288: No Such Thing As An Elephant In The Airport

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

I'm sitting here with Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter-Murray. 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 you, James.
Okay, my pet this week is that elephants can tell how much of something is in a closed bucket by smell alone.

So cool.

It's so amazing. So, let's say, let me take one of you, for instance, Dan, because I'm looking at you.
Hello.

If you have two plates of food, and one of them has got three steaks on and and the other one's got one steak, you'd know which one had the most steaks on.

But if you had two boxes of cornflakes that were both closed, you won't be able to tell which one was full of conflakes and which one isn't full of conflakes. And elephants can do this.

So that's insane.

Am I allowed to shake the cornflake boxes and are they allowed to shake the buckets with their noses? You're allowed to do whatever you want.

No one's going to stop you, unless you do it too much in Sainsbury.

But the elephants know they didn't do any touch at all. It was all completely by smell.
And it was, in their particular case, it was two buckets containing 11 different ratios of sunflower seeds.

And they managed to choose the bucket with the most sunflower seeds 59% to 82% of the time, which is more than you would expect by chance.

And actually, even dogs, they've tried this on dogs, and dogs can't do it. So basically, if you've got, say,

two kilograms of cocaine up your bum,

or four kilograms of cocaine up your bum, the dogs wouldn't know which one it was. Right.
I think if you had four kilograms of of cocaine out of your bum, it wouldn't take a snippet to identify you.

Do you think there'll be a marked difference, do you, between the four and the two? I think in your gait, yes.

Do you think the gait would be different? No. No,

it's like a big pocket up there.

Four kilos.

Two kilos. Two kilos is still uncomfortable, Andy.
It's not like you're swaggering along comfortably.

It doesn't have to be one big bag as well. You could do ten small bags.
Oh, great. That's going to make a big difference.
On the entry point, I think it would.

I want to know how you close a bucket. I'm glad you said bucket.

It's buckets with a lid on. The buckets, I wish my buckets came with a lid.
How many buckets do you have? But I have loads.

Yeah, like a bucket you would make a fire in, you would need a lid for, wouldn't you? Why are you making fires and buckets? Well, I'm trying to get rid of all this cocaine I've got out of my bum.

It's really interesting, right? It's not even like these amounts are huge differences. I think I read in the study that, let's say, what were we saying? Seeds of

sunflower seeds. It would be the difference between, say, 150 sunflower seeds and 130.

Not all of them could get it. It's obviously easier for them with bigger differences, but even at that point, they could still do it.

So the other cool thing was they double-blinded it because the experimenters thought we might accidentally give away if we, because we know which buckets have the most sunflower seeds, and we might get really excited when they're going towards the bigger ones.

So they definitely

made sure that the elephants didn't know and the researchers didn't know where the sunflower seeds were. Yeah, okay.

That's useful.

So if you're getting raisins in a supermarket, for instance, and you need to choose the packet that's got the most in them, you could bring an elephant and then you've got your money's worth, right?

Because

they frequently label on the packet how many raisins are in the bag. Not exactly.
Well,

they put the weight on. They don't say this contains 4,000 raisins.

4,000 raisins.

You're not having a good day with your friends today, Annie. I buy in bulk, all right? That must be how many are in a big packet of raisins.
I just buy those.

I just buy those little sun-made boxes the size of

more than 30 raisins in there. Imagine that you've got 10 raisins in your hand, that's a nice handful/slash/mouthful.
Right. You're 4,000, it's 400 handfuls of raisins on each box.

Look, it took a lot of work smuggling these into the country. That was good to sell them.

And you're walking funny.

Just on testing elephants, so there was another test of elephants' smell by the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and they did something really cool. They built an elephant-sized lab mouse maze.

So, you know the stereotype of scientists putting mice in a maze. It's almost always just a Y-shaped maze.

So, they put the mice in at the tail of the Y, as it were, and they'd see which of the two branches it goes into. And they built an elephant-sized one of that.

And they put a bucket of food they liked at one branch of the Y, and they put a bucket of food they didn't like at the other branch of the Y, and they could identify it.

They knew instantly which branch to go for for

smell. Just through smell, again, yeah.

So, do they have they have the best smell of any mammal that we know of?

They do, that's extraordinary. Yeah, they've got the highest number of olfactory receptors, definitely, haven't they?

And I feel like other animals can claim it in a different sense, but yeah, their ability to distinguish between amounts seems to be unique.

And it's so sensitive that, for instance, there was another experiment where they showed that they can distinguish between different people.

So, in Kenya, there are different tribes, and some of them kill elephants, and some of them don't. So, the Maasai kill elephants as a ritual thing, whereas the Kamba people don't.

And if you hold up a Maasai tribesperson's clothes, then the elephant freaks out and starts bashing its trunk at the same time. It's amazing, isn't it? It's absolutely incredible.

But they can do it by sight, which you've just described, and also by smell. Yes, they can do it by sight and smell, yeah.

So they identify the colour of the clothes, but also if they're blinded in their face, they can still smell it. Blindfolded, we should say, blindfolded in the face.
Blindfolded, yes. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, either of those works. Yeah.

Well, it just sounds a lot more cruel than my experiment

to blind a hundred elephants.

You're not going to get approval. Isn't it great to know that it does have the best sense of smell given how big its nose is?

Like you just you would hope that that big nose had some sort of great advantage. And it does.
Well do you know one other thing they can smell? TNT.

And they're very good at it. And in fact in one sense at least they're better than dogs at it.

What's that sense?

Sense of smell.

