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

Episode Date: April 7, 2017

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

Hey guys, just a quick announcement before we begin this week's show, which is that we are going on tour. We are going all over the country and there are tickets available now. We're going to Nottingham. We're going to Manchester, London, Leicester, Dunstable, Birmingham, Coventry. Yeah, and there are more dates coming up, aren't there? There are indeed, but we're not allowed to say where they are yet, but they'll be a bit further from the centre of England than those places that Dan has just mentioned. Yeah, it's going to be so much fun. We're putting together this whole fantastic first half full of stupid games and extra bit. and interactive bits, and in the second half, we're going to record an episode of the podcast. Yep, so if you want to see any or preferably all of that, then go to QI.com slash fish events,

and you can get your tickets there. Okay, on with the show. Welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covern Garden. My name is Dan Schreiber, and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chazinsky, and Andrew Hunter-Murie, and once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our fours. favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with you, James. Okay, my fact this week is that in 1966, the Chinese press reported that a 73-year-old chairman Mao had swum 15 kilometers of the Yanksy River in 65 minutes. That's twice the speed that

Michael Phelps has ever swum. 75. Imagine what he could do at 40. 73. 73. 73. It's amazing. you're given a number and you just remember a different number. No, I confused it with 65 minutes. Got it. So I took the seven from the year and then I took the five from the minutes. Wait, may swam 73 kilometres in 15 minutes? That doesn't sound plausible. No, he swam 166 kilometers and 65 seconds.

Okay. Wow. Can you say the numbers again? Yes. Year, 1966, age 73, distance 15 kilometers and time 65 minutes. And the thing is, I've read about this, and it's possible that he might have been carried along by some very, very strong currents. Right. But then I wonder if that's really swimming.

It's not because it could be floating. But he had floating bodyguards with him. Yeah, he did. And huge portraits of himself. So there's a picture of him floating along with these six bodyguards around him. And then these, like, giant pictures of Chairman Mao floating alongside him and in front of him. But wait, when you say they were floating bodyguards, what were they in boats? They were swimming too.

And they managed to keep up with the fastest swimmer. Maybe that's why they were six. They were positioned strategically further up and off the river. An improvement to Olympic swimming would be to have a giant raft with the swimmer's face on it going behind it. Because often when the water, you don't know who it is. But if there's a massive raft with Michael Phelps' face going behind it. Yes. That's great.

It's interesting he spent so much time in a body of water because he never bathed, Chairman Mao. in order to wash himself he would have servants wipe him up and down with towels so just wet towels in fact and this is a bit early in the podcast be going into this territory but he claimed to like to wash his body in the body of his women that was his in the body of his women yes i think what that's saying is he liked to have sex with a lot of women and he thought that that was enough of a cleaning process it really wasn't though was it no no no they had to wipe them off with towels afterwards You had to go for that really long swim to really get it off.

Well, it's the most polluted river in the world, isn't it? It's unbelievably dirty. So I suppose it suited him. I think it's got rivals in that. Maybe it was completely clean before he got it. Mao used to suffer from very bad constipation. And apparently, if he actually managed to get a bowel movement out, it was like a cause of celebration amongst the staff.

It was seen as a great moment. be celebrating if I was the towel guy. That's true. That's true. He, yeah, he used to have two to three enemas a day. Maybe when he was saying, I'm surrounded by enemies. He was actually saying, I'm surrounded by enemies. And the whole cultural revolution was a big mistake. So there's a lot of work for Mao lookalikes at the moment.

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

You say that. I wouldn't be surprised if that's the same on the BBC. That's just what you watch, Anna. Yeah. And so because a lot of these have Mao in them, there's a lot of work. If you're a Mao look-alike, it's one of the best jobs you can have.

