253: No Such Thing As Dolphins At The United Nations

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the Emperor of the Incas only ever wore an outfit once, after which it was immediately burned.

I knew that.

Do you?

Yeah.

Well, why are you wearing the same jumper as you've worn for the last three weeks?

No, I've worn 21 different jumpers over the last three weeks.

So this was the, he was called Sapper Inca, and he wore clothes, special clothes that no one else was allowed to wear.

Is there a theory as to why he couldn't wear them twice?

Would we not know?

We don't really know.

I think it's just because he's so important.

And it's an ostentatious show of wealth, isn't it?

And his clothes were seen as divine because he was seen as divine.

It is a bit like the Duchess of Cambridge.

Who?

Well, if she reuses an outfit, the newspapers say, oh, she's recycling her clothes, as opposed to only wearing everything once.

Do you think they burn it after she uses them?

Maybe.

Maybe the one she really likes, she squirrels away so she can wear them again.

I don't know.

How did they record their information, the Incas?

Yeah, so that is interesting.

Unlike a lot of the Miso Americans who we don't really have any information apart from like ceramics or cloths or textiles, we have a bit about the Incans because they did talk to the Spanish.

They were the last Miso Americans that were there before the Spanish wiped them out, or didn't quite wipe them out, but basically a lot of them died.

So we know what they did by what the Spanish said.

Although it should be said that the Spanish did lie a lot.

Because,

yeah, why weren't you?

They defeated exactly, exactly.

So, maybe this is not true, but

so when the Spanish came, actually, it was an extraordinary thing that happened, first of all.

So, it was 1532, and it was the conquistador Francisco Pizarro, and he turned up, and it was a surprise attack that he launched on the Inca.

It sounds a bit like a surprise party when you put it like that, doesn't it?

Surprise!

Surprise!

Have some smallpox!

Have loads of murder.

But he, according to the Spanish records, they killed 7,000 Inca without themselves having one single fatality, which you can't believe would actually be true, but that is what was recorded.

But the amazing thing about this is that we can study exactly what happened and the influence of the Spanish by looking at this one glacier.

So we've talked about this kind of thing before, but there's this glacier which is 150 miles away from where Pizarro landed.

It's called the Kelcaia ice cap and it's the largest

ice cap in the tropics.

And what it does is, because South America has wet and dry seasons, then a layer of dust forms every year in the dry season.

And so we know exactly which year it is by looking down in the ice cap.

Like tree rings, Kale.

Exactly like tree rings.

And so they've studied this ice cap to see what the influence of the Spanish was.

So the Spanish came and they started doing metallurgy and so it's got lots more kind of metallurgy deposits, various different types of metal deposits in it.

When the revolution started, the independence revolution, suddenly a lot of mines were decommissioned and so the pollution levels in it go down, which show you that.

And you can just drill straight through this ice cap and you've got this like year by year calendar.

Another thing we can look at is llamapu

and that will tell us what happened with the Incas

because basically their culture moved around maize, which was the main crop.

A few other things like potatoes and stuff, but maize is one of the main ones.

Maize pollen comes in, so you can look at that, but at the same time you can find a lot of mites in the ground, dead mites, which feed on llama excrement and you can work out by the number of these mites and the amount of maize pollen exactly how big and small the Incan Empire was.

That was kind of the super fuel the llama dung because

you need to farm more intensively and there was a big switch to maize

about 2700 years ago.

And the way they found it is so cool because they studied, I didn't know this was a thing, they they studied what's called mud cores in a lake.

So it's like an ice core, but it's made of mud.

Yeah, and it was also really easy for the Incas because llamas defecate communally.

You know, they have one toilet.

Not that all llamas go to, but that, you know, all the llamas they live.

It's a big country

country.

Yeah.

So, yeah, and that was what made it possible to grow huge maize fields because it's much richer.

They wouldn't have done it without that fertilizer.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, they were very into llamas, weren't they?

They relied on them massively.

Dittle llamas into maize.

Yeah.

Potatoes.

Not into the wheel.

Needed the llamas because they didn't have wheels.

So because they didn't have carts that could be pulled like massive long distances, they instead had this incredible system of chaskis, and probably not how you pronounce it, but who knows how Incas pronounce things?

And chaskies,

chaskies were relay runners, so they were totally crucial to the whole Incan Empire.

