60: No Such Thing As An Unenjoyable Bowel Movement

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Hi, everybody.

Welcome to episode 60 of No Such Thing as a Fish.

Just a quick announcement before we begin.

My microphone didn't work this week, and as a result, it has infected the entire other four working microphones.

So the show does sound good, but as soon as I start talking, it's terrible.

No change there, then.

Yep.

So.

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chaczynski, Andy Murray, and we have a special guest today.

It's the founder and creator of QI, it's Commander John Lloyd.

And once again, we have gathered around our microphones with our four favorite 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 final McDonald's burger ever sold in Iceland can currently be watched decomposing on a webcam.

Is that in accordance with a statement that might have been made last week?

I don't know what you're talking about, Anna.

Yes, last week I may well have said that Iceland has the most expensive McDonald's burgers, but there has been no McDonald's in Iceland since 2009, A fact that everyone has been very willing to point out.

That doesn't explain why they're so expensive because of scarcity value.

And so, no more McDonald's in Iceland.

And the last one they kept put it in a museum, and now it's in a hostel under a webcam.

How's it looking?

It's looking fine because burgers tend to not decompose very much.

Yeah, so I read that because there's some father who's got really outraged, didn't he?

He put one of his kids' McDonald's burgers in a jar or something and filmed over the course of weeks and weeks and months and months and said, isn't this outrageous?

This hasn't rotted at all.

And McDonald's, I think, ended up, I assume, having to be the first franchise ever to protest, our food does rot, honestly.

Please believe us.

But yeah, they don't rot.

And it was like, if it doesn't have access to the fluids that allow the bacteria to thrive, then they just go on for years.

If you keep it dry and you keep no animals near it or bacteria near it or whatever, then it'll be fine.

I like the fact that it's on a webcam as well, 24 hours a day.

Yeah.

It's good.

Do you know there are webcams where you can actually watch paint dry?

Have you seen that?

Paint peel.

There's one one a paint peeling website and there's a grass growing website.

And there's uh one where you can s or you could see a cheddar cheese mature.

And it was on for a year, which is like how long this cheese takes to mature.

And it the cheese was known as Wedginald, apparently.

Oh, God.

And it got used to get Valentine's cards from America and a signed rugby ball from the British rugby team.

The cheese.

The cheese, yeah.

It had a million fans.

Did they possibly read mature and think it was some other kind of online thing?

Adult cheese, X-rated

cheddar.

I had breakfast back today with a guy who used to work on the McDonald's advertising account.

Oh, really?

And he said that when they launched their I'm Loving It, which I think is a terrible slogan, I'm Loving It campaign, they had 30,000 parties all over the world simultaneously.

It's a world record for the number of simultaneously held parties because they've got 34,000 restaurants, as they call them in the world.

Always he's wrong, restaurants, doesn't it?

Yeah, what would you call them?

Joints?

Food holes.

And

I looked up some of these 34,000

discussions.

And here they are.

Number one.

The McDonald's in Roswell, New Mexico is the only one in the world shaped like a UFO.

Really?

Actually, just thinking about it, UFOs look a bit like burgers anyway.

Yeah, they do.

Perhaps it's an accident, yeah.

And there's a ski-through McDonald's in Sweden, in Lindvallen, in Sweden.

Is there a hundred yards between the order microphone and the bit where you pick it up?

So to give them time to prepare it.

Did you also see about the world's most expensive burger, which I think came out this month?

It's called the Glam Burger.

Oh, yeah.

And it's available at Honky Tonk Restaurant in Chelsea, which is not an ad.

And it uses in the burger is Canadian lobster, New Zealand venison, Kobe beef, black truffle bree, champagne, Iranian saffron, Himalayan salts, beluga caviar, and hickory smoked duck egg covered in edible gold leaf.

The bun is also covered in gold leaf and it costs £1,100.

Is that with fries?

No fries are extra.

It's £1,102.99

for the meal.

Okay, so you were saying about expensive burgers.

I read an article saying that burgers couldn't have existed 100 years ago.

Oh, I love this theory.

This is right, yeah, you saw this.

