532: No Such Thing As 'Is It Mushroom?'

Transcript

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Speaker 23 Hi, everyone. Just before we start this show, I wanted to let you know that James and I are going to be doing a talk, a chat, a lecture at the Hay Festival in Hay on Y next Wednesday, the 29th of May.

Speaker 23 And we are going to be chatting about our new release of the paperback A Load of Old Bulls, which is all the most interesting facts and things we learned about sports.

Speaker 23 It's for sports lovers, it's for sports haters, it's for sports sceptics.

Speaker 23 You've got Mary Queen of Scots football in there, you've got Michael Palin's Conquer tournament, you've got lacrosse games involving over 100,000 players. There's something for everyone.

Speaker 23 Do come and listen to us. Hey, it's such a fun festival anyway, so to get tickets for that, go to no such thingasafish.com/slash live.

Speaker 23 And while you're there, obviously buy tickets for our tour if you haven't already, which you should have. On with the show.

Speaker 24 Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber.

Speaker 24 I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tashinsky. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

Speaker 24 And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is James.

Speaker 24 Okay, my fact this week is that the coroner who did the autopsy of President McKinley injected part of him into a dog.

Speaker 24 So he was autopsied by two doctors called Harvey Gaylord and Herman Matzinger.

Speaker 24 And Matzinger wanted to find out whether the bullet that had killed McKinley had been poisoned or had some bacteria on it, like a biological weapon.

Speaker 24 And so the way he did it was he took samples from the wound and he injected parts of it into some rabbits and a dog and wanted to see how the rabbits and dogs reacted because if there was poison on the bullet, maybe they would die and that would be evidence that he'd been poisoned as well as shot.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 24 it turns out that the thing that killed him was the bullet that went right through his body. Yeah, the dog was fine, wasn't it? In the notes that were given sort of said he was acting fine.

Speaker 24 Doesn't mention the rabbit. No, it doesn't mention the rabbit.
It said that he was acting well, the dog, but his body temperature was around 104 degrees Fahrenheit.

Speaker 23 It's like a little bad for a dog.

Speaker 24 It's bad for a dog. Right.
It should be a bit lower than that. You can react badly to an injection.
I certainly do. Anytime I get a raised temperature.

Speaker 24 We should say this was 1901 as well. Just for anyone who's not up on their president's President McKinley.

Speaker 24 Around 20th-ish? Yeah. 25th.
I think. He was 25th president.
That's right.

Speaker 24 Okay. Okay.
Yeah.

Speaker 24 So why am I talking about this today if it was something that happened around 1900?

Speaker 24 Well, because we do

Speaker 24 that.

Speaker 24 This is a new feature.

Speaker 24 Well, in the news this year, there was an auction site called the Rab Collection, and they found the personal papers of this Dr. Herman Matzinger.

Speaker 24 And that gave us all of this information about him injecting the president into the dog, which we didn't know until this year. That's very good.

Speaker 24 He was actually, no wonder he liked animals because he was a buffalo doctor. And when I say buffalo doctor, he was a doctor who lived in the city of Buffalo in New York.
Who's that?

Speaker 24 That was Matt Singer. You're right.
I just thought I'd try and trick you guys there. Good trick.

Speaker 24 But he wasn't the first man to even look after McKinley when he came in. Okay.
That was a different man called Doctor Mann. And Doctor Man,

Speaker 24 Dr. Matthew Mann, and he wasn't even a proper surgeon.
He was a gynecologist. He was a gynecological surgeon.
Oh, no. This man has no vagina.

Speaker 23 It's all going into openings, isn't it? When someone's been shot.

Speaker 24 What a troubling thing to hear. Dr.
Anna say as you lie on the operating table, look, it's all just stuff going in places. Don't worry.
It's all holes in the body. Let's inspect your chest vagina now.

Speaker 24 Oh, the exit vagina is a lot bigger.

Speaker 24 But the weird thing is, Thomas Edison gets involved at this point.

Speaker 23 Of course he does.

Speaker 24 He sent... to Buffalo a new x-ray machine, which is exactly like first ever episode of the podcast in President Garfield's shot.

Speaker 24 In that case, it was Alexander Graham Bell sending a proto-metal detector. Basically, all new technologies were at some point just being tried on presidents who have been assassinated.

Speaker 24 Basically, if, God forbid, the American president gets shot in the next couple of years, they'll probably send the chat bot. Yeah, yeah,

Speaker 23 that's amazing. So, so autopsies have come have come a long way since the days of injecting stuff into animals.
And I didn't know really about body farms. That sounds grim.

Speaker 24 And yet it is.

Speaker 23 So they were basically invented by this guy called Billy Bass.

Speaker 24 Remember that

Speaker 24 singing fish. Big mouth Billy.
Big mouth Billy Bass is singing fish. But

Speaker 24 he became body farms and then he did novelty singing fish.

Speaker 23 Apparently so. Or it could be that they are different people.
So this guy called Bill Bass was a forensic anthropologist in the 60s and 70s.

Speaker 23 And he realized that we didn't know much about what happens to bodies when they decompose. And so he kind of bought up some farmland and decided to collect loads and loads of dead bodies.

Speaker 23 And it's still going today. And there are now a few body farms around the world.
And they're extraordinary places.

Speaker 24 It does sound like an excuse, doesn't it? When the police come and they say, why have you got hundreds of dead bodies buried in your field?

Speaker 23 Well, also because they're buried in really odd scenarios. Because he has it.
So they're stored in the boots of cars, for instance. Yeah, in pools of water, buried under rubble and in concrete.

Speaker 24 No, this is my body allotment.

Speaker 24 I hope one day to have a whole farm, but I've only got one so far.

Speaker 24 Yeah, they're incredible.

Speaker 23 And we've learned so much about forensics from them.

Speaker 23 And yeah, they do things like you'll be walking through a field and you might not see any bodies, but you might see pipes sticking up out of the ground.

Speaker 23 And that's because there are bodies underground and they're connected to pipes which are collecting gases. And the gases will determine what bodies smell of.

Speaker 23 And that's so that we can develop machines in the future that can detect them by smell. That is stuff.

Speaker 24 That's classy. Leaving your body to science like that is a really good thing to do.
Yeah.

Speaker 24 Well, I hope I have the gumption to do that.

Speaker 24 I thought when we established you won't have any body remaining after we got to it from last week's episode. It's a fun little callback if you haven't listened to last week's episode yet.

Speaker 24 Find out what's going to happen to me when these three get their hands on me. So the father of autopsy, what people call that, is a guy called Karl Rokitansky.

Speaker 24 And he came up with the idea of looking at the internal organs to diagnose disease on the outside. He personally performed 30,000 autopsies and supervised another 70,000 in a site.
70,000?

Speaker 24 That's one a day for ages.

Speaker 24 It's one a day for 100 years.

Speaker 24 He did more than one a day, is the way he got through that. Clever.
But that's weekends, that's evenings, that's your birthday. Maybe you do more on your birthday.

Speaker 24 I don't know if you're the father of it.

Speaker 24 So I got a question. I think Andy's the best one to answer this.
I guess. But Dan might be able to answer, and Anna definitely won't.

