Little Fish: I'm Not Even On The Internet Right Now

James does some gratuitous celebrity name-dropping while he, Dan and Anna discuss YOUR facts. This week's subjects include revels, rocks and railways. And Dan, James and Anna shout-out eight more Friend of the Podcast custodians. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

• 0:00Speaker 00

  At Tire Discounters, for as little as $350, you get four tires, a free alignment, and a free oil change. Four tires with all the fixins as low as $350 bucks installed.

• 0:14Speaker 00

  See store for details.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Hello, everybody, and welcome to Little Fish, the weekly podcast where we, the No Such Thing as a Fish team, take your facts, the facts from the audience, and we talk about them, we analyse them, we tear them to shreds. And here to do that with me are my fellow hosts, Dan Schreiber and James Harkin.

• 0:51Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Hello. Sorry, I left a weird pause there.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  It's okay. We should say we're doing this in three undisclosed locations. Hello. Hang on, no, James. Okay, that seems to be a connection issue. This might happen a lot.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  That was just me trying to be funny, Dan. Don't worry.

• 1:07Speaker 02

  No, I knew that. I was there doubling down on your funny.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10Speaker 01

  See, this is how natural it always seems as soon as you're recording remotely, which we are. Yes, undisclosed locations. We've been asked to go to our separate bunkers. And Andrew Hunter-Murray is not with us, but I think we're gonna be okay. So he has sent us some facts from listeners, hasn't he?

• 1:27Speaker 02

  He has.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  We still make him peruse the inbox. Has anyone got a great fact from a listener to share?

• 1:31Speaker 03

  Can I do one that he hasn't sent me, that I got independently?

• 1:34Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  Just because I know if he was here, he wouldn't allow this, but seeing as he's away, we should like subvert the genre a little bit.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:43Speaker 03

  Someone called Dave Swainy sent me this, and it is to do with a big rail crash in Clapham that was caused by an overworked signal engineer. And the government made a hidden report to establish all the problems that had occurred. And this report was named after Sir Anthony Hidden.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Come on.

• 2:09Speaker 03

  And he, basically, that's the reason why if you work as a train crew, you need 12 hours rest between shifts, and you have to have at least one day off in any fortnight.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:20Speaker 03

  But yeah, named by Sir Anthony Hidden.

• 2:22Speaker 01

  Very good.

• 2:23Speaker 03

  And I replied to Dave saying, well, you know what, I'm not really a big fan of these kind of facts. And Dave said, oh, yeah, sorry, I know Dan is the one who's pushing this trend, but you're my favourite. So he's another one who can't tell the difference between Dan and Andy.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  Wow, this is getting wild. But you're doing Andy's work for him now. You've converted without knowing. You were filling that book up every week now. Well, that's a great fact. That's awesome. I got one that was sanctioned, that was allowed in by Andrew Hunter-Murray. This is from Ray Honeyset. Ray says, "My fact is that when tomato plants are under attack from hungry caterpillars, they produce a chemical that makes caterpillars more likely to eat each other than the plant."

• 3:09Speaker 01

  What?

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, which is amazing. And Ray adds, "My mother tried to tell Dan this fact a few years ago when she lived in South London next to him and would share a commute with him into town. Unfortunately, she forgot the details of this and instead told him that scientists have found that tomatoes eat caterpillars. I am emailing to set the record straight."

• 3:29Speaker 01

  Do you remember this instance, Dan?

• 3:31Speaker 02

  I do. I remember his mum. She was awesome.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  Can I just say, I think tomatoes do eat caterpillars. Well, they certainly eat insects, for sure.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Okay, in what sense?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Well, they have like a fluffy stalk, don't they? And I think the fluffiness of the stalk is to kind of trap insects, and then they fall down to the ground, decompose into the earth, and then the plant can eat the chemicals.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  No way.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  That's interesting. Well, the further details on this particular method to stop the caterpillars from eating them is the plant, the tomato plants, release chemicals called methyljasmine. And the idea is that it makes the plant taste so disgusting that they would rather eat each other than continue to eat the plant itself. And what's amazing on top of that is different plants smell that smell and release their own plant smell that stops caterpillars.

