234: No Such Thing As The Lemur Police

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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 Covert Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter-Murray, Anna Chaczynski, 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 you Andy.

My fact is that it's very hard for scientists to spot armadillos having sex because armadillos have sex while running.

Yeah.

I mean how fast do they run?

Too fast to see them.

Too fast to see.

They would show up on film and in photos.

But

it's just a mating habit that they have.

So whenever the armadillo female is in heat,

she starts...

Males start chasing her, but then she starts running away.

So it's all a matter of the fastest armadillo who can catch up with her.

But she doesn't stop running when he's caught up.

So they engage in

sex mid-like passing a baton onto a

kind of baton.

Disgusting baton.

Don, in relays, did you used to hold on to the baton all the way around?

No, I used to hold on to the penis of the guy in front of them.

Well, we got there quite quickly, didn't we?

Yeah, and

it's amazing because they look like little battery-operated toys, because the female's just running along, and you can't really see their legs moving.

And the male mounts the female, but he then has to run along only on his hind legs while he's mounted her.

Yeah.

Like a wheelbarrow race kind of thing.

Yeah.

God, your spots, Dave, must have been awful.

Is this all armadillos?

Because there's quite a lot of different types in there.

I am not sure.

This was only observed in one species, so I don't think we can say for sure.

Or I certainly can't.

Do you know?

Is it the nine?

Which one?

I think it's the nine.

The nine.

Oh, the nine.

It's amazing.

They've got such boring names, but yeah, they sound like golf irons, don't they?

Like the nine or the

three.

I mean, the full name is the nine-banded armadillo, to be fair.

I'm not sure anyone's ever called it the nine before, but

henceforth.

Oh, I really hope it's the nine.

I'm going to check, though.

Sure.

There we go for it.

But yeah, presumably they don't massively like it, because they generally don't like each other, do they, armadillos?

They're very solitary around it.

That's true.

Yeah, because the women, the female armadillos are always kind of, I was going to say beating off, but they're trying to get the male away, aren't they?

Yeah.

Most of the time, until they're on heat, and then they kind of accept it a little bit.

Yeah.

Well, they're running away.

That's true.

It is a bit like the Benny Hill show.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the nine-banded armadillo, if that's who we are talking about, the nine, the nine,

don't always have nine.

Do they not?

Sometimes they have seven or eleven.

Yeah.

I think that's just a mean average that they have.

That is a mean average we got there.

It's the six.

No.

I'm sorry.

This is the six-banded armadillo.

Okay.

Is that because

the one you generally hear about is the nine-banded, isn't it?

Which is the one that lived in a like that's the one when people talk about armadillos, it tends to be the nine-banded armadillo because that's the only one that lives in North America.

It's true, but maybe we could talk about nine-banded armadillos.

The one that kind of goes into a ball is the three-banded armadillo.

Or the three, as we call it,

yeah.

There are 20 species of armadillo, and only two can can roll themselves up.

Yeah,

indeed.

Of you guys, my favourite armadillo, and this is the armadillo I'm mainly read into,

is the which one is it, guys?

What was it?

The three of us are

there.

They're 29.

No, my favourite armadillo is the pink fairy armadillo.

And they are so amazing.

Get up a picture of a pink fairy armadillo while you're listening to the rest of this and for the rest of your life.

They're the cutest thing I've ever seen.

So they're the smallest kind.

They're six inches long.

They've got a pink shell, this little pink shell, like baby pink, a fluffy white belly.

And they're just so cute.

And they've got these massive front claws, which are almost a bit grotesque because they're only for digging.

So they can't really walk properly.

They can only dig.

But yeah, they can bury themselves in a couple of seconds.

So if something comes along, their shells are actually useless.

In most armadillos, they're not very good protection, the shells.

Really?

But they just bury themselves immediately.

And yeah, they are so cute.

They're really fluffy.

They sound like Pokemon.

They've got fluffy bellies.

They are a bit like Pokemon.

They're very soft-shelled.

And their shell is pink because they use it for thermoregulation.

So they can pump loads of blood to it.

Oh, really?

And that just gets rid of all the excess heat in their body.

And they've got a bum plate.

Yes.

When they're digging.

When they're digging through the earth, they have a little bumplate which just compacts all the earth behind them.

So that means that it creates like a really strong burrow, doesn't it?

And also, it means that they get the earth out of their face so they can breathe.

It's got a square bum, basically.

Right.

And it bumps up against the earth to compact it.

Like you would with a spade if you bashed a spade on earth.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And the opposite of that, have we ever talked about the Glyptodon, which was the prehistoric armadillo, which was so big that humans used its shells for shelters?

Whoa!

Whoa.

So we lived inside the shell.

Oh, it's pretty amazing.

And it had like a, it was about the size of a car.

What?

And it had like a club tail that it would bash humans with.

My lord.

Yeah, no, I would do that as well if someone was living inside my shell.

Do you think they took the armadillo out first?

I think death took it out first, and then it was just...

I don't know, actually, maybe.

That is incredible.

Because today, living inside your car is seen as the sign of someone who's down in their luck.

Do you think in the old days living inside an armadillo shell was the same thing?

Oh, he's living inside his armadillo shell.

He's had a rough time.

I reckon.

Have we ever lived in a shell outside of that?

