91: No Such Thing As Apocalypse 1988

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with Ann Miller, James Harkin 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, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that The Very Hungry Caterpillar was originally called A Week with Willie the Worm.

Guys.

Quite a different book, that sounds like.

Yeah, how similar was it to the story about a caterpillar?

Well, it was a different ending, but it was a similar.

The worm didn't turn into a butterfly.

No, the worm didn't turn into a butterfly.

The book was written by a guy called Eric Carl, and he was inspired by a hole punch.

He noticed that the hole was going through some paper, and he thought, what if I turn this into a book?

And so he thought, well, I could do a bookworm that goes through the holes.

And so that's why it was called Willie the Bookworm.

And then I think it was his publisher came up to him and said, well, why don't you change it instead of a worm into a caterpillar?

And he thought, aha, caterpillars turn into butterflies.

Spoiler alerts.

I could do that at the end of my book.

Okay.

Do we know?

Was it going to be like Monday, Willie the Worm goes to the shops, Tuesday,

stays in bed all day?

It just seems, I don't know why you spend a week with Willie the Worm.

This is the worst Craig David song in the world.

There are some quite traumatizing children's books out there.

There's one that's like about the journey of a sperm, which is really popular at the moment.

I don't know what the sperm is.

It's called Where Willie Went.

I think it is, which is actually very misleading, calling it Willie.

I think that is going to confuse a lot of children.

I saw a picture of that book, Where Willie Went.

It's called The Big Story of a Little Sperm, and on the front cover it says, The best story of its sort, The Daily Mail.

So it's like, This is the best children's book about sperm books.

In the genre that is out there, children's sperm books.

Last year's best-selling UK child author.

Deal Williams.

Yeah.

He made 7 million last year off book sales.

£7 million.

Yes.

He needs to get out of the podcasting game and into the children's books game.

Yeah.

So his books get something like 600,000 sales each.

Like he's got about eight books.

It's ridiculous.

So I didn't look into books because I'm bored of them.

I don't read.

I had enough of books.

I just looked at worms.

Oh, yeah.

Anyone else interested in worms?

Yeah, definitely.

So have you ever tried worm fiddling?

No.

What's that?

Worm charming.

Well, worm charming, worm fiddling, and worm grunting are all very similar.

So worms, I don't think we know why, but when you create vibrations in the ground, then worms come up to the surface.

And so the way you worm fiddle or you worm grunt, which is like getting worms up to the surface, is by making vibrations in the ground.

And they think it might be because moles, when they're coming to attack worms,

they burrow towards them, make vibrations, so they come up.

Another theory is that they think it's rain coming down.

Yeah.

And so they're going out so that they don't drown.

We think on the other end, whenever a tractorite plows a field, that's a vibration.

So the worms get exposed, but then they get eaten by all those that are always following.

Exactly.

And the birds are extremely good at it, like the seagull dance that you often see them doing, where they bounce around on the floor a little bit to get the worms to come up.

But so worm grunting, charming, fiddling, whatever, is kind of a competitive sport.

And the person who holds the record for it is a ten-year-old girl who set it in two thousand nine in Cheshire and she brought up five hundred and sixty-seven worms.

Wow.

Out of that ground

on this little portion of land.

There was one year, I think it was like two or three years ago at the World Worm Charming, where no one got a single worm in the entire group of charmers.

Well, maybe that's why they've got more imaginative in how to get them up.

Apparently, in the competition that this girl won, techniques to get the worms up included a man who strummed rock tunes on his guitar, a woman who tap-danced to the theme from Star Wars, and a man who played the xylophones with bottles.

None of whom actually won, but it does sound like a really entertaining event.

And what did she do again?

She just did.

The common way is you tap the ground with sort of a single.

But she just went classic on it.

She She went classic.

I had a wee look at Eric Carl's website and his frequently asked questions.

Can you guess what one of his frequently asked questions about the hungry caterpillar is?

The one problem with the hungry caterpillar?

It's that it comes out of a cocoon, not a chrysalis.

Okay.

So usually butterflies come from chrysalises, but there is one called the Parnacean that comes in a cocoon.

So if no one's quibbling.

I bet that was a good idea.

It's okay.

Frantically looked to how he could.

Yeah, they live in Siberia.

Cool.

No, actually, I based it on a Siberian caterpillar.

But he also says,

and here's my unscientific explanation: My caterpillar is very unusual.

Caterpillars don't eat lollipops and ice cream, so you won't find my caterpillar in any field guides.