• 4:24Speaker 01

  So that's why they end up eating each other, not just another plant? Because it does seem illogical. If I'm eating, if I'm, I've got dinner and I'm eating peas, and I think I don't like peas, I don't instinctively think, okay, I'll eat the person sitting next to me.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  Can you imagine? Like the TripAdvisor reviews, "The gazpacho was so bad, I ate my own friends."

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. Wild, isn't it? This is, yeah, John Orick, who's an evolutionary ecologist in Wisconsin, said, basically, the plant rearranges the menu for the caterpillar to make the other caterpillars the optimal choice.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  It's a truly amazing fact, and would have made The Very Hungry Caterpillar a much more interesting book, actually. Although maybe not child appropriate. I had a great one from Hayley Abramson, and she is a biomedical engineer, so she knows what she's talking about. She's working in America, and she creates medical devices for hemodynamic monitoring, which I think is watching what's happening to your blood. And she said that the human heart uses over five kilos of ATP, which is the molecule that you use in your heart to release energy, uses over five kilos of it every day, which is 15 times the weight of the heart itself. Now, I got very into ATP at this point, because I realised you

• 5:38Speaker 01

  learn about it at school, you don't really know, I don't really remember what it is. And it's universal across all life. Every single living cell needs to use ATP to get energy. And I didn't realise that the way we get it is literally, we have this molecule in us, and we break it down, and that releases energy, and then we build it up again. Your body contains only 250 grams of it any moment, and you produce your own body weight in it every day. Because we just break it down, rebuild it, break it down, rebuild it. Kind of a mad Sisyphean task we're all doing, actually. But then...

• 6:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, it almost seems like the entire point of life is just to generate and regenerate ATP.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  And like, you see these sort of stories in New Scientist or whatever, saying, oh, we found a new kind of animal that lives on rocks, or whatever. And what it actually means is there's some kind of tiny cellular life, which is turning stuff into ATP, making energy, and then making more ATP, and then making more energy, and just doing that again and again and again.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  God, so is ATP, is that what's in charge of us all, do you think?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  I think it is.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  It's ATP has created life, so it can be created and destroyed. Whoa.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  I've never heard of it, ATP. Had you too? I mean, James, it sounds like you definitely have.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you went to an unusual school.

• 6:59Speaker 03

  I think in fairness, I don't think I learned it in GCSE biology.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  I feel like I learned it through doing 15 years of QI work.

• 7:07Speaker 02

  That period where you ate nothing but rocks. I think it was in that moment.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  But yeah, great fact, great fact from Hayley. Anyone else got anything else?

• 7:16Speaker 03

  Okay, here's another sciency one. Jason Sandeman Allen tells us that, "In the time it takes to say this fact, the world's factories will have made more transistors than there are stars in the Milky Way."

• 7:30Speaker 02

  What?

• 7:31Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  What?

• 7:33Speaker 01

  People do work very hard, don't they, in some factories?

• 7:36Speaker 03

  That's too hard. It says, like, the time it takes to read this fact, but the email's quite long, so I don't know if it's the entire email or just that sentence. But basically, a transistor, like, in my head, a transistor used to be like, oh, it's like a radio, a transistor radio or whatever. But actually, a transistor is a tiny little switch that you get in any electrical device. And in your laptop, there are millions of them. In your microphone, there are millions of them. In your headphones, there are millions of them. They're just, they're in everything. And it's just, it's basically the thing which is either a zero or a one.

• 8:14Speaker 02

  So there's, I think, an estimated about like 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, right? So surely we need just one day in the factory, and we have enough. That's it.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  That's a good point.

• 8:26Speaker 02

  We don't need anymore.

