230: No Such Thing As Tinder For Sloths

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

My name is Dan Schreiber and 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 our first fact, this week that's my fact.

My fact is according to a new scientific study, the best way to perform CPR is to do it while humming the macarena.

How cool is that?

And I think they recommend humming it because because they probably don't believe if you're trying to save someone life and you're going,

you're the right person.

And they have the actual lyrics that you just did then.

Does anyone know the actual lyrics?

I think everyone knows the word macarena and know the word in that song.

Yeah, exactly.

But it's what it is about this song is that it has a BPM.

So every song has a beat per minute, and this BPM is 103.

And as a result, when they're trying to teach people the perfect pounce that you need on a chest as you're trying to save someone's life, the macarena happens to be the the perfect amount.

And before that, they used to think it was staying alive by the bee geese.

That's right.

Because that's about 103 or 104 as well.

Yeah.

But actually, it also, maybe it's supposed to be about 100 is the best.

Right?

Okay.

But macarena is good because everyone kind of knows the beat of that, so it's good to do.

But I thought I'd look at some others that are 100 beats per minute.

So if anyone's having a heart attack, you should try these ones.

Crazy in Love by Beyoncé.

Independent Women by Destiny's Child.

Oh.

Yeah, any of these work.

Hips Don't Lie by Shakira, that's my favorite.

Or My Chemical Romance, Dead.

Yeah.

Ah, not a good one.

That's not a good one.

I found a few more.

So Simon and Gorfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water.

If it's just a nice mood, you want to chill everyone out.

Sometimes the situation doesn't need something fun, okay?

Sometimes poignancy is needed.

But the way they sing that on the X Factor, which is the slowest song in the history of time,

it doesn't have any beat.

You just, you'd pause on the.

Lack of bridge.

Da da da da da da da da da da da macaretta.

Tiandi knows a lyric.

Oh god.

I think Shorty the Macaretta is a bad one because no one's ever been able to hear it or hum it without actually doing the dance.

And as soon as they're doing the dance,

very difficult to do.

And also if you watch anyone doing the dance, a load of people, they lose their rhythm almost immediately, don't they?

And half of them are doing one thing and half of them are doing something.

Ideally, what you want is four people who need it surrounded you right around you so you can turn to the next person,

start administering it, get to the next.

It's a good way of multitasking and fair sharing.

So, Macarena is by Lost Del Rio.

Yes.

Okay, and this is very much a one-hit wonder, isn't it?

They never had any other hits at all.

James, I have got at least one of their other hits right here on my paper.

Go on.

It's Macarena Christmas.

It was released about 18 months after Macarena, and it is, I kid you not, the worst song ever released.

It's a medley of jingle bells, Joy to the World, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, and the Macarena.

Oh, wow.

Because often they just break off and they do a bit of Macarena.

They released, I think, five or six albums.

One of them was Macarena Non-Stop, which is a compilation album.

It only has eight tracks, and five of them are the Macarena.

But you know what's amazing about Lost El Rio, this band?

They got together in 1964, I believe it was, 62 or 64, the same year that the Rolling Stones got together, they had their hit 32 years into their career.

That was finally, they were like, should we give up?

I'm sure we're gonna hit it one day, mate.

Let's do it.

And they did.

And then they must have thought, wow, we've made it.

And that was the end of their career.

Yeah.

So they're still going, they're still performing.

But are they?

When I was researching this, I read an article from 1999, the headline of which was, does anyone remember the macarena?

I mean, and that's, what was that about that?

What a stupid article.

Everyone remembers the macarena.

I watched a video.

You know, you come see these on YouTube where they show teenagers' stuff from the 90s or whatever and see if they know what it is.

Yeah.

Every single one of them knew what the macarena was.

Yeah.

No one knew the band, but they all knew the song.

Yeah.

And in 2003, so that's 10 years after the record was released, they were still making a quarter of a million dollars a year in royalties.

Wow.

And it's extraordinary, the original macarena dance, there was an original.

That was the second dance.