Right.

I fucked up, right?

Yeah.

I fucked up.

I should have said that.

I said this.

Just leave it.

There are kids on his website, James.

Such an angry man.

He's so angry, isn't he?

He's so angry also.

He's

a national treasure and beloved by children.

Yeah, but he's got to curb the language.

It's not appropriate for an FAQ on your own website.

Can I just quickly tell you about one really terrifying worm?

I know I keep on trying to rebound this conversation back to worms.

But there is this worm called the Bobbit Worm, which lives on the bottom of the ocean.

Oh, is he named after Lorena Bobbitt?

I don't know who that is.

Is that a reference from the 50s, James?

Is it John Wayne Bobbitt?

Yeah, so Lorena Bobbitt was John Wayne Bobbitt's wife, who chops off his penis.

That makes sense.

Maybe he's named after a decapitated penis.

Was it by any chance a 10-foot-long penis?

Wow, not by the time she got it up.

It is 10-foot-long.

It lived on the bottom of the ocean and it lives under the sand at the bottom of the ocean.

And then when prey comes past, it pops up and snaps its jaws down so fast that it can cut fish straight in half.

Wow.

And then it sucks them.

So if you're cut in half, you're dead already, which is good for you.

And if you're not, it sucks you down into the sand, under sand, and eats you.

I just think a 10-foot-long worm that can cut fish in half is a pretty cool worm.

I have a more scary worm than that, even, I think.

Oh, yeah.

This is a colonoscopy-performing robot

that moves through your body in the same way that an earthworm moves.

Well, as in, they've actually made the movement of it to mimic it.

To mimic an earthworm.

Wow, that's quite scary.

Is there any reason they're sending robots into my body?

Or

for medical purposes?

It's not an Anne Summers Summers product.

The 10-foot one.

Yeah, we'll be.

Give it a year.

I like this.

I clicked on the Mongolian death worm, which I think we've discussed before.

Oh, we have, by the way, interesting fact.

I was going to mention it, but Andy has banned me from ever talking about the Mongolian death worm.

Here's your chance.

He's not here.

I've used it like three times.

For listeners who haven't heard it, it's a worm from Mongolia that shoots lightning bolts out of its anus.

A disgusting creature that fires lightning out of its anus.

Andy Murray will be back next week.

week.

Yeah.

We should move on soon, shouldn't we?

Oh, should we?

Okay.

We can do more worms.

I've got a few more kid book things.

One is one's a question, which is, J.K.

Rowling has said that she regrets killing one character from Harry Potter.

I want to see if anyone can guess.

Is it Harry Potter?

Does he die?

James.

So I can't answer that for spoiler alert reasons.

And I actually didn't, I didn't write down his name, but he's a random ice cream man, right?

Laurian Fortescue.

Right, so yeah, it's just a total random character, but it's because it was a senseless killing.

She didn't bring it back into the story in any way.

She didn't justify the killing for any reason.

She just had him killed.

She was just having a bad day.

Someone had ran into her website saying, Your wizards aren't actually technically wizards, and she just lost it.

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that is N.

My fact is that in World War II, the 20 Committee was in charge of turning German spies.

In Roman numerals, that made them the XX Committee or the Double Cross Committee.

Which basically means at peak wartime, someone thought, you know what's good here?

A pun.

Did they do it on purpose then?

I'm not.

So I heard this, I went to Bletchley Park the other week and I got told this on the walking tour, which is brilliant.

But I have read recently that they were double crossed first and then changed 20 after.

So either way, it's the double cross pun and then 20 first, making it less obvious.

But it was hiding in plain sight.

And is there a one to 19?

I don't know.

I like to think that just was 20.

And someone said that works.

I don't know about 1 to 19, actually.

I think, I don't, well, I know the guy who oversaw it was this guy called Tar

Robertson who was the MI5 agent who overlooked it and he would have done it on purpose because

so wartime rules dictated that spy code names couldn't have a hint of the person's actual identity in them and he disregarded these rules completely and made his own rule that every single spy name had to be a pun, a hint as to his actual name or a joke.

Amazing, what was he called?

He was called Tarr Robertson actually and I don't think he gave himself I think he gave himself a perfectly like impossible to uncover name But so it was like Dusko Popov was his second in command and he called him Scoot because he

popoff.

Nice.

Although he then later changed his code name to Tricycle because he was known for having threesons.

I have Tricycle.