Speaker 24 So it's guy stuff.

Speaker 24 He's called Karl Rocketansky. And where do you know that name from? Karl Rocketansky.
Rocketansky.

Speaker 24 What are you guys both into? Something that I associate with both of you, which is shit movies.

Speaker 24 Oh,

Speaker 24 was he in Adam Sandler's real name?

Speaker 24 I tell you, it's unfair to call this a shit movie. It's actually a classic, but it's the kind of movie you two would like.
Pacific Room 2.

Speaker 24 He gave his name to Max Rokotansky, who is the main character in the film series Mad Max. Oh,

Speaker 24 amazing. And that's because George Miller, who directed it, he was working as a doctor when he was getting funds for it.
George Miller. Yeah, that's amazing.
That is very cool.

Speaker 24 Yeah, George Miller's career has been amazing. He's done Mad Max.
He did Babe. Babe 2, Pig in the City, Happy Feet, and then More Mad Max.
Yeah, this weird function.

Speaker 24 What was it called? The latest one? The one second to last. Fury Road.
He's like in his 70s or 80s when he comes out to make that again.

Speaker 24 And the new one's out shortly. Yeah.
Anyways, this is a good idea.

Speaker 24 This is why I thought they seemed like now this answer.

Speaker 24 I have actually seen Mad Max uncharacteristically.

Speaker 23 I thought it was very dystopian.

Speaker 24 I'd rather be locked on a body farm. Yeah.
You know what? The plot was not lost on you.

Speaker 24 Oh, dear.

Speaker 24 James, I have a different father of autopsy. Oh, yeah, go on.

Speaker 24 Mondino de Liuzzi. Mondin's again.

Speaker 24 Who is the father of autopsy? And

Speaker 24 a lot.

Speaker 24 Most episodes.

Speaker 24 Mondino De Liuzzi was the restorer of anatomy. He was Italian, if you couldn't tell,

Speaker 24 at the University of Bologna. And anatomy was banned, except for once every five years, you could do a dissection.
Wow. Dissection.
Thanks for watching.

Speaker 23 Is this like what's that film where sort of every 10 years or something you can all kill each other?

Speaker 24 The purge. Yeah.
This is basically the purge. Oh my God, Anna.
You are in your dystopian worlds today. I am, yeah.

Speaker 24 So De Liuzi, he became the first person to do a dissection, document it, and publish his findings. And it was the first documented public dissection in 1700 years.
It was amazing.

Speaker 24 But weirdly, senior people like him, they would not do the actual dissection themselves. So there's a picture of this happening.
And it was in the 14th century.

Speaker 24 Senior people like him, they wouldn't do the dissection.

Speaker 24 He would sit on a big elevated chair above the action. Like a tennis umpire.
Exactly like that. And he was reading aloud from a book.
I presume a book of anatomy. No balls, please.

Speaker 24 And he was commenting on, you know, he was reading Galen's anatomy to the audience and saying, look, now you're going to say, there was just a sort of barber surgeon actually doing the procedure.

Speaker 24 And also, did we ever mention the ostensor?

Speaker 24 That was basically someone with one of those pointers whose job was to just point out the bits that were being

Speaker 24 autopsied or examined or whatever. Separate to the guy on the chair.
The guy on the chair is talking you through it. Because he can't reach.

Speaker 24 You'd need a very long ostensor i mean they can go very long though that's true the ostensor is just there going

Speaker 24 there's the pancreas uh-huh yeah fun girl yeah very they became really popular didn't they dissections uh in italy especially around the time of the 16th century they were so popular you could buy flap anatomies and a flap anatomy was like a book with flaps in it you know like a kid's book

Speaker 24 where you could lift up the flaps and say oh look there's the gallbladder oh you no. That's so cool.
Isn't that cool? Wow. I can't believe that technology is that old.
I don't know.

Speaker 24 Well, I mean, the technology is quite basic for a flap book.

Speaker 24 It's literally just a piece of paper.

Speaker 24 But I don't know if there were any kids' books that did that before then. I can't imagine the way.
So I think the original kids' flap book was probably this. That's great.
Wow.

Speaker 24 Have you heard of vampire autopsies?

Speaker 24 These are very weird. These are a real thing that used to happen.
There was concern that if you were dug up and you were very well preserved,

Speaker 24 you might be a vampire.

Speaker 24 And there was this big superstition that tuberculosis was an inherited disease. Okay.
So the dead could drain the life of their descendants.

Speaker 24 Actually, those people had TB, but the idea was that they were kind of being drained by the people who died.

Speaker 24 And there was a theory that the body of the dead person had to be destroyed to protect the health of the living. The last one of these happened in 1949.
What? I know.

Speaker 23 Was it to kill them to stop them vampirizing other people in 1949? Yeah.

Speaker 24 Right. Very weird.
I should have done my spooky voice for for that.

Speaker 24 I read about a very interesting autopsy that happened in 1533. And it was an autopsy that was done on two children who were infant twins who were conjoined.

Speaker 24 And the question was, are these two children two children with two souls or one soul? And the autopsy was to determine that, to work out, is there one soul between two children?

Speaker 24 How many souls did they find? They found two. Oh, did they? Yeah.
They found two because there's a Greek idea that the soul resided in the heart and they found two hearts within the conjoined twins.

Speaker 24 Therefore, that was the answer that they were given. But that was like a very theological specific autopsy.
I think the important part of that was that these children hadn't been baptized,

Speaker 24 but they would baptize people after their death, wouldn't they? And so if they only had one soul, they'd only have to have one baptism. But if they had two souls, they'd have to have two baptisms.

Speaker 23 Surely less effort just to do the double baptism. You know, just let's do to cover up the body.

Speaker 24 Yeah, but if you're baptized twice, then that undoes the effect of the first baptism.

Speaker 24 Actually, yeah, it's like being bonked on the head by something near to your memory. Right.

Speaker 24 The second bonker.

Speaker 23 I see. Another autopsy, which was quite amazing, was a little bit later on in 2010.
And this is the amazing stuff they can reveal now.

Speaker 23 So this was a robbery in Oregon, and it was two men in masks who tried to rob a cafe or coffee kiosk at gunpoint. And the guy who was managing the kiosk also whipped out a gun, because it's America.

Speaker 23 And he managed to shoot one of the people who was robbing him, but the other one got away.

Speaker 23 Now, they did an autopsy on the one robber that he'd shot, and they looked in his belly, and there was a still-intact French fry in his stomach.

Speaker 23 Now, we know about how much French fries degrade and how quickly they digest, so they knew that he must have eaten a French fry sort of within the last hour.

Speaker 23 Not only that, but someone doing the autopsy managed to identify it as a Wendy's French fry.

Speaker 24 I think I could tell the difference between a Burger King and a McDonald's one for sure. There you go.
Someone tasted it. They drew straws.

Speaker 23 So, some, you know, lovely.

Speaker 24 So it's a Wendy's fry.

Speaker 23 Wendy's fry. So they just looked at all the nearby Wendy's restaurants because it couldn't have been more than an hour ago he ate it.

Speaker 23 And they looked at the security footage, and there was one, you know, within an hour. And they did indeed find the pictures of the two people on CCTV and found the other guy.