Wow. Remember there's that Chinese guy who's an Obama look-alike? Is he? Yeah, and he gets a lot of work in TV shows and stuff. Is he Chinese? Yeah, he's Chinese. But he just looks a lot like Obama.

and he gets hired out as Obama. He can't look exactly like Obama. Well, he's a look alike. He's a look alike. Just on crazy claims made by dictators. Oh, yeah. In 2006, a North Korean publication called Nodong Simon reported that Kim Jong-il had mastered the art of teleporting and that he could move so quickly that American satellites could not track him.

Hey, have we ever mentioned the ex-president of Turkmenistan? Almost certainly what? I feel like we must have. Neosov? Yeah, Neos of. Yeah. He was one of those characters as well, claimed crazy things, did crazy things. He changed the names of the days and the months in the country to the names of his family members.

Didn't he name after his mother? Was that him? He renamed bread to his mother's name. Yeah. Very cool. Just on Mao. So a statue of Chairman Mao was unveiled in 1993. And it was a really big deal.

It was to commemorate him. It was the, I think it was like. 120th anniversary of his birth or something. Does that make sense? And it was in December, and it was in the Hunan province, so it's cold and dark and it's constant rain and sleet. And you can now, if you go to China, you can buy photographs of the moment

where the sheet was pulled off this giant statue, the six metre high bronze statue, and at the same time the sun suddenly came out and the moon came out, and they both shone upon the statue at the same time. And if you go, I mean, you'd look very as if you're believing it. I mean, that's possible. It is plausible.

I think it was just the fortuitousness of the event. I don't believe it at all. Sun and the moon coming out at the same time. The sun and the moon are always out at the same time. But half the year they're out at the same time. That's not always. No, but it bears credence that this might have been in that half of the year.

I just think it sounds suspiciously like a propaganda quote rather than, I think you guys are... And also, it's... Very trusting. No, but also, this is what last year or the year before? I mean, China has a lot... 1993. 1999. Okay.

Sorry. We're 25 years ago. Regardless, China has been scientifically, they would know basic things like when the sun and the moon's going to be out and might time it. Also, don't forget the Trump

when he was doing his inauguration speech and the rain just mysteriously stopped. Absolutely, yeah. Or started. I can't remember it. Started, wasn't it? No, he very clearly remembered afterwards at a bit of sunny day.

So that's nice. Just quickly on Mao. He is. initiated a campaign where you were supposed to murder all the sparrows. It was called the Four Pest Campaign. He started it in 1958 and the idea was to exterminate mosquitoes, flies, rats and sparrows. And it was really, really successful. So lots of people went out there and were supposed to form these kind of people's armies to try and kill them.

It was successful in the sense that it achieved what it was supposed to achieve. And then it caused enormous problems like these things do. So, for instance, the sparrows all being gone meant that there was a plague of literal plague of locust, which now weren't being scared off by the sparrows, and they ate all the crops and had incredibly devastating consequences where many, you know, millions of people died. And as far as what it was trying to do was get rid of pests, it didn't really work.

No, it worked as in it got rid of those pests, but it's just such a strong lesson in how we definitely shouldn't be just trying to randomly wipe out something that's annoying us. Yes. Also, if you're on the side that's telling you to go out and massacre the sparrows, it feels like you know that you're not on the right side. don't you? Do you?

The others are quite bad. Rats, mosquitoes, sparrows are so adorable. They're like the epitome of a sweet, innocent creature. Not when they're eating all of your grain. Of course not, but the word sparrow and the image of a little sparrow. If someone's telling you to trample it down. But without grain, how can you make a loaf of the president of Turkmenistan's mother?

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that is that Seahorse's greet their partners every day to make sure they are still alive. Top tip for all you couples out there. What does that mean exactly? Because you'd greet them anyway, wouldn't you? Yeah, how do they know their intentions? Well, if you're a seahorse, you might not.

I don't know. That's what I'm asking. What do they, what do they, how do we know? Because most likely a seahorse is going to say hi to another seahorse if they're married every day. Jesus. So much unpicky to do in that sentence. I'm completely with Dan.