And so it's apparently they didn't really exist back then.

But the thing is, if you have tomatoes, they have to be made at a certain time of year in a certain place in the planet.

The same with beef has to be, you know, in the olden days you would kill the cow at a certain time and the bread would have to be

farmed at a certain time, the wheat would have to be.

And so it would have been impossible until we had modern farming

techniques to actually have a burger.

Wait, you could have had some burgers, right?

You just couldn't have mass-produced them.

Or you couldn't have made it.

You'd have to take the cow to the wheat field,

kill it there.

Kill it there.

No, you're not saying that you couldn't get beef and bread at the same time of year.

But for instance, tomatoes would only come through in the summer.

Yeah.

And so you'd have to pick those in the summer if you wanted to have tomatoes on your burger.

Gherkins hadn't been invented yet.

Does a burger include the bun?

I've never really understood that.

Yes.

It does include the bun.

Have you been to McDonald's?

I get some buns with my.

I don't mind.

I'll pay extra.

It does not necessarily include tomatoes because McDonald's don't have tomatoes by and large.

Is that true?

Cheeseburger doesn't.

You know where you learn all this stuff?

Had no idea this place existed?

Hamburger University.

McDonald's has Hamburger University.

Is it in Hamburg?

No, it's in Harvard.

Sorry, it's not in Harvard.

It's considered to be the Harvard of it.

It's in Oak Grove Village, Illinois.

And everyone says it's the Harvard of the fast food universities.

How many other things?

I'm not sure.

But they have 5,000 students, they have 12 interactive educational teams, they have in-house professors.

Ray Kroc taught there, the original McDonald's genius, I guess.

Does Harvard University, do we know if Harvard University ever calls itself the Elk Grove, Illinois hamburger of the academic world?

Do you know what is the Harvard of the lock-making world?

No, surprisingly.

Is it Yale?

So this is quite fun.

Before 2012, this is

I found this on NPR.

Before 2012, Pizza Hut was the USA's biggest buyer of kale.

They did not serve any of it.

They used it as a decoration in their salad bars.

Now, NPR, check this out.

And they they said they never heard back from Pizza Hut, so they did try to fact-check it, but they haven't got got it cast iron.

That's amazing.

It is quite a technical.

And that was before Kale.

Yeah, it's taken off now, hasn't it, Kale?

You know, the Queen technically owns a McDonald's.

She works in it, doesn't she, on Alternate Tuesdays?

Yeah.

She studied at that university

when she went to Hamburger University.

No,

she basically, the Crown Estate, bought up a big shopping centre.

effectively and she's the landlord of it now and McDonald's is in there has a drive-through McDonald's so she's the landlord of that.

She's also.

You know what shopping centre it is?

Yeah, it's the

visible from Windsor Castle.

Slough, maybe.

Yeah, it's in Slough.

Yeah, yeah.

I like that park.

It's visible from Windsor Castle.

There ought to be.

Do you know the Great Wall of China is visible from Windsor Castle?

No, I think that's been debunked, hasn't it?

But yeah, so she also owns a BNQ superstore,

some branches of Comet, JJB Sports, and Mothercare.

Is she like one of those hands-on owners, a micromanager?

Do we know?

She's just always in there inspecting the star.

She turns up and demands the rent with a sledgehammer every month.

Let's be real.

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Okay, time for fact number two, and that is John Lloyd.

My fact that I offer you, Elves, is that in 1851, Prince Albert commissioned a ballroom for Balmoral Castle made entirely of corrugated iron.

Now you think of corrugated iron as being like a really cheesy, cheap material that's

garden sheds and tin shacks in Australia.

But from the time that it was invented in 1829,

it was an absolutely amazing wonder material.

It's cheap, it's light, it's fireproof, corrosion-proof, biodegradable, and earthquake-resistant.

And it can survive monsoons, heavy snow loads, immense heat, and directed by unskilled labour.

It really is amazing.

I actually went and bought a book on corrugated iron.

It's actually been massive.

It's about the size of a corrugated iron sheet because I got so fascinated by it.

Wow.

These days most corrugated iron is not iron.

