152: No Such Thing As A Sleepover With Lions

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Hey everyone, big news.

No such thing as a fish is turning three. Woo! Yeah, it's our birthday coming up on March the 9th, and we are going to celebrate it by throwing a big party.

Well, actually, it's a live recording, but we're calling it a big party. And if you want to come along, it's going to be in London.

It's going to be at our regular recording venue, which is up the creek, which is in Greenwich. And we're going to be starting at 7:30 p.m.
on the 28th of February.

Tickets are going to be going on sale this coming Monday, the 20th of February, and they're going to be available at qi.com slash fish events, and the tickets will go live at 11 a.m.

It's going to be really fun. There's going to be balloons.
I've just decided.

I've just decided. There's going to be balloons.
And cake. Cake.
We're going to have a cake. And Andy is going to do a strip tease.

And it is going to be packed all together with a live recording. You'll get to see a show recorded live.
So please come along, go get the tickets. Again, they'll be available at 11 a.m.

Monday the 20th. Go to qi.com slash fish events.
Okay, on with the show. What? Three-year-old's birthday party.
The strip teaser.

And also, if you're not into stripping and you're into wearing stuff, then we have a hoodie. No such thing as a fish hoodie.
And you can buy that by going to qi.com forward slash hoodie.

And we also have t-shirts and we have vinyls, but they've just had a big new delivery of the hoodies. They come in basically all the sizes you could want.

And it has on the back of the hoodie a huge list of our headline facts that we've done in the first year of of our podcast. Year one.

Celebrate the end of winter and the return of warm weather with a new hoodie.

Go ahead.com slash hoodie. Okay, on with the show.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anna Chaczynski and once again we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with you, Andy. My fact is, the doomsday clock was originally set at seven minutes to midnight because the artist responsible for it thought it looked good.

Those were literally her words.

She was a lady called Martille Langsdorff Langsdorff and she was asked to come up with a cover for a magazine basically but the magazine was the bulletin of atomic scientists

and she said it looked good to my eye when she drew the doomsday clock at the original thing.

So the doomsday clock for anyone who doesn't know is is a sort of theoretical clock saying how near we are to the end of the world.

And it's put together by a body of atomic scientists and nuclear weapons experts and they have just moved it.

So we're now two and a half minutes to midnight, which is just about about the closest it's ever been. I think at one point it might have been on two minutes.

Oh, yeah, I think it was on two at one point. Yeah, you're right.
If it was, it was around Cuban Missile Crisis time, wasn't it? No, that's the weird thing.

They didn't move it for the Cuban Missile Crisis. Do you know why? What? They had no idea what was going on.
They said we just don't have any data to make a judgment.

But it was in the newspapers.

Yeah.

I don't think they knew whether the missiles were being primed or loaded or whether they were going to get to Cuba or. No, but that's one of the times where they didn't change the clock at all.

So were they, this artist, A, was was she an atomic scientist as well by night? No, she was an artist by day or?

No, she was married to a guy who worked on both the magazine and was also part of the Manhattan Project, I believe. He was one of the scientists who was helping out on that.

She was just asked to design a cover, so she wasn't even designing a doomsday clock as such. She thought she was going to do a U, the letter U for uranium as the cover.

But she noticed in the talk that a deadline was sort of looming, and she thought, oh, like a clock going to 12, it's just on its way kind of thing it's an analogue clock as well isn't it so we don't know for sure that it's not like two minutes to midday yeah

absolutely fine oh that's great we're a whole 12 hours away i think they gave us not very much wiggle room by putting it at seven minutes two and i think that's causing problems now isn't it because actually the world could get much much more dangerous before catastrophe and so for instance now is the first time that they've only added half a minute rather than a full minute to it yes yeah because clearly we're getting closer and closer to midnight but you don't want to say we've gone a full third of the way closer.

It is like a parent saying I'm going to count a three to a naughty child and like one, two, two and a half, two and three quarters.

Do they factor in for when the clocks go forward?

I think the important thing for everyone listening is that there is no scientific basis or proper scale to this clock. They just kind of wing it, don't they? There is scientific basis in.

It's a load of scientists who come up with a assess whether the world is more dangerous or less dangerous. Yeah, but it's sort of an arbitrary scale.

You know, they haven't actually worked out this is 20% more dangerous than it was yesterday.

But it's just, I think it's just 10 scientists and security experts, and they just get together in a room, don't they? And they just kind of discuss things.

And then at the end of the day, before they crack open the whiskey, they go, Okay, what are we going to say? Two minutes? Pretty much that, isn't it?

So

you know the Manhattan Project. You know, when it was underway, so this is when they obviously Oppenheimer and co-exploded an atomic bomb.