You're joining the side of the lunatic, Anna. You're completely with that, are you? So the married sea horses, you're with him on that bit, are you? What partners, it says? I've just jumped in with both feet, and I decided when married seahorses get up in the morning, obviously they greet each other. How do we know it's to make sure they're still alive?

You're right. What they do is they do this courtship dance every day before dawn for a while, which is for two different reasons. One is to check that the other one is still alive, and the other is to also sing. synchronize their mating. Because you know the male carries the young in his pouch. And then he sort of, yeah, he's pregnant.

That's a thing that is, you've just said quite casually, but is incredibly amazing about seahorses. The male carries the child. Yeah. But apparently the ritual that they do, the sort of ritual they move around in sync, is designed to synchronize their movement. So the male will receive the eggs well when the female deposits her eggs in his pouch. Okay. Because otherwise they won't dock.

properly. And just this keeping a life thing, is it really common for them to die in their sleep? Are they constantly dropping dead overnight? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know why it's so necessary. But apparently this is the case. I looked into the lifespan of seahorses.

And in the wild, between one and four years, in captivity, four years. And they say they just almost always make it to four years. They have a really consistent sort of oldest age a seahorse gets to lifespan. That's interesting. So basically when you're three years old, you know you've only got a year left. Yeah, that's good. You can plan stuff, can't you? Like, the pensions world is very stable in seahorse land.

Because you know roughly how long you've got. I did not know that they were fish. Yes. I thought there was something aquatic. Did you think there were horses? I didn't think they were horses. Exactly. But you thought they were maybe like muscles and...

Yeah, I thought a lobster isn't a fish, you know. So they're called hippocampus, which means horse sea monster. and they eat super quick. They have to use in order to actually see them eating food, high-speed cameras in order to catch it because they can eat stuff in like six milliseconds. Oh really? They're sucking. They suck it in, don't they? Yeah, so it's...

And also they kind of flick their head because they got this horse neck and they catch the copepods that they eat about 94% of the time, which the article I read said might be the most successful in nature, but we know that actually dragonflies are slightly better than that.

we think dragonflies in 95%. But they're similar kind of. But it very much depends on the prey. It's like, it's all context. So, you know, a lion will be terrible at catching a copepod, but a seahorse would be terrible at catching a zebra. That's true. And if I was to go to McDonald's and I wanted to get a Big Mac,

I would have 100% success rate. Yeah, so we are the best hunters now, I suppose. If you're calling that hunting. And I am. That's when James and I go to McDonald's. We hunt for the burgers. We sort of tiptoe up and make sure it doesn't see us coming. So the copepods, which they hunt,

the reason the seahorses have to be so good at hunting is because the copepods can flee unbelievably fast. They can move at 500 body lengths a second, which is the equivalent of a human swimming at 2,000 miles an hour, which is roughly as fast as German now. And seahorses swim incredibly slow. There's one that's called the lined seahorse. If you put it into a bathtub, just your regular length bathtub,

to swim that length would take five minutes. Seahorse racing would be quite a cool thing to watch though, wouldn't it? Yes. You could paint a little, like a little ascot. Put little jockeys on top. And tiny copepad jockeys. And would they have to jump over things in the water? Yeah, why not?

Stiles and hedges and things like that. I didn't think you want the jockeys to be the things that the seahorses are going to try and eat. No, you're right. You want the copepod to be going round like a hair in a greyhound race. Exactly. Yeah. That'd be amazing. if in real horse racing there was a chance that the horse would eat the jockey

halfway through the race. And the Tori's come off and he's being eating. James and I know a seahorse expert, by the way. Yes, we do. Helen Scales. I know her too. I think we know it better. We probably introduced you to her once.

Yeah, you did, yeah. Yeah, okay. Oh, I don't know her. Good. Well, she's great. She's written a book called Poseidon's Steed, which is unbelievably good. Yeah, I have a feeling most of the stuff that I'm saying right now is taken directly from her book, but it was stuff taken from her book by James and put into a script, which I've then just lifted.