No, that's true.

Is it correct?

It's aluminium, zinc, and steel generally.

Since the 1890s, it has been that, and language just has not caught up.

So it's been not iron for a lot longer than it was iron.

Yeah, by now, yeah.

Do you know where the word comes from?

The word corrugated.

iron.

Corrugated.

It's ruga, Latin for a wrinkle.

Yeah.

That's why you say testicles are rugos, don't you?

Do you?

Well, I do.

Always, constantly.

I read that there's a theory, and it's not, it's very, very hard to prove, but there's a theory that more people have been sheltered by corrugated iron in the 20th century than by any other material in the world.

Isn't that incredible?

I think that's probably true.

Because

something like 60% of Nairobi's population live in corrugated iron houses to this day.

So, isn't that amazing?

Yeah, it's awesome.

Well,

and it's amazing that, as I guess as John's pointing out, I just didn't know the first thing about corrugated iron.

This is what I found about corrugated iron is I'd never thought about it in my whole life before.

But then suddenly, you think this is a really, really important thing.

Because

in, for example, in the First World War, the Nissan hut, invented by Captain Peter Nissan, who's a Canadian mining engineer serving with Royal Engineers in Britain, he invented this thing.

Again, you just need this, because as I said, it bends in one direction perfectly and it's perfectly rigid in the other.

So they built a hundred thousand Nissen huts in the First World War, which housed two and a half million men

around the trenches.

In the Second World War in New Zealand, they came up with a thing called a Bob Semple tank, which was

it wasn't invented by Bob Semple, but it was his idea.

I think he was a politician or something.

And the idea is they would take a tractor and put corrugated iron around it and turn it into a tank.

But unfortunately, due to functional failures, tractor gear problems, public ridicule, and impracticality, the tanks were rejected.

So they didn't work, and everyone thought they were stupid.

So the reason that corrugated is so strong is if you it's a bit like if you have a pizza slice and you just hold the end of the pizza and it kind of flops over, but if you bend it into like a U shape then it kinda stays stiff, and that's the maths behind that.

And it was first discovered by Carl Friedrich Gauss and he named it the Theorema Egregium, which was Latin for the excellent theorem.

He thought it was one of the best things.

I mean, he was one of the great mathematicians, but he thought this was one of the best things that he ever came up with.

He's his own hype man there, isn't he?

You like the excellent theorem, wait till we hear the outstanding theorem.

Do you know that the Milky Way is supposedly corrugated?

It's like a disk of matter and stars, but it has ridges in it.

Whoa, well, that's great.

Corrugated universe.

Yeah, yeah.

Is that for strength?

Well it might be.

Like because obviously in nature it just um if you think about the hexagons in a in a bee's uh nest, then they they come because they're so strong or so simple.

Maybe it is, maybe it's a wait but so is there anything else that's natural outside of the Milky Way that's corrugated?

Yes, I know something.

Um so woodpeckers, they have this cartilage in between their beak and the rest of their skull, because obviously they hit a tree at fifty miles an hour every time.

And they hit this cartilage is corrugated and it absorbs the shock of the impact, and it stops them from killing themselves every time they hit a tree.

That's clever.

That corrugation, someone is using it at the moment to develop, say, for bike helmet by using a layer of corrugation inside to absorb impacts.

That's cool.

That's really cool.

Yeah.

Just going back to Balmoral for a minute.

The actual ballroom in Balmoral now is the largest room in the castle.

It's the only one that's open to the public.

And Prince Albert, because Prince Albert bought Balmoral with his own money, unlike all the other royal residences, it's actually private property.

It's actually owned by the royal family, whereas all the other ones are owned by the Crown, which is the legal personage which manages the thing.

So they can do with it as they wish.

You should put a McDonald's in it.

They also, in the Balmoral Ballroom, the Castle Ballroom, as it's called, every year they hold a Gillies Ball because there's 50,000 thousand acres of Balmoral, so they've probably got quite a few ghillies.

I think it's a hundred and fifty staff, full-time, part-time.

And holding a ghillies ball reminds me this is my father's favourite joke.