• 8:27Speaker 01

  Have we got an oversupply? It's like, stop. Someone, where's the off button? We've got all these bloody switches, but where's the off button? Yeah, that is wild.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  I mean, that's a lot, 100 billion.

• 8:37Speaker 03

  Look, basically, the modern day is ATP and transistors.

• 8:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, sounds like it.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  That's how we're going down in history.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  I know, I happen to know that the co-inventor of the transistor was a guy called John Bardine. And when he co-won his Nobel Prize, he was told off by someone who was there, either the committee or just someone high up, for not bringing his family along. He was like, where are your kids? You didn't bring your family. And he said, ah, no, it's okay, I'll bring them to the next one. Next time I win, they'll be here. He won it again, and he brought his kids. Yeah.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  That's brilliant.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  One of the few scientists to get the double Nobel.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  What a dickhead. I never thought I'd hear this. Sorry, no, what an amazing guy. I was, I was just still reeling from the surprise of hearing the sentence come out of your mouth. "I happen to know that the co-inventor of the transistor..." It's just, just such a casual "happen to know."

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Because I mentioned John Bardine not too long ago on Fish, because when he found out that he had won his second Nobel Prize, he was in his garage, and he went to open the door of the garage to go to the party celebrating it, and the transistor failed, and he was locked in his garage. So the thing that he won the Nobel Prize for the first time stopped him from getting to his party the second time.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  All I would say is that we always do this podcast in person, most of the time. And when we're in person, we don't have our laptops or our phones or anything, and we're just chatting. But I watched a documentary about online chess yesterday, where basically they said, as soon as it went online and people weren't in the room together, they all cheated. So if anyone from, I'm not saying that Dan didn't know who that guy was.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 10:16Speaker 03

  But if anyone in the future is saying, "I just happen to know," then there could be something afoot.

• 10:22Speaker 02

  Outrageous.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  That's an outrageous claim. And I won't have it. I'm the host here, and I'm kicking you off the show for this kind of slander.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:30Speaker 01

  Against your fellow man.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  I'm not even on the internet right now.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  This is all pre-recorded Nuggets Dan sent us. That we're interspersing.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  It would be great if I turned my camera on the laptop and you saw six researchers sitting there just showing me, showing me facts on big bits of paper.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  We all know he's too analog to be able to use the internet.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  I happen to know, J- John Bardoun. What is it, what is it? Better spelling, give it to the guy with better spelling.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  Okay, go on then, Dan, give us one of your facts from your, um, non-internet perusing.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Well, this one is great. This one is from Draco, just called Draco. Um, Draco says, there are over a hundred people taking a road trip across the USA together. They've covered over 40,000 miles, yet none of them have left their homes.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Yeah. So this, and I want to thank-

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Can you guys hear, there's an, there's either an aeroplane or a helicopter going above my house at the moment.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  I can hear that, yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:33Speaker 03

  Is it anything to do with your fact?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  Dan sent it to take you out.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Your betrayal.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Question my use of internet. This is, I, again, thank you Draco so much for introducing me to this, but this is a website called neal.fun, N-E-A-L dot fun. And it's a bunch of online interactive games that you can do, and one of them is called Internet Road Trip. And you click onto it and it's a virtual map in which a car, you know, when you go on Google Maps and you have all the arrows and you press one of the arrows? Well, it's this, but right now, I'm on it right now, there are 100, despite not being on the internet, 114 drivers right now are on it. And whoever votes most for which arrow, that wins and that's where the car turns. Do you see what I'm saying?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  So it's a, it's an ongoing trip that is being voted for by people. I'm going to vote right now. I've just voted. Yep, it's gone my way. How cool is that? And honestly, this site is amazing, neal.fun. Um, there's, there's a game that you can play on it, which is called Cursor Camp. And you just give your cursor a little holiday and you play, I just played volleyball earlier with someone from the Netherlands.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  This is so sad. This is holidays of the future and sport of the future and driving of the future. It's all so sad.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  Highly recommend it, guys. This is incredible, incredible site.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  Was this site made by the buffins at fun.com?