And I look through the script, by the way. So she was on our show Museum of Curiosity as a guest about six years ago, seven years ago, almost even. This was the opening question we asked her in the show. Helen, as someone who spent the past 15 years learning everything there is to know about fish, perhaps you can answer this for me, is it true that there is no such thing as a fish? Did we? Yeah, that was our open question. What did she say?

No, that's rubbish. In 2009, there was a woman in Dorset who found a seahorse on her drive, and she lived three miles in land. Wow. And it was alive. How did it get there? Well, they think a seagull dropped it. It was a really rare endangered seahorse. Wow.

It could be that thing, you know, that riddle about the man who's found in a diving suit in the forest. Yeah. It could be that someone was trying to put out a fire in her house by scooping up water from the sea into a helicopter and then dropping it onto her house. And they scooped up a seahorse. Yeah. I was thinking of that one where there's a guy found hanging in a room with a puddle of water. A puddle of water.

So I was wondering if the seahorse was trying to hang itself. And he was stood on an ice cube. Yeah. Yeah. Was it that? Or a man arrives into town on a seahorse on Thursday and then leaves again. Friday. It's called Friday.

The seahorse is called Friday. Yes. I think it's that a seagull dropped it. I'm not sure. I just think that's amazing. It is good that. A lot of them are quite endangered. I read something I think it was on Mother Nature Network maybe saying that they could be extinct within about 30 years, which seems radically pessimistic.

But because they use so much in Asian medicine. So 25 million sea horses a year are used in traditional Chinese medicine or some, actually the Seahorse Trust claims that it's 150 million a year. So it's somewhere between. those two, which is a lot because they're thought to help impotence, aren't they? Yes, in China, yeah. Which kind of makes a lot of sense. No, it doesn't. Stop saying it makes sense. Yeah, it doesn't make sense.

Yeah, it's killing them. Don't encourage the seahorse grinding up, Anna. It doesn't make sense. It's a terrible idea. I can see where culturally it happened, because as the only males that give birth, perhaps that has some connection to the fact that men now think if they eat ground-up sea horse, they'll get fertile. And start spewing out babies. I know, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

It doesn't make any sense, Hannah. No, it doesn't. scientists tested seahorse relationships about 10 years ago. They did an experiment because everyone thinks that they're monogamous and they wanted to see maybe they're not. And so they put little wire labels on them, coloured wire labels, and sort of matched them up with their partners. And then they asked the public to spy on them to see if they were sleeping around.

One of the scientists responsible for it said, when people hear that this might not be true after all, i.e., their monogamy, their curiosity is immediately aroused and they seem quite happy to watch for long periods to see if there's any hanky-panky going on out. Aroused, so they are an aphrodisiang. That's the... Sorry.

Fish this week is sponsored by ground-up seahorses. They found out that they flirted with both sexes up to 25 times a day. So there's hanky-panky all over the shop. Oh yeah. Quite a lot. There is a lot. It is a lot.

Every day. Yeah, it's a lot. I mean, that's a lot. Wake up. Check your partners alive. Damn. Damn it. Well, my...

as well do a bit of flirting anyway. And their flirting is pretty intense, isn't it? Their mating rituals last for days and days sometimes. And the way they mate is they interlock their tails and they just bob along together with tails interlocked for hours on end. Or they dance around a kind of invisible maypole. And, yeah, it's just very romantic kind of animal. It's very sweet.

It's adorable. It's weirdly sweet, yeah. The eyes move independently of each other as well, which is actually more creepy. Because they're trying to check out all the other male and female horses. He's got a roving eye. Yeah, but they all do. Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three. And that is my fact.

