569: No Such Thing As Jousting Parrotfish

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

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter-Murray, and Anna Toshinsky.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with fact number one and that is James.

Okay my fact this week is that L.

Frank Baum based one of the witches in The Wizard of Oz on his mother-in-law.

I didn't know that he was a 1970s stand-up comedian.

It sounds like such a sexist fact that doesn't it?

Yeah.

But if we tell you who the mother-in-law involved is, it won't sound sexist.

And also which witch it was.

And which witch it was.

Yeah, that's more more important it's the beautiful and benevolent glinda who is the good witch of the north yeah gotcha you thought it was the green one no i don't know what colour she is i've never seen the film is it black and white what she's famously green the wicked one is famously green okay and it also is black and white and then not it was sort of the introduction of technicolour to cinema world really is a worst so it's not like follow the black and white road they didn't do that no they invented the colour process halfway through the first screening of the film yeah it was very exciting so quickly Just randomly.

He had this mother-in-law who was called Matilda Elector Jocelyn Gage.

And it turns out that she was a very, very awesome woman as well as being his mother-in-law.

She was one of the three leaders of the women's rights movement in the US.

So you might have heard of Susan B.

Anthony.

There was also Elizabeth Cady Stanton and there was this lady, Matilda Elector Jocelyn Gage.

She was very cool.

Yeah, she gave him lots of ideas for the story.

In fact, she maybe even gave him the idea of becoming an author.

And she came up with the idea of putting a cyclone in the story, which spoiler alert is what sends them to Oz.

These are spoiler alerts from a guy who hasn't seen the film.

I couldn't work out and therefore I have a theory on this, how she suggested the cyclone.

She died in March 1898, which is just when he started writing.

And I wonder if he was having a massive mental block where he just spent years like, I've got this idea, but I've got no idea how to transport them.

And then on her deathbed, she said, I've got it.

cyclone and that was it because she literally died as he was starting the book so it must have been the first idea that was had I wonder if she just already half written this book and then when she died he picked it up and went oh this is good because she was also an expert on witches Oh yes, she was, the real kind.

Yeah, because

when she did a lot of her sort of feminism and all that kind of stuff, people just kept calling her satanic and heretic and stuff like that.

And they would call her a witch, which is obviously a way of demeaning women in those days.

And as such, she decided, okay, I'm going to study them.

And she was a real expert on witches.

So that's another part that she had to say.

That's very kind.

She inspired a term.

So she not only was a suffragette, she also was looking at any kind of discrimination that was going on in the States at the time.

And she wrote a pamphlet, and it was called Women as Inventors.

And she basically said, here are all the women who have not been given their credit for all the inventions that they've done.

And years later, the term the Matilda effect is used to describe exactly that.

So, women who have been brushed aside from history and should get the credit.

Now, interestingly, there's a male equivalent to this, which is called the Matthew effect.

And the Matthew effect is when a male scientist who is distinguished and older often gets the credit if he has a co-writer who is younger and new to the field.

That was invented by a guy called Robert K.

Merton.

Interestingly, his wife, Harriet Zuckerman, appears on the Matilda effect list because she provided all the data that led to him inventing the Matthew effect.

Can I ask the Matilda effect?

If you're talking about a really awesome woman who is like one of the main leaders of the women's rights movement, but you start the fact off about her son-in-law who wrote a children's book,

is that kind of similar?

I think you're bankrupt.

Do you guys know what the reverse Matilda effect is?

Okay, so it's where women get loads of extra credit for stuff that they hadn't done.

You'd think it was that, but is it this podcast?

Wow.

That is the reverse though, isn't it?

Oh wow.

I mean it is logically the reverse.

I'm afraid that's not the thing that's been labelled the reverse

effect.

This was a quite interesting study that was done in Poland last year actually where a Polish scientist ran this study where they showed over 800 school children a bunch of presentations about the history of maths and science and STEM stuff and then as part of it they mentioned people who'd invented certain mathematical or scientific physics based things.

But these were made up inventions, they were made up people And for one group of students, they had a woman be the inventor, and for the other group of students, they had a man be the inventor.

And it turned out, when they asked the students afterwards, when they'd mentioned that a woman was the inventor, the people just weren't interested in the subject.

They were like, Well, that sounds like a shit subject.

And they didn't want to study it anymore.

And so we need to stop talking about women in science

in order to get women into science.

And it was the girls and boys.

They were both like, oh, women did not.

And it was the same level of coolness of invention they were discussing for both the women and the men.

It was the same invention itself.

It wasn't like this woman invented a doily and this man invented the space rocket.

You'd run some great studies there.

I think a doily is a cool.

I've come into contact much more with the doily than the space rocket.

A doily has probably avoided more human misery than a space rocket.

No, it is more up your street.

I agree with you.

I can imagine you, Andy, starting your doily X company

when you become a billionaire.

The world's most revolutionary doily.

So before he was a writer, L.

Frank Baum worked in shops and he did amazing sort of window displays, didn't he?

Really, that's what he was famous for at the time.

Didn't he have a magazine?

How famous can you be for writing a magazine about window displays?

Well, I think he did.

I think in the areas where he had window displays, people would copy his ideas.

And then he had the magazine and he came up with lots of different ways of doing things.

Like he thought that if you had an American flag in your window display you shouldn't have a fan blowing it because that's not the correct way for an american flag to be flown it should be on the end of a massive stick with someone waving it like a figure of eight and he came up with like a mechanical system to get a flag to go that way instead of being blown with a fan oh incredible so like he just came up with loads of amazing innovations that we all know today like

and then put it in his magazine and then he put it in his magazine and said this is what you should be doing guys not just stupid fan thing yeah okay i didn't didn't know he did the window displays.

I thought he just wrote about it.

Oh, no.

We should say the magazine was called The Show Window, which then became a book called The Art of Decorating Dry Goods, Windows and Interiors.

Which was almost the last thing he published before The Wizard of Oz, actually.

I think it was in the same year, wasn't it?

That was 1900.

So it was maybe a year or two before.

I wonder if he's got anyone out there who, if they say, what do you think of L.

Frank Baum?

They go, I prefer his early stuff.

Well, he had a shop called Baum's Bazaar, which was a complete disaster because it was

lots of tap basically.

It was sort of a

bizarre.

Very nice.

Didn't want to let that go unmarked.

You know what?

I probably would have cut that out, but now that you've made a point of it, I think let's keep that in there.

Let's shine a harsh light on that shop.

Thank you, Andy.

And it sold also, it was a very novelty-based shop.

It was not a dry goods emporium.

It was, you know, like chocolates.

It was based on Woolworths, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was any old stuff, like lanterns, paper lanterns, strange glassware, anyway.