• 13:01Speaker 02

  You'd hope so. Yes. Only the brains at fun.com could come up with this.

• 13:07Speaker 03

  This really does remind me of the old days of the internet and being at university. And one of my friends going, oh, you need to go on this website where you can play some games.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  I, I had a similar experience yesterday where I felt like I had gone back in technological time when, you know, when you can't, Google can't open a website because you're not connected to the internet. And so it says, press spacebar to play, and I've literally never pressed it. And I pressed it. Have you guys ever done it?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  No. Well, you do play Pac-Man or something.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  No, it's literally, you just make a, a dot, jump over some obstacles and it just keeps moving and you hit spacebar whenever you want it to jump. Did that for about five minutes and then thought, is this how I want to spend my life on this earth? And the answer was yes, I did it for another four hours.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  I have another cool fact, and this is from Hugh Fraser from Queensland, who says, long time listener, third time emailer. Thanks for letting us know. I have a fact for you. The man responsible for organising plays in Elizabethan England was allowed to imprison people at will when they offended him or didn't work hard enough. I really feel like Andy's given me this one because he knows it's a fantasy of mine. Uh, they were freed from jail when he decided they'd served their time. And this, I think we might have mentioned him before, Edmund Tilney, who's master of the revels in, under Queen Elizabeth.

• 14:26Speaker 03

  Is he the guy who was legally allowed to kidnap children to be in his choir or something?

• 14:32Speaker 01

  Maybe he was. It sounds like the kind of thing that would be a perk of the job of master of the revels, possibly. He's definitely, I mainly know him because he's one of the baddies in Shakespeare in Love. Have you seen that? He's the guy who keeps on censoring Shakespeare's plays and generally gets a very bad rap. But he's actually a good guy and he reformed the whole art scene under Queen Elizabeth and was the reason Shakespeare was famous.

• 14:55Speaker 02

  Starring friend of the podcast, Joseph Fiennes, just for listeners of the past.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Is he a friend?

• 15:01Speaker 02

  He almost became mine, just before you came back, he almost became a solid character.

• 15:06Speaker 03

  He's only been in that one film, whereas all the other Fiennes have been in loads of other films.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, his brother's really nailed acting in multiple movies.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  That is so harsh. I could definitely name another if you gave me the internet in a couple of hours.

• 15:22Speaker 01

  That's a great fact. Anyone else got any other facts?

• 15:25Speaker 02

  I've got a few from, uh, Dan Under from, uh, New Zealand, which are quite nice. One comes in from Connor, who says, if you sold your house with this company and they're called Aritzo, A-R-I-Z-T-O, they're a real estate company in New Zealand, you could quite possibly end up working with someone called Andy, someone called Dan, or someone called Anna James.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  These are all employees of Aritzo. If you're looking for a house and you want it to have a sort of fish flavoured.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  What a random thing to find out.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Hang on, why does this person know that? Does this person work for that company?

• 16:05Speaker 02

  No, I don't think so. They don't, they don't say so. Uh, it's just, they were going around the site. Maybe they were looking for a place to rent or buy and that's what they discovered.

• 16:14Speaker 01

  Frantically Googling our names over and over again.

• 16:17Speaker 02

  There were also three other choices of James, uh, if you, if you wanted to use Anna James as one and you need one more at the table, there's three other Jameses. Um, so anyway, that's, thank you very much Connor. Uh, but then we get one from William Wilson, also from New Zealand, who writes that Eden Park Stadium in New Zealand has its own pet rock. So when the stadium was rebuilt in 2011 for the Rugby World Cup, this rock was there and they considered getting rid of it, but it's so massive that they decided in the end, let's just build a room around it. And now when you go on a tour of the stadium, they take you to the rock room to meet the pet rock. Is part of the, the sort of history of this place, which is pretty amazing.

• 16:59Speaker 03

  Why did they, why did they build a room around it? That's kind of weird, isn't it?

