378: No Such Thing As A Reverse-Waterslide

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that some dog owners in Alaska are putting spiky jackets on their pets to stop bald eagles from carrying them away.

How many pets in Alaska have been carried off by bald eagles?

To my knowledge in recent weeks zero.

But that just shows that these jackets are doing their job, right?

Good point.

Yeah.

It's so cool.

Have you guys seen a picture of it?

They look like futuristic ravers, like an apocalyptic punk.

It's amazing.

It's like huge glow sticks on the back, but they're spikes multicolored and so on.

Are they

because I read a few things saying, I can't work out whether the guys selling this stuff are just on a genius streak of

manipulating dog owners' paranoia, because there are lots of eagles and they do carry off very heavy fish.

Yeah.

Well, okay, so there are a lot more bald eagles recently than there have been over the recent history, that is for sure.

There were about 72,000 in the US in 2009, and in 2019 there were 316,000 and that's to say nothing of the ones that are in Canada, which is plenty as well.

So that's good news for eagles, but it might be bad news for dogs because there are anecdotal stories of eagles coming down and picking up dogs.

And so they've come up with these new products.

There's a company, they've got a website called coyotevest.com.

and they've taken their existing waistcoats that they sell to dog owners and they've put, like Dan says, these kind of almost like kaplunk sticks, if you can imagine what they look like, on the back of them.

And then there's another product called Hawk Shield, which has Velcro on it, so that when the Hawk or the Eagle comes down, it only picks up the vest and it doesn't pick up the dog.

A bit like, you know, if you have a lizard and one tries to catch the lizard, but it loses its tail.

Yeah.

It's weak Velcro then.

Because that sounds like it's going to come undone all the time.

That sounds really annoying.

I thought you were going to say that the eagle sticks to the Velcro when it lands.

You get the Velcro that just glues it to the dog.

And your dog comes back and it's just got 20 eagles attached to it.

Guys, it doesn't matter what they can do.

They're not doing it.

What?

Why is everyone speculating

about how they're not blimming doing it?

One tiny little Pomeranian was sadly killed by one in 2020.

Not even carried off, just killed.

One too many, Anna.

It's not worth the huge industry.

The only other evidence I could find of any pet attacks was in 2008, a guy called David Hunsacker in Alaska said he had a bald eagle nest outside his house in his garden.

And at one point, he found a cat collar in there, which implies, I suppose, that the eagle's eaten the cat and left the collar.

Well, okay,

how do you explain the fact that two weeks ago I met a man who was taken by an eagle when he was a child?

Do you really want to know how he explained that, Dan?

It's true.

I met met a guy who came, a builder who came to our house.

He's from Kazakhstan, and he told my wife that when he was a child, he was in a field, and an eagle picked him up and carried him away, and his mother had to run after it and beat it with a stick so he could be dropped, which it did.

How do you explain that?

Did he use that as the reason why he left halfway through the day and didn't come back?

Sorry, another bloody eagle.

I'm not questioning his veracity, but I, when I worked in the Scottish Parliament, used to have a couple of constituents who were incessantly complaining their sheep were being carried off by sea eagles.

And I would love them in the same box as your Kazakhstani builder, which is a box of people who have hallucinations of eagles carrying things away.

Listen, there was a story in Scotland in 2019, and this might be the one that you're talking about, Anna, where sea eagles were blamed for stealing lambs.

And the farmers, they took it really seriously, and they were trying to work out how to prevent it.

They were putting up helium balloons to sort of float above where the sheep were, the lamb were, to sort of scare them away.

Just make it look like a birthday party for the eagles when they're tucking into their lovely fresh lamb meats.

That's true.

It didn't work out, though.

They said, we're struggling a bit with these because they're not staying in the air.

So a bit of a flaw with the old balloon technology there.

All that amazes me about that is that I guarantee you it's going to be the same farmer I used to talk to all the time, is that he's still banging away at the same nonsense drum 14 years later.

Wow.

My God.

Maybe if you'd done something 14 years ago, I know we wouldn't still have this problem.

It's actually why I'm not still in the job.

They fired me.

They've got very bad branding, bald eagles.

I feel so sorry for them.

Why are they called bald?

Bald is not what you want to be as an eagle.

And indeed, they're not bald.

And I actually, I never really thought about it.

I always thought maybe bald eagles were hiding a bald patch that I just had never spotted.

But it just comes from an old English word for white, like shining white.

Oh, it's completely.

They have white heads today.

Yeah.

Yeah, okay.

I always thought it was because the white head made them look bald, but it's not.

That makes sense.

but I guess bald will come from the same word, I guess, like clean white.

I think piebald, a horse that's piebald is two different colours.

Yes.

And I think the bald bit of that means white-headed.

So in the USA, it is also very illegal to own an eagle.

You can remember it because it rhymes.

It's very handy.

Is it illegal to own a beagle, though, Andy?

No,

how are you supposed to remember it?

A bald eagle, the national bird of America, you're not allowed to own at all.

And if you find a dead one, you're not allowed to keep it.

Why would you want to?

But there is a US facility called the National Eagle Repository, which effectively is a massive fridge full of dead eagles and eagle body parts because they're used by Indigenous Americans for religious purposes and ceremonies.

So this National Eagle Repository receives 30 to 40 eagle carcasses every single day they're coming in the door.

Yeah.

Wow.

And it's in a suburb of Denver.

I mean, it's nowhere very glamorous or weird.

It's just in Denver.

You wouldn't put it, you know, in Manhattan, would you

be putting

in Broadway?