He opened it shortly before a very harsh drought decimated the entire region.

And the appetite for paper lanterns and amusing glassware just went through the floor.

And lots of people were ruined.

And I think that was the point at which, I mean, his mother-in-law, I think Matilda,

was very concerned about his prospects.

She didn't originally want her daughter to marry him because he was a bit of a bum.

Well, he was just a very bad business.

Brilliant.

Brilliant.

See, that's how you do it.

That was good.

Thank you for the last thing.

Say it loudly and then a loud laugh to follow it up.

Yeah, he saw he was very bad at business, and that bazaar, in fact, had to be renamed Gage's Bazaar.

And this was another member of his wife's family who helped him out, who I think was Helen Gage, his sister-in-law.

So he drove the shop into the ground.

And his sister-in-law was like, oh my god, poor Frank, he's screwed up again.

And so she bought up all the remaining stock, renamed it Gage's Bazaar, and made it a very successful experience.

We haven't mentioned his wife, Maud, daughter of Matilda.

She came into his life as it was a quite quick marriage.

They were introduced by Baume's auntie.

He immediately said, I'm going to be marrying you one day.

They married a few months later.

But she was quite brutal from some of the stories about how she ran the house in certain ways because she sort of did everything in the house.

Do you mean the donut incident?

Yeah, the doughnut incident.

Let's talk about that.

It's incredible.

So he, okay, so he comes home one day, Frank, with a box of doughnuts.

Right.

But he hasn't consulted her about buying these donuts.

She is furious.

She's the one who decides what food enters the house.

She wants only good food in the house.

So if he was going to do anything like that, it had to go through her and it was not going to go to waste.

So he was going to have to eat all of these donuts.

He couldn't manage it.

By the fourth day.

It's very much a Matilda and Bruce Bogtrotter situation, isn't it?

He has to eat the whole cake.

Do you remember that?

Oh, yes, yes, exactly.

It's that.

So by the fourth day, they start going moldy and he thinks, I can't eat these anymore.

So he sneaks out into the backyard and he buries them under the ground.

Right?

She knows something's up.

so she goes into the garden, she digs them back up, and she presents them back to him and says, You never buy donuts again.

And he doesn't.

And she says, Can I ask?

How many donuts did he buy?

That he couldn't eat them in four days?

Exactly.

Well, he's got one of those Krispy Kreme full packs, didn't he?

There are like a dozen in there.

Anna, I've seen you go through those packs.

James, we don't need to talk about my history of doughnuts.

No, you're right.

That is the whole

hole in the story.

Yeah, yeah, it is.

I reckon I could get through 50 in four days.

No problem.

50.

Yeah.

You'd have a happier marriage than he did, clearly.

I love the sheer list of his failures.

Actually, he is one of these guys who makes you think, if I haven't made it by age X, like, you know, if you haven't started by the age of three, you're not going to be a tennis pro, for example.

Baum, until 35, mid-30s, was still just knocking about doing random stuff.

So has he given you hope?

He's given me a lot of hope.

He was a chicken breeder.

He managed to fail selling oil in America in the 1880s and 90s.

He just couldn't hack it.

How do you fail a petrol company?

Just ridiculous.

I thought the saddest story about Frank was, did you read about when he tried to be an actor?

No.

I will say for him, he tried so much.

The reason I know I'm not him, I'm not going to suddenly be successful at 40, is that he had a new fad every year and he threw himself into it.

And his dad bought a bunch of theatres and he decided, I'll be an actor.

So he kept on asking producers to cast him and eventually one said oh yeah I'll definitely cast you in loads of leading roles but you need to provide all the costumes for all of the possible leading roles you could be cast in so he went home told his mum and dad his dad said no the mum said oh come on he's got a job buy the stuff so they spent thousands and thousands of dollars buying up all the leading like you know Romeo Macbeth all the costumes he turned up for the theatre troupe on the first day the actor who was playing Romeo said oh my doublet's a bit broken can I just borrow that costume costume of yours?

Oh, no.

Within four days, every single costume had been taken from him and not returned.

Did he play anyone in the play in the end?

He got some tiny little extra parts.

He got some though.

That's amazing.

Speaking of costumes, by the way, obviously a movie, The Wizard of Oz.

Yeah.

Yes.

The cowardly lion costume was very, very heavy.

But the really interesting thing about it is because it was made of...

real lion fur and because lions have distinctive fur patterns they had to use the same one all the way through because if they were a different lion they'd be like oh that's just a different lion's costume because it's a different pattern wait as in would would a viewer a casual viewer of the film think where did the lion where did the lion go

who's this who just took a new character they've just introduced well on the other hand you might say good work to say let's try and make it as absolute continuity as possible to kill as few lions as you need to

i agree with all of this i'm just

kill one if i'm gonna be totally honest was the real lion fur coming in?

And also,

because actually, I'm thinking about the character of the film, he looks nothing like a lion.

They could have just put a yellow carpet on him, couldn't they?

And then, oh, we'll just keep using the same yellow carpet.

Actually, use a second yellow carpet, it doesn't matter.

I had no idea that that was an actual lion.

What about that perm?

Lions don't have an actual perm!

Like the head bit was separate, the head bit was molded,

but the actual fur bit was real fur.

Wow,

another interesting thing about that is that it went up for auction in 2014.

And one way of authenticating it is they looked at the patterns on the movie and they could see it was the same on the costume that they had, so they knew it was real.

And it sold for $3 million, which makes it the third highest priced outfit ever sold from a Hollywood film.

Incredible.

And the winner is.

Can we guess the others?

Can we guess one of them?

Batman's costume with the nipples on from the Tleedie version.

Very true.

Very good now.

Jim Carrey's wig and Dumb and Dumber.

The ball haircuts.

I'm going to say Ruby Slippers, which sort of thing.

No, so they're not from that movie.

Marilyn Monroe's dress from

the winter.

From the 70-year-old $4.6 million that's sold for.

Rosebud the Slay from...

No, you won't get these.

That's not a costume.

That was an actor in that.

Not that you won't know it, but you won't have guessed it.

It's Audrey Hepburn's dress from My Fair Lady.

Oh, from My Fair Lady?

Wow.

Yeah, that's incredible.

Andy, back to your point very quickly about he was going through lots of different careers and he finally had enough and he was like, I'm going to become a proper writer.

And he sits down finally to write The Wizard of Oz.

I really like this because you do often wonder if you've written something that is going to change the world.

I always wondered, does an author have that feeling?

He clearly did.

He got to the end of it and he had his pencil that he'd used to write the manuscript with, and it was right down to the nub, and he immediately framed that pencil because he knew that he'd written something that was

next to his window display pencil, his exotic chicken pencils.