It was when they made the video, when there was a remix done of the song.

What was the first one?

The first one was was an incredibly complicated flamingo dance that was done in clubs.

You would have to be an expert in order to do it.

It had double the amount of moves that the original verse had.

Wasn't it invented by

a random aerobics teacher or dance teacher or something?

Yeah, Mia Fire.

Yeah, or Mia Fry.

She was in the video clip, and so she wanted something that kids could dance to and adults who have to go to nightclubs but don't know how to dance could dance to.

So the four of us bow to her and say,

you've saved us.

Actually Macarena it's about a woman called Macarena

but the name Macarena was originally Magdalena and it was just a word for like a sensuous woman and it comes from Mary Magdalene.

Then it was a word for any kind of prostitute and then it was a word for a sensuous woman.

So really it should be hey magdalena.

Hey prostitute.

Well and isn't it about a woman who mentioned prostitute?

In the song the lyrics are actually the woman saying don't worry about my boyfriend he's gone off to fight you two or his best mates do you want to shag instead is that

maccarena

it's not a good message to be sending 12 year olds a disco no um this is this is just a little nugget that i enjoyed um it went to number one in france uh it went to number one in a number of countries but not in the uk not in the uk interestingly uh because uh it was beat

by

TLC.

No, wannabe by the Spice Girls.

No,

wow.

That was bad luck, wasn't it?

Because it's like the biggest song of all time, but they pay up against it.

There was a big gasp around the room at that 20-year-old chart news.

Yeah.

Hey, guys, and Blur beat Oasis to number one as well.

What?

What?

Ouch.

Do you think they were probably sad but quietly confident going, it's all right, we've got macarena Christmas in the bag.

We'll be back.

And then Tooth Become One came out and they had

So in France they went to number one.

Do you know what song they knocked off the number one?

Is that a French song?

No, no.

Is it Jeana Regret Rienne, the only French song anyone knows?

No.

It was the theme tune to the X-Files.

Oh, yeah.

And that was number one.

That was number one in France.

I think that was number one in the UK.

Oh, it did well in the UK.

Isn't that tubular bells?

Mike Oldfield did a cover of it later.

How weird is that?

You were thinking the Exorcist.

Yeah.

Should we talk about CPR?

Let's talk about CPR.

If you have a problem with CPR, as in, so a lot of people are quite light, and you need a lot of pressure to get someone's chest deep enough to get the blood flowing while you're waiting for the ambulance.

So if you are light, a tip is to jump on the person who you're trying to administer.

So you could actually be doing the macarena while kind of just...

Yes, you could.

Wow.

Sorry, I say tip, and I've like...

There's no medical advice on this stage.

I think that's fair to say.

Yes.

Don't use this tip.

There is a doctor, though, who does recommend using the feet.

I think people have said, especially if you're a bit older, you've lost some of your muscle strength.

But also advice now or advice released in 2010, it's always changing, is don't do the breathing anymore.

None of the snogging, you just do the hands to the heart, don't you?

You just do the heart function.

So you do the bit that isn't so much fun.

Yeah, exactly.

Just the jumping up and down.

The mouth-to-mouth one's really weird because it kind of was discovered in the 18th century and then it just got forgotten about for about 50 to 100 years and basically no one did it at all and then it came back.

And the reason they stopped it is because they realized what was coming out of your mouth when you breathed and it's carbon dioxide and they were saying well what's the point of breathing carbon dioxide into someone's lungs because they breathe oxygen yeah and you know what the answer is you know why that's not true uh no it's because when you breathe in and breathe out you actually only absorb about 40% of the oxygen so there's still plenty of oxygen in your breath

and any kind of oxygen is better than nothing okay so how long if we started some if someone breathed in at the edge of the room here and then they passed the breath around the room how long would it be before there was no point in that exercise exercise?

I think it's worth a try, isn't it?

All right.

I feel an experiment coming on.

Okay.

I think we should start with that topless guy.

You and that.

Oh.

But people have tried all sorts of weird CPR over the ages.