I can't think of an example of another animal where that's so cool.

That's cool.

Yeah.

You always find the most weird angles on these.

I mean, probably not.

Wow, the first instance of humans living in shells.

It's so cool.

Yeah.

Can I take us back to the nine for a second?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

So they have a really interesting, this is just, I was looking into the sex life of the armadillo off the back of your fact, Andy.

And so

the nine has quadruplets every single time.

Oh.

Every single time they have a baby.

So the baby basically splits a single fertilized egg, but it splits it so that they're effectively clones of each other.

Yeah.

But every single time.

Loads of them do it.

In fact, I think most armadillos might have quadruplets every time.

Wow.

Yeah.

But because they're identical, it's to prevent inbreeding, is that right?

Or prevent incest?

An accidental.

But how would that prevent it if they're all

if all four quads that you have are males?

They won't be able to interbreed with each other at least.

Yeah.

And the nine-banded is the state small mammal of Texas.

Is it?

What's the large one?

It's...

I didn't write it down.

It does have one.

I think it's a kind of deer or something.

So there's a state small mammal of Texas.

There's a state state large mammal.

There's a state flying mammal, which is a kind of bat, and there's also a state whelk.

I didn't even know there was more than one kind of whelk.

Everyone's state whelk is the same.

Something that's very cool about armadillos is that they have two ways of crossing water, and both are equally groovy.

So they

say.

Target more, Nana.

They inflate their stomach and intestines with air if they want to float.

So they fancy fancy looking at the view, and then they just float across the water, or they can deflate themselves and sink right down to the bottom, and then they just walk along the bottom using their claws, and they can hold their breath for five or six minutes.

Do you think they have races?

Like, where we go?

Of course they do.

It's like when there's two escalators in the tube going up, you always go one on each so that you can see who goes quickest.

Do you?

No.

I thought there was usually one up and one down.

Otherwise, how does everyone get down the stairs?

So there's often three in tubes.

Wow.

And it's always two going up and one going down.

And that's because people coming down, they come at a regular amount of time, but people going up, they all come off the train at the same time.

So there's more people at the same time.

That's really interesting.

Well,

I think that's really interesting.

That makes more sense.

I thought it was for rush hour when you know if there are loads of people going into the station, like at the end of the day, you'll have two, you might have two going down because you would occasionally do that, but almost always they have two going up.

That's a whole lot of sense.

Have we talked about the leprosy thing?

No, so they have.

But you should get that checked out.

So

they got the disease from humans.

We know that.

So this is Hansen's disease, as you're supposed to call it, but most people call it leprosy.

Exactly.

So they're native to the New World, the Americas.

So when humans first arrived, we know that they brought over leprosy, Hansen's disease, with them at some point.

But as a result, they're really good at carrying it because their body temperature is 34 degrees Celsius on the inside.

And the leprosy bacterium loves that temperature.

It's ideal for it.

We're actually not ideal for the living.

We're 37 or something.

We're 37.

But for some reason, oh, they live in our skin, the bacteria, which is a bit cooler, so they can survive there.

So a lot of people eat armadillo in Brazil.

But unfortunately, 60% of the armadillos in the forest have it.

And it's okay as long as you cook it all the way through.

But some people have the liver raw,

so you can get leprosy that way.

Or some people keep them in their homes to fatten them up.

And obviously, the more close contact you have with an armadillo, armadillo, the more likely you are.

And actually, most humans are immune to leprosy.

That's true.

Aren't they?

But the ones that aren't,

you're buggered.

So I think the lesson is, I mean, I was always taught you can eat rare steak and rare lamb, but don't eat rare chicken and rare armadillo.

I think that's all you need to take away from this, isn't it?

Armadillo shells can rebound bullets, people have found out in America to their detriment.

It seems like most people are basically okay.

But yeah, in 2015, a man was taken to hospital with injuries when he was woken up by armadillos.

And they're a bit of a pest in America because they destroy your gardens.

He was woken up at 3 a.m.

So he went and shot the armadillo and the bullet rebounded in him in the face.

He was okay.

He survived.

He was okay.

Yeah, yeah.

How was the armadillo?

They don't know about the armadillo.

They didn't find it afterwards.

Oh.

Well, that implies it survived, at least.

It walked away.

No, it could have ricocheted away into another garden.

That's true.

I don't know if that's how armadillos work.

You're thinking of when you jump on a turtle in Super Mario and they go skating away.

I was thinking of that, yeah.

I thought so.

The walking underwater thing with the armadillo feels a bit risky to me.

I would.

Would you?

Would you do the floating, though?

Because it feels like with the floating, you're kind of at the risk of currents and stuff like that.

And predators, you're much more exposed.

Well, they can only hold their breath for six minutes.

So I guess if you want to escape a predator, you could quickly deflate and sink.

But as long as you're never more than three minutes away from the edge of the river.

I guess you'd have to know, though.

though.

That's the problem.

If there's a river, and you get to a big rock underwater, and you've got to take a detail.

There is a scene just like this in Mission Impossible 5.

Is that

the white list?

Are you sure that's the five?

I thought that was the nine.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that the Kurwai people of New Guinea put grubs in their ears to eat their earwax.

So great.

And then what do they put in their ear to eat the grubs?

A cow.

Do they put a cow?

That's going right to the end of the thing.