They were exempt from things like farming and taxation because they were so important.

And their whole job was to deliver messages and parcels and equipment through the empire.

And so they would run a short space, like they'd run 10 kilometers, and they'd pass a message on to the next person.

They had to memorize the entire message perfectly.

So it was like Chinese whispers or sending something.

They weren't holding a message.

No.

Because I was wondering if that's why our empire wasn't so big, because we can never get a relay team that can get that sort of outlet.

You just keep dropping it.

So the Inca, obviously, they were taken out, and there are no longer any Sappers.

But there is a descendant of a Sapper sapa inca or the inca emperor uh who is still in power to this day wow so it's a long descendant it's the last inca emperor called hayuana capec his descendant is the current president of chile

yeah it's a direct descendant his name's miguel pinera and he um he's actually serving for the second time as president which is a new rule they've never allowed that before and he's a billionaire so he's still this super rich so he could afford to burn his clothes after every time he ordered yeah he's worth two billion pounds um the last inca sapper was called anyone oh don't know it's also the name of a rapper uh tupac tupac correct

he was called tupac amaru uh and he was killed by the spanish but then there was an insurgency in the 18th century and another

person um who wasn't related at all called themselves tupac after this guy and then tupac shakur his mother, I think, named him after

this insurgent.

Wow.

He's named after an Inca.

Very interesting.

Very cool.

The kings would go to the coronations of their descendants.

So their mummies would be at the coronation because they were really important still.

They were reminding the new king that he descended from a long line of kings.

And also, they would stay powerful after they died because the royal family would visit the mummified kings and ask their advice about stuff.

And then an oracle sitting next to them would.

What did you say?

A bit like Matthew, Carbet, and City.

Exactly.

What a show that would have been.

There's quite a few of the Incas, because they've got documents of the lines of the names that are associated with those Sapa, and quite a few of them are mythical, and then suddenly they just become real.

People always do that, don't you?

Yeah, it's like with Japanese emperors as well.

This is the problem with not writing stuff down, because that's an oral history, isn't it?

Or they did have this system of kwipu or kipu, which is these rods that had lots of threads with knots tied into them hanging from them, which was some really complex language that we don't understand.

So all we know is through oral history, which is always going to be entangled, I suppose, with myth.

Yeah.

Do we still not know what those knots mean?

We're getting close.

Wow.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

We're getting close.

Maybe in our lifetime.

Maybe in the next five or ten years, they'll work it out, we think.

Possibly.

Yeah.

That's so cool.

What are they missing?

Are they missing like a knot Rosetta Stone?

Yes, they are.

But they found one, which is some record keeping where it's in Spanish and also in Kipu and they think that they might have the names of some emperors now and they're getting pretty close.

Very cool.

Do you know where Machu Picchu is twinned with?

Well, I've been to Machu Picchu.

It's at the top of a massive hill that's really hard to get to.

So is it Highgate?

Oh, okay, nice.

It is not, though.

It is the Yorkshire village of Hayworth.

Is it?

Oh.

Yep, that's a big, big deal.

They had a ceremony in 2005 and they've twinned with the great inconsistency city of Machu Picchu.

And what is that?

Yeah, do we know anything else about Haworth?

Is Farmer Bingham from there?

The Brontes were from there.

Did they go okay?

Were they explorers?

They have nothing to do with Machu Picchu.

I was reading the ceremony.

I think they just wanted to inspire an interest in sort of Peruvian history in some schoolchildren.

But I have no doubt Machu Picchu has no idea it's twinned with Hayworth.

It doesn't have a sign as you enter Machu Picchu, James.

It says twinned with Hawthorne.

Now you've seen Machu Picchu.

Is it?

Sorry, I thought Bronte's were from Howarth, but is it not that?

Oh, is that how you pronounce it?

Oh, I don't know, actually.

Oh, is it H-A-W?

Yeah.

Yeah, it's probably Howarth.

I don't know.

Someone from Yorkshire, right in.

Write in angrily.

Everyone from Yorkshire.

I don't think they've learned to write, have they?

Oh, no, that's the Incas.

Sorry.

Maybe that's what connects them.

Maybe they are going to write it now.

I don't know how we're doing Frank's stuff.

I've got a fact about ritual burning.

Great.

In 2017 Pakistan's Minister of Tourism Fider Khan was so annoyed about his flight being delayed that he took his clothes out of his luggage and started setting them on fire.

