They are small. But I think I'm talking more of the day-to-day person going about their life. So this anyway is from a paper it's called Life in a World Without Microbes by Jack A. Gilbert and Josh D. Neufeld, and it's absolutely brilliant, I love it. In this paper they say it would take us nearly a week to realise what had happened, and then that they predict complete societal collapse only within a year or so. So the first week you don't notice anything, and then 51 weeks later- It's all downhill.

The whole society collapses. So that 51 weeks is really horrible. I reckon it would be. You'd probably get progressively worse. And you know the end is nigh. They say then annihilation of most humans and non-microscopic life on the planet would follow a prolonged period of starvation, disease, unrest, civil war, anarchy, and global biogeochemical asphyxiation.

But we're due for 90% of that already with the bacteria. That's true. But for the first week, it's fine. Okay. Yeah. So the thing is, let's think, what is there that we need microbes for and bacteria? So they're in your stomach, right? And they help you digest things.

Okay. But I found it really weird that you don't need, humans don't actually need it. Exactly. Or we could find it hard to digest things, but we can survive without bacteria. I read that and I couldn't quite believe it because I thought, surely we must need them. I think we just get constipated, wouldn't we? Yeah. But there are some animals which do need them, aren't there?

Yeah. Although now Anna said that. Okay. For the first week, we might be constipated. Okay. But at least it's not prolonged a period of starvation, disease, unrest, civil war, anarchy, and global biogeochemical asphyxiation. Depends how bad your constipation is as well.

So yes, animals do need it. So cows would need it, for instance, because they can digest cellulose without microbes. And a few other animals would as well. But basically, eventually what would happen is all the nitrogen wouldn't be able to be fixed. The nitrogen cycle would stop, which is something that we need for life. So all of the plants use that and then so the plants are going to die out and then. Basically that life needs nitrogen and it goes around in the cycle like water does.

But without the microbes, that would stop, which means that the oceans would get full of nitrogen, which means all of the fish would die. We'd struggle to make oxygen as well because a lot of microbes make oxygen. So a lot of bad things would happen. And this entire time. But in week two. It's in week two. And this is in the whole entire time, everything is dying.

And so nitrogen isn't being produced, but all the dead things just stay there. Well, yes. It basically means that we need the mushrooms, and I hate to say this, but we need the fungi. If all the microbes die and they can't break anything down, the only thing left to break things down is the mushrooms. They step in and save us. Who'd have thought it? It's not an action film.

I especially want to see. Would your poo stop smelling? Well, and your sweat. I think that's one of the real bonuses of week one is that this amount of sweat is just caused by all the bacteria. And so we would smell great for a week. You're constipated. So it doesn't really matter whether your poo smells or not.

No, that is true. That would happen. So Louis Pasteur, the famous guy, scientist guy, he thought that we needed bacteria to live in microorganisms, otherwise we'd all die. And then a bit after him, two guys came along, 10 years later, two guys came along called George Nuttall and Hans Thurfelder, and they disproved it by getting a guinea pig and getting rid of all its bacteria and microbes and the guinea pigs still managed to live. How did they do that?

Well, I reckon there was probably a lot of antibiotics involved. Oh, they didn't just give it a shower. I reckon there was a shower involved. Yeah, you might as well soak it down. There must have been, right? Yeah. And this is called nobiotic living. G-N-O, nobiotic.

Get this, there is a place in the world where this has kind of happened, your horror scenario, James. So it's in Chernobyl, lots of microbes and fungi got contamination and they died. And as a result, there are loads of trees in this place called the Red Forest, which is where all the trees turned red and died, and they're not decaying. So there's leaf litter, you know, the sort of leaf mulch on the ground, but it's three times thicker in the hottest bit of Chernobyl, radiation-wise, than it is in areas without radiation.

That's quite cool, isn't it? Because leaf litter is quite a nice thing to walk through and kick it up in the air. Yeah. You can go for some really nice, awesome walks. Is it though? Because it's still going to be raining, so it's still going to get wet and soggy and nasty. It's just going to bring down to dust. It's going to be really gross.

Yeah. It's going to be mulch, isn't it? Yeah. It is mulch, I'm afraid. That's not a romantic walk through the woods, is it? When you kick it up mulch. So bacteria are really cool, right? Yes.

And you do actually, when you do our job, you get really bored, actually, of reading all the journalists who say... Of reading. You get bored of reading. We have to do too much of it. But all journalists say, everyone thinks bacteria are just disease-causing bastards, and actually, some of them are really great, but some of them are really great, and some of them are just cool.

We learned about this one, which is the, let's see if I can pronounce this, Acidothiobaculous, and you find it in caves, and it only comes like a lot of bacteria in microbial mats, so they hang out together, bacteria often work together, comes in these microbial mats with many millions of them all squashed up together, and it hangs off the ceiling, and it looks exactly like a stalact might. Tight scoot. I always thought tight was off the ceiling, and then someone told me it was the other way around.

No, it's tights come down. Yeah. I always thought, and someone told me I was wrong. We're telling you, you're right. Stalactite, hold on tight. Exactly, and stalact might mighty, because it grows up. Or might poke you in the bum. Or might fall on your head.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Tight to the ground, it's hard, isn't it? Mnemonics are hard. Well, anyway, this stuff looks like a stalactite, and it hangs off the roof of caves, but it's got the exact consistency of bogies, and if you read about it in... Is that a scientific term? Because bogies have lots of different consistencies.

