554: No Such Thing As A Dragonfish At The Opticians

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from Cardiff.

My name is Dan Shriver.

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

And once again, we have gathered round 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, that is Andy.

My fact is that the Glasgow Tree Hugging Competition contains three rounds.

Speed hugging, dedicated hugging,

and freestyle hugging.

Wow.

Yeah.

Freestyle.

Freestyle.

What is freestyle?

It still has to be a tree, does it?

It all has to be a tree, but freestyle is by a long way the most erotic.

Well, I think we're witnessing freestyle in the background here.

There's an image that we put up on the screens at our live show.

The person up there is Hannah Willow, who is the winner of this year's.

Hannah Willow.

Yeah.

Did she marry the tree that she hugged?

It looks like it.

They should be married.

Considering

the potential.

I was going to say, for some of us, an erotic hug is also the speed hug.

You have to hug as many trees as possible in one minute.

So that is both speedy and do you know the number?

I actually don't know what Hannah scored on that, but the hugs have to last five seconds each.

So it's just...

Do you know what the world record for most trees hugged in an hour is?

No.

Can you have a guess?

What country?

Ghana.

How will...

Sorry, Dan.

And how are you factoring that into your matrix of calculations?

So Ghana, dense forest, trees are close to each other.

Good point, but equatorial saps the energy

I think in Ghana you probably know this Dan, but they've done a lot of tree planting in recent years so they got quite a lot of smaller trees.

Exactly.

I think that's what Dan's asking.

Yeah, okay.

How many seconds are there in an hour?

There are about 3,600.

I'll say 3,600.

One per second.

One per second.

Someone's not bringing the tree to you so you can hug it.

You have to go from one tree to another.

Are you allowed to hug the same?

Can you just go from one tree and back again and again and again?

Or does that have to be a different tree?

Every tree different.

What if you run out of a tree?

What if you hug so many and no more trees left in Ghana?

The number is lower than the total number of trees in Ghana.

Okay, but the giveaway.

Does the five-second rule apply to each hug?

No, it doesn't.

Well, sorry, what's that?

If you can still eat it as long as you haven't dropped the tree for long.

If a tree falls over in the forest, but no one notices and you quickly put it on your plate, it's fine.

No, in this tree hugging, you need to hug for five seconds per tree.

No, it's not a trendy tree.

Okay, so I'm going to say 400.

400?

Any advance?

I think about a grand, about 1,000.

About 1,000.

Anna is correct.

Almost.

It's 1,123,

which is on average one every 3.2 seconds.

Wow.

Decent.

That's pretty good.

That's pretty good.

Abu Bakar Tahiru.

did it this year.

Nice.

But Hannah Willow, previously mentioned, I think where she excelled in these three elements you mentioned, Andy, is the dedication.

And that is is where you show devotion, passion, and loyalty.

So

that's where she won the competition.

And that's a single tree, isn't it?

Yes, that's a single tree.

It's interesting, I think freestyle that round is also a single tree.

So you have to show something other than an embrace.

So it's not actually a hug at all.

You might play it a song.

You might...

Oh,

she did a dance.

Okay.

That was her big thing.

Yeah.

She didn't know that that was required of her, so she just had to improvise a dance.

But she is someone who goes out and does forest forest bathing.

She spends a lot of time getting in touch with nature.

Can we talk about what forest bathing is?

Because I read that as well, and I watched that.

Well,

it's when you go out into the forest and you just bathe, right?

Like you're

just you just take in the smells and the air and the it's just going out.

It's like a nine out of a second.

So, what I assumed is correct, that it is another way of saying she likes to go for a walk in the woods.

Yeah, yeah.

Does she have to take her clothes off?

Like a bath.

No, okay.

You don't have to take your clothes off in the bath, fun fact.

I don't.

You never take your socks off in any situations either.

Even the erotic freestyle.

It makes it more erotic if the socks are still on.

It's really cool.

So she's a mum of three, and she was asked, are they excited that mum is the tree hugging champion?

And she said, no, they were hugely embarrassed to find out I was tree hugging champion.

Yeah, I've slightly ruined their street cred, is what she said.

But she's going to ruin it even more because it's not just about winning the Glaswegian tree hugging competition.

She now, by winning that, qualifies to represent Glasgow in the international tree hugging competition that happens in Finland.

It's like a giant global competition where all our best huggers go and meet in Finland for an ultimate.

That's going to be tough for the favourites from Ghana, isn't it?

Going all the way up to Finland and that cold weather.

Yes.

It's going to be really tough.

Yeah, disadvantage.

And the taller trees, they won't know what to do, right?

Yeah.

I assume

you only hug the bottom of of the trees, right?

Yeah, there's no rule about whether you have to hug base or tip.

It's just not.

Grow up, garden.

But no, it is, it's really, it's quite fun.

I mean, I was quite skeptical about it, thinking it's a bit silly.

But the finished one, which is in a place called Halipu, I think,

it was designed, this competition, by the family of a lumberjack who realized he'd been growing all these trees and he loved them too much to cut them down.

And he was like a shepherd who just can't bear going to the abattoir.

So he and his family thought of this program where people adopt trees and they've been.

Is that not just a lazy lumberjack

who says, oh, yeah, sorry, I didn't chop any down today because I love them too much.

You're right, letting someone hug your trees isn't much skin off your nose, is it?

But this has become a big thing since COVID.

And I remember when we were playing on a previous tour, we were playing Richmond in London, and I went to Kew Gardens beforehand.

And I saw a lady go up and give a massive hug to a tree.

And it looks so nice.

It looks so because we'd all been stuck, and she was allowed to connect back with nature again.

And I just, it was a bit pervy, I just watched them hug for ages.

What were you doing while you were watching?

Because if it was just watching, I think it's fine.