The rental cost would be too high for your enormous eagle fridge.

But yeah, so you can, when you say no one can, you can own an eagle if you are, if you belong to one of the, I think it's like 573 recognized tribes who use those eagles in their services.

Exactly.

You can apply either for a full eagle or for effectively a franken eagle.

You can apply to get the constituent parts of an eagle if they have an eagle which has an eye missing or a wing missing or a tail or whatever.

Or they'll give you an eye from a different eagle and stick it into your eagle, will they?

I think they will botch they will send you an eagle kit.

What?

It's not build your own eagle.

What?

No, no, no.

It's things like burning the feathers during ceremonies.

Yeah, it is

for proper rituals.

But if you find an eagle, you're encouraged to post it.

You're literally encouraged to go to the post office and send it to them.

This is just as a random person.

And there's instructions on their website where they say, you know, if you're going to do it, select a very sturdy cardboard box.

Don't pack too many eagles in.

You know, don't bend them and make them a bit out of shape.

You've got to send them in a frozen state.

And I'm not sure how you do that, because they say don't include gel or ice packs.

But if you send them inside a ice cooler, they will send that back to you.

So it's sort of like, don't worry, you will get your ice cooler back.

You've got to double bag them.

You know, there's all these rules, and you've got to ship them via FedEx on any non-holidays that are Monday, Tuesdays or Wednesday.

A poor intern who's opening the post in that place.

Every single day.

Just, what is it?

Oh, it's another rotten maggot eagle.

Have you guys heard of Wounded in Winter Beautiful Bald Eagle?

Speaking of Native Americans.

Is that a person or is that a?

Is that a person?

His name is also David Bald Eagle for short.

So if you're called David, then it does seem like you can use the words wounded in winter beautiful instead of David.

But David Bald Eagle was an actor.

He was in Dances with Wolves as well as a lot of other things.

But he had an amazing life.

He was in the Second World War.

He was dropped into Italy.

And it's a group of soldiers who fought so fiercely the Germans called them the devils in baggy pants.

And then after fighting there, they took him out again.

He was dropped over Normandy during the Normandy landings.

But he was accidentally dropped in the wrong place directly over German troops, which meant they could just literally just look up and shoot at these guys who were landing on them.

Wow.

He said that we were like clay pigeons coming down.

Most of my outfit was wiped out.

He said as he came down.

So ironic that the bald eagle ended up being like a clay pigeon.

Yes, exactly.

The medics came, they left him for dead, but then some British soldiers, commandos, came in afterwards and realised that he was still alive and managed to save his life.

And then he later became a competitive ballroom dancer, a pro-baseball player, and then he became an actor and also danced with Marilyn Monroe.

Imagine that for a life.

That's an extraordinary CV.

It's hard to know what job to apply for with that kind of a range.

Yeah.

You know, the bird we started talking about here, what kind of eagle is that?

Oh, the bald eagle.

The bald eagle.

They, really interestingly, sound nothing like we have all been conditioned to think they sound.

So if you picture the American desert and someone riding a horse through a canyon and he looks up and there's an eagle above and it makes this amazing

cry, right?

That's a very bad impression of that.

Try a better one.

Try a better one.

That one.

That was really good.

That's my gosh.

It's a bit phlemmy.

Okay, look.

Anyway,

they don't sound like that at all.

They make these pathetic little cheeps, and they have to get the sound of a red-tailed hawk dubbed over in movies to make everyone think that they sound magnificent and mighty.

They don't at all.

Well, they used to get the sound of a red-tailed hawk, but now I imagine you'll be employed for the job.

Okay, so do you know how bald eagles have sex?

We got to that part of the podcast already.

It took longer than I expected.

Is it mid-flight?

Yeah, certainly the courting is all mid-flight and that's kind of the interesting part of it.

So you'll get two bald eagles, a male and a female, and they'll fly really, really high up together and then they'll lock their talons together and they'll go into kind of a cartwheel death spin.

Like if you imagine like a helicopter where the blades have all gone crazy and it's all the drivers stopped being able to control it and it goes into a spin.

They come come right down to the floor and they break it apart at the last minute.

And that is kind of the courting technique.

Although sometimes it has to be said, they do actually hit the ground.

Oh.

Well,

that's what makes it sexy.

Yeah.

Exactly.

It's the risk.

It's like an

apisty wank, isn't it?

It's a sort of

dangerous.

That's not a sisty wank.

That's not a fisty.

There's our title for this week's episode.

No such thing as a fisty wank.

I think you might be grappling for a spixy wank.

A fisty wank is just a normal wank, isn't it?

Yeah.

There was a lot of grappling going on, that's for sure.

But is it in the danger?

Is that the idea that as they're tumbling down, they're like,

we've got three seconds to live, quick.

I think if you were to anthropomorphize these eagles, then that's what you would think for sure.

It's like, you know, if you can afford to do such a dangerous thing, then it might mean you're a good mate.

God, I can't wait to hear the David Attenborough commentary on the.

And so, like an afisty wank

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact is that the last emperor of the Shang dynasty built a wine lake and a meat forest for himself.

Wow,

That is.

And what?

So he had all loads of wine and meat whenever he needed it, I guess?

I think basically, yeah, sort of meat forest sounds so disgusting, doesn't it?

But yeah, this was a very long time ago.

This was sort of over 3,000 years ago.

It was the Emperor Di Shin, and he was known for being very sort of decadent and prone to a bit of excess.