He used to say he used to repeat this joke a lot, which is

he said when he was in America they have these people called the mooses,

the moose in the order of the moose,

in Canada,

which is a kind of mate they're like the Masons.

And this guy, my father used to say, he's trying to get to sleep in this hotel and there's a terrible racket from downstairs and he rings up the manager and he says

would you please keep the noise down

and the manager says but sir they're holding a moose's ball

and the guy says well for God's sake tell them to let it go

you never tired of that

rudely I was reading over Christmas a book by well it was a biography on Robin Williams and Robin Williams's mother used to read so Laurie Williams used to read him this book, which she said was her favourite book, which was supposedly written by a 19th-century English society hostess,

and it was called Balls I Have Held.

That's very good.

There was a guide to ballroom etiquette written in 1880, I think, which has various good advice for attending a ball.

So, like, if a gentleman without proper introduction asks a lady who he's not acquainted with to dance, she should should positively refuse,

things like that.

But I like the fact that

during a ball in a ballroom, no lady should be left unattended, which I just quite like.

Because they may be removed and destroyed without warning.

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

My fact is that during the 19th century, Saddler's Wells Theatre in London was routinely flooded to stage fake naval battles.

Okay, this is amazing.

Which I think is really cool.

So, if people aren't familiar with Saddler's Wells, like these days, it's more of a ballet dancing theatre, but it's had about five or six iterations, I think, over the past few hundred years.

And yeah, at the turn of the, so between about 1800 and 1820s, this guy decided that in celebration of Britain's naval prowess, that he would fill it with gallons and gallons of water and use it to stage fake naval battles.

And they went to a huge amount of trouble trouble for it.

So they employed, it was in 1804 that this

was begun, and it was the brainchild of someone called Charles Dibbiden Jr.

And he employed all these shipwrights and riggers to exactly replicate the ships that have been used in the British Navy.

The scale was one inch per foot, so they weren't the actual size of ships, otherwise, that wouldn't have fitted in a theatre.

And yeah, it was filled with 8,000 cubic feet of, as it was announced in their newspaper in capital letters, real water,

not just fake water, and a hundred and seventeen model ships.

And they employed little children, so they they put out adverts asking for children who were able to swim so that during performances they could have, when they were staging all these fake naval battles, they could have kids who could swim in the water that had to be rescued by the actors.

And it was commonplace at the end of performances for the audience to jump into the water at the end, to all flood forward as it were, and jump in and start swimming in it.

Sounds great.

That sounds amazing.

The reason do you know why the reason for these battles?

But between the Licensing Act of 1737 and the Theatres Act of 1843, for a hundred years, only two theatres in the country were allowed to do theatre with dialogue, the two theatres royal, one in Covent Garden, one in Drury Lane.

Everyone else could do music, but they couldn't have speech as well.

Wow.

So what happened was that they basically became dependent on stuff that didn't involve any sort of proper acting.

So they had to have spectacles of various kinds and sea battles were just one of the main things.

But in 1784-5,

the top of the bill at Sadler's Wells were a play by Scaglione's troop of thespian dogs,

starring the moustache,

the canine matinee idol of his day, apparently, two horses dancing a minuet, a singing duck, and a pig that could tell the time.

Like the children's game, What's the Time Mr.

Pig?

So there was this, and hence clowning, and so you could have dancing and so on, but you couldn't have proper theatre for over a hundred years.

Yeah, because I was reading Grimaldi, the great original clown.

He used to perform there a lot.

Indeed, he made his first appearance there

at age three as a dancer in an Easter entertainment, and his last in 1828.

So to do with his whole life,

he was a big fan of Saddler's Wells.

And I just want to mention this thing that one of the highlights of Grimaldi's career was that in 1807 he was at Sadler's Wells and he caused so much hilarity that a deaf and dumb man in the audience recovered his lost powers of speech and cried out, What a damned funny fellow

was that just brilliant.

I don't want to sound like a spoilsmore or Darren Brown, but I think that guy was a plant.

It's even more impressive if he was a plant.

Could he tell the tide as well?