Yeah, I just thought we didn't have time to do the whole rhyme.

So yeah, this is a thing.

These are a tribe from New Guinea.

There's lots of interesting stuff about them.

But one thing that a lot of people learned in the last year or so was there was a TV show on BBC Two called My Year with the Tribe.

And presenter Will Millard let a grub crawl into his ear and eat his ear wax in this documentary, which everyone thought was a bit weird.

Yeah.

Even the tribe, didn't the tribe person the didn't the Kurawai tribesman say at the time, the elders used to do this, we don't really do it anymore, so we've forgotten how it's done, but shove it in and see what happens.

Maybe it is one of those things that you just get foreigners in and you just make them do stuff and say that it's traditional.

Is there a way of getting it out, though?

It just slithers out itself, apparently.

When it's full and it's slightly darker in colour, having eaten all your earwax.

Wow.

That's quite cool.

And he said he could hear it eating it inside his ear, couldn't he?

He was like, I can hear it munching away.

That would be the spot that you would get

access to hearing.

Yeah.

I mean, that doesn't surprise me.

Yeah, he's a...

I really like Will Millard, I realise, in the course of researching this.

He's done lots of very cool stuff.

But yeah, he went to Papua and lived with those people for a few months, I think.

But he had an extremely bad time.

He seems to have very bad luck.

And he's actually got PTSD now from being basically doing all these documentaries in these extreme places.

But he said, at one of the points in Papua, he said, I made a serious error of judgment that saw me not on an ancient inter-tribal trade route, but trapped deep within a 400-mile square of uninhabited, snake-infested, and extremely hostile forest.

We crawled out a month later, lacerated and covered in infections.

But yeah, he's had cerebral malaria, he's been, you know, assaulted, he's been robbed at Bow and Arrow Point,

which is kind of a cool life experience

to overcome the trauma.

Oh, it was a different program, wasn't it?

But the Bieb got in a bit of trouble because the Corowite traditionally live in tree houses.

Yeah.

And the B made a programme all about them building the treehouses.

And then it turned out that they'd sort of said, can you build us a treehouse for this programme?

That was Will Millard who had discovered it.

Oh, really?

That was when he went back and did this program.

And they said, when those last BBC guys came, they told us to build that treehouse.

And he was the one who said, well, that's not on.

I'm going to mention that.

So is it a myth?

It's not a myth that they live in treehouses.

No, they do, no.

They do.

So I don't think that's that bad

to ask them to build a treehouse.

Those ones did not live in treehouses like that.

They said we would never build tree houses that high.

Right.

Got it.

Some of them live on the ground.

But some of them, I think, still live in treehouses.

There are only about 4,000 Korawai people alive.

Yeah.

There aren't very many of them.

Yeah.

So there were rumors that the Korowai people sometimes engaged in cannibalism.

Yeah.

But they got asked about it, and they said, No, we would never eat a person.

What we would eat is a kakua, which is a witch who takes the form of a person.

Yeah.

And this doesn't happen anymore.

But ten years ago, it was in living memory.

So it happened a few decades ago.

And the k basically.

A decade, in fact.

A decade.

Yeah.

But the the Kakua is basically their version of germ theory.

So

when someone dies, they say, well, what's this?

And because germ theory is not very well known, they assumed it was a witch.

So when a clan member was dying, he would whisper to his relatives the name of who he thought was the witch who had killed him.

That's a good way to take out someone who you just kind of been pissing you off for a while.

I guess it's a great deathbed practice we should adopt.

But then it's very much open to abuse, isn't it?

From the person who heard the whisper, the only person who heard the whisper.

That's true.

Of course.

But this is, I mean, I think there are quite a lot of Korowai spread around and different groups of Korowai.

And there was a guy, Paul Raphael, who famously went there in 2006 and he went very deep in.

And he met one who said who was still a famous Kakawa killer, who showed him a skull and stuff and ate the skull in front of him.

And yeah, so who knows?

Apparently it tastes like...

He asked what human flesh tastes like.

And it tastes like cassowari.

In case anyone wondered.

So now you can picture it.

I've got something on earwax, but I don't know if you guys are horrorwax stuff.

In the Middle Ages, earwax was used to colour manuscripts in.

Cool.

Really?

Yeah.

Or to colour the ink used for manuscripts.

Yeah, it was partly earwax.

Wow.

Partly stale beer.

What do you mean they mixed the ink up with an earwax as one of the ingredients?

Cool.

Yeah.

So some of those ancient, beautiful documents will be partly earwax.

Monk earwax, probably.

Yeah.

Some of the worst.

Interesting, you say about beer and earwax.

We read once when we were researching for QI that if you put earwax in someone's beer, then all the froth will disappear from the top of the beer.

And we tried to do it as an experiment on the show, but it didn't work.

But it did enhance the taste.

I don't think anyone actually drank it in the end.

Whose earwax did you get?

I can't remember.

I probably produced a Piers Fletcher's earwax.

But yeah, we did try it.

But the idea is because it's got oil in, hasn't it?

And the idea is that oil would kind of pop the bubbles a little bit.

And was that a thing that monks did too?

I don't think they did, did they?

They mix it with their beer.

They sort of...

Well, when they were painting the manuscripts, it was the way they prevented bubbles from forming in the liquid they used.

