222: No Such Thing As A Warmongering Pigeon

Hey guys, just a quick announcement before we start this week's show, which is that we have a special bit of news.

We have released an audio cassette.

Yes, that's right, but it's not your normal audio cassette.

This is like a futuristic

year 3000 cassette because in it it contains not just your average 50 minutes that an audio cassette would, we have over 1,900 minutes on this.

It's true.

It's a USB audio cassette.

It's amazing.

It looks like an audio cassette and this USB pops out and on it it's got the complete complete second year of fish, which you may have noticed we've taken down from the website and we've put it onto this cassette.

Yeah.

And it's also got a special filmed episode never before seen, never again seen, but it's filmed.

Yeah, that's right.

We filmed it in our natural habitat at the QI office in Covent Garden around the table that we started the whole podcast on.

And I have to say, it's got, for me personally, my favorite fact that I found in all four years of doing the podcast.

It's very exciting.

It's a very good fact when you hear it.

Yeah.

You You won't believe fact number three.

It's fact number four.

But yeah, do get it.

You can get it by going to qi.com slash cassette.

And I do encourage you just to go there, just to look at it.

It's a thing of beauty.

It's absolutely stunning.

It's this retro item, you know, it's a proper cassette.

The casing, the booklet, everything is there.

And it's yellow.

It is yellow.

The actual cassette is yellow.

So qi.com slash cassette.

All right, on with the show.

On with the show, live from Melbourne, Australia.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you from Melbourne.

My name is Dan Schreiber, and I am sitting here with Anna Chaczinski, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go starting with you Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that there was a showman in the 1930s whose act consisted of repeatedly crashing his plane into the ground.

This is such an amazing guy.

So this fact...

Sorry, Andy, how do you repeatedly crash...

Surely he can only crash a plane once into the ground.

That's a very good point.

He

sequentially crashed separate planes into the ground.

Let the record show.

So this fact was actually sent into us, to me, by a guy called Cameron Dawkins.

So Cameron, thank you very much for this.

And I looked into him a bit more, the showman, not Cameron Dawkins.

Do you not care about Cameron at all?

I do.

He sent you a fact.

It's true.

All right, I've researched Cameron Dawkins' life, and we're here to tell you some home truths.

Andy, all the research we've done is on Cameron for this show.

Cameron was born in 1982.

Okay.

No, the guy's name, the showman's name, he was called Frank Frakes.

What a cool name.

He was from Tennessee.

And his speciality, he was an aerial showman, so he did lots of stuff.

So he did loop the loops and he did all sorts of acrobatics with his plane.

But his special trick was crashing planes into trees, lakes, pre-built houses, and sometimes just smashing them right into the ground.

He would buy a very old, clunky plane.

So obviously planes were very, very basic in these days.

He'd buy a really old, clunky plane.

He would get it just airworthy, and then he would crash it.

And he was very honest about his career.

He said, I admit, I fool the public.

Everyone who goes out there will expect to see me get killed, but I won't.

And he, it's amazing.

You can see footage of this online.

There's all these old newsreels where they see Frank, as he, that kind of voice.

And you you see him go through houses and

there's one great clip where he misses the house because

the plane actually goes out of control.

He loses genuine control of it and he plummets and you see him plummet in the distance and by pure coincidence he plummeted onto a car.

So everyone was just as happy because he still hit a thing.

Apart from the guy driving the car, I guess.

And he was badly hurt.

But he.

And we're definitely sure he wasn't just a very bad pilot.

Oh, well, All the time.

The whole time.

Because actors actually watch me stay flying.

Yeah.

He was sponsored by Camel Cigarettes, as were everyone in those days.

So actually, if you Google him and if you look at sort of old sources from the time, the only thing that mentions him are cigarette adverts where he just, there are a lot, it's so weird adverts in those days in the 30s, because you'll get like a really long form piece, paragraph after paragraph, about his career.

And then the closing line will be something like, and below you see him having performed this stunt and ready to enjoy his favorite smoke, camels.

And yeah, and he'd have, there'll be little cartoons of him where he'd say, I always smoke camels.

I can smoke as many as I want and I feel fresh, never jittery, and never upset.