I think it's the sort of the the proportion they can identify or I the sensitivity score, they score 99.7% and dogs get about 94%.

So there was an article all about this saying, so does this mean that elephants should take over TNT sniffing dogs duties? No, absolutely not.

Their sheer size and weight makes them completely unsuited to being infield TNT detectors. Which I think is fair at airports.

You'd have to go past the sniffer elephants. Well, they're not

sniffing for TNT in airports. This is in the minefields of Angola, isn't it? It's not like they're expecting people to smuggle huge suitcases.
What TNT

security. Oh, well.

Another amazing thing is that... So they're incredibly...
Elephants are incredibly smart, and they've only really started properly experimenting on their intelligence over the last 20 years or so.

We used to think they were idiots, because, for instance, there was this experiment where...

scientists dangled really, really nice smelling fruit and food and stuff at various heights that were too difficult for them to reach. And then they left sticks all over the floor.

And thinking the elephants will pick up the stick, hopefully, and then they'll prod the fruit.

Like a a piñata like a piñata exactly and they didn't so scientists thought well they can't be that smart they can't figure it out they should have hung an actual donkey because that's what an elephant really they wouldn't use one of the basic rubbish piñatas would they they you'd hollow out an actual donkey and yeah sweet you would i don't

i don't know if they have piñatas in their culture though elephants also you've been to some traumatic children's parties if they've hollowed out a donkey

that's tough to get through you'd need a really big stick for a long time

mine and james' parties i'm blinding elephants in one corner, James is scooping the inn and out of a donkey in the other.

Anyway, the point was that they weren't being stupid, not being able to get it with a stick.

They'd pick up the sticks and then they wouldn't prod up the fruit because people didn't understand that elephant sense of smell is so good.

So as soon as they pick up a stick, they can't smell anymore because they've wrapped their trunk around it and so they couldn't smell where the fruit was.

And the scientists, because we're so human, we just think, oh, you just see the fruit because we assume that the sight is the most important thing. But for them, they had to smell where it was.

So it's like putting a a clothes peg on your nose, but they wrapped the nose around the sky. Exactly, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I read a thing saying it's basically like having a nose on the palm of your hand. Every time you touch something, you're smelling it much more than you are touching it.

Butterflies can smell through their feet, can't they?

They have all factory stuff on their feet. So imagine if you had feet like a butterfly and hands like a

this is the worst Bahama Lee.

I found just on the subject of amazing senses of smell,

there is a woman who can smell Parkinson's disease. Oh, yeah.
This is really weird. So there are people with incredible senses of smell, the super smellers, they get called.

And this lady was a retired nurse called Joy Milne, and obviously she'd worked with a lot of patients with Parkinson's, and she'd been to a talk about it by a doctor.

And at the end of it, there was an any questions call, and she put up a hand and said, why aren't you doing something about the fact that people with Parkinson's smell?

And they didn't really, they thought, oh, that's a slightly weird question to ask.

And she, and eventually they worked out that she meant, no, I literally can smell it. And they tested it on her.
And

she can tell before physical symptoms appear. So

they presented her with a load of t-shirts that have been worn either by patients with Parkinson's or people who did not have Parkinson's.

And she got them all right, apart from one false positive where she flagged someone up as having Parkinson's who didn't.

And then later on, that person got in touch to say, oh, by the way, I've just been diagnosed with Parkinson's. Wow.
So she had identified it before. Yeah.

Anyone knew.

That's amazing. That is amazing.
We need to move on in a sec. One more thing about elephant smell.

They smell each other's urine and get a lot of information about the pack, about the herd from that.

And if you, if they're walking in a line, let's say, doing a conga or whatever, and then the one at the front smells some urine from the one at the back because some scientists have taken it and then run to the front of the queue and then put some urine there, they get really confused because they know whose urine is whose.

And if it's at a place where they're not expecting it, they get really confused and looking around and they can't work out what's going on. Wow.

Let's say you came into the bathroom next week when I'm on holiday in Japan and you smelled the urine and you went, funny hell, that's James's urine. I thought he was in Japan.

It's like that. Cool.
And remembering, because that's the other thing.

The two things we assume elephants are good at, smelling through the trunks and remembering, because in the jungle book they say an elephant never forgets. And they don't.

So they remember all the smells of urine, of all the different mates they have.

And also, there's this amazing moment in 1999 at an elephant sanctuary where there was this elephant called jenny they're still going on about this

um there's this asian elephant called jenny and she was suddenly introduced to a new elephant into the sanctuary and they had this amazing reaction to each other they got really freaked out and agitated and then ran up to each other and it seemed like this

exhibition of euphoria for both the elephants and the carer of jenny was like what on earth is going on this is so weird so as you look back into their history and for a few months, 23 years earlier, they'd worked in the circus together.

Whoa!

Just remembered each other. 23 years ago.
That's incredible. Like, Jenny, it was you.
I don't remember anyone I worked with 23 years ago.

You look at us blankly every morning.

I was nearly in a conga the other day. Yeah.

It was at a wedding. It was a very long conga, and everyone was going pie in the conga, and they kept saying, hey, join the conga.
And I kept saying, oh, I'm going to join on the end.

I got about five people say, hey, get in here and make room for me. I said, no, I'll just join on the end.
Did you join on the end? I tricked them all. No.
Not then. No one's going to know.

No one knows.

No one looks behind them in the conversation. Exactly.
But I had already urinated at the very end of their route. So I was there to freak them out.

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

My fact this week is that Thomas Jefferson cut his Bible to pieces and glued it back together in the order he thought thought it should be written.

