No Such Thing As A Fish - 572: No Such Thing As A Simon Cowell Bell

Episode Date: February 27, 2025

Dan, James, Andy and Anna discuss prank calls, casting calls, Earhart and heartbeats. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we get going, we've got a quick exciting announcement, which is that two of our colleagues, Jack and Manu, along with their chef friend, Rosie McKean, have just launched a brand new podcast called Lunchbox Envy. Yes, it's all the most interesting, weird, incredible facts about specific foods. Every episode is based around a food stuff, so bananas or garlic or sausages. There are a couple of episodes already out now,

more will be released very soon. They really are fantastic. You might have heard Jack and Manu, the elves on our spin-off show, Meet the Elf. They obviously have the bonafide research credentials of QI Elves. And then Rosie really knows what she's talking about in the kitchen. I've learned so many amazing things off the back of listening to these episodes.

All the things that they pull out of their lunchboxes make you just go, what the hell is that? Jack, for example, pulls out a chocolate garlic bar, which was used by the British Secret Services in the war. I'd never heard of it before. You get these amazing untold histories, but also good advice on food. Yes, in fact, as a result result I have started slow cooking sausages. Find out why. The

good thing about the good advice is they don't just tell you what to do they tell you why certain things work. It is jam packed. Jam packed. Yeah, very good. Jam packed with interesting facts from why food tastes better if you eat it with your hands. There you go toddlers, you've got it right. To how you can turn peanut butter into diamonds and make your fortune. Go and listen to it right now. Go to qi.com slash lunchbox or wherever podcasts are available. That's right.

So do check it out. Lunchbox Envy out now. Okay, on with the show. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tyshinsky and James Harkin. Once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Anna. My fact this week is that every time your heart beats, your memory gets worse,

but you become better at firing a gun. Better at firing a what? Sorry, better at firing a gun. Better at firing a what? I see, I see what's happening. See what I'm doing there. Yeah, you expose some obvious flaws in the system. Your heart beats a lot and I don't feel like I lose my memory every second in a bit.

You are. I think this is useful information to know. So if you're ever doing certain things, always do it on the offbeat. Other things, do it on the on-beat. And I found this a really interesting study I came across about the cardiac cycle, basically, which is the cycle of how your heart beats, which says that in systole, which is when it's beating, basically it triggers these barrier receptors, which are nerves in your blood vessels, which clock that the blood vessel is stretching because the heart just beat, the blood vessel stretches, the barrier receptors send a message to the brain going, right, the blood vessels have stretched. This is how much this is what's going on. And it sets off all this activity in your brain every time your heart beats and all that activity

in your brain, which is giving your brain all the information about exactly how much your heart's beat, how hard, how fast, how much the vessel's expanded. That drowns out loads of other stuff that's happening in your brain. So you get worse at lots of stuff. Like your memory gets worse. How do they test this out? That's a very good question. They rig people up to ECG's and they do things like really scare them Or they so they have more heartbeats. Is that what you mean? No, they so they test exactly whether they're on systole or diastole if their hearts beating or not beating and then they scare them

With something and if their hearts on an on beat then their reaction will be slightly slower than what they- Like reaction times. Yeah, and they had people in a rifle range and they logged them up to ECGs and they did the same thing. I got two questions. One, memory, is this long-term memory or is it memory in the moment that it's making worse? It's memory in the moment. So I think they'd say, what's Ernzo's name?

What's the name of the person who was sat next to you yesterday, Dan? And then on the on-beat, you'd be a bit less- Dan is not gonna remember that. Any circumstances. Question two was to do with the gun. So I'd read a study a while ago, which is that apparently snipers like to take their shot in between heartbeats. How interesting. Yeah, so they've been doing it wrong.

Yeah. Who? That's why they keep missing. Yes. Yeah. Well, it's a technique that they do, which is it's a bit of meditation prior to it. Slow breathing, they time the shot. Apparently, if your heartbeat is raised and it's much higher than the blood pressure on your trigger finger, like pulses will come in there, it might make you pull a shot slightly differently. If you ever watch Biathlon, which is cross-country skiing and then shooting, basically-

Not at the same time. Not at the same time. Not at the same time. And that is the critical point because your heart rate gets really, really high because you're doing this really big exercise and then you have to shoot. And the best players, the best people like Johannes Tingesbohr or people like that, he would really lower, lower, lower his heart rate. And you can see it, they often have it on the screen. It'll say what their heart rate is and you can see it going down down down and

they won't shoot immediately they'll let the heartbeat go down and then they'll shoot. That's really cool. So they do okay yeah. And that makes sense to make the heartbeat go down I guess because you're more focused you're more relaxed. Yeah I've watched my own heartbeat during surgery. What? Yeah. As in the actual heart itself? No I haven't seen my physical heart pumping away. I mean, on a screen. I was having a minor operation, which I was allowed to stay awake for. Right. And you can see it. And they sort of accidentally left the screen like pointing a bit at my face. So I was trying to muck around and speed it up and slow it

down. It's great fun. Were they inside? Did they have something inside your body? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But you didn't have an open heart surgery, did you? something inside your body? You said that was your arm. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. But you didn't have an open art surgery, did you? No. I said a minor operation. I'm not, I like to play it cool, but even I would probably say that's a medium sized operation. And when they actually put the extension in your penis,

did your heart rate go up or? It made that noise like a slide was. Ooh. Can I just say the potential reason for this, evolutionarily, which I also think is really cool. And just to let you know, when your heart doesn't beat, your sensitivity to Bane goes down. You have a worse memory for words, your concentration is less good, you've got higher fear response, so you're more afraid, more intense reaction, but your reactions are slower.

And then on the offbeatbeat you have a stronger grip so you're stronger, you're more accurate at firing a gun and your eyes flicker around more and weirdly I didn't know what happens is when you're under threat what do you think happens to your heart rate? Speeds up. Incorrect. What? Isn't this incredible? Immediately after you're under threat usually your heartbeat for a second slows down, apparently in an evolutionary sense, and that's because for a second it needs to be on the offbeat more often, so when your heartbeat goes slower it's more often on the offbeat, so that you can have fast reactions and process information more. So you process everything around you and then it speeds up a lot, because as soon as you've

done that, then it's on the on-beat and then you're really good at firing gun or punching someone or gripping something I would have thought it would be a part of just trying to be quiet like more quiet so they don't find you Not having that pumping heartbeat just as psychologically you'd be like you can hear Can I just ask for clarification? If your heartbeat slows down and you go from 100 beats to 50 beats, that means you also have 50 off beats in a minute. So does that not mean you have fewer off beats as opposed to more? I think it's more time is spent on an off beat. So you've got a longer off beat. Cause

like an on beat is always going to be the same amount of time your heart takes to go to pump the blood out. Right. But but then between them there's a longer gap. So the off beat is actually the gap between your heart pumping and not pumping. Exactly. And this was only in one study that it said usually the fear response causes your heart to immediately slow down and speed up and I couldn't find it many other places but I thought that was fascinating. That was very cool. Heartbeats are something that I didn't realize play quite a feature role in the world of music. Heartbeats is a single by Steps.