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and this animal

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the journey towards modern weight loss drugs begins with the venom of a gila monster.

Do you mean a gila monster?

I do.

And that is how I've seen it written down.

It's because I don't live in Utah.

I've never heard it called a gila monster.

We have had this discussion before we came on mic, and I always called it a gila monster, but apparently you've been wrong.

No, it's not.

I don't even think you need to do the yeah, I don't know where that came from.

I think what do you mean to say?

Just healer, right?

Wait a minute, wait a minute.

It's healing people, and it's a healer monster.

Oh my god.

We've lost shit wide open.

You've got to reword the fact that you're not.

That's true.

So I read this on a great blog called Astral Codex 10, and it was from a piece about Azempic, and it was about this whole class of weight loss drugs and where they come from.

They're called GLP-1 drugs.

They were invented for diabetes.

And then the scientists noticed, no, everyone's losing weight.

Human and rat who we're trying us on, they're all losing weight.

The basic thing about these drugs is, and the reason they work for weight loss, is that when you eat a meal, your intestine detects that you've eaten and it releases this hormone, which is called glucagon-like peptide 1, GLP-1.

That hormone tells your body you're full and commences operations to sort of deal with it.

So, you know, your body will, you know, it tells you pancreas to release insulin.

It pushes sugar down and so on.

But the problem is, originally, you couldn't make make a synthetic version of that exact chemical, the GLP-1, because it decays within a minute.

So if you were going to use that as a drug, you would have to inject yourself with it every hour.

You know, it's not an effective way of tricking your body into thinking you're full.

But in 1992, scientists found that Healer monster venom,

I pulled out of the full Espaniela, Healer Monster Venom, it has this chemical in it, which does a similar thing.

It triggers all the processes that GLP-1 does, but it lasts two hours.

And so they started playing around with the structure of that and making making a synthetic version of that.

And they came up with something called exenatide, which was sold to treat diabetes.

And then other scientists piled in and started, you know, the thing which led to his Empic, basically.

I really like, so it was 1984, Dr.

Daniel Drucker.

I have a lot of connection to that.

I was born in 84.

I'm called Daniel as well.

God, it's spooky.

It's really weird, isn't it?

Jesus Christ.

I love that he found out this thing about the healer monster and thought, I need to test it, but they didn't have any of its DNA in the banks.

And any that they did wasn't usable.

So he had to get in contact with the zoo.

He had to go and actually get one in person and had to apply for them to go and find it.

He could go and get one.

Well, actually, it flew to him on a plane, yeah.

Yeah, it was.

He could go in the zoo and sneak one out of his car.

But he had to, he sort of talks about how it was very different back then when you were trying to get any of these kind of DNAs that you had a theory about, and that's what it was.

He said, I think this could be to help diabetes.

And they went, fine, that's good enough.

We'll go and get you one.

It came in a cage with a metal bottom because they're so good at digging Hila monsters that they thought if we put it in any other cage, it will just dig its way out.

Dig its way through the bottom of the plane.

Oh my god, imagine if that's what caused a terrible tragedy.

So then he did this work, and then there was a guy called John Eng who synthesized a version.

So this Daniel Drucker was working with actual Hila monsters, and then John Eng came up with this version, which was fake.

Not fake, but you know what Andrew Devil.

Yeah, synthetic.

And he had never seen a Gila monster in his entire life.

He probably pronounced it Gila Monster like I did.

He'd never seen one in his whole life at that stage.

Also, we should say, obviously, Azempic has become one of the most valuable, remarkable drugs in the world.

It does sound like the beginning of a horror film, doesn't it?

Like, it was great.

We all started inventing this synthetic lizard saliva,

and the effects were great at first.

And we should also say that Novo Nodisk, who make Azempic, they say that the Gila Monster study has nothing to do with Azempic.

Do they?

And that it was an important step in the making of this kind of drugs, but their work was separate to the

well actually, I don't know if you know this, but the Healer Effect, James, is the name for when Healer Monsters are not given due credit for the inventions that they made.

There isn't an enormous bank of Healer monsters somewhere in Denmark being systemically drained of their venom.

Yeah, yeah.

That's not the problem.

But it did take about 20 years between the Gila Monster discovery all the way for it to be approved by the American Pharmaceutical Company.

And that's because it was two different stories.

Yeah, it was a long journey.

And that, yeah, so that happened April 28th, 2005, which is my birthday.

Yes,

that's stunning.

Your 21st birthday when you became a man is the, my God.

And here's one more thing, just to say, like, these new drugs that people are taking to make them thinner, it gives you this GLP-1, which helps you not want to eat.

You can get GLP-1 naturally.

Good news for everyone.

But unfortunately, you have to eat basically healthy foods and exercise.

You could literally just eat porridge instead of taking a Zempic, and it does the same thing.

And that's an exaggeration because it's not nearly as powerful.

But I did find it really interesting, the role of fiber.

I had no idea what fiber did as an appetite suppressant.

Okay.

So it does the same thing.

When you eat fiber, it goes through your digestive system really slowly.

You can't really digest it.

So usually the stuff you eat, like Andy said, it triggers the release of this GLP, which tells your body, I'm I'm full, don't eat anymore.

But then it goes away really fast.

But if you eat loads of fiber, you know, some brown bread, some porridge, then that takes ages getting to your colon.

And then that triggers way more release of it later on.

So as a Zempic does, it will tell you I'm full two hours, three hours after you've eaten.

There's a weird thing about Azempic, which is that it works inside the brain.

So the anti-diabetic effect happens in your intestine because that's where the GLP-1 is released.

And that is what triggers the body to slow down its release of sugar, for example, to to prevent a big sugar spike.

But scientists didn't know for a long time exactly how a Zempic controls the mental sensation of hunger.

And it shouldn't be possible for it to happen because there's this thing in your body, the blood-brain barrier, which is meant to keep your brain just working on nice, clean blood with no other stuff in it.

It just stops any big molecules from getting in.

And a Zempic, the drug, is a big molecule.

So what the hell is going on?

And it turns out that if a little bit gets in, and that activates a bit of of the brain stem which in turn acts as a kind of transmitter relay station for other bits of the brain that then makes your brain generate its own glb1 because it's not it's not only made in the intestine so that's why you feel less hungry it's really weird

but there's so there's another thing that i was going to mention off the back of a wonderful fiber would do this for you and i don't think it does one of the side effects of taking an ozembic and other weight loss drugs is a lot of people have reported the stopping of what they call food noise and food noise i've never personally had it, but it's constantly if you need...