The liquid was called glare, which was what they used to make the paints.

And supposedly to stop the froth forming on the glare, they put the Robax into that paint.

Oh, no.

So was earwax sort of a lucrative business to be in?

You generated a lot.

It's huge.

It must be a traded thing, right?

You know, I'm writing a book at the moment.

I think it must be.

I think everyone has a ready supply, don't they?

Well, some people.

You can't corner the market in earwax, though.

No, but you could.

Even the most productive earwaxer.

I guess you could go house to house collecting people's earwax and then selling a jar of it to the bottom.

Because they had gong farmers, didn't they, who would collect people's poo for

fertilizer and stuff.

And everyone has a plentiful supply of that.

Yeah.

You might as well get earwax at the same time, you're saying.

Yeah.

I wonder where socially the gong firmer, dung collector, and the earwax collector are next to each other.

I think they have Christmas parties together.

Yeah.

Because no one else invites them.

We could have traded earwax, though, with the Far East.

Because they've got different earwax to us, don't they?

Which I don't think we've mentioned before.

But

East Asian countries, so in China and Japan, Korea, there's a gene, the gene has changed.

So their earwax is kind of powdery.

And I think it doesn't taste as gross.

So,

well, because it's like powdery and it doesn't have the bitterness that ours has, and it's not as gloopy, the vast majority.

But whose taste?

Is that a thing?

No, I've actually just assumed that because I've read about it and it doesn't contain the stuff that makes ours so gross.

No, it makes sense.

It just sounded like that was a thing that people taste.

You know how, like, some people eat their boogers.

No, but you know, sometimes when you put your finger in your ear and you accidentally put your finger in your mouth, and it's absolutely

accidentally.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They don't have that.

You know, when you accidentally put your finger in someone from East Asia's ear and then accidentally put that in your mouth, it's wet willies.

I'm not allowed back to Korea.

Well, there were people who tasted your awax.

There were doctors in ancient Greece.

That was the whole theory, because it was all about the theory of the humours, you know, the different substances that made up your body.

So, Hippocrates said there were particular tastes for bodily fluids.

So, he would taste your earwax, your doctor, and he might lick your vomit

or or run his fingers through your phlegm to check the consistency.

So he probably got up close personally.

It's so unromantic.

He ran his fingers through her phlegm.

Do you know what's the most common thing, the most common living thing to get in your ear?

An earwig.

You would have thought, but they don't seem to do it as much.

An ant.

Larger, in fact.

Little

spider.

No, I'm going to let you know.

I'm like a giant armadillo.

Please don't.

Is it the nine?

Is it three?

It's got to be three.

The furry little, the pink fairy.

Pink fairy.

It's the 12-banded cockroach.

No, it's just a cockroach.

Cockroaches love ears.

Oh, my goodness.

And yeah, and that's by far the most common creature to go in your ear.

And it's because they've got this thing, and I'd never heard of this word, they've got positive thigmataxis.

And thigmotaxis describes how much you like the stimulus of touch.

So some animals will have negative thigmataxis

because they don't want to to be touched.

And cockroaches want their whole body to be touched all the time.

So they're kids.

They're so needy, aren't they?

So clingy.

They love a massage.

Full body massage every single time.

Never just the shoulders.

But that's why they love ears.

So they go in because they like being in tiny little nooks and crannies.

And that's why they'll always squeeze into little cracks in your house.

And also, they quite like the fatty acids.

Do any of us know someone who've had it who's found a cockroach in their ear?

I don't.

None of my friends have told me.

Does anyone know anyone who's found anything in their ear?

No.

It's still not as common as the common cold.

And also, we don't really have cockroaches in this country very much.

Do you not?

Oh, okay.

Not as much.

No, we don't, Dan, person who's lived here for about 14 years.

I thought I had reported termites the other day in my house.

Turns out they're not in England.

What were they?

The guy on the phone was like, that's fascinating.

I'll be over as soon as possible.

I was like, wow, he was keen.

They were flying ants.

Oh, my gosh.

I read on a BBC source that some of the earliest lip balms were made of earwax, and I don't believe it.

I regret mentioning it.

Thanks for bringing it to me.

Are they saying like ancient Egyptians and stuff like that?

Yeah.

But I just, it would taste bitter.

But what if they were Asian earwax?

Doesn't that taste fantastic?

But that's drier and crumbly.

It also doesn't taste fantastic.

You've taken the wrong thing from it.

It does feel like someone's opened a tub of CarMex, thought, that looks a lot like earwax.

Here's a rumor I'll spread on the internet.

I read that in bits of Asia, so India and China, ear picking is seen as a nice pampering thing to do, really enjoyable.

So much to the point where you can have it done on the side of streets.

There's vendors.

It's so luxurious you can get it done on the side of the earth.

And so there's such demand.

It's a career.

It's a dying career, though.

Because young people are more interested

on their phones and they don't want to have their ears picked by a stranger.

You can be on your phone and have your ear picked at the same time.

That's very true.

That's one of the few things you can do.

Not if you're talking to two people at once on two different phones.

Sure.

I forgot you could use phones to phone people.

But it's true, they have this whole set of pics, don't they?

These are cleaning cameras.

They have an earspoon at home.

Do you?

Yeah, yeah.