I have that Arthur Owens was one of the first agents they turned on this and his code name was Snow, which is most of the letters of his surname.

Yes.

Yeah.

But he was great because he was one of the first ones to work for this committee.

And he was very useful because the Abwehr, the Germans, used him as their meeting weight for new agents arriving in Britain.

So everyone that came in to spy for them went through him.

He was reporting to MI5 so he could just let them know what was going on.

So just to give this a bit more context, this is World War II.

Bletchley Park had set up.

They were trying to sort of get a lot of tricks over on the Germans, and a lot of German agents were coming into Britain and immediately either being caught or giving themselves up and then acting as double agents and going back to Germany or sending messages back.

And it was a huge part of the war.

I mean, it led to some of the biggest moments in the war, like the D-Day.

Yeah, the D-Day justified it.

I have read one really good book extract which is basically saying this was this ridiculous sideshow with these idiots playing spy games for the whole war, mostly pointless, and the only reason we now look back on them with this air of God they saved us is because of D-Day.

Like there was one instance where we tried to persuade the Germans that we were going to be attacking the French coast at a certain place and so we sent out all these secret radio signals hoping they'd pick them up and stuff and they'd get all their troops there and then we sent some dummy boats out towards the French coast so it seemed like we were going to attack and they hadn't picked up on any of these things we planted in their radio waves, so we just spent ridiculous amounts of money and effort on absolutely nothing.

One of my favourite double agents was a guy who was codenamed Garbo.

So he was a guy called Jual Pujel Garcia from Barcelona.

He was anti-communist, anti-Nazi, and wanted to work for the British.

But he thought he'd be more helpful if he was already a German spy.

So he got himself recruited by telling them he had a visa and was going to England anyway.

Didn't have the visa.

So he would spend all his time in Lisbon Library making up stuff for his spy network and research lines, including including things like, There are in Glasgow men who will do anything for a litre of wine.

And his reports were so accurate.

That was a lie, was it?

That was his impression from Lisbon of what life in Britain was like.

But his reports were so accurate, MI5 got really worried and started hunting for this mole in the UK because they thought stuff was getting out.

He was just making it all up.

And then in the end, he managed to get recruited by Britain, came over here to spy, told the Germans he had 24 spies, this big network, and because it was backed up by the British, whenever he killed someone off, they put their obituary in the paper so it would look legit to the Germans.

And on D-Day, he was telling his contracts to to stand by for an important message to distract them from what was actually happening.

And they never found out when he got honours after the war for his efforts by the Germans.

I didn't know that thing about all the names had to be a slight pun.

And I've got a big list of names of some of the spies.

And is it all falling into place now?

Slightly.

I mean, you've got to sort of know what they did.

Like, I don't know what Biscuit did, ate a lot of snacks.

I can presume what the spy Careless did.

Got fired.

Yeah.

Freak.

Not sure what he did.

Gander.

Oh, Gand I can tell you, Gander.

Yeah.

Gander was just Kurt Goose.

Which I would have been so annoyed if I was called Kurt Goose, and my boss said, I'm going to give you the code name Gander.

I think I'd be saying, Do you mind giving me a slightly less obvious code name?

Well, how about this one?

Sniper.

I wonder if the idea is because, like, in those days, there would have been a stereotype that Germans don't have a sense of humor, probably.

And they thought by doing puns, they'll never get these puns because Germans don't have a sense of humor.

I bet they had that chat in the MI5 MI5 HQ.

Mullet.

I'm going to guess that one's hair-based.

Well, the word mullet about hair only dates back to the 1980s.

That was the earliest anyone's ever found it is in a song by the Beastie Boys, and no one's ever found an earlier use of the word mullet.

So, Beastie Boys technically coined mullets.

Yeah, actually, it might even be the 90s.

So, the first German spies who came over were ill-prepared, right?

They couldn't speak any English, a lot of them, or spoke really bad English, to the extent that MI5 thought that they were joking, thought that they were lying, and used to interrogate them and say, Obviously, you know, Germany wouldn't be stupid enough to send a spy who could not speak any English.

But yeah, isn't that bizarre?

Yeah.

So with Bletchley, when they set this up, the way that they started recruiting people was through a crossword that they put out in the papers.

And they set a challenge saying, if people think that they can do a crossword within twelve minutes, come and take this challenge.

So people came and they did the challenge.

And after they won, they were then re-contacted saying, listen, you managed to do do this.

Why don't we get you to work at Bletchley?

And they reprinted the crossword.