I've sat next to you while you're eating, you do have a lot of food noise.

I have outward food noise.

Yeah, not inside food noise.

And inside food noise is if you can't help but keep eating and keep eating.

It's your head talking to you, going, we need food.

We need food right now.

Do you see that place?

Why don't you get some food?

And it's this thing that people really suffer from when they're trying to...

I don't think it's always necessarily like a voice saying it.

It could be just a feeling.

Exactly.

They call it the noise.

And supposedly a Zenpic knocks out the noise as well as suppressing the.

But is that just because you feel full and so your body's your brains can stop saying it I think people who are full still have the noise going we could probably get a bit more

in on an i have another donut come on you can do it scrape that mold off the top and it's still good

it is the case that it's not just about when you're full because it stops other cravings i think so it's supposed to be quite good for people who are addicted to other things yes and unfortunately people who are addicted to exercise it seems to stop you from wanting to exercise.

You don't need to anymore.

You're thin.

We haven't actually mentioned the real major player in the Ozempic story, and that is the great theme tune it has.

Oh.

You know, magic by a band called Pilot?

So that it's, oh, oh, oh, oh, it's magic.

You know that one?

Okay.

Okay.

Okay, Andy doesn't know it.

Well, we might not be able to put that in for legal reasons, but we'll Google it if we haven't.

But they changed it to, okay, so oh, oh, oh, it's magic.

They changed it to, oh, oh, oh, ozempic.

And so everyone was singing it.

And they were saying that psychologically they think it worked really well because it's such an upbeat song.

It makes you feel good.

But you all of a certain age know that the word that Ozempic represents is magic and magic is now in your head.

And so the lead singer of Pilot had no idea that this was happening.

He just started getting messages going, I'm hearing your song everywhere in America.

And he was like, what's going on?

Because they're able to license the song out, no one had to ask him for its use of adverts and

sounds like we can't use it.

Sing the whole thing.

Unfortunately, it'll be owned by a huge huge multinational music company.

That's the issue, yeah.

But so he himself is so on board with it that he's even gone back to Abbey Road to record the Ozempic version of the song.

Is it possible that all of the science behind Ozempic is nonsense, and the only way it works is that that theme tune has replaced food noise in people's heads?

That could be it.

Should we go on to Gila Monsters?

Oh, yeah.

I said at the start we were blowing shit wide open.

They do open their bums to keep cool.

Really?

Oh, Yeah.

Clever.

Can they just with thought or like with muscle movement?

They don't hold it open.

They don't hold it open.

That's what I'm asking.

They don't have a posable thumbs up.

You can do it with a finger.

Or they could do each other's.

Basically, a lot of reptiles keep themselves cool by opening their mouths.

Yeah.

But they can open their cloakers as well, which will help moisture evaporate and it can cool them by up to three degrees.

That is a lot.

For healing monster parties, that must be.

Are you feeling too hot?

No?

I think you are.

shut your asshole at the dinner table to go do it because they're found in the uh deserts of north america aren't they

yeah they live they live underground mostly because it's so hot they only come out for a few weeks each year you just see a bum sticking out

but their tail as well right is an amazing inner like i when i was reading about them i thought that's a cool thing i wish we could do that as well

store your fat in a tail yeah so it means that they only need a few meals per year basically and if they're in trouble that's their stock sitting there all the fat in their tail there's another thing they can do and this I'm afraid it's sort of at that end of the body, uh, related to the bum thing.

They store water in their bladder, right?

And then the phrase I found was they reabsorb it across the bladder epithelium.

And what that means is they can they could have a reverse piss inside themselves back into their system.

Isn't that mad?

Can they do that like just with thought, or do they have to shove their hands up?

Squeeze.

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

My fact this week is that for many years in the 2000s, New Zealand's highest earning sports personality was Tiger Woods' caddy.

It's a bit embarrassing, isn't it?

Well, who's your greatest sports star by brute force of economics?

Is this guy who carries stuff around?

Oh, there's a lot more to it than that.

There's so much more.

It's an incredible job.

Being a caddy.

Yeah.

If you don't carry the things around, you do get fired.

i'm just saying

that's undoubtedly the main part i'll give you that how much are we talking well i very specifically worded it as personality obviously it's not sports star you know the the 2000s uh you would have had jonah lomu you would have had all these characters um i didn't want to call and his name is steve williams i didn't want to call him uh very specifically a sports star i would say he's famous in the golfing world absolutely the reason he got so rich is because caddies have a salary right uh they get paid all year round by their golfers if they're playing the whole year.

But on top of that, when the golfer wins something, a percentage of it goes to the caddy.

Now, those numbers are sometimes hidden.

It's often thought to be 10% of what they get.

So if you're winning, you know, a million dollars, that's a good amount.

And he was Tiger Woods' caddy.

There was an unprecedented, I think I'm right in saying, James, moment in golf where he won all the majors.

He won four back-to-back.

And were there signs on the golf course that it was going to the caddy's head?

Like, was he turning up with a golden bag?

He had his own caddy.

I think.

Yeah, I don't really do the carrying part.

It's not really for me that.

Yeah, I think they're all quite humble caddies, actually, having met a few in my life.

I think, and because it's historical, isn't it?

It goes back to, you guys must have found this.

It was like people in Edinburgh or something.

A few hundred years.

And they used to be kind of general porters in Scotland who were the word caddy was applied to just someone else.

It was like a delivery driver kind of thing.

Yeah.

It was a kind of person who would pick you up something and bring it to your house and they were unionised and stuff like taxi drivers kind of thing.

And, you know, if you needed someone to do you a job, then you would just get a caddy to do it.

Right.

Yeah.

And the thing they seem very keen to emphasize now, which probably people don't know who aren't into golf, is that there is more to it than carrying all the clubs right now, even though that's the main part.

And I didn't know that they do give lots of advice.

I'd actually like to know from James actually in reality on the golf pitch.

Jesus.

You know how much do they do that?

Because the idea is with a caddy you have to know the whole course, like all the bumps and lumps.

Are they like a pilot for a ship?

You know, you have pilots who know the local terrain and advise how to get out of this particular river without

okay so if you play normal golf with your mates you don't have a caddy okay be very rare to have a cuddy would you look like a real tool if you turned up with one yeah you would i mean it would be insane it would be utter utter insanity however if you like let's say you go and play in st andrews which is the oldest golf course one of the oldest golf courses in the world probably the most venerable you turn up it's a really important moment in your life because you're a huge golf fan they will have caddies there who will uh carry your bags for you and give you lots of tips and they will really tell you okay on this hole it looks like you should go to the right but actually it's better if you go to the left that kind of thing

and on in the professionals though would tiger woods have its caddy you know give him advice yeah like that to a good.