They discussed at the time when they were planning the Manhattan Project the possibility that it could in fact blow up the entire world.

So one of the guys working on it, Edward Teller, did some calculations and he said that it was possible that the explosion they generated would create this fission reaction that generated heat so intense that it would trigger runaway fusion in the atmosphere.

Now, I only know what a few of those words mean.

Essentially, the explosion was going to generate such a huge heat that the fusion in the atmosphere would spread all around the world and the world would explode.

It would basically become a sun, which is

like the sun's energy comes from nuclear fusion, doesn't it? Yeah, exactly.

I really like that Oppenheimer said at one point, and this is before the Manhattan Project, that in an interview he said, my two great loves are physics and desert country.

It's a pity they can't be combined. And then he actually had the chance to marry his two great loves.
Yeah, but marry them by blowing one of them up.

My third love, love, of course, is tiny uninhabited islands in the South Pacific.

So on the end of the world,

there are lots of stories recently about preppers and things like this.

And people, so there's been a recent news story that everyone is buying a house in New Zealand.

Everyone who's anyone and has a billion pounds is buying a house in New Zealand.

My buddy Reese bought a house in New Zealand recently. But he's from New Zealand, isn't it? Yeah, yeah, he lives there.

I don't think he counts as a prepper in that case

because they think it's less likely to be bombed because everyone basically likes people from New Zealand. You know, they're pretty innocuous people.
But what about Mordor? That's there.

That's very dangerous. That's true.
That is a rogue nation, if ever there was one, isn't it?

But did you know, before the American election in November, prepper meal firms, a lot of them saw sales triple in the three weeks leading up to the election. Wow.
Yeah.

Which is substantial because people were thinking it's all going to kick off once we've had the election. Did they think that would be his first move? Literally, get into the White House, red button.

I was reading a prepper's list of things that you take into your bunker with you should the apocalypse happen, doomsday arrive.

This was actually a cracked article, and they were saying that one of the things that's on the list that sticks out as quite odd is non-lubricated condoms.

And they say you should have lots of non-lubricated condoms. Non-lubricated condoms.
Yeah, so cracked, they start saying, okay, it kind of makes sense.

Imagine if there's a big group down there and suddenly STI starts spreading. So you want to make sure that in any sex that that's happening.
But then you think, okay, why non-lubricated condoms?

Turns out that condoms are incredibly practical as a thing to have.

Almost like if you were out in a bare grill situation with nothing. You can carry water in them, please.
You can carry water in them where it's called.

You can. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You can carry two liters. Well, non-lubricated as well.
So I'm just going to put a bottle in the bunker and carry my water in there. You'll be toting around your condom.

You can put them around your head and blow it up with your nose. Yeah, for fun.
For fun, yeah. Because you need entertainment in these bunkers.
Yeah.

Very dry places you can make a slingshot out of them no you can't yeah you can so there's the prepper's journal uh and they have 11 ways a condom can save your life and one of them is make a slingshot and it acts as the actual bit of rubber that you pull back on so you can and they show you how to make it so you carve out the wood and then you strap two condoms and tie them up that's going to save your life

if there's a giant coming and you need to send a small boy to defeat him and in the post-nuclear landscape there probably will be giants walking around doing harm to people so Any other ways that a condom can save your life?

Yeah, starting fires.

Starting fires. Of course, starting fires.
That's why sex is such a dangerous business.

That's the song. This sex is on fire.

Due to this non-lubricated condom.

It's that friction.

Does it say how you might start a fire with a condom? Yeah, it does. Well, actually, it's not about starting the fire.
It's about protecting Tinder from moisture.

Not your Tinder app.

It does feel like that list is compiled by completely insane people.

Well, no, it's on this amazing site called preppers.com. Yeah, I think they're completely insane people.

And they're really secretive as well. So the New Yorker did a profile, and the journalist writing the article was approaching possible preppers to interview them.

And one prepper wrote back saying, asking to see my prepper stash, you've just asked me one of the most personal things.

I've ever heard. That is effectively like going to someone's house, meeting their new girlfriend, and then...
And have you got any condoles?

Yeah, he said. It's like saying, I'd like to see her naked and have sex with her.
So they are very, very secretive about it.

That's because I think they're the kind of people whose prepper stash does contain 100 blow-up dolls.

We should say that this is genuinely, really, quite widespread in America. So there was a study done recently that found 22% of Americans believe that the world will end in their lifetime.

Another study, the National Geographic, did that said 40% of Americans, so almost half, think that stocking up on end-of-the-world supplies is a more sensible idea than getting a pension scheme.

