Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As The God of Snooze Buttons About this episode Anne Miller joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss beans, Blackbeard and Ben Hur.
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Transcript 11,108 words · 7 speakers
0:00 Speaker 00 ChatGPT for Teens is designed to help teens learn, think critically, and grow their skills. ChatGPT for Teens supports active learning by breaking concepts down rather than giving teens the answer. Study mode helps teens work through problems, and interactive quizzes test their knowledge and provide immediate feedback. Safety protections are on by default, and parental controls offer families additional options, like setting study hours and quiet hours. Visit chatgpt.comPARENTS to learn more.
0:28 Speaker 01 Hi, everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things as a Fish, where we were joined by our good friend and erstwhile colleague, Anne Miller.
0:37 Speaker 02 That's right, Anne Miller. Not just a QI elf these days, not just a brilliant producer, but a children's author.
0:44 Speaker 01 Yes, she has a new book out. It is called The Monster Diaries. What's it about, Andy?
0:50 Speaker 03 It's about the Cyclops and the worst party ever. It's a telling of the Cyclops myth from the Cyclops's point of view, which is a very funny and good idea. Turns out Odysseus is a complete prat.
1:01 Speaker 02 And the Cyclops is the one who should be the hero of the story, but has been mistreated by history. So Anne is setting the record straight.
1:07 Speaker 01 I gotta say, it's an amazing book. My daughter has been swimming in it for the last week. She cannot put it down, and she's been asking for it to be read to her at every bedtime. I know other kids will love it, too.
1:19 Speaker 02 And it's a part of a trilogy, so there's two more on the way. If you want to subtly get brilliant bits of history and mythology into your child's brain, this is the way to do it.
1:29 Speaker 01 Yes, that's right. And if you have a very big brain yourself, and you would like to show people how big your brain is, then guess what? You have a chance to do so this coming week, because we have our next No Such Things as a Fish Quiz Night.
1:43 Speaker 03 Yes. If you're a member of Club Fish or the friend of the podcast here, you can come to our online quizzes. The three of us have been beavering away, writing questions. I am getting a costume for my round. I haven't told you guys this yet.
1:59 Speaker 02 It's ordered. Is it a beaver costume?
2:00 Speaker 03 It's not a beaver costume. It's so much worse than that. But basically, it's an enormously fun night. You can join as a team with friends or family, and it's all done over Zoom. So we will send you a link and you can just join. It's going to be on, is it the 14th of April?
2:14 Speaker 01 That's right.
2:15 Speaker 03 2026.
2:16 Speaker 02 Yep, this, yep, this year.
2:18 Speaker 01 AD. AD. And it's at 7pm UK time, so go to patreon.com/clubfish. Look for that friend of the podcast here and then you will be able to join us and see if you can pit your wits against other fish fans.
2:33 Speaker 02 Okay, on with the podcast.
2:35 Speaker 03 On with the show.
2:49 Speaker 02 Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing Is A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray and Anne Miller, and once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is Andy.
3:14 Speaker 03 My fact is, the author of Ben Hur dedicated the book to his wife, but he accidentally made it sound like she died, and when he tried to fix it, made it sound even more like she'd died.
3:26 Speaker 04 Oh no!
3:28 Speaker 03 So this is Lou Wallace.
3:30 Speaker 01 Right.
3:30 Speaker 03 Who wrote Ben Hur, which was one of the biggest books of the world in, it was out in about 1880. I think it was the biggest selling novel of the 19th century.
3:41 Speaker 04 Until Gone With The Wind, I think.
3:42 Speaker 03 It was massive.
3:43 Speaker 01 And it's a Roman epic that also takes in the birth of Jesus, of the life of Jesus.
3:48 Speaker 03 It's a bit like The Life of Brian, but it's serious, is the best way I can describe it. Like, it's huge, though. For many people, it was the first fiction they'd ever read. It was, it just sold so many millions of copies.
3:58 Speaker 01 It's like the modern version of The Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades of Grey, Anne Miller's new book.
4:04 Speaker 03 Yes, it's all of that, it's all of that. Do you have leprosy in yours, eh?
4:09 Speaker 04 No.
4:10 Speaker 03 Oh, you've missed a trick there. And it always adds 50% to sales.
4:13 Speaker 04 I suck up with a big eye.
4:16 Speaker 03 I should say this was sent in by Amber O'Rand, so thank you very much, Amber. It's a terrific fact. Basically, Wallace was married to his wife Susan and he said, "I'm going to dedicate the book to you. What would you like?" And she chose the wording, "to the wife of my youth."
4:31 Speaker 04 Only my youth.
4:32 Speaker 03 Yeah, exactly. A lot of people read that as, "Oh, that's so sad. She passed away, you know, some years ago. Ah, to the wife of my youth." And he wrote, "I began to receive letters of sympathy and inquiries as to when and of what poor Mrs. Wallace died. She was alive and well." And he got so many, I think he started getting marriage proposals by people thinking, "Hey, well, he's single."
4:52 Speaker 04 He writes a good book.
4:53 Speaker 03 Yeah. And he, so he had to go back and he asked his wife to help him fix it. So later copies read, "to the wife of my youth who still abides with me."
5:03 Speaker 01 Oh, my God.
5:05 Speaker 03 She lives on in my heart.
5:06 Speaker 04 Isn't that like the world's most famous funeral song as well?
5:09 Speaker 03 But yes. Just to my wife, to my wife, to my wife, who's here right now. She's looking great. She's never looked better.
5:16 Speaker 01 I just think, here's the problem. It's a great novel. He's written this great novel. His wife is only doing one little bit. His wife has done the dedication both times and she's messed it up twice.
5:27 Speaker 03 Yeah.
5:27 Speaker 04 Yeah.
5:28 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. She had one job.
5:29 Speaker 04 But she's played the long game in terms of PR because now she's on those things as a fish.
5:34 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
5:35 Speaker 03 Susan Wallace.
5:36 Speaker 01 Is she still alive?
5:38 Speaker 03 Well, she outlived him by a couple of years.
5:40 Speaker 04 She was a writer as well. And I read that she came up with the phrase, "the path of little feet" in her poem.
5:45 Speaker 03 Oh, that's huge.
5:47 Speaker 02 And people will know that more than Ben Hur. So she...
5:51 Speaker 03 It's snappier, isn't it?
5:52 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's quicker. It was a big book. I mean, there's no doubt that this was a huge, huge moment in literature. It supposedly was blessed by Pope Leo XIII. That's a story that goes around. It was one of the first books that was turned into a Braille book. But that's a big book.
6:09 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
6:09 Speaker 02 To be Braille.
6:10 Speaker 03 That is a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
6:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
6:12 Speaker 03 You get tired fingers.
6:13 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it was, it was...
6:15 Speaker 03 What?
6:16 Speaker 02 You would get tired fingers, yeah. And tired eyeballs from reading it because it is a monster book.
6:21 Speaker 01 And tired ears if you listen to the audio.
6:25 Speaker 04 Do you see it as one of the first like big like merch tie-ins as well? So his son was a businessman and he licensed it to all sorts of things. So you could get Ben-Hur cars, bicycles, cigars, Ben-Hur soup, Ben-Hur perfume and Ben-Hur flour.
6:37 Speaker 01 As in stuff you make cakes with?
6:39 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:39 Speaker 01 Wow. I also read you could get Ben-Hur and Ben-His bathroom towels.
6:44 Speaker 03 Stop it.
6:46 Speaker 03 Very good. I didn't think they had his and her stuff in the 1880s, if I'm wrong, clearly.
6:51 Speaker 04 Spell H U R.
6:52 Speaker 01 I think the merch that I'm talking about came after the movie came out. And so the movie came out in the 50s, didn't it?
7:00 Speaker 02 Wow. Yeah, the Charlton Heston version, the like real colossal famous one, yeah.
7:04 Speaker 03 But there have been four films, have there?
7:05 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:06 Speaker 03 Four films.
