543: No Such Thing As Ice Skating On Stilts

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Hi, everyone.

Welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish.

One little bit of time-sensitive news to let you know this morning or afternoon or evening, depending on when you're listening, is that we are doing a live show coming up next Monday.

That's Monday, the 12th of August, and it is in London at the Udderbelly.

It's going to be a full podcast, and then in between, we're going to do lots of little bits and pieces that we're trying out ahead of our upcoming tour.

So you get to see lots of stuff that, frankly, no one will ever see again.

But it's going to be a whole load of fun.

If you'd like to get tickets to that, then you'll have to be really quick because tickets went on sale earlier this week and we've already announced it to our Clubfish members.

It's also a very small venue, so there won't be many tickets left.

But if you go to no sixthingsofish.com forward slash live, then you'll be able to get those.

And actually, you'll be able to get tickets to any of our upcoming live shows.

Secondarily, or actually, probably much more excitingly for most of you, we have a very, very, very, very, very special guest on today's show.

Who is it, Anna?

It is none other than the hero of many of our youths.

Anyone who watched Jackass as a kid or a teen, and current hero still, Johnny Knoxville.

We were so excited to learn a few months ago that he is a fan of no such thing as a fish, and in fact, just a big old nerd.

And so we persuaded him to come on the show and it was truly brilliant.

So fun to do it with someone who knows exactly what it's about and who is a genuine geek about so many cool things.

He himself has another brilliant podcast called Pretty Sure I Can Fly.

It is an exploration of things that limit human beings and then the people who smash down those limitations.

They interview awesome people who've done incredible things.

It's him and Elna Baker, who you might know from this American Life.

Definitely worth listening to.

But first of all.

Hello, Andy here.

We actually have a bonus announcement which is that we are making a sneaky trip to the Edinburgh in just a few days time on the 14th of August we're going to be at the Edinburgh Playhouse at 8 p.m.

this is our last pre-tour live show so it's just going to be a brand new episode of the podcast itself it's going to be so much fun if you're at the fringe or if you know someone who is or if you simply live in edinburgh we would love to see you there and to lure as many of you in as possible we have sneakily lowered ticket prices so there are now plenty of tickets available for just 25 If you would like to come and see us, go to no such thingasafish.com/slash live.

That's it.

Hope to see you there on with the show.

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations around the world.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Toshinsky, and Johnny Knoxville.

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 Johnny.

Johnny Paycheck, who scored a number one hit with Take This Job and Shove It, once shot a man over a bowl of turtle soup.

Country music is so badass.

Yeah.

Well, guys, don't prejudge because he had had a day.

Yeah, he had had a day.

Go on, justify it.

Wait, what do you mean over a bowl of turtle soup?

Well, I'm going to get to that later, but he took umbrage to the fact that he was offered a bowl of turtle soup.

I see.

And so he had to retaliate.

He had no choice.

So you've got to be careful, Anna, because I don't want you to be shot over a discussion of a shooting over some turtle soup because that'll be a possessor.

Thank God this is on Zoom.

Yeah.

He's in a bar, right?

And a fan called.

He was minding his own business.

Yeah, he was in.

But what happened was it was 1985.

He just wound up his tour and he was hanging out at a Hell's Angels clubhouse because he loved to hang out with the Hell's Angels.

And at that point, a bomb threat got called in from another motorcycle gang.

So thinking quickly, he gathered up all the cocaine in the clubhouse, got in his car, and took off.

And he's going to his mom's house in Ohio.

Along the way, he stops at this bar, right?

And he is pinned on cocaine.

And he walks in and these two guys walk up to him and they're really crowding him and talking to him, really chatty.

One guy's name is Larry Wise and they start drinking together and they exchange hats, which incensed Paycheck.

It made him angry.

One was holding a bottle.

And I believe Paycheck's lawyer later said that he was scared of broken bottles, and that further inflamed him.

I think that's some bullshit they made up afterwards.

Then the guy's like, hey, Johnny, we got some turtle soup out in the truck.

Would you like some turtle soup?

And that was the final straw, right?

Cool.

He thought, well, they must think I'm some kind of hick.

And so he pulled his 22 out of his waistband and shot Larry in the head.

But Johnny's so short, it just skims up his brow and shoots his hat off.

You'll make him sound like a borrower.

He can't be that.

Yeah, Larry didn't even know he'd been shot until he bent over and his ears were ringing, and he saw blood all over the floor.

And at that point, he said, I knowed I had been shot.

And he just runs out of the bar as fast as he can.

And Paycheck follows him, going, Oh, come on back, Larry.

I won't shoot you no more.

Wow.

That's really interesting.

I didn't know this story and i thought well for me turtle soup is supposed to be really tasty no yeah uh i've never had it

i think wasn't the thing that in the 19th century all the posh people loved it and it was meant to be delicious and then fell out of favor but is it a hick thing do we think it was meant as an insult no i think they were just he was he was on like eight ball or two so anything was going to come across weird to johnny paycheck yeah okay and he fought it for ages, didn't he?

It went back and forth as a case about whether or not he was guilty.

And it was only years later that he eventually was found guilty by a court and got a jail sentence off the back of it.

Yeah, for in 91, he went to Chillicothe prison for seven to nine years, but he was only in there for two before the governor, Big Dick Celeste, pardoned him.

Did he give himself that nickname?

Yeah, that was

self-given.

If you're a man called Celeste, I think you've got to have Big Dick as the preemptive market.

Who is this Charlie Paycheck then, Johnny?

Because I'm not into country music, I must admit.

Is he a big name?

Yes, he was a wonderful bass player and singer.

He played with George Jones for many years, and then he went out on his own in the 60s.

Actually, him and his...

friend founded Little Darling Records in the 60s.

So he was way ahead of the curve on that.