My fact this week is that Falcon experts put on a special hat when they want to collect semen. Basically, falcons have been going extinct or endangered in the wild. And so what they were trying to do was to force them to mate with each other. They had to do artificial insemination. And this guy in America called Les Boyd worked out the best way to do that was to wear a special hat Which he would then walk into a room the hat would excite the falcon who would then land on his head and hump his head Until it ejaculated into this guy's hat and then he would wait for the next falcon So it's onto the hat really because I imagine that into a hat means it's you turn a hat upside down and ejaculate into the

No, no no no no it's no no no the hat looks like a waffle so it's got all these little holes on on it. And so I think what happens when the ejaculate comes out, it sort of seeps through the holes like Swiss cheese. We should say they're not wearing these hats, are they? Because they're particularly sexually attractive to the falcons. The hats are specifically there to collect the semen. But why does the falcon, I mean, this is an amazing fact. Why does the falcon want to have sex with the hat? I think it is, and correct me if I'm wrong, they introduced the falcon to the hat very early on in life. And it sort of develops a mother complex with it. It imprints it. And then when they see the hat come back in all those years later,

it thinks, I've got to have it and lands on it. But wait, are they introduced to the hat? Because, yeah, I think when falcons are raised by people, they are more attracted to people than they are to other falcons, because they are imprinted, so it's whatever raises them. They become attracted to. I thought it was the humans, and then the humans put on the hat. Oh, wow.

So, it introduced the baby falcons to the humans. So what happens if the human walks in without the hat? Then they shag their heads. So there's a real debate in the fulconing community over whether it's better to buy. a collecting hat. They call it a copulation hat or whether it's better to make your own.

Obviously it's much cheaper to make your own, but sometimes you just want a professional hat, don't you? Because it looks better? I guess so, but there's... I don't think anyone's wearing this for fashion, actually. They're not very fashionable things. They've got waffle stuff on the top and usually a bird shagging thing.

You can see it being a hipster thing. Yeah, I could imagine walking around short-itch. No, I've just remembered that's what they do. imitate the falcon's voice. Yes. So they imitate the falcons vocalizations to sound like a lady falcon. Yeah.

I think that's amazing. Yeah, it's incredible. And you can see footage of this online, by the way. They sort of land on the head, and they're just going at it, flapping their wings. This guy's head is just being jutted around all over the shop. And then it ends, and he walks out. And then he takes it through a tube, doesn't he?

And he brings it to inseminate it into the female falcon. And that in itself is another whole process. What does he have to put on a special? chest wig or something for that. In the video that I saw, he also had what looked like a glove and goshawks were mating on that. The copulation hat began as a copulation glove,

I think, because it definitely happened on the hand before. And I think... Some genius. Wait a second. Yeah. What if I wear the glove on my head? I think probably because if you have a falcon land on your hand, you can only stretch it so far,

and they are moving about a lot. I mean, it's a vigorous activity. and so you might get a wing in the face. So maybe that was a protection point so that... Yeah, yeah. Possibly. But does that mean that they can be collecting... Gossawk on the hand and Falcon at the same time?

Yeah. Do you know the other method for doing this? It's called stripping. It's a more old-fashioned method. None of this high-tech... Digital equipment they're using. So what you do is you get a little pipette and you have to put it.

It's a sort of tiny suction pump into the birds, the male falcons, cloaca, the sort of genital opening, and then you have to use an automatic pipette to just, you know, you just put it one notch, and it just extracts a little bit of semen from the falcon, right? Before the invention of the automatic pipette, what you would have to do is someone on the team would have to suck the open end of the pipette

to get the falcon semen going. And this is from the book, how fast can a falcon dive? Peter Capaynolo had some experience performing this procedure as an undergraduate. Despite keeping an eye out for the rapid movement of seminal fluid up the tube, he occasionally learned the hard way

that while falcon semen looks like a nice lager, it tastes rather bitter. Because it's amber falcon semen. It looks like beer. But he discovered, and he's the co-author of this book. So does falcon semen look like beer? Like if we went to the pub and I accidentally swapped Dan's beer for a pint of,

falcon seaman. He might not notice... If I saw the hat, if I was like, what are you doing wearing that, James? It's just fashion, Daniel. We are in shoreditch. Okay, I can definitely see there being a beer in shortich called falcon seaman.

That's a really good beer name, actually. Yeah, it is. That should be our no such thing as a fish. Beer. Yeah, release. But I put in falcon jizz into Google in order to... To make sure that there isn't already a beer called falcon jim.