7:06 Speaker 04 And when was it the first one MGM ever made?
7:09 Speaker 03 Yeah, the first was in 1907, which was 15 minutes long, which at the time was an epic. Oh my God.
7:15 Speaker 01 I'm gonna have to go for a wee three times.
7:18 Speaker 04 15 minutes.
7:20 Speaker 03 And they didn't get the rights to it, they just made the film. So all prints of that film by law were destroyed, except one.
7:26 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:26 Speaker 03 There was only one print left. Then there was a 1925 one, which was very faithful to it and they got the rights. And then, yes, the 1959 one is a very famous old Hollywood, you know, swords and sandals epic.
7:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
7:38 Speaker 02 Charlton Heston plays Ben-Hur in the movie, Judah. And in Grease, it was not starring Charlton Heston.
7:45 Speaker 01 No, it's starring John Travolta.
7:47 Speaker 02 Yes. Yes. Anyway, just a little fact there for you guys. Two different people, it turns out. Anyway.
7:55 Speaker 01 So in Grease, they released this with another actor?
7:58 Speaker 02 No, it was still Charlton Heston, but he was billed as Charlton Easton. And the reason is, is because in modern Greek, Hesto means to shit yourself. Yeah.
8:08 Speaker 01 Does it?
8:08 Speaker 02 It's a defecation thing.
8:09 Speaker 03 You tried driving a chariot that far.
8:12 Speaker 01 That's amazing.
8:13 Speaker 04 That's wild. I read that the film got, it won 11 Academy Awards, which is like the most anyone had got until Lord of the Rings, the third one that also got 11. And both books, Harper Collins books.
8:25 Speaker 03 Interesting.
8:25 Speaker 01 Oh.
8:26 Speaker 03 What are you trying to say here?
8:29 Speaker 03 This is a woman in publishing, you know?
8:32 Speaker 01 Can you name any other Harper Collins books?
8:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, Theory of Everything Else by Dan. That was, yeah, an imprint, mudlark of Harper Collins.
8:43 Speaker 03 The really nice thing about the film versions is that there's a guy who directed The Chariot Race in the 1925 movie, assistant directed it, he's called William Wyler. He directed the 1959 film. He worked his way up from assistant chariot race director to overall film director. But the 1959 film is the only Hollywood movie ever to make the Vatican's approved list of films.
9:08 Speaker 01 Really?
9:09 Speaker 03 If you're having a Vatican movie night.
9:11 Speaker 02 Yeah.
9:11 Speaker 03 Vatican approved movie night.
9:12 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:12 Speaker 02 Yes.
9:13 Speaker 03 You can only watch one Hollywood film and it's Ben Hur.
9:15 Speaker 02 And that's the only one. Still to this day.
9:17 Speaker 03 I don't know if they've updated the list.
9:19 Speaker 04 I should write to them.
9:20 Speaker 03 I should write to them.
9:21 Speaker 01 So what are the other ones on there then?
9:22 Speaker 03 Um, there's Dude Wears My Car Two. Not Dude Wears My Car One.
9:27 Speaker 01 But that's Hollywood as well, right? So what I mean, is it like European?
9:32 Speaker 04 Oh, like educational films or something.
9:34 Speaker 03 It'll be a load of boring, boring stuff, won't it?
9:37 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:37 Speaker 04 What if it's, what if it's, what if it's literally just Ben Hur? Like when I was, when I was in primary school, we had one video to record to every wet play or end of term. We all watched Mrs Doubtfire, but only the first 50 minutes.
9:48 Speaker 01 Wow.
9:49 Speaker 02 Why only the first 50?
9:50 Speaker 04 Because I don't know how long a lesson was. So I didn't see the second half till I was like 20.
9:57 Speaker 02 They're both the same guy?
10:00 Speaker 04 It blew my mind. I'm not kidding, we watched the same 50 minutes every wet break.
10:04 Speaker 01 And like presumably you went to school in Scotland, right? So for you guys, it would be like a documentary.
10:10 Speaker 04 That was after school childcare.
10:11 Speaker 02 How was the accent for Ronald Williams?
10:14 Speaker 04 Liked it.
10:14 Speaker 02 Oh, okay.
10:16 Speaker 03 Can we talk a little bit about Lou Wallace?
10:17 Speaker 04 I'm obsessed with Lou Wallace. I knew nothing about him.
10:20 Speaker 03 Very, very interesting fellow. So he started writing this book after basically being buttonholed on a train by an agnostic for some time.
10:29 Speaker 01 What do you mean by buttonholed?
10:30 Speaker 03 Sorry, where someone, it's like where someone grabs your lapel and just talks at you for ages about something. It's been buttonholed, you know? So he, he was on a train with another soldier. He was, he was a soldier in the, I think, Union Army in the Civil War.
10:42 Speaker 01 Civil War, yeah.
10:43 Speaker 03 In the Civil War. And he got talking to this soldier called Colonel Robert Ingersoll for ages and ages, who was quite a well-known agnostic speaker about, you know, doubts about the existence of God. And he just seems to have written a huge epic religious novel off the back of this conversation, saying.
11:00 Speaker 01 Just to piss him off then.
11:01 Speaker 03 Seems like it. Yeah, yeah. And it was read by so many famous people. So friend of the podcast, I would say first and closest friend of the podcast.
11:08 Speaker 01 Robin Thicke.
11:12 Speaker 01 Um, who?
11:13 Speaker 03 President James Garfield.
11:14 Speaker 01 No. Oh, he was a very well read man.
11:17 Speaker 03 Well, he had time at his hands, didn't he? While he was lying around.
11:19 Speaker 04 Did you read about the job he gave him?
11:21 Speaker 03 No, what?
11:21 Speaker 04 So apparently President James Garfield, while he was president, he loved Ben Hur so much. And this, I wish people empowered did this more often. He wanted to read the sequel so much that he gave Lou Wallace the job of ambassador to the Ottoman Empire based in Constantinople in hope that being there would make him inspire him to write a sequel.
11:39 Speaker 01 Oh, wow.
11:40 Speaker 03 That's so cool.
11:41 Speaker 04 That's so cool. But he didn't write a sequel.
11:43 Speaker 03 He didn't write a sequel. Well, he was probably busy being the, it sounds like a big job, like ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. That's a huge game.
11:49 Speaker 01 I imagine Donald Trump's done the same with Eric Cull to try and get him to do a Very Hungry Caterpillar 2.
11:55 Speaker 04 I'm here for it. But this guy's life is absolutely incredible. He's basically kind of like, the nearest comparison I can think of is like the Giles Brandreth of his time, because he,
12:04 Speaker 01 Oh my God, Giles is gonna love that.
12:06 Speaker 04 He did everything. So he, when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, he was one of the people who investigated the co-conspirators. He was a general in the Civil War. He was sent and made territorial governor of New Mexico, which is where he wrote Ben Hur. Then he wrote the book. Then he did some deal with Billy the Kid that went wrong. So he has like people going past his house and shooting at his candles while he was trying to write. Cause they were so cross with him, they said go himself.
12:29 Speaker 03 Sorry, hang on, back up. Billy the Kid's people were shooting at his candles.
12:33 Speaker 04 He had to stop him writing.
12:35 Speaker 03 That's pretty cool.
12:35 Speaker 01 I mean, I don't think they were that good at shooting in those days. I know they were good. To be able to shoot a candle.
12:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, you've got Calamity Jane who can do that, but that's about it. I don't think.
12:46 Speaker 01 How do you shoot a candle?
12:47 Speaker 03 Oh, you just aim for the top, don't you? No, but how do you not accidentally kill Lou Wallace in the process?
12:52 Speaker 04 I think they wouldn't have minded.
12:53 Speaker 03 Yeah, okay, very nice. Well, he, um, he did end up having Billy the Kid arrested, um, which is.