You can try the crossword and see if you can do it in 12 minutes.

Yeah.

I send off crosswords to the Sunday Times and Telegraph when I've done them, and I do it in the secret hope that one day I am going to get a phone call.

I mean, they do invite you to send them off to win a fountain pen.

It's not like I'm just sending unsolicited posts every week.

How many pens do you have?

I've never won a pen, I won a notebook.

I've never once successfully got the clue to a crossword right, ever.

What a cryptic.

I have any crossword, and I've tried.

That's exactly what a spy would say, though, wouldn't they?

I am so bad at crosswords, they would never recruit me.

The day I find out Dan Schreiber is a spy is the day I booked my ticket to Mars one away.

Well, here's another bit of evidence.

He doesn't really speak very good English.

Would a spy say cover guard?

Yeah.

So no one knows where we are.

It's an act of genius.

Surname Schreiber, German surname.

What does that mean again?

Schreiber.

Writer.

Writer.

Writer.

Yeah, just saying.

And that was an ironic kind of pun, right?

When they gave you that.

This is all falling into place.

There's this book called Double Cross, the True Story of D-Day Spies.

It's by a guy called Ben McIntyre, and I would highly recommend it.

It's full of really exciting spies.

Yeah, could I just say as well?

He wrote a book called Agent Zigzag, one of the best non-fiction books I've read about spying.

It reads like an Indiana Jones novel based on one of these agents, Agent Zigzag.

Yeah, he's awesome.

But so he tells this story about a spy called Augusta Caroly, who was a German spy who was parachuted into the Northamptonshire countryside.

He got concussed because he had a bad landing and he tried to sleep off his concussion in a ditch.

A farmer saw his leg poking out, and so he was arrested.

But then it was great being arrested as a spy in those days because you'd immediately have the government going, well, do you want to just be a spy for us instead?

So he was arrested.

and agreed to be a double agent for Britain.

But he agreed at first and then he sort of changed his mind and decided he was betraying the Nazis.

So he was in a safe house in Cambridge and he was given a minder,'cause double agents had minders to check they weren't going rogue and uh he crept up behind his minder while he was playing patience and tried to throttle him with a piece of rope.

When this didn't work, he apologised, tied him to a chair, and ran off with a tin of pilchards, a pineapple and a large canvas canoe.

Then he stole a motorbike and rode towards the coast with the canoe balanced on his head with the plan to row to Holland.

He fell off the motorbike, unsurprisingly I guess,

And then he approached a passing man and asked him to help him dispose of his canoe over a hedge.

At which point, when the man had helped him do that, this man called the police and said, A guy with a German accent on a motorbike and a canoe on his head just asked me to help him dispose of his canoe.

Does that sound right?

And then the quote from this book was, clearly unfit for double agent work, he spent the rest of the war in prison.

I like to think that if he'd have gotten to the coast, he would have gotten his canoe and put the motorbike on his head and rode across

This, I feel like you've told me this before, Anne, but I don't think it's been on our show, which is that at one point when Bletchley was going on, Agatha Christie, yeah, so she got investigated.

Do you want to tell the story?

It's really interesting.

Well, so Agatha Christie had a friend who actually worked at Bletchley, who was very much a part of the Enigma code cracking team.

And she released a book called N or M, and in it, there's a character called Major Bletchley.

And everyone got really worried that this guy, Dilly Knox, his name was, was leaking information about Bletchley to Agatha Christie.

And it turns out that what happened was she was on a train heading back to London from Oxford, and it stopped for ages at Bletchley.

And she got so annoyed by being stopped and the delay that she said, I'm going to name the worst character in my book after this crappy town that we've been stuck in.

And so it was just a total coincidence.

Bletchley isn't on the way from Oxford to London.

She's a spy.

She's obviously a spy.

Come on.

She's a best excuse ever.

And I can't believe James and I are the first ones to spot that Bletchley's my did she mean Reading?

All the spies were in Reading Park and we've just been mishearing some of these

Just a couple of things on punning

obviously a pun in the name.

So there's a pun in the book of Genesis

Bible.

Problem is that puns that are written in different languages aren't very good to repeat on this podcast because we can't get them unless I explain the language to you.

But so it's that the word for cunning, which describes the serpent, is very similar to the word for naked.

So the words are arum and aramim.

And so I think it's the idea is maybe that it's a pun saying that the serpent is very close with its evil, is actually very close to these naked people who are about to be evil.

So that's very, very funny for the blind people.

Yep, they did.