So I read that this genre, there was an actual genre of, as you say, these spectacles which specifically involved naval scenes and it was called Aquadrama.

All the papers referred to it as Aquadrama.

And one of the shows of Saddler's Wells was called Philip and His Dog or Where's the Child?

And the climax of that show was a dog actor jumping into the water and saving a child from drowning.

Yeah,

these huge dog celebrities.

Gotta have a lot of well-trained dog.

I know.

Did they have actors on the boats?

Did they stand on the ships?

Are they big enough to do that?

Yes, they did.

And there's one quite funny article which points out that everyone's so involved in the show and it's so captivating that no one notices the problem with perspective whereby the boats are about a tenth the size of but the people obviously are just people sized.

I was going to say, because if you had, I think they had 117 mini ships on the stage.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Were they all on stage at once?

They can't have been.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

Why would you not have them all on stage at once?

Why does he show that ship?

There was, I think, the biggest now machine.

So these are called Naumakia sea battles, and they date right back to classical times.

But the largest one we had in that era was in 1814.

And I came across this by accident.

It was all any newspapers are reporting on that day in 1814.

And it was in Hyde Park on the Serpentine Lake.

And it was to follow, it was to celebrate the peace in the Napoleonic Wars, so the peace treaty with Napoleon and the end of that fighting.

And to celebrate that, apparently, they staged a huge naval battle.

But a newspaper said the whole metropolis seemed depopulated, everyone was centered in the parks, and the whole of London flocked to Hyde Park and watched this huge naval battle on the Serpentine.

Cool.

We have to move on.

I've just got one last thing to mention before we do,

which is

it's a bit of a famous rock myth, which I think is really interesting.

You know that great rock myth about the idea of Van Halen saying that if they had brown MMs inside their, so they would have their

rider, you know.

This was in their rider.

The idea was that they said, this is what we want in the green room, but we don't want any brown MMs.

I thought that that was true, that they did that.

It is true that they did that.

But so the idea is that

they would come back, and one time, David Lee Roth found brown MMs, and he got furious, and he trashed the whole room, and that's what became a very famous rock myth.

And I say myth, the myth bit is the fact about why he got angry.

He wasn't angry because there were brown M ⁇ Ms, because he hates them.

He was angry because they were a tiny thing in a very big contract that he sent over, because the Van Halen show was such a spectacle, it was such a massive event, that most venues in America couldn't accommodate the kind of show that they were going to do.

And so he would put in precise detail, this has to be like this, otherwise people may die, stages could collapse, all that sort of stuff.

And if he found Brown M ⁇ Ms inside that bowl, he knew that they hadn't read the contract.

That's really interesting.

Of course, that's one reading, that the contract hasn't been read properly.

Or the other reading is that the person who's in charge of setting up the stage so it doesn't collapse and kill people isn't also on M ⁇ M scouting duty.

That's true.

That's true.

It's possible.

But that's one of the great rock sort of stories, and it's interesting that there was actually a guy concerned with health and safety.

behind putting yeah he's been unfairly maligned if that's the case yeah exactly douglas adams told me this great story about pythons the pythons when they were for their first live tour and they went to America, I think, and they were having a storm out

live tour.

And they went to this hotel, and the manager said, Gentlemen, as soon as you want to trash the hotel room, then go right ahead because they loved it, you know, because having the hotel room trashing got massive publicity, and of course, it was all insured anyway, but you got in the papers.

And so the Pythons being very polite and British said, No, that's quite necessary.

We don't need to trash anything.

We're very happy.

No, please, sir, please

trash the room.

So, look, let me try with a, you know, like, start with this chair and all that stuff so eventually after

not wanting to do this michael palin kindly went into the bathroom and broke a toothbrush

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Okay, time for our final fact, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that the practice of dog owners pretending that they haven't seen their dog having a crap is technically known as strategic non-knowledge.

And it's conducted by someone who's genuinely called Dr.

Gross.

Gross, was it?

Matthew Gross, who's a German sociology professor.

He spent 10 years following dog owners around at all different times of day, observing them and seeing how they behave.

And so

he decided that this is is a new sort of aspect to what we do?