And it lights up

so you can see inside the ear when you're picking something.

So you can't.

Does that have mirrors?

No, no, you do it for other people.

Like you said, it's like...

Yeah, yeah.

I don't use it, by the way.

I just bought it as a curio.

But the thing is that cotton buds are being banned in the UK, so there's every chance that the earspoon spoon or the roving ear cleaner could make a comeback.

Post-Brexit.

No smartphones, but here's your roving ear cleaner.

Thanks, Boris.

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

My fact this week is that the biggest single biomedical laboratory in Europe, designed to encourage scientists to chat more to each other is so noisy that scientists are actually complaining it's too hard to concentrate.

This is an amazing building that's up in London.

It's in the Euston area.

And it is

ginormous.

It's 1,250 people work there.

They're collaborating from different fields of medicine.

And it's the Francis Crick Institute, isn't it?

That's right.

It's called the Francis Crick Institute, or its nickname, so it's run, the head of it is Sir Paul Nurse, who is a Nobel Prize-winning scientist.

So its nickname is Sir Paul's Cathedral, which is quite a cool name.

Yeah.

And he had influence over the design, didn't he?

And he said that he wanted the atmosphere to encourage a gentle sort of anarchy.

So yeah, you don't necessarily want scientists to talk to each other all the time, I suppose, is what we're saying.

Sometimes you just need to be quiet and in a test tube, right?

Yeah, well, I suppose the problem is...

No, I'm not in a test tube, sorry.

Unless you're a test tube baby.

Yes, then stay in your test tube.

I think there's a difference between creating an atmosphere where people are there to work and collaborate as well as creating a sort of cafe-like atmosphere where people just come because they know that that's where their buddies are going to be.

So I think a lot of people are distracted when they're trying to do quiet work on an idea by PhD students coming in who've just graduated or so on and having parties without

not without actually having the party but effectively grouped.

Yeah, so yeah.

And this is not everyone who's complaining.

It's working incredibly well this place.

It's not

failed.

It's literally one dude.

Do you know what's underneath it?

Underneath the

Francis Crick Building Institute.

It's roundabout where Boudicca was buried, supposedly.

Oh, well, she's been joined, actually.

Is it plague?

Boudicca Plague, probably some plague, sure.

And also, so it's obviously named after Francis Crick, and his son, Mike, is still alive, and he donated Crick's California license plate into a time capsule, which is buried underneath the building.

So at the ceremony, they buried it.

Yeah.

Is there a reason for that?

I don't know.

The license plate number was ATGC.

Yes.

So those are the four letters that make up DNA.

So that's what that is.

That's so clever.

A, T, G, and C.

That's, yeah.

That's cool.

So that's underneath there.

Which is what Crick did.

This is.

This is all coming together.

Was it?

Was it Galton and no?

Watson and Craig.

Watson and Clinton.

Watson and Craig.

Crick and Watson, as we tend to say it for some reason.

Rosalind Franklin.

Rosalind Franklin, who's been left out of the history book.

Very much the Pete Best of

the DNA.

Yeah.

If Pete Best had secretly written all the Beatles songs.

Yeah, which, according to my theory, he did.

So this thing, is it all about open plan, basically?

Yeah, it's an open plan office.

To an extent, if you look inside, it's obviously got levels, but it's one of those ones where it all looks down into a big courtyard of desks

and everything seems to be open, yeah.

Because open plan

is very

controversial now, right?

In fact, I think most studies show that it's a negative thing, has a negative impact on work.

And it's very trendy, but I get really confused because people talk about open plan as if it's like a trendy, cool thing.

And it seems so obvious to me, surely, the reason we have open plan, and it's generally in Britain and America, is that it's just a hell of a lot cheaper.

Saves money on walls.

It just saves a a hell of a lot of money.

You can squash way more people in.

I think we just should stop pretending we're doing it for the good of our employees, for bonding and stuff, and be like, sorry, guys, we're cheap.

Yeah, we have, how many rooms do we have in this building?

We have four.

We should have a maximum of four members of staff here at any one time.

And we should all get a room each.

That's what they have in places like Germany and Scandinavia.

Like, everyone will have a right to an office because that's a better way to work.

To work.

Well, the person who invented cubicles, he was called Robert Propst, and he thought that it would be be like a dynamic, everyone would have their area and it would be really dynamic and you could move around it and it would be really good for work.

But of course, what happened was companies just made them smaller and smaller and smaller until it was the smallest amount that one person could work in.

And then obviously it had the opposite effect.

Yeah.

A friend of mine, their office is being relocated completely to a new place that is going to be this open plan layout.

But they're taking it a step further now where no one will have an assigned desk.

It will be hot desking.

And the theory behind that is that the idea is that's going to encourage more work because you want to get to work as early as possible to find a good seat next to an influential person because everyone of every level is going to be sitting around this same desk.

So if you want to get next to the boss, you're close to them, you arrive at 8.30 in the morning.

What if the boss doesn't come until 10?

The whole thing's a risk.

You've got to work out the rhythm, see when they arrive, all that sort of stuff.

But in theory, that's...

Why don't we just hide in the toilets watching the office and waiting for the boss to arrive?

And then lots of people will hide in the toilets and more toilets.

Everyone's just going to be following the bus to work like a horny armadillo.

Mouth of a congoline.