And in the 70s, he had a lot of hits with the Outlaw Country movement.

Which I actually was not familiar with the Outlaw Country movement, but it sounds like a bunch of people just thought country was way too soft or had gone a bit soft.

And so, Outlaw Country artists were basically the hardcore country guys, right, who lived really rough and ready lives.

And he seemed to be the extreme example.

Like, it couldn't have helped Johnny Paycheck when he was in court and they were citing previous songs that he had published, like, pardon me, I've got someone to kill.

Like, that can't be a great drinking and driving.

Yeah, his big song was called uh, take this job and shove it.

And that was written by a guy called David Allen Coe, who also spent time in Chilikothi prison.

And he only got into songwriting when he was in prison because one of the inmates that he was hanging out with was another guy called Screamin' Jay Hawkins, who is a huge singer.

He did that song, I put a spell on you.

But I mean, that prison has produced a lot of great contributions to artists.

Can I just say, this guy was in court, right?

Yeah.

And they're using his songs as evidence against him.

No, I realize they're just songs.

Like, this guy who sang, I put a spell on you, did he get done for witchcraft?

Yeah, right.

No, they obviously didn't.

I'm just saying, when you've got a catalogue with quite aggressive, murdery-sounding things, it can't help.

I think it does with drill music here, which I don't even know if Johnny would know about, right?

But that's sometimes used against people, I believe, drill music lyrics.

But yeah, he became sort of a working-class hero a bit with Take This Job and Shove It, right?

I think people

were a big fan of that because it was tough living in America around about that time.

People didn't like their bosses.

The New York Times obituary of him described him as someone who led a rowdy, jail-prone life.

Yeah.

Quite a few prison sentences.

Yeah, he got in trouble a lot.

He was on tour with Patsy Klein and he stole her car.

They were playing his fairgrounds.

And he stole her car.

And they're like, oh, Paycheck has stolen her car.

And they just closed the front gates of the fairgrounds.

And he just drove round and round the fairgrounds till the car ran out of gas.

And then he got out and went back to the show.

What's interesting is it sounds a bit like the rowdy life was slightly encouraged.

I was reading an interview with Willie Nelson.

So he was on the publicity road plugging his new book, which is called Roll Me Up and Smoke Me When I Die.

And

he was saying, You know, did you ever get into scrapes just to have the material?

And his response is, I don't want to mention any names, but I do know one country singer whose manager would intentionally get him in trouble with his girlfriends and wives and then get him drunk just so that he could write, because that's when he penned his best stuff.

And then it sounds like Willie Nelson had a wild life as well.

This is one of the questions from the interviewer.

Your first wife, Martha, once sewed you up in a bed sheet while you were asleep and beat you with a broomstick.

Was she a particularly crafty woman or were you a a really bad husband?

Oh, it was a combination of both.

And Willie didn't have to worry because he had this drummer, Paul English, who started out as a pimp in Fort Worth.

And Willie was having trouble getting paid for his shows.

So he hired Paul English to be his drummer and collect for him after the shows.

He had his gun in Bill Graham's mouth, Paul English.

Oh my God.

Bill Graham was like a famous promoter, and Bill Graham was trying to hoodwink them on the payment.

And he's like, let me leave and I'll go get the money.

And English had his gun in his mouth.

He says, no, you're going to stay right here, son.

Send him to get the money.

And that guy went and got the money and Willie got paid.

How long did he wait?

Just out of curiosity.

How long was that gun in the mouth?

Because that, you know, a bank run can take a while, can't it?

Oh, there was drooling and, you know, hot mouth.

He comes back 30 minutes later and he's like, I forgot the pen.

I'm sorry, I forgot the pen.

I'm going to have to go do it again.

Is this what it's still like?

Is Keith Urban rocking around with a revolver?

I don't think it's like it was in the day.

Well, you know, Billy Joe Shaver, legendary singer-songwriter, was in a bar in Lorena, Texas, and this guy was...

being disrespectful to Billy Joe, telling him to shut up.

After a while, Billy Joe goes, let's go outside, son.

And they went outside, and Billy Joe walked over to his car, got his pistol, walked up to the man, goes, Where do you want it?

And then shot him in the mouth, or as Billy Joe said, right between the mother and the fucker.

And

the guy lived.

Out of interest, when he asked the question, where do you want it?

And then he shot him in the mouth.

The guy asked for the mouth.

No, he didn't answer.

He didn't give him time to answer, which is where I have a problem with the story.

But other than that, you know, I love Billy Joe.

Sure, yeah, yeah.

The mouth.

No, sorry, the tote, the The toe.

I'm afraid I have to take your first answer.

Just one thing about Johnny Paycheck that kind of endeared me to him because he is a rough guy and he led quite a dark life.

But one quite sweet story I liked was

he was asked to sing the national anthem in a stadium before one of the Atlanta Falcons football games.

So he's there, a Falcons game.

The crowd is massive.

And as he struck the first chord, he forgot all the words for the American national anthem.

Oh,

and he just, it sounds awful.

And he said it, it was, it was horrible.

And he just made up the words.

He just made up kind of nonsense words, poor guy.

That's amazing.

Brilliant.

I didn't know that story.

I have to look that up.

I want to see if there's any footage of that.

I think there might be because they've recorded what the lyrics were that he made up.

At least he was a songwriter.

Yeah.

Imagine if they were just way better than the original.

Yeah, we changed it based on them.

He did clean himself up later on, I think, didn't he, Johnny Paycheck?

And he would give anti-drug talks to kids and stuff.

But everyone was just still expecting him to be off his face on cocaine and pissed and all that kind of stuff.

So I think he kind of, even though he was clean, he did play up to it quite a lot.

Yeah.

Didn't he?

And that song, Take Your Take This Job and Shove It, it got turned into a movie.

Did it?