Speaker 24 Wow. I'm going to hear how they know it was a Wendy's fry.

Speaker 24 I mean, I believe it. I just, I'm just curious.
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 23 We didn't have Wendy's here, so we don't have. If you can let us know if Wendy's fries are particularly

Speaker 24 S-shaped or something. The moral of this story is always chew your food.
It's a really good point. Why is the fry intact? I mean, he's literally inhaled that fry, hasn't he?

Speaker 23 Oh my God, I'd be so easy to autopsy if I committed a crime. All my food and does my body are completely intact.

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Speaker 24 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Andy. My fact is that England's worst ever pennies are worth £350 each.

Speaker 24 So they may be some of the best. These are coins called the Tealby pennies, right? And this is a story of a man.
Well, why am I telling you this fact today? Well, I'll tell you.

Speaker 24 Is this going to be a new feature now?

Speaker 23 I'm going to start finding it quite tedious, I think.

Speaker 24 Basically, there's a man called Tony House, which I love. He's a metal detectorist, and he was out detectoring away.
And he found a stash of pennies, ancient ones. They're from the 12th century.

Speaker 24 He found one and then he found 600 more.

Speaker 24 That's like if you see one ant in your house. Exactly.

Speaker 24 And they're worth about 350 quid each. And the thing about them is they're really, really low quality coins.
They are badly made. They're hard to read.
The image is just hopelessly stamped.

Speaker 24 They're from the reign of Henry II. They're named after Tealby in Lincolnshire, which is where 5,000 of them were found in a huge cache in the 19th century.
Ah, cache.

Speaker 24 And they're just really ropey coins.

Speaker 23 So, why are they worth so much? Just because they're old.

Speaker 24 Old now and rare.

Speaker 24 Maybe. They're all, they're pretty rare.
Oh, there are quite a lot of them. Well, I was on a numismatist website called Numsock, which was really good.

Speaker 24 It says this coinage is renowned for its ugly appearance, bad craftsmanship, and careless execution. To collect TLB pennies in the first place brands you as a little strange.

Speaker 24 Yeah. Right.

Speaker 23 To be strange in the numismatist world is

Speaker 24 truly strangeness.

Speaker 23 I kind of absolutely love numismatism, in fact, even though it's really hard to say. And I love coin research because, A,

Speaker 23 it's so reliable. It's such reliable history.
There's no spurious, oh, what was this used for? Because all the information that you need is on this coin.

Speaker 23 It's like, there's a date, there's a face, it's a physical thing. And people.

Speaker 24 You're saying we have no mystery coins that we don't know the stories behind. Oh, yeah.
I mean, we will have some mystery coins.

Speaker 23 Don't worry, Dan. There are the alien theories out there, I'm sure.

Speaker 24 Could you save my research?

Speaker 23 But people are also so obsessed.

Speaker 23 I was on a Reddit thread which was started by someone who said, I ranked all the Roman emperors for their coinage based on its artistic value, variety, collectibility, and historical value.

Speaker 23 Feel free to ask me about the rankings.

Speaker 24 And everyone did.

Speaker 24 That is really tragic if no one answers that to you.

Speaker 24 Oh, don't you worry.

Speaker 24 Thousands.

Speaker 23 I can tell you that Claudius wasn't high enough. And Claudius, of course, was responsible for the return to realism instead of the vaguely Hellenistic idealism on previous coins.

Speaker 23 So he should have had at least an A rank, according to one person.

Speaker 23 One person just said, I feel insulted you ranked Nero as high as Augustus.

Speaker 23 And this is not as an emperor. This is his coinage.

Speaker 24 You were saying about there being no dubious coins. And we should get back track on in fairness, but

Speaker 24 I have an interesting thing that I found, which is about rainbow cups. I don't know if you guys found this.

Speaker 23 Was it related to the moon cup?

Speaker 24 In the fact that they're cup-shaped, both. Okay.
Only.

Speaker 24 So these are coins that are cup-shaped. And you find them, especially in Germany, and you'll find them in fields.

Speaker 24 But these are often found after it had been raining, but then it was sunny straight afterwards.

Speaker 24 Because not only are they kind of pushed forward by the muddiness, but also water gets into the cupness and it shines and they're really easy to find because the reflection of the light comes off.

Speaker 24 And people associated them with rainbows. And according to Discover magazine, which is usually a pretty good source, this is the reason that we have like a crock of gold at the end of a rainbow oh

Speaker 24 people whenever there was a rainbow they would find these cup-shaped coins that's awesome and apparently there were tribes of southern germany that were celtic tribes that moved up into ireland and that's why the irish associate it with like leprechauns i love that that's amazing isn't that cool yeah that's really cool right i've got a i've got a favorite coin yeah

Speaker 24 double eagle this is an american coin and it was a ten dollar coin issued in 1933 Half a million of them were struck, but they weren't issued as legal tender because 1933, the Great Depression, blah, blah, blah, banking crisis.

Speaker 24 Gold coins are outlawed as legal tender. It is now illegal to own a double eagle one.
What? Yeah. They're all technically US government property.
Because they never put them out.

Speaker 24 You can't have accidentally got one in your change and own it.

Speaker 24 If you have one, it must have been stolen. I think there is one, isn't there? There's one.

Speaker 24 So there are two in the Smithsonian, which is kind of different, but then there's one, which is not illegal to own. I can't work out exactly why that's the only one that's not illegal to own.

Speaker 24 It was sold in 2021 at auction for nearly 15 million pounds. Wow.
What happened was

Speaker 24 a few of them were stolen and found their way into private hands via a jeweler called Israel Svit, who was from Philadelphia.

Speaker 24 And when they came to light, they would just get confiscated because you weren't allowed to have them. But one of them got sold to King Farouk.

Speaker 24 of Egypt and he wrote to the Treasury Department and said, I have this coin. Is it okay if I keep it?

Speaker 24 And they hadn't discovered the theft at that stage, so they didn't realize that they'd been stolen. And so they replied to him, saying, Yeah, you can keep it.
And that's the one.

Speaker 24 That's the one that, if it ever comes up, is the one that gets sold in our minds. Amazing.
That's wow. So that's, I think, unique.
That is. Yeah, that's really cool.

Speaker 24 Just while we're on American coins, in 2007, there was a coin that was minted, which had an image of JFK on it. And if you pressed a button on the coin,

Speaker 24 he played a short excerpt of his Ich bin ein Beline. So it had little technology in it to now.
I don't believe that was legal tender.

Speaker 24 Do you know where that was minted? What country that was for? Germany. Sounds it right.
Mongolia.

Speaker 24 Lovely.

Speaker 24 Do you guys know that the first book written about the history of the coin was called The Ass and Party Bus?

Speaker 24 The Ass and Party Bus?

Speaker 23 Is that right?

Speaker 24 Is that a Latin book? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 24 It's actually de ass et party bus. So I have translated two of the words.
Of ass. Something that's part of

Speaker 24 means like parts of. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And ass was like an old Roman coin. Oh, it was great.
Published in 1514 by Huyam Bud.

Speaker 24 And to be honest, is quite boring.