I'd never heard that as a justification for hot desking because everyone always claims that's a good thing, hot desking, and you don't have too much of your own.

It is more efficient because you always do have a couple of people in a big office.

You'll have ex-people who don't turn up or who are ill or who are travelling for business or whatever.

So, you know, there is a.

But it's risky because people will leave food on their desk or people will leave mugs.

Leave books, don't they?

Yes, personal items.

and why are you looking at dan

um so anna you know how you stand up at your desk quite a lot yeah um i read that according to a study office workers could lose half a stone a year by standing up at their desks that's why i'm actually in minus weight now

i'm in minus two stone if i'd have stood up for the last 12 years that I've been working at QI, I would now weigh about eight stone.

I imagine that's how that works.

Yeah, exactly.

So I was looking up distraction and concentration and things like that.

Yeah.

So when you're concentrating, or when you think you're concentrating, it turns out that if you look at your brain activity, you're actually distracted quite a lot.

So in between bursts of attention, attention is the study described it as a searchlight that sort of shines on the thing you're reading or the thing you're studying and then shines away again just to see if there's anything more important or dangerous going on that you need to know about.

So how often do you guess that happens, that the brain sort of scans the area and every five, three minutes.

Okay.

Every 45 seconds.

It's four times a second.

Four times a second.

There's no worthy you're not getting anything done on that.

I'm not lying.

I totally phased out while you were explaining, brilliantly.

Genuinely.

To be fair, he was scanning for danger.

Four times a second, no.

And your brain basically alters your perception to make you think it's a constant movie of you just focusing on one thing.

Four times a second, your brain sort of temporarily takes its attention attention away, scanning.

You just wouldn't get anything.

It happens.

Yeah, that's cool.

Very cool.

Okay, so each of these scanner ways, they must be an absolute micro-million.

Yeah, it's short.

It doesn't take a quarter of a second, four times a second.

Is it stuff just like breathe, blink?

No, it's not like.

I wish you hadn't zoned out while I was saying the thing.

I'm not going to go back and say it.

I'll hear it on the podcast.

Can I?

I found something about a laboratory

that I had never heard and I thought was super cool.

Have we mentioned this before?

You mentioned the special feces studying lab in the Soviet Union.

So this is in the 1940s.

The USSR developed a secret lab for studying world leaders' poo.

And

it was to find out stuff about them.

And the justification that people have made, have backdated to it, is that we didn't really have CCTV or other ways of watching people, so we collected their poo instead.

And this is genuinely, someone found this out a couple of years ago going through these old archives and Beria, you know, Stalin's sort of right-hand man, Beria, was in charge of it.

And it was a special department.

And for instance, in 1949, they had special toilets installed for Mao when he came and visited.

And they weren't connected to the sewers, they were connected to boxes underneath his loo, which they then collected and they went through it.

And it was like if you found certain things, like apparently if you found amino acid tryptophan, it meant they were calm and approachable.

And perhaps you could do a deal with them.

And the theory was if there wasn't very much potassium in their poo, then they had a lack of sleep and might be a bit stressed, a bit tetchy.

Give them a banana.

Give them a bloody banana and they won't press the red button.

But we know now that people are still doing this, right?

So Kim Jong-un did it during the Singapore Summit this year, brought his own toilet for exactly the same reason.

Was that so they couldn't steal his poo and study it?

Yeah, yes, yes.

So he would have taken all of that back to North Korea when he left.

It's bizarre.

Yeah.

It is weird, but then we now know that there's a historical justification for it.

Yeah.

I always thought it was them just being paranoid, but I think it is them being paranoid.

Okay.

Oh, no, although

we know that they were doing it, and we know now I bet you can learn way more from someone's beauty.

If there's a house guest visiting my place, I'm not ashamed to say, I'll analyse.

Yeah.

I do think you should be ashamed to say that.

Why do you keep giving me bananas whenever I come back?

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

My fact this week is that the largest sunflower farm in Ontario has been forced to shut because so many people were taking selfies there.

And this is a really funny story.

It's from this summer, summer and the farm is called Bogle Seeds Farm.

It's in a place called Hamilton and it's absolutely massive.

They've got 1.6 million sunflower plants over 68 acres and they thought it'd be quite a good idea to make a bit of extra cash, charge people some dollars by saying you can come here, park up in this little car park we've got, take a selfie, here you go.

And it went mad.

They were completely swamped.

Thousands and thousands of people came.

There were four kilometers of stationary traffic backed up on the road leading there.

There was a 300 car parking lot and uh any one time there were 7 000 cars trying to park in it and it just turned into complete chaos they trashed the place and so they had to shut it people were cutting off the tops of sunflowers someone said that one one person urinated on one of the neighbors bushes

it was bad the pictures did look quite cool didn't they?

The pictures look really nice.

Sunflowers are still pretty.

They are.

Lovely photos of people weeing and fighting and smashing their car.

But on Instagram, that's not what the photos were.

They were just nice pictures of people with sunflowers through.

I I didn't see a single weird.

Apparently, people brought ladders to this place, so you can go into the field and then climb up a ladder, so you can be poking out above the top at the sunflowers, which I think is quite clever.

Well, and also, maybe just because they're so tall sunflowers, I can't believe how high they can get.

Oh, yeah.