There used to be the barrel type, where

there was a big round barrel and you were sort of strapped to it, face down with your stomach over the barrel.

And I don't know how you did this so quickly when someone's obviously dying of a heart attack in front of you.

And then as the person who's saving them, you sort of stood in between their legs and you roll them on and off the barrel, don't you?

And it was the idea was that it eventually forced your heart into going again.

Really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like one of those, did you ever go to playgrounds where you would run on a barrel that span round and round?

Yeah, but I've seen cartoons where that happens.

Right, yeah.

Well, that's medical advice from the Victorian age.

Hey, we need to move on to our next fact shortly.

Oh, can I just...

So you know how people are always giving mouth-to-mouth and CPR to animals weirdly successfully?

What?

No.

Yeah, totally.

Yeah.

You know how people are always giving mouth-to-mouth to animals weirdly successfully?

There was a guy this year.

Are you going to talk about the guy this year with the...

Well, there are...

The frog?

There's a guy this year who did it with a frog after the frog.

What's happening here?

Oh, is this your fact?

No, it's not mine, actually.

Mine was the one I was going to say, Dan.

Let's do your fact.

You do the frog thing.

Let's.

No,

this was a deer.

And it was a deer who was drowning in a swimming pool.

And an RSPZA officer was called.

And he got the deer out of the pool and he gave it chest compressions and CPR and mouth to mouth.

Gave it the kiss of life until it choked.

He said it properly like in films, coughed water into his mouth.

And then he started choking.

It then had to give him CPR.

Where does the frog come into this?

Yeah.

Anyway, the deer got up, he brushed it down, and then he said the deer looked at him and then ran away.

Sweet.

Yeah, it's a good story, Anna, but I just wonder, has anything happened with any smaller, maybe amphibious frogs?

No, it hasn't.

I think we're moving on.

Interestingly, a frog got involved in a...

This is a great story.

There was a...

I can't wait this guy was walking just minding his own business when he came across a snake on the ground and the snake was choking and he thought i'm not going to give cpr to a snake how can you tell a snake is choking it was sort of like doing that okay yeah yeah and suddenly out of its mouth shoots a frog so it swallowed the frog but the the frog forced its way back out okay but in the process died the man saw the frog and he gave cpr to the frog and he brought it back to life yeah and he brought the frog home to the snake he doesn't doesn't feature in the rest of the story.

What happened to the fly that I imagine was the initial feature of the solar

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All right, look, we need to move on to our next fact.

It is time for fact number two, and that is Chaczynski.

My fact this week is that Donald Trump negotiated an extremely bad deal for himself when he wrote The Art of the Deal.

This is because a, so Tony Schwartz was the guy who ghost wrote the art of the deal with Trump, and he gave a talk a while back and he openly said Trump negotiated an extremely bad deal with me.

I got a great deal out of it.

He did an unheard of thing so there was an advance of half a million dollars for the art of the deal and Trump gave his ghostwriter 50% of the advance and then 50% of all the royalties.

So this guy has just been making millions and millions from this book.

This is unheard of in publishing.

I think someone who, a negotiating professor called Deepak Malhotra said there is not a better deal out there in the world for ghostwriting.

And then when the book came out, Trump hosted an absolutely massive party, didn't he?

In Trump Tower, I think it was.

There was a big red carpet, loads of celebrities came, there was a giant cake replica of Trump Tower, and then he went to his ghostwriter and he went, well, you owe me 50% for the price of this party.

And the ghostwriter went, I don't think so.

And he ended up paying about a thousand pounds just for the drinks that him and his friends had.

Oh, really?

Do you know what the inspiration for the book was?

For the book, The Art of the Deal?

No.

There was an article all about Trump in GQ,

and it was a popular article, as if that issue of GQ sold well because Trump was on the front cover, he was a businessman at the time.

And then they thought, well, why don't we see if we can turn this into a book?

So they tested out what the book would look like.

They designed a dummy cover, and then it had a picture of him looking heroic on the front.

And then they wrapped it around a thick Russian novel and thought what it would look like: a thick Russian novel.