And yeah, he filled a lake on his well, I think he dug a lake, in fact, filled it with wine and then he hung cured meat from the trees all around it and according to the sources of the dynasty that came immediately after him he got his courtiers to chase each other through this forest naked wow interesting

so if it came from the people who came after him might it have been a bit of kind of propaganda against him do you think or not It's almost, I mean, I guess it's impossible to say.

He was definitely pretty debauched.

And the reason he was removed from power, or the reason he eventually lost the entire dynasty, which had gone on for about 600 years, is because he was corrupt and, you know, excessive and stuff.

But yeah, what's a weird coincidence, and which does imply that could be the case, is that the dynasty that preceded him also fell down because the last emperor built a lake of wine.

I think the MOG.

Isn't that so weird?

Surely one of his advisors should have said, hey, this didn't work last time.

This time, it will work.

It's completely different.

Both persuaded to do it by their concubines.

There's always in this history, there's always some terrible woman

forcing them to do it backstage.

Yeah.

How big was this lake, Anna?

Are we talking a genuine lake or is it a sort of swimming pool called a lake?

It's not Loch Ness.

It's not Loch Ness, but they astonishingly, and this must have been the most exciting moment in this archaeologist's life, they found a pond that matches up to it.

This is in 1999.

So this is the first dynasty of which we have actual archaeological evidence.

So it's not just written stories about it.

We've got like archaeology that matches up.

And in 1999, they found an artificial pond in Yanshi, and it's 130 meters long and 20 meters wide.

So it's, you know, it's much bigger than your biggest swimming pool.

Largely full of water, I imagine, these days.

No wine left, no, I don't think.

Very diluted by this point.

Yeah.

Wow, right.

Yeah, because it's really interesting.

The Shang dynasty, we did think that perhaps it was like a kind kind of a story or you know some thing that wasn't actual history but then like you say they did find i think they found some bones or something with things written on them or yeah they were they were called dragon bones and the idea of dragon bones were you would use these for telling the future so they would write on them and they would then put them in a fire and crack them and and the the bones themselves would be bones from an ox's shoulder or they would be the flat side of a tortoise shell and once they cracked, wherever the lines went, that is how you told the future.

You followed the crack lines.

And for years,

we thought that the Shang dynasty was completely mythological, as with the preceding dynasty.

There was not really any evidence except sort of anecdotal evidence.

And then in the late 1800s, all of these little supposed dragon bones were being sold by pharmacies in China because they were seen to be a cure for malaria.

There was a guy called Dr.

Wan Yerong, who was the director of Imperial College, who had malaria and was prescribed some of these dragon bones and he was looking at them going hang on a second This looks like really old writing and that's where they realized this was the original writing of the Shang dynasty and it was real Do we trust a guy who thinks that these ox bones cure malaria?

I'll be making it to Imperial College London What year was that?

This is 1899 and this is the Imperial College of China and yeah oh sorry.

Yeah.

Fair enough.

It was a while back.

So malaria not cured, but you have made an unbelievable archaeological discovery.

Exactly.

Swings and roundabouts.

Very cool.

They seem, they're kind of like Ouija boards, aren't they?

But sort of much harder to read.

Because I suppose I was looking at the process that you go through when you're interpreting oracle bones, which is what they're also called.

And there was an example of one king, for instance, who had a toothache.

And what you do is you list a bunch of options for the bone, and then you ask it, you know, which of these options do you pick?

And whichever direction the crack goes in refers to the option.

So, this king was like, I've got a toothache.

So, first of all, which of my bastard ancestors is causing it?

And he lists four ancestors.

And then you've got to burn a bone, and the crack goes to the right.

And they're like, okay, it's, you know, it's Bob, Uncle Bob, who's caused it.

And then he's like, okay, which animal should I kill to appease Uncle Bob?

Should it be a puppy?

Should it be a pony?

Should it be a bald eagle?

And then you ask it again.

It's quite a laborious way of having a conversation, I guess.

I think it's quite important with these things that they are very difficult to read because you are making it all up.

And so

if it's something that someone else can check your work, then that's not going to work out, is it?

It has to be something that you can say this is right.

And when anyone says, are you sure?

You're like, yeah, look where the crack goes.

It's obvious, isn't it?

Look, all I'm saying is a toothache was cured.

So

I'm on the side of the oracle bones.

Wow.

It was Uncle Bub all along.

There we go.

Yeah, an eagle stealing a child.

A no-go zone for you.

The thing you said about puppies is unfortunately true, isn't it?

Because there were lots of Shang sacrificial puppies which have been found, and they're normally attached to people's graves, so it was a bonus cavity that would be attached to your grave.

And it's mostly middle-class people who did it, we think.

And there is a kind of scale range in terms of what you could afford.

So if you couldn't afford a full dog to be sacrificed for your grave, you'd get a puppy instead, simply because it was a bit smaller.

Wow.

Okay.

Do you know another reason why Emperor Di Shin was destroyed and why his empire fell?

What a bad question to ask.

What a bad way of phrasing it.

Did he have a home made of trifle to

be forest?

That's it.

No, it was to do again with the religion.

And again, this is written by a later dynasty, so it might all be propaganda.

But the idea is that his people ate the animal victims which were intended for the spirits, probably because they might have had a bit too much to drink.

And so they just got a bit hungry.

They looked at the sacrificial animals and they thought, oh, we are meant to

dislike the spirits.

And the spirits never take them.

I mean, we always wake up in the morning and they're still bloody there.

The spirits never eat them, do they?

I know, it's so relatable, just getting a bit peckish after a few drinks and thinking,

I can replace it with another puppy in the morning, can't I?