They might just want to get to the top.

The largest that we have on record, this is a Guinness World record, is 30 feet and one inch.

I can't...

That can't have been a happy sunflower, though.

Why?

Because it would be quite stressed, wouldn't it?

Self-conscious.

Everywhere in the hand is that shorter.

Think about that.

But you surely surely would.

They must grow to get more light, and if they need more light, they must be stressed, right?

As in, yeah.

So, for instance, four-leaf clovers, they only grow if they're stressed, four leaves, because they need an extra leaf to get more light and more energy.

I didn't know that.

So, usually, when a plant does something weird, it's because they're stressed out.

So, now whenever we find a four-leaf clover, we have to go, oh, that's so sad, rather than thinking it's good.

That's what I always do.

Oh, God.

Such a killjoy.

30 feet.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean,

how did he grow it?

Did he plant it at the bottom of a well?

Well, this is a guy who's managed to top his own record a few years in a row.

So he's...

It's just a growth.

I mean, do you have to have it trellised to something?

They're quite strong.

Well, they don't really strong.

We used to have sunflowers that were super tall and they didn't have any.

Really?

But not 30 feet tall.

I should just say that the

reaction of the bogle seed farmers was negative to this chaos.

So just to conclude the story, because you should really go on their website.

So, they closed down the farm.

They said, We're not having anyone else here this year, although they are still selling seeds, but like no one can come anymore.

And you should go to the website because it's so aggressive.

They've got about like seven different notices saying, So, they say, unfortunately, with the police involved, you know, all lots of capitals, they had to call the police.

We've had to close the photo opportunities due to traffic jams, etc.

There's a big one of those running banners that you get on slightly mad people's websites that's like in capital letters, closed for the season.

They sort of asked people to come.

Yeah.

And then lots of people came.

They didn't know how popular they'd be.

It's not the people's fault for coming.

It's not any individual person's fault.

It's the individual urinator in the bushes.

Yeah.

Isn't it?

Yeah.

The people who are cutting tops off.

Yeah.

I think I can blame those people.

And they do say now they've still got people coming who will like swear and abuse them and say, no, I've driven four hours to get here.

Oh, you've got to let me joke.

Check the website before you go.

Check the website, guys.

So sunflowers are massive in Russia in in every sense of the word okay um but so they're from america originally sunflowers and then they were brought over to europe uh

and in the 18th century they were really popular in russia because you were banned from consuming oil during lent but you weren't banned from consuming sunflower oil loophole haha because they didn't know it existed they didn't know they wrote the rules yeah so um so it was just an absolute get around and you could you know use the oil for for food or for light or for whatever it might be yeah so the russians used to to have massive sunflower fields.

Well, they still do.

The two biggest producers of sunflower oil are Russia and Ukraine,

which means that tensions between those two countries have affected the world's supply of sunflower oil.

Really?

Oh, wow, really?

Yeah.

God, I didn't know how I felt about that battle, but now I'm really anti-cause sunflower oil is a useful thing to have around, isn't it?

There's an amazing thing about the fact that sunflowers are used in nuclear

apocalyptic sites, basically.

So Fukushima for example,

part of the process of trying to clear it of radiation was to plant millions and millions of sunflowers because they soak up the radiation.

And this was a thing that was employed in Chernobyl as well.

Really?

Yeah, they did, yeah, lots of planting.

And it's many different flowers and field mustard.

I must admit, I read that and I thought it probably wasn't true.

Because it's the obvious thing to put in, isn't it?

Sunflowers, it's light, it's energy.

It feels like a kind of a folk remedy to that, doesn't it?

But then it's 100% true, isn't it?

Yeah, they have studied it.

There's hyperaccumulators, which take up heavy metals from soil.

Do you know who's a big fan of sunflowers?

Huge fan?

Gives a clue.

My wife.

Really?

Yeah.

That wasn't going to be.

Well, it's someone very similar to your wife, actually.

Oh.

I've got a lawyer in.

No, it's Osama bin Laden.

Oh.

I've always thought she reminds me a bit, she's tall.

Yeah, exactly.

She's got a beard.

She hates America.

Yeah, he had a passion for them, apparently, according to his wife.

He loved growing, he always grew them.

He loved growing the biggest sunflowers in his village.

Do you know what's ironic about sunflowers?

Osama bin Laden loved them?

Is it that they

come out at night?

Oh, that's good.

What?

Where do they hide?

No, I'm guessing.

That would be ironic if there's sunflowers that they come out of.

They hate the sun.

They love the sun.

They follow it around all over the place.

None of that.

No.

It's that they're the only flower with the word flower in their name, but they're not a flower.

What?

They're not a flower.

No.

My head just got blown.

They are thousands of flowers.

So they are.

So each sunflower is actually thousands of little flowers.

The definition of a flower is obviously like, you know,

the bit that has the reproductive organs.

And on the sunflower, the bits that are called the disc florets.

So, if you follow the big yellow petals down, you then get all these little circular bits.

Yeah,

yes, exactly, the bit more brown bits.

They have male and female reproductive organs, each one of those.

So, each little petal with a disc floret attached is a flower.

Wow, so every time we see a sunflower now, we should call it a sunflowers.

Exactly.

Yeah, I will do that from now on.

I know, you absolutely will, won't you?

I won't display that.

