No Such Thing As The Mice Of The Fruit Bowl

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss stress, sentences and supermarkets. 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everybody, Anna and Dan here with some very exciting live show news. Now unfortunately, some of us are too lazy to commit to doing a real full-on tour of the UK before Christmas, speaking about yours truly, but that doesn't mean you can't get your fish fix, because Dan, you're not too lazy, turns out.

• 0:20Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, I'm gonna be on tour, everyone, around the UK. I'm doing my first solo tour in over a decade and it is gonna be such an awesome night. It's called This Changes Everything. If you've heard my weird red string theories, my Dan zone obsessiveness of connecting everything, this is a show that is perfect for you. It's gonna be full of mind-warping facts, it's gonna have jokes, it's gonna have scary bits, goosebump moments, please come along.

• 0:49Speaker 00

  Yes, do, please make it worthwhile, the fact that Dan's entire house is smothered with weird sketches and strings and drawings, freaking out the rest of his family and any guests who come along. He has actually told me a couple of the extraordinary kind of plots he's weaving through this show and I've gotta say, it's jaw-dropping stuff, you've gotta go. And how can people go?

• 1:10Dan Schreiber?

  So, if you wanna come along, I'm playing places all over the UK. I'm gonna be starting October the 11th in Edinburgh, then Newcastle, Birmingham, Cardiff, and then in November, I'm gonna be doing Manchester, Liverpool, Cambridge, Oxford, Norwich, York, Hastings, Brighton, Leicester, Bristol, Exeter, there's so many places. All you need to do is go to thischangeseverything.co.uk to get your tickets. These are really cosy venues, it's like 20 quid a ticket. I'm gonna hang around after every show, so if you wanna say hi, just come along. So, just one more time, tickets are at thischangeseverything.co.uk or just go to my Instagram bio, you'll find a link there, 18 dates, hopefully I can see you at one of them.

• 1:50Speaker 00

  Do it, it's a once a decade experience, the Dan Schreiber live experience. See if he even remembers which way to face when he's on stage. Go now, check this guy out and for now, on with this show.

• 2:02Dan Schreiber?

  On with the podcast.

• 2:16Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing As A Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, James Harkin and Andrew Hunter Murray 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, and that is Andy.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  My fact is, the biggest supermarket in Europe has 12 people whose entire job is to sort out coat hangers.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  Give me a break.

• 2:51Speaker 00

  12 people?

• 2:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:53Speaker 00

  40 hours a week?

• 2:54Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Come on.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  It's so big.

• 2:56Dan Schreiber?

  That's the thing, it's biggie.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  It's so big.

• 2:59Dan Schreiber?

  How big, Andy?

• 3:00Speaker 02

  What do you mean? The supermarket?

• 3:02Dan Schreiber?

  No, the coat hangers, how big are they?

• 3:05Speaker 02

  Okay, so this came from a brilliant article by a journalist called Ralph Jones, who went to Gekas Ullared, which is a Swedish supermarket and it's a one-off, right? There's not a chain across the world and its total area, including the warehouse bit, is 114,000 square metres, which is 20 Trafalgar Squares, it's one and a half Buckingham Palaces, it is the biggest tourist attraction in Sweden, it gets four...

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Give me a break.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  What?

• 3:33Speaker 03

  What about the house where Abba used to live?

• 3:36Speaker 02

  That's not even second.

• 3:37Dan Schreiber?

  Is it? Yeah. The Viking museum we went to doesn't even get close to it.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  That's a museum?

• 3:42Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  The ship, that's a 17th century ship which sank on its maiden voyage, that's the second place, but it's second by a long distance.

• 3:50Dan Schreiber?

  But it's, like, stats are pretty amazing. I think my favourite one is that every day, staff can fill about 400 trolleys of items that customers have just discarded in different bits of the shop to make their return journey to where they actually belong. 400 trolleys worth every single day.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  How many people must be employed full-time to fill up and move those trolleys? Is it more or fewer than the coat hangers? We don't know.

• 4:14Dan Schreiber?

  That's a good point.

• 4:15Speaker 03

  Do they have like a 10,000 item off your line?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  It has, this place has its own reality TV show and I thought, oh well, often they'll do a little tie-in TV show. This thing has had 11 series.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  It's incredibly popular, it's the most watched programme on Sweden's Channel 5.

• 4:31Speaker 03

  So, just to say, is this in Stockholm? You said it was in Sweden, but...

• 4:36Dan Schreiber?

  It's not in Stockholm, no, it's called Ullared. It's a town which is, I think, quite far out. If you were driving, it's about a five-hour journey, I would say, roughly, by car, yeah.

• 4:46Speaker 00

  It does seem to be in the middle of nowhere.

• 4:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the town next door has a few thousand people and the, this supermarket gets 4 million visitors every year. I mean, it just, I think they're okay with it, but it is crazy, it seems to be quite beloved.

• 4:58Speaker 00

  Do you think he's like being a resident of Venice, living in that town? You know, and you feel like it was a beautiful thing that's been destroyed by descending...

• 5:05Dan Schreiber?

  Oh. I quite like, I looked into it, they do have a smaller supermarket in the town as well, that they can use and I just wonder how much action that gets versus the main one.

• 5:17Speaker 03

  I absolutely think I would only go to the...

• 5:18Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, no, exactly.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  If you need a pint of milk, you're not gonna go to the world's largest supermarket.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Unless you wanna get your 10,000 steps up, bread is another 14 miles away. I always wonder about those, because you hear that places use tactics, like, almost like casinos use, you know, where casinos won't show you daylight, they won't ever allow clocks, they will confuse you about what direction you're facing, they'll do all these clever psychological tricks to keep you gambling.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Give you a load of booze.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Give you a load of booze. That's it, and I just wonder what supermarkets do.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  Well, I know, for instance, some of them will pipe out the smell of fresh bread.

• 5:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  Aren't they? Because they'll make you hungry and make you wanna buy things.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 03

  There's also stuff about they know which direction people turn when you go into a supermarket. Quite often in a supermarket, they'll put the bread as far away as you can, so you have to walk, because everyone is gonna buy bread, so you have to walk all the way over to get the bread.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Past all the other good stuff.

• 6:14Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 6:15Speaker 02

  And they have vegetables right as you go in, because that makes you think, oh, I'm in a healthy place.

• 6:18Dan Schreiber?

  And it's got the sound that they do, they often play slow music to make your pace slow down and if you play French music around...

• 6:26Speaker 02

  People buy baguettes and garlic.

• 6:27Dan Schreiber?

  They buy French wine.

• 6:28Speaker 03

  Give me a break.

• 6:28Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, they'd say the more likely to buy French wine, if you play German music, the more likely to buy German products, like maybe a beer.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Does it have to be classically French music, like accordions and classically German, like umpan?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  If it's Daft Punk, it wouldn't.

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Superstores out of town...

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Were quite controversial when they started, because the idea was that...

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, they still are.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, the idea was that they were destroying in-town supermarkets, which were smaller, all traditional grocery shops. And then, of course, all the little grocery shops have gone out of business and now the superstores have moved back into town, doing, you know, Tesco, Metro or whatever.

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  So they've, they've done that. But, the first one was in Nottinghamshire in 1964 and it was called the windowless store, that's how it advertised itself, because they didn't need to do shop displays to get you in, because you're already in the shop.

• 7:17Speaker 03

  I see, windowless in that way.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  It's still not good marketing, I think. For me, a windowless store is gonna be very off-putting.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  And for most people, I think.