Yeah, I really love this.

It's the first movie to ever have a monster truck in it.

What?

It's a bad movie.

is that piece of information?

And apparently it like started the big monster truck craze in America.

Wow.

What a cool interlinking bit of history.

The guy who wrote Take This Job and Chovett, as you mentioned earlier, David Allen Cole, between the ages of nine and 35, he spent about half that time in prison in and out of correctional institutions.

and got out, became a singer-songwriter, had a lot of success.

But in the 80s, he stopped singing to become a magician

and

let me tell you he is the scariest looking magician you have ever seen so funny and ventriloquist and actually penn from pen and teller said that he saw david allen coe perform as a kid and he had a big influence on him really so wow i don't know if i trust someone hanging around with that crew i'd expect if they said they were going to saw someone in half they might just actually saw them in half

so yeah that would be furious.

Um, he's his son, by the way, is a podcaster, so Tyler Mahan Co., and he makes a show called Cocaine and Rhinestones, which actually sounds brilliant.

It's all about the sort of mysteries of country music and the history of its stars and so on.

Um, so yeah, because Ko called himself the Rhinestone Cowboy, didn't he?

And that was way before the mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy.

He performed in a mask, and here is a picture of him when he was with his ventrilic was dummy.

Most frightening

I've talked to Tyler Coe about that, and he goes, My dad told me that dummy was real and alive, and that really scared me when I was little.

I could just imagine someone going, tell me why you want me to shoot you.

And the dovey goes, in his mouth.

No, not in his mouth.

Yeah, in his mouth.

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

My fact is that in the 1980s, 1980s, skateboarder Nadis Koppas had his merchandise banned in many schools and shops because it was believed he was evil after some people noticed that his first name, Nadis, spelt backwards, was Satan.

Wow.

And was it like, had he changed his name to Satan Backwards?

No, he's he's um, I mean, Johnny, you actually, you know this guy, the skateboarder, um, but he's Lithuanian by descent.

And yeah, it's a it's a name there.

It means birth of Christ.

But it is Satan backwards.

And when people saw that, there was a bit of a panic that what if this guy is in cahoots with the devil?

We can't have his skateboard and backpack sold in our shops.

And so he suffered a sort of ban.

It wasn't a countrywide ban, but certainly it affected him and made news.

So funny.

Yeah, he overcame that ban because he was one of the most legendary street skaters, him and Mark Gonzalez.

You know, I think Nadis was the first guy to ollie up on a rail.

And an Ollie, as the three of us have probably been learning some skating terminology, an ollie is the one where you jump in the air with your skateboard, right?

Yeah, it's where you, it's where you so you need a skateboard that has got

two bits that flip up at the end, as opposed to like the street skateboard where it's flat on one end, push down, slide your foot forward, raise in the air, and land.

And you forget that Dan really is into skateboarding.

Yeah, I was a skater.

Yeah, my whole teenage.

Are we in a podcast where 50% of us can do an Ollie?

yeah oh i oh i can't i'm terrible i would only skate when we needed footage of someone smashing right

so you're good at falling off yeah yes yeah um just uh on narrows quickly he as johnny's just pointed out he was one of the originals he was one of the guys who took skating into the modern era as such of street skating he was one of the first people um if not the first credited with doing a grind down a rail he didn't land it that still though is like

wow.

That doesn't count.

But the idea.

The idea.

Yeah, but anyone could have it.

I could have an idea of what I'm going to do.

And then if I can't do it, then...

Yeah, but that's like saying any astronauts that died before they got to space because the ship blew up aren't astronauts.

No, you didn't make it, buddy.

No, it's not.

It's like me saying that my daughter's got a little rocket ship and she's singing Zoom, Zoom, going to the moon, and she's an astronaut.

No, no, he's, come on.

He didn't just look at the rail and say, I want to do that and then fall over.

It sounds like he actually got up onto it, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

He also innovated the idea of wall skating, where you can go off the side of the street and literally go on the wall and come back down and land.

And so that was him as well.

So he's a big player in the history of modern skating.

But it's interesting because skating has always been associated with sort of debauchery and it's kind of like the country music of the sports world, right?

Like especially in the 90s.

Obviously, skating has just become an Olympic sport.

And the previous Olympics, I I think, was the debut for it.

And so I went on their website and they've got a really interesting history of skateboarding on there, including the fact that in 1978, for a decade, skateboarding was banned in Norway because kind of like Nadus, they just thought it's leading to all these deaths, it's a bad influence and so on.

They'd heard that 100,000 people had been injured and that 28 children had died.

And so importing skateboards and having any ramps of any kind were not allowed in Norway.

And so there was a black market.

There was like a hidden forest area that people would set up half pipes and they would, they would sneakily make black market boards that they would pretend was something else.

And then you would turn them into a full skateboard.

And so it was through definitely.

What did they pretend it was, do you think?

They pretended it was sort of a weird flute or something.

It's still banned in Manchester, in England.

Is it?

Skateboarding.

Yeah, yeah.

Because dangerous.

I think it was because it was associated with youths.

Yeah.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, actually, the place where everyone skateboards in Manchester, they still do it.

They're just not allowed to.

Do you know what I mean?

Because you can't stop kids from skateboarding.

To be fair, it's quite dangerous.

I think it is on safety grounds that it tends to be banned and people get injured.

It reminds me quite a lot of, and I don't know if they have this in America as well, but in Britain, at the moment, there's a lot of panic about scooters.

You know, those electric scooters people ride.

They're so dangerous.

And there's lots of spurious stats thrown around about how dangerous they they are.

But it's it's quite risky, but also that's what makes it cool.

And I was reading that the reason actually skateboarding really struggled to get into the Olympics for a while was because skateboarders didn't want to because the Olympics is kind of lame and really mainstream and normal people like me watch it every night.