I think the rule is: if you're in a bush, it's not all right.

If you're just in the open, it's fine.

At least you're hugging the bush.

You might be bush bathing, that's the thing, though.

Yeah,

I was just watching.

I didn't, yeah, I just watched.

There is evidence that if you just watched.

Don't keep saying it.

But I only watched, guys.

There is evidence that you can lower your blood pressure by touching wood.

Andy said, grow up, guys.

Come on.

And different types of wood, depending on the texture of the wood, it can have a different effect.

So not the splintery ones.

Not the splintery ones.

Is that in the form of a tree, or is it just any metal?

It actually works with any wood.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

They did it where they compared people putting their hand on plastic, on metal, and then on wood, and their blood pressure went down.

Oh, really?

Oh, well, I hugged a tree in preparation for this fact.

Did you?

Yeah.

Your research is always below par, Dan, that this is reaching new depths.

No, but

it is really nice.

I've got to say, it was a genuinely nice experience.

And a lot of people have been getting back in contact with nature in that kind of way again since the pandemic.

And there's been reports all over the world.

So in New Zealand, there's great trees that the curators keep busting people hugging.

He's like, I kind of get it, though.

Like, this tree has ribbons of flaky brown bark, almost begs to be peeled like a banana.

And

he talks about great trees to hug, like the long-leaf pine, the spongy bark that it has.

It practically hugs back.

I can see, I can see,

but I did only watch.

I understand.

And what kind of tree did you hug?

It's a tree that's in my garden.

But did you even find out its name?

Okay, this is a bit embarrassing because there's five trees.

We name them after each member of our family.

So

I hugged Daddy.

Look, I don't want to reign on this tree hugging parade, but something

smells bad about it, and it's this: that

so it's organised, the Glasgow tree hugging competition by Vicki Dale.

The children's prize was won by Lottie, who is Dale's daughter.

And

the children's speed hugging race won by Freddie, Dale's son.

Oh, dear.

What's going on there, guys?

There were only 15 entrants in this whole contest, by the way.

Which I did.

The Guardian write-up of Hannah Willow winning was saying, Willow has savored the rush of victory before, but only on a minor scale.

How major is this 15-entron competition?

She's super cool, though, by the way.

If you've gone onto her Instagram because I was trying to get in contact with her to ask her questions for this, would you be willing for me to watch out in the open?

Yours sincerely, Daddy.

Well, look, while we're on that subject,

there is a thing called, what is it, dendrophilia, which is basically the sexualization of trees.

I mean, that is a real thing.

I saw a news article of a man in Wiltshire in 2023 who was arrested after apparently having sex with a tree.

So said the headline.

One witness said, I was just walking in the park with one of my mates and we saw a man hugging a tree and thought it was interesting.

We walked closer, and as we did, we saw his trousers down and thought, this is pure gold.

After I stopped recording,

the police turned up and arrested him.

Wow.

Celebrity tree huggers?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So, Prince Charles,

as we know.

Yeah, he talks to them.

Yeah,

King Charles, I know.

He claims he shakes hands with every tree he's planted and wishes them well.

What is a tree?

Well, a leaf.

A branch?

I would say a leaf is a finger, yeah.

A branch is an arm.

No, he tends to do leaves, so it's usually at tree planting ceremonies and he'll shake a leaf and say, have a good time, and walk off.

But you have to shake so many leaves.

You don't want to do like a full hug for everyone.

Novak Djokovic?

Yeah.

Again, not that surprising.

Tree hugger.

When he does the Australian Open, he goes to the Melbourne Botanical Gardens and he gets some tree hugging time in.

Does he?

Does he?

Is that because he kisses the grass as well, doesn't he?

Oh no, he tastes the grass at Wimbledon.

Yeah, he eats.

Eats it.

Yeah, must be related.

Tree huggers used to be squirrel killers.

I was looking for the first references to tree hugger, and a lot of people say that it came from the 70s, but the OED says first reference to some of being a tree hugger in a hippie, please stop building this motorway here because it involves felling trees, way, is 1965.

And so there are a few people in Appleton, fittingly, Wisconsin, who were named that because apple is a kind of tree.

But at the same time, in 1965, in Indiana, they were using tree hugger to describe squirrel hunters.

And it was because they basically hide behind a tree that's thicker than them, a tree whose girth is larger than them, watching squirrels, and then dart to another tree and hug that tree and then eventually kill a squirrel.

Although it does say that all tree huggers are possessed with a love of the outdoors and actually catching a squirrel isn't an ironclad must any more than it is for a fisherman to catch a fish.

Which means I've fully misunderstood fishing as well.

That first citation in the OED from 1965 was in South Shore, Chicago.

They were building a new road through a load of parks, and they had to chop down some trees.

And all of these conservationists sort of hugged the trees and tried to stop them from doing it.

And it turns out that one of the protesters was called Bernard Baum.

And Baum is German for tree.

Yes.

Come on.

That's very good.

We're going to have to move on in a sec, guys.

Oh, can I tell you another sort of competition-related fact that has something to do with trees?

It's about the World Conquer Championships.

Have you guys read this?

Breaking news.

Literally breaking.

It's literally happening right now before our very eyes.

The investigation is going on.

Just happened in Northamptonshire and allegations of cheating.

And it's very serious.

There's this guy called David Jakins.

He's 82.

He's been competing since 1977.

Every year goes to the World Conquer Championships.

He won this time and now there are allegations he used a steel conquer.

And it was the first time he won, maybe?

Yeah, yeah, it was the first time he's won.

Yeah, yeah.

He's the chief judge.

This goes all the way to the top.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is like the Dales all over.

Absolutely.

He had a painted nut, which he said was just for humor value.

What's the humor value?

It's a bit.