• 7:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're right, you're right, you're right.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Also, if you wanna buy some windows.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  No, sorry, we're a windowless store.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  I never go to Tesco for my windows, so to be fair...

• 7:34Speaker 03

  But the shopping centres, like Andy said, they got people out of the town centres and that's why if you go to any town centre in the north of England, it's just vape shops and betting shops, because...

• 7:43Speaker 00

  Also because of the internet, sadly.

• 7:45Dan Schreiber?

  Also because of the internet, but also, can I say, because of feminism?

• 7:48Speaker 00

  Well, we have a lot to answer for.

• 7:50Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, floor is yours, Andy, please.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  This is really interesting, so it is slightly to do with increasing employment for women, especially after the Second World War, right? Which is when you're starting to get the rise of the supermarkets. So more women are going out to work and that means that families no longer rely on one person in the household being at home and therefore being able to go out and shop every day for that evening's meal. Suddenly, people are at work and they're needing to do a weekly shop and that means bigger shops, so there's more of an appeal there. And the other thing is that people are getting fridges, due to labour-saving devices, due to feminism.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Mmm.

• 8:31Speaker 02

  And...

• 8:34Speaker 02

  That means that you can store more of your food, of course, and so you're much more tempted to say, right, I'll just go to the Megamart, you know, of a weekend and do my shop there.

• 8:42Speaker 00

  Yeah. I'm sorry, we're to blame for the fridge and so much more, what can I say? I found a similar supermarket to this one, but that I think is my favourite, called Jungle Jim's International Market. Do you guys know this? So this has a claim to be the largest supermarket in the world, it's in Fairfield, Ohio, and it's, it's a really good American dream story, because it was set up by a guy called Jim Bonamino in 1971, who literally borrowed someone's truck for the weekend to have a fruit and veg stall in a parking lot, worked 21-hour days and showered under a hosepipe that was in the car park. And, and now it's this gigantic, you know, maybe the biggest supermarket in the world,

• 9:23Speaker 00

  over six acres, has America's biggest wine selection, it's got live seafood tanks in it. But he's so great, I read an interview with him by the Wall Street Journal and he came down dressed as a wizard and the interviewer said, did you, did you wear that? Because he knew you were being interviewed and he said, no, I calmed it down a bit for you, usually I'd wear something much weirder. And he was just mad, like, at one point the interviewer said, perhaps the most important question, maybe the hardest question of all, and he said, hold on, we're onto the hardest question, let me get out my crystal ball and got an actual crystal ball out from under the table.

• 9:55Speaker 03

  I just think he needs to brand better, because that's not what someone who lives in a jungle would do. I feel like he should have come to the interview swinging down on a vine with like tidy birkin trunks on.

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Maybe he does that for the, for the New York Times. But they, they sell incredible stuff, they've got a whole aisle of adult-oriented hot sauces, goat's heads and pig's heads they sell, and just in full packaging, full pig's head, just staring up at you.

• 10:19Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 10:20Speaker 00

  An eight-foot-long gummy snake in the sweets section, could you eat that?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  For sure, I love gummies.

• 10:26Speaker 00

  Eight foot long, you could eat?

• 10:28Speaker 03

  Well, what's the girth?

• 10:31Speaker 00

  It's a millimetre, so you're fine, you're fine. You actually get less gummy than in a normal one.

• 10:39Dan Schreiber?

  That is big, that is big.

• 10:41Speaker 03

  It's big.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  It's a big gummy snake.

• 10:42Dan Schreiber?

  I think James could do it, I've seen him on tour.

• 10:46Speaker 00

  It would be like an actual snake eating, because you'd have to just open your mouth and stuff it in and then sit there for a month, waiting for it to digest.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  You're the gummy deer who's eating the gummy snake, it's a nice reversey Percy.

• 10:56Speaker 00

  Lovely.

• 10:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. When was the first self-checkout opened? What year? Quiz time.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  1956.

• 11:02Dan Schreiber?

  The first...

• 11:03Speaker 02

  4,000 BC.

• 11:05Speaker 00

  It's a palpable disappointment on Andy's face, 2010.

• 11:09Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, you idiot.

• 11:14Speaker 02

  It's 1986, I was surprised, there's an electronic self-checkout, which I only really became aware of in about 2010.

• 11:20Dan Schreiber?

  Where was it?

• 11:21Speaker 02

  Georgia.

• 11:23Speaker 00

  Oh, I thought it was a supermarket.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Ex-Soviet country, by the sound of your accent.

• 11:31Speaker 02

  That's right, Scotland's homeland. No, sorry, Georgia and America.

• 11:36Speaker 00

  That is surprising.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the reason they're not good self-checkouts is that if you're involved in a transaction, it seems to you to go faster. And this is a psychological thing called weight warping.

• 11:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  You know, if I'm having to hand over the stuff, then...

• 11:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, if I'm putting through my pork pies and I'm trying to make it beep and it doesn't beep and I do it five times and it's still not beeping, I get a little bit annoyed. But if someone else is doing that, I'm like, come on, get on with it.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Yes, you're right. And in fact, there's a reason why it's good to use a self-checkout, because it goes faster for you. Yes, yes, yes, sorry.

• 12:09Dan Schreiber?

  Very cool.

• 12:09Speaker 00

  But we don't actually have them because it seems faster for us. We have them so that supermarkets don't have to employ any humans.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  That's crazy. That's a very cynical world, isn't it?

• 12:16Speaker 00

  I'm dreadfully sorry. I would say there's another contender for first self-checkout, which we've actually never talked about before, but we've talked about the inventor.

• 12:24Speaker 03

  1956?

• 12:26Speaker 00

  You're really close. It's 1937. And it's found by Clarence Saunders. Any of you guys remember him? Invented Piggly Wiggly, which was a supermarket that we talked about. He invented Piggly Wiggly in 1916.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  So Piggly Wiggly was like the first store where you went in with a trolley and put stuff in your trolley, right?

• 12:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, or a basket, the first self-service. So usually you'd have, you'd meet the member of staff and then you'd say what you wanted and the staff would go and get it for you. And Piggly Wiggly was like, you know what, the people could pick their items themselves.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  It was an amazing idea.

• 12:55Speaker 00

  Credible idea.

• 12:56Speaker 03

  And everyone hasted because it felt to them like they were shoplifting.

• 12:59Speaker 02

  Oh, I thought that's why people might like it. It's a bit of a treat.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  No, I think at the start, people rebelled against it a little bit and thought this is ridiculous.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  They did keep forgetting to pay.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  But do you know what inspired him to create Piggly Wiggly?

• 13:11Speaker 03

  What?

• 13:12Speaker 02

  He was looking out of a train one day and he saw some pigs rushing towards a trough. And he thought...

• 13:18Dan Schreiber?

  Wow, what a metaphor.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Maybe those pigs could be the people in my shop. I think is the idea.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  And then this guy went on a few years later and...

• 13:26Speaker 00

  Yes, and he made Kaduzel, which some people think stands for, or meant, key does it all, which makes sense because it was fully automated in that you went into the grocery shop and everything was under these sort of like glass domes. And you had your own key. And when you got to an item you wanted, you inserted a key in a slot and the key had a ticker tape on it. And you go around inserting your key into lots of different slots, saying, I want this object, I want this object. And then you took it to the till and you gave it to a person who inserted your ticker tape into a machine, which then could see all the things you'd said you wanted. And then the machine automatically went and picked up your groceries and slid it down a conveyor belt towards you. It was fantastic.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  Did he get this idea from seeing a lot of pigs using a vending machine?