Whereas skateboarders are really cool.

And so I think there was a, you know, a lot of organizations did not campaign to get included in the Olympics because bit of a restriction.

It's really interesting.

I think we might have said this before we started recording about how break dancing is coming into the Olympics soon and we're all looking forward to it.

But I know a lot of people in the break dancing community were not happy about it being in the Olympics for that exact same reason.

And what they thought was that a lot of ballroom dancers think that ballroom dancing should be in the Olympics and all these different kind of dancing.

And they thought that the ballroom dancers were using break dancing as like a gateway drug to the Olympics.

And then once break dancing is in, all of the dancing will get in.

And they thought these are the things.

They don't have a problem with that actually, because there's some sports that like dressage where the horse dances.

I'm like, what is happening right now?

Yeah, my girlfriend loves it, and I'll get in trouble for saying that, but I'm just

behind it.

I agree.

I think a lot of the equestrian stuff is the horses need the medals.

Some of the equestrian competitors are really quite old because I was thinking Britain sent a team of three skateboarders, and it's the biggest age range in a skateboarding team.

And I thought maybe the guy that we sent, Andy MacDonald, might be the oldest competitor.

So he's 51.

Actually, I think he turned 52 yesterday.

And the two other girls that we've sent are 16.

So that's quite nice.

The team is two 16-year-olds and then someone who's more than three times their age.

But yeah, in the equestrian, you get 60-something-year-olds.

Yeah.

Which just goes to show the horses aren't 60-something, are they?

Yeah.

You try to think, what event could I possibly do well in in the Olympics?

And it would have to be something where you sit on a horse or

definitely I'm too old to be a skateboarder I reckon because I was reading about a 1080 trick which is six turns right on a skateboard that sounds impossible a six that sounds impossible if you want to try it I'll film it yeah yeah

I think is it not because it's that if it's the number of degrees it would be three turns right if it's 1080 Yeah,

unless the 11-year-old's dad was standing at the side and just went

and gave them extra spins as they were going by.

I guess it is.

It's three 360s, isn't it?

So

the first person to ever do it on a standard ramp was 11 years old.

And it previously only been done on what's called a mega ramp, which is a bit like a ski jump.

And the only people who'd done that last time I checked were 11 years old, 12 years old, 15 years old, and 15 years old.

And I'm wondering at the age of 45 whether I'm...

maybe a bit beyond it.

Well, like I say, the other guy is 51, so it obviously takes all sorts, but it does seem to be dominated by people under under the age of 20.

Usually when you see those, it's like Tony Hawke waiting at the bottom of the ramp with like a nine-year-old at this like 200-foot ramp, and he's like, just give it a go.

And then

that seems to be his gig at the moment, forcing nine-year-olds down ramps.

Tony Hawke seems to be the only person who's gained mainstream fame and it's massive mainstream fame.

I'm not totally sure how, especially because he retired when he was 30, 31, I think, from competing anyway.

And the thing I could find that he's done most recently is get into a big conversation with Apple about what the skateboard emoji should look like.

So

when you try and say skateboard in your WhatsApp messages, which we all do a lot, obviously, the skateboard there is based on his skateboard.

Because when

we've talked about the consortium that designs emojis, but when they released what they thought was going to be their skateboard emoji in 2017, he messaged them being like, that's shit, that looks like something from the 80s.

Here's a photo of my skateboard.

Do you want to give it another go?

Right.

So, why is he so big?

Because he is the only one I've heard of as well.

Like, in video games and stuff, right?

No one has done more for the sport of skateboarding than Tony.

He's like the ambassador of skateboarding.

He's one of the greatest skaters of all time.

And he's very intelligent, well-spoken.

And he also, when he landed the 900 back in, I can't remember when it was, he was already big, but he exploded, you know, after that.

I think that's when the Tony Hawk games came out.

And he's...

The 900 is that number of degrees turn?

Yes.

Is that what that is?

Spinning around in the air.

Yes.

Loads of times.

Loads of times off the big round.

As James points out,

the big moment in terms of commercialness was the video games.

Tony Hawk Pro Skater was a global sensation.

He effectively became what Michael Jordan is to basketball.

He became to skateboarding.

Interestingly, he's ruined the life of one man in the UK who is a quite well-known comedian called Tony Hawkes with an S at the end,

whose whole life has been absolutely ruined, his online life with people mistaking him as the skater.

So a few years ago, he actually published a book called Tony Hawks, The A to Z of Skateboarding, where he replies to the emails of everyone who's asked him for skateboarding advice with just terrible, uninformed responses.

That's going to confuse people even more.

People like me who do always confuse them.

And I'm like, hang on, he's the one who's written the skateboarding book.

When Jackass started, we got sued by this man named Jack Ass

because

we had ruined his good name.

That's so wow.

That's incredible.

Did you ever meet him?

Did you ever get to hang out?

I never got to meet Mr.

Ass, no.

I would have loved to.

Mr.

Ass suggests that the case is still going on, though, respectfully.

And there was some legal trouble with the guy from my hometown whose name was Reverend General Johnny Knoxville, who sold plots of land on the moon.

And like,

I think he came after me at one point.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Interesting.

For my birthday one year, I wanted to sue all my friends, but my attorney talked me out of it.

I was just going to make up some.

I I don't know, I just thought it'd be funny to like sue 10 of my friends and then have to hire attorneys and just be a big pain in their ass.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

How many friends do you have left now out of interest?

Well, that's true.

I would have had to sue like three people multiple times.

Yeah.

While we're talking about skateboarding, I, you know, most of the jackass guys, we came from Big Brother Magazine, which was a skateboarding magazine owned by Larry Flint.

He owned a bunch of mags.

Nadis art directed one of the articles I wrote for a snowboarding mag.