He was so reviled after, well, actually in his reign and then immediately after it, that he is now known as the Emperor Zhou.

And I've probably mispronounced that, spelt Z-H-O-U, but it's sort of pronounced like Zhou.

And the reason he's called that is because that is the word for the bit of a horse's saddle that would tie round the horse's tail to stop the saddle from sliding forwards.

And that's the bit that, when the horse does a poo, gets covered in poo.

So he's gone down in history as bit of a saddle most likely to get covered in shit.

That is weird.

I thought the next dynasty that came was also the Zhou dynasty.

It was.

It's extremely confusing.

But they didn't call themselves after the shitty covered pasting, surely.

It's a slightly different word that to me sounds almost indistinguishable.

To Dan's slightly more adapted Mandarin ears probably sounds different, but one sounds like Zhou and one sounds like Jo.

Oh, okay.

Oh, I see.

Can I just quickly ask, just back to the very first fact, where did they get the wine from to fill a lake?

That's a lot of wine.

Was it a bit of a faked botched job where it was mostly water and then there was just a top layer of wine kind of thing?

I mean, it's not like oil and water.

People don't say they're like wine and water because wine and water do mix.

You can't just keep it on the top layer.

Was it just like a normal lake and Jesus walked past?

Every time Jesus walks past, you taps.

Oh, god damn it.

I can't do the washing up anymore.

Christ.

Oh, yes, that's my name.

It's a good question.

And I don't think it was the wine, wine as we know it.

It was some kind of alcohol, which is usually referred to as wine these days.

Maybe more like beer.

But I always wonder this as well: when in English historical sources, the medieval times, they talk about fountains flowing with wine.

And you know, kings went through a phase of about 500 years of whenever they were celebrating anything, they had a birthday or a foreign dignitary came to visit, the pipes would flow with wine.

And no one knows how they did it.

But it's in all these sources.

I think it started in the 1200s with Edward Longshanks and there was a royal visit and it was like, you know, London flowed with wine.

We've got no idea how they made that happen.

What's going on?

There is a, there's, we might have said this before, but there is a wine kind of tap, isn't there, somewhere in Italy, I think.

There's like some pipes of wine where you can just go and fill up your bucket whenever you want.

Or blasts, I guess.

Yes, there is.

That is very cool.

Although, yeah, I was reading some TripAdvisor reviews of that, and they did say there's a sign outside it saying, louts and drunkards not welcome.

Right.

This is for passing pilgrims.

Well, that's you gone then, Anna.

Yeah.

Who wants free wine if they're not a lout?

Yeah, outrageous.

That's why I gave it one star.

One exciting Shang Dynasty discovery was a tomb of a fabled character.

Again, we thought that she was entirely mythological called Fu Hao.

She was a wife of one of the emperors and she appears on over 180 of these dragon bones as a sort of story, but no one could prove that she ever existed.

And then there was an archaeologist called Zhang Jianxiang who was basically the first female archaeologist of New China.

So she came about during the Cultural Revolution and she discovered the tomb of Fuhao.

And it was the only untouched tomb of a royal that they have ever found in in China.

It's basically the equivalent of like the Tutankhamun discovery of his tomb.

Everything was intact, everything was in there.

I like the way that they can't say, Oh, this is the first untouched tomb that we found, and then deliberately go and touch it.

Yes, it's like you know, they've only done exactly the same as all the previous people have done.

Yeah,

I guess it's because they've left an itinerary of what they've taken from it that that's the difference.

That we're like, oh, okay, we know everything that was there before you stole it.

Yeah, now you just have to buy a flight to the British Museum in order to see it.

I'm very sorry.

Exactly.

At least you know where it is.

Yeah, but she is an amazing character, by the way, Zheng Xianxiang, this archaeologist from China.

And I read about her story in a fantastic website that people must check out.

It's called Trowl Blazers, as in a trowel for digging.

And it's a website which is in celebration of women, archaeologists, paleontologists, and geologists who've been doing awesome work for far longer and far greater numbers than most people realize, is the mission statement of the website.

And it's just packed with all these incredible women who are making these discoveries, like Zhang Zheng Xian, who is the first lady of archaeology there.

And they did discover inside the tomb, they found all these things like 16 human corpses that they believe were sacrifices of slaves to come into the afterlife with her.

They found, as you say, Andy, dogs.

There were six sacrificial dogs.

And shed loads of weapons, right?

She's a warrior.

In fact, I think she was general of the army and led the forces to like the biggest victory of the century.

And they found hundreds of weapons with her.

Yeah, she was the leader of the largest army that we know of in ancient Chinese history.

Wow.

13,000 men.

Yeah.

It's amazing.

And if you were that posh, you could get a human sacrifice.

I think, so the dogs maybe were for, you know, if you couldn't quite afford the people.

But I think you know you've really made it in life when you can convince 16 people to die when you die.

They think that possibly the Shang dynasty had a collection of future human sacrifices.

A bit like if you can imagine a giant freezer with a load of eagle parts in it but with humans instead and yeah they reckoned because they would do these big sort of human sacrifices loads at the same time and they could tell that you know these people had been not very well fed for a certain amount of time They can tell that they were kept as prisoners.

And the idea is that whenever you needed a human sacrifice, because you wanted to show strength because you're the leader or perhaps, you know, for some religious reason, you would go to this pool of sacrificial victims and say, Okay, I need 12 sacrifices, please.

Okay,

if you were kept in better conditions, after all, it's befitting that a human sacrifice should be kept in decent conditions.

Would you volunteer to be a human sacrifice if you knew that at some point in the future your number would be up and you'd be much better would my conditions be than my current conditions?