12:59 Speaker 01 I think what happened with Billy the Kid, I might be wrong about this, but I think what happened was Billy the Kid was an outlaw. And he said, well, I'll pardon you. Come back and we'll let bygones be bygones. And maybe you can like tell us about some of your accomplices. But then he kind of lost his power a little bit and the other people who were in charge said, oh, we're not gonna, we're not gonna agree with that deal anymore. And Billy the Kid then went to prison. So I think it was like a deal that he did, but then he wasn't in a position to honor it. And I think that's then the reason that Billy the Kid's people were so upset with him. I think.
13:33 Speaker 03 Right, right, right, right, right. That makes sense.
13:35 Speaker 04 Like, what a life.
13:36 Speaker 03 What a life. He made his own violins, Lou Wallace. He patented eight inventions. One of them was a retractable reel inside a fishing rod handle. This guy.
13:45 Speaker 04 That's useful.
13:45 Speaker 03 Very useful.
13:46 Speaker 04 I was looking at the website of the, um, his, his study, which he built to play the violin in is now a museum. And on the website, they've got these FAQs. So they're like, oh, did he really go back on his word to Billy the Kid? Did he really, Abraham Lincoln? But one of the questions is, did Lou Wallace really invent the snooze button? And the answer is no.
14:06 Speaker 04 It says, and we're not sure how this rumor got started.
14:08 Speaker 03 How frequently asked is this question, really?
14:12 Speaker 01 Well, you ask it every nine minutes.
14:15 Speaker 02 Um, I feel like with what we've heard about him, that doesn't sound out of place.
14:19 Speaker 04 Yeah.
14:20 Speaker 03 He invented, he did invent things.
14:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, but not, not the snooze button. And then there's this lovely quote from him where he said, um, let's read the whole thing. So it's beautiful. He says, I would not give a tuppence for the American who has not tried to do at least one of these things. Paint a picture, write a book, get a patent or tried to play a musical instrument. That is the genius of the true American in those four. Art, literature, invention and music.
14:40 Speaker 03 Hmm. Well, it's easy for you to say. You're a sort of multi-award winning genius inventor.
14:46 Speaker 04 Military leader, presidential writer.
14:48 Speaker 02 Did he produce any other major work outside of Ben Har?
14:51 Speaker 04 He wrote the big biography for Benjamin Harrison while he was running for president because.
14:54 Speaker 03 Ben Har?
14:58 Speaker 01 He should have called it that.
15:05 Speaker 04 Because there wasn't really much like, there wasn't, you know, like a, like a TV news circuit you could go on. So to like get to know the candidates, they, they pushed these books. And he wrote Benjamin Harrison's. It's such a good job. It was like the book about him for like 70 years, but with the wrong title.
15:23 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
15:37 Speaker 00 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
15:48 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
15:54 Speaker 06 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
15:59 Speaker 05 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
16:20 Speaker 03 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Ann.
16:24 Speaker 04 My fact is that as well as more famous Greek gods like Poseidon and Zeus, there was also Chymites, the god of beans.
16:31 Speaker 03 Yummy. Mmm. Fantastic. What was, what would be your job as god of beans, just making sure?
16:38 Speaker 04 Counting them, I guess.
16:39 Speaker 03 Counting.
16:40 Speaker 04 There's very little known about Chymites, I should say. So we think specifically the broad bean, and we think he may have hung around with Demeter, who was the goddess of agriculture, but he's quite mysterious.
16:50 Speaker 03 Do you get kind of junior, because like in the government, you have the main minister of transport, but then you'll have the minister of buses, who's got a smaller brief, obviously. Is it the same kind of thing? You'll have a god of the big deal, like god of war, and within that is a goddess of archery or whatever.
17:04 Speaker 04 I would say yes, but with a lot more having sex with your sister.
17:09 Speaker 03 Well, we don't know what the minister of buses gets up to.
17:13 Speaker 01 That's what on the buses is about. There's not much written about this guy, Chymites. But Porzanius writes, "I cannot state for certain whether he was the first to sow beans or whether they gave this name to a hero because they may not attribute it to Demeter, the discovery of beans. Whoever has been initiated in Eleusis or has read what I call the Orphica knows what I mean."
17:44 Speaker 01 We don't know what that means.
17:46 Speaker 04 It's so mysterious. But Andy's kind of right. It kind of is like a government setup. So you have, basically, you're like 12 Olympic gods live on Mount Olympus. And there's kind of two groups. There's Zeus and his siblings, and then there are his children. And there is some crossover. And so you have Zeus, who's married to Hera, who is his sister. They have some children. There's also his sister, Demeter. They also have a child. And then there are his children. So you've got Athena, Aphrodite, Hermes. But again, with Greek mythology, because the stories were told so often and in different places, there's different versions of everybody's parentage. So Aphrodite's one is brilliant, because there are, one version is that she's Zeus's daughter, but not Hera's. So far, so straightforward. The other telling is that her father was a different god, Uranus, god of the sea.
18:31 Speaker 04 Sorry, Uranus, god of the sky. And in that's the version of the story.
18:36 Speaker 03 Come on, Anne.
18:36 Speaker 04 Not because of what's coming next. And in this version, he, his testicles were cut off and thrown into the sea.
18:44 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
18:44 Speaker 04 And Neopathos in Cyprus. And the resulting foam led to the creation of Aphrodite. And her name comes from the Greek aphros, which means foam. But there are very famous paintings of Aphrodite coming out of the sea and being born. And so as far as I can tell, no testicles in the paintings.
18:59 Speaker 03 Okay. Okay. That's interesting. Is that the same as the birth of Venus?
19:02 Speaker 04 Yeah.
19:03 Speaker 03 Where she's on the shell?
19:04 Speaker 04 Yeah, but before me.
19:05 Speaker 01 Yes. I find it all very difficult to keep in my head. You know what I mean? It's like, you get it in quiz questions and stuff like that. It always comes up. And I've often tried to learn how everyone's related to each other. But it's so difficult.
19:18 Speaker 04 It mashes together and it changes. And there's different versions. Even the 12 Olympian gods, there's different 12s, depending on who you talk to. They're kind of like Zeus was always there, but some of them vary around a little bit. And it all starts slipping into each other.
19:34 Speaker 03 Aphrodite, we've mentioned, the goddess of love. She just has an interesting entourage of junior gods around her. There's Eros, there's Hermafridus, and there's Hyman, the god of marriage. But there are various other, I like this kind of very junior level gods. The small gods, as Terry Pratchett would call them. Hadilagos, god of sweet talking.
19:54 Speaker 04 Nice.
19:55 Speaker 03 Sweet talking. Yeah. Right. Right, flirting. Yeah.
19:58 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah.
19:59 Speaker 03 Chat. Good chat. Bance. Top but hot bance. But Aphrodite has another very interesting thing that she gave the world because she may have been the first mother ever to slipper her child. As in like thrash with a slipper. Oh, really? There's a vase from 360 B.C. Which depicts Aphrodite giving naughty little Eros a spanking with a slipper. Which is obviously, that's become, you know, that was a staple of things like the beano. Yeah.
20:28 Speaker 01 That's true, yeah, yeah.
20:29 Speaker 03 With a slipper.
20:30 Speaker 04 It feels like, you know, when you have a bad moment, you think, I hope nobody saw me do that. Imagine having it painted on a bar. Painted on a bar.
20:36 Speaker 03 Have you seen the latest vases? No. Um, we did something ages ago, which was about Pythagoras and his, his death. Yeah, and his fear of beans. Was that connected in any way to the fact that?
20:49 Speaker 01 I think it might be connected in some way in that the reason that he didn't like beans is because some people thought they had the souls of dead people in them. They were definitely associated with death. Uh, and they were an offering that you would give if someone had died. And so for that reason, they were obviously important in society. And when something was so important, they might have a god associated with them.
21:11 Speaker 03 Yes.
21:11 Speaker 01 So I think that's what, what the association is.