But anyway, Big Brother, there was a mix-up in the shipping department one day,

and all the people that were supposed to get Big Brother magazine got Taboo magazine, which was Larry Flint's dirtiest magazine.

And all the people that

were supposed to get Taboo got Big Brother.

So it was really bad because a bunch of 14-year-olds got taboo and a bunch of dribble ejaculators got, you know, big brother.

And I don't know who was more upset.

I would assume the people who got taboo.

I don't know.

I think some of those 14-year-olds were pretty delighted.

Best idea.

I found a skateboarding record I think we could break.

A Guinness World record.

Okay.

I think, well, maybe...

Johnny or Dan, you can say I'm totally wrong.

But basically, on February 17th, 2017, a guy called Brandon Gonzalez performed a stationary manual that lasted two hours and 55 minutes.

And now I obviously have to pick up what that was.

But it's just

standing on your skateboard, right?

With one foot in the air and one foot on the ground.

No, but

the tail can't touch the ground.

Oh, can it not?

So it's a balance act.

You would be balancing.

I didn't see that from the picture.

On the two back wheels.

Hannah doing her 27th hour standing on a skateboard going, come on guys, I'm absolutely smashing this.

It's so easy.

The Guinness adjudicator going behind her going, oh shit, I didn't see.

Okay, no.

Got this wrong, man.

Okay, I take that back.

I'm sorry.

Okay, yeah, no is the answer.

We cannot break that one.

Okay, it is time for fact number three.

That is Anna.

My fact this week is that when Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, he brought 220 gallons of alcohol on the flight with him.

Nice.

I've done a trick.

I'm tricking us, Anna.

I've done a trick, father.

But I found this so surprising.

So Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in 1947 in the Bell X1 plane, and the fuel it used was alcohol.

Like, it was just a huge tank of alcohol.

So it was burning liquid oxygen and then a mixture of five parts alcohol to one part water which seems incredibly weird and is not something that like occasionally you talk about alcohol fuel there are jokes that prince charles runs his cars off wine um there are certain places that uh use ethanol in their vehicles but it doesn't seem that ordinary but it seems like yeah he ran them off ethanol i imagine it's quite dangerous i suppose you wouldn't want to drop a drop a lit match in there but then

you don't want to in any of it and you wouldn't want to drink it halfway through the flight either yeah

Well, if you distill it through a sock, it's probably safe because I think that's what people in prison do with rubbing alcohol.

They distill it through their sock and then.

But hey, kids, don't do that.

You know, because

if you're desperate, if you've run out of wine,

was that fuel for all the P-51 bombers at the time?

I'm not sure.

I know it was fuel for the flights that he flew over that time period.

Yeah, I don't think it will have been.

I think because this was a very experimental plane, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It was more modeled on a rocket, I think.

And he nicknamed it sweetly, the glamorous Glennis after his fiancé, who was called Glennis Faye Dick Hatt.

I know, thank God he didn't go for the surname.

We make that sound.

It was our production, it's a production company.

Really?

Yeah, that's our production company's name.

There's no way.

Maybe not the Glennis.

Well, no, no.

It just.

That was a coincidence.

Yeah.

And it was sweet, but I remember I was reading a book about Chuck Yeager and to woo his wife.

He said, stick with me, honey, and you'll be farting through silk.

He had a real way with words, Chuck Yeager.

Nice.

The night before he broke the sound barrier, this is widely known.

He had broke his ribs in a horse riding accident.

And the doctor who is rumored to have patched him up was this man, Colonel John Paul Stapp.

Now, he was a physician, flight surgeon, and led some of the most groundbreaking experiments on deceleration.

It was like the late 40s to mid-50s.

And they were trying to determine what it was like for pilots to eject at high altitudes and also what they can withstand in a plane crash.

So they thought a person could only withstand 18 Gs of force.

And a G is like the amount of force the Earth's gravitational field exerts on human body when you're standing still.

Anyway, they thought they could only withstand 18 Gs, and he knew that was wrong because, being a flight surgeon, he could look at the crash records and see that these pilots had withstood more than that, but the plane had failed.

So he did all these experiments.

And one was they had this rocket sled, and he would strap himself to it, and he would go up to speeds which eventually reached 630 miles an hour and stop within 1.5 seconds.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah.

It's not safe.

No.

And 630 miles an hour, by the way, was faster than a speeding bullet at that time.

Wow.

And come to a complete stop.

And I think the last time he did it, he experienced 46.2 Gs.

Wow.

And he went temporarily blind afterwards.

Not only that, not only did he go temporarily blind, but he ended up with two black eyes because when he stopped, stopped, his eyes shot forward into his sockets so hard.

What?

Like somebody who sees Jessica Rabbit.

Yeah, exactly.

They went

and he ended up with black eyes.

And prior to doing it, he was so sure that this blindness would happen that he spent a lot of time in his room blindfolded and trying to work out how to exist without sight anymore because he thought that's what's going to happen.

That's so cool.

That's like being punched in the face from the inside, isn't it?

Yeah.

Someone punching you from inside your head.

Exactly.

But I think, am I right that he broke the land speed record?

I think he was known as the fastest man on earth.

Yeah, Time magazine did a bit.

He was on all the TV shows.

He was a huge star then, and now no one knows him.

Yeah, that's weird.

I read that when he stopped for that instant, his body weighed about 7,700 pounds.

What?

Yeah.

Which is about the same as a white rhino.

Nice.

Wow.

Because your weight is your mass times the gravitational.

He didn't balloon to it, did he?

No, no, it's just that.

It's more of a mathematical thing, really.

What a shame.

He was trying to prove what humans could withstand, but it feels like it's a loose definition of withstand.

Because, yeah, he went blind, had black eyes, he cracked his ribs, he broke his wrists, his respiratory and circulatory systems were really badly damaged.