Okay, time for fact number three, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that houses in Bali are built in proportion to the owner's body.

That's incredible.

It's so cool.

But what does it mean?

I don't actually know what it means.

Does it mean if you have a big head, they do a big roof or something?

It's kind of like that, except it's not quite laid out like that.

You obviously haven't spoken to Balinese architects, but it's similar.

Shake your head in shame, James.

So they employ a special kind of architect who's called an undagi, and the first thing he does when you employ him to come and build your household is he measures all your body parts and works out, and and by those measurements, he can work out what shape and size to make the house.

So he'll measure different parts of the head, he measures the distance from the elbow to the fingers, I think, the width of the fist, the length of the index finger, the width of the little finger, and all these measurements determine the size of the compound and the dimensions inside of like pavilions and the spacing of different pillars.

The width of the beds even is determined by, you know, the width of a fingernail or whatever.

It's so weird.

That's amazing.

Yeah, it's really cool.

And there's a bit, so part of the house represents the head, and that's where the head of the family should stay, because they think that the head is the most sacred part of the body, it's the best bit.

And then the feet are where sort of the cows and the pig, if you've got, if you own farm animals, the foot area of the house is where they stay.

And then it's got an anus area, which is where the rubbish is, and which is where they measure the house.

They measure the size of your anus.

I believe they have to.

Wow.

Otherwise, you can't build a proper house.

That's amazing.

I mean, I'm assuming that's not every single house in Bali.

I've been to Bali and I've never seen the measurements.

No, it's traditional houses.

Because

if you didn't know who had done that process and not, and you got to their house and you saw at the back there was a massive rubbish bit, Mike's got a massive anus.

I had no idea.

Is he okay?

There's three skips in there.

Yeah, I don't know if they do that.

I wonder if you'd be able to go to a house, measure all the rooms, and say, oh, this person must have slightly above average size head,

large anus, whatever, large feet, so it's going to be Jeff or whatever.

Yeah, or maybe there's a, if you take your girlfriend home, then she brings a tape measure and you find her measuring the sort of protruded extension at some point.

And that's how you judge a man, isn't it?

What?

You mean it's like, you know what they say about men with large areas for their pigs and cattle?

Huge feet.

Protruding extension.

By the way, Jeff and Mike, not very Balinese names that we've picked for these examples, but Balinese names are really interesting.

So I used to go to Bali a lot as a child because I grew up in Hong Kong.

It was very close.

And so we used to go a lot because Hong Kong being a concrete jungle, you sort of wanted to get away from the city.

And that was a nice place that you could get to very easy.

And the names there, so they're kind of given the same names.

This is traditionally, so I don't want to speak as if everyone's got this, but Wayan is a name name that I've known since childhood because everyone I've met there is called Wayan.

It's the oldest.

The first son is called Wayan.

There's a few other options for that as well, but Wayan is the big one.

Secondborn names, Madi, and Wayan's for guys, by the way.

Then you've got the thirdborns, the fourthborns, and that's all that the list goes up to.

So then if you have a fifth child, they just call it Wayan and then use the word for again in Balinese.

So it's Wayan again.

So the word for the name for a fourth child, the ones that Dan's just listed there have a few alternatives.

So you can say Wayan, and then there are a couple of other synonyms that they say.

So you can have one of two or three names.

But if you're the fourth born, there's only one name.

And I think that's because at the time this system was set up, they wanted to discourage people from having too many kids.

So they were like, look, you're fourth kid, you've only got one option for the name.

And that option is ketut, and it means little banana.

It was in the smallest banana at the end of the bunch.

So every single fourth child is called little banana.

That's much sweeter than that.

Do you remember the thing we had about Victorian slang for the youngest child?

What was that?

Last Shake of the Bag.

Oh, yeah.

Nice on Victorians.

I just, this is completely off topic, but I was reading about it today.

If you read any old kind of Guinness Book of Records, there's often the woman with most children.

And she was Russian.

She was from St.

Petersburg.

I can't remember her name.

Valentina, maybe it was something.

Maybe Valentina...

Vasilyev or something.

Anyway, so she had 67 children, if I remember rightly.

a lot of them were triplets and um you know twins i bet she's got a big garbage jump hasn't she

yeah but what i what i learned um today is that her husband after um he left her and then went to another woman and had 18 children with her

Wow.

But it's like 19th century, so I think we're not 100% sure if it's all true, but there are some contemporary reports about it.

Wow.

So it's possible that everyone in St.