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think the idea was it would cost so much. It's a volcanic rock. It's thousands of years old. It's 50 feet plus. They just thought this is such a big job. It's easier just to leave it there in place and put a room around it.

• 17:16Speaker 01

  Sorry, you said it's 50 feet plus, the rock?

• 17:18Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  Oh, it's huge?

• 17:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:20Speaker 01

  I was imagining a kind of a large pebble.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  What?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Uh, okay. It's a big rock.

• 17:27Speaker 02

  It's big.

• 17:28Speaker 03

  Isn't there a, isn't Mecca got a big rock in it? That big building in Mecca's got like a meteorite or something. I think so. And they built a big building around it and now millions of people every year go to visit it.

• 17:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 03

  I think so.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  And yeah, and that's different to going on a pilgrimage from, to Mecca. Hold on, there are loads of Muslims going on pilgrimage to Mecca and then there are loads of rock fans going on pilgrimage to the rock next door. Or is it the same thing?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  It's the same thing.

• 17:55Speaker 01

  It's the same thing. Got it. Okay. I was just thinking what a low maintenance pet that would be, because I was thinking about pets the other day and thinking, maybe I'll cave eventually and go for stick insects because they're the easiest, but that is easier.

• 18:07Speaker 03

  Stick insects are not easy. We had pet stick, we had pet stick insects when we were kids and they would die 10 a week.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, but what's easy about them is that you can buy more and no one ever knows.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  10 a week? How many do you have, James?

• 18:21Speaker 03

  I may be wrong about 10 a week. In fact, I am exaggerating, but you would just put them in big jars. We had them a lot. They wouldn't do anything at all. And you would kind of be hard pressed to know that they were even there. And the only way that you'd know that they died is because they stopped pooing. And you'd be like, oh, I don't have to clean the poo anymore, so they must be dead.

• 18:43Speaker 01

  Gotta be tempting to just leave it at that. How long does it take a kid to go, you know what, should we not buy anymore?

• 18:50Speaker 03

  There was a craze for pet rocks in the seventies. It was like, uh, yeah, it was like a, um, I suppose it was just like people would go to the shop and buy a pair of googly eyes and put them on a rock and, um, and say, this is my pet rock. But it was a thing.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 19:06Speaker 01

  Tough time, the seventies.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  By the way, the Eden Park venue that this rock is at, um, it's kind of the national venue of New Zealand. It's where the All Blacks play. And, um, they've got a record there of consistent wins since 1994. And I think it's 53 consistent wins. They've not lost. They've had a few draws, but they are yet to lose in their own stadium for that long.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 19:32Speaker 02

  Isn't that wild?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It must be the rock.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  It must be the rock. The thought is, is actually, is that they only invite teams to play them there when they absolutely know they're going to thrash them, when they know that they're just not in a good shape.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  I don't think that can be true.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the sort of ongoing joke in New Zealand, apparently, from the sports websites I've been reading.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  We should probably move on to our custodians soon. I just want to give Dan a holiday tip for if you ever want to take a holiday, that's not just a virtual one on your computer.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:01Speaker 01

  Um, because this is from Rich Schaffer, fact that was sent in. And he was saying, I was driving through southern Virginia in the US and saw signs for Dan Daniel Memorial Park in the city of Danville. It specifies, Danville is not named after the politician Dan Daniel, nor is Dan Daniel named after Danville. And yet.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  They're all named after that real estate agent from New Zealand.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  Okay, we have reached that time in the show where we bestow some facts upon our lucky Club Fish listeners. And we have some facts from our previous podcast to give to you. Does anyone have a fact they want to let go of?

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Yep, I have one here. This is for Louisa. And the fact is, ancient Jerusalem's lost property office just involved shouting about what you had lost in the hope that somebody had found it.