I mean, you know, there's withstanding and there's

living through in good health, isn't there?

Yeah, there's withstanding and then there's a showing off.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

There's a thin line between a great guitar fill and a smart-ass guitar player.

I don't quite get that, but I think I agree with it.

He's also the reason, by the way, for the term Murphy's Law.

We have Murphy's Law because of him.

Yeah, because on an experiment that was done five years earlier where they were testing out the speeds, it was Captain Murphy who was part of the test.

And afterwards, when Stap was utterly injured, like really broken, Murphy just kind of exclaimed that anything that can go wrong will go wrong in different words.

That became Murphy's law.

It needs an addendum.

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong if you are working with Colonel John Stapp, who's offensive mental shit.

Stapp did nothing wrong.

He was just the passenger.

It was Murphy.

Have you, Johnny?

I imagine within the world of Jackass that you've done a few things testing the pull of gravity.

Well, gravity is the funniest comedian of all time,

in my opinion.

I never reached a speed of 630 miles an hour on anything.

But yeah, gravity did play a part.

That and Newton's third law of motion.

Without those two things, I'd have no career.

Thank God for physics.

Yes, thank God.

That's so good.

You know, STAP is also the reason we have seat belts in cars now.

Really?

Yeah.

He was also testing restraint systems.

and finally got the Air Force to listen when he explained that we're losing more pilots on the ground than we are in the air.

And there's a stapp car crash conference that he founded.

I think still goes on today.

Oh, wow.

What a good guy.

Yeah.

Shall we talk a bit more about Chuck Heager?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

He was really hardcore, another really hardcore one, along with those country artists.

In World War II, he distinguished himself by being just amazing at dog fighting, basically, didn't he?

And he loved it.

So great in a plane, but he had this episode I didn't know about where he was shot down over France.

And so he has to bail out with his parachute.

And he said he could see German soldiers all over the ground below.

But luckily, he landed in a forest.

But this meant that he had to climb over the mountains to cross the border to get into safe territory.

And so he's like knee-deep in snow.

He's had to bail out of his plane.

He's with a comrade,

and they almost get caught and have a really awful scrape when they find a hut to sleep in.

And the guy he's with leaves his socks outside the cabin to dry which i'd be so pissed off about german soldiers came past how on earth were they distilling their alcohol

that's oh wow so yeah the germans came past and they start shooting at them so then they leap out the window and his navigator who's the guy with him is badly shot but then an incredibly cool thing i think this is what happened they both jumped onto or chuck basically carried his badly injured navigator onto a log slide which I think must have just been one of those log flumes that they use to carry logs down mountains

and they cascaded down the mountain on this log side to escape he then amputates his friend's leg with a pick just out of anger because he's so pissed off with him

that's one less sock you'll need

but yeah and then

he takes his leg off and then he leaves him by the side of the road says bye and fortunately he's rescued and saved.

But I mean, Jaeger didn't know that.

Jaeger just left a legless man on the side of the road.

Yeah, he had one leg.

He didn't take both his legs off.

You got to make some hard decisions.

Yeah.

Yeah, he got picked up by the resistance.

And at the time, if you spent time with the resistance and got back to America, you were no longer allowed to...

fly again because if you got shot down again, you may give up the resistance.

But he went to Washington and lobbied to, I don't know if it was Washington, but he went, he lobbied with a general and said, Look, I want to go back.

If I get caught, I won't say a word.

And I think he was the first person to be allowed to fly again after being captured.

Wow.

And this is Jaeger, right?

Yeah, when he was young.

This was way before he was Chuck Yeager.

This was just, he was just a hard ass kid.

Because when he was doing all of his flying afterwards, by all rights, he should have been one of the first astronauts, right?

You would have expected him to be.

But he couldn't get in because he didn't have a degree.

And I get the feeling that that really pissed him off for pretty much his whole life after that.

Yeah.

It's interesting.

There's a big role in the movie The Right Stuff, which was a book by Tom Wolf, where you see him sort of getting overlooked because he was the man.

You know, he, yes, he could do anything.

In the movie, he kind of makes pizza with it.

But yeah, you get the impression that he should have been there with Neil on the moon.

Wow.

Widely recognized as the greatest natural pilot to ever live.

he had 2010 vision yeah yeah what he was just built for it what is that because i thought 2020 was the best but it's clearly not right if 2010 is better oh mate anything that you can see from 10 meters he could see the same from 20 meters okay so he's twice as good as you twice as good actually a lot more than that for you but for a normal person

yeah yeah i'm not a good person to use that um how interesting and he's so i mean bringing up the apollo astronauts um the Glennis Faye, his wife,

it's such a shame that the sound barrier wasn't broken in a plane called the Dick House.

That's such a shame.

But

he named three of his initial planes after her, the glamorous Glenn, and then Glennis became a name afterwards.

And they were married until his dying day.

And astronauts.

I mean, her dying day, in fact.

Sorry, her dying day.

He died in 2020, didn't he?

I used to follow him on Facebook.

I used to get updates all the time from Chuck Yeager.

He was very active on Facebook.

Was he?

Yeah.

But yeah, that was rare.

All the Apollo and Mercury astronauts ended in divorce multiple times, and him and his wife were a unit all the way to the end.

And in fact, I think he used that

when there was discussing who's going to try and break the sound barrier, who's going to be our test pilot.

I think they said there was an argument that it should be someone who was single and childless because then if they died, it didn't matter.

It was just one person.

And I think he argued, no, it's much better to choose someone like me who's got a wife and a little boy who I love because I'll be much more careful.

And

so I'll make sure that I do survive it.

It's an argument that worked for him.

So we don't need to interrogate.

Now fill her up with booze.

I'm going on a whole drive.

He did an experiment with Colonel John Paul Stapp as well.