Yes, yes, my job is dangerous, but I'll tell you what's even more dangerous, a lifetime of smoking camel cigarettes.

So the civil aviation authority didn't like this guy, did they?

Right.

They kept trying to shut him down and all he'd do was just move to a different state where they couldn't get hold of him.

And so one time he was flying in Florida and he crashed his plane and everyone thought he was really injured.

So an ambulance came and put him in the ambulance and then they drove off and then they got to state lines.

He jumped out and then ran off and then did a show in the next state, the next day.

That's so amazing.

It was very popular back then, wasn't it?

What doing these like tricks and stuff?

Yeah, particularly air flights and air stunts.

It was basically after the First World War, there was this massive surplus of aeroplanes and the government didn't know what to do with them.

And so they sold them for nothing.

I think actually they would sell the petrol in the tank and it came with a free plane sometimes.

And so all these amateurs just bought up all these planes and became stuntmen.

And yeah, it was a huge deal.

And we've mentioned it before on the podcast, but what they used to do was a thing called barnstorming, where a group of them would go and fly over a town and they would land in a field.

They would ask for permission to put on a massive show.

And if they got the permission...

permission, they would drop leaflets out of the plane saying, come and watch our show.

So they traveled in a pack.

They were a tour, like a flying, a literal flying circus that would come in and do their show and then some people think that the barnstorming word comes from crashing into these barns like this guy did he crashed into prefab buildings didn't he yeah do you know his other act

it's called the casket of death

and he would climb into a barrel which had been reinforced blow it up with dynamite in from inside and then jump out

What?

Wow.

How would that work?

I don't know.

But what you're saying is that he's in the same place as the dynamite.

They're both inside the the barrel.

I would have had at least the barrel in between me and the dynamite.

Well,

that's why your circus act failed.

James safely blows up a barrel at a distance.

It's no peril.

There was another guy called the salamander, and he would...

He had a death slide, which was like a bobsleigh with a cradle of lit fireworks underneath him.

But he also did a trick where he poured a pile of gunpowder along his neck and arm to a pile in his hand.

And his assistant would set set fire to the gunpowder in his collarbone, and when it got to his hands, it would blow up.

But he only did it apparently on special occasions.

He only ever did it twice, indeed.

But gunpowder-based stunts, I think, were quite a thing.

Again, because people, the war just happened, people were quite into blowing things up.

And in the 30s, in Germany, rocket cycling was quite a big deal.

And so this was tying big sticks of dynamite to a bike and then lighting it and then it propels you in your rocket there was a guy called Herr Richter who was good at this he was another guy called Wiley Coyote who was good at it

yeah he so this guy he tied 12 rockets to his bike and then he called it Rackenton Rud and when he hit 55 miles an hour the first time he did it all they all exploded and he flew off and traveled about 50 yards into a hedge I think but he kept it up it is weird they used to um the daredevil it was a job that suddenly boomed where people were answering adverts in the newspaper.

This is a genuine one from 1931, wanted single man not over 25 to drive automobile in head-on collision with another car,

must crash with another car at 40 miles an hour, and give unconditional release in case of injury or death.

Name your lowest price.

And these are like, if you picture the cars as well, if you picture in your head just old cars of the olden days,

those are the ones that were flying over buses and they couldn't get much speed and it's pretty extraordinary to look at all the photos at the time.

Yeah.

They were kind of flimsy weren't they?

And they because another thing they used to do was travel in a car, well a little bike with a sidecar with a lion in it.

And that was though this was another popular thing and they they actually had a name, I think they were called lion drones.

So they'd go round a velodrome but on a motorbike and there'd be sometimes there'd be a lion in your side car and then there was another one where you were riding round a velodrome on your motorbike and a bunch of lions got released and chased you.

What?

Wow.

Come off it.

And just charged after you.

This is entertainment.

Sounds great.

Yeah, that's cool.

The first person to do a loop the loop in an aeroplane was a Russian Soviet guy called Pyotr Nyestarov and he was immediately arrested for risking government property.

And then a few months later there was a French guy who did it called Adolphe Pegou and he became world famous and then the Soviets went, maybe we shouldn't have arrested that guy after all.