If you play Conkers, I guess it's funny.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess.

But it turns out he was concealing concealing steel.

Well, did he use the steel nut to smash his opponent's conkers to pieces?

Because a couple of the opponents said, My conker just exploded when he tapped it for the first time.

And yeah, this is a huge, this is huge.

And we just want to say for the lawyers, nothing's been proven either way yet.

It's all still underway.

And he was actually defeated in the final.

It seems like they must be gender divided until the end, because he won the men's section, but then he was defeated by Kelsey Banschbach from Indianapolis, who came all the way to Northamptonshire to defeat him in the final.

Wow.

First American to win.

And what was she using?

Like a platinum colour.

Just put the conqueror in a shotgun.

Can I tell you one more competition?

Yeah, more natural competition.

This was in 2002 in Australia.

They had a sheep counting competition.

Oh, yeah.

Like there were 10 competitors.

They ran 400 sheep past them.

400?

No, they didn't tell them there were 400, but you had to count them as they ran past you.

There was an indeterminate number of sheep running past you, and you had to count them in your house.

I would count the lex and divide by four.

So awful.

Very good.

And is it the idea whoever's awake at the end is the winner?

That's it.

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Okay, it is time for us to move on to fact number two, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the wax coating on 6,400 shop-bought apples is enough to make one tea light.

Wow.

Yes.

Apples, tomatoes, lemons, peppers you get in shops, it's all covered in wax, but it's a very tiny layer.

There's lots of rumors that it can give you, you know, cancer and make your head explode and stuff.

So I thought, I wonder how much they're actually putting on.

And I read that one pound of wax will cover 160,000 pieces of fruit.

And one pound of wax also makes, according to various craft sites, which I spent a long time on, but I think one pound of wax makes about 25 tea candles.

And so there you go, 6,400 apples.

Melt the wax off.

You've got a tea light.

You're welcome.

And a tea light is one of those little white round ones, is it?

Because I had to look this up, actually.

That is such a man thing to do.

What?

No man listening knows what a tea light is.

And no woman listening doesn't.

It's just a...

And they were invented to make tea with or something.

I read that.

I don't know if this is true because I didn't know what they were.

But apparently in the Japanese tea ceremony, you would put them underneath your kettle to keep it warm.

Oh my god, this is so weird because I've got a small kettle at home which has a tea light underneath it for making the water warm.

And I just thought that was a gimmick that they found to do with the tea light, but you're telling me that's the original the dubbing.

It looks like it has enough flame to keep something warm.

Probably just sort of maintaining.

The wax is so weird.

So

this happens even more in America than it does in the UK.

Like in America, everything is sold with a thin layer of wax on the top of it, basically.

I think it's pretty much all fruit, like all apples you buy in a shop here.

Yeah, all fruit you buy here will also have a layer of wax on it.

But there's this thing called epicuticular wax, like cuticles as in skin.

And the thing is, apples grow with a thin layer of wax on them,

which is then removed during the harvesting process.

And they think, oh, no, we lost all the wax that was growing beautifully on the apple anyway.

So they put wax from a different species back on the apple.

So I have a tree in my garden.

No, Dan.

Leave it alone.

Well, no, I took an apple off the tree and it was really exciting.

It was like, my God, I've got an apple from my own garden.

And it was so waxy that even when I washed it under the sink, it just took ages to get off, yeah.

And I stupidly

used washing liquid on it at one point to try and get off.

But yeah, I felt it literally the other day.

That's cool because it's quite, usually on fruit, it's quite powdery and unsightly.

You often see it on plums.

It's most obvious.

It's like a white powder.

But why did you want to take it off?

It's fine.

What do you mean?

Oh, I thought it went off the tree to eat it.

Oh, no, no, it just felt odd.

It just felt unknown.

But it grows back, even if it gets scratched or removed during the harvesting, it would grow back naturally.

But during those few days, the fruit would shrink a little bit because it's lost a layer of protection and it would lose a little bit of volume

moisture.

And so it's worth spraying the wax on.

because it keeps the fruit at exactly the same size for that little few days in between.

Yeah, right.

It's essential.

Fruit would be shriveled in the process process of making it through the, you know, importing it, getting it into a shop process if we didn't have it on.

And for the same reason they have it on trees.

It's so that nothing can get in, nothing can get out.

But the wax that grows on plants, this is, okay, this is unbelievable.

So it's amazing stuff, epucuticular wax.

It's really cool.

It repels water, it repels dirt.

That's why plants are clean, despite the fact that, you know, water has all sorts of stuff in it, the water just rolls off.

The other thing is, it makes it hard sometimes, if the plant wants to protect itself from insects or other pests, pests, the wax itself makes it hard for the insects to walk on.

They fall off because the wax is

like a travelator or whatever.

That's cool.

And

there's an even more weird bit to it.

There is co-evolution.

So some plants rely on a single insect to walk all over them and fertilize the flowers or whatever it might be.

Some plants have kind of password-protected wax

so only their chosen insect partner can walk along along the leaves and the stems

without falling off, and everything else falls off.

The insect's legs are the password to

just hang on.

So, are the insects' legs specially designed?

They've got little wax skates on their feet, or does the plant alter when it feels like using your fingerprint to open your phone?

Yes, it's exactly like that.

This is why King Charles talks to plants, they're fucking sentient.

Oh, no, no, this is

come on!

But it's it's amazing.

I just found that one day.

Wow.

Yeah.

by the way, if they are sentient, Dan, you've got a lot of consent to get.

Operation U-tree's got nothing on you.

Anyway.

It's a huge industry,

the making wax to preserve food industry.

And it's actually, it was patented in the 1920s, and Brogdon's original wax and kerosene makers who patented it went to the Supreme Court to defend it.

This is how big a deal it is.