It's only going to delay the flight more really, isn't it?

If you start a fire in the airport.

Unless they say, oh my god, there's a fire.

Everyone get out of here.

You get on that plane.

It's the quickest way out, isn't it?

Don't you find it weird that when you you know when you see people wearing these amazing expensive clothes on the red carpet and they don't own any of them, it's actually kind of like all these celebrities are,

you know, when you are struggling financially, off early 20s, you sort of hire stuff and then you have to send it back, otherwise it accrues interest.

They're basically those people.

They're poor early 20s students.

Well, they're hiring out a dress.

They're going to Top Shop and then getting it and then wearing it once and then taking it back saying, no, no, I never wore it.

I never wore it.

Do you think the day after the Oscars, there's just a queue with Jennifer Laura and Stephen Bradley Cooper and you're hiring.

Yeah, go, oh man,

they are really strict.

It has to be within one to two days always.

I was reading about, just while we're on America and the sort of rich elite there, Russell Westbrook, who is a basketball player, who you guys won't know, but in America, he's one of the biggest names in basketball.

And he's very famous for his flashy outfits.

And he is someone who has said, he said this on Ellen DeGeneres' show, he never wears the same clothes twice.

But he says he doesn't waste them.

He donates them, you know, he doesn't burn them.

He donates them to Goodwill charities.

And as a result, he says when he walks through or he's in a car going through Oklahoma City, he just sees everyone wearing his clothes.

It's just like a single.

Is everyone the same size in Oklahoma City?

As a basketball player.

You just got loads of people with clothes like they've been given by their older brothers.

No one can pick anything off because the sleeves are too long.

That's very true.

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

I've changed the number on my fact, by the way, so don't freak out when I say it.

My fact this week is that about 70% of

my fact this week is that about 70% of parents admit to having a favourite child.

Yeah, this, they and they do have favourite children.

I love your favourite one.

You've only got one.

If it's not that, it's not mine.

Which is your favourite?

I met this awesome kid at the playground when Wilf and I were there.

It's called Jeff.

Wiggin.

Jeff.

Right, so about 70% of parents were as bad as Dan is at parenting and prefer certain kids.

And this is, I was going through a bunch of kind of studies that have been done over the years, as they often are into parenting.

And that seems to be roughly the average.

So there was a study in 2016 that asked parents, and 74% of mothers and 70% of fathers fathers admitted to having a favorite.

That was in California.

There was another one 10 years earlier where it was 70% of fathers, but 65% of mothers.

So it seems like mothers have really gone off their kids in the last decade.

And yeah, this keeps on coming up again and again.

If it's an in-depth study, they will sort of reluctantly admit that they do have a favorite child.

And also, studies that look at the behavior of parents towards their children invariably find that they prefer certain children's in the way they act.

Is that right?

So I just

texted my mum this morning

because I have three brothers and sisters and asked if she had a favourite.

Oh, yeah.

And she didn't say, she didn't say the way, which suggests to me that she does and I'm not it.

Not a one in four chance though.

That's something.

I'm pretty sure I'm not even her favourite on this podcast.

Wait, hang on.

Are you the youngest?

I'm the eldest.

Well, that damages your chances.

Because there have been studies done finding that half of parents

who confessed they had a favourite said that it was their last born.

And there's another theory about why it's the lastborn, which is that more than half of parents and grandparents say that the lastborn child made them laugh more.

So there was an Australian news website which said, so if you aren't the favourite, you might just not be very funny.

And that was written by my mum.

But the good news is, kids are really bad at knowing which one the favourite is.

So it shouldn't make you feel too bad.

Yeah.

Again, in these studies, when they look at who the children think is the favourite and who the parents' favourite actually is, it's really often different.

So there was a survey which was it was only 30 older mothers and they were asked about their adult children and 80% of those mothers admitted to having a favourite and 80% of the children said their parents definitely had a favourite but almost all of them got the favourite wrong.

Wow.

So maybe parents are overcompensating.

So in fact it doesn't really matter if you're the favourite or not because if you are the favourite you will be treated better but you won't know it.

And if you're not the favourite they'll make up for it by pretending to treat you better.