Speaker 24 But you read the whole thing, presumably. Yeah, the first 10 pages are about the etymology of the word ass.

Speaker 24 And then it goes on about...

Speaker 23 I bet you read that so voraciously.

Speaker 24 It's brilliant.

Speaker 24 One thing.

Speaker 23 One actually amazing thing, speaking of Romans and coins, is that coins are the reason that we're still discovering Roman emperors.

Speaker 24 Which I sorry, I just didn't know. Wow.

Speaker 23 We discovered our latest Roman emperor in 2022.

Speaker 24 No, I'm laughing. No.
It's true. Who are we missing?

Speaker 23 This is.

Speaker 24 It's not a biggie. It's not like in between Nero.
Oh, yeah. The heir to Augustus, actually.

Speaker 23 Only came to light. No, this is the great Sponcianus.

Speaker 24 And yeah.

Speaker 24 Yeah, yeah, that sounds like a legit one. Hi, I'm doing it.
Would you like to sponsor my anus?

Speaker 23 This is from, well, we think it's from the disastrous century, whatever it's called, the crisis century in the Roman period, which was like the third century when it was all falling to pieces and there were sort of 1900 emperors.

Speaker 23 But the reason he's only just come to light is because there were these coins found in Transylvania in the 1700s, which were assumed to be fake.

Speaker 24 And people looked at them and said, sorry. Kanandi, can you say these coins were found in Transylvania, please? These coins were found in Transylvania.
Yeah, that seems to add to it for me.

Speaker 23 Yeah, you're absolutely right. Yeah.

Speaker 24 They were found in Transylvania.

Speaker 23 In the 1700s, and they had a picture of this bloke, and it said Spontianus under it.

Speaker 24 Sponsidianus.

Speaker 24 Just doesn't work when you spoil it.

Speaker 23 Anyway, it was decided that they were fakes, and it was only in 2022 that that analysis of them actually concluded they were probably real.

Speaker 23 And so we've literally just found out that there was a Roman Emperor sometime between 248 and 253 AD.

Speaker 24 Okay.

Speaker 24 Wow. And that five.
Very much a sort of Liz Truss style Lincoln, you'll miss him. Yeah, I think it was an in-and-out job.
And just one coin so far, did you say?

Speaker 23 I think there are a couple. I believe there are two coins.

Speaker 24 Did you hear about the Eid Mar Aureus? So there's another Roman coin. Is this after Caesar was killed? Yes.
Oh, this is is Eides of Mars. This is an amazing coin.

Speaker 24 This is a coin that celebrates the assassination of Julius Caesar, minted by Brutus, and it has the inscription Eid Mar, which is Eides of Marsh. And it has their daggers on.

Speaker 24 Brutus and Cassius' daggers are depicted. I mean, easy.
It's like immediately after almost, right? Like it's like merch. That's kind of what they did, though, wasn't it?

Speaker 24 It was like, get rid of the old emperor. How do you do it? Well, let's just mint a load of coins.

Speaker 24 Yeah. Let's go mad.

Speaker 24 Interestingly, Julius Caesar was the first known autopsy that we have evidence of. Yeah.

Speaker 24 Was that required?

Speaker 24 They found out that he was stabbed 23 times. Right.
I mean, that.

Speaker 24 But was that poison on the dagger, which was the actual cause of death? I can't deal with this many vaginas.

Speaker 24 But they wanted to find out which of the stabbings was the one that killed him. No.

Speaker 24 How did they... No offense to the Romans.
How did they think they were going to be able to do that? Surely it would have been some combination of the 23 that did it.

Speaker 24 I could tell you because most of them were either in the face or the It was found.

Speaker 24 I do. I do.

Speaker 24 Wow. And it was just one or two.
And I think one of them went through the side of his arm and into his artery.

Speaker 24 So they decided that that was it. Wow.
Anyway. Limey.
In the groin.

Speaker 23 That's just, was that deliberate?

Speaker 24 It does seem inadvertent, doesn't it? Yeah. Going for a crotch.

Speaker 24 Coin villain.

Speaker 24 Henry VIII. Really? Yeah, a bit of the numismatist's foe.

Speaker 24 So he wasted lots of money on wars with foreigners, basically.

Speaker 24 And he specifically debased the currency. He issued new coins where he'd put copper in the silver coins just to make the silver go a bit further, basically.
And it caused mayhem.

Speaker 24 People were hoarding their good coins from the before times, which were still worth every bit of silver in them, and they left the bad ones in circulation.

Speaker 24 Foreign bankers refused to accept English money. They were asking for gold instead.
It just was a disaster. And then, a few years after he dies, Elizabeth I came to the throne, sort of 15 years later.

Speaker 24 She had to recall every single coin in the kingdom and melt them down and reissue proper coins.

Speaker 23 You have like a coin amnesty. Everyone come and hand your coins in at the forum.

Speaker 24 Pretty much. They had those, you know, those machines where you pour all your coins in, and then it gives you a little slip.
They had those. Not the ones with the tray going back and forward.

Speaker 24 Is that what they're doing? They're collecting my coins. Well, they are collecting your coins, effectively.
You know those things, by the way.

Speaker 24 They were invented by, oh, I can't remember who it was now, but they were invented, and the person who invented them thought that they would only last one year

Speaker 24 Because there'd been quite a few of these kind of amusements that had come and gone really quickly and so they invented them They didn't patent them They made a load of them and then they became really successful and now you could just make them without any patents I didn't realize that yeah and the original one had the big hole in the middle which your coins would go in so they would make money Whereas now the holes are hidden so when the coins are being pushed there's holes on the side that you can't see and that's where the the coins kind of fall into and that's the cut that the

Speaker 24 machines are. So, I'm not aiming, I don't want to get into those holes.
No, so think about it: like I want to get into the big hole in the middle.

Speaker 24 Every coin you put in in theory is going to come out again, right? So, how do they make money? Well, the way they make money is they have hidden holes, which the coins fall down and go into the bank.

Speaker 23 Wait, why would every coin in theory be coming out again? I just thought they got more and more and more coins until the whole thing exploded.

Speaker 24 Until the whole thing was full of coins, yeah, exactly. I mean, someone's equipped with those machines, and they're just.

Speaker 24 You've never seen one of them fall to top. I think

Speaker 24 you fill them with coins to start off with because you've you've never turned up to one of those and there's no coins in it.

Speaker 24 You've got a sign saying, please.

Speaker 24 So they fill them with coins, and then in theory, everyone you put in is going to push nothing out. I did not know there were side things.

Speaker 24 I just thought they built up and then at night people came by and siphoned out and stacked them artfully so the next day none of them would fall in the hole. That might happen as well.

Speaker 24 Those machines are great. I love them so much.
I spent so much of my money on them. Yeah, they are amazing.
I look them as well.

Speaker 24 You know, those penny collection machines, actually, what do you mean? The one where you get all of your money that you've been keeping in a jar for

Speaker 24 cash. Do you know what the most that anyone's ever got out of

Speaker 24 it? Oh, great. Oh, God, how much?

Speaker 23 So I think I mentioned on the show once that I did it in Australia, and I think I got three or four hundred dollars out of it.