And wow. Yeah.
Great. He had a better idea for the Bible.
It was in the wrong order. And he was right, really.
So this was the New Testament specifically.

And he was a Christian, obviously, Jefferson, and he had a Bible and he wanted to put it all kind of in chronological order. So he got all the Gospels, he ripped them apart.

He actually had six different volumes, so he could do lots of experimenting. And he had a Greek one, a Latin one, English and French ones.

And he cut up all the Gospels page by page, rearranged all the pages in chronological order.

So, you know, if John said Jesus had a sandwich when he was 17, then Matthew said, and then he went on a slide when he was 20, he'd sort of put Matthew after the John bit, even though in the actual Bible, Matthew would come before the John.

Yeah, yeah, that's a really good idea, Corporal. Because Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, they're all telling the same story.
They're telling the same story, different bits of it.

Is there any good bits that he left out, do we know?

I actually don't know what the examples are that he left out, but I know he left out some of the dodgier miracles. So he was a bit sceptical that some of the stuff might not have happened.

The miracle of the sandwich and the slide face.

Exactly. It was tuna at the top and then it was BLT at the bottom.
Wow.

Clearly a step down, I would say.

And he glued it back together and he liked it so much, his new upgraded version, that he glued all the pages together and he sent them to be bound properly.

And in fact, I believe it still exists somewhere in America. I think it's the library.
Is it the Smithsonian? Is it the Smithsonian? Yeah, of course it is. They've got a lot of Jefferson's stuff.

They've got his Bible, so you can visit it. I'm not sure you can flick through it, but I believe you can see it.
You definitely won't be able to flick through it. Yeah, but it's very unusual.

If there's six volumes, it might be open certain pages. His desk that he wrote the Declaration of Independence on, they have that.

And a polygraph, which I've always thought to be a lie detector, but it's...

Yeah, I would have thought that too. Well, it is, right?

But originally what it was, was a way of, whenever he wrote letters, because because he wrote thousands and thousands of letters, and he always wanted a copy of each letter because if they made it into the papers, he could show the original.

So it was a machine that was designed that would have a double pencil with a double ink well,

and it would mimic his writing. So he wrote two letters at a time, but the same letter.
Yeah. Amazing.
And it makes actually more sense, because polygraph, it means lots of writing.

So it's actually a better term for that machine.

His Bible, he didn't mean it to be published, because it was just a private sort of passion project of his.

He showed it to a few friends, but then after he died, it became very popular, and lots of copies were made of it. It was printed, and it was called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.

That was his title. That was his name, wasn't it? Yeah, he retitled it as well.
The Bible wasn't good enough. Yeah,

he was a kind of a Jesus fan, as opposed to a religion fan in some ways. And then 9,000 copies were printed.

And until the 1950s, when they ran out, each newly elected senator got a version of it when they were elected.

Do you know how it ends the book?

Spoiler realized. His book, I don't know, I don't.
It ends, I believe, now in the place where he was crucified, there was a garden, and in the garden, a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid.

There they laid Jesus, and rolled a great stone to the door of the sepulchre, and departed. That's it.
No resurrection. No resurrection.
Oh,

he just dies. Poor Jesus.
Isn't that amazing? That's like the main bit. That's what I was told at school.
That's like the main bit. That's like the somber art house reinterpretation

realism bullshit.

Yeah, he was an amazing guy, though, Jefferson. He's quite a confusing person, isn't he?

Because he has this bizarre legacy where he came up with the idea that all men are is created equal and then he had six hundred slaves and everything.

And actually, even the Monticello, which is the place that he built his home, very famous home, even the Monticello website now acknowledges that Sally Hawkins mothered about six of his children at least.

Who was an enslaved person? Wow. Yeah.
Who bizarrely was the daughter of a woman who mothered children of his father-in-law. So they kept it in the family.

So his wife's dad had lots of affairs with Sally Hawkins' mum. Wow.
Sorry, it's not Sally Hawkins. That's a famous actress.

Sally Sawyer.

Sally Hemmings. Sally Hawkins is, of course, in Paddington.

Shape of water. She's great.
She was also the mother of a lot of Jefferson's children. Oh, God, she's versatile.
I know. So

he was third president, right, after Washington, and then who was it? John Adams. Yep, yep.
And he, you know, he did a lot of, he had a lot of remarkable achievements in office,

as we said, drafted the Declaration of Independence. He's also responsible for a phrase that was a massive hit in the 19th century in America.
Can't wait to hear this. Yeah.

So he bumped into a man near his home. This is the story.

No one knows if it's true or not. But this guy started complaining.

They were riding their horses next to each other, some neighbor of his, and the guy was complaining about everything in Washington and all these idiots they had running things.

And he talked for a couple of hours, talked Jefferson's ear off about all this. And then eventually they got to Jefferson's house, and Jefferson said, Well, this is me.
And is that the phrase? No,

that would have been a great phrase to come up with.

This is me. This is me.

So the guy eventually asked pretty much the first question he'd asked this whole time. And he said, What's your name, by the way? And the guy's, and he said, Well, my name is Thomas Jefferson.

Uh-oh, massive social clanger this guy's made. He was deeply embarrassed, and so he couldn't think of anything to say.
And he just said, My name is Haynes, and then he galloped away on his horse.

So this became a phrase, My name is Haynes, which is whenever you had to leave suddenly, or whenever you were massively embarrassed about something.