Of a healthy bogie, James. A country bogie, not one of these horrible London polluted bogies. What would happen to your bogies if all the bacteria disappeared? Great question. Would they get stuck in your nose like your poo? No. You've got bogies stuck in your nose. We're talking nasal conservation is what I'm asking.

They would not be colourful, like bogies are now. I know your pink bogies have always impressed me, but the colours are the bacteria, aren't they? Yeah. So you would still have mucus, but it would be see-through. But what would it gather around? I thought the bacteria was the start of a mucus party. Yes.

Well, you might have hairs in your nose. I have got hairs in my nose. And they could be used as a nucleus. Yes, I see that now. But, I mean, it's cleaner. That first week of your body, it's great. You don't smell no mucus, no pooing. Like, oh, disgusting stuff, stop.

It's brilliant. You've got glassy snots. Like a cartoon character. We've gone off topic. Sorry. We have something. We've strayed. What I'm saying is, this stuff is lots of bacteria, which are basically bogies hanging

from the ceiling. And if you read journal articles about them, they're referred to snotites as insalactites. So, you know, scientific journals, it's talking about the snotites. And they're actually really cool because they excrete sulfuric acid and that dissolves the limestone and it makes caves go sparkly. So you get really sparkly caves because it creates gypsum, which is like, you know, gypsum crystals. That is very cool.

They sparkle, but they are called snotites. That sounds like an ancient people, the snotites. It does, doesn't it? Yeah. They're fighting against the hittites. So I looked up a few other what ifs. Oh, good idea. So this is a bit off topic, I know, but I just basically went to Google and started going

through what if, what if X happened and there are loads of amazing results. So what would happen if there was no number six? This is on 538.co. Just go straight from five to seven. Well, no. This is the thing. I would. You might.

But basically this was a question asked by a child who was five and a half years old and clearly interested in what happens next. And they went to mathematics professors at Duke University and they said, well, everything would fall apart. They said, I imagine they said, stop wasting my time. I have more important research beginning on this. They said it's really interesting because basically if there's no six, there can't be any numbers higher than six.

I just don't think that's true. Is it? This is a maths professor who said all the other integers are out. It's very detrimental. If you think about it, how do you define six? One more than five. How do you define seven? Two more than five.

Then you're right. Exactly. So if you define it as one more than six, you're in trouble. But if you define it as two more than five, you're absolutely fine. But then if you start working that way, how do you define 11? Six more than five. But there's no six. So now 11's in trouble.

Exactly. This is an actual maths professor who said we are screwed if we lose six. I think to reassure him, you just bomb seven down, don't you? Then you bomb eight down. Everyone gets a bomb down one. Or you could promote everyone from zero to five. And you promote zero to one. Zero's always wanted to be one.

Zero's just sitting there uselessly. The concept of zero is a useless one as established by... All maths. But it didn't exist until, you know... Wasn't it about the seventh century? How did we get to the seventh century without zero? It's impossible. Exactly.

It was the sixth century then. All the eighth. I don't know. Anyway, I was looking at some more stiff stuff as well, mainly because you said you were, and I thought, I'll copy Andy. That's what I do. So, if everyone thinks about if we all jumped at the same time, what would happen? And if we all gathered together in the same place and jumped at the same time, then we

would push the earth in the opposite direction to the way we jumped by 100 the radius of a hydrogen atom, which I think is actually decent. Yeah. I think it's not bad. Is it worth the organisation required? Yeah, I think that's not much actually, I don't know. We could jump. Also, because as soon as you come back down, the earth comes back up to meet you, doesn't

it? Yes, it's not long-lasting. It's a very rare circumstance in which we need the earth to move that little distance for that shorter time. Would everyone at the other end of the earth go, whoa, what was that? No, we're all like members of the earth. No one's even there to experience. It would be amazing, Alex, if you were the only person on the other side of the earth.

You know what? We just did it as an elaborate prank. Where is everyone? I must have missed a member. You're like, where is everyone? And why have I just moved one half the diameter of a hydrogen atom? The entire world's jumping at a party. You click on Facebook.

Oh, that's where they are. Seven billion attending. One has not replied. Can I give you one more what-if? That I'm done. I didn't know if you shot a powerful gun, like a sort of a cannon gun, but a gun that exists today, a modern gun, on the moon, you can shoot yourself in the back. That's so cool.

It's an elaborate suicide method, isn't it? Yeah. If you want to fox the detectives. One of Agatha Christie's later prank stories she never wrote up. A man is found dead alone on the moon. So hang on. Does the bullet go all the way around the moon? It does.

So the moon's small enough that the gravitational pull isn't too much. It basically goes, you have to be on top of a hill or something. On a mountain, yeah. It kind of stays in very, very low orbit if you get the right velocity. You obviously have to, you have to have a very precise shot to make sure you do hit yourself. Does it only work its way on once, but if you shot it and then you felt it go past your ear, would it go around again so you have time to stand one click for that? No, I think you've only got one chance.

Really? Because then you'd lose momentum, wouldn't you? And then it does still have a gravitational pull. Yeah, it might still hit you, but it might hit you lower down like in the testicles. Oh, yeah. Man is found shot in the testicles on the moon alone. That is a great what if. That's incredible.