• 14:12Speaker 00

  He did, yeah. And much like the pigs using a vending machine, it didn't work very well.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  He's an amazing innovator. He was just missing one person really in his life, and that's someone who could think of a decent name. That's clearly...

• 14:25Speaker 00

  Do you think that was the problem?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Piggly Wiggly? What was the other? Kaduzeluzi?

• 14:29Speaker 00

  Kaduzel. Kaduzel. I think the problem was that everyone got the wrong stuff all the time because he didn't quite perfect it, which is annoying in a shop.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  So coat hangers. Who invented them? Someone you've heard of?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  George coat hanger.

• 14:46Speaker 00

  Ben Franklin.

• 14:46Speaker 02

  Someone famous?

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Ben Franklin is about as close as you're gonna get.

• 14:50Dan Schreiber?

  Thomas Jefferson?

• 14:51Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  No.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  According to the Paris Museum of Fashion, he invented them. Although, according to the Monticello website, which was his home, there's no evidence that he invented them at all. But for sure, we invented coat hangers sometime in the 18th century, but they didn't catch on. And it wasn't until the 1850s that they became popular, thanks to friend of the podcast, the burgeoning middle class.

• 15:18Speaker 02

  We've got to get them on the next Friend of the Podcast t-shirt.

• 15:22Speaker 03

  And the disappearance of domestic servants. So it meant that people were buying more clothes and they had to put them somewhere and they didn't have someone to iron them. Then the wire coat hanger was invented by someone called Albert J. Parkhouse in 1903. And he was working in a wire company. They made like novelty wires, it said. But the company didn't have enough coat hooks for people to put their coats on. And so he took a discarded piece of wire from the machinery and turned it into the shape of someone's shoulders and said, we could do this. But according to his granddaughter, who's called Barbara Mussel, he didn't make any money from it because the company took the patent, sold a gazillion wire coat handlers, and he never made a penny.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  Right. He was muscled out.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, as the name of his granddaughter's husband, presumably, came at that wedding. He must have heard the name of that guy and thought, oh my God, this puts my whole life into perspective.

• 16:22Speaker 03

  Do you, Mr. Mussel?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  He's busy polishing the altar.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I think though, some inventions are so good that you shouldn't be able to patent them. As in, if we had to pay a quarter of a penny to the guy who invented the coat hanger every time we bought one.

• 16:37Speaker 03

  I mean, technically you do. That's how capitalism works.

• 16:41Speaker 02

  Well, I don't pay anything for my coat hangers. I get them free from the dry cleaner.

• 16:44Speaker 00

  Stop stealing them!

• 16:47Speaker 03

  I get mine free from hotels, but it's really annoying because they don't have the hook bit on the top.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  You've got to take the whole wardrobe with you. It's a complete pain in the arse.

• 17:01Speaker 02

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

• 17:04Speaker 00

  My fact this week is that the latest winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature wrote a novel in 2024 that was one sentence long.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  That's short.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's all you need to do to get it. Just write a sentence. No, it was actually a really long sentence. It was 400 pages long, more than 400 pages. Yeah, this is a guy called Laszlo Krásna-Halkai. He's Hungarian. I haven't read anything of him. My brother's read a couple, says he is a challenge.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  I've read a few pages of one of his books this week.

• 17:32Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah?

• 17:33Speaker 03

  And it's dense.

• 17:35Speaker 02

  It's hard going.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  Even just looking at it, it's like blocks of text.

• 17:39Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  And the one that I read, which is called Satan Tango, does have quite a lot of sentences in it, but they are all very long.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  That was actually the one I think my brother likes.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, it's objectively good.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  The ideas seem good. I picked one up this morning. There's one called Hirschd 07769, and it opens with him, the character, writing a letter to the Chancellor Angela Merkel because he's convinced the Big Bang is going to be reversed.

• 18:01Speaker 00

  So this is the one that's the one long sentence. And apparently the opening, if that was what you read, it starts, "Hope is a mistake." And I think this might be...

• 18:09Speaker 03

  That's a sentence.

• 18:11Speaker 00

  I believe it then goes on. I don't think there's a full stop at the end. I think it's, "Hope is a mistake and..." Blah, blah, blah. He just uses the word "and" a lot. Yes?

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Also, semicolons cover a multitude of sins.

• 18:21Speaker 00

  They do, although I don't know how many semicolons he's using. And he says it's because he wants to mimic human speech.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  Which I think is a very good and interesting point. People don't speak in short declarative sentences. Usually they pause, they deliberate, their words flow. You see, I'm doing it now. And he composes it all in his head and then he only writes it down when he's ready, which I think is crazy.

• 18:44Dan Schreiber?

  What?

• 18:44Speaker 02

  That must be so hard. I don't think the whole novel, but...

• 18:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, right.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  I don't guess the feeling of it, yeah. He has something in common with the man who invented Piggly Wiggly.

• 18:54Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  Okay, he was inspired for his first novel by a load of pigs in a field.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  No.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:00Dan Schreiber?

  Really?

• 19:01Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 19:01Speaker 03

  God.

• 19:02Speaker 02

  So he had a load of jobs. He grew up in Hungary, Cold War Hungary. And he had a load of different jobs. He was a miner for a while. He was a...

• 19:10Speaker 03

  We were all a miner for a while.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Why do I walk into these stupid jokes?

• 19:19Speaker 03

  Stupid jokes? No, that's the spirit. Thanks for the encouragement.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  And then he was a night watchman for a herd of cows briefly, and then...

• 19:33Speaker 00

  That's not a job. No farmer's asked him to do that.

• 19:37Speaker 03

  Farmer comes in, yeah, they've been asleep all night.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  Okay, look, Anna, it's no podcaster, but it was with the work that was going in Soviet Hungary.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Fair enough.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  And then he got a job working on a farm, holding piglets in place to be castrated.

• 19:51Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  And he just said, this was a horrible job.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  They would have been wiggly piglets.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Wiggly piglets. And he realized he sympathized very deeply with these piglets, these poor piglets, which are being, you know, losing their knackers. And he said he wanted to write about the world in a deep way as a result of that job.

• 20:08Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 20:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:09Dan Schreiber?

  We get to read him because of his translators, right? And he's had a few, but the most recent one is this lady called Ottolli Mulzet. But she seems to be just his general translator because, Anna, the article that you sent to us, which was a New Yorker article that had his story, all of his answers were translated by her. So even his interviews are translated by Ottolli. And she says sometimes it can take up to three years to translate because you're translating a single sentence. You need to make it work. And it's really dense and it's really hard.

• 20:37Speaker 02

  But not, surely not an interview for the New Yorker where they've got to go to press at the end of the week, actually.

• 20:42Dan Schreiber?

  Honestly?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Honestly, give me three years.

• 20:44Dan Schreiber?

  Honestly, the interview's like as long as one of his books and as intense. One of the opening questions, the interviewer talks about his Nobel Prize speech, and he says, "You thanked your brother, your older brother, for lifting you on his shoulders when you were children because he taught you that there could be another way of looking at the world. What did you see up there?" And he said, "At first, nothing. My older brother got angry at me because up there, on his shoulders, something frequently happened in my little trousers. It was not so pleasant for my brother. He would shake me in his anger and then I couldn't see too much of the world. Now that we're both very old, I asked how awful it was for him. He says, I still feel it."

• 21:21Speaker 00

  The urine trickling down his neck.

• 21:24Dan Schreiber?

  I think we're talking about a hardened state.

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Oh, are we? Because I thought urine at first.