It was basically the 19th century, Boy Was My Face Red. That's what I mean.
Like, I'll get my coat kind of thing. Yes, it is like that.
Yeah. Wow.
And what was it? My name is Haines.

My name is Haynes. My name is Haynes.

Start doing it. And just very quickly on typos in the Bible.
Oh, yeah. There are some absolute doozies.
So there's one in the 1682.

there's a 1682 edition which gets called the Cannibals Bible because there's a typo.

It should be If the Latter Husband Hate Her, and they mistyped it, so it's If the Latter Husband Ate Her, talking about his wife.

And there's a great one, the 1944 King James, which has a line which should be, submit yourselves to your own husbands. It's advice for wives, basically.

But it accidentally reads, submit yourselves to your owl husbands.

That's good advice.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that in 19th century America, caviar was a free bar snack.

Yeah. Actually, I hate caviar.
Do you? Yeah. Oh, well.
I don't like things that are savoury that have the kind of texture that I think sweet things should have. That's understandable.

Well, I know where and when you should not go on holiday in 19th century America because you couldn't move for it.

It was so readily available because there was huge sturgeon fish that's the where the fish that caviar comes from yeah or classic caviar anyway and they were just so thick in the rivers that people put it in bars basically like peanuts to make people thirsty oh yeah it was a way of getting people because it's very salty stuff so there was a way of getting people thirsty oh yeah because it used to be used like salt as well didn't it you'd sprinkle it on a meal just to add a little bit of salty flavour

how did they used to eat it because from what I've read the best place and the sort of most encouraged place to eat it from is the little bit of skin between your index finger and your thumb.

So you place it on there. Oh that's the what's that called? The snuff box yeah.
It's called the natural snuff box or something. Oh, okay.
They say it's because you don't taint the taste by doing that.

So if you use a metal spoon for example that that has a metally taste that can affect the caviar

that sounds just like the kind of thing that high society makes up for weird ways to eat the high society food, doesn't it? But I think if it's a bar snack, it surely should be on a cocktail stick.

And you could get one little egg

i would think it would just be in a bowl like peanuts with like 12 different types of urine i i think it's like that yeah exactly people don't wash their hands coming back from the toilet it's very squidgy to get on your fingers though you can just do it straight with the fingers yeah probably not i mean you need to have a finger bowl next to it yeah let's say in russia you have it on bleeny so maybe they had little bits of bread that's perfect that's like a little micro plate for each bit of caviar that's a very nice way of eating i think but this is the thing so u.s caviar was so common, but Russian caviar was thought to be a lot better.

So quite often, US caviar was exported to Europe and then it was repackaged and relabeled as Russian caviar.

Then it was exported back to the States and sold as Russian caviar as better stuff, even though exactly the same. Amazing.

And basically what happened was the caviar in America was extremely numerous, like you say, because the sturgeon were numerous. But then they overfished them.

And then that meant there was no caviar left in America anymore, which meant you had to get it from Russia, which made it much more expensive. Exactly.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Because in Russia before then, before the Western demand increased, in Russia it was sort of peasant food as well, wasn't it?

It was considered much more peasant foodie than sauerkraut, for instance, which is more of a delicacy. And they use it just as a flavouring.

And it was only when there was apparently a Greek guy called Ioannis Varvalkis who discovered Russian caviar on his travels, said, This is delicious, I'm going to introduce it to high society in Europe.

And then that was what shot its prices up. He made it fashionable.
kind of just shows that food, how much you value it, is just about how fashionable someone says it is.

Apparently, if you were to take, let's say, a 45-kilogram barrel of caviar, I'm not putting this up my Boston James. No, not after last time.

But if you would take this massive barrel of caviar, which is kind of how they transport it, it would take a farm laborer two weeks to earn it back in the olden days in Russia.

And now it would take a decade for them to go. Wow.

Jeez, that's amazing. That's a big difference.

I guess so much of of it is because it's sturgeon i mean you get salmon caviar and you get lumpfish caviar and there are all sorts of other much much cheaper meals which are just fish eggs basically of different kinds but sturgeon has this kind of you know supposed hallmarker quality about it you know it's pretty similar so okay here's a question is caviar vegetarian because it is eggs not vegan for sure it's not vegan i'd say no because you have to um you have to kill the sturgeon in order to get it fair play however there is some i think vegetarian caviar out there where they don't kill the sturgeon.

Oh, yeah. They make a tiny incision and then they massage the sturgeon to get it out of them.
And that's nice. Well, it's quite a rough massage.
So I've originally filled it.

This is a company in Leeds. And then you just squeeze the sturgeon like a toothpaste tube, basically, and all the caviar comes out of it.

And then you put it back in the water? Yeah, it survives. You keep them, yeah.
I was reading about this actually. Yeah,

you can repeat the process every 15 months. Yeah.
Yeah.

I read that there was a scientist called Angela Collar. She spent nine years trying to work out how you wouldn't have to kill the sturgeon in order to extract the eggs.

And I believe it was her who pioneered it. It could be wrong.
Maybe multiple people around the world had the same idea. But the process isn't just doing what you said with the incision.

They give the sturgeons an ultrasound to see if they're ready. And then they have a protein administered, which you're talking about, which releases the eggs.

And then they massage them out like a toothpaste. Yeah.
That's really funny, an ultrasound for a fish. You're going to have 100,000 babies.
Congratulations.

I think they have to give them ultrasounds anyway because there's no way of telling if they're male or female. So you need to make sure that you've got female fish.
I think so from the outside.

So you have to check their innards anyway. Check you've got the right gonads.
That's incredible.