It was probably all from Randall Monroe. Who knows when you're looking at stuff, hypothetical stuff on the internet, how many of them were originally Randall Monroe, so we should credit him just in case. Randall Monroe basically invented the two words what and if. He did, yeah. Yeah. No, that's ridiculous James. He just invented putting them together.

Yeah, but what if he did? Okay, it's time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact is the world's largest wine cellar has tunnels 150 miles long and it's so big it has to have traffic rules for people who drive through it. That is very cool. Yeah, it's incredible. It's in Moldova and it's got streets and all the streets are named after different grapes and you can drive a car through it and a lot of employees there.

They just cycle around all the time. We should say what it's called. It's called Milesti Michi and it's near the capital of Chisnau. Yeah. It's incredible. Yeah. Who knew, I mean James obviously, but who knew of the rest of humanity about Moldova's wine industry?

It's amazing. I know because I've had Moldovan wine. Yeah, you don't. You love it, don't you? Well, I do not rate it very highly on my list of wines by country, I must say. They drink a lot in Russia. They drink a lot in Russia and the same way they drink Georgian wines. I was reading that they really messed up the Moldovan wine trade.

In fact, I think it was about 2005 when Putin imposed some sanctions on Moldova and he banned all imports of their wine from going into Russia because they were a bit too pro-EU for him or I think he said it was some other reason, but I think it was because they were too pro-EU and they're just loosening it. So that really damaged their wine trade because about 40% of their exports went to Russia. That's so weird because Vladimir Putin, he has his own cave in the second largest wine cellar in Moldova. That must really piss him off.

No, no, no. It's fine. That's only 120 kilometres, but he has his own cave there and lots of celebrities or wealthy people have their own special little zone. Oh, it's like Beverly Hills, but for wine. Yeah, but he had his 50th birthday party in that second largest wine cellar. It's in Krikov. So cool.

The wine cellar at Krikov. Have you heard about this? They have a race there. No. So it hosts a 10 kilometre race around the wine cellar and you wear a headlamp because obviously it's quite dark, a lot of the place. And at the end of it, you get a glass of Muld wine, but during the race, they hire someone to dress up as the Grim Reaper and chase you.

No way. It sounds to me like the prize is getting the wine, right? Yeah. Kind of. But you're running around next to a load of wine. No one ever gets to the end. We're holding an Olympic stadium out of gold medals. We should say that that second largest wine tunnel or cave or cellar in Moldova is also

the second largest in the world. Oh, yeah. It's just it majors in this thing of having big wine cellars. And this one, the biggest one, Milesti Meetsy, two million bottles it has, which is more than the next 10 cellars combined. Wow. It's a big cellar, mate. Jesus.

That is really big. Yeah. We are actually drinking wine now, aren't we, to celebrate this fact? We are. I was thinking it to celebrate. Nice one, James. You've earned yourself another glass for that. That's good.

That's really going to help my performance later on. I'll cave in and have a glass, too. Very strong. Alex, have you got a pun that will earn you a glass of this red wine? I don't have to have one because I'm the banker. I've got nothing. Oh, well, we've got some beer here. What else can we say?

So in Moldova, you will find the world's largest building in the shape of a bottle. And it is, it hosts the Strong Drinks Museum. Wow. It sounds like an awesome museum, right? Yeah. Welcome to the store. Would you like an audio guy? The audio guy is the same guy.

My wife. Is it on? No, no, no. When you say the largest building shaped like a bottle, it's not that it's the largest building in the world and it's shaped like a bottle. No, mate. It's just that there are some buildings in the world shaped like bottles and Moldova has the biggest one.

Yeah. So the largest building in the world is somewhere in Dubai or something, isn't it? Taipei. And we would probably know if it was shaped like a wine bottle. It's kind of odd. Sky Scrapers all shaped a bit like wine bottles. It's a great philosophical point for another time. The gherkin, isn't it?

No, that's true. That's shaped like a gherkin, the walkie-talkie. No, true. The Empire State Building is shaped like a novelty liqueur bottle, I would say. The shard is shaped like a tiny bit of broken wine bottle. But we didn't bottle wine until 1860, I think it was, so it was illegal to sell wine by the bottle between 1636 and 1860 and the reason was that people who were doing it before that when Glass first came in, it was really easy to cheat on the size.

So you could sell someone a bottle that wasn't enough wine. So you sold it by the barrel and then you took it home and you put it in your own bottle. There were bottles of wine that existed. Yeah, they had them at home. I don't know how you siphon it in. You couldn't buy a bottle. Yeah. Because I get a bit annoyed when there's not a reasonable size option at a bar and if