21:14 Speaker 04 And they also had sort of like deities. They weren't specifically like gods, but they like sort of had special powers really for certain areas. So there was Horus, who personified the curse on those who make a bad oath. You would sort of call to him. Uh, there's somebody, Mamas, it's for mockery and satire. Um, this whole bunch of like.
21:28 Speaker 03 I love Mamas.
21:29 Speaker 04 Skills.
21:30 Speaker 03 Mamas is the bastard child of night.
21:33 Speaker 04 Oh.
21:34 Speaker 03 Um, Mamas was thrown out of Olympus eventually for hanging around making unhelpful comments.
21:39 Speaker 01 Which sounds like you would be.
21:41 Speaker 03 How dare you? How dare you?
21:43 Speaker 01 Sounds like your patron saint.
21:46 Speaker 03 I did think, oh, wow. Like the class clown has a, yeah, yeah. So I get quite, I get quite confused about how people in ancient Greece experienced all this. Yeah. What was the day to day life like with all of these gods? I know they had individual temples and some major ones and some smaller ones, but. I just wanted to do a little quiz question for you guys. When was the last temple built to the Greek gods?
22:12 Speaker 02 Oh, there's probably still people around who believe in it. So I would say 2025.
22:16 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think that's very likely. But to play along with your game, let's say it was
22:22 Speaker 04 500 B.C.
22:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, 100 B.C.
22:24 Speaker 02 Thank you.
22:25 Speaker 03 May 2025.
22:28 Speaker 04 This morning.
22:29 Speaker 03 It was in 2025.
22:33 Speaker 01 Was it?
22:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's in the Peloponnese and it was the idea of a doctor called Manolus Heliotis, who has 150 acres of land. It's a proper temple, like it's marble.
22:43 Speaker 02 Cool.
22:43 Speaker 03 Ionic pillars.
22:44 Speaker 04 For specific gods or for all of them?
22:46 Speaker 03 It, do you know, I don't know.
22:48 Speaker 01 Sounds like a tax break to me.
22:49 Speaker 03 It's to the right offs. Yeah, yeah. It opened on the 8th of March.
22:56 Speaker 01 Oh.
22:56 Speaker 03 The same birthday as No Such Thing As A Fish.
22:58 Speaker 04 Oh.
22:59 Speaker 03 That's the day after.
23:01 Speaker 01 It was illegal to worship Zeus until 2006. Yes. In fact, any of these lot. If you wanted to do a Kaya Mites festival, then that was no can do.
23:12 Speaker 03 Wow.
23:13 Speaker 01 But then in 2006, an Athens court decided that you can do this kind of pagan worshipping. Because before that, you could only be, I think, an Orthodox Christian and one or two other things were allowed. But yeah, then they came in and then there were censuses and the US State Department in 2006 reckoned there were 2,000 followers of the ancient Greek religion. Although people who do that, they reckon the number's more like 100,000 who still believe in those gods. I mean, it's in their interest to pump up the numbers, right?
23:46 Speaker 03 But it's not like, it's not like a thing, it's not like a thing of saying you're a Jedi, which was on a census, a few censuses ago.
23:51 Speaker 01 It's more like, more like being a Wiccan, I would say, or like, you know, I'm sorry to the Wiccans listening, because I know people get that wrong a lot as well. But it's, it's worshiping the old gods.
24:01 Speaker 03 Yes.
24:01 Speaker 01 Which definitely there are people in the UK who do that.
24:03 Speaker 03 Yeah. And the Greek Orthodox Church are very down on this sort of thing. They were very against this temple.
24:08 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, they were very hostile to it and they said it was a regression to a dark world.
24:12 Speaker 02 Right.
24:13 Speaker 01 Gosh.
24:14 Speaker 02 So Uranus, who you didn't pronounce properly beforehand.
24:19 Speaker 02 Is that the only planet that we have that is named after a Greek god?
24:22 Speaker 04 So that's, this is where it again gets confusing because generally the planet names are the Roman versions of the gods.
24:27 Speaker 02 Right.
24:28 Speaker 04 So Aphrodite becomes Venus.
24:29 Speaker 03 But Neptune is Roman because the Poseidon, Poseidon is the Greek god.
24:34 Speaker 04 Yeah.
24:34 Speaker 01 Jupiter's Roman.
24:36 Speaker 03 Jupiter's Roman.
24:36 Speaker 01 Saturn's Roman.
24:37 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:38 Speaker 01 But Uranus is the only one that's slightly.
24:39 Speaker 04 Seems to be both.
24:40 Speaker 03 Pluto is the dog.
24:41 Speaker 04 Yeah, yeah, running around barking a lot.
24:43 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:45 Speaker 01 Mercury is the lead singer of Queen.
24:48 Speaker 04 Would you like some fun ancient Greek etymology?
24:51 Speaker 03 Yes.
24:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, so is.
24:53 Speaker 04 The word tantalizing?
24:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:54 Speaker 04 It's from Greek myth. I didn't know this until very recently. It's a myth about King Tantalus. And he was punished by Hades made him stand in a river up to his neck in water. And he wasn't allowed to eat or drink. So if he moved to get the fruit trees above him, the water, the trees would move. He moved to drink the water, the water would move. So he was like always trying to get food or drink and he couldn't.
25:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
25:12 Speaker 04 But would you like to know why he was punished by the gods?
25:14 Speaker 03 Yes.
25:15 Speaker 04 He did three things.
25:16 Speaker 03 Can we guess?
25:18 Speaker 04 You can try.
25:19 Speaker 01 He stole grapes.
25:20 Speaker 04 Yeah, kind of. He stole Nectar and Ambrosia.
25:22 Speaker 02 That's a pretty wild first hit rate.
25:26 Speaker 04 Next one, two and three.
25:27 Speaker 02 He smacked the wrong child with a slipper.
25:30 Speaker 01 He had sex with Osora, goddess naked. That often happens.
25:34 Speaker 02 That's a good one.
25:35 Speaker 04 I mean, they're not a million miles off. So the second one is secrets. He told secrets he'd overheard that he shouldn't have. And the third one is a worse version of the slipper. He killed his son and served him to the gods to test their powers of observation. And they did not like this.
25:48 Speaker 03 How was he serving him?
25:50 Speaker 04 I think in a stew.
25:51 Speaker 02 Oh, how, that's impossible to tell.
25:54 Speaker 03 A stew?
25:56 Speaker 02 There's a lot going on.
25:57 Speaker 01 Is this chicken? Is this pigeon? Is this your son? I don't know.
26:01 Speaker 02 The god of beans is going though, what meat is this?
26:05 Speaker 02 God, something's up.
26:06 Speaker 04 I said we should all be vegetarians.
26:08 Speaker 03 That's really interesting because Tantalus is, so I was looking at the things, we covered ages ago, that there are various financial houses named after Greek gods. It's a really common thing to do to make your grubby little hedge fund sound like it's been around for 2,000 years. You know what I mean?
26:25 Speaker 04 Like Olympian, Olympian handlings.
26:27 Speaker 03 Yeah, like exactly, like Jupiter Investments or whatever, you know, all of this stuff. But, sorry.
26:34 Speaker 03 For any hedge funders listening, if you want to sponsor an episode, we'll very happily do that. But there's a very niche one. There's this amazing article by Thomas Fedorek who spotted there's Yuri Clair Partners, right? And I'd never heard of Yuri Clair. And Yuri Clair is a minor character in The Odyssey. And this is actually, I think, the best named financial institution you could have named after a character from ancient myth. Because in The Odyssey, Odysseus gets home 20 years later. Where have you been? All that. But there are loads of chancers living in the house trying to shag his wife, basically. And she is putting them off and saying, look, my husband's going to be home any minute. But it's been 20 years and it's wearing increasingly thin.
27:19 Speaker 01 The god of snooze buttons going, I'll give you nine more minutes.