Well, I mean, I can see in the background of the zoom call, James, that you've got your meat forest and your wind leg behind you, so it can't get much better no you're right you get to live like Elon Musk but you will die within two weeks do I have to do really irritating tweets all the time what do you what do you well that won't be a stretch James

continue as you were

you know um speaking of meat forests um the leopard is an animal that likes to put meat into trees.

Really?

And yeah, sometimes it'll kill something, like something as big as a small giraffe, for instance.

And then to stop any hyenas or lions from eating it, but it can't eat it all at once because it's too big, it'll drag it up into a tree and then leave it hanging there and then just munch on it when it feels like it.

And there's some examples of leopards carrying such big amounts of meat up these trees that it's the equivalent of a human carrying 2,000 Big Macs up two floors in one go.

What?

That's a bad hangover you've got, Ben.

That's your Saturday.

That poor deliveroo guy.

Do you want fries with that?

You know what?

Probably not.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy.

My fact is that if you look at your phone when you're out, half the people around you will do the same within 30 seconds.

What, half the people around you will look at your phone?

I'd said that was an invasion of privacy.

Yeah, so be careful what you're looking at.

Assuming it's people looking at their own phones, I'm almost surprised it's only half, I have to say.

From experience, it's so catching, isn't it?

Yeah, it's really bizarre.

So, this is something that I think is probably anecdotally observed a lot, and it's finally been studied by a team at the University of Pisa.

And it's a team led by Veronica Maglieri observed nearly 200 people and they did so in the field.

They went out and about and they looked at men and women in social settings and there were various trigger individuals that they were observing.

And if those trigger individuals looked at their phone very shortly afterwards, about 50% of the people around them did the same.

Didn't they say as well that it was you had to actively engage with the phone as well?

So they noticed that if you sort of in passing looked at your phone, it didn't trigger off people doing it.

But if you picked it up and you did a swipe and

you were actively engaging with your phone that's when everyone got it started doing it yeah and this is called the chameleon effect right where you mimic what other people are doing and it was coined by dr tanya chatrand and i listened to a podcast that she was in um this was the annual reviews conversations podcast and it was absolutely brilliant um she just talked about where she came up with the idea so she was a student and there was one of her fellow students who was a bit more senior than her.

He had a beard, and he would just like he had this weird mannerism, she said, where he kind of would pull his beard whenever he was doing any work.

And she noticed that even though she didn't have a beard, she kept pulling this little bit of skin on the bottom of her chin.

And she suddenly thought, wait a minute, why am I doing that?

Is it because I'm mimicking him?

Because he's got a slightly higher status than me.

And then that became the subject of, I think, her PhD.

That is so cool and interesting.

And actually,

on that note, I had a tutor when I was at university who had a very thick and bushy beard.

And at the start of a tutorial, if he was only slightly interested in what you're saying, he would start winding one finger around in his beard.

But if you got more intellectually stimulating to him, two fingers would get in there and start grinding around.

The creepiest thing I've ever heard.

By the end of the tutorial, both hands would be fully grinding through the beard.

It was nightmarish.

It sounds like he he had a lice problem to me.

Yeah,

it does happen, according to Dr.

Chatrand in this podcast that I was listening to.

It does happen with people who you respect, people of a higher status.

But actually, there is a baseline, even if you're with a stranger, someone you've never met, you're never going to meet again, you just kind of sat on a train platform and they're doing something, rubbing their fingers in their massive bushy beard or whatever.

Then you might copy that.

And there is a kind of a small amount of it that happens no matter who you're next to this mimicking thing though it even happens when it's very disadvantageous to you so rock paper scissors the game we all know and love yeah when people play rock paper scissors they mimic each other unconsciously this has been tested by scientists from ucl who set up a series of rock paper scissors games where either one player or both players were blindfolded.

Okay?

Okay.

I mean the most pointless rock, paper, scissors games imaginable.

But when both of them were blindfolded, they didn't imitate each other.

But when there was one person blindfolded and they played one of the three options, the sighted player, the one who wasn't blindfolded, was slightly more likely, very slightly more likely, to play the same thing, which is baffling.

That's incredible.

Because obviously, that's not how you win rock, paper, scissors.

And also, you're playing someone blindfolded.

Just wait until they've made their clear offer and then play the thing that wins.

However, yes.

Yeah, what's incredible to me is that we haven't managed to hack into our subconscious and be able to win rock, paper, scissors, because it's extraordinary that your subconscious knows what your opponent's going to do, but it won't tell you in time.

Oh, you're right.

With this fact about, so you're saying that there's disadvantages where it still happens.

But for me, the confusing thing about your fact is that if I was mimicking, as you say, like twiddling a bit of the skin of your chin,

there's nothing there that you're doing that you're conscious of.

Whereas checking your phone is an active thing.

So, if you see someone else checking their phone, you might go, Oh, I should check my phone.

It's a reminder rather than a social mimicking thing.

Am I so am I misunderstanding that?

I don't think so.

I think sometimes you just like check your phone without thinking, right?

You're just kind of sat around looking at the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and your phone's next to you, and you think, Well, I've seen that Leaning Tower of Pisa for three hours now.

Nothing's changed, it's still leaning, it's not moving anywhere.

I'm going to look at my phone

and you're not,

but yeah, I mean, it's more of a subconscious thing, I think.

Sometimes you just do it reactionary without thinking.

Okay, I think that was what they found, yeah.

It's the subconscious.