Like, you know, in reality, would it be actually shot?

So

before the round start, your caddy would walk out and walk the whole course.

They would make their books, which would tell you where all the shots come in from, the different yardages.

Yeah, they just could not be.

The suggestions about which irons to use, because you have multiple different ones.

It goes even deeper than that.

Like, for example, in Tiger Woods' case, there was one time when there was a boulder in the way of his ball.

So he hit his ball and it landed behind the boulder.

And they worked out that the boulder was loose on the ground, which meant it was a loose impediment.

His caddy, Sisyphus, was able to

temporarily remove it.

Just for the moment, yeah.

But no, and so that was his job.

He had to get in.

What happened there is they got a load of people who were watching to move it.

It was part of actually, Tiger Woods had such a large team that it was his team, but legally, on the rules, you can have onlookers come and move a notch.

If it's just sort of resting on the ground rather than yeah, exactly.

So, because it was loose, he was allowed to move it.

Um, this Steve Williams, who we're talking about, he used to be the caddy for Raymond Floyd.

One of his jobs was when Raymond hit the ball towards the hole, both Raymond and Steve had to stare at the ball and will it into the hole.

That was part of his job.

That was part of his job.

That was good.

I mean,

well, you might get fired if it doesn't go in, and he looks at you and says, you weren't willing it.

That was your fault.

So, yeah.

So, yeah, it's a real, it's like when you watch those car races that are off-road where they've got someone sitting there with a little buck telling it's like that.

Rally drivers.

Yeah.

Well, so there was a

very famous caddy troop in the Augusta National Golf Course, which I guess is the best, bigger biggest deal in the world as a golf course, one of the biggest deals in the world.

One of the biggest deals.

A big deal.

It's where the masters happened.

Correct.

America.

America, yes.

In Georgia.

Yeah, got it, got it.

And they had a very famous troop of caddies.

So it was started in the 1930s, 1934, I think.

And the caddies were all sourced from a local area, which was a completely black area.

And they were all like black kids who are making a bit of extra money by carrying their bags around and between 1934 and 1983 i think it was it was like all black caddies who are sourced from there i think the first white caddie there was 1983 when golfers started bringing their own which was very controversial um but the godfather of the augusta caddies was this guy called willy pappy stokes who started when he was 12 and he ran this caddy school but yeah they said a lot of the golfers at the time said it was completely like down to the caddies that they won.

There was a champion called Fuzzy Zella who was very fuzzy.

Yeah, we all know the champion called Fuzzy Zella.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

We all know Fuzzy Zella.

And we all know that he was the only person ever to win the Masters on his debut.

And that when he did so, he said it was nothing to do with him.

He said he was led around by Jerry Beard, his caddy, like a blind man with a seeing eye dog.

Fuzzy and Beard.

Is that your takeaway of that anecdote?

It's all I can remember.

Is this true, James?

I don't know if you.

As the person who plays golf here, they're known as the 15th club.

I can understand that because you're only allowed 14 clubs.

Right.

And there's this great...

But you're not allowed to use them for that.

Rare circumstances where.

They're a bit like the demon, Daemon in Philip Pullman's Northern Lights, you know?

They're always a different animal.

But they're so umbilically tied to the golfer, you know, that's a real team thing.

There's a golfer, right, if I'm saying his name wrong, I'm sorry, Ian Woosnam.

Correct.

He was doing extremely well in 2000 in the Open Championship.

He was playing the golf of his life.

Was he?

Yeah.

He was very far ahead.

Oh, Woozy.

Woozy.

That is his nickname.

Woozy.

Yeah.

Has Fuzzy ever played?

Woozzie.

And then at this key moment when he was doing brilliantly, his caddy said to him, There's too many clubs in the bag.

And he'd miscounted

the number of clubs.

And the golfer, Woosnam, had to had to go up to the judge, umpire, man in charge, rules official, bingo, and say, I've got 14, I've got 15 clubs.

Yeah, he loses a shot for every hole, I think.

He was penalised a couple of strokes and he lost his cool, and it was all the fault of the caddy just not counting how many because he'd tried two different versions of the same club and then they'd all just gone into the bag.

That's terrible.

And he was ahead, and he would have won big money, and then he didn't.

And then he was forgiven.

Woosnam forgave him, probably through quite gritted teeth.

And then the next,

he failed to show up on time for an early tee off.

I think a few, not long after that, I think he got shown the door fair really absolutely fair they do get fired every now and then yeah there's a guy called robert allenby who's an australian golfer and he has fired a couple of caddies but one of them he fired them halfway through the round and so one of the spectators had to come in and carry his bag for the rest really

got to be a serious infraction if it's i think he was a troubled man at the time and they'd had a bit of a set two okay did the spectator provide the advice was he going you hit itself over that way no a bit higher than you did before It does, it does sound really scary, like the intensity of some of these moments because of the penalties that you can get.

I'm fascinated by the rules of golf.

There's a story from that same period with Tiger Woods and with

Steve Williams where it's the final day of one of the major tournaments and he's going into the bag to get Tiger Woods a ball.

And he's suddenly like, there's way less balls in here.

There's only three balls in here.

There's meant to be six.

And what happened was Tiger Woods had been practicing putting in his hotel room and forgot to put three balls back inside into the Steve?

Yeah, that's what he was doing in his hotel room.

So he's so that's Tiger Woods' fault.

Tiger Woods' fault, except no, it's Steve's fault.

Steve should have checked the balls before they started.

Now the game has started.

And the issue is you can't say to the guy next to you, can I borrow one of your balls if he's playing with a different one?

You will get a penalty and strokes will be added to your

count.

So he's going, got three balls.

Don't tell Tiger.

It's absolutely fine.

Tiger hits the first ball, scuffs it, goes, oh, this is crap, hands it to a kid.

Steve goes,

I can't take it off the kid.

This is live TV.

It's going to look so bad.

So he doesn't do that.

Then they go, and then later in the...

I don't know Red have to ask a kid, can I have my ball back?

Yeah, true.

And then he hits it off into

a spot where I think he wants to reset the ball.

So he goes, give me my next ball.

Now, Steve knows this is the final ball.

Oh, God.

So things are going to screw everything over for Tiger Woods if he doesn't land this next shot.

I'm so stressed.

I know.

That's the thing.

It's like high octane.

It's like Apollo 13.

Anyway, he makes the shot and it's fine.

But like, you know, you don't really know what's going on.

Didn't Apollo 13 end that abruptly as well?

Suddenly, and it's all fine.

Yeah, it all works all fine.

Yeah, it's all fine.

Yeah, right.