Getting a work pension scheme.

If you don't get a pension, but you do have a lot of canned food and water, you can, once you retire, just go and live in your bunker anyway. It doesn't matter that the world's not ended, does it?

It doesn't really affect you whether the world's going on or not. It's the retirement everyone's always dreamed of.
The windowless, canned food-dependent, 30-year post-working life.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that some villages in the Central African Republic deliberately allow lions to live nearby so they can steal their food.

So what would normally happen if you lived in a village and there were lions nearby, you would always try and shoe them away. But these guys kind of allow them to live nearby.

They don't try and get rid of them because what they know will happen is these lions will catch bits of meat and whatever, and then they can shoe them away or they can sneak up on them and they can grab the meat and they'll be able to eat it.

Have you seen the video of people doing this though? No. With the lions.
Yeah. I saw the no.

What were you about to say? I brought up the YouTube page. Yeah, I've seen the crown.
It's great. It's a 10-part series.
It's amazing. Oh, gosh.

And I brought up the YouTube page and I saw all the videos, but I didn't press play on them. So I saw the screen gram that holds the video.
And I saw the advert before it came came out.

There's a new Nokia.

Anna, you've actually seen the videos. I have, they're really good.
So,

basically, I think I saw a video that was of the Darobo hunters in southern Kenya. So, as James says, this happens in various places.

And what they do is there are about 10 lions gathered around a corpse. I think it's a gazelle or something.

So, 10 lions, males and females, and there are three hunters, and they're, you know, scrawny little humans. And

they just go up to them. I think two of them had little spears, just wooden sticks essentially.

And the key is confidence and if you just stride up and look like you definitely own the show, then the lions just leave. So this kind of a staring contest and a battle of wills.

They walk towards the lions and the lions look up at them and sort of meet their eye and size them up.

And then for some reason, this pride of ten lions thinks, no, I can't handle these three small, skinny men. And they go away.

But they know they have to cut the meat off the animal really quickly because if the lions stay and watch them long enough and size them up properly then they'll realize that actually I probably can take those guys and I'll go back.

So how do you do it at the end? Do you just walk off? Just walk away. Just casually stride away.
It's like these guys have read the game but with lions.

Just this is completely off subject but about staring people out. Dan, what do you think is the record in the world staring someone out competition?

Ooh, so is this the same as a no-blinking competition? So if you and I are kind of who's gonna blink the latest, what do you reckon?

The two people who were in the final,

the person who went out, how long do you think it was?

I can't imagine.

Is it 1962 between Kennedy and Khrushchev at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis?

That is pretty old satire.

It's because we were talking about the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was timely.

It was weirdly topical.

Just going from my own eyeballs. Your own record.
Yeah, my own record. I'd say no longer than half an hour.
No, no, like, no, no, sorry, sorry.

Like half a minute. How do you think someone's not blinking for half an hour? That's what I'm saying.

Well, James is asking what I think the record is, and I know it's got to be more than half a minute. So I'm saying half an hour.
I'm saying half a minute. Okay.

I believe it's about 40 minutes. 40 minutes.

Was one of them dead? And they haven't realised.

That's amazing. Whoa.
Did you know that in Nepal they do the same thing that James is talking about, but with tigers? So there's kleptoparasitism.

Humans do this with tigers, but it's very often in Nepal elephant trainers who do it, and they do it by they'll lead their elephants into the undergrowth to feed them and things like that.

And then if there's a tiger nearby, then they take the elephant with them and they use the elephant to scare away the tiger, to scare the tiger off a carcass.

So they employ the elephants as their henchmen in order to get the tiger to scarpa. Wow.
That's very cool. Here's the thing.

So the worst time for being attacked by lions, as in the time it's most likely to happen, it's always bad.

The time it happens most often is just after the full moon. Okay.

And that's because lions hunt best when it's dark.

And when it's light at night time, there's a full moon. They tend to not really hunt that much and so they don't eat that much.
And so just after the full moon, they're really hungry.

And so they're more likely to attack you. Oh, really?

Do you know how you lure a lion to you if you want it to come to you?

With some meat.

Yeah, you could. You put on a gazelle costume and you prance around looking incompetent.

No, it's an interesting trick that's used by a lot of photographers when they're trying to lure them to camera traps to set off to take photos for jaguars and for lions.

It tends to be men's aftershave.

So with lions, a photographer that I was reading about said that they use old spice.

And what they do is they just spray it all over, say, the leaves of the area where the camera is and that tends to lure them in.