And they took him out of prison, and he was promoted to staff captain and awarded a medal.

Really?

Wow, wow.

That's so funny.

Have you ever heard, obviously, jumping out of a moving plane is very dangerous.

Have you ever heard of jumping into a moving plane?

No.

This is a thing that some people do.

What, if you're really late for your flight?

I'm serious.

This has been done.

It was first done in 1997.

And then last year, 2017, two guys recreated it, two French daredevils.

So, what happens is you jump out of the aircraft, you're wearing a wing suit, you then

fly until you've caught up with the aircraft, which is flying downwards, and then you jump back into it.

Wow.

It's not as rare.

It is also one for special occasions only, guys.

Well, check this story.

I was reading about a guy called Graham Donald.

He was a pilot in 1917, and he was attempting for the first time in a plane that's called a Sopwith Camel.

Yeah, so he was attempting his first loop the loop.

So he went went up 6,000 feet and he got to the peak of his loop the loop.

He was upside down and his belt snapped and he fell out.

He disappeared out of the plane.

Yeah.

Now, 55 years later, he tells this story.

Oh, it was.

I'm going to say 55 years later, he landed.

So check this out.

He's upside down, the belt snaps, and he falls out.

He plummets 5,000 feet, but because he was in the middle of a loop the loop maneuver, his plane came back down and

this is his story he landed on the wing of the plane with 2,000 feet to go fly back in yes I've got okay

there are a thousand people here does anyone believe that story give us a check

Graham Donald check him out 1917 a thousand but it doesn't matter if he said it he's obviously delusional a thousand percent not true isn't it incredible he met it on the bottom of the loop the loop on the wing it is literally incredible it's not credible how did the plane how did the plane know where to go Because he had it in a loop-the-loop maneuver.

It was just following its path.

It was a natural path.

That's not how physics works.

Solid camel.

It would just go to straight, it got a tangent.

He said the first 2,000 feet passed very quickly, and Terra Firma looked damn firmer.

As I fell, I began to hear my faithful little camel somewhere nearby.

Suddenly, I fell back onto her.

Maybe he was talking about the cigarettes camel.

And he made a good landing.

He's a hero.

Yeah, fine.

Hey, we're gonna have to move on to our next fact.

Uh,

all right.

Do you guys know

do you guys know Tommy Fitzpatrick?

No, my favorite air stunt man.

In 1956, he was really drunk in a pub in New York.

He made a bet with his friend there that in 15 minutes, he would be back at that pub in an aeroplane.

And then he went to an airport in New Jersey.

He stole a plane.

He landed it on St.

Nicholas Avenue in Manhattan between a whole bunch of cars and in complete darkness, no lights on the plane, nothing.

And he rocked up back in the bar and he said, Hey guys, I did it.

I suspect it took him longer than 15 minutes.

He was charged with grand larceny, but the owner of the plane didn't press charges, so he got away with it.

And two years later, he was in the same bar telling the story, and the person he was telling didn't believe him, so he did the exact same thing again.

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

My fact this week is that a new scientific study has shown that people who claim to know a lot of facts don't actually know as many facts as they think they do.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, Dan.

What does it say about people who don't know that many facts?

And that the few facts that they do say are often described as dubious.

So yeah, so

this is a study that was written by a man called Graham Donald, who previously survived a loop, the loop, in a plane.

No, I'm joking.

I'm joking.

This is real.

This is real.

The other thing was real.

I don't know why I'm.

Other thing was real.

So this is a new study.

This is that people who think that they have superior knowledge, both knowledge, belief, facts,

they tend to overestimate how much they actually know.

And then, so they did this as a study.

It's in a paper that's called, Is Belief Superiority Justified by Superior Knowledge?

They sat people down and they asked them what they knew and then they did a test to actually test if they knew what they thought they knew and it turns out they don't.

But even when they were told that they were wrong, they still believed that they knew more than most people, didn't they?

And this was a, it was all about political facts.

Yes, exactly, yeah.

Oh, so as if they have political biases, then they won't, they'll just assume they know facts.