There you go. Is that what you're thinking? That's not what I'm thinking. I mean, artists recording their heartbeats or their of their children and putting them into songs have been used multiple times. You've get them in print songs in John Lennennon very sadly released it as part of an ultrasound heartbeat to a child that unfortunately didn't make it full term. But so many bands, Max Cavalera from Sepultura, he did it. Interestingly, Taylor Swift did it for one of her songs, right? And it was a song that was re-recorded, as you might remember, Taylor Swift had this

huge moment whereby she had her manager claim all of her music, so she went and re-recorded every single album. Yes, I do remember. Yeah, so one of these songs contains her heartbeat, and so she had to replicate the sound recording of her heartbeat. So she's got twice recorded heartbeats into tracks. But they all get listed in the song credits on Heartbeat, Taylor Swift. Oh, very nice.

So he means you get more money. Yeah, exactly. That's like Phil Collins. Do you remember Phil Collins? Didn't he do an album where it was all Phil Collins? And I think he put himself in the credits as everything. So he played like the kazoo when he played the... Yeah. Huge kazoo guy college. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You can't just add a triangle and get paid a whole extra bit, can you? Well, you can. That's the whole idea. So Simon Cowell, that was a story that he would play a minor instrument, like one cowbell noise, and that would be writers' credits on the songs to all his artists that he would get. And that's why we renamed it the Cowell Bell. But no one knows. It's so beautiful. Very good.

When your heart rate synchronises, we've briefly mentioned before, I think, that it's choirs, the heartbeats all synchronise. It's pretty cool. That is cool. When you go to the theatre, your heart also synchronises with the people around you. And it lasts into the interval. Everyone goes out into the interval with their hearts speeding up, sort of going at the same rate.

I wouldn't lie. We all go to the toilet at exactly the same moment when there's like five minutes left before the second half. Yeah, it's our hearts is the problem, isn't it? That's the problem. But so that's that saying that a movie has a heart rate. Yes, it does. It does. So you could actually probably, you know we talked before

about how you could do CPR singing a certain type of song because it's the right BPM in order to do it. There probably is like if you want to go to a movie that puts you on this heart rate. No, it will go up and down. So you'd be, because if it was Titanic, you know, as the ship cracks in half, you suddenly have to double the rate of CPR. Oh yeah. But I'm sure there's some like, how long you have to do movies where you can just sit for... If you like, if it's something really tedious like Dune 2, you can just sit all the way through it. It's too slow, the person would die. But if it's something really exciting, yeah, then I mean you don't need to do it for long, how long do you need to do CPR for normally?

Until they're live again? I've done 45 seconds now. I'm afraid we've watched the whole of the climactic fight scene in gladiator. So I'm going to be clocking off. Yeah. Um, pig hearts. You know how we were all going to get pig hearts a while ago? Oh yeah. It's going to be the big thing. I know. I was excited. It's so complicated. The process. Cause it's so basically pigs are very similar to people in lots of ways physiologically. And there was a, there was an idea that we were going to be able to transplant pig

hearts into people and that was going to be, because there are hundreds of millions of pigs around the world. Sure. Just sitting there with their hearts beating around. We're not using them for anything, right? Let's steal their hearts for us. It's pretty sinister as a species anyway, but it turns out you have to do so much stuff. You have to make the pig more human before you do this. How do you do that? Dress it up.

Bring it to the movies. My grandma, what big trotters you have. Yeah. It's so no, you can't, you can't just take a, like take a heart out of a pig and shove it in a person. You have to take a pig, right? Remove three of its genes, knock out some growth hormones, knock out some growth hormones, add a couple of other genes, then you have to keep the pig nice and clean so it doesn't get any pig bacteria, then you breed from that pig and you make these GM embryos, you put them in surrogate cells, and then you have to give the mummy pig a C-section so that it doesn't get contaminated at all And then those piglets have to be bred up until they're big enough Wow and those are then the sort of a bit more human pigs They've had no contact with the outside world no external viruses

Those are the ones and has anyone ever had this I think two people have made both Well, one of them built a house out of straw and the other one built a house out of sticks and they never made it No wonder we don't use it. You got to, it's like, we've found a match. We now just have to get it pregnant. Buy it dinner first. Let it birth some and then take their hearts. Anna's right. A couple of people have had it, but I think that didn't, it didn't. I think the reason is like hearts in all mammals are kind of the same, aren't they really? Right. They all work the same way with electrical impulses and they have sodium and potassium that make the electricity happen and they're all kind of the same so that's the idea

is it right that we have a billion beats or mammals three billion we've got roughly the same we do humans get about three billion humans get a bit more basically because our life is longer because we have invented indoors and it turns out indoors is a more relaxing environment and um but like we're similar enough that we have a roughly the same. You do, but it's not like you have that number. Like Donald Trump thinks that you have a certain number and if you use them up, then that's when you die.

Yeah. And that's why he doesn't like to do any exercise apart from play golf. And I think a few other famous people have thought that maybe Neil Armstrong thought that. I think I think, yeah, no, there's a quote. I think, I think they've looked into it. Maybe as a joke. He said, you only get a certain amount and I'm down to if I'm going to use all mine

running up and down the street. That's a funny life. That's interesting when you're, when you're playing golf because it is reduced, is it better to play in the gaps? Well you know what? I'd never thought that before, but I'm going to try that next time on the cost. Yeah. I think it is my small animals don't live as long, isn't it?

Cause it's a small animal. You have to, your heart beats faster and so use them them up and I got one last thing before we move on. Have you guys heard of the intimacy 2.0 dress? No No, okay. Let me guess it's a dress you were Correct and two people wear it and it sinks your heartbeats and it changes color With the heart rate so you can see that each is flashing at the same time and that you're in sync. Is it like a dress version of paddles basically? Aggressively stops your heart and restarts in that. Does it change color? Does it go transparent if your heart rate rises?