So the Maasai obviously are known for lion killing, their lion-killing ways, and it's the rite of passage in Maasai culture to

yeah, when you hit adolescence, then you go out and you kill a lion, and that means you're a man and means you're very brave and you come back and the person who killed the lion gets to wear the mane on his head at special events and the tail's all bejeweled by the women in the tribe.

And they've started cutting down a bit now because lion populations are under threat. So it used to be more individuals that went out.
Now it's more groups. But

because there's a kind of increasing awareness about how lion populations are in trouble amongst Maasai people, I was in Kenya 10 years ago, and even then I met a couple of Maasai guys who were campaigning in their tribes against killing animals because they don't think they should do it.

So because there's this increasing awareness, they've started the Maasai Olympics as an alternative way for men to prove their kind of status in society.

And they have all the same kind of skills that it would take to hunt a lion, like sprinting or long-distance running, javelin throwing, but they don't have to kill lions anymore. I watched,

just thinking about humans living with lions.

I was watching a video of, do you remember that Melanie Griffith,

those pictures came out, that she grew up with lions? Who's Melanie Griffith? She's an actor, very famous, but you might know her through, she was married for years to Antonio Banderas.

And she was, whose daughter was she? Tippy Hedron. Tippy Hedron.
Yeah, Tippy Hedron. Oh, yeah.
Yeah, so. That's more your era, isn't it, Andy? Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
The 1962 good old days.

Hitchcock was alive. The Rolling Stones were still good.
The Cold War was still going. So all your jokes still made sense.

Hey, guys, what about those missile bases in Hungary, huh?

Yeah, so

Melanie Griffith, the actor, she, when she was growing up, lived with lions. And there's all these photos of them playing in the pool, sleeping in the same bed, and so on.

But her parents made a movie called Roar, which is a very, very famous movie in which they used actual lions and tigers in the movie.

And a few of them, I think Melanie Griffith actually got a bit mauled in it. She had like 100 stitches off the back of it.
You can see that footage on the DVD that they've released.

But you can watch the sort of collected clips from Roar on YouTube of all the lion and tiger attacks in the movie. And it is nuts.
And they lived with like 100 lions, the family itself.

So Melanie Griffith grew up with these. 100 lions.
Yeah, I promise. It was like 100 lions and tigers.
And you can see in the footage, because

they weren't all in the house, like it was an outdoor area.

just the sleeping arrangements would have been bad enough yeah we'll put you in the 98th bedroom yes exactly it still has got a lion in it obviously we have a hundred lions

well it's not one of the two rooms that have got two lions in it

no

you'd never say yes to a sleepover would you

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

My fact this week is that there is a Victorian Time capsule buried in London that contains photographs of the 12 best-looking women in England. So the 12 best-looking from Victorian times? Yeah.

Well, yeah, not. It would be amazing if they have pictures of Kim Bessinger and stuff in it now, wouldn't it?

Still an incredibly old reference. You had.
You're getting closer.

Yeah.

So

here's the thing. I'm not fully sure, and I don't know if anyone does properly know who these women were.

So the phrase I kept coming across is 12 best-looking women in England or 12 English beauties of the day.

And no one says any more about it. So this is buried as part of a time capsule which is buried underneath Cleopatra's needle, which, if you've ever been to London is on the embankments.

It's on along the Thames.

It's only down the road from here. Down the road from here, we could almost see it from our office.
Can we get to the pictures? No,

they're buried, obviously, underneath in a time capsule. That's the point.
Well, when do we get to open it and have a look at these English beauties? They haven't said.

But that's what's amazing to me. This is what I find very interesting about the fact is that there is this box buried underneath the Cleopatra's needle, which was brought and erected in 1896.

Things that were included in it were a box of cigars, there's a portrait of Queen Victoria, there's a written history about how Cleopatra's needle actually got transported to being on the embankment.

And then there are 12 photographs of the English beauties of the day, and no one has seemed to have gone, huh? And said, who are they? Why is that?

They just treat it like it's a normal thing you put in a time capsule. So it's a load of really weird stuff.
Like, there's also a three-foot-high model of Cleopatra's needle under Cleopatra's needle.

Yeah. Is that then underneath that there's a three-centimeter one? That's the original Russian doll.
It was really weird. It is strange.

Yeah, and they've got, and they've also inserted under there one of the hydraulic jacks used to lift it up because it was lifted by just four men using four hydraulic jacks and it was hugely technologically advanced for the time.

They consulted Joseph Basiljet.

He was the person that they asked about how to get it onto the shore and whether it would be safe because people were worried that it was so heavy it would cause the embankment to collapse.

And Basiljet was of course the guy who designed the London sewer system, so he knew a lot by that point about what was underneath the earth in London.