27:25 Speaker 03 So when Odysseus is on his way home, he will be killed by all the chancers who, you know, sort of like young warlords trying to get with his wife. So the goddess Athena disguises Odysseus as a tramp so he won't be killed on sight, right? So he can get into the house and suddenly throw off his costume and win the prize and reclaim his wife and all this. Everyone is fooled by the sight of this tramp, except Yuri Clair, who is an elderly servant living in the house. And she is the one who spots a familiar scar on his thigh and says, you're Odysseus.
27:59 Speaker 01 How does she know his thigh so well?
28:02 Speaker 03 Well, good point. Good point. But she observes him and it means she can, you know, she can buy stocks in Odysseus, basically. So I think that is a terrific, like she has the insight based on good market knowledge. So I think that is a fantastic name for a financial organisation.
28:18 Speaker 01 Do you know what my hedge fund will be called?
28:20 Speaker 03 Yeah.
28:21 Speaker 01 Mine would be called Epimetheus Holdings. Okay. Because Epimetheus was the god of afterthought and excuses.
28:31 Speaker 01 And he was the brother of Prometheus. So Prometheus in this story creates humans and Epimetheus creates all the other animals. But he's so sort of stupid and just really impulsive that he puts all the best bits on all the other animals. So he puts the wings on the eagles and he puts the humps on the camels and the trunks on the elephants and all the best bits were there. So the humans just get a shitty little human body.
28:59 Speaker 02 Oh, that's so funny.
29:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
29:01 Speaker 02 So should we have had humps and wings and?
29:03 Speaker 01 We should have had humps, but in the end, only the black eyed peas had them.
29:12 Speaker 02 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the greatest ever treasure trove of original American comic strips was discovered in a naval warehouse by a man called Blackbeard.
29:27 Speaker 04 Ooh, that's very cool.
29:29 Speaker 02 It's a great name. He's William Blackbeard. This was a guy who really is credited by people within the community of comic books in America as single-handedly the reason that we have all the original source material from, you know, the 30s onwards. He made it his mission to track down and find all the original newspapers. So he would go around to people's garages, you know, and he would just say, do you have any old newspapers? And often they did. And he would cut out the comic strips and he would log them. And so he kept this huge archive and he was having to do it very slowly. But then eventually he discovered that the Library of Congress had six acres of naval warehouse in Virginia. And it was where they were housing all of these newspapers that went back to the 19th
30:14 Speaker 02 century. And so he suddenly thought, great, they're safe. But then it turned out that they were getting rid of them because they thought, oh, they're going to deteriorate. So they were photographing, making microfilm of them, and then they were going to toss them away. Now, the issue for him was if you'd make a microfilm of comic strips, they're in black and white, they're no longer in color. And so he did a deal and he was able to extract them all. And as a result, saved all the originals of these things. So he's a real hero in that community.
30:39 Speaker 04 Did you have to cut out the strips individually or did you keep them as like?
30:42 Speaker 02 No, he did. He just kept them out. I don't know if he did that for every single one.
30:45 Speaker 04 Cause that's for every paper, that's.
30:47 Speaker 03 You can't keep the whole paper. That's why they were in warehouses, these huge stacks of papers. And all he wanted was one tiny strip of paper. So we should say, yes, this is comic strips, not comic books.
30:56 Speaker 02 Exactly.
30:56 Speaker 03 It's not a first edition Superman, it's a first edition.
30:59 Speaker 04 Garfield.
31:00 Speaker 03 Garfield.
31:01 Speaker 02 It was something like 2.5 million clippings that he managed to get his hands on. They're still going through the archive. So there's a couple of Instagram accounts where they show latest findings. I saw one the other day of a poster of Charlie Brown, which they were really excited because it's, you know, it's original. So yeah, a huge, huge hero to this community.
31:21 Speaker 04 I guess people didn't realise what they had. Like you need somebody to, like every book, the British Library takes a copy. You need a system to store the comics and sounds like that guy set up and.
31:30 Speaker 02 Yeah, him and his wife, he just did it. He just set up his own company.
31:33 Speaker 04 That's so cool.
31:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, which he had to do, I believe. Otherwise they wouldn't give it over to him because he wasn't an institution.
31:38 Speaker 04 Oh, like resources.
31:40 Speaker 01 Are people like using this resource now?
31:42 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's kind of the main archive that is used for any comic book history. He wrote a lot of books as well off the back of it.
31:49 Speaker 01 Did he?
31:49 Speaker 03 Yeah. He printed the strips, didn't he? He said, look, here are a load of peanuts cartoons.
31:55 Speaker 04 I think he did a lot.
31:56 Speaker 03 I think. Probably sold it a bit better than that.
31:59 Speaker 04 I think I read he did a lot of like consultancy work for people who wanted to know what was in the comics, who to find out stuff because he knew them all so well.
32:04 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah.
32:05 Speaker 04 He was like the go to comic strip guy.
32:07 Speaker 01 Yeah, the reason I was thinking is like, what use is it to have this stuff?
32:10 Speaker 03 Lot of medical knowledge in there, a lot of like ancient lost secrets.
32:14 Speaker 01 By a frying pan twice, then you get your memory back.
32:18 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
32:18 Speaker 01 It's just cultural history, isn't it?
32:20 Speaker 02 Cultural history, yeah.
32:21 Speaker 03 When did people start wearing braces? Well, let's look at this ancient edition of Fred the dog or whatever it is. Yeah. There's a lot of debate about when comics began, because obviously they became big in the 20th century in a really big way in newspapers.
32:35 Speaker 01 What about hieroglyphs?
32:36 Speaker 03 Well, you've just outgunned my early bid, which was for the biotapestry.
32:40 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah. Comics, a comic strip?
32:42 Speaker 02 Is it a comic strip?
32:44 Speaker 01 What about like the cave paintings? I've seen cave paintings where it appears like one thing comes after the other one.
32:50 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:50 Speaker 04 Oh, yeah.
32:51 Speaker 03 That's a good one.
32:52 Speaker 04 Cave comics.
32:53 Speaker 01 Arguably cartoons and comic strips are the oldest medium.
32:57 Speaker 02 There we go.
32:59 Speaker 03 There we go.
33:00 Speaker 02 When were you going to say the?
33:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
33:03 Speaker 02 Tapestry.
33:04 Speaker 01 Yeah, because that is sequential though, isn't it? The Bayeux Tapestry.
33:07 Speaker 03 And it's a strip.
33:08 Speaker 02 It is.
33:08 Speaker 03 It's coming here. We're going to get it in the UK. We're so excited. There are some vases, which are technically a kind of animation. I know they're not as old as the cave paintings, but there are some ancient Persian vases. This is really cool. I've never heard of Iran's burnt city.
33:22 Speaker 01 Oh, Jesus.
33:23 Speaker 03 It's unfortunate timing now, but there is a place called the Burnt City, which is an ancient historical site. They found a bowl in there, which was 5,200 years old. And it's got these five images on it. And if you spin the bowl, it shows a goat jumping up and grabbing some leaves from a tree.
33:39 Speaker 02 Oh, cool.
33:39 Speaker 01 It's like a Zoe trope.
33:41 Speaker 03 It's like a Zoe trope, the thing you spin round and round and the animation repeats itself.
33:45 Speaker 04 That's amazing.
33:45 Speaker 03 I've seen that they've rendered it into an animation.
33:47 Speaker 02 So that's like the original flip book as opposed to comic strip.
33:50 Speaker 03 You're right. It is more of that.
33:51 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:52 Speaker 02 That's very cool.
33:53 Speaker 01 Do you know where the word cartoon comes from or when it was first used in the UK?
33:58 Speaker 04 Hmm, Shakespeare?
33:59 Speaker 01 No, after that, it was 1843 and it referred to some things in the Houses of Parliament.
34:06 Speaker 03 Hmm.
34:06 Speaker 02 Ooh.
34:07 Speaker 01 So they'd recently put some murals in there.
34:10 Speaker 04 Yeah.