Is that what Kanye West's partner was wearing? She was just so excited to be at the Grammys. Her heart was going 10 a second. But it's basically that. So it's a dress that you would wear. Obviously no one is wearing this as far as I can tell. And it's got a neckline that plunges to the midriff, which if your heart rate rises and you're out on a date, it slowly makes the dress more transparent around these.

Yeah, sort of like the cleavage area and so on in order to. Crikey. Yeah. So it's just enhancing... In the woods you're wearing it and you're threatened by a lion. Now the lion's seen your naked flesh exposed. That makes the situation even worse. Well, fortunately when you're panicked your heart rate goes down, so you should be fine.

Good point. Have you learned nothing from this section? Where did she go? Stop the podcast! Stop the podcast! Stop the podcast! Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Sailie. That's right, Sailie allows you to sail everywhere over land and sea, I've just realised I think that's why they call it that, and be able to surf the internet as you surf the waves. Or for anyone who actually wants to know what the hell we are talking about in this ad,

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and look up on the internet all the stuff you could be visiting i mean i think that's a much better holiday so if you want to get this you can get an exclusive 15 discount on your salee eSIM data plan by simply downloading the salee app and using the code fish at checkout or you can go to salie.com slash fish if you want to go on a desktop. Do it! Get that app Salie away with, not with me, with whoever you want. Okay, on with the show! Jesus, on with the show! Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 2023, a team mapping the ocean floor announced they may have found Amelia Earhart's plane. In 2024, they announced it was actually a plane-shaped

pile of rocks. Could they not have looked a bit closer the first time round? Got a second opinion. It's at the bottom of the sea, Anna. It's very, it's amazing they found such a plane shaped pile of rocks. It would have been cool if they had just announced we found a wicked pile of rocks shaped like a plane down there. But they had to go a bit further and say it's one of the most famous lost planes ever.

Yeah, so this is Amelia Earhart. We've mentioned her once or twice before. She was flying around the world in 1937 and she was about 100 miles from a place called Howland Island, which is in Kiribati. And she started running out of fuel and we never heard from her again. Basically, she gave one last radio call and then disappeared. And for the subsequent 90 years, people had been wondering what's happened to her. Yeah. And she was really, she was world famous wasn't she?

Oh yeah. Incredibly celebrated aviatorics. Yeah, prior to the disappearance as well, which is... Yeah, absolutely. Often sometimes these things make you famous. She's broken so many records and things like that, and she'd done a lot of trips, which was the first time a woman might have made those flights and things like that. She was amazing.

And this is a group called Deep Sea Vision. The CEO Tony Romeo, who's a former US Air Force intelligence officer, said that they'd found these rocks, said that they found this plane or what they thought was a plane. And then they've done a bit more work and they realized that it is some rocks. And Tony said, talk about the cruelest formation ever created by nature. Yeah. And I can only agree. Because it was, yeah, it's a hundred miles from Howland Island, right? So if you see a plane, shape. I don't mean to be morbid, but when a plane hits the water, it often, especially a 1930s plane,

it might not stay looking like a pristine plane all the way to the ocean bottom, you know? Absolutely. So what were they using to say it was like a sonar thing that sent back a vague shape? The image does look pretty good. Is it very planing? Oh yeah, it's even got a little tail that sent back a vague shape? The image does look pretty good. Is it very plain? Oh yeah, it's even got a little tail fin on it. It looks very plain like. It was a huge search for her at the time.

The US Navy did a lot of searching. They even sent, I think, an aircraft carrier to the region, which had 63 aircraft on it. So, you know, all those planes can go out making trips. I thought you meant like an empty one, optimistically hoping to carry her aircraft back. Yeah, and it cost them about 4 million US dollars at the time, it's about 90 million US dollars today. And of course they didn't find her. And actually that became kind of the end of celebrity aviation because at that time, the

loads of celebrity flyers who were doing loads of crazy stunts and everyone that they're on the front page of all the newspapers. But when Emilia had disappeared, Congress decided to make it illegal for the Navy to spend any money on search and rescue. And when they did that, everyone just stopped caring a little bit. Wow. Yeah, there were all these psychics who were claiming that they were in touch with her and the family were looking for anything. So they were going to see psychics and hoping to follow up on things. There was this story that we mentioned briefly, which was the Tokyo Rose story. So the idea that the Japanese had got hold

of Amelia Earhart, she was captured and she was putting out propaganda radio news about what was going on in the war. So Tokyo Rose was real, right? Yeah. That was actually, but they were saying that that was her. That was, they were saying it was her, but what's interesting is her husband, because

she was married Amelia Earhart to a guy called George Putnam. He actually made a three day trek through a Japanese held territory so that he could get to a US Marine radio station to confirm whether or not it was her voice. So like it was taken really seriously even by the immediate family, some of these, some of these theories. I think that was one of the ones that vaguely sane people believe, like the person who was in charge of the island. I have to say, of the ones that vaguely sane people believe, like the person who was in charge of the island. I have to say, I find that Amelia Earhart searches, I have a real blank light with Jack the Ripper on them.

I'm like, God, get out of life, guys. A lot of them, no offense. Also, welcome to the podcast. We appreciate you listening. Interesting you've made these people your bet noire, Anna. I don't know why. Relatively benign minded people trying to solve a classic mystery.

New enemies of the podcast. Yeah. I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You can buy stuff from their website. Look, I'll advertise for them. They sell little, they sell t-shirts, they sell badges. If you want to help fund their expeditions.

Nice. Each trip costs up to $500,000 to go and uncover another rusty jackknife or compact mirror in the ocean that you say belong to Amelia Earhart. Sounds good. Okay. Hey, I've got, so just on sort of the ocean and the mysteries of the ocean. Something that I read about, which is a big problem for a lot of boats out in the open sea now is UFOs.

Oh no. Unidentified floating objects. So this is to do with container ships and container ships when they're in rough seas They can lose so many containers have gone missing. There was an estimate between 1985 and 2007 five to six million Container units would be floating mental. Yeah, and they all float they do for a while So they can for a few weeks if a container is up to 80% full then you've got enough air in there for it to, but they're not air tight. So they will eventually seep water and go down. So a lot of ships just say that if they're out, these come out of nowhere because they're not mapped right. So you're dodging UFOs all the way through the ocean. When it's, yeah, we're just

constantly losing giant containers off the back of ships. Other mysterious things in the ocean. containers off the back of ships. Other mysterious things in the ocean. Yeah. Well, one big ocean mystery is, you know all the plastic in the ocean. Yeah. Well, where is it? In the ocean.