They did a wind blast experiment where they went up in a plane without a canopy on it and reached speeds of over 500 miles an hour.

And And people were saying, no, don't do that.

You're going to be decapitated, this or that.

But, you know, they were fine.

Decapitated by just

that much.

The wind.

Yeah.

How were they fine?

I'm really surprised because a story that is always told about me is when my mum was driving the car when I was a baby and they had, you know, you had like a, you've got a roof window.

What do you call it?

Sunroof.

Sunroof, thank you.

And my dad was holding me and my mum was a very fast driver.

And my dad thought it'd be really funny to lift me up.

He was just holding me on his lap, lifted me up, and put my head out the window.

And my mum said she's never been so furious with him.

I mean, in a way, it was her fault for driving at 100 miles an hour along a main road, but

I think it wasn't that fun for me as a baby.

I'll be honest, Anna, I don't think anyone comes out well at that story.

I was an innocent victim.

I could just see in the background Johnny slightly going, Tell me those footage that I could use for future works.

They survived it.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that according to tradition of the banner people of Ethiopia, before a man can become a man, he has to learn how to walk on stilts.

Okay.

You know, like,

I don't drive, but I'm told that if I fail the driving test enough times, they just give it to you.

Is there like a

no

I'll learn then okay damn thinking how many times can you fall off the stilts before they just go okay have your penis anyway yeah exactly

I think they always have a penis.

It's just like their culture has got like quite a complex level of age groups like you go from this age group to this age group to this age group and to go from and actually this is true of a lot of people around the world but to go from adolescence to manhood they have a ceremony and part of that ceremony involves them having to strike a balance on stilts and it's supposed to show that you're strong-minded independently willed confident and ready to take on a wife okay

it's what all women want yeah man they can walk on stilts yeah i've walked on stilts before it's pretty

yeah yeah i've had i you know not ginormously high ones but i would say four feet in the air at least.

And that's high.

They're fine.

They're really easy to get used to.

Yeah, straight away.

What was the context in which you were walking on stilts?

I think I was at a house that just had a lot of party gear and stilts were part of the gear.

And I just gave it a bag.

Maybe you just have a natural affinity to stilts.

Wow.

I don't know.

It can't be that easy because people make a living from doing it.

So it can't be that easy.

Well, no, but they do more complicated things with it, right?

Like, I'm just

like, and they do it in funny clothes.

And to be fair, when I was watching a video of these banner kids, some kids on stilts, and they mostly look like they're having so much fun and they find it extremely entertaining, which it would be.

And also, the interviewer says to one of these little kids who's just running around on stilts, so how long have you been doing this?

How long does it take to get ready?

Is it months, years?

And the guy's like, I just started yesterday, mate.

It's, I mean, so maybe, I think Dan might be right.

He might be like, this is a piece of cake.

You may be right.

And the idea was that the tribe would traditionally use stilts to avoid wild animals.

And also, you can see over the savannah.

Yes.

Absolutely.

Because actually there's a tradition in Europe of shepherds using stilts for the same reason because you can get much higher up and you can see where all your sheeps are and stuff like that.

Is this the Landis region?

It's over quite a lot of Europe.

Yeah, the Landis especially.

The Landis in southwestern France, this is amazing.

They basically, everyone in this town existed on stilts, but it largely was the farmers.

And exactly it was for that.

You would be on your stilts so that you could see where all your sheep were.

It was also very mushy and muddy in the ground.

And so it was very useful to get around by standing on the stilt.

You had a big stick which was what you would use to what's the word for when you're getting the sheep into shepherd?

Yeah, you'd shepherd them with your big old stick and but you would then use the big stick as a seat so you like a tripod so you'd place your bum on it and they would just do their knitting all day long.

Would they?

Yeah.

Oh, that's nice.

With their recently shorn sheep's wool, presumably.

Yeah.

What else are you going to do with it?

Lovely.

These the banner people, it's weird that they say it's to then escape predators because they also paint their bodies in black and white stripes that do resemble quite closely a zebra.

If I'm with them and I was offering tips, I'd be like,

don't disguise yourself as a zebra.

That's true.

One of the other ceremonies that they do is when they're just about to get married, and that is a bull leaping ceremony.

So you line up a load of cows in a row, and everyone has to run and jump over the backs of four cows without falling.

And if you can do that, then you're allowed to get married.

Whoa, four cows?

It's not four, you know, like it's not like evil can evil jumping over four at once.

You jump over one.

Like, it's like hurtles.

Oh, it's hurtles.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I think I'd like to see James jump over four at once.

I'm really becoming focused on James doing a stunt.

I'm actually very scared of cows.

So perfect.

What else are you scared of, James?

Oh, commitment.

I'll make sure your wife doesn't listen to this episode, guys.

When we were filming Wild Boys, we came across a lot of rite of passages for boys to become a man, and a lot were quite entertaining.

And one sent my friend Chris Panias to the hospital.

The Soteri Moay tribe, I hope I'm pronouncing that right, in Brazil.

They will go out in the jungle and gather up bullet ants, which are one of the worst stings in the insect kingdoms like 30 times worse than a bee sting and they'll gather up all the bullet ants and they'll weave them into a glove of leaves with their stingers sticking out and to become a man you have to put your hand in the glove of bullet ants for 10 minutes and take it

and Steve-O and Pontius both did it and it was the most excruciating pain that was it they've endured yeah and that's a high bar for them in fact wow yes more than that's good to know because I think we might have mentioned bullet ants before and you know they're this extreme pain animal and sometimes I think are they that painful or are they just kind of they've gained this reputation but you can verify Steve-O says hurts a lot yeah dude yeah

yeah Pony's had to go to the hospital because he had an allergic reaction anytime he gets stung by anything he has to go to the hospital um I was looking up just I was just googling around with the word stilt, and I discovered that one of the greatest early day basketball players had the nickname the stilt, which was Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain, which I had no idea about.