Obviously, it's conscious once you're writing a long and heartfelt message to your aunt, but the action of picking it up and looking at it, which is what kicks that off.

Of all the people you could have chosen to write a long and heartfelt message to.

Dad's relationship with his auntie, they're very close.

I appreciate you bringing that up up.

Private.

Sorry.

As well as the chameleon effect, there is a reverse chameleon effect.

And what this is, is let's say I'm sat opposite you and you're scratching the right-hand side of your face.

Then to mimic you, I will scratch the left-hand side of my face.

And it's as if it's a mirror.

Do you know what I mean?

But if you do it the other way, so if you scratch the right hand side of your face and i scratch the right hand side of my face then actually rather than having positive feelings for for me because you can see that i'm mimicking you you'll have negative feelings for me and that was a study only in 2020 by a guy called daniel casasanto and his team and it was in the journal psychology and they set up like a digital face that would kind of copy what you were doing and it found that people who were opposite this face when it was doing this this weird sort of non-mirroring mirroring, they would feel really negative about it.

Well, it's annoying if you know you're walking with someone, you go in one direction, and they immediately go in the opposite direction.

It kills the conversation.

There's probably underlying reasons that that's happening.

No, it's a subconscious response, I'm sure of it.

Do you guys have at the right-hand side of your head

around the hairline a little lump or bump?

Well, my hairline is getting a lot further than that.

Does the bump move as well?

I think the bump stays the same.

The bumps are skull thing.

I'm not sure.

This is an amazing thing.

You're all feeling your heads now.

Okay.

This isn't mimicry, Andy.

If you're trying to make us all copy your...

I'm trying to make you find your organ of imitation.

And this was a phrenological concept in the 19th century.

And the idea was that if you had a very lumpy bit of your skull just there, that was an enormous organ of imitation and you would be a very good mimic.

And you might be an actor, but you also might be a liar.

You might be a fraudster.

That was where it was.

But you could only really mimic someone else who had a massive growth on the side of their head, could you?

How big are we talking?

Is it, you know, like a hockey stick sticking out of your head?

Just there.

Just, you know, a lump or above.

I can't tell because obviously everyone's skulls have, you know, different shapes all the way around.

And it's obviously nonsense.

That's why at the Oscars, when you see all the nominees who are about to be announced the winner, it's the one with a giant protruding lump that you know is about to get it.

It sounds to me like it's someone who's been punched in the head so many times.

They think the way to make people like me is by imitating them.

And so they go and do it.

I mean, surely that's the cause and effect as far as I'm concerned.

I suppose what we are actually saying here is that phrenology doesn't work.

That's what I'm saying.

There was a Dutch study by psychologists that showed, and this is a handy tip for anyone who works in restaurants and is waiting staff, that if you copy the behavior of the customer,

so you eat the food as well.

You give them the food and then you sit opposite them and just have the same thing.

Yeah, go up to them and give them your order and

then they'll go off and do it.

They'll just mimic what you would have been doing.

What do you mean?

The idea is that if you can relate to the customer more, you're more likely to get a tip from them.

So they found that if you were the waiting staff and you went up to them and they made the order, if you repeat the order back to them, that almost heightens the fact that you'll get a tip because it makes them feel like you're friendly with them.

If you bend down next to them while they're giving you their order, that's been shown to increase tippage as well.

Bend down when you say bend down next to them,

sort of like, yeah, you bend your knees and sort of get down to their level and still look them in the face.

You don't turn around round and shovel them your ass.

Yeah, don't ace venture it.

It's yeah.

Yeah, I guess the reason that we sort of do this is because people like it, right?

And that's why you'll tip.

It's because you like it when your waiter mimics you in a way.

And I read a really interesting article saying copying might be what makes us human.

So we've actually evolved it.

So a lot of people say it's like innovation and ideas, right?

Humans, we've invented so much stuff that other species haven't.

But they did this experiment that was really interesting, where toddlers and chimps were both shown a box with a tree inside it, like sweets or something.

And then the experimenter showed them how to open the box, but they added a irrelevant motion during the opening, so they tapped the box just before opening it, and then they gave it to the child, the toddler or the chimp, to see if they were able to open the box.

And the chimps realised straight away that the tap was irrelevant, so they copied all the other stuff that the human had done, worked out how to open the the box, but could see that the tap was irrelevant.

Whereas the toddlers all still tapped the box, and this is like over-imitation.

It's like we imitate everything people do, even if it's totally useless.

And the idea is that this is how we've developed this amazing culture, because the only way that humans are so successful is that we've developed skills and technology over generations.

Like no one can make a mobile phone from scratch, no one really could work out the best way to build a canoe, even.

So it's by copying bit by bit exactly what our ancestors have done or what our parents are doing that makes us really successful.

But it does mean that we do pointless shit like tapping a box with the chip next to us going, why are you doing that, mate?

But that's how we invented drumming as well.

Exactly.

Just tapping the box.

There is a thing where, like you say, it makes you feel better if people copy you,

but you kind of inherently know how much mimicry there should be depending on a situation.

And if there is too much or too little this again this is according to dr.

Chartrand in this podcast that I was listening to she said that if you if there's too much or too little mimicry then it kind of hurts your self-control so you can't self-control as much you procrastinate more and you eat more junk food and have worse motor control so your reactions are even slightly worse as well and all these things can affect you from just someone mimicking you too much or not enough.

That's really passing the buck, passing the blame on, isn't it?

The only reason I had those 8,000 Big Macs or whatever it was I carried up the stairs is because you keep not copying me enough.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that elephants can down five pints in under a second.