It's not nearly enough there. It's in the garbage patch, isn't it? Well, not nearly enough, James. Let's get going. Let's get more in there, guys. What is the problem you're trying to solve here, Anna? This plastic. It's in animals.

No, we don't know. So you, well, we're starting to find out, Anna. Gosh, this plastic. It's in animals. No, we don't know. Well, we're starting to find out. But basically, 99% of the plastic that should be in the ocean is not in the ocean. We keep on looking, and most of what is there is in the garbage patch. But a lot of that is kind of old plastic,

and we don't know where the newer plastics gone. Whereas you'd think the older plastic would be the stuff that degrades, if anything, and is getting smaller and disappearing. So when you say it's not there, sorry, what do you mean? So in the surveys that we've done of the ocean, looking at how much ocean plastic there is, we haven't found nearly enough to equate with how much we estimate we've been flushing into the ocean.

And it's called dark plastic, and they equate it with dark matter. I knew, I knew that climate change was a hoax in this whole environmental push. I knew it. It's actually not, there's something quaint with climate change, but it's not quite the same. No, but that's crazy. That is not.

So is this scary, Anna, cause like presumably it's somewhere bad. No, it's actually somewhere good. Well, I think the latest research shows, and this is great news. Anna, this is a roller coaster of a fact. I like to keep your heartbeats fluctuating. The latest research is a guy called Lor L'Ebriton,

who's an oceanographer who ran this big computer model looking at how the plastic that we know about gets distributed, where it lands in the ocean, where it floats to and stuff. He's concluded that the vast majority of macro plastics and micro plastics, so big and small bits rather than being lost in the middle of the ocean or deep down we don't know they actually all wash up on beaches and are buried in shorelines or a right on the

coastline interesting which to me says great I always thought we can't get that plastic back I can't row out to sea and get it back but if all you need to do is go to a great we just need to pick up the baby turtles it's choked to death on the beach well under the beaches the lug worms who are getting it. Oh no. I know the lug, the poor lugs. No one talks about them. And it's going to turn out the lug worms

with a keystone species, keeping this whole thing going. And we'll be sorry. That's really interesting though. It just seems more accessible, doesn't it? Does it make it easier for us to deal with if we can work out technologies to do that? I understand animals will die, obviously, but like... I think really the problem is stopping it from entering the oceans in the first place.

Yeah. But I mean, I think once it gets to the coast, to me, I mean, this is new research, but it seems like it would be easier to access once it's not in the middle of nowhere. It looks like it. So get to your beach, people, with a bucket and spade. Yeah, nice. Have you guys heard of dark oxygen? Dark oxygen. Dark oxygen.

So by extension, there's not as much oxygen as we thought there should be. And some of it's missing. This is stuff that's found on the ocean floor. And it's produced this dark oxygen by battery rocks. These are the nodules, metallic nodules, that are all over huge chunks of the ocean floor around the world, and they make oxygen without light. They do it chemically, so they split the water molecules around them into hydrogen and oxygen. So that's insane.

I mean, that's the source of oxygen. Yeah, it's like putting an electric current. It's like we would make on Earth in a chemistry lesson. Electrolysis. It's crackers. Yeah, yeah. Are these connected to ocean farts? No, and I'm sure we'll come up with those in a minute. I just love the idea of Andy doing a lecture

and Dan sitting on the front row with questions like that. If you could put your hand down until we end, Dan. We will have a question and answer session by in writing. Yeah? Yeah? Go on, please go on. How can I possibly continue talking about something really interesting about ocean parts? And that's how the disruptive kids do it.

Yeah. This is why no one learns anything. Yeah. No, it's just interesting because there's a huge debate at the moment. I'm sure you're all keeping up with it in the International Seabed Authority about ocean mining, mining the ocean floor. Are we going to, are we going to do it? Should we definitely not do it? And um... Well, the problem is one of the big problems is obviously logically you say we shouldn't do it, but it contains so much stuff like lithium that you need. If everyone's going to have electric car, you need these minerals. Where are you going to get them from? So it's like

this weird sort of balance. Do you get them from land, which we know causes some damage? Do we get them from the ocean where we really have no idea what effect it would have? Might be none. Why not just do it, assuming it'll be none. That's really big, the ocean. Oh, it's huge. Yeah. So, but it is a really big debate at the moment. So wait, these batteries, how are they, are we mining these big ocean floor batteries? These are the nodules that people want to mine because they contain these metals.

And so it's being debated at the moment and it was found in a study, which was funded by a mining firm, which is desperate to mine the ocean. And then it turned out, oh, these might be a really important source of oxygen for all kinds of life. And so they were furious that they'd

accidentally funded this study. One other problem is that they are mostly found in something that's called silicious ooze. Silicious ooze is this kind of really low sediment at the bottom of the ocean but it accumulates about one to three millimeters every thousand years. Wow. So once you dig it up it's gonna take a while to get back. Oh because because we're probably going to dig faster than that, because we dig faster than one three millimeters, don't we? My company is suggesting that we will do faster than that. Interesting. Well, there is one kind of ocean drilling, which is good, and that's the scientific research kind. And the first mission was really cool. It was in 1957,

and it was organized by this group called the American Miscellaneous Society. I love them already. They are so cool. They're like the Ig Nobel's of their time. They were a bunch of geologists and oceanographers who just wanted to get together and have weird ideas. Anyway, there was this thing called Project Mohol,

which they started, which was to investigate the Mohorovitch discontinuity. It sounds sci-fi, doesn't it? The Mohorovitch discontinuity has been producing dark oxygen. It does sound like someone who thought, I'm going to write it as a Russian name. And they go, no, no, that's not Russian enough. Let's put another itch in the air. There are too many O's and too many itches in it for me, to be honest. But that's this bit between the crust of the earth and the mantle, where suddenly seismic waves start moving much faster.

And it was the only reason we knew back then that there was an earth's crust. So these guys, the miscellaneous society were like, well, let's go and dig into the ocean and find out what's happening. It ended up being a failure, but it started off this thing that happens today a lot where we dig into the ocean floor and pull up all these cores and find out loads of cool stuff and the person who came along with them to write about it and to report about it was oceanography fan and big lover of the sea Taking a guess James Cameron. Ah, he I think in a former life. Maybe this is who he was. Oh Jack Cousteau in 57

No, I can give you a clue by saying one of the letter books he wrote was called Steinbeck and Ricketts Sea of Cortez. So John Steinbeck. So it was John Steinbeck. He absolutely loved the sea and oceanography. So he hopped on board this research boat and that's so good. Mentioning Jacques Cousteau, the Calypso and his efforts of ocean mapping are some of the greatest that we've ever had. On his ship. Was the Calypso his ship? The Calypso was the ship.