34:10 Speaker 01 And the word cartoon at that time meant like a little sketch you would do on cardboard before you did your big painting. So if you're in Italy, for instance, it was an Italian word. So let's say Leonardo da Vinci wants to do the Last Supper, but first he's going to do a little scribble on his shreddies box.
34:27 Speaker 04 Like to get all the spacing right.
34:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, to get all the spacing right and stuff. So that was an Italian word. And then the magazine Punch used the word to refer to these murals in the Houses of Parliament that people were able to go and see. And then it became kind of a risible thing because it was a comedy magazine. And then they started using the word cartoon to refer to their political cartoons.
34:47 Speaker 04 Ah, that's so cool.
34:48 Speaker 01 Which became big around that time as well. And that's why we use it today.
34:51 Speaker 03 Wow.
34:51 Speaker 04 That's amazing.
34:52 Speaker 02 So interesting. It's very cool.
34:53 Speaker 04 I have another Italian word. The Italian for a comic strip is fumetto, which means literally little puff of smoke. And it's named for the shape, the little speech bubbles you get in comic strips.
35:03 Speaker 01 Say again the word?
35:04 Speaker 04 I think it's pronounced fumetto.
35:06 Speaker 01 Right.
35:06 Speaker 04 F U M E T T O.
35:08 Speaker 03 Fumetto.
35:09 Speaker 04 But it's little clouds.
35:10 Speaker 03 I love that.
35:11 Speaker 04 It's very beautiful.
35:11 Speaker 03 That's wonderful. I was looking into a few of the major comic strip creators of the 1930s onwards in America. When circulation was like, you know, it was getting 34 million readers a day because it was syndicated to all the newspapers. So these people were amongst the most read in America at the time.
35:31 Speaker 02 Elsie Seegar, who we've mentioned before, he's the creator of Popeye. This guy died quite young, so he did about nine years' worth of Popeye. But the cultural impact that it had is massive. Most of the illustrators who came after, like Charles Schultz and so on, hold this guy up as one of the great geniuses. So that stuff is kind of obvious, but it had an even bigger impact that I didn't realise, which is that Popeye was meant to be Mario. So in Japan, when Mario was first made, it was never meant to be Donkey Kong and Mario. It was meant to be Bluto and Popeye, but they couldn't get the rights to it. So they had to change it so that it became that. So we could have been playing Popeye Kart, you know, these days, but actually,
36:10 Speaker 03 That's cool.
36:11 Speaker 02 It was just simply a rights issue and they had to pivot into making it something else.
36:15 Speaker 04 So like literally necessity is the mother of invention. I read that during the Great Depression, it made spinach consumption go up 33% as the American children named it one of their top three favourite foods after ice cream and turkey. It was spinach. It really rebranded spinach.
36:30 Speaker 01 That's unbelievable branding for spinach, isn't it?
36:33 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's quite the bronze position on the podium. There have been a lot of concerns about comics over the years. And I'm speaking here more about comic books rather than comic strips. No one's ever been made depraved by Garfield in the paper. But there were a lot of worries in the 1940s. There were even some comic book burnings that happened. So a lot of editorials, which said they were a national disgrace. One American critic called John Mason Brown described them as the marijuana of the nursery. I know, there was a big work in 1954, Seduction of the Innocent by-
37:06 Speaker 01 That was Frederick Wertham, right?
37:07 Speaker 03 Yes, he was a child psychologist who did a lot of good in his career. You know, ensured that a lot of poor or mentally unwell people got fair trials, helped fight mental illness in children, but he had a big bee in his bonnet about comics. He decided they were evil. He decided that Batman and Robin were an item, which was less socially acceptable in the 40s than it was today.
37:27 Speaker 01 Well, they weren't an item.
37:29 Speaker 03 They absolutely weren't. He was, I think he was seeing what he wanted to see there.
37:32 Speaker 01 He did a bit, didn't he?
37:34 Speaker 03 He decided Superman was a fascist, very much not the point. And he basically thought they should all be a 15 certificate blanket, no exceptions.
37:40 Speaker 01 So we have slightly mentioned him before.
37:42 Speaker 03 Have we?
37:42 Speaker 01 Yeah, but what I didn't know about him is he did this sort of like comic books are terrible thing. And then a load of right wing people started giving him money because they really liked the fact that he was trying to censor cartoons and stuff. But on the side, he was an anti racism campaigner. And like you say, he was running clinics for mental health and stuff like that. But specifically, he was running them in Harlem, which had a very, very high African American population. And he was really helping those communities. And so all the money from these right wingers that they thought was going to kind of ban Porky Pig or whatever was actually going to help these hospitals. Isn't that cool?
38:20 Speaker 03 Funny. That's very cool. Yeah. It led to this thing called the Comics Code, which had all these rules, like if crime is depicted, it should be as assorted and unpleasant activity. No lurid, unsavory or gruesome illustrations, no Walking Dead torture vampires, ghouls, cannibalism or werewolfism. Guess what year this code lasted until?
38:43 Speaker 02 Twenty two.
38:44 Speaker 04 Twenty twenty five.
38:46 Speaker 01 Is it 200 BC?
38:48 Speaker 03 Thank you, James.
38:51 Speaker 03 It was 2011.
38:53 Speaker 01 Wow.
38:53 Speaker 03 Final members of this code, people gradually, like comic book makers gradually fell away from it, but the final members kept going until 2011.
39:00 Speaker 01 You still get that a bit today where like in a movie, it's quite rare that you get a film where people do something bad and they don't get caught for it, or they don't get, you know, they don't get the comeuppance somehow. Do you know what I mean?
39:14 Speaker 03 It's quite unsatisfying when you watch it and people don't get the comeuppance.
39:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. On, you were talking about werewolves and all that kind of stuff. In 1954, in Glasgow, there was a vampire hunt. And this was basically a load of kids were going around Glasgow trying to find vampires. And eventually it led to. The Children and Young Persons Harmful Publications Act of 1955, which banned the sale of comic books with, you know, evil characters in it. And what they thought was that people had been reading comics with vampires in, and had decided to go around cemeteries attacking people. But people pointed out that actually there were no vampire comics around around that time. No one had read any.
39:55 Speaker 03 Right.
39:55 Speaker 01 They couldn't point to the one that these kids had been reading. But there is a monster with iron teeth in the Bible, in Daniel 7:7, which had been mentioned in local schools around the time. And what they think happened was they'd heard this story from the Bible. They thought, let's go and find that person. And then the police had said, oh, they're looking for vampires. Wow. But it did lead to an actual act of parliament.
40:18 Speaker 03 So it's sort of excess Sunday school is what we're saying.
40:21 Speaker 01 That's what it seems to be. Yeah, ban it.
40:25 Speaker 04 I was reading about Sajid's lovely fact that there were two Dennis the Menace cartoons launched on the same day. So the Scottish one and the American one. But I didn't realise that they think that the reason that happened at the same time was there's a really popular musical song called Dennis the Menace from Venice.
40:40 Speaker 03 Okay.
40:41 Speaker 04 Which I'd never heard that bit before.
40:42 Speaker 03 Dennis the Menace, so it's.
40:44 Speaker 04 So they may have heard that song and then it was sort of like a catchy name and they developed it. I mean, it still, it still came out on exactly the same day on both sides of the Atlantic, which is absolutely wild.
40:53 Speaker 03 Insane.
40:53 Speaker 04 Yeah.
40:54 Speaker 01 But not that insane if two years earlier there was another character with that same name.
40:59 Speaker 03 I still find it hard to get my head around. I still think that must prove something. I don't know what it proves.
41:04 Speaker 02 Simulation theory.
41:04 Speaker 03 Simulation theory, yeah. I mean, Dennis the Menace, we should say, doesn't.
41:08 Speaker 01 Which one?
41:09 Speaker 04 Which one?
41:09 Speaker 03 British one.
41:10 Speaker 04 British.
41:10 Speaker 03 Black and red, spiky hair, dog called Nasha, all of that.
41:13 Speaker 02 Yep.