Speaker 24 What? How much? Oh, yeah, you're pouring in coppers into a machine. You got $400.

Speaker 23 It's not all coppers, though, 50 cents.

Speaker 24 What?

Speaker 24 What Looney Tunes bank robbery had you just done to have $400 in spill? It was all of Beans money they'd been collecting over the years.

Speaker 23 Well, remember, he just spills change everywhere, never picks it up. And I was unemployed, so I thought I'm going to try and contribute to this little domestic economy.

Speaker 23 Go on, who's beaten my record then?

Speaker 24 Yeah,

Speaker 24 it's 2,000, I'm going to say. No, the record is $13,084.59.

Speaker 24 I'm sitting behind that person.

Speaker 24 There was a man in Alabama, and he had to have all of his coins delivered to the bank to do this because obviously there were so many of them he couldn't carry them.

Speaker 24 And it took seven hours to count them all.

Speaker 24 And his collection weighed more than 4.5 tons

Speaker 24 why did he stop um

Speaker 24 the fool

Speaker 24 yeah it's what a weird again that's an inside out logic i would have gone but why did he start does feel like perhaps there was someone else in his house who asked him to do it yeah fair enough i don't know have you guys heard of christopher ironside he was the designer behind the first decimal coins that we had in 1969 in the uk right and so so he designed the 50p that was the first thing that he does.

Speaker 24 He designed all of the coins. I'm so sorry.
I think it was 71. Maybe he designed them early.
Maybe no, there were some that came out earlier.

Speaker 24 71 was decimalization, but there were a few earlier decimal coins. Right.
That's confusing. Yeah.
That is confusing. I mean, the whole decimalization thing sounds confusing, to be fair.

Speaker 24 Oh, you would have loved the Daily Mail in 1971.

Speaker 24 Why are there 240 anymore? But so there was sort of an announcement that Britain was going to be heading this way, but the Royal Mint didn't say who was designing the coins.

Speaker 24 But they had picked this guy, Christopher Ironside, and he had to do it in secrecy from 1962 all the way to 1968.

Speaker 24 Now, you would think they gave him an office to go and do it in, that he could do it in secrecy if it was such a big deal. They didn't.
He had to do it in his house.

Speaker 24 He had his mother living in the house. He had a daughter living in the house.
He had two young kids on the way. He had a small house, so he had nowhere to do it.

Speaker 24 And they're constantly at risk of discovering the big secret, which is that he's working.

Speaker 24 But he's what he's designing. All you need is a desk.
Exactly. Anyone who like, there's the voice of Big Mint over here.

Speaker 24 They could give him a room in the building, I would say.

Speaker 24 I'm not saying they couldn't do that, but I'm just saying that the fact that he's working from home, like many of us does today. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 24 But if I was working from home and I couldn't let my wife find out that I was working on a podcast, it might be tricky. Would it? Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And what's this microphone for?

Speaker 24 Well, she's she's at home because she's got two kids on the waist. And she's finding drawings of 50p coins around the place.
She's saying, what's this?

Speaker 24 It's nothing. So

Speaker 24 I think she gets into it because she becomes the model for Britannica on the back of a 50 coin. Her name was Jean, and we were talking last week about Uma Thurman's grandmother.

Speaker 24 Well, we now know who was basically the model for Britannica. But he had to hide it from all his friends who would come over and so on.
So he had a big cloth that he would put over his desk.

Speaker 23 What did he claim he was doing? Did he say he was a spy?

Speaker 24 He kind of felt like it. It just doesn't feel hard to hide drawing a picture of Britannica.
No, he was making the molds. He was doing all the molds.
Do you know how the kerkine is?

Speaker 24 Yeah, totally, but like,

Speaker 24 I think this guy had a rough time. I do, I've got to say.

Speaker 23 I want to know why it took him six years to design what, like, five coins?

Speaker 24 Because he was constantly trying to hide his tiny molds everywhere. I think as he reports into the office every quarter, no, sorry.
Um, no, my mother-in-law came into the room

Speaker 24 just as I was making the molds, and then I had to throw it out of the window into the garden. Then someone walked past the garden, and I had to go and bury it in the garden.

Speaker 24 And then a fox dug it up, you see, that was the problem. So I will need another three years.
I'm afraid to complete the mold.

Speaker 24 He had to delay one of the coins because he found his daughter at the desk putting into the putty her like knife or whatever, and it completely ruined the coin. So, he had to redesign the coin.

Speaker 23 His whole vampire imagine is just going, darling, we don't care.

Speaker 24 It's something to do with the coin. We couldn't care less.
It's dinner time.

Speaker 24 Oh, that's so good. Yeah, that's hilarious.

Speaker 24 Um, just very quickly before we go, crypto coins that exist include the Yeti coin, brilliant, the golf coin, the Mossland coin, the egregious fish token, and the AP wine coin.

Speaker 24 Get out! What?

Speaker 23 For me. They've minted a coin for me.

Speaker 24 It's a crypto coin. I'll explain later.
All right, yes. Just send me your back details.

Speaker 24 Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in theory, you can get a peanut allergy transplant.

Speaker 24 Good.

Speaker 24 Why would I want that? You wouldn't be asking for it. This would be an accidental transplant.
So there's numerous papers out there. The one that I read was to do with a 31-year-old woman.

Speaker 24 She had liver failure. So she had a liver transplant.

Speaker 24 And then after the operation, she was kissing her partner and he had just eaten a peanut butter chocolate. And as a result, she rashed up and she said, that's weird.
That's never happened before.

Speaker 24 They went to the doctors and they worked out that she now had hypersensitivity to peanut, hazelnut, and pecan. And they believe that that was new from post-transplant.

Speaker 24 And then there are other multiple examples of people who have been claiming to have had a peanut allergy post-transplant. That's very cool.
Yeah. What a pain in the ass for those people.

Speaker 24 Peanut allergies.

Speaker 24 Did you say peanuts? It was definitely, it was either penis or peanuts. Oh, peanuts.
Sorry, no, no, no, still on peanuts.

Speaker 24 There is a day of the year where in Canada, peanut allergy cases which trigger anaphylactic shock rise by 85%.

Speaker 24 Can you work out what that day of the year is?

Speaker 24 When they eat a lot of peanuts, Super Bowl. No, Canada.
The World Series baseball, the hockey. Hockey.
Hockey. It's not sport.
When's a day when suddenly everyone eats a lot more peanuts?

Speaker 24 Christmas. Christmas.

Speaker 24 It's the Canadian peanut Christmas. When they all take flights and get them for free.
That's right.

Speaker 23 When they go to the cinema, do they all go to the cinema one day of the year?

Speaker 24 Canadians only go to the cinema one day a year because it's quite sinful, so they try and limit it. It's National Peanut Day.
What's Charles Schultz? Was he Canadian? Oh,

Speaker 24 these are such good guesses. Okay.

Speaker 23 Is it really obvious?

Speaker 24 It's not really obvious. Peanut-based confectionery gets eaten a lot more on one day of the year.

Speaker 23 Halloween. When they do.
Halloween.

Speaker 24 It's Halloween. You get children going house to house, having a lot of confectionery.