So it doesn't matter that they don't really like like you exactly they're not going to show it how blatant would a parent make it though what the

you wouldn't give one child loads of presents at christmas and the other no presents it's not like cinderella or harry potter or something um does your child cry much dan no not too much oh really um because a lot of children do i've read and

according to um evolutionary biologist david haig this might be to stop their parents from procreating and having another baby which kind of makes sense if you think about it, evolutionary, doesn't it?

Yeah, I wrote about this.

They do it at night, particularly, right?

The idea of like late nurse feeding from the mum, so that if you were about to go, okay, let's let's get down, uh, your baby would stop you.

Yeah, and the idea is that the baby then gets more resources because it doesn't have to share it with brothers or brothers and sisters, which means in theory they should do better in life, which means they should reproduce more and then

but doesn't also breastfeeding act as a contraceptive so if you're exclusively breastfeeding as a woman you tend not to have periods is that right meaning that you can't become pregnant right so the more the child cries and wants breastfeeding the less chance there is that another child will be born wow so it's working double efforts yeah stopping the actual sex and then even if the actual sex is happening it's still not acting as a like a human contraceptive problem is it's obviously not working is it so these genius babies are failing they're doing the best they can can.

Maybe in another million years, they'll evolve to, you know, make chastasy belts or something.

One of you was saying that parents don't tend to just favor one kid with loads of presents, but there was one parent who literally did exactly that.

So, do you guys know about Evelyn Waugh's dad?

No.

So, Evelyn Waugh had an older brother called Alec, and his dad absolutely loved Alec and absolutely hated Evelyn Waugh.

So, all the way through their life, if Evelyn Waugh wanted anything, his dad got it for his brother.

So, Evelyn asked for a bike.

His dad bought one for Alec instead.

Alec once asked for a billiards table.

And so Evelyn Waugh was a child at the time he played in his nursery.

And the dad just dumped a billiards table in this room that he was supposed to play in.

He once said, when Alec fathered his first son, then Evelyn Waugh's dad said to the son, I have only ever loved three people in my life, or I've only ever had three great loves in my life.

And my mother, my wife, and your father.

And that was it?

Poor old Evelyn.

But Evelyn Waugh was also mean to his children, wasn't he?

Yes,

we've done the banana story before, haven't we?

Which is that there was lots of rationing in the war, and Evelyn War had children, and there was a special thing where bananas were distributed because they had not been easy to come by during the war.

And so,

you know, you would get basically a banana per child.

And Evelyn War sat his three children down in front of him and proceeded to eat all three bananas.

Yeah.

I think with a knife and what he poured cream over them and just sat there eating the banana.

So did he just hate them or

maybe he was teaching them some lesson that we can't quite comprehend at this amount of time.

It can't be how to eat a banana

with a knife and fork.

I have a test question for you guys.

Yes.

The company Kellogg's, who's it named after?

John Kellogg.

John

Kellogg.

John Kellogg.

Incorrect.

John Harvey Kellogg is the guy that we've talked about before.

He was sort of an inventor.

He thought everyone had to eat oats and stop masturbating, stuff like that.

He was, again, only two rules at Kellogg Academy.

So he's a famous one, I think, that people know about John Harvey Kellogg.

But Kellogg's Cornflakes and Kellogg's the Company was founded, invented, and named after his brother.

And so he, so John Harvey Kellogg had a younger brother called Will.

And John was this really flamboyant, really outgoing character guy.

And they hated oats.

They were polar opposites.

They were opposites, although I don't know about the opposite patients.

Round the dinner table, one of us got a big bowl of oats.

Not near my cereal.

Anyway, we get this back on track.

It's actually quite a serious rivalry.

Oh my God.

Will was opposite of John Harvey, not very flamboyant, like hardly said anything, super shy, was younger.

He worked for his older brother for 25 years.

So at that sanitarium that he founded, Battle Creeks Bar,

where he did like real dog's body stuff.

John Harvey treated him really badly and made him do all the drudge work, made him shine his shoes and stuff.

Never gave him an official job title, hardly paid him anything.

And eventually Will turned around and thought, I'm the better businessman.

I'm going to set up Kellogg's company, invent some cornflakes.

And he did it.

So he set up this cornflake company in 1906.

And it had a promotional campaign where the slogan was, Wink at your grocer and see what you get.

That's a spelling mistake.

And he got a bowl of corn flakes.

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

My fact is that Robert Louis Stevenson died halfway through making a batch of mayonnaise.