Petersburg is descended from that one man.

That is

the logical conclusion.

So in Bali, they have sort of an inbuilt sense of direction.

It's one of the first things you learn is your sense of direction.

And anthropological accounts will say that if a traditional Balinese person

moves to a place where they're not sure about their orientation and they get really disoriented, then that can make them feel really uncomfortable.

You mean like it's you always know which way is north, kind of thing?

You always know which way is north, except if you go to Bali and you ask which way is north, sometimes they'll point south

because

these people have an extraordinary way of telling where's north.

Why do they point south?

So the reason they point south is actually because the equivalent north in Bali is actually just towards their biggest mountain.

So and the biggest mountain in Bali is right in the middle.

And so, it's not actually north, it's Kaja.

But that's often translated in English as north.

And most people live in the south of Bali, so Kaja is usually north.

But if you're in North Bali and they say Kaja, then they mean south towards the mountain.

And all of the orientation is based on towards the mountain or towards the

but I reckon if I had to point towards the largest feature in my island,

I would be able to do that because it's a massive mountain.

You just go, look, it's there.

Just stop doing down the innate sense of direction.

They shouldn't point to Ben Nevis.

Yeah, they can't all see it.

They can't all see it, although I did read something that said that Balinese people who live nearer other mountains use that mountain instead as north.

Is this Mount Agung?

Yes.

Yes, okay, so Mount Agung, it's twice the size of Ben Nevis.

Can you see it from everywhere?

Can you see it?

I feel like it was always.

No,

there's obviously bits where you just go way too far, and it's just whatever fog might take over or something like that.

But

yeah,

that erupts quite, it used to erupt quite a lot.

I I remember as kids, when we used to go past it, we were always really scared because they said, well, it's still active.

And that's not what you want to hear.

And I asked my dad, what would we do in the situation?

He said, well, I'd grab your sister and run.

And I'd go, what about me?

So in the scenario of death, I was being left behind by my dad.

That's why I learned that.

At least he was honest with you.

Yeah.

Shall we move on?

Just on buildings related to body parts quickly.

China now, the Chinese government now has a ban on building eccentric buildings because people keep building buildings they consider embarrassing.

One of them was built by a British company and it's called the pair of pants.

It's been called the pair of pants.

It used to be called the Gate of the Orient building because it looks like a giant pair of trousers.

And lots of people in the area complained it's in Suzhou in China.

And local bystanders are raging that it's just a big pair of pants as soon as the legs were joined together.

And they say, I just feel like I'm humiliated as I walk under someone's crotch.

And so the Chinese government said, look, no more embarrassing buildings wow yeah shame they did a few years ago in South Sudan do you remember when they got their independence they decided they were going to build all of their cities in the shape of animals wow so they were going to move their capital from

oh god the capital is juba i think they were going to move it to a new city which was shaped like a giraffe or an elephant or something.

The city was shaped like a giraffe.

Yeah, and they would put like the president's palace would be in the eye of the elephant or giraffe and the waste disposal would be where the anus would be.

Cool.

There's like the streets would be the light elephant.

Yeah, but they never did it because basically it would cost like £20 billion to do it.

And they're the poorest country in the world, so they never did it.

But they thought it might get like tourists in and stuff.

I got to visit the giraffe town.

I don't know if you would if it was in the South Sudan.

I'd be tempted to pop in if I was ever going from Oxford to London.

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

And my fact this week is that, according to Isaac Newton, the world is going to end in 2060.

Okay.

And he knew a lot.

So

do we believe it?

No, okay, so we definitely definitely shouldn't believe it.

It's interesting that he just made that prediction, though.

And he, because obviously we all know, if you've looked into Newton's life, that he was obviously this great scientist, but he also believed in a lot of, I don't know, alchemy and

mystical sort of stuff.

Crazy shit.

Crazy stuff, yeah.

And he also, but the Bible was one thing that he really loved analysing.

And this is where he got the date 2060 from.

He was analyzing the Bible and he was trying to work out when the end of the world would be.

Didn't he say that 2060 is just the earliest that it might end?

I think he said it may end later, but I see no reason for it ending sooner than 2060.

Yeah, he also said it was to put a stop to the rash conjectures of fanciful men who are frequently predicting the time of the end, and by doing so bring the sacred prophecies into discredit as often as their predictions fail.

I should rephrase my fact.

According to Isaac Newton, the world will end in 2060 or sometime in between then and the end of the universe.

Well, actually, no.