• 21:30Speaker 00

  Oh, are you sure it's not urine?

• 21:32Dan Schreiber?

  Wow, I've got to see my shrink.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  I'll just book that. You guys keep talking. I'll just sort that out.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Wouldn't you say?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  Don't, heya!

• 21:44Speaker 03

  It's happened again.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  Don't worry, we edit the show. It's fine. I'm sure James will help me out. Tomorrow's good.

• 21:49Speaker 03

  My mum's fine, yeah. No, she's great.

• 21:52Speaker 02

  Looking hot as ever. Okay, good seeing. Bye, yeah. Sorry, guys. When you said he thanked his brother for lifting him up on his shoulders so he could see the world, I assumed, of course, that was a metaphor. But then if you say, "And I pissed on his shoulders," or worse, "While I was up there," no, it actually is lifting me up on his shoulders so I could... Because you know what? I've been standing on the shoulders of giants. I assumed for years that that was a metaphor.

• 22:16Speaker 00

  No, it's not.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  I should use it. Literally got piggybacks from everyone in the scientific establishment.

• 22:23Speaker 00

  Anyway, long sentences.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 00

  They're not gimmicks. What I quite like is all the record holders for long sentences aren't like silly gimmicky people. They're great writers like Faulkner held the record for a long time. He got the Guinness World Record in 1983.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  James Joyce did a lot of long sentences.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  He did, but not as long as Faulkner's in Absalom, Absalom.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  I'll tell you what, he nearly got a long sentence after the, you know, obscenity trial and so on, under which Ulysses was banned in the early 20s.

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Good one. Tough to Google long sentences, isn't it, when you're doing research? Because you get a lot of penal stuff. Not that kind of...

• 23:00Speaker 00

  Anyway.

• 23:01Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:02Speaker 00

  Faulkner, 1,288 words. That was the longest sentence in literature, absalom, absalom, which I haven't actually read, but just thinking of postmodern literary techniques. One of my favourite books is his Sound and the Fury, where he wanted it to be printed in lots of different colours. Have you guys ever read it?

• 23:19Speaker 02

  No.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  It's incredible, but it's quite unclear who's narrating it sometimes. There's like a tangle of narrations and he wanted-

• 23:25Speaker 03

  He should write sad George.

• 23:27Speaker 00

  If only he thought of that.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  I don't want to give too many tips to the greats, but sometimes-

• 23:33Speaker 00

  No, I wish he was still alive to hear your suggestion. He wanted all the different people to have the font in different colours. And finally, they couldn't afford the publishing costs at the time, but they released a special edition a few years ago, which I now own of William Faulkner's Sound and the Fury in all the different colours of the rainbow.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  And does it assist the reading experience? I guess it makes it clearer.

• 23:53Speaker 00

  Yes, it does.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  Wow. Sentences are getting shorter, are they?

• 23:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 03

  Just in that little conversation or more generally?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  So this is in New York Times Bestsellers. There was a great piece in The Economist analysing sentence length between 100 years ago and now. And sentences have lost one third of their weight, their heft. They've gone from about 22 words on average to 15. And Victorian sentences were thumpingly long. You read a Victorian novel, the sentences are just longer. There's more being expressed in each individual-

• 24:26Speaker 03

  It's Hemingway, isn't it? What did it?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:29Speaker 00

  And Orwell.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Bloody Hemingway.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  Well, wasn't it true, like, have we said this before, that Hemingway supposedly lost one of his transcripts, but needed to deliver it like two weeks later and so had to rewrite the thing? And then thought, oh my God, I'm not going to be able to write it the way it was. I'm just going to write really short sentences because it's easier.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  I can't remember any of the adjectives or adverbs I used, so I'm just going to strip all of those out. It was just the man hunted the fish. And then I'll do those later. Also, he sent that off to his publishers and like, I'm going to send the adjectives in a second package in case they get lost.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  I feel like that's at least a story that's told about him.

• 25:05Speaker 02

  I have heard that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 25:08Speaker 00

  But yes, they have. Although I wonder about other languages because all these studies are always done about the English language. And it's very hard to research other languages. All I could find is speculation that French actually, the sentences haven't really got shorter and actually in literature they're getting longer, some people were saying, but it's hard to work it out.

• 25:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. The Nobel Prize for Literature, there's a fantastic list, obviously on Wikipedia where you can see every winner. And there's a photo with every winner as well. And that is so worth looking at because the first like six or seven people, all of them somehow look like a dog that's been shampooed and blow dried. Their hair is just, it's marvelous. Yeah. Highly recommend going to look at it.

• 25:48Speaker 03

  Were you not looking at the winner of Crufts on Wikipedia?

• 25:52Dan Schreiber?

  I did have that tab open at the same time. I'll go back and look. The early days, Sully Prodhom is the first winner. I personally have never heard of Sully.

• 26:01Speaker 03

  I only know them as the first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

• 26:04Dan Schreiber?

  And there's a lot of, there was a lot of controversy. As far as I can tell, there was a lot of newspapers saying, where's Tolstoy? You know, at the time and, and why did this guy get it? And I think the prizes have always had that. But then we do have big names that you would recognise. There's Samuel Beckett, of course. Waiting for Godot was his big play, but he wrote novels as well. And one of them was called How It Is. It has no punctuation and the entire story is a guy just trawling through mud, trying to just get somewhere and remembering his old life. Sounds awesome. Sounds fantastic.

• 26:35Speaker 02

  I do think sometimes, would it kill them to give it to a mystery or a thriller writer? You know, just to someone who's done a really good crime reveal.

• 26:43Dan Schreiber?

  Stephen King. Where's his, yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  Like, where's, where's the Nobel, you know, for-

• 26:46Speaker 00

  Nobel.

• 26:47Speaker 02

  Where's the Agatha Christie Nobel for Literature? Like, that was a cracking plot where actually it was his brother all along.

• 26:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  But he thought he was lost at sea, but actually he was found in a mine, you know?

• 26:58Speaker 03

  They can win other prizes, but this is for high literature, right?

• 27:02Dan Schreiber?

  2017, I reckon you're like, Andy, it was Ishiguru, Kazuo Ishiguru. And he wrote, what was his book? The Remains of the Day.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 27:10Dan Schreiber?

  Incredible book, right?

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Wonderful book.

• 27:11Dan Schreiber?

  So he, he did win it. Do you know what he did before he got into books?

• 27:16Speaker 03

  Ishiguru.

• 27:16Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Pickhama.

• 27:18Speaker 03

  I don't remember.

• 27:19Dan Schreiber?

  Doesn't tangling coat hangers. He was a grouse beater for the Queen Mother at Almaral.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  Now, for American listeners, we should say. No grouse hurt, well, actually lots of grouse get hurt really badly, but not, not through the beating.

• 27:33Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's the start of it. So you're, you're scaring them to fly up in the air and then they get shot.

• 27:38Dan Schreiber?

  And then they get shot.

• 27:39Speaker 02

  And then they get shot. But you're beating the, the, whatever it is.

• 27:42Dan Schreiber?

  The bush.

• 27:43Speaker 02

  The bush.

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Beating the bush.

• 27:45Speaker 02

  You're beating about the bush. You're beating the undergrowth that they're in to scare them out.

• 27:48Dan Schreiber?

  To scare them out.

• 27:49Speaker 02

  Sorry, Kazuo Ishiguru was a grouse beater.

• 27:51Dan Schreiber?

  For the Queen Mother.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, that makes me reevaluate Kazuo Ishiguru, I have to say.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  Why?