It was a very famous ship. And he had three tanks that would be there to take out to sea. So you had the diesel to run the ship, you had the water to drink. What do you think his third tank was? Probably ocean farts, which he's bottled. Yes. Along the way. Thank you for reminding me. We didn't, we didn't pick up on my question. It's just like Bilge water to keep him. Waste water. Yeah. Waste water. So it did not pollute the sea. No. Is it just whiskey or something?

It's wine. He had a giant wine tank attached to the ship in order to. For drinking? Of course for drinking. Right, not for some kind of fuel purpose. Jacques Cousteau. He's going to be and his French buddies drinking as they're... Amazing. Have you guys heard of, while we're talking about weird rock formations, do you guys know

about the Ararat anomaly? Mount Ararat. Mount Ararat, yes. Above land. It's above land. Oh is it that there are loads of fossils that should be ocean things on Mount Ararat? There are those but that's not what this is. Okay. This is if people have taken photos of the snow near the summit of Mount Ararat there's something that looks very much like Noah's Ark. Brilliant. And if you see the pictures you can kind of see where they're coming from. I mean, they're very fuzzy. But the interesting thing is this was classified

as secret for the US Air Force from 1949 until the 90s. Wow. And it's in snow. It's like a snow ark. It's kind of, it's basically just a jagged bit of rock. Is an ark shaped pile of rocks. Precisely. Yeah, why do you think it was classified as secret for so long? Because it might provoke religious conflict. Interesting, because obviously a lot of believers think that this is evidence that the Bible is true. But no, that wasn't it.

It's much more quotidian, much more boring than that. People might visit and they didn't want to visit. Basically it's on the border of the Soviet Union and so there was lots of things happening around there between America and the Soviet Union so they didn't want any photos coming out. But obviously the conspiracy theorists were like, oh, what are you hiding? What are you hiding? Yeah, Noah's off.

Noah's in there. You're keeping him prisoner. I've got one last thing. What are you hiding? What are you hiding? Yeah, Noah's off. Noah's in there. You're keeping him prisoner. I've got one last thing. It's very silly, but I was looking into people and how they managed to survive the ocean once they'd been lost and people are out looking for them. So there was a group of people, eight men and seven women, and they were stuck out on a sort of life raft situation.

No one there to save them. They have no water. How do they survive? And they manage 12 days. Huge barrel of wine floats up. How long did they manage? I think they were out there for 12 days. Like drinking turtle blood. So we're in that territory, they've got to find a source of food. Drinking the little bit of liquid you get in a fish's eye. We've said that before. Where were they? We covered turtle blood enemas in the past. Yeah, turtle blood enemas.

They were on a journey to Puerto Rico. So one of the people on the boat was Faustina Mercedes. She had back at home a one-year-old daughter, which meant... She was still lactating. She was lactating. And so she offered up her breasts to everyone on the boat. And every day, how many people were on the boat? There were a lot. There was a cruise ship. 2000 people doing up every day. Eight men, seven women. Every day they would take a quick couple of

sips and then that was just keeping them at bay. And in order to feed herself, her sister would go on the breast and then pass the milk back to her. Oh, clever. Yeah. Wait, does that keep her going? Does that? It feels like that. It certainly wouldn't.

It doesn't make any sense at all. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense. I know. Many people have pointed this out. We were not producing milk out of nowhere. But it's what... It deals with your dry mouth, you know.

It's basically they're very, very slowly cannibalizing this woman. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's motherhood. She must have been quite saggy by the end. When she got back, she said she was unable to feed her own child because of the... It was pretty traumatic. It was pretty weird. It was highly unsurprising. It was weird, yeah. Well, that is weird. It is weird. I'm with her on that one. It's also the ending of, loop it right around, The Grapes of Wrath.

It is! The Grapes of Wrath ends with a lady... It ends with a young lady suckling an old man who's starving to death. It's the Dust Bowl America. That is the final scene. That's an incredible full circle. I am only 100 pages into The Grapes of Wrath. 10 years ago, fine, I never got any further than that. Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that when the Forbidden City in China had its first telephone installed, it was first used by

the emperor to make prank phone calls. This was the last emperor of China known as Puyi and after having the phone installed he went through a phone book he found one of his favorite opera singers a guy called Yang Xiaolu and he called him up and he said is this the great operatic singer and he said yes and then he just giggled and hung up. He hadn't developed the pranks by that point. No, that's not Bart Simpson level. The second one is closer to sort of teenage pranking. He would call up local restaurants and he would order a bunch of food to an address that wasn't the Forbidden City. So, here's a question. It sounds like everyone in the country had telephones apart from him.

Yeah, possibly. I mean, well, the emperor was kind of isolated from the rest of the world. They were sort of, no one was really allowed into the Forbidden City who weren't part of the system. Okay. You should probably explain who he was then. Well, yes. So he was the, he was no longer really the emperor by the time we're talking about when he was a teenager. So he was born in 1906. He became the emperor in 1908 and he was deposed in 1911 because he, you know, he'd done such a terrible job. Because he threw his ties out of the pram or something. It's like having Boris Johnson in charge over there. Yeah.

So he, so he, but he was allowed to stay in a palace and keep living as though he were the supreme authority, even though he wasn't. So it's really strange. Well, he's a figurehead, wasn't he? That is a bit like Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. I'll let you stay.

But when he asked for his phone in the first place, he was told there is nothing in the ancestral regulations to provide for this, because obviously his ancestors hadn't had been saying, oh, I've got to have a phone. It was a really weird old fashion. His father said it would upset imperial dignity if outside voices could ring in to the palace. So there was controversy about it at the time. There was, absolutely. And this was, he only really knew about the phones because he had a British tutor who

was a guy called Sir Reginald Fleming Johnston. Not a sir at the time, I don't think, but he became the English tutor to Puyi and he was the one who mentioned it. He was like, you've got these things called phones. And he said, I'd love one. Johnson got pranked all the time by Puyi. Puyi was constantly ringing up the man who'd got him the phone. Because kind of he was his only friend.