Wow, they wouldn't be allowed near that wine tap, would they?

That's the very definition of alcoholic and lout.

Oh my god, that Shang Dynasty lake would be drained.

So, just to clarify very quickly, it is obviously the trunk is not the bit that they drink through.

The trunk is basically, well, it's basically a storage unit, isn't it?

It's where they suck up and they can hold the content in and then they pass it through to their mouth.

But recently, there's new research which was published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, which found that when they suck up, either drink or when they're trying to eat food, that the suction is so great that they can inhale air at 330 miles per hour.

That's mad.

But I still think in a downing contest, I don't mean to quibble, but that doesn't count.

This is like me taking part in a downing competition, pouring my five pints into a big bucket next to me and going, I win.

Oh, yeah, I'm just going to drink them later.

No,

no, it's like you taking five pints and snorting them up your nose and then dribbling it out of your nose into your mouth later.

Yeah, which I understand that I have seen you do.

I really like that this was.

Did you say the Royal Society interface, Den?

Yes.

Because it is literally about something going into a face.

Oh, it is.

It's very true.

Just to contextualize that speed, 330 miles per hour, that is faster than a Japanese bullet train travels.

It's incredibly fast.

In the article, they say that it's 30 times faster than a human sneeze.

So picture, because that feels like that's the speed of light when you do that.

It's 30 times that.

This speed of sucking water I found is six times faster than the world's fastest water slide.

And then I got right back onto water slides again from the other week

because the world record fastest speed ever on a water slide is 57 miles per hour.

And it was done in 2009 by a guy called Jens Scherer, who is a German advertising executive.

And according to this article in Outside magazine and nowhere else on the internet as far as I can find it

there's a thing in Germany called speed shooting where you have to go down a water chute as quickly as you possibly can and this journalist met up with Jen Scherer and tried to work out how to do it and apparently the trick is you isolate a couple of muscles in your kind of stomach and you really work on them and then you have to minimize the surface area of your skin on the water chute so the way you do it is you have your shoulder blades on the chute and just one heel that goes on the chute and it's only three points that are touching the water chute and it makes you fly down really, really, really fast.

You also have the cannonballs and these are the really fat shooters who, according to Shara, have no technique, just stomachs.

I know which method I prefer.

I'd rather overeat for a year and win that contest.

Well, you know, Shara, he takes this really seriously.

He wears very, very small speed-os because he thinks that skin is the fastest way of doing it, just human skin.

But he has tried other things.

He's tried covering himself in soap, in oil, in wax, in a special hydrophobic gel he covered himself in to see if he could go faster.

And he also used a type of cream he used to tenderize the udders of dairy cows to make himself go faster on water chutes.

But apparently...

Hang on, you said he was an advertising executive.

How has he got access to the cream that you use to lubricate the udders of dairy cows?

Well, maybe he's advertising that.

I don't know.

Good point.

Yep, very good point.

Stacks up.

I always see big poster ad campaigns for cow udder lubrication cream.

I cannot believe you've used this elephant trunk fact as an excuse to use all your unused research from last week.

We've just sort of dug a time tunnel three weeks back into the past.

I promise you, I found this all brand new stuff this week.

I was absolutely devastated I didn't find it three weeks ago.

I do think that a water slide that was called the elephant's trunk that involved firing you up a slide incredibly fast is a good idea if anyone is out there wanting to do it.

A reverse water slide.

Yeah.

Firing it, yes.

But is there a blow as well?

You get sucked up it.

Oh, yeah, nice.

So do you start in the pool?

Everyone's in the pool and you don't know one random person every minute is going to get sucked back up the tube to the very top.

Yeah.

And you don't know who it's going to be.

That's stressful.

And then do you have to walk down?

You have to queue down the steps for ages at the end.

So one thing elephants do with their trunks is to touch each other's genitals to comfort each other.

If one of their friends is distressed,

they will just kind of copper feel.

Or the alternative thing they do is to put their trunk in their friend's mouth.

Just sort of stick it in there.

And that's another way of calming them down.

Yeah.

We should start trying that.

That's why Dumbo used to carry that feather, wasn't he, to tickle the genitals of his friends.

You can't be unhappy when you're laughing.

Apparently, they also use it to pinch their parents' genitals, sometimes to get their attention.

This was, I read somewhere there's an archive of African elephants' trunk uses, and there are more than 250 separate uses for their trunks.

No.

Which sort sounds like one of those, you know, difficult interview questions.

How many uses can you think of for a trunk?

But one of them was named as kids getting their mum's attention by pinching her genitals.

Or dad.

Oh, wow.

Do you know how you take an elephant's temperature?

Sounds like the start of a joke.

Yeah.

The bum bum.

Tickle its genitals.

It's...

So it is a thermometer and it is up the bum, but it...

Weirdly, the thermometer is a normal size one.

Oh.

Because you'd think it would be a comical oversized elephant one.

You'd think it wouldn't touch the sides, would you?

Like a normal.

Exactly.

But you've got to keep your arm there for four minutes.

And it could be really important to assess the elephant's health as well.

But that's a long time.

Have we then been using unnecessarily large thermometers?

That's a great point.

That does imply that humans should be able to use one the size of a blade of grass.

You're absolutely right.

It does.

Do you think is there an elephant no such thing as a fish podcast where they're going, do you know humans use thermometers the same size as ours?

Doesn't that work?

Because you'd think they'd be the size of a little drawing pin.

It would be the equivalent of me shoving a telegraph pole up my ass.

But people have been studying this since 1936.