• 20:55Speaker 01

  That's a good system.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  Such a good system.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  Presumably, you have to shout in a very particular place, so people know where you're shouting, or you just walk around shouting for it.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Was it, was it, you told a, you told a specific shout at what you'd lost, didn't you? And they, and they walked around, like they were the town crier, but the lost property town crier. Because then I think this is the one where we discovered that James has actually been to town crier championships, or he claimed to have been to them. Is that true?

• 21:20Speaker 03

  I have been there, yeah. There's photographic evidence. I didn't take part. I was just there as a, as a viewer.

• 21:27Speaker 01

  How do you think you'd go? Would you be good in a town crier championship?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  I don't think so. I don't think I have the base in my voice to be a good town crier.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  Hmm. Needs Andy or Dan, maybe.

• 21:37Speaker 02

  Hmm. I got some base. Yeah, I might be able to do it. Hey, do you guys remember when I was on the way into the Royal Institution for our recent run of live gigs? And on the train, and the other end of the carriage, I heard a man on his phone going, hi there. Yes, I've just left my second son at the station. Could somebody please collect him and hold him? And I'm just wondering, to what extent, this lost property box, what would be like the weirdest thing that you would hear someone shouting? Because I've never heard anything weirder than that.

• 22:09Speaker 01

  I see what someone's shouting, a second son, second son, anyone found a second son?

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  That kind of thing.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  So what, yeah, what, what kind of lost property are you shouting for?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's gonna be something rude, isn't it? It's like, how, how much do you want to face embarrassment to say, you know, the pink fluffy dildo with a goat attached to it?

• 22:30Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 22:31Speaker 03

  Fluffy dildo. Okay.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  It's just gonna need regular cleaning, that's all.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  But interesting idea.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  I wouldn't know personally, but you're right. It is an interesting idea. And I think if it's washing machine friendly, and it's got, I've got a duster, actually, which has a really useful removable cover, which could easily double up as a fluffy dildo.

• 22:54Speaker 03

  Lost fluffy dildo. It's machine friendly. And it has a removable sheath. So it's very usable. You could reuse it. Anyone seen it?

• 23:05Speaker 02

  Imagine 20 years from now, Anna's gonna be sitting in an interview, and they're gonna say, now, not many people know this, Anna, but before you started your humongous fluffy dildo empire, you were a podcaster, weren't you?

• 23:17Speaker 01

  I prefer to forget about those times. They're just an embarrassment. Okay, here's another fact. This one now is under the custodianship of Julia and Brandon McKay. And Julia and Brandon, your fact is that the man who discovered why we sweat did so by getting in a sauna with a dog, a steak, and an egg.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  I remember this guy.

• 23:42Speaker 02

  Me too. What a wonderful fact this was.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  What a lad. Yeah, I think, wasn't it, wasn't it just to prove that it was hot enough? Like, people said they thought the thermometer was wrong. And so he said, okay, well, you can cook a steak in here. That's how bloody hot it is.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  And an egg, and the dog.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  And an egg, and a dog. Why take the dog? We believe you with the steak and the egg. It's fine.

• 24:07Speaker 03

  You've got to share the steak with someone.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think this, this is the guy who discovered about thermo regulation, wasn't it? What a laugh. What a fun party that sauna party was. Okay, here is a fact for Ferry Hunt. And this is the fact that, oh my gosh, how weird that this has just come up. This is the fact that stick insect sex can last for 79 days, and the insects are stuck together the whole time.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that fact was originally read out by someone who kept stick insects as a pet when they were younger.

• 24:45Speaker 01

  And you, did you spend 79 days straight staring at your little cubicle?

• 24:49Speaker 03

  Honestly, my parents taught me about the birds of the stick insects.

• 24:56Speaker 02

  Funny. Was this show, this show was up the creek. I think this was a live show. These are all, yeah, they're all reminding me. Because quite often, despite all these years, this is the show that often gets cited as, if you're gonna start listening to Fish, this is the episode to listen to.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Oh. Don't say that, because it was over 10 years ago now.