Speaker 24 Maybe they didn't know they've got a peanut allergy, or maybe they are, you know, they're just excited and they have some unfamiliar confectionery and they already knew about it. But yeah, that's 85%.

Speaker 24 Easter is 60% rise.

Speaker 24 I guess chocolate-containing peanuts. Yeah, it's amazing how much it's changed over the last 20 years or so, isn't it? It's bizarre.

Speaker 24 Like the number of people who are allergic to peanuts just 20 years ago is so much lower than it is today. Really? So much.
And no one really knows why.

Speaker 23 No. 1995 to 2016, there's been a five-fold increase in the UK in peanut allergies and more in other places.
And yeah, as James says, we're not really sure why.

Speaker 23 It's much more in industrialized countries. It could be to do with the fact that we are not getting as many parasites, they think.

Speaker 23 And I think the immune system uses a similar mechanism to fight parasites as it does to flare up in allergies. Yeah.
Yeah, we just don't know, but it's rocketing.

Speaker 24 It is, and definitely, like, the more that you live in a city, the more likely you are to have it.

Speaker 24 So, seems like it's something to do with not being exposed to natural environments, possibly vitamin D, sunlight.

Speaker 24 Apparently, people with a vitamin D deficiency are 11 times more likely to have a peanut allergy. Really? But that might not be, that might be just that the two things are related to a third thing.

Speaker 24 We just don't know. Yeah.
One way of stopping getting allergies is to desensitize yourself by having small amounts of it, right?

Speaker 24 This doesn't work in all cases, but it's a very common way of treating them.

Speaker 24 And for that reason, there's a new kind of toothpaste that's been invented, which has got little tiny, tiny, tiny bits of peanut in it. Oh,

Speaker 24 you have this toothpaste and it desensitizes your immune system to the allergens. Nut paste.
Nut paste. Give your kids nut paste today.

Speaker 24 I think we can go back to the branding drawing board before we start printing the packets.

Speaker 23 Ironically, they all just get stuck in your teeth. So then you need to use an actual normal toothpaste to get rid of it, presumably.

Speaker 24 Yeah.

Speaker 24 You can be, of course, allergic to peanuts. Penis.
Penis, yeah.

Speaker 24 Post-orgasmic illness syndrome is where you get like flu-like symptoms, rashes, itching after sex. But it has been caused in a few cases by men being allergic to their own semen.
Their own?

Speaker 24 Their own semen. Yeah.
Oh, no.

Speaker 24 There is a cure. Thank God.

Speaker 24 What is the...

Speaker 24 We're back to nut paste, basically.

Speaker 24 We are, I'm afraid. No, it's multiple subcutaneous injections of the semen in question.

Speaker 24 I think I'll just stay ill for life. Thank you very much.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so you get very, very tiny bits of the semen and you would inject it under the skin and your body would learn to

Speaker 24 wow. Yeah.
Scientists get allergic to the thing they're researching quite frequently because you're exposed to it day after day.

Speaker 24 There was a great piece, I think it was The Atlantic, about a scientist called Brian Fry. He studies snake venom and has since become allergic, not to venom,

Speaker 24 but to snakes in general. Really? Yeah.

Speaker 24 And if you, there's apparently the huge chance that if you work with something all the time, you develop an allergy. 40% of vets.
45% of people who work with lab rodents get an allergy to heavy.

Speaker 24 There was a leech scientist called Danielle de Coehl who uses herself as bait when she's trying to catch catch leeches out in the field. You know, she just walks through a swamp and gets them.

Speaker 24 She now, after a year or two, couldn't do it anymore. And her hands started swelling up massively if she was trying to feed a leech in the lab on her blood.
And she had to feed them pig blood instead.

Speaker 24 That's weird, though, isn't it?

Speaker 23 Because obviously you're supposed to sensitize yourself up until a certain point. But maybe you can be overexposed.

Speaker 23 Like if I'm eating peanut butter on a daily basis and a lot, does that mean I eventually might then become sensitized?

Speaker 24 I read that article and it said 25 to 60% of people who work with insects become allergic to them. So people who work with bees might come out in hives.
Right.

Speaker 24 Lovely.

Speaker 24 Now I think about it, people keep telling me that, because I love milk and I drink milk a lot, that I will become allergic to milk by the amount of milk that I drink. And I listen to those people.

Speaker 24 Do you know who told me it was Ash Gardner? Didn't he? Who did our theme tune, for anybody who doesn't know?

Speaker 24 Who stopped drinking milk because he thinks he became allergic from drinking so much as a kid. I think I'm right in saying that.

Speaker 24 There's an interesting thing where people who think they are allergic to things in double blind tests, quite quite a high percentage of people turned out not to be allergic to them after all. Right.

Speaker 24 Just on the quickly jumping back to allergy transplants and just the idea of things being transplanted when you take in a body part from a donor, I read an article from a lady who said that her personality changed after a kidney transplant, where instead of reading celebrity trash and watching celebrity trash, she started reading Jane Austen.

Speaker 24 And

Speaker 24 that was purely

Speaker 24 the back.

Speaker 24 from the kidney. She said she got a brainy kidney.
She said

Speaker 24 there's a pseudoscience

Speaker 24 theory, which is the idea that you inherit traits of a person that you might take something off. And

Speaker 24 so many exact doctor, there's a guy called Dr. Hagen, who's an ER doctor, who claims that he inherited a love of avocados and barbecues after he got a transplant.

Speaker 23 I don't know, maybe that your digestive system responds to a certain foodstuff seems more likely than liking trash magazines compared to Jane Austen. Yeah.

Speaker 24 To be fair to the doctor?

Speaker 23 Yeah, fair enough.

Speaker 24 He got in contact with the family because it was like a murder trial that she'd been killed in. He went to the trial and the family took him in and they did prayers together.

Speaker 24 And then he went back to their house and the sentence reads, he learned she loved avocados and barbecues.

Speaker 24 Oh, and there's such unusual things that people like that could only possibly have come from this ridiculous idea. Well, he never used to cry during movies as well.

Speaker 24 As a surgeon, you're trained not to cry. And then after surgery, he kept crying and kept crying.

Speaker 24 And as well as learning that this lady loved avocados and barbecues, she was also an emotionally passionate woman.

Speaker 24 But there's a doctor who believes that as a patient's about to go into surgery to receive their transplant, a few bits of details might come out about the person they're getting the transplant from.

Speaker 24 And they embed that in a really emotional moment before they're about to go down. And it goes into their psyche rather than it being a physical transplant.

Speaker 23 Imagine, by the way, the kidney that you're receiving comes from someone who loved avocado.

Speaker 24 Okay, go under.

Speaker 23 There is a lot that we obviously don't know at all. Like we've talked about fecal transplants before and how you can actually transplant unexpected things in them, it is thought.

Speaker 23 And then we're in very early days of fecal transplants.

Speaker 24 It changes with my personality if I get someone else's poo in me.

Speaker 23 Depends whose poo you get. Which one of our poo do you want? And then I'll tell you what you'll get.

Speaker 24 We'll save that for our therapy session after the show again.

Speaker 23 No, you can't. I think Andy mentioned on the show before that a mother who received a fecal transplant from her daughter suddenly became obese.
And her daughter was obese.