But what came up is that there's a club in America called Fulken Jiz. jazz, which is what it ordered corrected it. You have to wear a special hat to go in. It sounds like a really fun jazz club, and it's run by like this environmental scientist.

Why is you running a jazz club? I don't know, and his name is Tony Falco. So he's just missing the end to be Tony Falcon, Jazz Club, and it's in New York. So if you're in New York, go see the Falcon Jazz. An astra pints of Falcon Jazz. We should launch a beer there. Falco Jazz presents.

Cheers. I think what's really interesting about this fact is it's the current method. Probably the most successful falcon breeder in the world. His name's Bryn Close. He specifically breeds falcons who fly incredibly fast because falcon racing is a thing that happens a lot in the Middle East. Dubai and Abu Dhabi specifically do it and the shakes and the super rich out there by these falcons.

He is the number one breeder of these falcons and that's how he collects the semen of all these of these different falcons. But anyone listening to this might remember ages ago there was an image that appeared online of a commercial airplane and it was the economy class of the airplane and it was just packed with falcons sitting there. And to Bryn, that's a very regular thing because that's how they fly all the falcons out to Abu Dhabi in Dubai. Was there a business class on the same flight full of humans?

Or was it as people were coming in like, yeah, just this way, sir, just this way. Falcon, you'd need to turn right. so airlines have specific rules for this right there are a lot of airlines that will the only animals that allow in the cabin are guide dogs for the blind and falcons for falcon racing so emirates is one of those airlines where it says they're the only two animals that are allowed but if you buy a first class seat you're allowed two falcons so I think this is one on the head one on the gloves this is with etihad that's what it was with yeah if you're going to do

buy your Abu Dhabi or somewhere like that, you buy a first class seat, you're allowed two additional falcons on the seat next to you. I get Etihad and Emirates a lot because my sister lives over in Abu Dhabi. I have never seen a falcon. Well, you're never in first class, Dan. That's where they're all hanging out. I thought you said you can have one in economy. You can have one in economy, yeah, maybe. So just very quickly on Bryn Close, he raises these falcons in Doncaster near an industrial estate. He's been doing it for years. He says that his falcons can get up to 75 miles an hour. The average Vulcan can get up to 60 miles an hour. So he doesn't know what he's doing right, except that he knows that he's spending a lot of money on their daily meals and so on

in order to just build them up to be the strongest that they can be. What's interesting is he lives in an industrial town. I read an article a year or so ago about pigeons, which is that pigeons can fly faster through noxious air than they can through clean air. If you get, if you have racing pigeons, they always go faster if you put them through horrible air. And no one knows why. It might be because they just want to get out of it or it might be something to do. I don't know. But that's his secret is what you're saying. Maybe. Maybe the Doncaster air is the one secret. Maybe it's not anything else he's doing. Do you know how staff at Marine Parks get semen out of a killer whale? No, go on. They used to use a cow vagina.

Used to. They lost it. Some real and some artificial. Although where you would make an artificial cow vagina, I do not know. I could think of a worse way, wearing a swimming cap. Another marine biologist had his neck broken today. Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Mayan women had to prove they could make cocoa with the right amount of froth before men would marry them. This is something I was reading in the Smithsonian, and it's something that's claimed by the, this guy called Hayes Lovis, and I've no idea if that's how you pronounce his name,

but he's a cultural arts curator at the Smithsonian, and he said the early records of Mayan marriages in Guatemala indicate that in some places a woman would have to make the cacao, so she'd have to make the chocolate drink, and prove that she could make it with the proper amount of froth before she was able to marry the man. And this is a thing, froth was incredibly important, so I hadn't realized that the froth on the chocolate drinks

in Meso-American civilizations was a bigger deal than the actual chocolate drink, I think. And why? Do we know? I guess because it was just part of the ritual, right? So you'll see lots of Mesoamerican art, which shows the women making the froth. And they'd stand up really, really high above the vessel that they were pouring the chocolate drink into. And they'd pour it in from really high above and it would splash down onto the ground from like two meters high. And that would sort of froth it up. And they'd do that a few times. So you just pour back and forth and back and forth. So it's just like a ritualistic thing. I guess it's just showing that you're not a complete idiot. Can you pour some stuff into a pot and then back and forth?