They were like, objectively, I'm right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And these people were also found to, whenever they want to read about a subject, they always read papers that agreed with whatever their viewpoint was.

And they also did it knowing that they were doing that.

Said, no, this is fine.

This is what I meant to do.

So that's what the study was about.

I know.

I'm relating to so much of what you just said.

But I think there have even been studies done before that show that the more expert you are in something,

the more you'll lie about how much you know about it.

So basically there was a study in 2015 that found that you're likely to overclaim if you're good at something.

So for instance, if you're a geographer, then you'll claim you know of a place that actually doesn't exist.

And that literally happened.

So, a bunch of geographers by profession were given a list of geographic locations and told, you know, tell us if you're familiar with these places.

And they said, Yeah, Lake Othello, sure, yeah.

Kashmir in Oregon.

Yeah, yeah, I know that place.

It's my aunt lives there.

And none of those places existed.

92% said, same with biologists.

So biology experts were said, are you familiar with these toxins and chemicals?

And so they were asked, do you know about metatoxins?

Do you know about retroplex?

And they just ticked all those boxes.

They said, yeah, of course I do.

I'm a biologist.

All made up.

That doesn't just happen with people who are experts in the field.

So, for example, in 2013, the TV host Jimmy Kimmel, who's a very famous guy, he carried out an experiment on this.

And when I say he, I mean someone in his production team.

But they went to Coachella, the American Music Festival, Your Honor, and

they filmed themselves asking people, have you heard of these bands?

And are you looking forward to seeing them at Coachella?

But there were a lot of made-up bands, and it's amazing seeing people say, oh, yeah,

I haven't heard their new stuff, but my friends have told me I have to see them.

When the bands were cool, things like Dr.

Shlomo and the GI Clinic,

the obesity epidemic, I love that stuff.

And my favourite, Shorty Jizzle and the Plumper Cracks.

I really like the idea that Jimmy Kimmel actually, instead of working on his show and doing jokes, is like, can we get more scientific surveys going on?

I'll focus on them.

You guys do the rest.

Another psychological study.

Anna, you're quite good at crosswords.

I'm better than Dan, sure.

James could have asked you anything that you were good at, and that's still the answer.

So I'll give you some words and so see if you can guess what they are.

I'll just give us your best guess.

It's a horrible thing to do.

So it's four letters: W blank blank H.

W, blank, with.

Wow.

With, okay.

And the.

I'll say wash.

Okay.

S blank blank P.

Soap.

Stop.

Okay.

Well, this has worked quite well because.

You know, this isn't how crosswords work, guys.

Well, here's the thing.

Here's the thing, right?

Apparently, anyone who says cleansing-related words like wash or soap

has

done some extremely bad deeds in the most recent past.

Wow.

And it literally says instead of alternatives, such as with and stop.

I thought with, I just took wash because she's so with already.

I did say soap first, I grant you that.

This is great.

So I'm the normal against which the soap.

You're the angelic one, and this is the evil bastard.

So

there's a thing about when you're tricked by a fraudster, it turns out it's not the fraudster who's tricking you, it's you who's tricking you.

You trick yourself into thinking

this fraudster is plausible.

Okay.

So in 2008, Stephen Greenspan, he's an author, he published a book called The Annals of Gullibility, which was the summary of decades of work of his about how not to be gullible, how not to be fooled.

Two days after publication, he discovered that his financial advisor, one Mr.

Bernie Madoff,

had defrauded him out of a third of his retirement savings.

Whoa.

I know.

Yeah.

I bet he's glad that we're having a massive laugh about that in Melbourne.

That is pretty funny, though, isn't it?

But what he said is that, well, he didn't say this, but the theory goes that Greenspan trusted Madoff.

He made himself believe, no, this guy seems plausible.

If I give him a bit of money, I'll get loads back.

Okay.

So this fact is about basically the Dunning-Kruger effect, which I'm sure we've mentioned before.

Semi-while-known people of low ability who are just crap at things, thinking they're really good at things.

And the idea is that if you literally know almost nothing about something, you don't know the stuff that reveals to you how little you know.

So, like, a good example that really spoke to me was that if you don't know the.

I bet they all speak to you, Dan.