It's very sad.

It's very sad because he was young.

He was only 44.

It is.

It's so sad.

It just makes me sad.

Also, that batch of mayonnaise, I suppose, never got finished, presumably.

Oh, that's the real tragedy.

Also, how long does it take to make mayonnaise?

It takes me about two and a half minutes.

Well, it was a very sudden death.

No, I think he was dropping the oil in drop by drop.

It might have been a longer process.

I don't think he did, no.

Especially not in Samoa where he lived.

So, yeah.

Yeah,

just very quickly, you're saying an early death.

People, when the news got relayed, because he was in Samoa, back home, people were properly devastated.

Famous authors like Henry James actually flat out denied that it was true.

He just thought, this can't be right.

And Rudyard Kipling said he was so upset he couldn't write for a month.

He was just absolutely broken by it.

Yeah, so he was a big big character in his time yeah yeah but about this mayonnaise

yeah sorry what about

you are supposed to add the oil slowly uh okay so yeah that's what he was doing and he yeah he just he took ill halfway through making the mayonnaise and then he he sort of collapsed and then he died it was very very sad he was a sickly being wasn't he he was so ill and weak all the way through his life it's amazing he wrote as much as he did and yeah yeah well the idea was that some people said he wrote quicker than anyone else because he knew he'd had these these hemorrhages and he'd been sick.

And so because he knew his life would be short, he felt that he had to just get get as much out as possible.

That's interesting.

Wow.

Yeah.

Just back to mayonnaise.

Dan, will you stop going on about mayonnaise?

Well, I was just looking into, because he was in Samoa and he was eating mayonnaise and I thought, I wonder if that's, do they eat mayonnaise in Samoa?

Turns out they love it, do they?

Yeah, yeah.

I found a Facebook page called Samoan Quotes and Sayings.

And

there's one one quote, which is, if you eat everything with mayo, you might be a Samoan.

Hashtag Samoan habits.

And yeah, apparently it's a very, very loved source there.

Really?

Anyway, back to it, Stevenson.

So Robert Louis, when he was in Samoa, one thing that Robert Louis Stevenson did, which is very sweet, was that he gave his birthday to a child.

He was born on the 13th of November, and he bumped into a little girl who was called Annie Eyde, daughter of a friend of his, and she was born on Christmas Day.

And so she said, oh, I'll never get a proper fuss made of me on Christmas Day so he drew up a proper legal document what kind of pseudo-legal document in which he said I bequeath you my birthday that's cool so was she one year older than she thought she was at the end oh I don't know I don't know half a year older right now aged herself

he was born on the 13th of November so it's not too much better just a month yeah you're still in that category of birthday present Christmas present annoyance I would say so I was reading he wrote such a sweet letter to her and he put it all in legalese because he trained to be a a lawyer.

And so it started out saying, I trust this will prove sufficient in law and

explain why he was doing it.

He said, I've attained an age where we never mention our age anymore because it's so old.

So I have no further use for my birthday.

But I remember discussing this before and it being in November.

But at the end of this letter, it said his birthday was the 19th of June.

Ooh.

He gave a fake birthday.

Has he given her a fake birthday?

I guess so, because actually, maybe he was thoughtful.

Yeah.

And he thought, well, actually, that November date's no good.

I'm going to pretend it's June.

Because, I I mean it's all pretend it's all made up isn't it yeah yeah birthdays aren't made up birthdays are real

right um but lots of his interactions were with um lots of his significant interactions were with children so supposedly he only started writing treasure island when he met a small boy who repeatedly asked him why he didn't write something interesting like Robinson Crusoe Wow I think he was already an interesting writer I like I like his stuff but uh yeah you're saying you don't agree with that little child no you think his previous stuff your child was a fool

I don't know.

I think that was.

I mean, that's what's made him in the end, isn't it?

That's the main thing that everyone knows him for.

It is, but there is one claim that he invented the sleeping bag.

Oh, yeah.

Now,

that should be the biggie.

I don't think he did invent the sleeping bag, but he commissioned one of the very early sleeping bags or invented a kind of prototype version of it.

Because he was travelling solo through the Cévenne Mountains in France with only a donkey.

And that was researched for his book, Travels with a Donkey in the Cevenne.

An imaginative title.

Yeah.

He got better at those.