Okay, well I marry you, that's fine. Hey, from quite a height? I'd struggle. I would have been a spinster. I don't know. So Jose Di Costa, who is a Spanish Jesuit missionary, he said that the scum or froth had a very unpleasant taste. Oh, really? So I think to European taste, it wasn't that tasty

because it's hot chocolate, but it's not that sugar in. I'll pass some of the chocolate. I'll just have some of that falcon semen, thank you very much. Much nicer. Because they didn't have cane sugar or anything like that They could have put honey in it I suppose But mostly it was a bitter and spicy drink It wasn't sweet and...

Yeah, they more often put chili in it, didn't they? Yeah, and yet it was really, really popular In spite of not being delicious and sweet like we now have. You know when old chocolate goes white? Mm-hmm. You know that? No. Yeah, when it goes off.

When you leave chocolate for a while, you get white. Do you know what that is? No. It's called a fat bloom. so it's liquid fat from the cacao bean gradually moving towards the surface of the chocolate and breaking out on the surface like a rash. It's not bad.

Yeah, but I wouldn't eat it. I would. Would you? Yeah. What about green bacon? Yeah, love it. No, sorry, no. Green bacon?

You know, bacon goes a little bit off, off-coloury sheen on it. I think that's probably still all right. I still eat that. Yeah, it's nitrate burn that. It's the nitrates that they use to cure the bacon with and preserve it. That's just that reacting with the oxygen.

Great. So that implies it's on the turn, right? Yeah, but it's fine. It's still okay to eat. Good. Otherwise, I'm in serious trouble. I mean, if it's green and furry, probably not. They used to the Mayans and the Aztecs used to use the cacao bean as currency.

That would be their equivalent to money, not exclusively, but it was a traded thing. And you would know what it was worth. So one bean might be worth, according to this expert. Sorry, 200 beans might be worth, according to this expert. the price of one turkey, for example. Okay. And they think they know that, don't they? So a lot of this stuff we kind of have to guess at

because we don't have written records for a lot of these cultures. But they think they know that because they found counterfeit beans, right? No. Yeah, they have. The archaeologists keep finding what looked like cacao beans, and then they go up close and their little beans made of clay to look exactly like cacao beans. And they think it must be counterfeit currency.

But or it could be, you know, they use them in... I've got this pot chocolate taste like, Shit. Is it their equivalent of chocolate money is non-chocop money? One of the suggestions was that the counterfeits were to use in ceremonies because a lot of religious ceremonies involved cacao because it was such a valuable thing. But the point of religious ceremonies is to give offerings to the gods, right?

And you would have thought if you're offering a god what looks like a cacao bean, but when he tries it, it's a bit of clay. That would actually piss them out. Yeah, but that's ceremonial things, don't you like? Yeah. Like in ancient Egypt, they would have made fake slaves or fake this or fake that. Fake slaves for the afterlife? Oh, model models of place.

I'll sell you my slave. It's just a block of wood. And in China, like traditionally they would do paper versions of things you want in the afterlife. Because they knew that you couldn't necessarily take your iPad to the next life because it's a solid thing. But you could take a paper one and it... They still do that. Yeah.

It's amazing. Yeah, I think we have mentioned this. We have it. Yeah. They do money, so you just burn money and you burn items that you think they would like to take into the after. It would be amazing if you get to the afterlife and you've got a paper iPad there. Oh, shit! I thought when I walked through this door, it would all transform into the real thing.