One way that you might get some eggs without killing the sturgeon is sometimes producers will take some of the eggs out to check if they're ready or not.

Because you don't want to kill your sturgeon, get all the eggs out, and it's not at the right stage.

And so some fisheries will take a female sturgeon, put an incision in her, put a straw in her, and then suck out some of the eggs to taste them to see if they taste right.

And then, if they're right, then they'll kill the sturgeon and get the eggs. And if they're wrong, then they'll just let her go for a while.

That must be something someone's doing in a posh Russian restaurant is just serving up live sturgeon, jamming a straw into it.

Yes, but we only have paper straws in our business, so it's good for the environment. And then, do you, what, if it's not ready yet, do you just sew it back up? Yeah, yeah.
And then. That is insane.

Isn't it, Joe? They have a bit of a rough old ride surgeon because it's not just caviar. We also use them for beer, don't we? Traditionally, they were the original icing glass providers.

So that's the swim bladder. And that's what they use to kind of purify beer.
It was used in things like Guinness until a couple of years ago. I think they got rid of it.

It's to clarify alcoholic drinks. Sorry, I don't fully understand it.
So you get the swim bladder, and it's just used in the wine making or the beer making process to get rid of a lot of the sediment.

I think think it's kind of used like a sieve. Yeah.
And so that's why a lot of beers aren't vegetarian or a lot of vegetarian. A lot of vegans can't have wine, can't they? Yeah.

Because of that reason. Yeah.

Sturgeon are amazing. Amazing, amazing fish.
They can weigh up to 1,500 kilos.

Okay.

That's a lot.

I only work in stone.

That's a lot of stone. It is.
No, they are massive.

And they grew up to 28 feet long, which I find, I mean, that's 28 feet long. Right.
The sturgeon. Thank you.
Those are the very, very biggest ever found would have been

around there. Okay.
It's a beluga sturgeon. So it's,

I think beluga sturgeon is the second biggest kind of bony fish. And yeah, it's the length of four men.
That is extraordinary. Yeah.
I see.

And they take a long time to, one of the reasons why caviar is so valuable is that they take so long to reach maturity, right?

So the biggest ones, sometimes it's not until about 20 that they're producing enough caviar. Wow.
You have to wait forever. So as well as eating fish eggs you can eat fish sperm.

There's something called shirako. That's probably not how you pronounce it in Japan.
It translates as white children and it's the war is the raw or cut sperm of the codfish.

And in Russia they eat the sperm of herrings because they like herrings in Russia and they not on they preserve it but not only do they eat it on their own sometimes they will eat it with the row of herrings as well.

So they eat the eggs of the herring and the sperm of the herring

in the same meal.

I think that's a little unkind, isn't it? Why? To whom? To the sperm and the eggs, because they should they belong together. They should be well you're marrying them.

Then you eat one of each and then a herring grows in your stomach.

It's like if you eat an apple seed, then an apple tree will grow out of your mouth. Oh man, we've got a lot of stuff to fill you with.

I do feel like if I ate the sperm and the eggs of a herring, I would genuinely worry about that. Right, yeah.
Yeah,

a little bit. The sperm is called um malaka, which I thought was Russian for milk.

And your Russian lessons are not going well.

And you came back with a pint the other day, didn't you?

Hope you enjoyed your tea.

You get ant caviar too. That's the thing.
What's that? It is ant pupe and larvae, you know, so it's not eggs really, but it's from a particular Mexican ant which is known locally as La Jomiga Pedora.

You say that as if there's only one ant.

It's incredibly, it's incredibly expensive stuff.

He cooks it as well as producing it, so it's a real treat if you're in town.

No, La Jormiga Pedora is the farty ant because their nests smell like farts. The eggs are a delicacy.
Although the larvae, you know. You do get snail caviar, don't you?

Which is quite like fish caviar, apart from it tastes a bit more like snails and fish.

Have you tried it? Yeah. Wow.

You get cowboy caviar?

Is that made of the eggs of cowboys?

No, it's slang.

It's bulls' testicles that are fried. So they're also known as Rocky Mountain Oysters.

Have you? But they also would have those as bar snacks, wouldn't they? In the olden days? Yeah. You would have testicles as bar snacks.

They eat them a lot somewhere. I think it might be in Mexico.
It's still a common eating

somewhere in South America. It was the Montana Testicle Festival that I read about them in.
So maybe Montana is. That makes sense.
You're going to eat them anywhere. It's going to be there.

Confusingly, it's also, from what I can tell online, cowboy caviar is a salad which is just a lot of salad bits thrown together. So there's no sense to it.
It's just a.

Yeah, so be careful when ordering. If you're a vegetarian in Montana.
Yeah.

What else happens at a testicle festival?

I think it's a lot of eating of testicles

competitively. Testicle festival is a very nice phrase to say.
It is. It's very nice.
Yeah. It's true.
It's a favourite waxing of testicles probably I'd have there, like waxing competitions.

There's the big bull contest that I've got here, which is men in wet underwear. So, I guess

that's what it says here. I wonder if you could call it the festicle.
Yes, you could. Or the testival.
No, neither is as good as testicle festival.

Anyway, they've branded it right. They've branded it right.
Well done, guys.

There's another caveat. There's a caviar sort of replacement you can have, which is very much like the real Russian thing.
And this is a replacement for Russian Sevruga caviar.

And this is a kind of caviar that you can get from paddlefish. And basically, where most paddle fish are is a place called Warsaw in Missouri.