And the donkey was called Modestine.

And he was really rude about the donkey.

He said, oh yeah, the donkey held me up.

I would have done it faster if it hadn't been for this donkey, which was carrying all my stuff in my sleeping bag.

When Robert Louis Stevenson had a birthday in Samoa, he was very popular there.

They celebrated by consuming 804 pineapples.

Sorry, can I interject here?

Yeah.

What the fuck was he doing celebrating his birthday in Samoa Samoa when he's given it away to a girl?

To a girl on the side going, excuse me.

Put those pineapples away.

That was his 24th birthday, so it must have been after that.

Terrible behaviour.

800 pineapples, that's amazing.

That's a lot.

It's a lot.

I mean, I don't know how many people there were enjoying those pineapples.

There might have been 900 people and 100 people went hungry.

His wife was called Fanny Vandergrift Osborne.

Isn't that a great name?

Yeah.

And one of the early women he fell in love with was called Fanny Sitwell.

He had a type, didn't he?

He had a thing about Fannies.

He loved Fannies.

Their story was quite sweet, actually.

She was married to this guy in America, and he sent her to get their kids educated in Paris.

And that was where she fell in love with Robert Louis Stevenson.

And so she popped off back to New York, got a divorce from this husband of hers, and said, I fall in love with someone else.

And then her and Stevenson got married straight away.

And her ex-husband came to the wedding with his new girlfriend.

Did he?

Yeah.

That is quite

mature, I think.

Very mature.

We've been talking Treasure Island, but the other big, big work outside of Travels with My Donkey

is, of course, Jekyll and Hyde.

And that's really interesting, Jacqueline Hyde.

He wrote a first version of the book and hated it.

Absolutely hated it.

So threw it in the fire and burnt it.

And then he rewrote the whole book in the space of, I think, a weekend.

It was like 30 hours that he sat and he managed to bring it out.

He was quite bad at spelling.

That was noticed in the drafts of that.

But Jekyll and Hyde, there's a few interesting facts about it.

The first one is we're all saying it wrong.

It's G.

Kill.

G.

Kill.

G.

Kill.

If you were

pronouncing it, it's J-E-E and then Kill.

G-Kill.

Yeah.

Is that what he said?

Did he put a pronunciation guard in the back?

He did.

He said that the audio said that he said that in an interview.

He said, let the name be pronounced as it is spelt, G.

Kill, not Jekil.

It's not spelt G kill.

He's a bad speller.

We've already established.

But it sounds quite Scottish, doesn't it?

Because he was Scottish, you know.

Jeekil.

G-Kill.

And do we know how to pronounce Hyde?

He'd.

No, I think it's probably Hyde.

He did lead quite...

Robert Louis Stevenson did lead a kind of almost Jekyll and Heidi life in some ways.

So, first of all, he created an alternative character for himself.

And this is when he was in Edinburgh, and he loved doing really absurd things for the sake of it.

And him and his cousin would play pranks on everyone, and they called them jinks.

And he created this character called John Libble, who sort of haunted Edinburgh in all these different ways.

And so, for instance, he had hundreds or thousands of calling cards for John Libble printed off, and he went around Edinburgh handing them round to everyone, saying you must get in touch with this person.

Oh, God, that sounds very familiar from the Edinburgh Festival.

I'll be in the voodoo rooms at 3 p.m.

every day.

He used to go into hotels or boarding houses all over the city and say, Has John Libble arrived yet?

And they'd say, No, he hasn't.

And he said, Oh, he will.

And so

word got around, like, who's this guy?

He'd drop him, he'd drop into conversation that he was an agent looking for the person who was going to inherit the liberal fortune.

He tried to get an ad in the Scots money.

He just created this guy that everyone was talking about.

It does sound like a good way to get noticed to Edinburgh, doesn't it?

Yeah, it's not about it.

It's just a month before.

Yeah.

Just go into hotels.

Is Andrew Huntington here yet?

No.

He will be.

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

My fact this week is that in the 1960s, NASA helped to fund a scientific project that aimed to teach dolphins to speak the English language so perfectly that they would be given a chair at the United Nations to speak on behalf of marine mammals.

Obviously, they wouldn't fit in a chair.

You'd have to have some kind of tank set up.

That's true.

Imagine Imagine a dolphin flopping around in a chair.

UN think tank.

So did it work?