Guys,

the clues were there from the start.

Wow.

No?

no, okay, all right, on we go.

What's exciting is you've all heard something that won't be in the actual show when we release it, so that's

he has a bad record of deal-making, though, right?

He's um, this was actually in an article by Jonathan Friedland, I think, in The Guardian, pointing out his deal-making history.

But so, The Apprentice, first series, extremely successful.

Um, so he asked for an increase in what he was paid, I think it was per episode, so he got 50 grand.

He asked for an increase to $1 million.

That's a good deal making, isn't it?

That sounds like good deal making.

He ended up with 60 grand.

But no, a lot of people say not a good deal maker.

Someone else who's done a deal with him said he seems way too keen.

You've got to seem cool.

He sort of paces around the room like he's wearing a sign saying desperate.

And who said that, Vladimir?

What was he called?

He chose to remain anonymous.

Do you know he released a novel years ago?

Really?

Yeah, called Trump Tower.

And then he effectively unreleased it in that the novel still exists, but he took his name off.

So it was ghostwritten by someone else.

And he had his name, though.

It was a Donald Trump book.

It was called Trump Tower.

And it was a book based on an idea for a TV show that he developed, which was meant to be Trump Tower, done like the TV show Dallas or all those American soaps.

It was the life of all the people that worked in Trump Tower.

And they got a pilot, but the pilot didn't get made.

So they ended up doing this book.

And on the front, it said it was the sexiest novel of the decade.

Wow, which decade?

It was 2011.

Was it?

It was 2011.

It's a current.

He's predicted we still cannot top the sexiness of this book.

Wow.

It was an erotic novel, wasn't it?

Yeah.

First novel.

And so I was reading some snippets of it.

It is, this is how erotic it is.

So someone walks into a room, a guest in Trump Tower, and sees at least six women not wearing tops and says, I must be dead.

I've gone to boob heaven.

That was an actual line in an actual novel.

Just very quickly, he's also really good for books, Donald Trump, because anytime he tweets about a book that he doesn't like, it does really well.

So, for example, Fire and Fury became massive off the back of him taking it down.

And there was a very famous, he's a civil rights icon in America called John Lewis, and he wrote a number of books.

He wrote a tweet saying, I don't think he's fit for president.

And Trump took him down massively.

As a result, the sales increase of his books were over 100,000%.

And in the weekend of the tweet, seven of the top 20 books were attributed to John Lewis.

All his books just rose to the top.

Wow.

So he's actually good for book sales if he hates you.

The John Lewis brand is very different in America, isn't it?

Yes, yeah.

I've got a couple of bad deals from history

that I've researched.

So the fact being that Trump negotiated a bad deal for the art of the deal.

I thought this was quite fun.

In America, the NFL, there's a team, the Green Bay Packers, and they had a player called Mirror.

M-I-R-E-R.

yeah I never heard of him oh okay he was he was a big deal back in the day and his contract he was so wanted by this team that his agent put a clause in the contract that they eventually the team had to sign and the clause was that my Myra would be paid under all conditions and then this is the clause up to and including the end of the world

including including the end of the world so if some people survived and he was one of them and they were one of them they would still pay him for all the apocalyptic future that they lived through.

Imagine if they were the last two people I had.

I've got a bad deal.

Oh, yeah.

So, there's a famous story about the Dutch buying Manhattan Island from the Native Americans for a very small amount of money, and them thinking, oh, these Native Americans, they don't understand the value of property, they don't understand the concept of property rights.

They absolutely did.

The problem was, the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Canasi Native Americans who happened to live next door in Long Island and did not live in Manhattan?

They only used the Isle of Manhattan to get drunk in.

And the Dutch showed up and they offered to buy the place from these people, saying, Is this your place?

Oh, great, well, we'll buy you this for it.

So it's like going to a pub and offering a random man standing outside the pub, quite drunk, £100,000 for this building.

I got another sporty one.

This is a Swedish soccer player called Stefan Schwartz.