41:13 Speaker 03 Doesn't, of course, get slippered anymore.
41:15 Speaker 01 Does he not?
41:16 Speaker 03 No, if you buy the Beano these days, it's very rare to end with corporal punishment. Which I just sort of accepted when I was reading it as a child, that that was the thing that would happen was that.
41:25 Speaker 01 You get slippered, yeah.
41:26 Speaker 03 Your grumpy mustachioed dad would hit you with a slipper. And that was.
41:31 Speaker 01 That was normal.
41:32 Speaker 03 That was normal. And it never did, never did us any harm.
41:38 Speaker 04 Do you know that in Dundee, we have a, um, our big statue in the town centre is Desperate Dan?
41:42 Speaker 03 Is it? That's right.
41:43 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a mini that makes next.
41:44 Speaker 03 Oh, that's very cool. Cause that was the other thing. We've mentioned that on the show, the, um, the meat pies that he would eat. They got changed into vegan pies for a while as well.
41:52 Speaker 01 Cow pies.
41:53 Speaker 03 Cow pies, sorry. Yeah.
41:54 Speaker 01 Yeah.
41:54 Speaker 03 They were changed into veggie. Hang on, this is my son in here.
41:59 Speaker 04 Ah, it was an observation test, so.
42:03 Speaker 03 Oh, here's a tiny, tiny fun detail. Um, Scrooge McDuck was invented by a man called Carl Barks. The wrong sentence person.
42:13 Speaker 01 It sounds like a cartoon of a socialist dog, doesn't it?
42:21 Speaker 03 Why don't we all share the bone?
42:25 Speaker 03 So funny.
42:30 Speaker 05 Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.
42:44 Speaker 01 People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.
42:55 Speaker 05 And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.
43:01 Speaker 06 One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.
43:06 Speaker 05 So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.
43:28 Speaker 03 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is, James.
43:32 Speaker 01 Okay, my fact this week is that naked mole rat toilet cleaners have no hope for promotion.
43:40 Speaker 03 It's a tough enough gig, being a naked mole rat. And it's a tough enough gig cleaning toilets for a living.
43:45 Speaker 01 Yeah.
43:46 Speaker 03 But being a naked mole rat and cleaning toilets for a living does feel like you've drawn a bit of a short straw.
43:51 Speaker 04 Are they only cleaning naked mole rat toilets?
43:53 Speaker 01 Yes.
43:55 Speaker 03 Good question.
43:56 Speaker 04 That'll take a very long time to do like King's Cross Station.
43:59 Speaker 01 That's such a good point. So this is naked mole rats.
44:03 Speaker 04 Yeah.
44:04 Speaker 01 I think one of the poster boys of QI over the years. We love naked mole rats. They're hardworking, they're hideous looking.
44:16 Speaker 01 They live in Africa, where we don't, and they live underground. And there was a recent study from the Journal of Science Advances that showed individual naked mole rats perform specific duties for their colony. Okay, there's digging, transporting garbage, cleaning the toilets, because they have all these tunnels and some of the tunnels are used for pooing and wheeing. And the team from Kumamoto University in Japan, they put RFID chips in some of these naked mole rats. You know, like the ones you get in your Oyster cards or whatever, or in your credit cards. And they managed to monitor these naked mole rats over a certain period and found that they never changed their job.
44:58 Speaker 01 So what they think is that basically, once you're a toilet cleaner, you stay as a toilet cleaner. It's not, it's still early days whether this is completely right, because it was quite a short survey, but that's what they think.
45:09 Speaker 03 They are absolutely hideous looking.
45:13 Speaker 01 Are we talking about the scientists from Kumamoto University?
45:16 Speaker 03 I am.
45:18 Speaker 03 But we should say, if you've never, if you've never seen a naked mole rat and you're listening to this, do have a little Google, because they, they just are not classically fit animals.
45:26 Speaker 01 No, but they live underground.
45:28 Speaker 03 They live underground.
45:28 Speaker 01 They have terrible eyesight.
45:29 Speaker 03 I know, they've got bad, so it doesn't ma, so it doesn't matter, is that what you're saying?
45:34 Speaker 02 How does she look? I have no idea.
45:35 Speaker 03 I have no idea. But they've, they've basically got, they've, they're naked, they've got, they've got this sort of wrinkly nude flesh. They look like a sausage with teeth, is what the scientists who work on them say.
45:44 Speaker 01 But would you eat that sausage?
45:45 Speaker 04 No.
45:46 Speaker 03 Uh, I'd have to have gone a long time without a sausage to, to consider it. I wouldn't take that off the barbecue first.
45:53 Speaker 04 But especially not these guys, because they have such amazing superpowers. So like, they don't, we think they don't feel pain, they can survive 18 minutes without oxygen, but they can do so many cool things.
46:02 Speaker 02 They're incredible. I wonder, by the way, if the toilet cleaners are also partial chefs, because...
46:06 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, I hope they wash their paws.
46:08 Speaker 02 Well, naked mole rats, they eat each other's feces.
46:11 Speaker 03 Oh, boy.
46:12 Speaker 02 And the queens, they have a queen, which is an amazing thing.
46:16 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, queen of the toothed sausages, you know, it's not, I think, I think queen is putting it a bit strong, actually.
46:23 Speaker 02 That's very unfair.
46:25 Speaker 01 They probably wouldn't find you very attractive, Andy, actually.
46:28 Speaker 04 They'd be like, can he survive for 18 minutes without oxygen?
46:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, hairy stick man. Can this guy shut his lips behind his teeth? No, he can't. Yuck.
46:38 Speaker 01 But yeah, the queen, Dan.
46:39 Speaker 02 Well, the queen, yeah, she, um, she has particular hormones in her droppings, so they'll eat the queens to get, you know, sustenance and so on, but yeah. Pooing, so I wonder if the, if the toilet cleaners are sort of going, hey, let's, let's eat this stuff.
46:52 Speaker 04 I feel like I read that by eating the poo, they sort of learn like how best to protect her and what she needs.
46:56 Speaker 02 Hmm.
46:57 Speaker 04 To show her in the details.
46:58 Speaker 01 Actually, she can fire her estrogen out in the poo, they think.
47:02 Speaker 04 Hmm.
47:02 Speaker 01 So when she has babies, she gets a whole load of estrogen in her body, some of it obviously goes out in the poo, the other naked mole rats eat it, and they get estrogen in their body, which makes them better parents, so they can all look after the children together.
47:15 Speaker 03 They live in colonies, where there's one sexually active female, who's the queen.
47:19 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:20 Speaker 03 There are a couple of sexual males, and then there are workers, and it's between like 40 and a few hundred workers, but the queen suppresses the... Sexual instincts of almost everyone else in the colony.
47:30 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:31 Speaker 03 Most adults don't even develop genitalia.
47:33 Speaker 02 Yeah.
47:34 Speaker 03 All the females have sealed vaginas, the males have immature sperm that could not penetrate an egg. And that's thanks to the queen being in position.
47:42 Speaker 02 Well, because the queen, it is Game of Thrones-y, like the queen isn't born queen, they fight to find who the next queen is. Yeah, so they, it's like a bloodbath, they're just killing each other right until the point where the female mole rat becomes pregnant. And then that becomes the queen and.
47:55 Speaker 03 They just kill, the females were the most easter and just fight and kill each other until one of them establishes enough dominance.
48:01 Speaker 02 And then they start giving birth and then it's an amazing process. So the first time they give birth, it's between one and 10 naked mole rat babies.
48:08 Speaker 03 Pups.
48:08 Speaker 02 Pups. But then every time they give birth, their body stretches. It's like you've pulled them a bit longer because their spinal column stretches, which means they can hold more pups in them to give birth. So they end up being able to give birth to 30.
48:22 Speaker 04 Oh.
48:22 Speaker 02 And they get pregnant every few months.
48:24 Speaker 03 They're insane.
48:25 Speaker 02 Yeah, the most insane, I can't believe it, they've got 12 years to cover naked mole rats.