I think one of the leading Newton scholars who's called Snowballen said has worked out exactly what he meant by it and says he thought the world was going to end sometime between 2060 and 2344.

Okay.

So it's in that window.

Okay, that's a good idea apparently.

But yeah, I think it was just, it was sort of rough scribblings, wasn't it?

It wasn't really ever meant to be published.

You scribbled it on the back of an envelope, literally, I think.

And it might have just been to put off, as Anne says, all of these scaremongers who kept on predicting the end of the world.

And he really got very annoyed about that, all these prophecies that were saying the world's going to end.

So he thought the way to counter that is for me to prophesise when the world's going to end.

You also need to put it way out of his own lifetime, so no one can say you were wrong.

Yeah, but so he was a truly interesting character for outside of his work in science.

Interestingly, his most famous work,

which I find hard to say, Principia,

almost didn't get published.

How come?

Because a book just before it that was published was called History of Fishes or Historia Paseum and it bankrupts basically the whole of the world.

And

I was like, to publish another book.

It bankrupted the whole world.

And somehow the world pulled the cash together.

Yeah, and they got the money together eventually, and so it was published.

What do you actually mean by that?

No, it was to do with the Royal Society, yeah.

So they had funding for publishing books, and they thought this book on fishes was going to be massive, and it tanked.

No one bought it.

So it basically delayed the publication of Prince of Peace, so they weren't able to do it.

And then Edmund Halley stood in and he said that I think this book should be published, and he even put in some of his own money.

And so it was eventually published in 1687.

But there was a point where it wasn't going to be published because of the situation that they were in.

That's really interesting.

Yeah.

I have another Royal Society book, which is that there was a bit of, well, today it's generally accepted that both Newton and Leibniz came up with calculus independently.

But there was a while when they were sort of, they set set up basically the Royal Society in 1713 set up a committee to decide once and for all who'd done it, who, and they found that it was Newton.

Chair of the committee, Newton, Newton,

like, I think it was me, you're fine.

But he had a like he had a lot of professional rivalries, really bitter one with Hook.

Hook is the one I remember.

Hook's his main one.

And actually, Hook he gets everywhere.

Peter Pan pisses off.

Newton.

He's a bad guy.

The crocodile.

I think Hook might be the good guy.

No, it's hard to to say who's the good guy in this.

I think they're both not very good guys, actually.

Yeah, okay.

So he, yeah, he had this dispute with Hooke, and it was about when he came up with his theory of gravity, and Hooke said that actually Newton got part of this idea from me about how gravity decreases.

The inverse square law.

The inverse square law, precisely.

Don't explain that.

We all know that.

Dan and I are fine.

Don't want to patronise anyone.

And yeah, Newton just wrote this letter saying he had absolutely nothing to do with it, and I don't need to include him in my book.

But there is a theory that, you know, the quote that Newton is most famous for saying, which is...

Your mum is so fat that a theory is

your mum is so fat that the gravity decreases by the inverse of the square of the distance as I move away from her.

Was that it?

Sorry, guys.

His most famous quote is, if I have seen further, it is standing on the shoulders of giants.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

And he wrote that to Robert Hooke in a letter where he was saying, you know,

it's been a real help having you guys around.

If I've seen further, it's by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Some people believe, actually, this was just a jibe at Hook because Hook had a quite serious back problem, which caused him to have a really massive hunchback.

And so some people have now speculated.

You look like a stepladder.

No?

I don't get it.

What's the jibe?

So he's thanking the giants, but not Hook, because he's too small.

He's too small.

Yeah.

You're not one of those giants.

Yeah, not like, it's nice that you're bending over so I can climb onto your shoulders.

So I found a list.

Have you guys read this list that he wrote when he was about 20 years old?

Yes, I love it.

Incredible.

It's such an insight to him.

His sins.

What are your favourite ones?

My favourite is threatening my father and mother Smith to burn them in the house over them.

Yeah.

That's pretty vicious.

The next one is wishing death and hoping it to some.

Wow.

Eating an apple at thy house.

Probably the apple.

Carter ate it.

Was that so?

You're not allowed to eat an apple in church?

Well, I guess at the time.

You focused on praying, not your belly.

24, punching my sister.

25, robbing my mother's box of plums and sugar.

Yeah.

Oh, is that some kind of weird euphemism?

No.

So making jam.

But making jam is a euphemism.

There you go.

People have speculated about his relationship with his mother.

It was very difficult and twisted.