Because you're eating your panino.

What technically then is it?

It's a group of flowers.

It's a group of flowers.

That is going to save me a lot of money.

I'm just going to be able to say, darling, I've got you 2,000 sunflowers.

Hey, I've got another ironic thing

about sunflowers.

This is about Van Gogh or Van Guch.

So he never sold any of his sunflower portraits.

I think he painted about 11.

And he never saw a single one in his lifetime.

And yet, now the one that the National Gallery in London has one, and they sell more postcards of that than of any other picture they've got.

When you go to the National Gallery, they say no taking photos, but actually since 2014, they've lifted the ban on selfies and taking photos because they realized they just couldn't regulate it.

So if they saw someone with a phone out, most people, they couldn't tell if they were Googling something, texting, or whether or not they were about to use it to take a sneaky photo.

So they do know that certain...

flashes and so on do actually affect paintings but they've only with a few specific paintings said now that is illegal to take a selfie with.

But that's also ironic that a place with hundreds of self-portraits stops you from taking a self-portrait.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Apart from they don't

the irony used to exist and it now does not.

Yeah.

And that's that's the great thing about the sunflowers.

They um the the painting is wilting.

All the Van Gogh's sunflowers are going brown very slowly.

As in because the Incas are.

Yeah,'cause he used he used a paint which degrades under light.

Although, great news, it's not yet visible to the human eye.

So everybody stop panicking.

Wow, so the painting of sunflowers doesn't like the light.

Brilliant.

This isn't irony special.

Past and present irony special.

Yeah.

So they've analysed the chemicals and they know which, because they use different pigments for different bits of the painting.

And one of the pigments is going to steadily get browner.

Well, that's fitting, isn't it?

Because they all die eventually, as do we all.

And I think that's the point he was trying to make when he used that chemical.

Yep.

He was another man with great foresight.

Do you know the optimal distance at which to take a photo of your face?

Is it arm's length?

Sadly it's not, so that's why everyone looks hideous in selfies and they should all stop doing them.

So five feet is the best distance for a portrait.

That's the one, that's the length that doesn't distort your facial features.

Well, you know what that is?

About the length of an arm's length and a selfie stick.

Yeah.

It's about the length of a giant armadillo.

Yeah, but selfie sticks are more easily gotten.

Well, I wouldn't.

I wouldn't hate someone carrying around a giant armadillo quite as much, though.

I think if all the taurus in Covid Garden were walking around with giant almadillas, you would soon get sick of it.

But no, selfies make your face look 30%

fatter, 30% wider than it is, don't they?

Because they're two close-ups.

Right.

So Kim Kardashian,

she takes a lot of selfies.

Yeah.

And she seems to look normal in them.

Does she have an extremely thin face in me?

I'm like,

I don't know.

She looks like a freak.

Yeah.

Actually, weirdly, Fenella was showing me last night a picture of Kim Kardashian when she was 14 versus now to show the facial difference.

And she looks like she's had a lot of the work done that would make a selfie look right.

It's a personal person who needs to look good.

I'm not surprised.

No, you're suggesting that Kim Kardashian has had work done.

I can't tell you how thrilled I am this podcast has ended up with us discussing Kim Kardashian's percent plastic surgery.

So I got another Kim Kardashian factor.

And that is that she's been warned by doctors to stop taking selfies after a painful wrist injury.

Wow.

He genuinely had one.

Apparently, she's got RSI because she's taken so many selfies.

Really?

Doesn't she have any mates who will take a photo of her?

It's a selfie.

You've got to do a.

Well, you can just call it a photograph.

We've got a word for the other one as well.

No, no, no, no.

It's all about the angles.

She released a book called Selfie, which was literally 500 selfies.

That was the whole book.

Loved it.

Absolutely.

Loved it.

Yep.

Yeah.

I've got a selfie fact here, which is that in Ohio, there was a man who was wanted by the police.

and his name was Donald A.

Chip Pugh.

He was wanted by the Lima police in Ohio, and so they put a picture of him.

Hang on.

They're looking at the wrong place.

There's a county called Lima.

Oh, I can't remember.

I remember the animal, the Lima Police.

The most adorable police in the whole country.

Yeah, so they released a photo of him,

which they said, have you seen this guy?

Please get in contact.

And someone who got in contact was Donald himself, who did not like the photo that they were using.

So he sent them an updated selfie of him sitting in a car with sunglasses on, looking like he's cool.

And they ended up using that photo as well, sending a message saying this photo was sent to us by Mr.

Pugh himself.

We thank him for being helpful, but now we'd appreciate it if he would come to speak to us about his charges.

But yeah, they actually know.

No, I haven't found an update.

Are we sure you didn't just send them a picture of somebody else and think, oh, he's got away with that one?

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James, at James Harkin, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Chaczynski.

You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, our Facebook page, which is no such thing as a fish, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

So, on there, we have all of our previous episodes.

We have links to any upcoming tours that we're doing.

You can get tickets through there.

You can listen to all the previous episodes.

And we also have this behind-the-scenes documentary we made, Behind the Guild.

So, we are going on tour again.

If you want to see what it looks like when we're on tour, the behind-the-scenes stuff, as well as some of the front-of-stage stuff, it's give you an idea of what it's like.

So, go download that.

We'll be back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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