Everyone in the afterlife has all wandering around with paper iPad. Yeah, mine doesn't do anything either. That's ridiculous. We've no way of communicating to be honest. Maybe that's what ghosts are trying to do. Bring iPads! So I didn't know this, but cacao bean stocks are running lower and lower, and all the crops are being converted to corn and West Africa where they grow a lot of it,

and chocolate's going to get way more expensive in the next few years. And Erica McAllister mentioned this a few weeks ago. Yes. But there was a guy in 2010, because you get traders who buy and sell loads of cacao beans, he bought 7% of the world's cacao beans 658 million pounds worth mountains of them and he was nicknamed Chock Finger Chocolate finger it should be just

His real name's Anthony He's just a trader who's specialised in cacao his whole life He knows all about the market movements And you know he's to spend his whole life buying and selling it On what he thinks the market will do Just on the Mayans very quickly not to do with cacao, but to do with those massive,

amazing pyramids that they built. So back in the 30s, they discovered a pyramid within a pyramid. Is it in Russia? Well, no, but what's amazing is last year, they've just found another pyramid inside that pyramid,

inside the pyramid, yeah, and they think there may be a few more inside. So yeah, it's like a Russian doll effect. At the very, very middle, as a Toblerone. Yeah.

This was only last year that they announced it, that they found this new smaller pyramid. I would have looked outside the first pyramid for a massive pyramid. It could be that we're all living inside a massive kind of solar system-sized pyramid. And that one, first one they found, is actually the second one. Exactly. Yes. Why would you make the second Russian doll so much smaller than the outside layer?

You just wouldn't. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, that's a huge scaling difference between, Well, they're hard to make when they get that big. The first one took a lot of effort. And then the next one, they're like, oh, we shouldn't make one that big. Just very quickly, we've never mentioned before that the first ATM machine, so the first cash machine that was based on a chocolate bar dispenser.

And so it was invented by this guy called John Shepard Barron in the 1960s and 67. And I was really an interview with him. I just imagining like Fivers on one of those chocolate machines. where it just about to fall down and it doesn't quite fall down. That would be the worst thing ever, wouldn't it? Yeah, and they wouldn't fall properly. No.

Yeah, it would be a nightmare. It was done with using checks in the olden days, so you'd write a check and it had a bit of... Come off it. To get some chocolate out of a chocolate machine, you'd write a check. And six days later, once it's cleared. Who should I make it out to all?

Just A-9. Please deliver this check to A-9. Your sincerely, Mr. Barron. Dan, you don't sign off checks yours sincerely, you know? I am so lost with what's happening at the moment. Clear up number one. No, you didn't ever put checks into chocolate bar machines. I'm sorry, give that impression.

What I meant was he based the cash machine on a chocolate bar machine, but to use cash machines in the olden days, you put a check in, and it had a bit of radioactive carbon-14 ice. Tope, which interacted with the machine. And he used to get in trouble and people would say, oh, we reckon this is dangerous. It's radioactive. Wow. So he said, I later worked out that you'd have to eat 136,000 checks for it to have any effect on your health.

Okay. Wait, you put, that's how cash machines used to work with radioactive. Yeah, a radioactive system that triggered it to give you some cash. That is unbelievable. But that's not how the chocolate. The chocolate dispenser works. No. It would melt.

You did used to get radioactive chocolate. bars. When they first invented radium or discovered radium, they started putting them in chocolate bars. So technically you could have actually put a chocolate bar into a cash machine and got cash on. But he'd have to get his chocolate from the original machine so it's just a system that's just working back and forth. He's still stuck between

two vending machines. So this guy, this inventor said he then moved up to Scotland to the coast and the next thing he invented and the only other thing he invented as far as I can tell is a device that played the sound of killer whales to ward seals off his fish farm

and he said to the BBC it only succeeded in attracting many more of them We shouldn't have put it inside a cow's vagina Okay, that's it That is all of our facts Thank you so much for listening If you'd like to get in contact with any of us About the things that we have said

Over the course of this podcast We can be found on our Twitter accounts I'm on at Shreiberland James at Andrew Hunter M. And Chisinski. You can email a podcast at QI.com. Yep.

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