A lot of people have Freudianly decided that he has mother issues, and that's why he remained a virgin his whole life, which he did, didn't he?

He never really had an attachment to women because they think.

And he hated his stepfather.

Oh, he didn't like his sister much because he punched her.

No, that was a sign of affection in the 17th century.

Playful punching.

Okay, going on to the end of the world?

Yeah, yeah.

There's a book called 88 Reasons The Rapture Will Be in 1988 by Edgar Wiesant,

which I really like.

And on Amazon, there's some one-star reviews.

In fact, there's only two reviews, and they're both one-star reviews.

And one of the reviews is: Really, it's impossible to give this a positive review, given that it exists entirely to preach that the rapture will be happening in 1988.

As I recall, the rapture did not occur in 1988.

But yeah, this guy, Edgar Weissam, was quite famous at the time, but obviously in 1989, they realized that he was wrong.

But then his next book was called Rapture Report 1989.

And then he also wrote another one called 23 Reasons It Looks Like the End of the World Will Occur on Rosh Hash Hana 1993,

and another one called Earth's Destruction by Fire, Nuclear Bonfire, Prediction for 1994.

Is it an annual?

It is phenomenal how these people manage to, if it doesn't, when it doesn't happen, to say, oh, yeah, we just got the numbers wrong, and the next time there's always a big fuss again, or there's a news story, and people panic.

What I realize is this guy in New Hampshire who set up a business called Eternal Earthbound Pets, which will look after the pets.

If you believe you're going to be raptured, you pay him to look after your pet because the ones who stay behind can feed the cats.

And he's told the Wall Street Journal that the people who pay him will be disappointed twice.

Once because they weren't raptured, and again, because I don't do refunds.

But actually, he admitted that that was a hoax a bit later on.

Oh, no.

Well, it was because the state insurance department came after him and said, oh, you seem to be selling insurance, but you're not really registered to sell insurance, are you?

He said he's had no clients, never issued a certificate, and he's not taken a single dollar in the three years of its existence.

So the payments are going well.

Sure.

It is really interesting, though, that whole

when you've predicted the rapture comes and it doesn't, what do you do after that?

And I think that was one of the spurs for psychological analysis of cognitive dissonance, which is the thing where you sort of adjust reality in your mind to suit what you've expected, because humans find it so hard to deal with facts that don't accord with what they thought was the truth.

And so I think this was expanded in 1954 when Dorothy Martin said that she'd received news from the planet Clarion that a bunch of aliens were going to come down in a flying saucer and beam up everyone who collected in a certain area.

And she gathered quite a few followers.

And on Christmas Eve, they all went to this area to be beamed up by a flying saucer.

And they sung some Christmas carols.

And the flying saucer didn't come.

And what she didn't realize was that her group had been infiltrated by this really famous psychologist called Festinger, who I think is the leading psychologist on cognitive dissonance, who was looking at how do you justify that?

And they justified it by saying the aliens were so impressed at their sign of devotion that they decided not to destroy Earth after all.

Oh, that is a brilliant excuse.

Went away again.

Yeah.

I saw a thing on Twitter a while ago, which I love, which is there was a dystopian futures book convention, and someone overheard someone saying, Excuse me, is this the cue for the apocalypse?

One of the events.

I just think it's so British

cue for the apocalypse.

You know, Newton used to give lectures to empty lecture theatres.

Did he?

Actually, someone's done a study on kind of the mentally what famous scientists are like, and that someone is Simon Baron Cohen, who's a really famous neuroscientist, and he's also Sasha Baron Cohen's cousin.

But this is looking into how they display signs of autism, and it seems like Newton found it really hard to connect to other people.

And he gave really boring lectures, he didn't care about lecturing, he just wanted to be alone in his attic studying.

So people tended not to go.

And if no one went, he'd just give the lecture anyway to an empty room.

We've closed off the whole stream, there's police on either side, and

the shop is empty.

Yes.

And And that's it for this week's episode.

You'll notice our abrupt ending there.

That was because Alex Bell came in to tell us that the entire road that we work on had been evacuated, except for us, because we were busy making a podcast talking about the end of the world.

So we had to leave the building immediately.

Also, incidentally, at the same time, Mount Etna erupted.

So, yeah, but that's it.

That's our show.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

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

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Anne.

At Miller underscore Anne.

James.

At egg-shaped.

Czazinski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can find us at no such thingasofish.com, where all of our previous episodes are up and ready to be listened to.

We'll see you again next week.

Goodbye.