It did not work.

But the premise of it was quite interesting.

It was a guy called Dr.

John Lilly and he had the idea along with his wife that dolphins were talking through their blow holes in a sort of specific noise that suggested that perhaps that could be manipulated into human language.

And if they could train these dolphins to talk, that they would be able to get cross-species communication going.

Now, the reason NASA got involved is because NASA thought, let's see where this goes.

If they get anywhere with this, this could be useful in the future, should we ever make alien contact.

The idea of learning some fundamental basics about communication.

That kind of makes sense, right?

Because we don't know that aliens will have the same kind of language as us.

They could have the same kind of language as any animal, so you would learn that.

Yeah, so this was set up in the 1960s.

And when this funding was given, NASA allowed, through its funding, to let John Lilly set set up this kind of really bizarre laboratory where they flooded an entire room with water so that a dolphin called Peter could live in there with this lady who was going to sit there for months and months on end.

She had a mattress in the room.

She had a desk that she could work at.

Was the mattress wet?

Like, was it underwater, the mattress?

No, she had like a platform.

She wasn't underwater herself.

Yeah.

Sorry, yeah.

It was her who was the instigator, really, of making the experiment,

of making the experiment so extensive.

that was Margaret Lovett right who visited and she loved dolphins already she visited this place and she totally fell in love with these three dolphins that were there and the lab at the time was just one tank and she said I want to see the dolphin living in this house in this full lab as if it's its own house so she insisted it was all flooded and then she said I want to stay with it 24-7 so she can really get to understand how it works so she could help with this experiment and yeah then she erected these hanging platforms so she could sit hanging from her swing desk.

It's very shape of water, isn't it?

it?

It is very shape of water.

That um those platforms aren't the only thing she erected

because

well anyway Peter was a young male dolphin and and needed and was and uh I think fancied her basically did yeah yeah I think um quite famously dolphins do uh tend to have a bit of a hump, don't they, when you go swimming with them.

You hear a lot of stories of celebrities.

I must say I went swimming with dolphins once and I attracted no attention whatsoever from the dolphins.

Oh, God, not a celebrity.

Apparently, it's only celebrities.

Celebrities that you speak for.

Insist on seeing your Instagram followers before they...

Maybe they're whispering to the dolphins.

Seriously, it's a very successful podcast.

They all have a higher bar than that.

Margaret used to do, it's interesting looking at the techniques that they tried to teach the dolphins with.

One of the techniques I thought was interesting was she painted her face white.

She put a white paint all over her face and then she used black lipstick.

And the idea was she wanted the dolphins to look directly at her lips to see the way she was mouthing words.

So it's sort of to distract every other bit of her face from being the attention.

They wanted the dolphins.

I couldn't believe that the dolphins were speaking through their blowholes because I instinctively think of dolphin chatter as coming from their mouths.

Yeah.

And

she said that the one thing she wanted him to say, Peter the dolphin to say, was her name.

He wanted her to say, hello, Margaret.

And she said that it's very difficult to get a dolphin to make an M sound with its blowhole.

And eventually he rolled over and kind of bubbled it through the water.

But the dolphins could imitate humans.

We should say that they were able to imitate, you know, the pitch of a voice and maybe even the frequency too, I think.

So there was some progress, but not

a lot.

Not enough.

Not enough.

Yeah.

And then it got a bit dodgy when he, this is John Lilly, um, who set up the whole thing, as we said before, started experimenting with LSD.

He thought that the drugs would actually help the dolphins in order to understand language better and communicate better, open their minds up maybe.

Um, so he started injecting them with LSD to try and get that going.

Is that right?

It was interesting.

Yeah, she she wouldn't let him inject Peter, but she couldn't stop him injecting the other two.

But it didn't really affect them, did it?

Dolphins don't really s well, I guess we don't know what visions they're seeing, because they still

everything they could see had an M in it, so they just couldn't say he was just seeing MMs everywhere, but he just couldn't say it.

But then he got too into LSD, didn't he?

And ran away to experiment more with that.

Yeah, abandoned all of them.

The project got abandoned and so on.

So there is no marine mammal chair at the United Nations as a result.

And then he did go into drugs.

He decided that he would take a lot of ketamine and go into sensory deprivation tanks, which is a bit stupid because they're just full of water.

And so on quite a few occasions, his wife had to save him from drowning.