Okay.

It's intense.

Yeah, well, it is.

It's so intense.

There's one other caddy who got fired that I read about.

I don't know if you guys know about him.

So first of all, they all have nicknames, apparently, which is quite cool.

Like literally every caddy seems to have a nickname, like John Stovepipe Gordon or Frank Marbley Stokes.

And there was one called Willie Cemetery Pertite, who was Dwight Eisenhower's caddy.

Oh, so his nickname cemetery.

Yeah yeah yeah so his nickname cemetery.

So he was fired in the end for being too old and slow but the way he got

we all get there eventually

James your days are numbered

but the reason he got his

reason he got his nickname, it was given to him by Eisenhower and it was because he by night was a jazz drummer and he was leaving a gig and he was jumped by this gang with knives who had been sent by his ex-girlfriend who was upset that he dumped her and he was very badly injured.

He was sent to hospital.

People thought he was dead.

He basically woke up in a morgue staring into the eye of a mortician who was about to, you know, cover him and wax or whatever and embalm him because he'd been given the wrong medicine.

Everyone thought he had died.

Wow.

And so from that day on, he was called Dead Man until Eisenhower said, I don't like having a caddy who's called Deadman.

Shall we go with cemetery?

Isn't that a good nickname story?

That is.

That's really cool.

That's a solid one key.

I wonder if he's in the Caddy Hall of Fame.

He's not.

He's not?

Oh, man.

I had a look into the Caddy Hall of Fame.

130 men and women have been entered into the Hall of Fame.

129 men.

Exactly.

Actually, 128 men.

There's two women, but one of them isn't a caddy.

So

it's a lady, so Fanny Simerson, who is a very famous caddy.

She was Nick Faldo's caddy for many years.

She's the only actual female caddy in there.

The other person's called Laura Cohn, and she's who founded the Caddy Hall of Fame.

Oh, I'm really happy.

And so she's in there for honorary purposes.

Just to get herself in there.

Yeah.

That's very funny.

Someone else who's in it is George Lucas.

Oh, yeah.

Yes.

Caddy, Hall of Fame.

Absolutely.

George Lucas started his career as a caddy, and he is actually the king of the yardage books that James mentioned, which are the books that now everyone carries around.

Actually, now they've been banned.

Actually, have they been fully banned?

Like as in the last maybe six months.

I'm sorry, what's a yardage book?

It's a thing where you, a book that was sort of invented by a few individual golfers in the 50s or 60s, where they drew up the complete layer of the land, very detailed, all the contours, the distances, the angles, and everything.

And then this George Lucas guy was like, I'm going to make an official one.

Spoiler, right?

It actually wasn't the same George Lucas, I don't think, although I didn't 100% check.

It is a different George Lucas.

What an incredibly, incredibly misleading fact.

Jesus.

Here we go.

I'll bring you back.

Oh, great.

Okay.

He's actually more interesting than George Lucas.

And they could be the same person because the way he measures all the distances is he goes around, or he went around golf courses with a laser and he fired lasers at different spots on the golf course.

And, you know, the time they took to bounce back told him the distance it took.

Which, if that's not a lightsaber, a lightsaber, yeah.

Yeah, right.

It's you know what it is.

Well, he does insist all the golfers he caddies for go

as they're about to hit with the club, doesn't he?

Yeah.

Wow.

He's wild.

He's what's his nickname?

He has a nickname.

Is it George Lucas?

No, yeah, George.

Not that one.

It was something like gorgeous.

Oh, yeah, gorgeous with a J.

Yeah.

Wow.

Very nice.

Okay.

I don't know how I got onto this, but I was trying to find sports where you can

bring a friend.

Like caddying, I suppose.

Okay.

So, you know, weightlifting.

You often have someone to, like, help you with the weights.

No.

No, someone to spot you, you know, when you're lifting a big, heavy bar.

They might be able to step in if you get into difficulties or whatever.

They've got professional stuff, do they i don't know uh but

they might do they might do yeah yeah um anyway i i just the google you know what shows up automatically when you type in sports where you can it's quite interesting you've got sports where you can be short

oh yeah um fair few um i didn't i didn't look it up um sports sports no sports where you can start late and i thought originally i thought that meant like at noon or whatever actually it turns out it's sports where you can start late if you want to be the l frank bomb of Exactly.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Start late.

A moment if you just...

The gun's fired, everyone's gone.

You're going.

Just give me a second.

I'll start on the next lap.

Yeah, yeah.

And most of those articles, I did follow this one.

It's mostly, look, even if you're 12, it turns out you can start this sport and be fine at it in life.

But the one exception does seem to be equestrianism.

Yeah, jockeys, so old.

Show jumpers are often in their mid-40s.

There was another New Zealander called Judy Braum who debuted at the Rio Olympics age 62.

And a lot of the horses are old too.

Are they?

They're teenagers, which is

in horses.

They're quite old for a horse.

Yeah.

We've spoken to a lot of sports people for our other podcasts that we won't go into because...

No, I don't want to mention it.

It's embarrassing.

It was last year when we did all that plug-in.

But occasionally, like, I think shooters tended to be a bit late.

And occasionally you come up with someone who started when they're at university and stuff.

Like you get rowers who start at university.

Yeah.

It's time to get into it, isn't it?

Yeah.

Often often in the Paralympics, you start later, which is quite hard to decide to do that.

That's a slightly weird thing that I wasn't expecting to learn about caddying, which is I assumed that maybe it was an alternative career once you tried to be a golfer and then you pivoted into that as a secondary job.

But Steve Williams started doing it at six, and a lot of caddies started when they were very, very young, and that was the primary job.

Like, it's a job, it's a

skill, it's a, it's got

the money is so variable depending on whether you're tiger tiger with Scaddy or not, basically.

And there have been some controversies.

Like, there was a golfer some years ago who he won $1.3 million on an event and he paid his caddy $5,000.

And that was a real controversy.

I thought it was that Jim Furik, was it?

It was Matt Kucha?

Oh, Matt Couch.

Matt Kucha.

And

there was a little bit of backlash to that at the time.

But he said, look, we had an arrangement.

He's very happy with it.

He's earned 5,000 a week.

Well done him.

He's really happy with that.

Honestly, still, people bring that up to Kucha in interviews and stuff.

Yeah.

So this is their discrete.

Because Dan was saying you have to pay some of the prize money to them.

His normal caddy wasn't there, so he brought in a new person and said, I'll pay you this flat sum.

Right.

So it's not a rule, which is like you have to pay them 10%.

I don't know.

Just on rich sports people and jockeys.

You can be super rich and old as a jockey.

And do you know the...

Keep talking.