And so, apparently, it's so good, this stuff, and all the Russians in Missouri think that this is just like their Seruga caviar back home.

And so, there's this huge black market caviar fishing problem there. And there was a really good, this was on longread.com, I think, a really good longread about it.

And it was about police descending on this place, and its population doubles in the paddle fish fishing season, which is just a couple of weeks long because people flock there to try and get these fish and get the caviar out of it.

And they thought, We know there are all these Russian people who are coming and they're illegally poaching these fish, and then they're going, obviously, selling them, they're getting so many.

And gradually, as you're reading this article, you realize the police have this massive problem because even though they know these fish are disappearing, they know they're illegally taking them, they can't track down any kind of black market, they can't trace any money.

And it turns out, when actually they start arresting people and when they go undercover, then no one's selling it at all. It's just all these Russians just picking it, they're just eating it.

They've just got these big Russian families, so they'll get like tens of thousands of pounds worth of caviar, or some of them will have, you know, about £1,000 worth of just the fish themselves.

And they're like, no, we're not going to, why would I sell this? I'm not going to sell this. They just take it back to their big families and they eat it all.

And so there's nothing really that they can do. And they just get taken to the police station and told, please don't take that fish again and then sent home.
Yeah.

They just like it. They like it in Russia.
I can say that much. I think it's delicious.
I was reading about a sniffer cat called Russic.

Sniffer cat. Sniffer cat.
And they just praises this entire long reading. This amazing industry in America.

Fucking sniffer cat, which looks like a bit of research left over from your elephant research from an hour ago. This is in Russia.

There's a lot of smuggling, or was a lot of smuggling, in the Caspian Sea. So they would come to a checkpoint and people would try and get it through on their cars.

And they found that that was a big problem.

But they had this cat that they had adopted that was, I believe, a stray, who loved eating chunks of sturgeon and caviar and so on that was being confiscated from the criminals.

As a result, they developed a really strong nose for sniffing out whenever there was sturgeon in the area. So

what they started doing was every time a car came up, the cat would be sent to go and, you know, maybe they walked it on the leash. I didn't actually get that detail.

And Russik would have a smell and smell out all of these um bits of sturgeon and caviar and uh so good was he at doing it that they actually retired the sniffer dog that they had

that has got to hurt yeah a sniffer dog and you lose your job to a cat yeah first first i lost my job to the elephant in that airport and now this

but yeah so unfortunately he died in 2013 when a vehicle that he was searching suddenly uh jerked forward

how convenient a hit job

i can't believe they didn't do that sooner i can't believe no smuggler thought of doing that straight away.

So they've got the cat smelling the cars. Are they stationing it on the pavement and cars whiz past and the cat's then like, meow,

and then you notice

that? It's kind of like a speed gun. This is surely at a checkpoint.
It's a checkpoint. You have to stop at checkpoints.
Imagine holding onto the cat and pointing at cars as they go past.

You pull its tail when you want it to sniff something.

Surely once you've stopped a car and you've opened the doors, isn't it as easy for you... We've just covered how big sturgeon are.
I would say I could find sturgeon as easily and quickly as a cat.

You're right, they're massive.

I didn't think they were sat in the sort of passenger seat with a hat and a fake mustache.

This is my friend Bob. What do you say, Kitty? That's a sturgeon.

Thank God for Rossett or whatever he's called.

Otherwise, I would have believed in Bob. And it stinks.
I mean, if there's a car full of fish, I'm going to smell it. I wouldn't need a cat.

But maybe his gift was in telling people about it. Oh, yeah.
Like most cats, if they smell, they're not going to tell you.

I'm not going to grasp them on it. I've not written down the most interesting bit of the story.
It was a talking cat. So sorry.

Missed out the best detail.

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Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that wrestling star Andre the Giant was so massive that once when he drunkenly passed out in a hotel lobby, staff couldn't move him and had to corner him off with velvet ropes until he woke up.

So

this is yeah, this is from a um this is an anecdote that comes from a book called As You Wish, Inconceivable Tales from the Making of the Princess Bride by Carrie Elwez, who was the lead actor in it.

He was also in Robin Hood, Men in Tights.

And the whole book is just anecdotes about the time that they were making the movie, and that's what came out.

The fact that he just used to have all these drunken escapades, one of which meant he, yeah, passed down. And Andre the Giant was in that movie as well, right? He played Phezwick the Giant, yeah.

Okay, really typecast, wasn't he? Yeah, um,

wasn't gonna play Phezwick the more, was he?

Um, and he was a wrestler, Andre the Giant. He was a wrestler before he was a film star.
Absolutely, I mean, that's that's his big career thing, really.

Well, before that, he was a rugby player, and before that, he was in a furniture removal business. And before that, he was a child.

Before that, he was a tiny egg, a professional egg. But he's to the WWF, now the WWE, he is one of the great wrestling stars of all time.

He was in the period of Hulk Hogan and Macho Man and Ultimate Warrior, that sort of very classic era when they started. I just don't get wrestling.

It doesn't make any sense to me. We've covered it before on this podcast, and I find it impossible to research because everything you read about it, you're like...
Is this real?

Did this really happen? The confusion of real sport and fake acting is bewildering. Like, there's this fight between him and Hulk Hogan, which was this really famous fight.

And apparently, it was super controversial. It was in 1988.
And

there was a referee, a famous referee called Dave Hebner, who refereed wrestling matches. And he happened to have an identical twin.
Oh, yes. Who they tracked down for this match.
Referee.

And yeah, the referee had an identical twin. He didn't really, I think.

He did, really.