• 25:16Speaker 03

  Episode 82, if you're listening to this and you want to go back and listen to it.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  I believe.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Downhill from there.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  I think it was up the creek, yeah.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think you're right. Okay, well, anything from the far inferior, episode 83?

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Yes, this fact is for Vigana, Vigana Natural. And your fact is, the seventh time park ranger Roy Sullivan was struck by lightning coincided with the 22nd time he fought a bear off with a stick.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  A damn classic.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, Roy Sullivan, what a, what an interesting character. And the further you go along the story each time of when he's getting hit by lightning, the more improbable and more ridiculous it is. Just one of those fantastic stories that just keeps giving.

• 26:00Speaker 03

  I read an article about people who get struck by lightning. And there's like a conference every year that they all go to, because actually, it's a really, like, it's obviously very bad at the time, but the people who live with it have a really difficult time of it. And so they have like, support groups where they all get together and stuff like that. But there is like, various different things that happen to you if you get struck by lightning. And I am gonna look, because I have it as a fact in my future facts file.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  Some behind the scenes here. James, James has had all his facts, basically, since we started Fish in a file. Like, we, we scrounge around every week looking for headline facts. James has had them all since day one. It's amazing.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah. And actually, there's so many of them. I have got like, 20 of them that are to do with lightning. But yes, symptoms of being struck by lightning include foods tasting like glue, sexual dysfunction, and the inability to sweat.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, you see where I was going?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  I see, I see who you're suggesting might have been struck by lightning at some point.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. Well, it's unfair, Andy's not here to defend himself. So.

• 27:10Speaker 03

  Witch, Andy.

• 27:17Speaker 03

  Okay, here is another fact. This one is now under the custodianship of Walter. And Walter, your fact is that in 2015, America's Hero Dog of the Year award was won by a cat.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Unbelievable, they can't even find enough heroic dogs to fill that, that prize. And there's a, there's an episode of Harry McLeary based on this, that I was reading only a couple of nights ago, isn't there? When Harry, as you all know, being Harry McLeary fanatics, Harry McLeary wins the best cat in show competition.

• 27:50Speaker 02

  Harry McLeary from Donaldson's Dairy.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  That's absolutely correct. Yeah, that one.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  And when you say episode, is it now a TV show? Or do you mean a book?

• 27:56Speaker 01

  No, I mean a book. I just forgot the word book.

• 27:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:01Speaker 03

  The interesting thing about Harry McLeary from Donaldson's Dairy for British people is that he's from a dairy, but the books were written in New Zealand, where dairy is very different. A dairy is like a corner shop in New Zealand. So it's not a place where you get milk from or anything like that. So in Britain, we always think that Harry McLeary lives in a place where there's loads of cows and they're getting milk. But actually, he lives in a corner shop.

• 28:25Speaker 01

  Amazing, when you first told me that, it's like, everything falls into place. Because Harry McLeary, there are never cows in it. And there's not this bucolic countryside landscape. It's sort of suburbia. So yeah, not interesting to our New Zealand listeners, which Dan has confirmed we have a lot of.

• 28:39Speaker 03

  And you know who told me that? It was the son of the people who wrote The Little Yellow Digger, which is, I think, the second most famous kids book from New Zealand.

• 28:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  The little yellow digger got stuck and a bigger, bigger digger pulled it out and all that kind of stuff.

• 28:58Speaker 02

  You know their kids.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  Oh, mate, I got my showbiz pals, just like the rest of you.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  You just don't drop them into clanging forced anecdotes like we do on the show. Damn it, that's wonderful.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Okay, hero dogs. Excellent. Enjoy that one, Walter. I have got a fact for Rolf Lindsay. And this fact is that the earliest known penalty for illegal parking was to be impaled on a steak. Yeah, this is just in the 50s, in Leicester Square. And, no, it wasn't. It was thousands of years ago, wasn't it? I think it was about 4,000 years ago.

• 29:35Speaker 03

  Was it, was it the, one of those old codes of Hammurabi or whatever they're called?