Do you remember him, James?

So he was paid a £4 million deal with Sunderland for the English Premier League.

The condition that he had to sign when he was signing, which for him was a bad deal, is he was not allowed to go to space.

That was the

space tourist.

He was obsessed with going to space, and they were like, he's obsessed so much, we just have to say, no, you've got to play football.

We're going to put that in the contract.

Maybe that's a deal breaker, too.

Is it?

Right.

We need to move on to our next fact.

Should we do that?

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

My fact is that on the bio-tapestry, you can tell how how important someone is by the size of their horse's penis.

So there's a professor at the University of Oxford, he's called George Garnet.

He has gone through the bio-tapestry, the whole thing, rigorously counting the horses and their penises.

And presumably there are the same number of penises as horses.

There might be some female horses.

There are some female horses.

I forgot they didn't have penises.

Yeah.

I actually think they already

fool you.

also written out.

I think they might be hidden by a leg.

Yeah, sometimes someone's standing in front of the horse or...

Or amusingly holding a vase in front of the horse.

Or the horse is wearing a pair of novelty trousers

or it's a pantomime horse and they famously don't have penises.

Well, they have two, some of them.

Oh, that's my horse.

That's a very good point.

So he counted all of these, and he points out that King Harold,

who came second in the Battle of Hastings, he has a horse which has a very large penis, but there's one larger horse penis, and that belongs to William the Conqueror.

So

it's a clear the man who wins the battle has the largest horse's penis.

Wow.

Wow, and this is new, right?

This is a breaking.

No, no, it's up at 66.

It was fine.

This study is new.

This is new research.

This is breaking.

This is to a lot of people in the room, this is like.

This is like the Spice Girls and the Macarena all over again.

Yeah.

Yeah, so this is very exciting, previously neglected research.

He counted all the human ones as well.

He did, sorry.

There are

four and a half, would you say?

That's a bit harsh on the guy who had a half.

It was a wound.

But I think what happened was a lot of people have kind of paid attention to this in the past because in Victorian times they were all edited out.

And there is one guy who had a pair of underpants drawn on him or tapestried on him by the Victorians.

That was in the English one, right?

There's an English rap.

Yeah, sorry, in the replica.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But this is the first time people have looked at all of them, including the horse ones.

Yeah, yeah.

Dude, I couldn't believe the.

So I don't actually know much about the Bay of Tapestry, not being English myself.

So this is.

Yeah, and it's a frequent topic of conversation in English hubs and children.

I am so lost at dinner parties every time it comes.

If you walk around the festival site here, you'll find two or three hundred people talking about the Bay of Tapestry.

Actually, it gets a bit boring sometimes, you know.

So I literally had no knowledge of it all.

So it's fascinating to know that this thing was, A, it was 68, 70 meters long, which is incredibly long.

If you put that into context,

that's about 30 meters less than 100.

No, it's like, that would take Usain Bolt roughly seven seconds to run.

He's the fastest man running the Bea tapestry.

The thing is, as well, is that, A, turns out it's not a tapestry at all.

No.

It's embroidery.

So it's got the wrong name.

But also, if you read the whole thing up until recently, when they decided to fix this, the final scene is missing.

Imagine reading 70 meters of story and getting to the final scene, and someone's ripped the page out.

As in the, it's William's coronation, isn't it?

That they're missing.

And they added it, so they finished, was it 2013, I think?

Or only a few years ago?

They did it on an island, on a channel island.

There was over 400 people that did it, and one of the stitches was done by Prince Charles.

So despite the fact it lives over in France,

made using British royalty.

Wow, that's cool.

And a lot of people think it was made in Britain anyway, in Kent.

And a lot of people think it was made completely by women because of the penises, in fact.

So historians think that there is the occasional erect penis on a dead soldier.

And the theory is that the tapestry or embroidery was therefore stitched by women, and the women were ridiculing the men for the fact that they used war to show off their manhood.

So it was thought to be kind of a satirical thing, women were saying, you idiots.

So the people used to fight with no trousers.