And at one stage,

he said, One evening, I took 150 milligrams of ketamine, and suddenly the Earth Coincident Control Office, who were some aliens that he believed in, removed my penis and handed it to me.

I screamed in terror.

My wife, Tony, came running in from the bedroom, and she said, It's still attached.

So I shouted at the ceiling, who's in charge up there?

A bunch of crazy kids?

I did not get to that middle of the score.

He sounds like a reliable man to be doing science.

So yeah.

I wonder how many times your husband would have to take loads of ketamine and get into a tank of water before you didn't save him.

I think on the

side I am a fossil.

Especially if he hasn't got a penis anymore.

What's the point?

No willy-lily, they called it.

We are talking to dolphins now better than they used to.

Yeah, so we've got this thing called a chat, which is a cetacean, hearing, and telemetry device.

And it's just been invented.

It's about the same size as a toaster.

You wear it on your chest.

All animals tell you you look like a twat.

No, they've worked out how to translate.

So you can teach dolphins to recognise certain words.

They're clever.

So you teach them to recognise the human word for seaweed.

And then they make their own sound for that seaweed.

So you know what.

So this machine can work out what the dolphin sound for seaweed is.

And then it can translate that back to a human.

So they have got dolphins now to say the word seaweed into this machine.

That's pretty good.

And actually, if you think about it, at the UN, they don't all speak English, do they?

No.

They speak all sorts of different languages and it gets translated

by a poster thing on your chest.

Well, you could theoretically have a dolphin at the UN just, I mean, all you can say is seaweed.

At the moment,

you would shove one of those earpieces in its blowhole, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it would have to breathe sometimes and then...

Well, you would have to take turns to breathe and speak and listen, which you should do in life anyway.

So I don't think we've mentioned before before Peter Gabriel's project.

From Genesis.

Peter Gabriel from Genesis is working on an interspecies internet.

Well, it's a really cool project.

He's been doing it for a while.

It happened because he's a musician and he sort of played music with some apes.

And he thought, these guys are really getting me.

And he called this scientist, called this scientist called Neil Gershenfeld, who runs, I really like his job, he runs MIT's Center for Bits and Atoms.

And this this guy, Peter Gabriel.

None of this sounds real.

I don't know.

These are legit people.

A woman called Diana Rice, who's a cognitive psychologist, and one of the founders of the internet, Vince Cerf or Kerf, who I think worked at Apple.

It's a difficult second invention, isn't it?

After you've invented the internet and then you go, now I'm going to invent an internet for monkeys.

Is it for all animals to talk to each other?

Yes.

So you can get a wasp talking to a rhino.

Because

They would have nothing to say to each other, would they?

They might have anything in common.

What are you talking about?

They can all bitch about humans.

Oh, yeah, but.

Bloody humans swatted my mate today.

Yeah, well, they took off my nose.

But

the user interface is going to be really hard.

Yeah.

Because you're going to...

They're going to use a mouse.

Amazing.

Oh, just stuff on the UN.

I didn't realise this, but I think maybe it's quite well known that the UN, the idea of the UN, was conceived by Churchill and Roosevelt when Churchill was naked, as so many things were conceived.

I think we talked about his ponch on for children's.

So this is from Daisy Suckley, who was a confidant of Roosevelt.

It was when America had been sucked into the war and they decided that they had to have a united front against fascism and they wanted to know what to call it.

And FDR was lying in bed going to sleep and suddenly.

Churchill bursts in.

But no, no, he didn't notice the other way around.

FDR thought, United Nations.

And so the moment he woke up the next morning, he jumped out of bed and then he actually had some breakfast.

And then

he went up to Churchill's bedroom and knocked on the door and Churchill said, come in.

And Churchill emerged from the bathroom, butt naked and apparently appeared like a pink cherub.

FDR describes him as.

FDR pointed at him and exploded, the United Nations.

And I think if I was Churchill, after he came in, pointed at me naked and said the United Nations, that would be the nickname for my genitals.

I can get you a seat on the United Nations if you like.

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 stuff we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at James Harkin, Andy, Andrew Hunter, M.

And Jasinski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yeah, or go to our group Twitter account at no such thing, or you can go to no such thingasoffish.com where we have everything from tickets to our upcoming live UK tour and Ireland.

And you can also listen to all of our previous episodes.

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

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.