I had to choose between a glass of wine and a barrel of wine, I'd be very annoyed. I'd like a large glass, please. No, we don't do that. 125 mils or a barrel. I'll have a barrel. Have you heard about the government's wine cellar? No. So the government of this country has a wine cellar and it's for when they host parties

and receptions or digger trees or big dinners, you know, they do loads of official occasions. And so they have to have a wine cellar and it's got about 34,000 bottles of wine in it, valued I think about 800,000 pounds, but it's really clever. They try and sell fund by selling off every year or every few years. They sell off some really good wines. You know, they sell one bottle of a great wine, which allows them to throw an entire party with rubbish wine. And they've got, and during the Second World War, one of the first aggressive actions

of Britain in the entire war was to requisition the wine from the German Embassy. Similarly, I didn't know about the Bolshevik Revolution and it's running into wine problems. So this was when the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace. The Winter Palace obviously had this enormous wine cellar, which they all discovered, all the Red Guard had been sent in and they got really drunk immediately. Was there a Rose Guard as well who was not as popular? So yeah, they went and got really drunk and then they'd send others in. So the leaders, the Bolshevik leaders, your Lenins, they're quite annoyed

because they really want to get on with the job and they keep sending in more guards and more people in their revolutionary lot and they kept getting drunk. And I was reading an extract from this guy called Antonov Oficienko, who was a Bolshevik commander and he remembered repeatedly sending troops in and them succumbing. Eventually he said, we sent armored cars to drive away other crowds, but the armored cars started weaving suspiciously after a short amount of time and then he said they tried to flood the cellars so that this wine issue was totally removed and the firemen they deployed to flood the cellars ended up getting drunk so they failed to do that.

It was just havoc. That is amazing. Yeah, very undisciplined. That's so funny. Have you heard of Octavian vaults? No. It's another mine actually and it's in Wiltshire and it's got five million bottles of wine in it. What?

No. But this one that's the world's biggest has got two million? No, you're right. I'm looking at that and doubting it now, but it's under Corsham in Wiltshire. I mean, it's not. Wait, Corsham's where the secret nuclear bunker is as well. They've got a lot on the ground there. It's basically for wealthy people or famous people, but it's the size of 20 football pitches

and they hold a huge amount of wine there, which people have as investments and things like that. I think I should go and check it out. Yeah. For a research purpose. Yeah, if I don't come out for a while, Anna, come along. Just make sure I'm okay. I think they'll send me in. Send in Alex as well.

I'm sending down an armored car. We'll send it back and find that Anna's finished it all off. That's the only way to end one of these things. If Anna had been in the Russian Revolution, it would have all been over a lot faster. What I quite like about wine is how French wine has just always been the best wine. It's the most wankiest thing you've ever sent on a podcast. Always the best wine. When the Greeks first met the Gauls and tasted what the grapes were like, what the wine was like,

they were like, this is obviously the only wine we're going to drink. The same with the Romans. From the start of the Roman Empire, the invasion of the Gauls in like the 50s BC, they immediately started making sure all their wine was imported from there. To the extent that by 92 AD, the emperor Domitian said that he wasn't going to allow any new planting in France. So they had, they possessed France in France by that point. He said, you're not allowed to plant vines here because it's ruining the industry back home. It's ruining the Roman industry because people only want to drink French wine.

So there must be an objective quality to French wine that must be better. Well, there's an objective quality to Moldovan wine that says it's not as good. In my opinion. They weren't banning any Moldovans from growing their own vines and exporting them. Sure, feel free to try to sell us your wine. So obviously wine sellers can have rat problems. They can, as in because they're sellers. And a lot of French wine sellers have rat problems and you get populations of alcoholic rats to the extent where there is a traditional Bordeaux recipe for rat that you grill alcoholic rats.

It specifies alcoholic rats as part of the recipe because they've drunk rats. Is that true? How do you identify whether a rat is an alcoholic or not? If you notice the rat drinking in the morning, is that when you know that you can't cook the rat? They've got shaky paws. Can a rat identify that it's an alcoholic? I think there's a lot of it's fine. It doesn't even know it's a rat.

Admitting you have a problem is the first step. Admitting you are a rat is the first step. Well, stage 12, the cooking is you skin them and eviscerate them, brush them with a thick sauce of olive oil and crushed shallots and grill them over a fire of broken wine barrels. So, I mean, there is a sort of element of romanticism about the wine including that because you have to burn a wine barrel as well. But like, that's kind of cool, right? Yeah, romanticism. It does sound post-apocalyptic as well.

I think it's a shame Valentine's Day is over otherwise we'd all be serenading our partners with this exact recipe. OK, it's time for fact number three and that is Anna. Yep, my fact this week is that before they settled on the name Windsor, serenames that were considered for the royal family included Gelf, Whipper, Wetin, Tudor Stewart and England. I like Tudor Stewart because it's like a double barrel where they've taken both sides of the family. I know, but I think they were worried it might sound a bit posh and the royal family know how they like to not give that impression. Yeah, they went really old. I like Gelf and Wetin especially.

I've been in a lot of, you know, first idea brainstorming meetings where it's just, there's no bad ideas and that really sounds like it's one of those. What is Gelf? How do you spell Gelf? So it's G-U-E-L-P-H, so I don't know if that's the right pronunciation actually. Gelf. Gelf? The house of Gelf sounds so rubbish. So there was reasoning for all of this. This was in 1917. So the royal family descended from Queen Victoria who'd married Albert were really officially the Saxcoburg, Gotha family,

which had a bit of a German ring to it and in 1917 for obvious reasons, Germany wasn't everyone's favourite country and they decided to change their name and they changed it to Windsor and all of these other names genuinely were justified. So Albert's house, the Saxon royal house, had the names Wetin and Whipper in it and then Gelf came from the Hanoverian royal house and then yeah, people threw in Tudor's Stuart. Why not? Everyone loved the Tudors, everyone loved the Stuart. I think it's Hadelver is in Germany. Right, so people would have picked up. That's probably why it was dismissed quite early on. I think you've buried the most hilarious lead in the story and that they took the name from Windsor Castle. So the royal family was named after Windsor Castle rather than vice versa.