I've seen the actual pictures. Either he did, or there's some amazing amazing photoshopping going on.
But he had this identical twin.

And so, right, Andre the Giant's agent got Dave, who was supposed to referee the match, locked him in a cupboard, and then bribed Earl, his identical twin, to referee the game instead. And he did.

And then he made Andre the Giant one, and then Dave broke out of his closet, and then him and his identical twin brother had a big fight afterwards in front of the crowd.

This is the weirdest conversation. I really want to hear Anna do the coventry of WWF.

I don't understand any of this. Is that real? Oh my god!

But there's storylines. There's storylines.
You go to the theatre all the time. Are you standing up going, what the fuck is going on here?

No, no, no, no, because in the write-ups of the theater, it doesn't say, and there was an incredibly controversial moment when Hamlet's mother remarried Hamlet's uncle, and the audience can you're like, oh, okay, this is a story.

Whereas in the Wikipedia page, this is what I'm saying.

Was it controversial? Or was it all made up? up?

Is it

all made up? It's all made up. Then why is it controversial? It's controversial in the world of wrestling.
Which is a fake world. Yeah.
Yeah. Okay.
Now you're getting it.

No, it is weird how it's presented as true. You know, normally in plays, there is a synopsis.
Normally, when you go out of the play, the thing doesn't keep happening outside.

No, but. I just think it's amazing that we found the edge of Anna's comfort zone.

Yeah.

I never thought we'd get there. Who would know it was pro wrestling is fake?

It just makes me have a panic attack when I read about it. But it's a drama like EastEnder's.

It goes on and on. EastEnders' characters don't smash out into the news at 10 and suddenly they're brawling and what about the guy from Holly Oaks was fighting the guy from Emmerdale last week.
What?

I missed that. Yeah, one of them got fired in real life, I think.
Yeah. Although this is all making me wonder about Emma Ellis.
Wait, hang on. So there was a real-life fight between a camera.

Someone in Emmerdale and and someone in Holly Oaks. Was it Holly Oaks? Yes, it was Holly Oaks.
They got a big fight. Wow.
Physical fight? Yeah? Yeah.

I thought you meant that someone from Hollyoaks turned up in Emmerdale, like a character sort of made his way through the membrane and he ended up because I definitely watched that as well.

Like a weird portal opens between the worlds. It's like the Truman Show or something.
One of the pint glasses from the old Vic suddenly smashes through the coronation streak.

But can we get back to Andre the Giant? Oh sorry, Andre the Giant. Or was he a giant?

He was actually three children in a massive undercover.

So when he was drinking, according to Carrie Elwers, when he was drinking in New York once, the NYPD had to send an undercover cop to follow him around the bars because if he got too drunk, there was once time where he fell over and crushed a human underneath, and they didn't want that to happen again.

Not to death. No, no, just I think he was stuck.
You know,

that's seven foot two of massive, massive body on you. He got so tall, because he had acromegaly, you know, that was the cause of his giant size,

that his parents did not recognise him. So he left home at 14.
He came back at 19, and they said, who are you? And they'd even seen him wrestling on TV without recognising who he was.

But yeah, they didn't realise until quite late, right? So he wasn't sort of amazingly huge. He was normal until he was 15, normal-sized until he was 15.

And we keep saying he gets drunk, but to give him credit, I don't think he really did get drunk very often.

He basically held his drink incredibly well and he drunk extraordinary amounts like he'd drink a hundred over a hundred beers in a night and be fine or I think someone was once asked how much can he drink before he's drunk and someone said he starts uh he starts to feel it after the first bottle of vodka or something so he used to order a drink which was a concoction that consisted of 40 ounces of just random liquids which he called the american he just he had it poured into a pitcher so glad he didn't have a cocktail bar because that is the most disgusting sounding drink.

Constantly random liquids on a menu. Well that's Carrie Elwez again.
This is from him and he says it I've never tasted airplane fuel but I imagine it's very close.

It's like a top shelf you would have. Like let's say it was your 21st birthday and your friends wanted you to get drunk.
They'd buy you a top shelf which is basically one of every shot in a glass. Oh.

Your friends would have done the same thing I'm sure. Well yeah we would have done but we didn't finish our croquet in time so we all had to go home.

When Andre the Giant was in Paris one day he realized that the cars there were quite small and he could just move them around if he wanted to because he was so strong.

And so he would get his friends, because in America they're much bigger, right? So he would get his friends' cars and then move them into tiny little spaces where they couldn't get around.

God, it would make parking easier. If you could just get out of the car and lift it into the space.
That's such a good idea. He could hardly get into cars.
He was so huge. This is amazing.

There's photos of him getting in and out of a car and he basically went, had to go in on all fours and be the entire back seat was him.

You know? Yeah, he once got into a taxi and they couldn't close the door. Whoa.

Who was it that I think we've done it on the podcast before, but when he was a kid, because he couldn't get the bus, the normal bus, he used to be driven to school by Samuel Beckett?

Samuel Beckett, but that's not true. Is that not true? That was actually another thing that Elwers claimed,

but wasn't quite true. So he grew up in the same French town, weirdly, as Samuel Beckett moved to in Monlien.

And apparently, Beckett was kind of a friendly guy and used to drive the kids to school. Okay.
And in a way, that was okay back then.

And sometimes he would hit to ride with them, but he could fit on the bus. Because how small would a bus have to be if, you know.

No, he had a pickup truck and the kids would sit on the back of the truck. So it is true that he used to lift.
Yes, he did. It just wasn't because he couldn't fit on the bus.
Right, okay. Got it.