Kind of, yeah, there's a specific way of not knowing about something or deciding that you're not going to know about something happening because you think it's disgusting.

And he found out a lot of other things.

So often before people actually do pick up their dog's poo, they will look over their shoulder and they will try and make sure that other people can see them doing the right thing, basically.

Or sometimes

if there's no one around or if they really don't want to, they'll start to put their hand in their pocket for a plastic bag or something and then they'll take it out again they just they'll decide at the last minute not to wow well andy what is the thing about people doing the poopa scooper putting it in the bag and then hanging it on a tree what's that for

well he has a theory about this

which is that it's a form of passive resistance

that people are saying i don't People are saying, I know it's the right thing to pick this up, but I resent having to do it.

Therefore, I'm going to leave it anonymously.

Because he said he followed people for years and he never saw anyone leave it on a tree.

Therefore, people must be leaving it when there's no one else around and making sure that no one sees them doing it.

Is it a form of decoration, maybe?

Maybe it's making a double mark for their dog.

So the dog pisses on the tree below, he sticks the poo up.

It's just a total that's my dog's tree.

No matter how high your dog is.

They do this thing now, because obviously it's a big problem.

Everyone hates the idea of seeing poo in the street.

DNA dog testing is a new thing now, where where they sample the who and they can identify now whose dog it is.

So you can no longer, and they're doing this in London.

London is where it kind of started.

It feels like it would really give you the DNA of whatever the dog's eaten rather than the dog itself, isn't it?

Yeah, that's true.

A cow took a poo.

A tin of pedigree charm has been defining the streets again.

That's true, but no, so they now have 18,000 dogs when this article was published

in the borough of Barking

and Dagenham.

And they've registered their DNA.

So if you find Pooh on the street now, you can take it in and they can go, okay, that's that's Mike's dog.

I think I might just still leave it rather than take it in.

Well, you get a big time.

Also, the fatal flaw in this is that it because I think it's all voluntary whether you submit your dog's DNA into this DNA database.

So it relies on the people who decided to go and submit their dog's DNA, then also being the kind of people who aren't going to pick up Pooh.

There's a serious selection bias kind of problem here.

That is tricky.

Why don't policemen have to get off their police horses and you know with a shovel get a sack

next to an enormous tree in the dark

the guy who did this, Matthew Cross he wanted you asked about leaving things by a tree he wanted to ask owners about the practice and very bravely he approached them and started asking them about it and apparently in his own words some of the the friendlier comments included mind your own business and don't you have anything else to do

that reminds me of the study of the guy who cycled around a town on a unicycle and made a list of all the different comments that he got and something like two-thirds of them were something to the effect of was you're on the wheel

so on on pretending not to know things um yeah this is from a book called why everyone else is a hypocrite which deals with some of these questions, like Anna was saying, of self-deception.

So I just wanted to quote a bit of it.

So there are lots of situations where if you don't know something, you can avoid a situation which is a lose-lose situation just by pretending not to know or not to understand something.

So this is the line.

If you see a building on fire and a small boy comes to tell you that a cat is caught in the window, your options are either to risk yourself to save the cat or take the reputational hit of neglecting a socially perceived duty to rescue the cat.

And then there's a footnote in the book which says, you could kill the boy, but then you've got other problems.

It's something to consider, though.

Yeah,

so

whereas if you simply pretend that you don't understand the language the boy is speaking, then you don't have to rescue the cat.

You don't have to risk your life.

Or kill the boy.

Or kill the boy.

According to a survey commissioned by Samaritans quite recently, three times more men than women would pretend not to notice if a friend broke down in tears in front of them.

Bloody hell.

That takes a lot of not noticing the friends.

Broke down in tears, not even just a little dribble, a proper hysterical crying fit.

Three times more.

You can't say whether that's positive or negative, though, because is it thoughtfulness with a person?

I might well do that because you don't want to make the person feel uncomfortable.

It's true, you could go up to them and say they're there, or you could walk off, or you could kill them.

All of those would stop the crying.

That'll shut them up.