And he said, look, it's fine, it's made of London clay, it's safe, dump it on there. And so they did.

So we should say what Cleopatra's needle actually is before we go any further. So it's an obelisk.
It's a huge ancient Egyptian stone

sort of pillar covered in hieroglyphs. And it's got nothing to do with Cleopatra.

It should be called Footmoses' needle because he was the pharaoh who actually commissioned it. It's way, way, way longer ago than Cleopatra.
And there are three of them. One of them's in New York.

It's in Central Park. One of them is in London.
And there's another one in Paris, but it's from somewhere else. Yeah, so that's what they are.

Yeah, and Anna is saying the worries about how placing it there, was it going to go through the ground?

The initial proposal for where it was going to be was outside the front of the houses of parliament. That's where they wanted to stand.

And the Metropolitan District Committee said you can't do that because it's directly over one of our tube lines and it's going to be too heavy and it's going to fall the rumbles are going to topple it over and then the weight of it once it topples over it's going to break through the ground and stab a train it's not that big

come on

it wasn't their exact words but it's a needle point at the top isn't it so it's it's not that pointy i don't know pointy enough to penetrate the ground

it's not so big is it it's much less weight than say a building yes like that's the thing Yeah, like you would think that Big Ben would be more likely to fall over and stab a train than that.

Oh, yeah. It's very pointy Big Ben.
Yeah. At the top, yeah.
That's very true. And also, it's got these two sphinxes which are facing it.

And they are, firstly, they're the wrong way round, these massive bronze sphinxes. They should be facing away from it, protecting it.
And actually, they're looking towards it like idiots.

And the other thing is that they were actually made in 1881. They're so fake.
No way. Yes.
They're completely knock-off Victorian things. Yeah, they're replicas.

I went down there this morning to look at them and just see if I could see the... You were looking for the 12 beauties, weren't you?

I was looking for where I thought they might have even acknowledged that maybe there was a time capsule somewhere, but they don't.

But what you do see is there's a lot of things they tell you about the people who died in the process of bringing it over because there was a whole ship container that was built for it called the Cleopatra to transport it, and it got disattached during a storm, so they lost it for five days.

Fell over and stabbed a ship.

Just stabbed the fish, it came up like a sort of lovely kebab.

This was insane. I think you're underselling it a bit, Dan.
Like, they literally built an iron capsule with sails on top, exactly slotted Cleopatra's needle into it, and then towed it behind a ship.

Unsuccessfully.

Really unsuccessfully.

Several men died, didn't they? Because there was a storm arose, and it was, was it the men going from the main ship to try and steady the needle that were lost at sea?

Yeah, there was another ship that realised that there'd been a big storm and they were in trouble, and they sent some people on a little boat to try and rescue the people, and those people on the boat died.

But then, I think you were saying, Cleopatra's needle itself inside this massive container just floated around. Yeah.
Lost at sea. No one knew if it had sunk.
And then someone just stumbled upon it.

Yeah, and I think they gave up. I think they thought, well, it's gone.

It must have gone down in the storm. It was absolutely terrible when they thought we've lost Cleopatra's needle.

Because the thing is, before it was brought over, right, it was given to the British by the ruler of Egypt, who was called Muhammad Ali, incidentally,

to say thank you for winning the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Alexandria against Napoleon. But the British government said, well, we can't really afford to bring it over.
This is 1819.

So they then waited 60 years, 59 years, until 1878. And they said, I suppose we better bring it over.
Then they've given it to us. It seems churlish now.

And then as soon as they try and bring it over, they lose it. Yeah.

Do you think when they lost it, they thought, well, we have this three-inch version.

Shall we just put that on display instead?

We can only fit one photo of a beauty underneath it, unfortunately.

So yeah, I was going to say, so it has the names of the guys who died in that process on the back of it, facing the water, facing the Thames.

And then underneath one of the Sphinxes, you can see a little sign that says the shrapnel holes that you can see in here are little holes that were made as a result of nighttime bombing in 1917 over London.

And the bombs hit a tram and it shot off metal and so on into it. And so you can actually go up to the Sphinx and put your finger through a bomb hole in the...

God, that's out of control today. Well, we've lost Dan, everybody listening.

You didn't see it coming, did you?

You just said you could put your finger in a bombhole.

All innocence.

On time capsules, well, we've got that subject open,

loads of them have been lost.

So there's an international body called the International Time Capsule Society, which set up in 1990, and it reckons that there are 10 to 15,000 capsules worldwide, but that most of them have been forgotten and lost.

Unfortunately, the International Time Capsule Society now says we are not open anymore. We're not open for business.
We'll be open in 2153.