I think that's insane. That is very weird. It's so funny. But nobody knew what the official surname was because it had never been used. They didn't really know if they had a surname or not. Yeah. And when they got rid of the surname, it wasn't just the surname. It was the use of degree styles, dignitaries, titles and honours of dukes and duchesses of Saxony and princes and princesses of the Saxe, Coburke and Gotha and all other German degree styles, dignitaries, titles, honours and appellations

because they have all this crap, like, at the beginning and the end of their name. So they had to completely rebrand themselves. It's not just case changing your name. But isn't the Queen now Windsor Mountbatten? Yeah. Yes. Because of Philip took... No, it's her favourite cake. Is it?

She always orders it. You'll think of Mount Battenburg. It's like two normal Battenburgs on top of each other. That is weird, though, because the Mount Batten were the Battenburgs, but they changed to the Mount Batten's of Philip's family and at the same time, they thought we need to sound a bit less German so they changed to Mount Batten. So, get this.

Do you know the exact thing which prompted them to change? Because, yeah, we'd had three years of total war against Germany before they thought, oh, maybe we should be sounding so German. The thing which prompted it was that there was a bombing raid on London. And before that, there were some bombs from Zeppelins, but this is the first time there was a heavy bomber plane dropping bombs on the British population, June 1917, and the bomber planes were called Gotha Plains.

That was the name. And people looked and thought, hang on, if they're called Gotha Plains, and those guys are called the Saxocobo Gotha's, something's not right. And so, and it was within a month they changed the name. That was how first the turnaround was, which is quite a speedy rebranding. But we still have Goths. Yeah, that's true, yeah.

Why didn't they rebrand, is that what you're saying? Imagine, oh, look, there's a pack of Winzers over there on the street. But the other thing is, why didn't the Germans then just rename their planes Winzers? Every time the Queen changed her name, they just renamed the planes. I don't think the priority of the German Luftwaffe was to gently troll the Royal Family into submission. I think they were trying to just blow up the whole country. I agree with that.

But then on the other hand, there is a certain kind of propaganda thing that they're trying to do all the time, isn't it? No, I reckon it would work that. I do agree, they missed the trick. Do you know why Elizabeth is Windsor Mountbatten, rather than just Windsor, which was the suggestion? No, is Mountbatten something to do with Prince Philip or something? It certainly is, but they were the Windsor House,

and actually when they were born, Charles and Anne weren't born Windsor Mountbatten. But then, what's described as an expert amateur, wrote to the Royal Family, or wrote to the government, and said, if this Prince Andrew, who was about to be born, if this baby that the Queen's pregnant with is born, not with his father's name, then he will have the badge of bastardry upon him. Because it's a bit embarrassing to not have your father.

It implies your parents might not be married. And this caused this huge consternation, and there was an official parliamentary investigation into it where they decided eventually that they had to add Mountbatten to the name, because otherwise people would just assume Prince Andrew was a bastard born out of wedlock. Clearly people knew, didn't they? Literally his parents were the Queen and Prince Philip. You would have thought.

At least with that point on, the Royal Family went on to avoid any controversy due to heritage. Thank God, that's the last trouble Prince Andrew ever caused. But Prince Charles calls himself Charles Wales, doesn't he? Yeah, they still play pretty fast and loose with their surnames, don't they? Which would have been even more embarrassing if they'd been called England. Yeah, you're right. Would he have hyphenated to England Wales? What was that thing that you said they would have if the child was born with?

The badge of bastardry. That, weirdly, is my only Boy Scout achievement. All the other lads clumped together and got over me, pretty proud. What was the guy? Was he an amateur or what was he called? Expert amateur. They just refer to him as an expert amateur. I feel like we get quite a lot of those actually writing into QI, and we love them, by the way.

He was a real expert, wasn't he? I think he'd previously embarrassed the government on other occasions by pointing out, actually, if you do that, then genealogically, you're screwed. So he was good. And always in that tone of voice, which we've enjoyed. Did you know that another Royal surname, Stuart, way further back, like Mary, Queen of Scots, kind of time, was originally Stuart, as in like an heir, Stuart, as in Stuart.

That's where he got it from, isn't it? He swear for Ryan, didn't he? After his coronation, he would push the royal trolley all the way down Westminster Abbey, offering duty free on the left and the right. To the pews. So Mary, Queen of Scots changed her name from Stuart to Stuart, S-T-U-A-R-T. Because the French wouldn't have been able to pronounce it, they would have pronounced the W as a V and it would have been Stuart.

She would have been Mary Stuart. Are you serious? That's why Stuart doesn't have a W now? Yeah. That's amazing. And it was just because people weren't pronouncing it correctly. So they were just like, well, fine. But the French wouldn't pronounce a D or the T at the end of that word, would they? Because they miss out the S-T-U-A-R.

So it doesn't really matter if it's Stuart or Stuart. No, it's weird that she changed the D to a T. No, yeah, that makes sense. But then it should be Stuart. It's Stuart. But maybe it was just those rhino jokes that just got to her at the end. I think there may be a change in the Royal family's name coming up soon. Oh, hello. I'm not certain about this.

Sorry, you do say that. I know I do. We were saying the other day that I use the word hello sometimes to mean, oh, hello. Did you do that? I didn't believe him. I didn't believe it either. I do sometimes. That's so weird.