Yeah, so Wilt Chamberlain very famously scored 100 points in a single game.

He did free throws in that match underarm, which we know is a better way of doing three throws, but we also know that basketball players think they look too wimpy when they're doing it.

So they do it in the overarm way instead.

He also is responsible for the fact that when you take a shot at the foul line, so Anna, I know it's going to be hard to describe, but this is a thing when you're fouled, you go and you get two shots in the basket in the key.

Anna has just written a book about sport.

It's called One of All Balls, the QI Book of Sport.

It's available now in all good bookshops, and she knows everything about Will Chasing.

So you know all about this.

Shot yourself in the foot there, Dan, if you didn't want us to mention it.

Better than in the mouth, Anna.

So, um.

Where do you want it?

So, yeah, so he's responsible for a major rule change within basketball as well, which is the fact that when he used to shoot at the foul line, he's six foot 11, he would jump and dunk it, and that's not allowed anymore.

So, they said you have to remain behind the foul line.

But the stilt thing is really interesting in his name, Wilt the Stilt Chamberlain, because everyone called him it.

It was the nickname that was used in every paper and magazine, and he hated it.

It was given to him in the early early days and when people were on his team or playing on an opposing team, their coaches would be like, don't call him the stilt.

He'll go nuts.

He's really hated.

Why don't you hate it?

What's wrong with the stilt?

It's not like they called him Wilt the asshole.

Yeah, I know.

Wilt

Dick House Chamberlain.

Well, he could have been called that.

He supposedly.

That's another story on it.

Apparently, 20,000 women were betted by Wilt the Stilt.

He's sure they were.

But he loved the name the Dipper or Dippy.

And

he got it because, as I said, he was ginormous, 6'11.

And it's got nothing to do with basketball.

It was one day he kept walking into doorways because he's so tall.

And one doorway cracked him in the eyes.

He got a black eye.

And they started calling him Dippy because they needed to remind him to dip down anytime he was heading out a doorway.

And that's the name he loved.

But he was Wilt the Stilt to the end.

Well, I have to say, Wilt the Stilt's a little snappier.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It is.

And cooler.

And you can't make your own nicknames, guys.

So

get over that.

Yeah, well, big dick James Harkin says different.

It's like a walking stick full of bagels.

I think the tallest still walk in history certainly claims to be, speaking of people who make their own nicknames, a guy called Roy Malloy.

Which bit is the nickname in Roy Malloy?

Yeah.

I think

it's not even a good one.

I just think he wasn't born Roy Malloy.

I think that might be a nickname.

You know, to make his name rhyme, maybe it doesn't even qualify as a nickname.

He's like a nom de plume.

Anom de plume, exactly.

Thank you.

So he's set a bunch of world records, four world records.

And in 2008, he set the unverified world record for the tallest stilts walk ever.

But I was looking up.

Again, I know I keep making wild claims, but I think we can break this one too.

Johnny, you could definitely do this.

Surely you've done something similar to this because it was 17 meter high stilts, which is high.

That's like

five stories.

There you go.

For all the yanks.

There you go for the yanks.

And he had to mount them by going up to the fifth story of a building and lean the stilts next to the building, and then he mounts them from there.

Wow.

But then it's a little bit like if you're teaching a baby to walk, he's got his helpers.

You can just see their hands in the video, and he's clinging onto their hands.

And then he just lets go for a second does a really quick blub blub blub blub blub one two three four five on the spot on the stilt and then falls back into their arms again and says that's the tallest stilt walk in history i don't think that's counts i don't think it counts either i think you've got to get from a to b and they need to get to different places did they hand him his penis after

you're now a man

17 meter penis

Have you not ever walked on stilts, Johnny?

It seems like the kind of thing that jackass would have done, some kind of stilt walking stunts.

I can barely walk on my own two feet, which really helped me in stunts.

But Steve-O was a clown when we initially hired him.

He worked at a carnival, a circus inside of a swap meet in Florida.

It was bleak.

So he did a lot of stunt walking, and we did one or two things with stilts, but they're nice to look at, but you need a little blunt force trauma to make something watchable.

Sure.

Well, you can stilt walk into a wall if you want.

Yeah.

But yeah.

Do you know?

Something interesting.

I haven't actually got the research on this.

I just, this is something I remember is that with stilt walking, there was a person who had cerebral palsy and found that their walking was better when they were on stilts.

It helped to improve them in some respects with their gait and how they're walking.

And Michael J.

Fox also talks about that when he goes ice skating, it really causes the tremors that he has to sort of mellow down and rest a bit.

Interesting.

Interesting.

I wonder the medical benefits of...

I'm not suggesting that everyone be just ice skating and on stilts.

No, ice skating on stilts.

I love it.

That's how you get the blunt trauma.

That's Harkin's stunt.

There we go.

Hello, my name's James Harkin, and this is ice skating on stilts.

I'm there.

I'm there.

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 show, we can all be found on various bits of social media.

I'm on Instagram at Schreiberland.

James?

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Johnny?

My Instagram is Johnny Knoxville.

And Anna, where can they get to us as a group?

You can get us on Instagram at no such thing as a fish or Twitter at no such thing or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our website, no such thingasafish.com, check it out.

All previous episodes are up there.

All of the upcoming tour dates for our Thunder Nerds tour can be found on there, and a link to our secret club, Clubfish, is also there.

But the main thing for you to do right now is to switch this episode off and head over to a new show.

It's Johnny's show.

Pretty sure I Can Fly is the name.

It is a show where they look into great historical characters from history.

Johnny, do you want to add anything to that?

It ain't too good, but it's long.

That's my Tinder profile.

All right, that's it.

We'll be back again next week with another episode.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.