Did you see they accidentally dug up a Blue Peter time capsule at the end of last year or the start of this year? It was under the Millennium Dome, and they accidentally dug it up and damaged it.

And they've taken old bits out and put them in the office, and they're going to rebury them. Yeah, and it's...

I mean, it was buried in 1998 to sort of go under the Millennium Dome, and it is the most 90s collection of things you could find. So here's what they thought was worth it.

I bet you could guess something. Yeah, is it one of the dogs? Yeah, one of the dogs.
One of the Blue Peter dogs.

So it's got to be newspapers of the day. Richard Bacon.

Loads of cocaine.

So bear in mind this was selected by children who were watching Blue Peter in the 90s. Was it not much cocaine?

A small amount of cocaine.

Oh, right, you want an actual guess as well? Yeah, think of some things to do with that. One of those badges.
Yep, Blue Peter badges, absolutely.

But like really 90s things, children's things from the 90s. A Spice Girl.
A Spice Girl, correct. A Spice Girl CD, not bad.
Was it? Yeah, absolutely. It's got a Tamagotchi.

It's got a picture of Tony Blair in a high-viz vest.

And it's got some. One of the great beauties of the day.

It's got some felt from the roof of the Millennium Dome.

What I think is strange is, like this Blue Peter one, for instance, we know what's in it. And they were only planning to open it in 2050 or something.
Yeah.

Presumably, we're still going to know what was in it then. I think what they should do is put stuff in and keep it a secret.
Like the 12 beauties. Who are they? See, that will be a huge reveal.
Yeah.

Yeah.

You know the New York one? So there's a Cleopatra's needle in New York. Yeah.

Egypt has asked for the one in New York back because they're not taking good enough care of it. So this was a couple of years ago.

The Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities wrote a letter to the mayor, who was Bloomberg at the time, saying, I've seen some pictures of the obelisk that we kindly gifted you in the 19th century, and we've noticed that you're not taking good care of it at all.

All the hieroglyphics have rubbed off, it's chipped away at. If you don't remember,

a weird guy sticking his finger in it at various times of day.

And he said we're going to have a duty to come and remove it if you don't soar. Oh, shit out.
One of the first things they did when it arrived in New York was they gave it a thorough cleaning.

They said this is too mucky and it did a huge amount of damage to it.

Yeah, that was pretty much on installation. Oh come on guys.

We think there are only about 28 left aren't there? And

they were all in Egypt, obelisks. And I think Egypt only has six left because it seemed to keep giving them away as thank yous constantly.
The Romans stole loads of them.

I think there are as many in Rome as there are in Egypt now. Yeah.

Did we steal ours? No, we were given it. We were given it for winning those battles.

Yeah. I think we found it though as well.
We uncovered it. It was British archaeologists over there who uncovered it and so said, can we have that? Oh, I didn't know that we found it.
Yeah.

It was found by a circus strongman.

Come on. Yeah.

Why did he not just carry it home?

He might have been able to. He could carry 12 people up on a.
That was part of his act. He would hold people up on stage, 12 people on a sort of platform, and walk across the stage.
Really?

But he studied hydraulics initially, and so that was his thing. So he was one of the most successful archaeologists of his time.
I don't need hydraulics with these arms.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure he was the one who found the obelisks itself. If not, he definitely was very much involved with Cleopatra's needle.
I can't quite remember why, though.

And he was quite strong, so he ruined a lot of things. So to get into so many...
Just kind of leant against the pyramid and it's not really.

Mr. Strong for the Mr.
Men books.

Actually, all the pyramids used to have square sides.

His name was Giovanni Battista Balzoni. He was born in Italy, but he lived over in England.
He was six foot seven tall.

And he was known as the Patagonian Samson when he was a strong man. And he found the tombs of Ramses I.

So he made some mega discoveries, but he used to like battering Ram his way through in order to because he destroyed a lot of. Is that why he wanted the obelisk so he could batter some tombs down?

He just used it as a toothpick.

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Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Jaczinski. My fact this week is that after women stop breastfeeding, their breasts eat themselves.
And

this is something we've just found out about human women.

And it's that, so what happens is when we're breastfeeding, then we have to produce loads of extra cells, which produce the milk for the babies.

And so our breasts have suddenly become full of these cells. And then when you stop breastfeeding, then you're just full of useless cells which die.

And in normal circumstances, if you've got a bit of your body that are full of totally useless dead cells, that would create a huge immuno response to try and clear them up, which would be extremely painful.

There'd be loads and loads of bruising, there'd be tissue damage, because that's just all this dead stuff hanging around in your body that your white blood cells then have to come and eat up.