And these days, things get dipped in baths of it.

So when you're eating a melon, it might have had a bath in wax before it came to you.

And it could be made of lots of different types of wax, right?

I think you said kerosene, so you can get like paraffin wax, quite a lot of it is.

And then there's other ones that are less, sound like they've come from the petrochemical industry.

Beeswax, they used to do it in...

Beeswax.

Beeswax is every...

You know what?

Bees get get a lot of credit for honey, but people don't talk about the wax that much.

In the Middle Ages, they went on about it a lot.

Did they?

Oh my god.

They really wanged on about it properly.

I think they were quite right.

Well, because like in those days, you had to light your house with candles, right?

Yeah.

And if you were just a normal person, a pleb like me, then you would get it using tallow.

So you would cook your meat and then there would be some fat there.

And then a chandler, a candlemaker, would come round to your house and he'd pick up all of the goo

and he'd turn it into a candle and you would burn it.

But it would stink.

It would really, really stink.

And all the houses would smell of burnt rubbish.

But then the church decided, well, we don't want that.

We want perfect white candles and we want it not to smell like old garbage.

And so they had to have beeswax.

And the beeswax industry in that time was off the charts.

They were like wars because the price of beeswax went too high.

Right.

And they used it for everything, right?

They used it for lubricant, for waterproofing, for all cosmetics are made of beeswax.

They didn't really have any other materials except beeswax, practically.

The other reason it was so good in churches is because they thought that bees were virgin born like Jesus.

There was this thing and if you own bees and you look in your beehive, they never have sex.

You can sit there watching them as long as you want Dan.

They will not have sex.

Because they go, they kind of find a little region and they all fly.

All the drones fly to this little region and then that the queen flies there as well and then they have sex in the air while they're flying and then they all come back

So no one ever saw them have sex so they thought they were virgins But that's the same as humans I never see humans have sex because very similarly they go to a special place where I'm not allowed and they have sex there I don't assume everyone's a virgin just because I haven't seen any of them shagging

people were stupid in the Middle Ages, weren't they?

Wow.

Can I tell you a thing about ancient Roman beeswax?

Oh, yeah.

This is so cool.

Okay, I love this.

So

you would have a wax mask made of yourself,

and it was for use in life, but it was also for use at your funeral.

What would you use it for in life?

I'm getting onto that.

Jesus.

Sorry, you went straight to death.

Sorry, sorry, sorry.

But it's all connected.

That's the weird thing.

So

at about the age we all are, about 35 to 40, you would have a wax mask made of yourself.

And when you had reached political high office, as the four of us all have, sure,

you would have them in your hall, but you you would also have your ancestors wax masks, normally male ones, but often some female ones too, if you're a very politically connected family.

And at a funeral, you would hire a load of men to wear these masks and pretend to be your male ancestors.

And if it was your funeral, someone would be wearing a mask of you at your funeral, dressed as you, dressed as the highest office you've achieved.

Wow.

They would wear like a...

Podcaster uniform or whatever.

Is this the highest office we're going to achieve?

I'm afraid so.

Yeah, they would take the piss out of you a bit as well, wouldn't they?

They would.

I think they would wear this mask and wear your clothes and then go up to your friends and go, Oh, I'm an idiot.

That's quite nice.

Why did we stop doing it?

I don't know.

I think we should bring it back.

The fall of Rome, yet again, screwing everything up.

But the other thing you would have in your front hall, you would have this wall of faces, like here are my male ancestors.

You would have a wall of your family tree, and you would have a wall of military spoils that your family had seized in battle.

So as someone came into your front hall, hall, they would get the full works of like here is what a great kind of guy I am.

Nice.

Hey, actually, back to back to candles and sex.

Were we talking about that at all?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Have you guys read about brothel candles?

No.

No, I think I can guess what they are.

Yeah, so well, this is interesting.

This is around the 1880s, and it was into the early 1900s.

The idea was that in the brothel itself, every sex worker there would have a candle that would burn down in seven minutes.

And that's how you knew when the session was over.

That's a lot of pressure, which you don't want, do you?

That's going to ruin it.

I mean, you know, I'm not asking you personally, Dan, and I don't want to know the answer.

You got any seven-second candles?

It is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, and my fact this week is that the first known example of mastitis was in an empress called Atosa.

She was cured, and the doctor's payment was to be allowed to invade Greece.

Yeah.

So we're talking the Achaemenid Empire, as I'm sure you all know, based in Iran in the 5th century BC.

They were the biggest empire in the world at the time, and then eventually they went on and fought the Greeks.

And if you know that movie the 300 I think it's called it's a documentary isn't it it's a documentary well it's about 300 Spartans who fought against all these Persians and these are the bad guys in that movie oh yes they get a very very bad rap the Persians in this film as if they're portrayed as being really dreadful

types well they were like I haven't seen the movie but they're like they were super soldiers normally when you say I haven't seen the movie it's because we're talking about quite a good movie and you absolutely don't have to watch 300.

That's good to know.

I haven't watched the first 299, so I wouldn't know what was happening anyway.

So, Atasa, she was the daughter of King Cyrus the Great, she was the wife of Darius the Great, and she was the mother of Xerxes the Great.

Okay.

So, behind every great man, there was a Tossa.

And she was like

a lot of what we know about her was written by Herodotus, and he basically put her as like the power behind the throne in all these different situations.

And he was Greek.

Greek.

And he was Greek, so he was writing about them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She was also a wife twice, right?

Three, I think.

Okay, but she married a brother at one point, didn't she?

She did marry her brother.

Not her choice.

No.

His choice.

His choice.