I got the impression. So that's kind of sad. And I'm sure Johnson pretended to be really upset or amused every time. I think what we're going to find is that this is a pretty tragic story, isn't it? This guy, very young, made an emperor, turned out to be an utter, utter asshole, but probably a victim of circumstance because he was left on his own the whole time. That's the thing. The whole thing feeds on itself. It's like no one comes out good in this story. I just want to stick up for Puyi. Oh yeah. Because I've got this book out of

the library. Yep. It's from Emperor to Citizen. Oh yes. And it's his memoir. Oh yeah. And I've been reading it and he you know it's actually a lot funnier than we're all giving it credit for. Does he mention all the stuff about constantly whipping eunuchs just for the sake of having fun of watching them? And he dates them to death. Does he mention it when his wife had a child with another man and then he had that baby stolen and killed? Is that in there? Is that part of the funny stuff? Okay I haven't read the whole thing. Yeah, he's a bad dude. No, he does mention the eunuchs stuff though, because that was his whole big repentance thing,

his memoirs at the end of his life, was when he said, I'm sorry for all this. There's an entire chapter called the eunuchs, because he lived surrounded by eunuchs. Yeah, there were a few hundred, and even that was a substantial cut down from the glory days. Substantial cut down to make those eunuchs. In the good old days there were thousands and thousands of eunuchs. Look, eunuchs, page 61, just a great section on the eunuchy life he lived. That's pretty funny. Until he was 10 years old he only played hide and seek with his own eunuchs.

He was very isolated growing up. He had siblings, but he didn't see his own mother for years and years and years because he was taken away to live in the... He wasn't the child of the previous emperor. The previous emperor was his uncle. That's right. So there was the Empress Dowager, who's a very famous character in ancient Chinese. Yeah.

So she was this amazing person. And she, when the emperor had passed away, there was no child in order to take over. So this was the nephew. But there were moments of levity in his childhood. I just think there were a few. So just get this, if you ever went to the park, this is the nephew. But there were moments of levity in his childhood. I just think there were a few. So just get this, if he ever went to the park, this is the process of how it would happen. He would have a eunuch walking ahead of him,

basically honking with his mouth to say, everyone keep away. He was like a sort of one man beep, beep, beep system. They hadn't invented the clacks and horn, had they? Not yet, no. So you need the eunuch. A rare example of trying to not inventing something first just because the eunuch system works so well. Then there would be two chief eunuchs going kind of crab wise sideways just keeping an eye on everything. Then there would be junior eunuchs with him. There would be

a eunuch with a canopy. Then more eunuchs holding a chair, a change of clothes, some umbrellas, some cakes, some hot water. Then there were the medical eunuchs who came behind them. We've all been to the beach with our kids. We know how much you have to take, how many eunuchs you need. And then at the end is the eunuch with the lew or the eunuchs, several eunuchs with commodes and chamber pots and things. And when he was a kid, he would just run around and this caused absolute mayhem because the whole procession was trying to keep up with a five year old boy who was just running around in a park.

Can I do an incredibly quick, this is his life. So on the throne at two, kicked off the throne at six, but got to be pretend emperor until like mid 19 early mid 1920s, at which point he was booted out by a warlord, hung out being a playboy who used to be the emperor shagging around a bit until 1931, Japan invaded Manchuria, thought, we'll pluck this former emperor, put him in charge, apparently, but he's our puppet. He had no power, but he got to keep living this weird, fake royal life. So continued being pampered and petted,

having people wait on him, no power. Then Japanese surrender 1945, he's fucked, because the Soviets come, they put him in prison for five years, then they hand him over to the Chinese who re-educate him. The communists at this point. Who are communists, re-educate him, he comes out, bona fide communist and ends his life for Gardiner. Mad life.

It is a mad life. And re-education is like being in a jail cell, right? Like it's your... It's like going back to school, Dan. You're being conditioned. Yeah, it's like a British boarding school. Maybe that's why I think all this sounds absolutely part of the course. We were constantly firing air guns at the unix at my school. And he did. And that final bit of life where he became a gardener, he fascinating

just reading how useless he was in day to day activities where he would sort of forget to flush a toilet or know any directions or all these basic things that you would... Shoelaces. Yeah, shoelaces. Someone's just done his shoes for his whole life. I found it... I really question this, but I mean all the historians say it, that when he was being re-educated by China it was partly to say, be a communist and apologize for uniting

with the Japanese, and it was partly to say, here's how to look after yourself, and they taught him to tie his shoelaces and brush his teeth. He was breastfed until the age of eight. And at that point, the dowager, the powerful dowager said, I think it's probably time we removed your wet nurse from you, which made him very sad because he believed he was still enjoying it. But he was stranded out in the Pacific at the time, wasn't he? No other sustenance. If you were the Empress Dowager in this weird fake palace situation. First of all, what is an Empress Dowager?

So she's the widow of the emperor who is now in a senior position, kind of like a regent. She's got a lot of authority, but she's not technically... So she basically runs everything. Exactly. But she's putting in little puppets to do her work like arguably this guy even though he was emperor three times he was never really in charge at any stage never absolutely he just wasn't in charge so yeah the dowager would have been the one really controlling things saying I think maybe we should stop breastfeeding you

now that kind of thing um well more like I think maybe we should invade Mongolian yeah exactly um they had this thing in the palace and again this is after the first revolution maybe we should invade Mongolia. They had this thing in the palace and again, this is after the first revolution. So they're not really in charge anymore, but they're still treated with a lot of respect. There was an as you wish lodge, which was one of the 48 offices that the staff were working in. And if the Empress Dowager one decided she wanted to do some painting, the staff at the lodge would make her the painting already. They basically made her a paint by numbers and she just had to fill in the colours and put a title on it.

What a great service. How cool was that? Wow. I want that. He married five times, which was easier to fit in when you're allowed multiple marriages at once, as you were. But again, this seemed like an unfair trick. This is in 1921. So when he was being like pretend emperor with no power, he was shown five photos of women. It used to be that the emperor had women paraded in front of him and got to choose, but because he's been downgraded, he just got photos. And he was asked, choose who you like best.

He picked one and then they chatted amongst themselves. The other people at court went, no no she's not fit enough. No. And they made him marry the other one. So he did get a second wife from a different photo but on the day of marriage he then also married this first choice. He had two marriages on the same day? On the same day. That's a sitcom reading to be written isn't it?

It sounds so unfunny their lives. I want you to inject some gags in those. If anyone has any objection and you're hoping the concubine hasn't turned up to your wedding or your wife hasn't turned up to the concubine marriage, I think this is good. They were really young, weren't they? These young women who were brought in. The last one who was called Li Yuchin, she was, I think she was 14 or something when she became the last Imperial consort and the emperor was quite old at this stage or comparatively old at this stage.