• 29:41Speaker 01

  Well, I think it was one of those, like Hammurabi code. Yes, it was in Nineveh. And it was the royal road. So I suppose only the king was allowed to waltz up and down there.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  I'm trying to work out if this show will go out before the second episode of our Royal Institution run, where the crowd were baying for blood for any social infraction that anyone could make. Like, we would say, oh, someone got fined for using their phone on the, on the train. And the crowd was like, find them more, find them more, string them up.

• 30:16Speaker 01

  Turns out, we've got some really hardline fans. They're gonna be loving this. All listeners going, damn right, should still have that for parking infractions.

• 30:26Speaker 02

  I've got one here for Chris Martin. This is your fact now. Female corn earthworm moths go invisible after sex.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  It's a good fact, because A, it starts with a thing you've never heard of, the corn earthworm moth. And B, it heads into magic.

• 30:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, seems unbelievable.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  And C, it's going to Chris Martin from Coldplay, presumably it must be him.

• 30:52Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  Right? Whose ex-wife runs a sex toy website that in future will presumably be selling fluffy dildos.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 31:01Speaker 03

  And when we were last in New Zealand, on the day we were in New Zealand, guess where Coldplay played a gig?

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  I'll give you a clue. There's a big rock there.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  Oh, oh, don't, I can get this. Hang on.

• 31:19Speaker 02

  Come on, guys. Sorry, just talking to the research team. Oh, Eden Park.

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Eden Park, that's right. Because do you remember, we had some issues with trying to get guests over, because all of the flights were booked out, because all the fans were gonna watch Coldplay at Eden Park?

• 31:35Speaker 01

  Of course. And that must be where Chris Martin heard of us, all that kerfuffle. And that's why he's writing in now.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Must be.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  And he'll love that fact, because he, of course, wrote the song The Scientist, and it is a sciency fact.

• 31:49Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  It's like we tailored it to him.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Blowing shit wide open.

• 31:56Speaker 03

  Okay, the last one for today, I think, goes out to Jill M. Jill M, your fact is that every week, two people in Sydney get bitten by ticks and become allergic to meat.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 32:12Speaker 03

  Those two people need to get out of Sydney.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, this was huge a few years ago, wasn't it?

• 32:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  This was reported everywhere.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  It still happens. People can get allergic to meat through being bitten by ticks, for sure, but gone out of the news a little bit.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 32:28Speaker 01

  I always like it because it's called the Alpha Gal something, like Alpha Gal Syndrome or something. When you get bitten by, yeah, it just sounds really cool. It sounds like something from Mean Girls.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  I'm surprised that there hasn't been a sort of like a vigilante group of vegans who haven't collected up these ticks and have just been spraying them around in people's homes and getting them allergic to meat so that we literally stop it that way.

• 32:52Speaker 03

  That is such a good terrorist atrocity that you've come up with.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 03

  Let's hope that no one does it now because you'll be directly implicated, I think. It's such a genius idea.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think it still might be easier to print out lots of pictures of dogs being tortured and distribute them rather than catch these elusive ticks.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, but you've got to torture the dogs, you've got to print out the pictures.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Shit, is that what they're doing?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  I'm only joking, obviously. Please don't write in.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Okay, and speaking of writing in, though, please do write in because this is the end of this show, but if you want to feature in a future show, you have to write in with a good fact. It's podcast at qi.com and he goes through all the emails and shaves off the best stuff for us to say. And thank you to our brand new fact custodians. They are Louisa, Julianne Brandon McKay, Ferry Hunt, Vigana Natural, Walter, Rolf Lindsay, Chris Martin and Jill M. Thank you so much. And if you want to be a fact custodian, you'll have to join Club Fish. Only way to get there. Look it up, find out how. But for now, that is it from me, James and Dan. We will see you next week for another episode of this or later on this week for another

• 34:08Speaker 01

  episode of No Such Thing As A Big Fish. Until then, goodbye.

• 34:13Speaker 03

  Goodbye.