Speaker 23 and because we really don't know that makes sense because it could be the microbes causing that right that's right um there was someone else who received a fecal transplant who had had alopecia and not had any hair since they were six who suddenly grew hair again and

Speaker 23 i suppose this is all like the um micro um climate there's a lot still to learn about it and who knows what little things it's affecting yeah i buy it i buy it a lot okay here's a way if you are a parent and you have a baby who has a dummy you can protect them against allergies

Speaker 24 how do you do it um never let them take the dummy out so no food could get into their mouth. That's right.
That's right.

Speaker 24 Can anyone think of a second method?

Speaker 24 I know the answer to this because I've accidentally been doing it, all my three kids. I've seen you doing it.

Speaker 24 Oh, well, that must be you sucking on the dummy as well. Yeah.
Is it really? Yeah. Dan still has a dummy.
He doesn't like to admit it, but it's no, it's

Speaker 24 sucking. Oh my god.
Oh my god, Dan. For the listener, Dan's just got a dummy out of his pocket and popped it in.
We assume it came out of his pocket. We couldn't see where it came from.

Speaker 24 It certainly came from below the table. That's That's incredibly dead.
Wow. That's really disturbing.

Speaker 23 It's weird how disturbing that is to see.

Speaker 24 Well, I didn't know I had it in my pocket until I was coming in this morning and I felt it and I was like, oh, I've got Kit's dummy.

Speaker 23 What's he got of yours?

Speaker 24 Where's my research notice?

Speaker 24 That would explain so much.

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Speaker 24 Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Anna.

Speaker 23 My fact this week is that the largest parasite in the world is a Christmas tree.

Speaker 24 Feels a bit political. Feels like you're saying Christmas is rubbish.
Okay, like it's feeding on ordinary families, trying to make them spend all their money on Christmas.

Speaker 24 Basically, it's capitalism, and capitalism is a parasite on the working people. Good point.

Speaker 23 Christianity, actually, religion, organized religion of any form, is a parasite on our society.

Speaker 23 All right, put down your joints.

Speaker 24 Put down that old wacky baky.

Speaker 24 Welcome to the dad cast.

Speaker 23 This is a different kind of Christmas tree to what you might be thinking. It's the Australian Christmas tree.
And the Australian Christmas tree is different to our British Christmas trees.

Speaker 24 Upside down.

Speaker 23 It's not upside down. It's actually very beautiful.
It's also known as...

Speaker 24 All the baubles are made of cork.

Speaker 24 They're not used as Christmas trees, we should add, in Australia. We use the classic Christmas tree in Australia.

Speaker 23 Yep, you do. You Australians listening do use the classic Christmas tree.

Speaker 23 These are known as mongy or moo-jar trees as well, but they get called the Australian Christmas tree because they flower in December. And they're endemic to Noongar County in Western Australia.

Speaker 23 And they're really beautiful, actually, and they grow in very barren landscape. And they're bright yellow flowers when they flower.
So they're like, you know, fires all over the desert.

Speaker 23 But they are also parasites. And it's so amazing.
So, their roots can steal from other plants that are up to 110 meters away by slithering under the ground to this other plant.

Speaker 23 And then the plant root wraps around the other plant's root and then injects a spike into it and can just suck out all their nutrients.

Speaker 24 It's extraordinary. Amazing.
This is so cool.

Speaker 24 It's actually

Speaker 24 tipped me over into believing in plant sentience now.

Speaker 24 You're always so skeptical about that. I have been.
I've been on a fence, I've been on the line, but this is just extraordinary what it does.

Speaker 24 The thing that tipped me over is that it's a beautiful-looking tree.

Speaker 24 So, even when they are cutting down areas where this tree grows, they'll cut everything down but this hot tree that just looks so cool. And then it feeds off the grass.
That's basically what it is.

Speaker 24 It's like that's a sexy tree. We're keeping that up.

Speaker 24 It's evolved to be, I assume, a good-looking tree to the human eye. No,

Speaker 24 it's striking what it does.

Speaker 24 It's pretty spooky stuff, if you don't mind me saying it. So

Speaker 23 it's so aggressive.

Speaker 24 It's yet another bit of evidence of like the Australian version of everything is much more lethal than the non-Australian version. So it'll attack power cables.

Speaker 24 It can cut slice through power cables because it's so powerful, this wraparound organ it has. Sometimes I read it steals juice from its own roots.
Yes.

Speaker 24 That's embarrassing. So what it's trying to do is get the juice from the power cable because it thinks that's a root.
Yeah. Yes.

Speaker 24 But actually, it's just not just trying to contact its friends on the phone on the other side well maybe it would be trying to contact aliens because there was one time there was a space tracking station in western australia which was connected by underground cables and it got into those as well

Speaker 24 really

Speaker 24 yeah

Speaker 24 getting it from its own roots is an accident as well it is an accident yeah it just finds something else so i'd never i don't know if you guys had or the listener has but i'd never heard of parasitic plants before as in i didn't really recognize that this relies entirely on stealing other juices from other places the most famous one is is mistletoe, of which this is a type of mistletoe.

Speaker 24 Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, mistletoe famously just grows on other trees.
Grows on other trees. Photosynthesis is not a thing for it, so it just relies entirely on it.

Speaker 24 But just the idea that this needs other living things to live is extraordinary.

Speaker 23 It kind of explores your year nine biology when you learn about how plants survive. When actually, there are thousands of plants that aren't doing any of that shit.

Speaker 23 They're not bothering with all this complicated chemical equation with their leaves. They just jab into other plants.

Speaker 24 I think there are 4,000 species. Have you guys heard of Hydenora africana? No.
No. According to one website I read, and I quote, no plant looks more like a labia than the Hydenora africana.

Speaker 24 This flower not only has teeth-like traps to lure insects into leaving or picking up their pollen, but emits a feces-like scent to attract dung beetles.

Speaker 24 Gosh. I just love that sentence.
Nothing looks more like a labia and it has teeth that smells like feces.

Speaker 24 That's why you get that. That is a good riddle to ask.

Speaker 24 But yeah, this one sort of likes to attract dung beetles

Speaker 24 with its smell. And a lot of those ones that are like really, really smelly plants, they are also parasitic.
The dodder is amazing as well. Did you guys read about that one? Yeah.

Speaker 24 That one's extraordinary.

Speaker 23 It's a little unstable on its feet, isn't it?

Speaker 24 But it's pretty extraordinary.

Speaker 24 Yeah, so this is a plant which is, it's got no roots or leaves and it's sort of yellowy looking.

Speaker 24 It sort of grows on other plants and it's only got a lifespan of five to ten days without a host right so it needs to find a host in that time and it goes when the seed gets

Speaker 24 dispersed yeah sorry when the seed gets dispersed and it can sense where the closest best host is through the air which is mad and then goes that way yeah that's

Speaker 24 so sinister

Speaker 23 no it is because we don't understand a lot of how they do this so it is extraordinary it is amazing and it is it's weird how pretty so many of them are it's like if you came out almost like they evolved just so that humans would like them.

Speaker 24 Thank you. James!