But she said, and in his view, she said she didn't even know how children were made at that stage. She believed what she was told by her mother that we were picked up from the rubbish bins. I just think that's an unusual way of telling kids that that's where babies come from. It's good parenting and it's what I, it's a story I've maintained. Well, I just think, cause we have like the stock comes and drops a baby at the front door. Cabbage patch is nice and fertility and growth.

But rubbish bins? Yeah. To be fair, this is an almost entirely eunuch based society. It's very hard to actually get a handle on where children come from in this world. But he doesn't seem to have been especially actually interested in women. No. Well, he used to have blazing rounds with his wife, both wives and all five wives about, they would sometimes refer to him as a eunuch because of his lack of prowess in the bedroom.

On the honeymoon night, he had both of his first wives, so the wife and the consort, in the same bed waiting for him. And when he went in, the story goes he ran out of the room and they don't know if there was much with any consummation happening. I'm hearing sitcom. I'm sorry. They're running in and running out certainly as an element of fast. His last wife seemed like quite a sweet story. So this was in the 1960s. He started off working as a street sweeper. So the Chinese reeducated him then pardoned him. He became a street sweeper. And there's a very sad story of him getting lost.

And he has to approach his former subjects and say, hello, I used to be the emperor. I don't know how to get home. I'm staying with family. He should just follow the clean streets. If he goes back in the direction that all the clean streets are, he knows that's where he came from. The thing is, James, he was so bad at all these tasks,

he hadn't actually effectively cleaned the streets. I think it's like the reverse of following the breadcrumbs. Yeah. Isn't it? Yeah. That's beautiful. Follow the lack of breadcrumbs. But then he married this woman who was a nurse and they stayed together forever and I think she didn't die until 1997. And she said he was just desperate for someone to love him, which after that life.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. So you find the story very depressing, Dan, which is fair. Oh, very. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's wild. So you find the story very depressing, Dan, which is fair. Yeah. But actually, when he did write his memoirs at the end, which were heavily influenced by the Chinese Communist Party and his free education, he did say he was they come in for some very good press at the end of this book, I've got to say. He was at least contented with his current status as a repentant and devoted communist who loved

the party. I did notice, notice Andy that it is a little red butt. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is Andy. My fact is that the film Spider-Man once cast two crowds of identical twin extras so they could film the same scene at the same time in different places. That's amazing. Why? You know what the first thing that comes into my head is that meme of all the Spider-Man points at each other.

This is a really weird thing that just happened to happen once in the annals of filming history and I got this because I was looking into casting and how people are cast and how extras get cast in films. And there was a woman called Jennifer Bender, who was the vice president of an extra film about 10 years ago. And she was being in due to develop business. And she said that this film, they had two units shooting, you know, you have two units. There's a main unit and a second unit. And they needed that. Yeah. Due to just the nature of film. It's so weird when you ask anyone about the world of film, why that stuff is so weird. They just say, well, it's just filming, isn't it? Yeah. It's basically they had to shoot this scene in two places at the same time because of the schedule they were on

to get this film. So they said, well, let's just cast twins. So they got 25 sets of twins. So one lot to one set. So one lot to the other set, dress them the same. That's really good. That's really cool. And one of the thing is that the twins, they can like telepathically communicate to each other, right? So they can tell them what's happening in the other place. So when he said this fact, so we were like, wow, why? And you said you'll have to wait and see. But what the answer is just because they're really shit at making film schedules. Schedules, it's just, you know. I mean, surely it's easier to revamp the schedule.

I was gonna say, like, Andy's sort of amazing mystery is always gonna end up, it was a matter of scheduling. Exactly. Anna, you don't understand the nature of film. Like, there are producers on your ass all the time saying we've got to get this ready for the Hong Kong market in two weeks, you know? Go on, there are many identical twins identical twins in the world! We've got to do the reshoots. Get Chalamet now! I want five Chalamets on my desk tomorrow morning! You know? It's hard. It's uh,

that's film. Incredible. Yeah. So good. That's really cool. It's hard to be an extra. Oh, it sounds it. I've done extra work a couple of times. Have you? Yeah. Well, in this podcast. Wow. I've done extra work a couple of times. Have you? Yeah. Well, in this podcast. Wow. What did you do? I can't remember.

It was a film with James McAvoy, which is quite exciting because you often don't know before you turn up what it's going to be. Yeah, right. Are they looking specifically for people with quite normal looking faces? Blanned. Ideally they want balloons on sticks. Well, that is a thing, isn't it? Yeah.

You can buy inflatable crowds for movies. No. Yeah. I think Seabiscuit famously like that's where it started. I think that was the first one. Yeah. This guy called Joe Biggins, who suddenly realized rather than organize loads of extras and have to pay them, you can just make inflatable people. And you can deflate. I think you've got 10,000 in the back of a lorry, which you can't do with extras. That's against union rules. Yeah, yeah. It is. Very annoying about that.

I really hope like in the background of like a movie like Gladiator, if you look carefully, there's just a slowly floppy deflating. They're floating away, unfortunately. It is helium. Weirdly, appendages cost extra. So he charges $50 for the body, the torso. So is this from a big distance that you're shooting? Of course, because it couldn't be a scene where you've got people walking around.

Yeah, it is. It's like crowd scenes really. So in Seabiscuit, they're running around a horse track, aren't they? And what you do is you get loads of them and then you get some humans in between them and your eyes are naturally drawn to the humans. So the rest of it is just background. That's brilliant. It's amazing what we don't notice. I read about a movie that was made by actually an old buddy of mine called Anthony Ng, where he tracked down the lady who has the Guinness World Record for the most extras appearances in movies. So her record was 1951. And they're everything from she said she was on 80% of the carry on films.

She was in the very first episode of EastEnders. She remembers being on a set one day with a guy having a great chat at the lunch hall and then he's the lead in a movie years later. It's David Bowie who says, Hey, we had a great chat and they reconnected through that. So she sees people go up. So her name is Jewel Goldston. And we know that she has appeared in the 1951 movies. Certainly she had at that point for the record because her husband is an accountant

and he marked down every time. He just got obsessed with making sure that he had lists of what was going on. Yeah. So there's a whole documentary about her and all her little things that she learned along the way. Don't look at Tom Cruise when he's on set. Are we saying because her husband's an accountant, therefore sort of a really boring guy who loves tallying up. He just happened to do it. Yeah. He liked making Excel spreadsheets.