Well, I have noticed with British people generally, this is one observation I've picked up from being here, is that if people are talking in a room and someone farts loudly, just people just continue talking.

They just walk over it like it's a little bit of a break.

This is own research, isn't it?

Yep, this is.

You may have been noticing, I've been conducting my study in the office for the last few years.

We've edited those all out of the podcast.

Yeah, look, pretending not to know stuff is huge,

especially in Britain.

So interestingly, because there are a lot of, scientists don't understand why we do lie, though, and I don't think it's as simple as we think.

So, there's what they say.

So, there's this

thing called smork, which is the simple model of rational crime, which says that we lie for rational reasons.

So, we lie when it's going to benefit us.

So, if I've stolen something and then someone asks me if I've stolen something, I'll lie so I don't get in trouble.

But, actually, and I've owned, basically, we started the podcast just as I was in the middle of reading this, so I didn't see examples, but it's this guy called Dan Ariali who tested the smork principle.

And it's not true, we don't lie instinctively in a way that benefits us at all.

We lie in a way that says we want to present ourselves as a certain, as something, or something that's to do with our own self-image.

It's not to save ourselves from something.

So I don't think we really know where we lie.

I think my favourite thing about lying is that very small children under the age of about four never lie because they think you can read their minds.

Is that why?

Because they think that that voice we all have in our head that we've got used to, small children just hear this as a kind of of constant thing.

They think, well, everybody, I can hear it.

Everyone else must be able to hear it.

I can sort of remember thinking that.

I can remember being convinced that

if you were a manipulative parent, you could really use that to your advantage.

Yeah.

Ensure that the child never stole a biscuit again.

Or you could kill the boy, but then you have another boy.

So chimpanzees can do this thing.

Sometimes, if a chimpanzee is foraging for food, he'll see something really tasty and then just kind of walk past it, pretending he didn't see it, just so that no other chimpanzee can see him kind of getting an eye on it and

fight over it.

Apparently, sometimes a competitor chimp will kind of notice what he's doing and then walk past the pretending chimp, hide behind a tree, and then peep out to see if the pretending chimp really does have some food after all.

They're geniuses.

Yeah, I love it.

Another animal apart from us has evolved nonchalance.

It's great.

No, no, don't get

not a banana guy, not me.

We should wrap up very, very quickly.

We should wrap it up.

Indeed, I think that's the message of this podcast.

Who should be wrapped up with disposed of responsibilities?

I think we really need to wrap up and tie this podcast around the tree.

Actually, have you guys ever enjoyed your bowel movements?

Love them.

Girl, just yes or no?

Do you you enjoy your bowel movements?

Yeah, yes, on occasion.

Okay, so this was a study done actually to test whether liars were more successful, and it found that they are.

And the way they did the study, these two scientists stayed up really late, had a few drinks.

This is in the 90s, I think.

Had a few drinks and said, okay, we need to ask people questions that we definitely know the answers, yes, but I bet people will lie about it.

And so one of their questions was, do you enjoy your bowel movements?

And it was just, they were like, well, obviously everyone does.

So if they say no, they're liars.

And other questions in this study included.

So in.

So win.

Have you ever doubted your sexual adequacy?

Apparently anyone who said no to that, they're going, well, obviously a liar.

And have you ever thought about committing suicide to get back at somebody?

Anyone who says no to that,

they've got to be a liar.

That's how you tell.

Then you do the study.

So apparently the scientists concluded we've all wanted to do this.

They called Ruben Ger and Harold Sakine.

Wow.

Wow.

I'm going to kill myself to get back at him, or I'll just have a nice poo first.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

High five to Anna for asking her boss if he enjoys his bowel middle friends.

See me afterwards, Kczynski.

We can all be reached on our Twitter handles.

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

James, at egg-shaped, John.

I have someone do that for me.

Kaczynski, over to you.

Sure, you can email podcast at qi.com, which someone else will be monitoring after this podcast, I suspect.

I'll be on jobseekers.com.

You can also get to us on at qipodcast, and you can go to qi.com slash podcast, where we have all of our previous episodes, all 59 up there.

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

Thanks so much.

Goodbye.

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