So it would be really painful. So we've never quite known how it is that once we stop breastfeeding, we're able to get back to normal without any serious problems until now.

And it turns out that they thoughtfully kill each other, these milk-producing cells.

So once you stop breastfeeding, then there's a hormone release, which means that they stay quite close next to each other, the dead cells, and the live ones just swallow them.

And they just keep eating each other and eating each other until there are a few enough left that the white blood cells rock up and swallow the rest. Crikey.
But yeah, our breasts devour themselves.

That is amazing. Breasts are really intelligent when it comes to

producing milk for babies. I asked Ash, so my best friend Ash, he has become a dad recently.

And he'd been telling me a few things while Jackie, his wife, was pregnant about what breastfeeding, how it works.

And he said that basically the nipple sort of listens, listens, not being, you know, obviously it has no ears, but it analyzes baby saliva

to give the appropriate milk. And I looked into it and this is true.
So what it does is little bits of saliva when the baby is sucking on the nipple makes its way into the nipple.

And they say that the breasts and the body of the mum actually manages to sort of diagnose what kind of milk the baby needs in terms of if it's actually a bit ill, it might need these

like the extra antibodies in order to make the baby healthier.

So it kind of it produces whatever kind of concoction of it's really it's really controversial that is it yeah it is so there's there's not been any studies done on it and it's also just very possible and some people think it's much more possible that if you're producing more antibodies it's just because whatever's making the baby ill is also making you ill you've caught the virus and so you're producing antibodies but there's there's a lot of anecdotal evidence you know mothers say that my milk looks different when my baby's sick yeah that was like that famously a mother put a picture up on Facebook which said look at the colour of my milk because it's kind of changed and the suggestion suggestion was that it was changing because it was adding more stuff into it.

So weirdly, science sometimes requires more evidence than a mum's picture on Facebook. It has to be weird.
Honestly, I'm not going to

lying, 70,000.

Oh, well, then that does sound unequivocal.

One thing that's true, and this is not from a mum's Facebook post, is that

no, one thing is that babies can smell breasts very accurately and then home in on them because after a woman's given birth, women give give off from the breast these kind of secretions which babies can smell very clearly and babies can smell them and react to them more strongly than they react to the smell of actual milk.

Oh, wow. So it's like a homing beacon saying there is a breast here, make your way towards it.
And then it's frustrating because most babies can't really move at all.

So they just breast nearby and get really frustrated. There's nothing they can do about it.

When they smell these secretions, they get more interested and they sort of make more, you know, head movements and suckling gestures and things like this than they do even when they smell milk.

So that's how they sort of...

I thought that was really interesting. I was reading about this for the O-series research, actually.
I was looking into ovulating.

But very interesting, and this is related to lactation, that in the olden days when we were a hunter-gatherer society, we menstruated far, far less.

I hardly menstruated all, to be honest.

So we had far fewer menstrual cycles back in the olden days because women would breastfeed for much longer.

So the average in hunter-gatherer societies now and and then, the average length of time you breastfeed for was about three years, whereas now varies a lot, but I think it's about six months here.

And so, you'd either be breastfeeding, which suppresses your periods, or you would be pregnant, where obviously you don't get periods.

And so, someone worked out that back then you'd have about 50 menstrual cycles in your lifetime, which is hardly any, and now we have about 420, 430 menstrual cycles.

And we're just not evolved to be able to cope with these constant, wild fluctuations of estrogen and progesterone, because we're not supposed to be doing that.

It's supposed to be kind of an occasional thing between being pregnant and breastfeeding.

And then you're dead at the age of 25 or 30. So

everything really drops off in all departments after that.

I was reading about let down. It's a phrase called let down.
And I think that I've heard it before, Dan. I've heard the phrase so many times.

But it's obviously four people around the microphones right now who don't have children.

So the what we might we might be saying a lot of very obvious things to parents in this chat, but I'd not heard of this. Just check it on Facebook and see if anyone's mentioned it.

So

it's the fact that lactating can happen not just when the baby latches on to the breast, but things can spark it off.

For example, if you show a mum a picture of her baby, she might let some milk loose just purely by seeing the photo. Isn't that incredible? Wow.
Yeah.

Or even if she hears another baby cry because of a primal urge to soothe a child, knowing that soothes, might just release some milk.

Again, obviously, most mums and fathers around the world are going, yeah, we know this, but I'd never heard that before.

I remember reading a year or two ago about the idea, there was a study done that a lot of babies, especially mammals, I think, all kind of cry at similar frequencies.

And I can't remember why that would happen. Maybe you would look after other species.
Yeah, that's what that would imply, isn't it?