But I think that that was the original meaning of the word hello, wasn't it? Yeah. I'm not making a point. It's just what I said. No, I know. I just didn't believe you. And I'm really sorry for interrupting Andy. When you guys are quite finished.

So when the throne is inherited from a queen, i.e. down a matrilineal line, right? The Royal House often changes to reflect the patrilineal descent of the Pneumonic. It's a bit naughty. So Queen Elizabeth is in the Wettin dynasty, as you say, from a branch of the House of the Saxcoburg Gotha line. But Prince Charles, his father's line is Prince Philip, obviously. And Prince Philip is a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Gluxburg. So genealogically. Goodness, we won't have the German problem again.

So Charles William, everybody down that line, because of that sort of ancient, slightly sexist, you know, tradition of the patrilineal thing, they are all members of that dynasty. They probably will not change to make themselves the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderberg-Gluxburgs. But there's an outside chance. That's like all of the names they brainstormed put together. It's really weird that their surname is a hypothetical surname. Well, this is what our surname would be if we ever really used them. Yeah, because they don't use them, do they?

They don't, because they have tidally literally never used them. So the whole thing is pointless. Don't need them. It's like Madonna. Don't need a surname. Yeah. Same thing. Madonna Ciccone, you mean? Oh, sort of. Hey, in royal news, this is the thing that's happened this week, which you probably read about,

is the thing about Prince Henrik, who was the Danish Queen Margaret's husband who died this week or last week. But it's just a thing that's in the news this week, so I was reminded of it. But I find it really weird that Prince Henrik of Denmark has been annoyed his whole life, that he hasn't been promoted to the same level as his wife. Like he has made no secret of the fact that he's furious, that he's not king consort, he's prince consort. That is weird.

He doesn't have the same status as his son or his wife. So he's just died and he has refused to be buried next to his wife, the Danish Queen Margaret, because he's like, well, if you don't think we're equal in life, I guess we're not equal in death. But wait, is she still alive? Yeah. Well, I think she can make the decision for it now, can't she? I'm sorry to be crude about it, but... She's done the graceful thing and allowed him not to be buried in the great space of her.

I mean, you can have a compromise and he would just be buried facing away with his arms crossed, clutching the TV remote with him. Did you know all Spanish people have a secret surname? I'm not even joking. Is it the same for everyone? No, it's different for everyone. Right, OK. Children.

Different for everyone. Well, no, logically. I'll have to box myself into a corner there. Do you know the Thai in Thailand? Sorry to interrupt, we'll get back to that. But in Thailand, every family has to have a different surname. You just knocked Andy off the fact stool with your feet and then jumped on it. What was that?

This is, it's extremely relevant. You don't know if it's relevant or not, I haven't told you my facts yet. I think I'm going to have a nice follow-on fact, how Andy finished his. No, it's relevant to the little stupid joke that I made in the middle of Andy's thing, which wasn't really relevant. Yeah, but a single family has to have a given family name, but it's not allowed to be the same as anyone else. Wait, so everyone's got a different surname. How do you know someone's your cousin? You don't.

Oh. When are they going to run out? Well, they're quite long Thai names, aren't they? That's probably why they're so long, yeah. Just like your password for your computer, if you take them long enough, no one else is going to have the same one. We all live with this issue online every day. We have to have unique codes for it. But you then have to have a surname plus one, two, three, and then your cat's name.

What's your name? It's Andrew Smith, 1986. Right. Did you know that all Spanish people have a secret second surname that no one outside Spain knows about? What? Yeah. So children inherit two surnames. Okay, one from their mother, one from their father.

So there are Spanish people who are called, you'll have heard of them, Rafael Nadal Pereira, Enrique Iglesias Presla, and Fernando Alonso Diaz. These are all their actual names. So there's third ones. Why aren't they, why don't we know about the third ones? It's not common. It's not reported. And how did you get this scoop? Who leaked this?

Okay, well, here's the interesting thing is that until recently, automatically, the first one would be from the husband, from the male parent and the second one from the female parent, the mother. And children would only inherit properly the first surname of each parent. So there's, over time, there's a trend towards keeping male surnames and not female ones. And as of last year, parents get to choose. So that will now be balanced out a bit. True in Russia as well. They have secret surnames. So Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, that's his real name.

I can see why he cut the unnecessary. That's why Russian novels are so confusing to read. Yes. So many different bloody names. The Spanish was quite interesting because it's kind of like natural selection through surnames because the nicest surname from now on, the nicest surname will be picked. So you'll get lovely surnames. That's true, actually. Because it's unlikely you're going to be called, you know, dick face, cock head.

And then, like, you would have two shit names to pay for which one they do. Yeah, that is an unlikely name. Root names are dying out. So in 1881, there were 3,211 cocks in the UK. And now there are only 785. And they're all in the House of Commons. That's a joke. It's 650 capacity. Sorry, it doesn't work.

It doesn't make any sense. Wow, only 785? Yeah, same with a lot of surnames like Shuffle Bottom. That's massively declined. Only 322 of those left. Dafts are going down. About 75% decline in these names. That's a shame.

I tell you a way to protect a name is by giving people money to have the name. The University of Glasgow office. How much money would you need to be called Alex Cock? That's a good point. If I gave you £10,000, but you had to keep Alex Cock for the rest of your life? No. Are you serious? Are you kidding me?