He was a really nice guy, though, wasn't he? Everyone said he was very much a gentle giant, everyone called him.

And didn't, someone said he didn't like hurting people, which now I understand that wrestling isn't really about really hurting people, does make sense.

But he was friends with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Arnold Schwarzenegger in this PBS documentary that you should watch if you're really interested in Andre the Giant.

But Arnold Schwarzenegger said that he was at a restaurant with him once, and Andre used to always insist on paying for anyone's dinner or anyone's drinks when he went out with them.

And so Arnold knew this, and he tried to sort of sneakily pay. And Andre lifted him up off his chair and put him on top of a cupboard.

That's brilliant. Well, bizarrely, and it's weird seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger say this word.
It's an arm moi. So he says, and Andre just lifted me up and he put me onto the arm armoire.

Wow. I never thought I'd see Arnold Schwarzenegger use the word armoire.

He was meant to play Physic. He was meant to play the role in Princess Brown.

Yeah. He was the original casting choice.
He couldn't do it. It was such a different film.
Yeah. Yeah.
And he didn't because it took so long to make, didn't it? It took about a decade to make.

And by then, Arnie was too famous.

It took a decade to get into production, I think.

And by then, Arnold Schwarzenegger had a real career. Gosh.
Wow. I've got some facts about alcohol tolerance, but I don't know if you've got more on Andre the Giant.

Oh, just that he kept a small farm and he would walk around and play with the animals because they didn't stare at him for his size. I think that's bullshit as well, but worth saying.

No, I think he definitely likes not being stared at.

It's kind of a tragic life he had because he was obviously lovely and knew that his career depended on being huge.

But at the same time, he said the Princess Bride was the happiest he'd ever been filming that because for the first time ever, people didn't stare at him.

Because I guess he was just an actor on set and they knew what to expect. He loved it.

And in fact, there was a really nice interview with one of his friends called Lanny who said that after he'd filmed The Princess Bride, Andre invited him out to his house and gave him a bunch of alcohol and said, Hey, do you want to come into my drawing room?

I'll show you something. And made him watch the film.
And then he kept inviting him around and kept making him watch it. And he did it with all his friends because he loved it, he was so proud of it.

And he'd say, you know, did you think I was good in it? Do you think I was all right in The Princess Bride? And they'd all be like, Yeah, you were really great in that. Don't worry.

Have you guys all seen this movie? Because I actually don't even know what it's about. So,

like, is it a

fantasy? It's a fantasy film,

But a very funny one. Yeah.
It is an amazing film, if anyone listening hasn't seen it. Yeah, it's a classic, isn't it? Yeah.
Yeah, it's very good.

I also did a bit of reading about just other people who drank a lot. Okay.
So Oliver Reed, one of the great hellraisers of the 20th century. I didn't know this.

He would frequently expose his penis when drunk. Standard practice, I guess.
But he got a tattoo of an eagle's claw on his penis.

I know. Painful.
Well, it was just a tattoo of one. It wasn't an actual claw.
Yeah, but do you think people got confused and thought an eagle had landed on his

well, he then later got an eagle's head tattooed on his shoulder, and he would show fellow drinkers his shoulder tattoo, and then he'd say, Would you like to see where it's perched?

And then get this cock out.

Wow. I know.
That's quite a labor-intensive practical joke, isn't it? It really is.

So he died on the set of Gladiator, you know, to sort of reconstitute his role for the final film. But when he died, he'd had 12 double rums, lots of whiskey, and an arm wrestle.

And which of those killed him?

I think it was the previous 60 odd years that killed him. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Wow, yeah. Just another film giant is Richard Keel, and he's the guy who played Jaws in

Jaws.

He was amazing. I really believe.
He's actually a sturgeon.

So famous fish, Richard Keel. No, he played Jaws in the Bond films.
But he had lots of jobs before he became an actor. So he was, first of all, he was a cemetery plot salesman.
I just like the idea.

So he was seven foot two, whatever, seven foot three. Imagine someone selling you a cemetery plot who's a giant.
And then he was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman.

You know how if you're if you bury someone, they're six feet under, he could stand at the bottom of that plot and still talk to you and you'd be able to see his face.

Wow. And what else was he? A vac vacuum cleaner salesman.
A vacuum cleaner salesman. And then he married a woman called Diane, who was five foot one.

And she did an interview and they said, yeah, also, sorry. He's got lovely knees.

Interestingly, the opposite. They said, why did you marry him? And she said, we just see eye to eye on most things.

Sweet. That's very sweet.
Any more for anymore? I'm done. I'm out.
I mean, I'll just tell you. Go on, tell us.
Well, it's just another Hellraiser factor. It's not really relevant.

But Peter O'Toole, big old drinker.

When he was filming Lawrence of Arabia, he found and bought a precious pair of Greek earrings, but he had to get them through customs, so he smuggled them through in his foreskin.

Wow. No.
I didn't expect that.

I told you it wasn't relevant.

Are you sure, Jumbo? Are you sure it's there?

We better get the cat as well.

My second opinion.

She's an elephant, he's a cat. Together, they fight crime.

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

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland.
Andy.

At Andrew Hunderer M. James.
At James Harkin. And Scaczinski.
You can email a podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account at No Such Thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

We have everything up there from upcoming tour dates to links to all of our previous episodes. We even have a behind-the-scenes documentary called Behind the Gills.
Check that out as well.

It's us on tour. It's really fun.

Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts.
We'll see you again next week. Goodbye.

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