Yeah, so if if you're a stoat, if you're a baby stoat, you cry in the hope that there'll be A, your mum, B, another stoat, or C, a weasel passing by. Or any mum alive.

And did you see that thing this week, speaking of nursing other species?

The woman in Peru who was being interviewed about floods in Peru at the moment, which are devastating agriculture, things like that, and she was holding a piglet.

And as the interviewer was interviewing her, she lifted up her shirt and just started circling the pig on her own breast. And the cameraman's so tactful.

The camera swings away from that image faster than you can think.

He just suddenly takes a real interest in the surrounding scenery.

It's very weird. So there are obviously loads and loads and loads of stories about breastfeeding.
You know, saints who miraculously started lactating when they were starving in the desert.

So one of them is a Christian holy woman, Christine the Astonishing. I seem to remember, could Christine the Astonishing fly as well? From her name, I wouldn't be surprised by anything she could do.

I have a feeling she was in a church once and she flew up into the eaves of the church.

So, also in the Bible, they used to depict the Virgin Mary breastfeeding Jesus, but sometimes they didn't want her breasts to seem sexy, so they put her breasts on her collarbone instead of at breast level.

Yeah, so there are all these pictures of that. Isn't that less sexy? I suppose it is less sexy, isn't it?

It's more weird, isn't it? Which makes it a bit less sexy. Yeah.
Yeah.

That's really funny. So, there are all these pictures of her having a breast way up here and Jesus feeding on them.

Did you know that opossums, so you know, opossums look like possums, but American,

their nipples grow up to 35 times their original length when they're being circled? Do they start off really small or do they get really, really long?

They're quite normal size, they get incredibly long. Silly baby opossums climb up into their mother's pouch when they're very undeveloped and they have to latch on immediately.

And if you don't find a nipple really quickly, you die straight away.

So you latch on and they latch on and then the nipple swells up inside their mouth so they're locked on and they stay locked on for two months. So it becomes like an umbilical cord.

It grows up to 35 times its own length down into

the body. Yeah, yeah.
What? That is not sexy. Oh my god, yeah.

It's weird, isn't it? And because it's so swollen up inside it, it's so latched on. If you try to detach one from the other, then you tear, you know, you'd tear the nipple because they're locked.

They're locked tight. Nope, no, no, no, no, no.

No, thank you.

Do you know the effect that breasts have on men? Yeah.

Well, they have done experiments on men who they divided men into two groups, normal men and pervert. No.

They asked them to do the experiment, like, you know, the experiment with children, we have a marshmallow now or two marshmallows later. So they said you can have one breast now or two breasts later?

No, they asked them if they would be willing to delay gratification, get a small cash amount now or a large cash amount later Right and then they show the two groups of men two different films one of them was a woman running along a beach in slow motion like in Baywatch and the other was some countryside right

and the men who watched the

countryside was there anything was it just was just a piglet there were no piglets

there were no rotting boars

no so just like boring countryside and the men who watched the baywatch style video were much likelier to take the small payout now rather than wait and defer their gratification.

So it's believed that the sort of the neurochemical circuits of the brain get hijacked, and they're basically saying, pleasure, now, take pleasure now. Oh, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah. Okay.

When I was researching this, I remembered a scene that I watched in a movie called The Last Emperor, which is about the Chinese, the final Chinese Emperor before Mao Zitong kicked him out of power.

And

there's a scene in it where he's quite old and he's being breastfed by one of his nurses.

and he's he's like eight nine something like that in there um so i quickly looked into it and that was a thing of chinese emperors that you can actually see um this really cool um looking device which is a big steel thing with a hole in the middle and women who were basically auditioning their breasts for the emperor would come to have their breasts checked yeah and to see if they were giving enough milk and so on so they would they would audition people and be like you've why would you have a breast factor basically why would they need the steel with the hole in the middle?

You don't need to put your breast through a hole in order to breastfeed.

Unless it was like the voice where you're not allowed to see their faces.

No, so it wasn't a full steel door.

It was just for the breast and there was a hole at the front where presumably the name was.

How big was it?

I would say

a hardback book. Like the private eye annual.
Like the.

No, smaller than the private eye annual. Oh, okay.
No, I'm kidding.

The third book of General Ignorance. Whereas the previous books of General Ignorance were a smaller format edition.

All available at qi.com forward slash shop. And that is the worst plug for anything.
One up our books, which are of different sizes to the breastplates formerly used to feed the Emperor.

Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Shreiberland, James, at Eggshaped, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M. And Shaczinski.
You can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, qi podcast, or you can go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com. We will be back again next week with another episode.
We will see you then. Goodbye.

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