• 27:57Speaker 00

  I don't know. I didn't know he was from that kind of stock.

• 27:59Dan Schreiber?

  I don't think you-

• 28:00Speaker 03

  Is the grouse beater usually one of the royal family or is it usually-

• 28:04Speaker 02

  It's usually the Earl of Argyle or something, you know, saying, like, it's not, no, not at all.

• 28:07Speaker 00

  Do you not think you'd be quite posh to be beating the Queen Mother's grouse?

• 28:12Speaker 02

  So layered in innuendo, but.

• 28:16Speaker 00

  What are we really talking about?

• 28:17Speaker 03

  Speaking of like the history of some Nobel Prize winners, Gabriel Garcia Márquez.

• 28:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yes.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Who wrote 100 Years of Solitude as well as many other things, but that's the main one. And do you know what his favourite song was?

• 28:31Speaker 02

  Mambo Number Five.

• 28:32Speaker 03

  Is correct.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  What?

• 28:35Speaker 00

  But not that version.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  100%, yeah.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Oh yes, and Anna's right. The Lou Bega or the original?

• 28:44Speaker 03

  It was the original, the Perez Prado one.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  But wait, that's only because Márquez probably didn't live to hear the Lou Bega version, which is infinitely superior. Or no, the Bob the Builder version, that's the one.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  The height.

• 28:58Speaker 03

  Well, did you know that where it goes one, two, three, four, five, it actually goes all the way up to 100? And then Years of Solitude. No.

• 29:07Speaker 03

  So when he, in his memoir, he wrote about when he was a young man, he lived in a brothel in Barranquilla. And that's when he learned to write and he would dance the night away. And he keeps saying that his favourite song is Mambo Number Five by Perez Prado.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  Really good.

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Stunning.

• 29:24Speaker 00

  Good on you.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  If you lived in a brothel, you probably would have a little bit of Monica in your life, a little bit of Jessica by your side. Yeah.

• 29:37Dan Schreiber?

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

• 29:41Speaker 03

  Okay, my fact this week is that zebras don't get ulcers, but zebrafish might.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Mouth ulcers or stomach?

• 29:50Speaker 03

  We're talking stomach ulcers.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  Ooh.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Okay. But I'm gonna roll back on this all quite quickly.

• 29:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 29:57Speaker 03

  Okay, so this is about a paper that I read from the journal Brain Behaviour Evolution by Bianca Fusani and Rui F. Oliviera. And their title refers to a book called Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers by Robert Sapolsky. And he says that animals don't get chronic stress. Because if you're a deer being attacked by cheetah, you get really, really stressed for a few seconds. But then afterwards, you kind of forget about it.

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  And then you might get stressed again and then you forget about it.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  But you don't worry. You don't, then as he was lying awake at night thinking, I'm really hoping I get eaten by a cheetah tomorrow.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  When we make a very, very minor faux pas, we lie in bed at night thinking, oh my God, what did I do? Or when we know we've got something coming up, we worry about it. And that's a chronic stress which people used to think caused ulcers. And now we know it doesn't cause ulcers, but does exacerbate them. And so the paper was actually about zebrafish and whether zebrafish do get chronic stress. And they are arguing that they do. And they use this whole zebras don't get ulcers. Because it's a famous book, they use that as the title of their-

• 31:06Speaker 02

  And is it, is it like a self-help book? Is it saying, well, zebras don't get stressed?

• 31:10Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 31:11Speaker 02

  There's no reason for you to.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  Be more zebra.

• 31:13Dan Schreiber?

  Zebrafish are amazing, by the way.

• 31:15Speaker 03

  Sure are.

• 31:16Dan Schreiber?

  They are known as the mice of water because basically scientists are able to do so much testing on them because they've got 70% genetic similarity to humans. So we have used them in so many different ways in order to learn about ourselves in the way that we use mice. That's pretty amazing.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  You know when people say that? We know that we've got 60% genetic similarity to bananas, right?

• 31:40Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  So when people are like, oh, they're 70%-

• 31:41Speaker 03

  But they're known as the mice of the fruit bowl.

• 31:44Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 31:47Speaker 03

  But no, they're kind of, not just genetically, their kind of body is built quite similar to ours. So their heart is quite similar, their brains are quite similar.

• 31:54Speaker 00

  Inside. On, for the outside, they don't look that similar, but on the inside.

• 31:57Speaker 03

  Much smaller.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  And also they're really useful because they lay transparent eggs and they have transparent larvae, right? Which seems to be quite a key thing. So it means that researchers don't need to get X-ray vision to watch what's happening inside them when they test them. So they'll give them an infection and you can just use a telescope. A telescope or a microscope?

• 32:15Speaker 03

  That's where the eggs are.

• 32:18Speaker 00

  They always send them to the moon, actually, to do the studies.

• 32:20Dan Schreiber?

  Well, you say it's just in the larvae, but this is one of the extraordinary things about the zebrafish. We have genetically modified the fish to create a new fish, which is called the Casper fish. The Casper fish, I guess, like the friendly ghost, it's see-through. So they've basically mutated two different genes so that as they get into adulthood, they stay transparent.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  And so you can see their heart work in presumably under-

• 32:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. Is it a camouflage thing for the eggs to be transparent? I think I read that, that it's, it's useful so that other fish can't see your eggs as easily and eat them.

• 32:53Speaker 00

  Makes sense. You're invisible, aren't you?

• 32:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:55Dan Schreiber?

  Oh God, that makes it even worse then, that we've created out of zebrafish, another new type of fish, the glow fish. Have you seen the glow fish?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  No.

• 33:03Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, so basically scientists were taking green phosphorescent protein out of things like jellyfish and they were putting it into zebrafish. And what it meant was if you turn out the lights, they glow, right? And this has changed everything, if any of them go back into the wild for the fact that they can't hide anymore. Because they're literally a beacon of light in the ocean.

• 33:23Speaker 03

  I can't believe they put them back in the water. That seems mad.

• 33:25Speaker 02

  I think you shouldn't do that.

• 33:27Dan Schreiber?

  I think they wouldn't, but they do put them in fish tanks because they sell them commercially. So if you happen to have another fish that was a bit predatory, even in the fish tank, it's got no chance of hiding.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  They can't even hide in the little, the little castle or the skull.

• 33:39Speaker 03

  I also think if you have two fish and one of them is a predator of the other, probably keep them in two bowls.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:46Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah?

• 33:48Speaker 02

  If, if you've got a lionfish and you've got a zebrafish, it will end very poorly.

• 33:53Dan Schreiber?

  But a lot of people don't do their research. It's mad that this exists, I think. I don't think it harms the fish itself, but you can get them in starfish red, moonrise pink, sunburst orange. There's a whole-

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. Frankenstein-y, isn't it?

• 34:05Dan Schreiber?

  It's very, yeah, it's very odd.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  I definitely know people who've had aquarium fish where they get a bunch of aquarium fish and one fish eats all the others. I think that might be quite a common mistake that fish buyers get. So yes, do your research.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  It's a common mistake that fish sellers sound like they're making.

• 34:19Speaker 00

  Yes, you're right.

• 34:20Speaker 03

  It's not a mistake for them. They get to sell five more fish when the other ones get eaten.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  It's a racket.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  So zebrafish, whether they get stressed or not, when they're attacked and they get stressed for that reason, they will swim into a nice warm area of water. And this is really interesting. It's basically, they call it an emotional fever. So your body can metabolize things better when you're warmer. And that's why when you are sick, you get a fever, because your body heats up and a lot of the mechanisms that will help you get better work better. But what they do, because they can't increase their own temperature, they'll swim to a warmer bit of water, which heats up their entire body and then can speed up like the tissues being repaired and stuff like that.