It was kind of a dumb thing at the time, and her brother was basically trying to get the empire, and he thought that this a bit like the Egyptians would sometimes marry brothers and sisters because it would make them a socialist

although I think it was still I think it was illegal to do that

even so he made it legal yeah that's that's the good thing about being king and he actually married two of his sisters didn't he he married her and another sister and I think he might have married his niece at one point as well but

you were Cambyses just to be

the first husband of a tosser yeah okay but you were quite limited because if you belonged to one of the noble poshous families or the royal family at that time you could only marry someone from the seven, which is such a cool thing to be a member of.

And it was the seven most important families.

So it was a small pool.

I think Snow White had the same issue, didn't she?

But then Cambyses, the brother, went away.

And their brother, Bardia, usurped the throne.

This is all kind of very, very late gossip of the...

How's it pronounced?

Achemenid?

The Achaemenid.

Or Persian.

The Empire.

Just call it the Persian.

Persian.

The Persian Empire.

But then the person, Darius the Great, was the one who became her big deal husband.

And he assassinated Bardia, who was the usurper, and then to sort of cement his control and power, he married all Cyrus the Great's female descendants.

Yeah.

As in just, he married the whole family.

It was a different time.

It was a different time.

Not so many trees in Persia.

No.

Yeah.

They were brutal, though, weren't they, the Persians, with the torture that they did.

Oh, really?

Well, it's just the examples are wild.

Like, I was reading about, so Cambyses, he had a judge who had done some behind-the-scenes stuff that he was unhappy with.

And so, he basically had this judge killed and then stripped of his skin.

And then, to remind any next judge not to do all the bad stuff that this guy had done, they laid the strips of his skin over the judge's chair that the next judge had to sit on, right?

So,

the next judge was sitting on the previous judge,

And the next judge was the son of the previous judge.

By the way, it's so weird that the groan came only when I said the son had to sit on the

charge.

But is it possible that this is a load of kind of Greeky propaganda?

Because I think most of the loads of what we know about Persia comes from historians like Herodotus who were Greek and had a good a good reason for

in fact Atosa who is written about as the most important powerful member, female member of the Achaemenid Empire, also maybe didn't exist.

Maybe.

The only sources we have are Herodotus, who famously made up a lot of shit.

I sometimes like to think that Herodotus just made it all up, and basically everything we know about Greek and Persian history is just from his head.

But I think it's Herodotus and Aeschylus wrote a play that mentioned her.

So it could be.

Well, we know that Darius existed.

Definitely, and Cyrus the Great.

Cyrus existed and Xerxes existed.

100%.

Cyrus the Great was great, by the way.

Oh, yeah.

You know, you read about old kings, emperors, etc., and they're all bastards.

Cyrus the Great, he's one of those annoying people, he's just a good, all-round guy.

He's just constantly doing nice stuff.

So he forgave people constantly.

He was very famous for when he invaded somewhere, he'd, instead of killing people or taking them prisoner, he'd draw them into his bureaucracy or into the top of his military.

He was the grandson of this.

What a nice guy.

What, that is nice.

I've taken over your entire country.

I'm going to let you join.

It was a nice time.

It was a different time.

It is a different time.

It was.

That meant good in those days.

He famously captured Babylon.

He did it quite cleverly at night.

So he overnight managed to divert the whole river Euphrates into a canal so that his soldiers could just walk across a riverbed.

And so he arrived in Babylon.

Everyone in Babylon woke up and gave up.

We're like, oh my god, how did you get here?

And he released all the Jews there had been taken captive there and sent that, you know, said you can go back to Jerusalem.

So Jewish people love him.

He defeated his grandpa, who tried to murder him, and immediately forgave him.

Although I think he killed all of his grandpa's kids because they might be threats.

But every good guy...

Does that include his dad?

I don't think it did include his dad.

No.

He didn't kill his own dad.

You really, the more you talk about this Cyrus guy, the less I'm convinced.

Yeah, he was the guy who started this army that's in the 300, and they were known as the Immortals.

And there were 10,000 of them in this army.

And the way that they did it was: if ever any of them got killed, or injured, or a bit sick, or just didn't fancy it, then they would go off, they would take them off the battlefield and immediately replace them with someone else.

So, as far as you're concerned, the enemy, there are always 10,000 of them.

And so, you think they are immortal?

And can you just tap out by raising a hand?

I've really had a great time.

I've met a lot of friends,

but I'm done.

Is it like NFL?

Is that how they do it in NFL?

Oh, yeah, bring on the offense.

I think they're all offense.

They wore tiaras.

They were called tiaras, but they were actually felt caps.

And the main thing they used was a spear, and it was a really long spear, and they had a counterbalance at the end of the spear.

And the counterbalance would be a different type of fruit depending on how good you were.

So the best possible thing you could have was a little like an apple at the end of your spear, and then you were part of the apple regiment.

Well, because that meant you had to suspend more weight at the front, or is it just like a watermelon?

Yeah, so the counterbalance was so that you could have a longer spear and it wouldn't dip down.

But actually, the weight of the thing would always be the same, it would just be in the shape of an apple or a banana or a grape or something.

That's nice.

I'm trying to think of a really shit fruit.

If you had a raspberry or something on the end,

they were kind of famously luxury-loving, the Persians.

And this, again, again, is a lot of propaganda that was dished out by the Greeks.

Basically, the Greeks kept saying, these people wear trousers.

They're just too addicted to luxury.

Genuinely, that was an example they used.

Their kings have parasols.

Embarrassing.

You know, a servant has to shade your king with a little umbrella.

Weak.

So there was a lot of that.

But one of the great things they had in the Persian Empire,

post.

So

as I look at this, it's now less exciting than I think it.

I think it's just really interesting.

They had an amazing postal system.

Sometimes you look down at a note, the confidence just drains.

Like all the blood drains from your face.

Did they have a morning and afternoon post down there?

James, they had so many posts.