Yeah.

Really?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

No,

there was a battle, wasn't there, where the English had terrible dysentery or diarrhea and they all took off their trousers.

That was Henry V, so it was the Battle of Agico.

It was the Battle of Agincourt.

But so why are there naked people in there if people wore trousers?

So naked people are mostly in the margins, aren't they?

So there's the main bit, there's the main strip of the bio-tapestry, but yeah, the main story of the battle.

And then at the top and the bottom, there are these margins.

There's this amazing thing where they're, I love the embroidery because you, when you see old art, you assume, oh, it must be done perfect, you know, the perspective and everything and there's a couple of moments in the tapestry where they've run out of space so there's a there's four people holding um a chest on on four sticks or two sticks rather four of them and there's three of them that are nicely done but they went a bit too high on the tapestry so the fourth guy's head like

just making a quick cameo into the tapestry uh when really it should have been gone very fun my favorite part of the bayo tapestry is the bit where odo earl of kent is whispering to william telling him what to do in the battle.

And it kind of makes him look like he's really the important person who was the architect of the whole invasion.

But it turns out that it seems like it was him who commissioned the tapestry

and gave himself a massive role in there.

And he was quite interesting, wasn't he?

Because he was never seen with spears or anything in the tapestry because he was a bishop and bishops weren't allowed to shed blood.

So instead, he's always seen with a massive club.

So they were allowed to beat people around the head, which apparently didn't draw any blood.

Have you you seen the reviews of the bio tapestry

they're great what uh they're well trip advisor reviews everything in the world oh okay and as with all things the most funny reviews are the one star ones so there is a complaint actually there is actually one star isn't there hailey's comic oh

anyway i feel like you're gonna say something funny yeah well you know

thunder stolen um no so the reviews are things like so one review says we went on a visit to the bio tapestry big learning curve for some people we were walking along looking at the tapestry.

Not much to see to be honest.

All of a sudden, I see a large phallic object sewn on the tapestry.

This attraction is not displayed as containing adult content.

We had very young children who could see the penis, which is an outrage.

I wanted to learn about medieval battles, not medieval penises.

That's one star.

One star.

And there's another one star review which just says, nine quid and 40 minutes to see a carpet.

Nah.

But nine quid and seven seven seconds for Usé Maltz

was very blurry.

I like the little touches in the tapestry because people used to add kind of slight digs at people or what they thought of certain figures in it.

So there's one, there's one really nice bit actually where Harold, when Harold first went over to see William the Conqueror in France, him and his men then got in boats to go back across the channel to Britain.

And there's such a good picture of him and all his men holding up their kind of hose and all their stockings and everything.

and they've taken their shoes off, they're carrying their shoes and they're carrying their pets and stuff in their arms because they're wading through the water to get to their boats.

And it's just exactly like you know when you're at a beach and you sort of wander into the water.

What's going on?

Pets.

They brought pets with them.

One person had a dog under his arm and another person was holding a bird, which seems unnecessary, but

yeah.

Maybe a helpful war dog or a snipper dog or something.

Yeah.

You know, Nigel Farage wears his favourite tie, is a Bayer tapestry tie because it reminds him of the last time Britain was invaded.

How long is it?

It's the same thing.

Yeah, it's an exact replica to scale.

Yeah, right.

So it's just constantly dragging.

He's just screaming behind him.

He has some bridesmaids who carry it along.

That's interesting because when I was looking at Odo, Bishop of Bayer, who was the guy who commissioned this, I went onto the BBC website and they said that he was the least popular figure in Kent's history.

But then I looked up other people from Kent who were unpopular, and Nigel Farage is from Kent,

as well as the most unpopular person, Nasty Nick from Big Rugger One.

Oh, no way, don't tell these guys, they didn't even know about the Spice Girls' chart history yet.

Nasty Nick will blow their minds.

We should move on to our final fact shortly.

Anything before we do?

Yeah, should we go for it?

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

Okay, and my fact this week is that if you're a sloth, every time you go for a poo, it's more painful than childbirth.