• 35:01Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Isn't that cool? So they make their own fever when they're stressed.

• 35:05Speaker 00

  That's why you should wee in the bath if you're ill.

• 35:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 35:09Speaker 00

  You'll get better faster. Nice.

• 35:12Speaker 03

  Or if your child is feeling sick, just sit another child on top of their head and allow them to wee on them.

• 35:18Speaker 00

  They test antidepressants on them. So they do get depressed. And this is because zebrafish get depressed. Yes. And you can tell if a fish is depressed because it swims lower down in its tank. And that's, that's literally the way. So you can tell if an antidepressant is working, that you've tried on it, because it suddenly starts swimming high up in the tank. And do you know how they get them depressed in the first place?

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Is it reading them the works of Lajlo Kraslo?

• 35:44Speaker 00

  It is, yeah. It's more basic than that. They get them drunk and then they let them have a hangover. They feed them alcohol for a few weeks and then they cut off their supply and then they get repressed.

• 35:59Dan Schreiber?

  That's amazing. You know, they've been flying to space since the seventies.

• 36:02Speaker 00

  On their own?

• 36:03Dan Schreiber?

  Mm hmm. Nope. With astronauts.

• 36:06Speaker 02

  The mice of space.

• 36:08Dan Schreiber?

  The mice of space. They kind of are. They kind of are, Andy.

• 36:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 36:12Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. Cause in 2024, four zebrafish were up in space. That was one of the most, that might have been one mission since, but this is the most notable one recently because they survived 43 days. The longest any fish has ever survived in space. They went through a huge selection process. So these four were whittled down from 200 candidates and managed to get up there.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 36:34Dan Schreiber?

  They don't live long. So for them, 43 days is about four years in space.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Oh, wow.

• 36:39Dan Schreiber?

  So that's how we see the change in what's going on with them. So they're very useful. But then, this is a bit shocking, they don't bring them back. They just pop them in a sort of.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Not out of the airlock.

• 36:48Dan Schreiber?

  Well, they put a pop them in some kind of container and they just let it burn up on entry back into earth.

• 36:53Speaker 00

  Oh, man.

• 36:54Speaker 02

  At the very least, stick them in a saucepan, which you hang out of the spaceship.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  What, so that they float away?

• 36:59Speaker 02

  So you'll have a delicious fish supper by the time you get, you land.

• 37:02Speaker 00

  Oh, nice. Sorry.

• 37:04Speaker 02

  Right?

• 37:04Speaker 03

  These things are about three centimeters inland.

• 37:07Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. But they're better than mice in space in theory, because they don't have solid poos that go rolling around everywhere or floating around everywhere. And they don't have gas that escapes the fishbowl. So apparently they're just a better.

• 37:20Speaker 03

  They must have some kind of poo, though.

• 37:21Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 37:22Speaker 02

  Why would mice, sorry, are you saying mice farts are problems in space?

• 37:28Dan Schreiber?

  Big problem. Have you not read all the news recently?

• 37:30Speaker 00

  What's happening? The ISS is floating further and further away.

• 37:35Speaker 03

  Even if they did have solid poos.

• 37:37Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 37:37Speaker 03

  They're living in water. Right? The poos are gonna be in the water. They're not gonna disappear around the.

• 37:43Dan Schreiber?

  Yes, I think that's, yeah, yeah. And you figured the mice would be in a container as well, that would mean it wouldn't escape. So what's going on NASA?

• 37:49Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 37:51Dan Schreiber?

  Lot of, lot of questions. Lot of questions. I actually had an insanely stressful moment just before coming into the office today. I was getting on the tube and there was a 70 year old man on a wheelchair and he was.

• 38:05Speaker 00

  How did you know how old he was? Do you count the rings?

• 38:08Speaker 02

  He had a balloon, he had a badge, yeah.

• 38:10Dan Schreiber?

  And he got off the tube, the doors closed, but the balloon was stuck inside and he just flew. Oh, it was, it was worse for me than him, I've got to tell you. I can't deal with that. No, he, he was, he was in a wheelchair. He looked roughly 70 years old and we came up to the escalator and I went down. I thought, oh, there's a lift over there, but he thinks it might be here. And then I was watching him and he turned around.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Oh, crabs.

• 38:40Dan Schreiber?

  And he went backwards down the escalator. It was amazing. Yeah. He had, he put two hands on each of the other side.

• 38:46Speaker 03

  I've seen that.

• 38:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. And, and I was watching the big wheel and it looked like it was teetering over the edge. And the stress was actually less, are you gonna hurt yourself? Because I assume he knew what he was doing. But if he did fall, I was, I was in his path.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  You'd be like Indiana Jones.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Wait, is that a scene in Indiana Jones?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  With the giant ball coming chasing him, but it would be an exactly 70 year old man in a wheelchair.

• 39:09Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, it was horrible. I mean, stress is a fascinating feeling because you get over it. I was, by the, by the time I was off the escalator, it was gone.

• 39:18Speaker 00

  I can't believe, I can't believe you've crowbarred that anecdote.

• 39:22Dan Schreiber?

  Why? It just happened to me. It's so relevant. A life experience? Just before we talk about stress? And I'm not gonna bring it up?

• 39:28Speaker 00

  Can't believe you were stressed by that. And also your takeaway is stress just disappears, doesn't it? Straight away. I think I'm saying it doesn't.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  But that was Dan's equivalent of being chased by a lion.

• 39:37Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 00

  No, you've treated stress like we're supposed to, rather than holding on to it.

• 39:41Speaker 03

  Yeah. I've got a question. Did you, did you, when you got that sort of stress hormone in your body?

• 39:48Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 39:48Speaker 03

  Did you do the fight or the flight? Cause that's what happens, right?

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 39:53Speaker 03

  You know, that's, that's the idea.

• 39:55Speaker 00

  Did you punch him in the face?

• 39:56Speaker 03

  That's the idea invented by a guy called Walter Cannon. Sounds so much like water cannon.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  Brilliant.

• 40:03Speaker 03

  Just with an extra L. But now, these days, we've gone from the two Fs to the six Fs. So you can have fight, flight, freeze, fawn, fine, or faint. It sounds like you had fine.

• 40:16Dan Schreiber?

  Fine.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  As in it was fine.

• 40:18Dan Schreiber?

  It was fine. It was fine. I had fine.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Fawn as in bowing and scraping and apologizing.

• 40:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, yeah, exactly. It's like when you're in a stressful situation, rather than running or fighting, you try and almost calm things down.

• 40:33Speaker 02

  You apologize.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Friend the person.

• 40:35Speaker 02

  That's my method.

• 40:35Speaker 00

  And then fain is like, you pretend you're okay, presumably. But what's, what's fine?

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Faint, it was.

• 40:41Speaker 00

  Oh, faint? With an E or an A?

• 40:43Speaker 03

  With an A. So it's like you just collapse as if.

• 40:47Speaker 00

  Is that a useful response?

• 40:48Speaker 03

  Well, people do do that. If you're in very stressful situations, you might just go completely catatonic and not respond to it.

• 40:54Speaker 00

  But these feel like really not use, like fight or flight is a useful thing if you've got a lion attacking you. But is it useful to collapse?

• 41:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, because you play dead, right?