So I happened to come across a list of the 50 most well-paid jockeys in the world.

Okay.

Current.

And current.

and 29 of them are Japanese.

Weird.

29 out of the top 50 are Japanese.

It's huge in Japan because it's one of the only four sports you can gamble on legally.

So they get loads of money.

And the top guy, Yutaka Take, is 56 and he's earned a billion dollars.

But

I think a lot of that money was when he was a sumo wrestler before he got the Azempek.

You're absolutely correct.

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

My fact this week is that if 88 elephants balanced on a 50p piece on a parrotfish's beak, the beak would not break.

What part is the 50p piece playing in this?

It feels like an unnecessary intermediary layer.

I'll tell you, I'll tell you what part it's playing.

Pressure depends on area.

And I think I have to say, and I have to to come out and say it at the top, because otherwise, someone's going to mention it.

I was clicking through some stuff and I ended up reading an article in Scientific American called Fun Facts About Teeth.

And yes, I'm a senior QI researcher, and it's a long time since I read an article called Fun Facts About X, but it was a good article.

And it was in this article, and it said it's about an inch.

So if you have a balance, you're not a square inch.

So I thought 50p is about an inch, probably.

One of the old ones.

I had the 50p on its side

on its edge, but it's not.

No, sorry.

No, I think that would break it.

Sorry.

No, it's a 50p laid down flat.

Then I've got a big apology to make to my parrot fish.

And this is just.

We're going to cut to live to see the experiment in action.

I'm bored.

I'm bored.

Have you factored in the weight of the 50p?

Because it's exactly 88 elephants.

I haven't.

Okay, it's 87.9999 elephants and a 50p piece.

Asian or African elephants?

Bucks.

Are we we talking full-grown males or are we talking newly hatched?

All right, I'm just going to give you the amount, okay?

Let's just take away the stupid metaphor, and I'll tell you that one square inch can take 530 tons of pressure.

You happy?

Okay, it was a parrot fish.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

So it's a fish.

Okay.

And they have these beaks.

So they're the fish you often see on coral reefs gnawing away.

And they're quite beautiful.

Softer.

What should you move the elephants out of the way?

Yeah, it wasn't a great dive.

The reef was discovered.

It's an elephant dying.

It was horrible.

That's why they're dying out.

They have, they're very beautiful, except for their faces, I would say.

And maybe it's just a personal thing.

I get that a lot as well.

Because they've got these weird beaks.

And it looks a little bit like if you've ever seen what's it called the sheephead fish, which has almost human, giant human teeth.

But their beaks are made from about a thousand teeth arranged in 15 rows, but that have been compressed and compressed and compressed and sort of a molecular level woven to make them incredibly hard.

It's the stiffest biomineral ever found, which, of course, is not the same as the hardest.

It's only the second hardest.

What's the difference between stiff and hard?

Good question.

It took me a

long time to work that out.

Yes, I mean, you did.

Hard means if you like get a diamond on it, one of them will scratch the other.

Yes, basically, yeah.

Okay, that's hardness.

Stiffness, I think, is more about how bendable it is.

So if you try and dent it with your fingernail, it will dent the least out of any...

What did you call it?

Biomineral?

Biomineral.

Yeah, basically just a thing that's made by nature.

Fluorapatite, right?

Yes, fluorapatite.

Fluorapatite is the same stuff as you get on your teeth if you use fluoride toothpaste.

Your teeth create fluorapatite, which makes them so strong.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

So it's sort of, but I would not be able to, for example, as these fish do, chew coral I mean no because most of your teeth are made of dentine and other stuff, but you do get small amounts of fluoropatite and your teeth have used fluorine.

That is very cool, but don't try the elephant trick.

Okay, no, but okay, so these parrotfish they're very good in a way for coral reefs despite the fact they eat large chunks of coral reef because the reef gets some algae growing all over it, doesn't it?

And that slightly inhibits the growth and the you know the natural functioning of it.

So along comes Mr.

Parrotfish and just crunch, crunch, crunch.

Yeah.

They are really wants to eat the algae weird thing is the parrotfish don't want to eat the coral they just want to eat the algae on it but it's bloody hard to scrape off isn't it yeah well there are loads of species some of them just scrape off and some of them do more gouging and they do all kinds of kinds of varieties but they're massive so each adult green humph head parrotfish which is a particular species of parrotfish they're the biggies they can get about a meter and a half long um they can eat five tons of reef per year it's a lot it's so much yeah and then they poo it out we've mentioned before, as sand, basically.

Beautiful white sand.

Beautiful white sand.

They're responsible for so much.

They put out hundreds of pounds per year.

A single parrot fish can produce up to 90 kilograms of sand each year, which is enough to fill the most popular parasol holder on Amazon.

You know, at the bottom of a parasol, you have a really heavy sort of thing.

Oh, yeah.

But it's not always heavy because otherwise, how do you get it to the beach?

What you do is you bring it to the beach, then you fill it with sand, and that makes it heavy and stops your parasol from blowing away.

Sorry.

Anyway,

they only produce that.

That actually is quite disappointing to me.

Yeah, one parrotfish would fill that in a year.

Oh, that's less than I thought.

At first, I thought you were talking about one of those parasols that ladies had in Lack of My Third Lady.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But you mean a big one?

Yeah.

A big one.

I don't think we've said before about parrotfish.

One of the other brilliant things about them is that they have two sets of jaws.

Okay.

Like the alien in alien.

You know, they open the mouth.

Then, uh-oh, there's a little mouth inside.

Second one.

Okay.

Yeah.

What are they using?

What's a word for that?

There is a word for for that, isn't there?

Pharyngeal teeth.

Pharyngeal.

Pharyngeal.

So I think more eels have them.

Yes.

And a few other things.

But they're really rare.

They're diving a reef with pharyngeal teeth.

That's a moray.

Look at that.

James, that's beautiful.

Brilliant.

And those are the teeth which grind up the coral and turn it into sand, basically.

Yeah, okay, right.

So the main teeth just bite off chunks, and the pharyngeal teeth are the ones that do the fine milling of the coral.

You mentioned the giant bump head parrotfish, the big ones.

And so they fight each other by head-butting, which I think was only filmed recently for the first time.

And it's just, it's quite funny to watch because

they've got quite thin heads.

Like, if you look at them face on, they're almost two-dimensional.

So you watch them going after each other and they miss each other about three quarters of the time.

They just whiz past each other and then spiral back around and then eventually bump into each other.

It's like jousting.

Yes, yeah.

It didn't happen a lot in jousting.

You just whizzed straight past.

I saw some jousting last summer at a castle.

Of course, I was like, what do you mean, of course, you did?