James, I'll do it for a tenner. Oh, I'm not going to bargain enough to a tenner immediately. We have a winner. Oh, OK. Great. I mean, to just the name Cock. No, no, no. The name Cock.

Yeah, but that's still... Like in Bolton, that's just a nice way of saying hello to Anna. All right, Anna Cock. Is it? Yeah. That sounds like the kind of thing you're telling me now. Anyway, the University of Glasgow offer a grant of up to £500 for anyone with a surname Graham.

It's called the Graham Trust and they offer it because traditionally Graham was a name for poor people a long time ago. Are you joking? I know. You still get that? It's just on their website and there's a paragraph saying that the original name from 1759 was the distribution to persons of the name of Graham or descendants of persons of that name, such sums that they shall just requisite and to put poor boys of the same name or descendants

of such blah, blah, blah, blah, to enable them to... It's not a poor name now, is it? No, but it's carried on. You can still do it at £500. But is it... So it's for... How much money? £500.

That's not how much money is. Well, Heather Graham, if you're listening and we know you do, you're quits in now. I'm an Arsenal manager, George Graham. Yeah. Yeah. That's another reference, in case you didn't get the Heather Graham one. Do you know any of the Graham's? I was trying to think of like a rich Graham.

I can rarely think of any. Heather Graham's got to be worth a bobble, too. I don't know who that is. Heather Graham. Austin Powers. She's in the second Austin Powers film. She plays Felicity Shagwell. That's an unusual saying.

There aren't that many Shagwells these days. Actually, if you're called Shagwell, you can get a... £50 grant from the University of Keele. OK, it's time for fact number four, and that is Alex. My factor this week is that in 2012, thieves stole an entire ski lift from the Czech Republic. I'm glad that you specified it was thieves, because imagine if it was Laura Biding people who stole, and it has to be thieves. Yes, I'm sorry.

Yeah, that's amazing. Sorry, just one of the things on the lift or the entire lift mechanism. So, all of the pylons, the cables, all of the gondola chairs on it, the whole thing was just taken away overnight. Isn't that crazy? Was there another ski resort that opened its magical new lift two days later? The thing is, OK, I reckon more than one person was involved in this theft, right? Yeah.

Pretty big accusation to chuck around, James. I just don't think that's... James walking around with his notepad and his pieces coming out. I think this is the work of more than one person. I'm putting my Sherlock Holmes hat on, but I think, you know... You can't do it on your own. No, I think that would be another great Agatha Christie, where Poirot calls them all together in the drawing room.

Actually, you all stole the chair. And where is the chair now? On the moon. That's incredible. Yeah, I don't know how they did it. Surely you'd need sort of like jumbo jet to take it away and stuff or huge lorries. It's unbelievable. I think...

Well, I think because if you think about ski lifts, you can take them apart. I suppose you have the right equipment and you're able to chop up all the pylons. A lot of it, you know... If you have the right equipment, you can take anything apart. That's true. That's true, but it's all... Like, if you think about it, they're quite simply made things. They're huge, just lots and lots and lots of metal.

It's not rumbly, really complicated, dense stuff. You've got hollow pylons. You've got long, long strands of cable. You've got lots of individual stackable gondolas. You can just wind up the cable onto a reel or something, can't you? Well, I'd wind it around one of the gondolas. It's amazing. Like, wind Christmas lights when you wind it around the pod.

But as soon as you put it away, it gets nothing. And then you open it up. Oh, it's tangled. That's why they haven't set it up yet. They're still trying to get it apart. They sort of got all the pylons together and tied it together with a string. Yeah. So that happened.

Are we going to talk about ski lifts or massive things that have been stolen? Can I tell you my one favorite, amazing, my favorite fact about lifts? And then that's the only thing I've got. Ski lifts, sir. Well, cable cars specifically, because there's no skiing involved in this one. But this is potentially my favorite fact, if it's true. And I rang TFL to find out today and they haven't got back to me yet. So Coco may yet run in with a note telling me it's true.

Although it's the last fact, so... Yeah, it's not looking good for this confirmation. Well, either way, it's a cool idea. And it's sort of half interesting anyway, is that the Emirates cable car, Emirates airline, the gondola, which goes from Greenwich to the Docklands over the River Thames. It's about 90 meters above the water. The fact that I read was that that's tall enough for most ships to go under. But, you know, just like with Tower Bridge,

they have the capability to lift the road for taller ships to get through. The same capability exists with this cable car, which is that if you take off all the gondolas off the cable car, then the reduction in weight means that the cable raises by a few meters, meaning that even ships that are taller than that can get through. I would say if you're wanting to steal that cable car, then you turn up and you take all of the bits first, don't you? You take all of these bubbles first and you say,

oh, no, I'm just doing it because there's a ship on its way. And then after that, all you have to do is wind up the rope. I think the easy way would be to put a hook on top of a 90 meter high ship and just drive it as fast as you can. And then pull it. And actually, to be honest, if we're doing this in the Cartoon Universe, then you probably would stretch and then you go... Straight back into central.

That's the old dog taking a string of sausages. All you need is one of the sausages to be in your mouth. I googled biggest things ever stolen and the internet seems to think it's a mountain. A mountain called Humta Pahad, which is in eastern India. And apparently what's happened is locals have just climbed up there and start chiseling bits off the top. So now if you go there, it's like got a flat top, but it used to have a peaked top.