So, if you're bad at

writing, and let's say you don't have a good grasp of grammar and spelling, you won't know that you're a bad writer because you don't know the rules in order to know that you're bad at those rules.

Therefore, you think you're good without knowing.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is a good example.

The example it was based on, though.

I'm actually going to edit that out because it doesn't help us if you say smart things on this podcast.

You've got a personality to keep up here, Dan.

So the example, I didn't know the example on which Donning Kruger effect was based.

So, it was Dr.

Dunning who came across this incident.

David Dunning came across this incident in 1995, I think.

It was a man who robbed banks in Pittsburgh, and he was caught on security cameras.

So, he went in broad daylight, he didn't have a mask on or anything, caught on security cameras, arrested.

And when he was interviewed, he said, But I wore the juice.

And it turned out he'd rubbed lemon juice on his face, and he thought, because that works as invisible ink, that that would render his face invisible to security cameras.

That is a brilliant trick to play on someone isn't it to tell them that.

Even better if you tell them that human semen was used as invisible ink in the wild.

Right.

Which it was.

Otherwise that would have been an extremely weird thing for me to say.

But again, human semen on your face does not render it invisible to security cameras.

Just to be clear.

How did we get it?

So it makes you quite conspicuous, actually.

It'd be so weird at a lot of the end of pards.

Where's she gone?

It would be.

We need to move on in a second, actually.

We need to move on five minutes ago, Dave.

Anything before we do?

Just one little thing.

British, there's a thing called the better than average effect, where you'll have heard that lots of people, most people consider themselves better than average drivers there was a study on British prisoners which found that they rate themselves as more ethical and more moral than British people who are not in prison

they also think they are more they think they're more kind moral trustworthy honest dependable generous law-abiding self-controlled and generous The only category they didn't think they were better than average on was law abidingness

and even then they considered themselves average with everyone else.

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

Yep, my fact is that in the first major battle of World War I the soldiers arrived by taxi

and the taxi drivers duly charged the government 70,012 francs for the journey.

Was the incentive to get soldiers to jump out of the taxis very quickly because the last guy would have to pay?

Is that what you do?

I never noticed it, but the company.

Well, I think we're learning where these words wash and soap come from, Andy.

This is the amazing story of the Battle of the Marne, which was a massive turning point in the First World War.

It was September 1914, first major battle on the Western Front, and the Germans were getting dangerously close to Paris.

But that did mean that they could deploy all the Paris taxi drivers.

And so the Prison government sent 3,000 soldiers by taxi from Paris to the front, the war front, in 600 cabs.

And everyone carried five soldiers, so a bit of a squash, because that's, you know, that's four squashed up in the back, and then one in the front who has to make awkward conversation with the driver all the way there.

So are you saying that later on they're in the trenches going, well, it's bad here, but it's not as bad as the squash taxi that we had to get here in?

It must have looked quite bizarre because they weren't allowed to have their lights on except the taxi at the very front, and everyone else just had to follow the back lights, the back red lights, so they couldn't be spotted.

But yeah, this is how they got to the front, and then it was a turning point, and the Allies won it.

And happy news, the war then went on for another four years.

The account of it on Wikipedia just reports that the Germans were surprised.

It's a very important element of war.

I do love that they got charged for it.

Taxi drivers, you know, however much they want to do their duty for their country, in the end, you have to deprive them of a couple of fares.

So, yeah, 70,000 francs.

Well, London is actually a big, steep journey.

Yeah, it is.

London used to send in double-decker buses during the war effort as well.

And that was amazing because those are big buses, not the modern ones, obviously, the sort of the old classics.

And they were going down these country roads, which obviously weren't built to take these double-decker buses.

So, what would often happen is they would come across another double-decker bus from another ally coming the other way, try and get past each other, but tip over.

And so, the roads were littered with tipped-over buses that they couldn't get back up to function.

Were they littered?

Was it like,

you know, you can't stretch your arms out on this road without bumping into a double-decker bus?

It just.

Some of those ones actually, because they were used for lots of different things, they were used as ambulances and for transport, the London buses.