• 41:03Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:03Speaker 00

  You're playing dead, I suppose. Yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 03

  And fine is just ignoring the problem, which there are definitely adaptive reasons for that, I can imagine.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  Yeah. Um, I think we have the most amazing way of measuring stress levels now. So as we've said, raised cortisol is stress. I could find out from James, how stressed you've been at different times of the year over the past year.

• 41:25Speaker 03

  Okay, how?

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Can you do it on me now? I need some, I need some equipment and I need to be a scientist.

• 41:30Speaker 03

  I'm not bending over for that.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  Come on.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  Is it a part of James that it's been left in?

• 41:36Speaker 00

  Yes. And you can actually tell much better on me. You could, you could tell a much longer period of time on me.

• 41:42Speaker 03

  Oh, is it my breast milk?

• 41:44Speaker 00

  You're not producing much these days, are you?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  I'm very stressed.

• 41:50Speaker 00

  So I suppose I'll kill this guessing game quickly. I have longer hair than you guys.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:57Speaker 00

  Cortisol goes into our hair. The way now that scientists study stress levels and what causes human stress is they look at their hair and the cortisol levels. And you can see it's a bit like ice cores are used to tell climate over time. And you can see about a period of 12 months. And so, you know, they've studied, for instance, the fact that people's stress levels peak in winter, we know. And if they take hair from people who live in nice equatorial countries, there's not nearly as much cortisol in the winter segment of their hair, which was growing in winter, compared to in Norway, for instance, where there's much more stress.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And that's like how lots of tropical trees don't actually have very strong rings in the middle.

• 42:36Speaker 00

  It's just like that.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Because they've got the same climate all year round.

• 42:38Speaker 00

  That these people are the tropical trees of the human world.

• 42:42Speaker 02

  That is crazy.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  Isn't that so cool? So yeah, I could just pluck a hair from your head and tell you that three months ago, you were really stressed about something.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  It was probably my hair transplant.

• 42:52Speaker 02

  But that's a good point, isn't it?

• 42:57Speaker 03

  This isn't working at all.

• 42:59Speaker 00

  Some dickhead keeps plucking my hairs out.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  It doesn't go into all your hairs?

• 43:04Speaker 00

  No, just one.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  No, but if they. Takes ages to find it.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  I was thinking about other parts of the body.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  I'm thinking, because I don't know, I don't know if they used your ass hair for the thing.

• 43:16Speaker 03

  Well, have a look. What do you think?

• 43:18Speaker 02

  It's very luxurious.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  And now have a look at this.

• 43:22Dan Schreiber?

  You did bend over.

• 43:31Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that the world record holder of most bug tattoos is terrified of bugs.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  That's so silly.

• 43:43Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, well, it's...

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Why's he done that?

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Just trying to increase his stress levels.

• 43:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Oh, he's got 864 insects tattooed on his body. Not all bugs, by the way. So when they were doing the Guinness World Records count, they had to discount a bunch because they were...

• 43:59Speaker 03

  Arachnids?

• 44:00Dan Schreiber?

  Arachnids, yeah, you know. There were millipedes on there. They don't count, so it's a...

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Come on.

• 44:07Dan Schreiber?

  That's what it is.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  I think a bug has to have, like, sucking mechanism or something. Like, there's quite a lot of things that you would think are bugs and not bugs. Like, if you asked Erica McAllister, for instance.

• 44:16Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, right.

• 44:17Speaker 02

  Right. So he could have creepy crawlies as a...

• 44:20Speaker 03

  Or mini beasts.

• 44:20Speaker 02

  Mini beasts is a cute phrase they use. Okay, so he's got even more of those, but he's got 864...

• 44:27Dan Schreiber?

  864 insect tattoos on his body. His name's Michael Amoya, and he's quite a famous guy, actually. He appears on a lot of... He's big on YouTube and so on.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  It is a bit of a trend, isn't it, getting the most tattoo X variety on you? So there's a guy who's got the most Marvel comic book hero tattoos.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  And it starts with one, and then it just snowballs from there.

• 44:50Dan Schreiber?

  Yes.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  So this guy's got 63 superheroes all over him. He's called Tom Radford, lives in Hull. And he says, "I've endured pain in places very few will understand for tattoos no one will ever see, all for the sake of this record."

• 45:04Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. But his head and neck and hands are completely uncovered. Can you guess why?

• 45:09Speaker 03

  Um, head and neck and hands.

• 45:12Speaker 00

  He doesn't have, doesn't have any.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  He doesn't have a head or neck or hands.

• 45:17Speaker 03

  That was gonna be my guess. He didn't have the head, and he thought, well, there's no point having a neck.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Does he work in a place where he can cover up the rest of his body quite easily, but can't cover his hands and neck?

• 45:30Speaker 02

  What kind of place would that be?

• 45:32Dan Schreiber?

  Strip club.

• 45:33Speaker 03

  No, a strip club is the one place it wouldn't be, because strip clubs, you literally are showing the rest of your body.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  He's a bouncer.

• 45:44Speaker 03

  Does he do, like, you know, like, sign language for children's TV shows?

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Brilliant guess. And he doesn't want to be confusing.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. No, he's promised his mother he wouldn't.

• 45:56Speaker 00

  Oh. Okay, well, we were never gonna guess that.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Why weren't you gonna guess that?

• 45:59Dan Schreiber?

  Two more guesses, I would've got there, I think.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:02Speaker 00

  Sweet.

• 46:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  The most tattooed woman in Britain, or so she certainly was a few years ago, Becky Holt. I just find it really interesting that her first tattoo was her boyfriend's name, and it was on her crotch. I just think that's such an interesting place to get your first tattoo.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Usually, your first tattoo would be...

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Arm.

• 46:21Speaker 00

  Arm, you know, belly. On my fanny, it's just like, it's like, this girl's going on to bigger things tattoo-wise.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  What if her boyfriend was called Fanny, which is, like, short for Francis, like, Fanny Lee? So she could write Fanny down there, and then future boyfriends wouldn't know it was the next boyfriend. They'd be like, "Oh, you're just labelling your bunny pants."

• 46:43Speaker 00

  That's what it was. Yeah.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  That's actually a really funny record to break, is the most parts of your body clearly labelled with what they are in tattoo form. Head, shoulders, knees, toes, you start with, then fanny.

• 46:56Speaker 00

  Yeah. Yeah. Because that's the second verse of the song.

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I started looking up excuses for tattoos.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 47:07Speaker 02

  Mainly Nazi tattoos, because there are a lot of times where people...

• 47:13Dan Schreiber?

  You've become obsessed, man.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  Get tattoos that they, you know, and then they go on to a position of prominence.

• 47:20Speaker 03

  Like Podcaster.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Like Podcaster.

• 47:24Speaker 03

  Okay, here's one.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, go on.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  I thought it was a Hindu symbol of peace.

• 47:30Speaker 02

  Ding, ding, ding. This year, the Barnsley councillor for Reform UK, who was accused of having a swastika tattoo, his wife explained it was due to a brief interest in Buddhism as a young man.

• 47:39Dan Schreiber?

  That makes, okay.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Tick. All right.

• 47:41Speaker 03

  Here's another one.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  I'll give you the tattoo. Okay, okay, okay.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Swastikas on Japanese maps means a temple. So someone tattooed an entire Japanese map, like an ordinary survey map on it.

• 47:53Speaker 02

  And then said, "My body is a temple, specifically this bit with a swastika."

• 47:56Dan Schreiber?

  Someone's tattooed an early Rudyard Kipling book cover onto them, because he had swastikas all over them. Youngest person ever to win the Nobel Prize for Literature as well, by the way.