And so they've stolen the top. It's different from stealing the whole mountain, though. They've stolen some of them. That's like stealing one gondola and saying I've stolen the whole... You've got to make a start somewhere. Not all these things can be stolen overnight. I wasn't stolen in a day. Actually, Scarfell Pike had a bit of a theft problem as well,

speaking of stealing mountains. There was this in 2015 and an artist took the top of Scarfell Pike. He took a bit of rock, which I think was about an inch squared. It was in an art exhibition called The Intruder about how humans impose our own categories on nature. And so he mounted this rock that he'd taken from the top of Scarfell Pike, and he got a nice job before it. And like the head of Cumbria Tourism said,

this is taking the mickey and we want the top of our mountain back. What are you going to say if you're the head of Cumbria Tourism? What are you going to say? Yeah, come on, have a bit more of Cumbria. He's got to preserve Cumbria, hasn't he? That's his job, isn't it, really? He can't have a laissez-faire attitude to this. His neck is on the line.

He's probably got the DA busting his ass over losing the top of Scarfell Pike. The most important part of Cumbria, the worst part of Cumbria is a lose to finding... We come into work and find you're missing one bit. It's not unreasonable to think that he's going to be pissed off with this. Yeah. Headline from the Bonne Mefeco in 2013. Stolen prosthetic arm discovered in secondhand shop in Bonne Mefeco.

Jesus, no. It's true. In 2012, police apprehended a woman after she hobbled to the exit from a shop in Oslo in Norway, and she was wearing a long skirt covering a 42-inch television that she was carrying between her legs. I think you'd go for a smaller TV, don't you? I think her eyes were bigger than her groin in this case.

In 2012, Jamie Oliver complained that 30,000 napkins were stolen from his restaurants every month. And so I was looking at restaurant thefts, and people do steal stuff from restaurants. So the Jamie Oliver ones just say they have his branding on, don't they? They're nice. They look a bit like tea towels, but they've got Jamie Oliver branding on them. So the police should go for people who are also called Jamie Oliver?

No, no. It's people who like Jamie Oliver, not people who are named Jamie Oliver, but people who are called Jamie. It's not a name tag. Jamie Oliver doesn't put that name on all his towels so that if he loses, then they get returned to him. Do you put your name on all your napkins? Yes.

I put them on my tissues. It takes ages to monogravate anything you play at those ones. Have you heard of the South American endoscopy gangs? Are they thieves? They must be because they're in this sector. And what are they stealing with their endoscopes? Well, no, they are stealing endoscopes. This is a gang who go around hospitals in Europe

stealing specifically endoscopy equipment, i.e. things that you put up people's bottoms to look inside them. Are they really daring thefts while they're in use? No, they're not. That's weird. I'm not getting a feed on them. So when all the lights come out, so all the feeds go down in the hospital,

they've just got a massive bank of monitors and they're all going out one by one. Massive bank of monitors all showing bottoms. Security guards like, what's going on? I can't believe that is the worst security guard job in the world. 2005 in York, £300,000 worth of endoscopes, less to the same year, £250,000. How much are they, do you reckon?

I don't know. They must be expensive, but 2017, last year, a gang took 1.2 million, I think it was Canadian dollars worth of kit, 2014 to 2017, 16 million euros worth of Germany. Well, what they think is that it's so that you can check that drug mules have swallowed the drugs.

Got it. Oh, wow. I know. I was thinking, who's getting backstreet endoscopies in this day? Every endoscopy is a back alley. Shall we wrap up? Yeah.

Don't you know one amazing thing about a ski lift? I would like to know that, yes. Okay, cool. So, one amazing thing about a ski lift I learned is that in the last couple of years, a snowboarder got stuck on a ski lift. He was stuck for six hours, and this was in the Austrian Alps.

It was incredibly cold. It was minus 18 degrees. He didn't know how long he was going to be stuck for. They closed it for the night. So, yeah, he's been there for six hours, and he's getting really, really cold. He said he kept falling asleep into some cold-induced stupor, and he realized that he had a lighter on him.

So, the only thing he could do was burn anything flammable on him. And so, he started burning everything he had. So, he burned, he had a bunch of tissues. He burned them. Then he burned some business cards he had. He took his business cards on a snowboarding trip. Oh, you might meet an executive. Sorry.

I'd like to give you a raise. He must have had them in his wallet or something, right? Yeah, yeah. But I mean, you probably will meet an executive. You're on a skiing holiday. I agree, right? You start off with tissues less important than business cards. Yeah.

Both my tissues and my business cards have my name and my number monogrammed on them. OK, so what did he burn next? Then he had about 100 euros in banknotes, and he burned each banknote one by one. And he was on the last banknote when someone on a snowmobile saw him. The bad news is he was then stolen

by some guys from the Czech Republic. OK, 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, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Andrew Hunter M. James. At James Harkin. Alex.

At Alex Bell. Anna. You can email podcast.qi.com. There's also our group account, which is at no such thing. There are details there about our tour. We're going all over the UK, the Republic of Ireland, and Australia and New Zealand in May. There are details there of our book,

and, of course, behind-the-gills documentary about us. That's it for this week. We will see you next time with another bunch of facts. Until then, goodbye.