Is that you impersonating childbirth?

I was just trying it, yeah.

Is that more painful than human childbirth?

I believe it is, because actually, sloth childbirth is not that painful because baby sloths are super small.

They're about 14 ounces.

Whereas sloth poos are at least twice as big, maybe more,

and they can lose up to one-third of their body weights during death.

Oh, God!

They do it once a week.

It's the equivalent of if I did a poo that would be too big to check into a Thompson's flight.

I mean what's the purpose of your visit for a start?

Their stomachs physically shrink every time they do it.

But how do we Has someone laid a woman mid-labor next to a sloth mid-poo and what judge the volume of the screaming?

I think.

How do we know?

You're right.

I mean, to be honest, there's a bit of you know, supposition going on here, but basically, it's the size.

And this is what we said this before.

Unlike other animals, sloths they only do this once a week.

They go down from the bottom of their tree and they do this, and it can take like up to 50 days for the food to go through the system because they're trying to get every single bit of nutrients out of it.

And so, by the time it comes out, it's absolutely huge.

It's just fibrous mass, and it obviously must be extremely painful.

Yeah, and it's super heavy, isn't it?

So, um, well, obviously, like a third of their body weight.

And the problem with being a sloth is that you're upside down basically all of your life.

And so, your poo's all gone to the bottom, waiting to come out.

And then, it would the only thing that stops it all from crushing the rest of their organs is that their bowels and everything like that are literally hooked onto their rib cage, aren't they?

Or onto the sides of their body, because otherwise, you know, if it was loose hanging like ours are, as soon as the sloth turns upside down, this enormous weight of feces would crush all of the rest of its organs.

So all of its organs are kind of, yeah, hooked on, hooked onto its side.

And then it goes down to the bottom of the tree, does its business, and goes back up again.

And travelling back up must feel amazing, doesn't it?

Ah, yeah.

They do a little dance before they have a poo every time as well.

And that's unusual for sloths, is it?

Yeah.

Why do they have to dig a little hole in the ground?

And it must, the jiggling must help, mustn't it?

I'm sure it does, yeah, yeah.

And the thing is, one of the reasons we think that they do this just once a week is because it's extremely dangerous for them to go to the toilet.

Because they're nice and safe in their little tree, no one can see them, they're really well camouflaged, they're really slow, no one can see them move.

But of course, when they go down to do this, they're really kind of vulnerable.

And apparently, more than half of sloth fatalities occur when they are doing their business.

Well, that's the thing.

So their main predators are both, I think, tigers and eagles.

Yeah.

Which is...

What a...

Bad luck, right?

Like, imagine that being your predator.

You've got two predators.

It's like, oh, so it's like a type of ant and a sausage dog.

That'd be fine.

An eagle.

What organism are you possibly thinking of?

So this is the weird thing.

When they're in captivity, sloths have a poo once every day.

Which suggests that they really, really want to have a poo once every day.

And that in captivity they know they're safe, they can do.

Because when you're in the wild, the shame of dying...

Basically, they're all dying like Elvis Presley died, aren't they?

They're half of them dying on the toilet.

You don't want to risk that.

And we don't know why they go down to the bottom.

Well, there's a great theory.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, so the theory is they have this algae on them, which grows.

And some of the species of algae are specific to a single species of sloth.

So it's quite specific stuff.

But they're in this weird love triangle with some algae and some moths.

So they go down to the ground.

There are these moths which live in their fur.

And because sloths move so slowly, they can never groom themselves to get rid of the moths.

Because as soon as they move their claw over to their arm, the moth just walks out of the way.

That's because they can fly moths.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a bit of a kick in the teeth, isn't it?

I know.

I know, they just stroll off, they don't care.

So

the moths lay their eggs in the poo of the sloths, right?

And then

the moths live, they fly up when they hatch into the sloth's fur.

They live there, they die.

That algae that we talked about grows because of the nutrients released when the moths die.

So the moth die, they release nitrogen, and the algae feeds on that.

And we think that the algae is beneficial to the sloths.