You're a Renaissance man.

Oh, you really flipped that into a confidential.

That's amazing.

Yeah, no, it was great.

But they didn't.

Was it not violent?

Oh, it was.

Oh, that's why you liked it.

Well, I blindfolded myself for the violent bits.

No, it wasn't too violent.

There wasn't enough gore.

You know, everyone walked away.

Okay.

What was it?

Like, it was a...

It was just a, I think it was Hever Castle in Kent.

Yeah, beautiful.

Anne Boleyn's old house.

And they were just having a sort of medieval faire.

And there was jousting.

And there was a great hype man dressed as Henry VIII who was doing a lot of crowd work.

And then they did a good bash at each other.

It was really fun.

And was it, as with the giant bumper parrot fish, that the winner got to shag the woman at the end?

That does explain why they sent us all home.

Wow.

So that's how that ends.

That's how that ends.

Yes, yes.

It is.

Although they all start out.

Almost all parrotfish start out as women, don't they?

As females.

There are a few that are born male, known as primary males, but quite rare.

And then as they get older,

they get sexually mature.

And the biggest female in the group has a sex change, I think.

Well, it's one male and then a load of females.

So it's a harem situation.

And then one day, the male wakes up and finds out, oh, hello, my biggest girlfriend has turned into another boat who's now challenging me.

This is a nightmare scenario.

And the thing I find amazing about it is that if you've got the harem, which they do seem to be referred to as, a female and a male, but then the male dies, another female will know to change sex.

And how does that happen?

Isn't that unbelievable?

Or does she kind of go inside and

do some molding?

There is a different kind of parrotfish.

So these are not the only fish that get called parrotfish.

This is a, I never know how to say it, cichlid.

Oh.

I always call them chiclid, but I don't think they are chiclids.

That's a word that I always mispronounce.

Cichlid is what I.

Let's Let's land on that.

C-I-C-H-L-I-D.

But they are called the parrotfish.

And these were invented in the 80s.

What?

I just find that so weird.

They're like sea monkeys.

They were a hybrid of two different cichlids.

Cichlids.

And I was on Tropical Fish Magazine website

which said it was as improbable as Steve Urkel and Madonna getting together.

That's one for the oldies, isn't it?

Who's Steve Urkel?

Well, Dan knows who Steve Urkel is.

No, I don't actually know what show he was from.

I can't remember.

God, but he was like a very annoying, sort of nerdy American point deck dirt sort of.

Oh, right.

And who's Madonna?

Which is the Virgin Mary, which is why it would be so surprising for her to cop off with Steve Urkel.

But they get bred, because they're breedable ones.

These are for aquarium nuts, because they're on Tropical Fish Magazine.

They get bred jelly bean parrotfish, which have been soaked in a dye and are artificially coloured.

Some of them have tattoos.

So they're soaked in a dye and then permanently they stay that colour.

Yeah.

Wow.

Some of them have tattoos on.

You get people to tattoo their fish.

It feels bizarrely unnecessary because of all the fish.

Parrotfish are famously beautiful patterns and colours.

And everyone is different.

And those are proper parrot fish, not these six.

These are the proper fact parrotfish.

Okay, sorry.

Oh, so maybe these ones are a bit more dull and they wanted to be more like the proper ones.

So they tattooed them.

Not very weird.

But yeah.

It was amazing.

And they get even more colourful when they're pissed off.

So

defending territory, they'll get even more attractive.

Yeah.

Vibrant.

There's quite a few species of them as well, right?

There's between 60 and 90 subspecies of a parrotfish.

So when we're talking about one, a thing we're saying might not occur in another subspecies.

But they do do that thing that we've mentioned on the show before as well, where they create a mucus bag when they go to sleep.

So it's a sack that they just sleep in overnight.

It looks incredible.

And that means that they sleep so long.

They're so lazy.

They sleep 10 hours a night.

Oh, I imagine.

I know.

You just need to learn to build your own mucus bubble.

I have been trying.

I have been trying, Anna.

Yeah, it's pretty disgusting.

We need to clean this room every night here in the middle of the day.

Every night.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It takes an hour, I think.

The idea is that they do it to stop parasites, right?

And the way that they worked that out is scientists got a load of them in a pool or something.

And when they made their sleeping bags, once they'd fallen asleep, the scientists sort of very slowly pulled the blankets off them so they didn't have them anymore.

And then they put parasites in and found who got bitten the most and they got way, way more.

Oh, that's interesting.

because there's also a theory that they are using it so that if anyone is trying to pull the blankets off they've got time to escape rather than just be outright sitting there to be eaten i'm sure there's multiple reasons behind it yeah so it's for big predators and small ones in a factor in a way yeah yeah that's what pajamas are for that's great

your pajamas are covered in metal spikes aren't there but no parasites are handy no exactly

there was a test on the moray eels actually an experiment just while we're on the experiments done on these things um so on the pharyngeal jaws the the cool thing about them for the moray eels is that they it means they don't need to feed in water oh well they can grab something like a mosquito or something kind of or a little bit of prey outside but i find this so weird basically it's to do with the mechanics of how you eat like all other fish need to be in water to have the mechanics of water so that they can feed like it's just it we would find it difficult to eat if we were submerged in water do you know what i mean like the mechanic the physics doesn't work as well so the scientists who did this on the eels they they trained the eels.

They took five years training seven eels to slither up a ramp, grab a mouthful of fish from outside the water, and then go back into the water.

I don't think there was evidence that they were doing this before, that they were eating outside water, but I think they were trying to show how these drawers worked.

What if that knowledge spreads among the eel community?

And now they all leave the ocean.

Yeah.

Again, that's the start of a horror movie, isn't it?

Like beachgoers.

Oh, you mean disasters for us?

I was thinking disaster for the eels, but you're afraid of the...

I just think we shouldn't be teaching animals to come out of the water and bite live prey and go back in.

Yeah?

Sorry if that makes me old-fashioned.

Guy who's seen a jousting match at a castle.

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've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts i'm on instagram on at shreiberland james my instagram is no such thing as james harkin and andy i'm on at blue sky oh i don't know how to

you you are at blue sky oh gosh i'm old um i think i'm at andrem on blue sky i'm not sure okay nice good luck everyone um

that hunt

or you can get to us as a group uh through various different means anna what's the best yes you can email podcast at qi.com or you can tweet at no such thing or you can Instagram no such thing as a fish.

That's right.

If you want to find out anything more about us, our club fish, you want to find all our previous episodes, you want to just read general stuff about us, you can go to no suchthingasafish.com.

All of that stuff is there.

But otherwise, come back next week.

We'll be back with another episode, and we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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