I found a scientific paper on elephant body temperatures which said the method used in India is to have a Mahoot, an elephant keeper, holding a thermometer in his hand, insert his well-lubricated arm into the capacious rectum after first removing several of the huge balls of feces.

I think, by the way, if we call out James for having used water slide material, we have to call Andy up for using thermometer material from about six weeks ago.

Female Asian elephants have exactly the same sex pheromones as moths.

Do they ever get coupled with the materials?

Very confusing couplings.

Yep.

You would think so, right?

Surprisingly heavy knock at the door.

Moth looks up.

Or the other way around, I guess, right?

So

this is in a brilliant book by Tristan Wyatt.

He actually says in his book, apart from the mating difficulties, should they try, male moths are unlikely to be attracted to female elephants.

And the reason being that actually a moth pheromone is usually a couple of different pheromones together, one of which is this elephant pheromone, but without the secondary pheromone, you're probably not, you're going to think that the elephant is like a bit like a sexy moth, but not exactly like a sexy moth.

Is that the only thing that's holding them back?

If they're that stupid, that they would genuinely get confused.

Well, I'm just thinking if a normal tiny thermometer works in an elephant's anus, then maybe a moth penis works in an elephant vagina.

That's the ultimate you don't look like your Tinder profile picture.

God, imagine the crossbreed.

So these elephants can down five pints in under a second.

Yeah.

What do you think is the fastest time that a human can down a pint of liquid?

A pint of liquid.

Oh,

I mean, you see these people drinking a pint, don't you, where they just open their throat and it just goes.

Five seconds, I would say.

Five seconds, Dan,

you've seen me do it in less than that.

One second, 1.2 seconds.

Five seconds is like average first pint drinking time.

Last orders at the bar, last order.

Oh, another one, Anna?

I'll say two seconds.

Well, yeah, it's in between those two.

It's 1.75 seconds.

And this was achieved by Tim Cocker, who was the DJ for XFM and is now a DJ for Virgin Radio.

And I spoke to Mr.

Cocker about this

and asked him a few questions about his amazing skill at being able to down drinks.

So he reckons it was 1.75 seconds and it was done on this breakfast show that he was presenting.

But the time began from when he picked up the glass and it stopped when he put the glass down.

so actually he did it much quicker than that so Anna's 1.2 second or one second might be quite close I think and I asked him how he discovered the skill he said it was during a drinking game at Exeter University when he was just doing that and suddenly everyone turned around and went what the hell has just happened over there but he could literally if he was on a night out walk through a bar pass a table and say to someone with a full pint hey what an amazing painting on the wall they'd turn around for two seconds turn back and there's just an empty pint glass glass.

And he walks to the next table.

He says, Oh, England have just kicked a goal.

They turn, boom.

He could have a whole night in 30 seconds.

What pubs are you going to where you say that's a nice painting on the wall?

Well, here's an interesting thing.

The study that I was talking about for this fact, when they were looking into elephants sucking in all of this liquid into their trunk in such speeds, they found that more liquid was going into the trunk than was available in terms of space that the trunk had.

Just way more liquid.

And they're going, what's going on there?

So they did an ultrasound on an elephant as it was drinking the liquid.

And they found that the elephant was dilating the nostrils inside the trunk.

And they were expanding it to a total volume of up to 64%.

So its trunk gets bigger as it drinks.

Exactly.

And I'm wondering if your buddy there is expanding his throat to a much larger size to allow for it to just go down, like pouring a pint into a well, basically.

Maybe.

Yeah.

Do you think it looks like a giant Adam's apple just sort of appears and then disappears there, don't you?

He's not a cartoon character, guys.

He's a respected DJ.

I have another food record or two, or consumption, rate of consumption record.

There was a story that broke quite recently, and it was that during lockdown, a man called Declan Evans from Lincoln broke the world record for the fastest time to drink a Capri Sun.

Now, they're probably only around 250 milliliters or

20 milliliters or something like that.

So, half the size, I reckon.

Yeah, and you're drinking through straw, aren't you, as well?

Well, this is the problem.

The rules are very stringent.

You need to drink an unmodified 200mm Capri-Sun pouch.

The straw still has to be not only stuck to the side, but also still in the plastic.

So, it's actually the record for drinking a Capri Sun is much longer than the record for drinking a pint.

It's like by an order of 10.

Wow.

By an order of magnitude.

Yeah.

So the more than 10 seconds, really?

Yeah.

So he broke it.

It actually got re-broken within a month by a lady called Leah Schuttkiver, who managed it in 15.71 seconds.

That, I believe, is the current world record.

Really?

The rules are so strict though.

Listen to this.

Up to two and a half milliliters may still be found in the pouch after it is normally drunk.

Once the attempt has ended, the contents of the pouch must be poured into a 2.5 mil measuring spoon.

And you're filming all of this.

If any liquid overflows, the attempt will be disqualified.

Yeah, that's strict.

That's very strict.

How crazy that the rules are more strict than posting an eagle to the National Eagle Repository.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our Twitter account.

I am Mon at Schreiberland.

Andy at Andrew Hunter M.

James at James Harkin.

And Anna, you can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, you can go to our group account at no such thing or go to our website, no such thing as offish.com.

It is booming on there at the moment.

All of our previous episodes are up there.

We've got a massive tour coming up later this year.

Check them out.

See if we're coming to your town.

Do come along.

We have an amazing time on tour, and we'd love to see you there.

We also have a link to our merch.

There's all the stuff you need from us.

You can even see our faces there.

Check them out.

They look nice.

Okay, we'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

Let's be real.

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