48:30 Speaker 01 Every time I find the naked mole rat fight, I just think, oh, we've probably done them before.
48:34 Speaker 03 Yeah, I know. A lot of their brain apparently is devoted to their teeth.
48:38 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:38 Speaker 03 Because it's one of the main ways they experience the world is through their teeth, because their teeth are right out in front. They're digging a lot and that's why they close their lips.
48:46 Speaker 01 They feel with them.
48:48 Speaker 03 I don't know, I don't know if they, they could probably sense vibration through them, I'd think so. They are really good diggers, one quarter of their muscle mass is in their jaws to close their jaws while they're digging. They can run backwards as fast as they can run forwards.
49:02 Speaker 04 Very, very slowly.
49:05 Speaker 02 Is it slowly?
49:06 Speaker 04 I would imagine so.
49:08 Speaker 03 I think they can whizz around their tunnels, but they, they live in these huge colonies, like the area of a football pitch, let's say. But with thousands of meters of tunnels underneath. Just imagine looking down on a football pitch from underneath and seeing these sausages firing themselves around through the soil in all these zigzag patterns.
49:26 Speaker 01 Better than watching a football match for you up there, I'd imagine.
49:30 Speaker 02 One of the things they do, by the way, when they're running backwards and I guess forwards as well, is they use their hair. So we call them naked mole rats, but they do have hair and they're kind of like whiskers. They're very, they're very soft, very thin, but they're kind of like how cats use their whiskers as sensory items. So as they're running through the tunnel, they have tail hair and they have body hair. There's allowed for them to sense where they're going.
49:52 Speaker 03 Can we talk a bit about them and air? So Anne briefly mentioned that they don't really need air in the same way that we do.
49:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
49:59 Speaker 02 By oxygen.
50:00 Speaker 03 They're crazy. Yeah, they can, because they're tunneling underground all the time, they can go for ages and ages in a tunnel, which is, let's say, 5% oxygen. Now, normal air is, what is it, 21% oxygen? Above ground air, classic air, is 21% oxygen.
50:17 Speaker 01 Original full fat air.
50:20 Speaker 03 But they can live underground in these tunnels, which have very low oxygen content, and they're fine. They've been experimented on. They can live for 18 minutes with no oxygen.
50:30 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:31 Speaker 03 Which would kill any human.
50:32 Speaker 02 That's what David Blaine did about that.
50:34 Speaker 01 You get, you do get those people who can hold their breath for about 20 minutes, don't you?
50:39 Speaker 03 Yeah.
50:39 Speaker 01 Because remember, we did an episode, and I think we said that World Record for holding your breath was like 23 minutes or something.
50:45 Speaker 03 Okay, you're right. You guys are right. But I would just say, if unless you've done a lot of training.
50:49 Speaker 04 Yeah.
50:50 Speaker 03 18 minutes without oxygen, it's going to be bad for you.
50:52 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
50:53 Speaker 04 Related to that as well, did you read that when they sleep, they like to sort of sleep all together in a big pile, all 300 of them. And they think that because they're all breathing out, they basically kind of like blanket themselves in carbon dioxide, which has the effect of reducing seizures. And the paper I read said very clearly, this is only for naked mole rats. No one else is to try this as a treatment. But there's some reason that they think it sort of like slows down their brains and it sort of protects them. And even if you give them a big space, they will clump together. And they described as, it's like building a luxury resort and having all of your guests choose to sleep in the same broom closet.
51:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
51:26 Speaker 03 Naked as well.
51:28 Speaker 01 I've got a few whiskers. I'm not really naked. The, you were talking about the oxygen and how they survive with little oxygen. So I don't really quite understand this, but the way it works is, our bodies use glucose as energy. And that glucose system in your body requires oxygen to work. But when they have no oxygen, they switch to fructose based system. I don't really understand this, but apparently fructose doesn't require oxygen. So you can still get the energy going around your system, but you don't need the oxygen as well. And that's how plants work. That's how plants get energy around them. But no other mammal has ever been found that uses this system.
52:08 Speaker 04 Like the plant system. They are very cool.
52:11 Speaker 03 It's the missing link. It's in the fossil record between plant and human.
52:17 Speaker 04 Naked mole rat. Only if they're underground. So like, maybe they're just like hanging out with the plants.
52:21 Speaker 03 That's wild. Can I ask, I know you said you didn't understand it, but the idea of them doing a thing that only plants do. Is that one of the most interesting biological things that we've ever noticed? Like, is this the great mystery of?
52:33 Speaker 01 I don't know. I didn't get a massively good response in this room.
52:35 Speaker 02 Oh, are you kidding? It's insane. It's insane that they have.
52:38 Speaker 04 Everything they do is.
52:39 Speaker 02 Yeah. It's insane. They have two operating systems, one for backup, which no one else has. There are other naked mole rats, I think. There's the, what is it? The Damara land mole rat. There are a few others. But yeah, they're very weird.
52:56 Speaker 01 The Damara land ones are quite interesting because they have basically two different types of that mole rat. Half of them are really, really hardworking and industrious. And the other half are fat and they don't really do any work. But those are the ones that do the mating, apparently. So the other, the busy ones do 95% of the work. But the lazy ones do almost all of the reproduction.
53:19 Speaker 04 Do they?
53:20 Speaker 02 That's so unfair.
53:21 Speaker 01 I know. That's life, isn't it? All I say is it's exactly what happens in naked mole rat holdings.
53:32 Speaker 03 How do you have time to make this show when you have so many businesses on the line?
53:37 Speaker 01 Every one of them is making a massive loss.
53:41 Speaker 02 We should say who first described them scientifically. It's quite interesting. There's a German scientist who was called Edward Ruppel. And he travelled around a lot sending samples and animals and specimens back to Frankfurt, which is where he was based. Various things are named after him. There's Ruppels busted, Ruppels griffon vulture, Ruppels wrasse, the fish, you know. Anyway, when he found the naked mole rat, he thought, this is so hideous. This must be a diseased or a mutated individual from another species. The main thing cannot look like this.
54:16 Speaker 01 Ironically, it doesn't really get diseases.
54:18 Speaker 04 You're so right. You're so right. Yeah, yeah.
54:21 Speaker 03 God, is that what we're gonna look like if we're truly healthy?
54:27 Speaker 01 That's true, actually. If you get all these squillionaires who are like trying to make themselves live forever, they all do end up looking a bit like a naked moron.
54:39 Speaker 03 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James?
54:51 Speaker 01 I, my hedge funds can all be found on LinkedIn. Come and join me on there. James Harkins, my name.
54:59 Speaker 03 Andy?
54:59 Speaker 02 My Instagram's Andrew Hunter M.
55:01 Speaker 03 Yep. And Anne?
55:02 Speaker 04 My Instagram is at Anne Miller Books.
55:04 Speaker 03 Yeah, and don't forget, it says books at the end of her handle because she has just released her kids book, which is called Monster Diaries.
55:11 Speaker 04 It's a retelling the Greek myths from the monster's point of view. This one's the Cyclops.
55:15 Speaker 03 Yeah, so it's called Monster Diaries, The Cyclops and the Worst Party Ever. It's part of a trilogy, so there's two more coming out. So get it now. It's gonna be out very soon. And if you want to get through to us, by the way, podcast at Q I dot com. We get all your emails there. Andy goes through them. If you're gonna send us an interesting fact, that might make its way to our bonus episode that comes out every Monday called Little Fish. If you want to send us an interesting experience or something that's related to something we said in an episode, Andy might pick that out for Drop Us a Line, which is our mailbag episode. Now, that's a secret show. You can only listen to that show if you join Club Fish. That's a Patreon thing, so check out patreon dot com slash Club Fish.
55:55 Speaker 03 There's so many fun things going on there. It's turned into a real amazing community, so go see if you want to join that. And otherwise, why not just come back here next week because we're gonna be back again with another episode? And we will see you then. Goodbye.
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