Honestly, they make the current post office look absolute dog shit.

They were just

like a huge empire.

So you have to get stuff, you know, like thousands of people.

Yeah, so it went basically all the way to the Balkans, like where Albania is today, all the way to the edge of where Iran is today.

So it's absolutely massive.

Exactly.

And they had this amazing thing called the Royal Road, which was basically only allowed for the use of posties and the army.

And to go all the way from western Iran to what is now western Turkey, a place called Sardis, two and a half thousand kilometers.

On foot, it would take three months.

They could get post in a week.

So that genuinely was amazing.

And it was the fastest land travel system in the world at the time because it relied on very, very fast horse relays.

You would just ride a horse for as long as it could go, and as soon as it stopped, another horseman would take the post.

Yes.

And the stations were set up for that, weren't they?

So Cyrus, when he set up the post stations, worked out exactly how long a horse can go at full speed before it just collapses.

And then where the horse has fainted, he builds a little post office.

Lovely.

And it's like, leave the next horse here, a nice guy.

I should just explain the fact.

Oh, yeah.

This doctor who was allowed to invade Greece.

So he was called Democrates.

And he'd been previously taken as a slave in a raid and he'd found himself in this Achaemenid Empire and Darius the Great, who was

Atosa's husband, he had broken his ankle.

He'd fallen off his horse and really actually dislocated his ankle.

And all of his doctors tried to help him.

And the way they tried to help him was basically yanking him around and pulling him up and down and hopefully it would get back in place.

And he absolutely hated it.

He was unable to sleep.

He was in so much pain.

But he found this guy, Demosthenes, who had been taken as a slave.

And this guy was a doctor.

And Demosthenes made his leg better.

And as a

to say thank you, he gave him two sets of golden shackles.

So he was basically saying, you're still enslaved, but at least you've got gold now.

Nice.

Oh, wow.

Anyway, so then Demosthenes becomes very popular.

Atosa gets this boil on her breast.

We think now it's mastitis because he managed to cure her and he wouldn't have been able to do any surgery and she lived to quite a long age.

So we think it probably was mastitis.

He manages to cure her and he says, I will only cure you if you give me anything in return.

She says, fine.

He says, well, let me go to Greece as part of a raid.

And then when he gets to Greece, he escapes because that's where he was from originally when he was enslaved.

So that's kind of the story.

And he goes back to Croton, which is where he was from, and he marries the daughter of a really famous famous wrestler called Milo.

And this guy is extraordinary.

Have we spoken about him before?

I don't think we have.

He was an Olympian.

He won six Olympic events in his time.

And he was just one of those guys who was so big and massive.

He could do feats of strength that almost seemed impossible.

So he could hold out his arm with his fingers outstretched and challenge people to attempt to bend his little finger.

And they couldn't do it.

They would be trying and he'd be going,

he would stand on a greased iron disc and challenge people to push him off it.

They never could.

He could hold a pomegranate in one hand and challenge others to take it from him.

Nobody could.

And despite holding it very tightly, it was never damaged.

This guy is incredible.

And in his off years, he would train by carrying a newborn calf on his back every day until the Olympics took place, by which time he was carrying a four-year-old cow on his back.

back

and he would carry it the length of the stadium and then kill it, roast it, and eat it as part of like an intimidation, like doing the hacker that the New Zealanders do.

It was like his intimidation process.

What a life for that cow.

He's

incredible.

He's for four years on someone's shoulders and then killed.

Yeah, exactly.

You'd think you're like best buddies.

Yeah.

And so then the legend goes that he died when he tried to show one final bit of feet of strength, which was he was passing a man who was chopping a tree and he said, I will rip this trunk in half with my bare hands.

And the guy said, incredible.

he said what an honor for you to do that Milo and for some reason the guy then went off while he did it and as he stretched to separate it something cracked and his fingers went in and he got stuck and he just died because the guy didn't come back

but he did win the tree hugging contest for three years in a row

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We're going to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that one way to tell how deep you are when scuba diving is to take a set of snooker balls with you.

Is that because you're at the bottom if you've done that?

You've sunk to the bottom.

Or is it because you're so far, once you can't hear the snooker players going, where are you going with that balls?

Then you know you're a certain.

You know you're in trouble.

No, this is a fascinating thing that I didn't know, which is that as you go lower into the ocean, different bits of color disappear.

And so if you had no way of knowing how deep you are, you can consult your snooker balls.

And if you can see that your red ball is no longer red, that your yellow ball is no longer yellow, but your green ball is still green, then you know that you're roughly where you are in the ocean.

It is genius then

it's fascinating so this is this it's not it's very inconvenient to have to take a sense no no no anna au contraire because i looked and the cheapest depth gauge you can get online is 30 pounds but the cheapest set of snooker balls is only 15 pounds there you go i'll take it back what if you drop one and then you better hope it's a red one

but like

how will you know what color they are

because you can still see the colours so okay so say you're going down Say you're going down at about 20 feet, red stops being red.

Okay, so you can see.

So all the red balls look grey.

Yes, exactly.

So you're like, oh, I must be about 20 feet down.

You go down to 50 feet, orange disappears altogether.

Oh, I must be at 50 feet.

You keep going down.

Where's yellow gone?

I'm 100 feet deep.

So

the more you go down, color starts disappearing.

And it's fascinating.

So, for example, if you were, let's say, 50 feet below the ocean, maybe even 100,

and you cut yourself, you would bleed green blood because that color would be morphing towards so people.

I think it's quite, I think it's even just like 10 meters, because red disappears very fast.

Red is a shit color, it's got no energy, it sees one bit of water and disappears into it.

And I think on diving websites, it says like early scuba divers, if they cut themselves, can get quite shock because you're eight meters underwater and you go, whoa, I'm an alien.