We don't know how, but it's either because it camouflages them or because maybe they groom themselves and they might eat it, although that's a bit controversial.

Also, apparently, it contains some agents that kind of work against things like malaria.

Right, okay.

So, whatever it's doing, it's definitely helping the sloths survive.

Yeah.

So, that's why they need to go down, is for the moth life cycle, and then the moths feed the algae, and the algae help the sloths.

No, I don't know, but I

don't risk that just for the sake of nurturing a few moths who've poo green all over you and maybe camouflage you or maybe not.

No, just well another theory is that they go down and they do their business and that is kind of telling the female sloths where they are and there's information in that dung that tells them that they're fit and good people to mate with.

And so maybe it's like a sloth Tinder kind of thing.

Yeah, wow.

It's like a reproductive system thing where they're going, I'm I'm fertile, I'm ready.

So actually they go down a lot more than they usually would when they're ready for a child and as a result they build this mountain of poo going I want babies and that's that's what they see and they're like whoa look look how awesome this is and then they go up the tree that is an alarming Tinder profile

Just huge steaming piles of poo every single sloth Tinder.

Different pile of poo.

If you work with sloths you're not allowed to wear perfume because their hair is so absorbent.

So they can have algae growing inside their own hair.

It's very weird.

It grows on the outside and also on the inside.

So if you wear perfume, it can get into their fur, basically, and it stays with them for weeks.

So you're not allowed to wear perfume.

You're not allowed to wear things like suntan lotion, which is a problem because of where they live.

And you're not even allowed to wear anti-mosquito spray if you're cuddling sloths for a living.

And you have to get very good at climbing trees, apparently.

I think the person who's done a lot on sloths recently, who's often in new scientists and stuff, is someone called Rebecca Cliff, who took a tree climbing course and still said that it was impossible.

She was outsmarted and outpaced by the sloths because by the time she got up the tree, they'd be on a different tree.

And she found that she had to get Guatemalan free climbers to go and get the sloths for her when she wanted to study.

I read one article about sloths in trees and that is that what they do is equivalent, you know those gymnasts who do that kind of it's like a crucifix position on the rings.

They're like oh yeah yeah.

Which is unbelievably hard for humans to do.

Apparently sloths just do that really easily.

They can just do it.

All of them do that all the time.

Right.

Right.

But they do fall out quite a lot.

Do they?

This is one thing she said was: if you see a sloth fall out of a tree, which happens alarmingly often, I mean, they seem to just be popping out.

There was a story that babies would fall out because they mistake their own limbs for tree branches and hold onto their limbs and fall.

But I don't know if that's true.

It's not true, unfortunately.

I mean, fortunately, but it's...

No, no, it's probably a myth.

The babies do fall out quite a bit, and if they do fall out, the mothers will not go down and get them.

The babies are dead at that point.

Whereas they will go down to take a poo they will not go down and fetch their baby so infant mortality very high because so I've read they can be really fast if they want to be really what sorry fast I read that the top speed of a sloth is 15 miles per hour oh come on yeah

faster than a cat if they're falling out of a tree I can believe that

Supposedly, I read this from a zoologist.

It's a double bluff, basically.

Their slowness is real.

It takes them 30 days to digest a leaf.

They are a slow being, but when something is threatening them, they're able to be very speedy.

She said, faster than a cat can run on the street.

No way.

Probably not.

Probably not.

There's a self-help book that came out in the last year or so called Be More Sloth.

It's by Alison Davis.

And she says that you should be more still, you should turn things upside down, be more intentional, be kind to yourselves, and be more positive.

Which apparently these are all things that sloths do.

And have a very, very, very high fiber diet.

Well, she says on the front cover: the winner of the race isn't always the one who comes first.

Incorrect.

Yeah.

That's the definition of the winner of the race.

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter account.

I'm on at Tribaland, James, at James Parkinson, and Andrew Honduran and Czechzinski.

And you can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, or go to our group account at No Such Thing.

We'll see you again.

Goodbye.