Fair. For respect. Yeah. She points at me when he's talking about a boring guy. It's offensive. When we say someone comes from central casting. Oh yeah. That's a phrase, right?

Is it? This is sort of, oh, he's straight out of central casting. I mean, someone's a bit of like a stock carrier or like if someone turns up and they're an accountant and they're wearing a gray suit and they're carrying a gray briefcase, got a rolled up umbrella. Central Casting is an actual company, which I didn't know. Yeah, and it's 100 years old this year, because it started in 100 years ago. 1925. You can do the math. Are you an accountant? Yeah, and just that was the firm that Jennifer Bender was the vice president of.

They place hundreds of that. Even now, these days, they place hundreds of thousands of people a year. American based or here? Certainly in America. And I think all over, and lots of people started out there. David Niven started out there. He's a famous actor. He was registered as Anglo-Saxon type number 2008. And in the 1920s, extras were categorised into groups because you just needed like a job lot of people who looked a particular way. And the groups included blonde, beautiful, Latin, nurses, swimmers and toothless. Sometimes you could take a few boxes, beautiful but toothless, you know, I've got two gigs.

The Lord of the Rings films have got a lot of extras in, haven't they? Famously. In fact, they pretty much cast everyone in New Zealand in those movies, I think. In Return of the King, they brought in some members of the New Zealand army and apparently they were way too enthusiastic and kept breaking all the wooden swords and stuff. But in the two towers they had a group of apologies to people who like Lord of the Rings because I've never read any of them. But there's a group called the Uruk-hai, which is like orcs. Flawless. And they needed to get people to

play them. So they put a casting call out for everyone over six foot tall in New Zealand to come and play the Uruk-hai. And they couldn't find enough people. So they said, okay, everyone who's over five foot could come in. And they brought in all these like slightly shorter men and they were known on set as the Uruk-lo. Brilliant. Out. Out. Having a fun day out as an extra on a movie.

Can we get the Eric Lowe in? We would. Do you know how many extras were used on those movies? It'd be in like the tens of thousands. Tens of thousands for sure. Yeah. So the one that gets cited as the movie that possibly will never get broken for most extras is Gandhi, which had 300,000 extras, which is pretty extraordinary. And

that was for Gandhi's funeral scene. They weren't all paid though. No. Most extras, like 200,000 of them were just people who are milling around. Yeah, that's true. And that's often sometimes the case. It's just actual people in the background. There is a big list of movies of the most extras ever used. Lord of the Rings is in there as well. And another one is the Last Emperor movie, which was based on Puyi. It was filmed in the Forbidden City. It was an extraordinary achievement of British filmmaking because they managed to get access to the Forbidden City itself to film inside. So even when the Queen was over there, she couldn't visit it because they had priority

access over filming in there. It was a big deal. It was a big collaboration. Well she could have if she had planned to be an extra. Yeah. Is it a comedy? Yes, it's hilarious. A raucous, eulogic comedy. Have you guys heard of Waller groups?

Waller? Waller. W-A-L-L-A. Rick Waller was a singer from the early days of Pop Idol. Mm-hmm. Fats Waller was a blues. Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, we're talking extras in movies here. Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Oh, the prequel to Wall-E. Wall-A. Wall-A, yeah, yes. That's quite, I'm in the film area at least.

You are, that's very good. No, this is to do with the fact that if you were filming extras in the background You're miking up your main characters who you're recording you haven't necessarily miked up the extras, but you need that background noise So they often hire people to come in and make the sounds of the extras So this sort of actors who are acting as the extras And so they stand in and there'll be a group of them who will stand in a studio and they just have to make murmur sounds. Exactly. Yeah. And so they're called Waller, but it's obviously changed. But so that often happens where you

just have a group of people having to make the sounds of the people in the background. Who mentioned short extras? Oh, the Iraq high-hai, being the... Yeah, the Uruk-lo. So there's another film which had short extras, for a very specific reason. So can you guess? It's one of the most famous films of all time. Chocolate Factory. Yeah, that was my first thought. Not Chocolate Factory, not Wizard of Oz, those probably both did do exactly that, but

please let's just move on. Okay, it's something with lots of children in it. It's not. It's something where you need to make something else look a different size. Oh, okay, a film about a giant. Dolophus travels. Very good. Very nice.

No one's so short, they can be a little pew. We need a bunch of three inch high people. Honey, I shrunk the kids. It's, I know. I think we've still got the same problem here. You've built a prop, but you need the prop to, but the prop is only like three quarters of the actual size of the actual thing is representing. So you need to make it look bigger.

That what's the one where the monkeys come and it's earth all along and they plan it the apes. So there's the statue of Liberty, but they couldn't get a full size one. So they had to get small apes. That's right. This is not, it's not right, but it's brilliant. Yeah. Oh, but it's right in that it's good. Yeah. It's exactly, it's exactly that kind of thing. But it's something else like Stonehenge or the Eiffel Tower.

Titanic. Leonardo DiCaprio is actually four foot two. Titanic. Titanic. Oh, is it Titanic? James Cameron only used people under five foot eight on the actual ship. Okay. To make it look, to make the ship look bigger. Wow. Because it's a pretty big ship already isn't it? It is pretty big, but the ship was a bit smaller than the real life Titanic. It was 15% smaller. So if you cast a load of like 6 foot 9 people, it would look a bit... It's going to look tiny! You're right!

Why have they started the movie in the lifeboats? What's going on? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our various social media accounts. I'm on Instagram on at Shriverland Andy. I am on blues guy at Andrew Hunter. I'm James. I am on bluesguy at Andrew Hunter M. James. I am on TikTok. Notice this thing is James Harkin. And Anna, if they want to get to us as a group.

We are on at no such thing on Twitter or at no such thing as a fish on Instagram or you can email podcast at qi.com. That's right. What enthusiasm. I always forget. That's right What enthusiasm We email podcast at qi.com because we love hearing from you we love here like if you have you ever been an extra Are you Ridley Scott? You know like like right in yeah Actually do right here because we use that material for our bonus episodes So we do you can get a mention you can be an extra on our show. You can. You'll get a mention on Drop Us a Line, which is part of Club Fish, which is our very secretive community

of bonus episodes and stuff. It's great. Check it out. And you can find out more about that by going to nosuchthingasafish.com and you'll find all of our previous episodes up there as well. Or you can just come back next week. We'll be back again with another episode. We will see you then, goodbye.