But

this is the amazing thing.

This is why,

why are so many fish red?

Because loads of fish are red.

Yeah.

And they're doing it in the deep sea.

Loads of fish are red, and it's for camouflage because you can't see red at that depth.

Yeah.

So they look grey or black.

All the red light's been absorbed.

They're basically invisible.

But blue is the color that lasts the longest and penetrates the best.

So there are very few animals which have big blue bodies.

The blue whale is basically so confident.

Like, there are no predators.

But in the reefs, you get like blue and yellow fish, don't you?

And the reason is that they want to signal where they are for sexual reasons or something like that or scare things away.

And yellow is the complementary color to blue.

So the complementary color to red is green.

They really contrast against each other.

The complementary color to blue is yellow.

So that's why you get lots of blue and yellow fish.

But also it means if there were traffic lights in the fish world,

there would be no use being red and green because the red would disappear straight away.

They would have to be blue, which is the thing that stands out the most.

So the red light would be blue and the green light would be the complementary color to that, which would be yellow.

And if you look at SpongeBob SquarePants, they get it wrong.

I should quickly say where I got this fact from, because I was reading a novel when we were on tour.

We were in Dublin, and I bought this book on the way over, which was Whale Fall by Daniel Krauss.

It's a science fiction book, so it's all fictional, but this was in it.

And it's the story of a guy who's going scuba diving, and he's accidentally swallowed by a whale.

And while he's in the whale, he's still got the scuba gear on him, him.

So he makes it into one of the stomachs.

And he knows he has an hour of oxygen left.

And it's the story of how he attempts to get out of the whale within an hour.

It's one of those books.

It's like the Martian, it's proper science trying to work out how to not be digested in a whale stomach.

I learned so much, despite it being fiction.

I know, for example, if you do get swallowed by a whale and you're in its stomach, don't try to escape via the anus.

Not going to work for you.

You need to go back out the other way.

I'm not going to say whether or not he makes it out, but don't do that.

Does he try the anus?

He does.

His initial thought is, I need to just go all the way out through the end.

This guy sounds like an idiot.

Well, I think when you get...

Wait, what's wrong with that?

What?

Because you get digested by the digestive juices?

What does he discover as a scientifically incorrect reason?

One thing is that a whale doesn't want to eat you.

It wants you out of it.

It's not a nice thing for them.

You can see inside a whale because largely it swallows bioluminescence.

So actually, you can get sight inside a whale.

whale.

What do you mean it swallows stuff that's bioluminescent?

Yeah, exactly.

So it might swallow an octopus that has bioluminescence attached to it, so you can use that as a torch.

You can use an octopus as a torch inside a stomach.

Oh my god, I've lost a snooker ball.

90% of animals in the ocean glow in the dark.

Which makes sense, because as we say, all colours go away, so they have to make their own colour.

But 90% have fluorescent colours that show up.

And as we say, if you don't have fluorescent colours and you want to disguise yourself in your prey, then you're often red or black.

But that becomes a problem if you meet a dragonfish, which is the only fish that can actually generate red light.

So the dragonfish knows that it's so deep down that red light can't penetrate.

So it brings its own, and it's got these headlights under its eyes, kind of like wall paint, and they flash red.

And so as soon as they land on a fish that's red, that thinks it's completely invisible, it shows up red.

The only problem is that red doesn't travel very far in water, so they have to get literally centimeters away from the prey.

But they basically have a,

they effectively have an invisible torch.

Because nothing else can see it.

Nothing else can see it.

Yeah.

Only they can see it.

Like one of those blue light things that you get, like UV torches, right?

Like that.

Yeah.

It's very

cool.

But they can't have an eye test, because if you bring them to the surface, they will explode.

Now, if you could just read the first.

What was that?

That's so funny.

On sea colour, colour in the sea, oceans used to be pink.

And in fact, the whole world was pink.

Is that like a bacteria thing?

It is a bacteria thing, yes.

Good guess, Dan.

Ten points.

I'm the only member of this panel that gets marked when they say something remotely correct.

Well, don't you have a star?

And how many marks are you up to after 10 years?

This is my first one, but

it's a good feeling.

it's improvement.

Um and this is this is the revelation quite recently that the world's oldest colour is pink.

And this is from researchers who found ancient pink pigments in rocks that were one point one billion years old, and so they were over five hundred million years older than the second oldest known pigment.

And they're fossils of chlorophyll, but back in back in the day, really back in the day then, chlorophyll was it's now green, it's what makes plants green, but back then it was pink, and it was this pink produced by ancient bacteria, and that that was all there was and that was the what the oceans were full of and so the whole world was pink Barbie's world was 1.1 billion years ago you knew she was old-fashioned but

have you guys heard of yum yum yellow yum yum yum yellow yum yum yellow no is it the yellow of uh that mustard yellow that is meant to make us think it's delicious whatever it is uh

no is it sea-based is it spongebog it's sea-based is it a starfish it's not what have I already said about yellow?

The yellow and bluefish on the reefs.

Yes.

So yellow is very easy to see underwater.

And there is a theory that if you're wearing yum, yum, yellow when you're scuba diving, you're more likely to get eaten by sharks.

Oh.

And scuba divers will talk about this and they'll say you should never wear yum yum yellow.

It comes from early, in the World War II, there was a lot of incidents in the Pacific where US Navy people would end up in the water and they get eaten by sharks and stuff like that.

It comes from that originally.

And we're not really sure whether or not it's true that sharks do go for yellow.

Are we saying people aren't willing to test this?

Well,

it seems theoretical that it's true.

But the International Shark Attack File said the benefit of increasing one's chances of being rescued far outweighs the minimal risk of attracting a shark.

So the thing is, if you're yellow, people will be able to see you and be able to rescue you.