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Lovely throwback there. Couldn't leave that on the table.

• 48:09Dan Schreiber?

  Uh, yeah. Is it that?

• 48:11Speaker 03

  I wanted to tattoo the words "my struggle" on my forehead, but my tattoo artist was German, and I wrote "mein Kampf" instead.

• 48:20Speaker 02

  I'm gonna give you the tattoo, and you have to give me a great excuse for it.

• 48:23Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  There's a German Big Brother contestant some years ago who was done for having an SS symbol tattooed on his arm. What was his excuse? Bear in mind, that's also illegal in Germany, of course.

• 48:35Dan Schreiber?

  And you mean, so it's the font, really, with the SS?

• 48:38Speaker 03

  Everyone used to call him a silly sausage.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Which is what SS actually meant, isn't it? Hitler's silly sausages. The elite silly sausages, yeah.

• 48:54Speaker 03

  It was the sound that his favourite snake made.

• 48:59Speaker 02

  It's as bad an excuse as this.

• 49:00Dan Schreiber?

  Is it?

• 49:01Speaker 02

  Think of the font. What else is written in that font?

• 49:03Speaker 03

  Kiss.

• 49:04Dan Schreiber?

  Kiss.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  He claimed that he was a fan of the band Kiss, but had only got the second half of the band name tattooed on him.

• 49:11Dan Schreiber?

  He could only afford two letters, and he went for that?

• 49:13Speaker 03

  That's so good.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  He needs to get a best friend who's got the K.I. Quickly, get your best friend to get the K.I. on.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  And I'll just give you the last one. There was a Lee Mac-fronted Sky History reality series about woodwork called The Chop.

• 49:26Speaker 03

  Oh, I remember that.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  It was a very short-lived series, one of the reasons for which was that one of the contestants turned out to have a tattoo on his face saying 88. And that is a, that is a number often used by neo-Nazis, because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, HH, Heil Hitler, is the, is the thing. He explained, when challenged, that this tattoo was simply because his father had died in 1988, at which point it turned out his father was alive and well. Told the Daily Mail, "I'm here, aren't I?"

• 49:57Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 49:57Dan Schreiber?

  There's an interesting new tattoo that people are getting. So every bit of content that goes up on Spotify gives a little barcode, and it's meant to be for just, you know, the actual code.

• 50:08Speaker 03

  Sharing playlists and stuff.

• 50:08Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, exactly. So you could get your favourite episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, find the barcode, have that tattooed on you, and then if you, if you do... It's just an option, is all I'm saying. But this is happening. Listen to this. This is amazing, because people are talking about having done it. Mary Haley has the perfect party trick. A barcode-like tattoo of nearly two dozen fine lines that, when scanned with a Spotify music app, prompts a phone to play Mambo Number Five by Lou Begum.

• 50:35Speaker 02

  That was one stunning.

• 50:37Dan Schreiber?

  Spotify have said, "Listen, great idea, very cool, but if the song gets taken down and re-uploaded, the code is changed," and that's a defunct barcode. And a lot of people are also saying that when you get a bit older, after a couple of years, and the tattoo slightly loses a bit of its edge.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  Someone scans it and just ends up buying a tin of beans or something.

• 50:58Dan Schreiber?

  The US Navy in the early 1900s, when certain people were coming and trying to join, they were required to get more tattoos before they joined. It's a little riddle, but I'll just give the answer straight away.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no. We have to guess.

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Okay. So what use would be a tattoo for someone in the Navy?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Because they did have, they were a big deal.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  An anchor. Get an anchor tattooed on you.

• 51:21Speaker 03

  That's not useful. You wouldn't need that, unless it was, maybe it could show who's on your side.

• 51:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 51:26Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Identify marks if you're washed up.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  That's a good one.

• 51:30Dan Schreiber?

  That's a good one, and it's possible that maybe there was areas where they did ask you to do that. This very specific case was you were fixing things.

• 51:38Speaker 02

  Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. Yeah. Sailors in the Navy have to learn how to do a lot of knots. And you learn how to do them by diagrams, don't you? This is how to do a triple chank, half hitch, whatever.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 02

  So they're getting drawings of the knots tattooed on them, right?

• 51:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 02

  To learn to...

• 51:57Dan Schreiber?

  Not right.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  What do you get?

• 51:58Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  What do you get at the sea? Zebra fish. So they were tattooing zebra fish onto their arms, but if you scan them, it's a code for their favourite Spotify song.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  Plays Mambo Number Five.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  And that's the international distress call. That's what you know. If you hear it, you know that someone's in serious trouble.

• 52:19Dan Schreiber?

  The answer is, is that, and these are all great answers, by the way, but the, the one in this case is that a lot of sailors who were joining in the early 1900s had tattoos that were seen as indecent. They had naked women all over them. And so they would either be dismissed and not allowed, or you had to go back and have clothes tattooed onto the women.

• 52:37Speaker 00

  Yes, because I read an interview with a tattoo artist from the 1920s, and it's interesting how things go in and out of fashion. It was in The New Yorker, and it was saying how fashionable and classy tattoos suddenly were. And this amazing tattoo artist was saying, "I have to put a lot of clothes on mermaids for sailors who are about to go into the Navy and aren't allowed to from anymore."

• 52:54Speaker 03

  I went onto GuinnessWorldRecords.com and searched for ironic, because this world record holder for most bug tattoos is terrified of bugs. So the world record for sticking matchsticks up your nose is held by Scott Consal, who worked in ER. That was his job before beating the record. And he says, "Over time, your nostrils stretch, so you can insert more matches into each side if you wait a few minutes." I want to personally say, I don't think you should shove anything up your nose.

• 53:27Dan Schreiber?

  Absolutely.

• 53:29Speaker 03

  The first album by Westlife produced five number-one hits in the UK official singles chart, which is a record. Ironically, the album peaked at number two.

• 53:39Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 53:41Speaker 00

  Wow. That's a great...

• 53:44Speaker 02

  Richly ironic. Why doesn't that get in the song?

• 53:47Speaker 03

  The Grand Midway Hotel in Winburne, Pennsylvania, has the world's largest Ouija board. It's now located on the third floor of the hotel, which is ironic, because the inventor of the original Ouija board, William Fold, died after falling from a third-story building.

• 54:08Dan Schreiber?

  And when are you sending these lyrics to Alanis Morissette for the rewrite?

• 54:18Dan Schreiber?

  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 @shreiberland on Instagram. James?

• 54:30Speaker 03

  My Instagram is No Such Thing as James Harkin.

• 54:32Dan Schreiber?

  Andy?

• 54:32Speaker 02

  Mine is at AndrewHunterM.

• 54:34Dan Schreiber?

  Yep. And if you want to get to us as a group, Anna?

• 54:36Speaker 00

  You can email podcast at qi.com or on Instagram, go to @nosuchthing.

• 54:40Dan Schreiber?

  That's right. Podcast at qi.com, that is the main place to go. Send us your mail, because if you send us your favourite facts, every Monday, we put down our facts and we read out the best of yours. And if you also wanted to give us general feedback, Andy cherry picks the best and brings those emails to drop us a line. The bonus behind-the-scenes show that we make, which is part of Club Fish, which is a really cool club that we've set up. It's on Patreon, patreon.com/clubfish, if you want to check it out. There's multiple different things, multiple tiers, so give it a go, check it out. Otherwise, do come back next week. We're gonna be back with another episode. Thank you, as ever, to Ling Li, Ethan Ruperalia, as well as the larger Fishbuster team for all their work, and we will see you again next week. Good luck.