Speaker 23 I love them.

Speaker 23 There's one which lives entirely inside the stems of plants. And this is a genus, Pylostyles.

Speaker 23 Nicely described in 1948 by Australia's government botanist who was called Charles Gardiner.

Speaker 24 Which is nice. Very nice.

Speaker 23 And it's so pretty. So it just lives entirely inside a stem.
You don't know it's there. It's just little threads.

Speaker 23 And then plops out for about about a week of the year again, like the one Dan described. And it's so pretty, and these white flowers come out all over the stem of a plant.

Speaker 23 So you'd think, gosh, this plant's looking so pretty. And actually, it's disease.

Speaker 24 It's another plant. It's another plant.

Speaker 24 It's so weird. I love it.
Did you guys hear about the lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe? This is another. So, this is a kind of mistletoe.
Most mistletoe seeds are dispersed.

Speaker 24 Oh, most kinds of mistletoe, they're dispersed by birds. Birds eat the berries and then they fly somewhere else, and then they poo out the seeds, and the seeds have a new environment to grow in.

Speaker 24 Not the lodgepole pine dwarf mistletoe it spreads by explosions

Speaker 24 it's the basically the seed each fruit has a single seed inside it which is covered in this very very sticky stuff and then as the fruit matures the pressure builds and builds and builds inside it right and then eventually it just goes

Speaker 24 I've seen these exploding cucumbers in Greece yeah

Speaker 24 so it was growing almost like a weed and some steps but I noticed it and it's um it looks like a tiny little gherkin okay and then if you prod it enough, it just explodes and the seeds go everywhere.

Speaker 24 And they're really cool, but they don't go that far. But then it apologises.

Speaker 24 Sorry, that's never happened before for me.

Speaker 23 Do you know why mistletoe seeds are sticky? Because they are when they're dispersed. No, what is that?

Speaker 23 Partly is because they have to grow from up a tree, which is kind of cool anyway, so to stick to the tree. But as you say, they're dispersed by birds pooing them out and then wiping them on trees.

Speaker 23 So, what it requires is for the bird to poo, but this annoying sticky seed gets stuck to its anus. And so, this bird's going, I've got this seed on my bum.
I just need to wipe it on something.

Speaker 23 And they wipe their bums on the tree branches. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 24 And that's what sticks them together. And also, because they've wiped their bums on the trees and their bums had poo on them, then they have their own fertilizer.
Lovely. So, there you go.

Speaker 24 If you're a seed, you know, you're being flown to the top of a tree and you're being put exactly where you want with a load of fertilizer. It's a dream.

Speaker 24 So, I just said, when you said that, that, I went, clever. But I realized that's obviously humanizing it.
Like, what is it? What is that? If it's not clever. It's just evolution to make it.

Speaker 24 It's just what it is. It's just what it is.
It's just a random thing. It's not.

Speaker 24 It's just over millions and millions of years. Maybe even before humans existed,

Speaker 24 different things have been tried out.

Speaker 24 I don't think we invented sentience. I'm not blaming humans grow on that alone.
Isn't is ivy parasitic?

Speaker 23 No,

Speaker 24 that just crawls on stuff. If it just grows on something, it's not technically a parasite.
It has to be stealing its resources like it's

Speaker 24 not. It might not be particularly good for the thing that's growing on, but it's not parasitic.
Yeah, it could weaken a tree and make it fall and so on. Yeah, but okay.

Speaker 23 Do you know what it is, which makes people really angry? Is orchids.

Speaker 24 Are parasitic? In fact, all orchids are parasitic.

Speaker 24 No, another beauty. But another beauty.

Speaker 23 But this is something that is vigorously denied by the American Orchid Society.

Speaker 24 It's so weird. So basically,

Speaker 23 they're a slightly different kind of parasite. They parasitize mycorrhizal fungi, which are those threads underground, those fungal threads underground.

Speaker 23 So all orchid seeds start off by parasitizing the fungi because they're not born with the resources to grow properly. So they steal from this fungi at first.
Many of them do it for their whole lives.

Speaker 23 So the parasites. And yet, on the FAQ's page of the American Orchid Society, there's a question, are orchids parasites?

Speaker 24 No, no, they're not. Go away.
Stop asking questions.

Speaker 23 Absolutely not. Of the approximately 20,000 species of orchid, not one is parasitic.

Speaker 24 So, how are they claiming that?

Speaker 24 Are they claiming that because it's hosted by the fungus, that it's different to being hosted by a I think that's the assumption they don't address, much like hearing a politician interviewed on the Today programme?

Speaker 24 They're really very much just repeating this one point.

Speaker 24 I don't think anyone wants to talk about parasites. No, people want to hear about the good work that I'm doing for the people of the underground.

Speaker 24 Exactly. I think I've been very down on sentient plants throughout this, but I do think fungi are evil.

Speaker 24 Yeah, that's a good point.

Speaker 24 So

Speaker 24 there is a mushroom called Fusarium xyrophyllum. This is amazing.
So it will find a plant called the xyrus plant and it will sterilize it so it can't make flowers.

Speaker 24 But it will then make its own flowers that look exactly like the normal ones, but they're made out of mushroom. Wow.

Speaker 24 Isn't that amazing? Oh my god, like a tofu alternative.

Speaker 23 plant replacement food.

Speaker 24 So you might think you're getting a nice bunch from Interflora, but actually all those roses and lilies and whatever, they're all actually mushrooms.

Speaker 23 That reminds me of the show, Is It Cake?

Speaker 24 Yes,

Speaker 24 there should be a show called Is It Mushroom?

Speaker 24 It looks like a sofa. It's a mushroom.

Speaker 23 And then the final episode, it turns out the host is a mushroom.

Speaker 24 Yes.

Speaker 24 It's a format. You might think I'm the host, but in fact, I'm a parasite.

Speaker 24 That's very funny.

Speaker 24 I read just related to that: this 2024, Bolton, where I'm from in Greater Manchester, has been named the town of culture for Greater Manchester.

Speaker 24 But also this week, it was named as the moldiest town in the whole of the UK. And it just feels like they got the wrong meaning of the word culture.

Speaker 24 Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts.
Thank you so much for listening.

Speaker 24 If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our various social media accounts.

Speaker 24 I'm on at Schreiboland on Instagram, James. My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
Andy. I'm on Twitter at Andrew HunterM.
And Anna, where can they get us all as a group?

Speaker 23 You can go to Twitter or on at No Such Thing or Instagram at no such thing as a fish or you can email podcast at qi.com.

Speaker 24 Yep, or go to our website, no such thingasafish.com. We've got all of our previous episodes up there.
We have the doors to the secret club known as Club Fish. We put lots of bonus material up there.

Speaker 24 It's a really fun place. There's a Discord where all the listeners get to chat to each other.
It's really worth checking out. Do that now.

Speaker 24 And as you will know, we are back on the road with our new tour, Thunder Nerds.

Speaker 24 We are going to be coming to a bunch of cities and towns around the UK, and then we're going down under to Australia and New Zealand.

Speaker 24 Get tickets now before it sells out, or otherwise, just come back here next week. We'll be here with another episode, and we'll see you then.
Goodbye.

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