There was a person called Valerie Taylor who invented a wetsuit which had the same markings as sea snakes

because great white sharks don't like sea snakes.

And the theory was that they would see you and think you were a snake and then would swim away.

And it's a really good theory.

The only problem.

Well, tiger sharks are keen predators of sea snakes.

Oh, no.

So it does save you from the great whites, but the tigers will still get you.

Do you know, that's a new thing, sea snakes.

In 2021, a report was done by a scuba diver who noticed that every time he was going into the the water, sea snakes were trying to shag him.

And it was because they can't really see.

The only way they can know properly what they are going to be eating is by tasting it.

So they wrap themselves around the legs and the torsos of scuba divers and they start licking them and then going, oh no,

this is not a sea snake.

Wait, do they want to...

Are they testing if they want to eat it or shag it?

Sorry.

So it's mating season.

And because they can't see, basically in order to know what they're dealing with, they need to lick it.

And that's not good.

The other thing with sea snakes is the way of courting is the male will go up and look for a female, and then the female will swim away.

And so, if you're a diver and a load of sea snakes come up to you, and you swim off away from them, they think you're playing hard to get.

Yeah.

So, apparently, the best thing to do is just go to the bottom of the reef and just let them

go to the bottom.

Let them have a go.

And soon they'll realize that you're not a sea snake and bugger off.

Yeah.

Wow.

There was a study recently of a body of water, a body of water that one of us loves more than any other in the world.

Oh.

Gosh, I don't have a favorite body of water, I don't think.

Dan, you've been there looking for a Loch Ness.

Oh, Loch Ness.

Right.

There was a theory that maybe, just maybe, a very, very big eel

might be the Loch Ness monster, like a six meter long eel.

Carl Sagan, great scientist, admittedly more of space than of water, thought that there could be 310 meter eels living there.

And if they all teamed up, they could look very convincingly like the Loch Ness Monster.

And there was a study, a sort of trawl of the DNA in the water, and it found huge amounts of eel DNA.

And so, right, we're on a winner.

Like, maybe the Loch Ness Monster is actually just a load of eels.

But unfortunately, the latest thinking is that probably there are not giant eels living there.

Because the maximum length of a European eel, as I don't need to remind you guys, is about 0.9 meters long.

The odds of finding a six-meter eel are very slim.

But that just means six times more of them need to get together to pretend to be a lot less monster, right?

That's true.

They just need to buy a bigger trench coat.

Yeah, well, so maybe, maybe that's it.

Quite a cool thing related to Dan's original fact about wavelengths traveling different amounts underwater.

You know, when it's been a hot, sunny day and you think, I'll get in the river because it's a nice hot sunny day, and you put your toe in, and it's like, oh, the water's so warm and nice.

And then you put your full foot in, and it's fucking freezing underneath that.

That is because, um, in the electromagnetic spectrum, which you all remember from school, infrared waves have an even longer wavelength than red, and they're the ones that we get heat from.

And so, when they come from the sun, the heat lands in the water and immediately spreads on the surface, and it only gets 10 centimeters down max.

So, that's why, I mean, obviously, then it does mix in a bit because it's liquid, but that is why, when you put your foot in the water and you think, lovely, yeah, yeah, then

interestingly, that's the same with trees, right?

So, if you're not going to be able to do that, not, it all comes back to that point.

No, no, it's true.

If you hug, wrap your arms around the lower trunk of daddy, and you're going to have a colder experience.

So they found this out with koalas, basically.

It's a very similar thing, which is that koalas, when it gets really hot, they travel down a tree and they hug a tree much lower.

And they did scans on the tree to see the heat signals.

On a lower bit of a tree, it's always colder.

So they're regulating themselves because they don't sweat koalas.

They have to sort of lick out the wetness out out of them.

They lick themselves and then that evaporates and takes away the heat.

I mean, that's a different way of saying it.

They don't have to suck their own sweat out.

But this thing actually about the koalas is interesting because that study was done a few years ago, right?

And they wondered if anyone else did it.

And they found that there's a type of lemur called the white sifaka.

And they do the same thing in Madagascar.

And the amazing thing about that, they hug the trees because they want to get cool.

Because the water comes up from below, it's a little bit cooler, it can keep them cool.

And what they found out is that they never do it until the temperature gets to 30 degrees.

And then for each one degree increase, it doubles the chances of the lemurs going there.

So it means that if you're in Madagascar and you don't have a thermometer with you, all you have to do is count the number of lemurs who are around the trunk, and that'll tell you what the temperature is.

Incredible.

That's amazing.

Guys, we're going to have to wrap up.

And do you know what kind of TV dolphins like

while we're talking about seeing things underwater?

It won't be Flipper, right?

It won't be stuff that they're in.

Well, they just, oh, I don't really like to watch things that I'm in.

What do dolphins like?

They love fish to eat fish.

Reality stuff.

Reality shows.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, some scientists showed some bottlenoses, Planet Earth, and SpongeBob SquarePants and tried to see whether they prefer real-life underwater scenes or ones where they stupidly get the traffic lights wrong.

And it turns out that actually dolphins are interested in all TV shows no matter what is on.

I knew they were stupid.

Although male dolphins slightly preferred to watch videos of female dolphins.

Okay.

Just like your average British male at the end of any day, really.

I'll watch anything, mildly prefer it if there's a female in it.

Good on him.

What a lovely thought to end on.

Have I got that right?

Makes you think.

Yeah, yeah.

Meanwhile, Dan's watching Forestry Live 24 hours a day.

Okay, everyone, that is it.

That is our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us, find us on our socials, email us, we'd love to hear from you.

Otherwise, Cardiff, that was awesome.

Thank you so much for having us.

We will be back again.

We will see you again.

Goodbye.

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