And some of them were used to carry pigeon, to carry...

carrier pigeons, to carry carrier pigeons.

And they had special pigeon lofts built on the top of them.

So there are really cool pictures of these double-decker buses with a pigeon loft kind of house built on top of it and brought them over that's amazing you'd think the pigeons could just fly over you would have thought

but they were actually all conscientious objectors so they really had to be forced

very

some stuff on taxis yeah okay yeah um so in the uk um it's illegal to get into a taxi if you have plague

unless you tell the taxi driver.

So you're not allowed to withhold it from him.

And this is actually, there's all sorts of different diseases.

This is according to the Public Health Control of Diseases Act of 1985.

So if you have the plague, cholera, relapsing fever, smallpox, or typhus, then you have to tell the taxi driver.

But also, weirdly, food poisoning,

you need to.

And these are all, if you also, if you want to go to a library and get a book out and you have plague, you have to.

I thought you meant you have to tell the driver that you're going to the library.

It's none of his fucking business.

It is kind of his business where you're going.

That's very hard.

I've got a taxi story.

This is from 2015 and it's a story about a taxi in Britain.

It was that in 2015 a group of friends tricked a taxi driver out of a £140 fare by leaving a mannequin in a hat in the back seat

and pretending it was their sleeping friend.

Oh, really?

They went from Brighton to London, which is about 50 miles.

It's a very long journey.

Lucky cabby.

And they were like, oh, no, you need to take Derek here up to Manchester.

And they just, they got the two of them, they got out and they left the guy at the mannequin in the hat and they said, our friend's asleep.

But when you wake him up, here's the address.

And where did they send him to?

That's what I want to know.

It wasn't too far off.

Yeah, because

he might have worked it out, right?

He might have worked it out, yeah.

Do you know some other cars that drove from Brighton to London were

it was such a pointless link, it's about taxis.

I mean,

were the world's first fleet of electric taxis, and these were in 1897.

So, electric cars came along, and most cars were taxis then.

And so, in 1897, they wanted to show off.

They were called hummingbirds because they made the sound of a hummingbird whenever they drove along.

And they traveled at a maximum 12 miles an hour, usually more like nine.

And as part of the unveiling, they did the London to Brighton journey, which, as you say, is about 50 miles.

Although they weren't actually able to complete the journey and they had to do part of the race by train.

The other reason they were unpopular, the electric cars, was because they had electric lighting inside.

And people didn't really like that because people with a bashful disposition felt as conspicuous as if they were on the stage with the limelight on them.

And so people didn't like having lights on them.

So was the light on while they were driving.

So it was showing taxis on the passengers.

Oh,

that's so weird.

Okay, so the first taxis were sedan chairs, right, in London.

And they were, well, all over.

But they were very good precisely for the opposite reason, which is that there was no light on you at all, and you were surrounded by fabric.

So it was extremely discreet.

And the best thing was they could go into your house and up the stairs.

So

that's really odd.

They were really good.

That's like getting an Uber and the guy carries you up to bed.

So, you know, they were faster than carriages, lots of narrow stairways, two guys carrying you up there.

And basically, if you were having an affair or you were trying to avoid arrest, you just get into a sedan chair in your house and say, take me to that house, second floor, please.

And they'll do it.

What?

Yeah.

As a connection,

our mother show, QI,

Stephen Fry, his car is a London black cab.

And it's fine now because he lives in the countryside in Norfolk, but he used to live in London and most of his days were people just hopping into the back

and seeing Stephen Fry up the back.

I had had that Stephen Fry in the front of my care.

Prince Philip.

Oh, Prince Philip.

And yours.

That was a risky one, man.

Yeah, he had a private care, but he only gave it up last year.

Did he?

Okay.

Yeah.

Good.

So.

You know, the first drunk driving incident was a taxi driver.

And this was also in 1897, actually.

This was a cab driver called George Smith who drove his taxi straight into the side of a building and rode it off.

He was arrested for drunk driving, first person ever.

And the police officers couldn't prove it, but they knew he was drunk because apparently he was acting drunk and he said he was drunk.

But that

after that, they realized that they needed a test for it, and that's where the breathalyzer came from.

So they based the breathalyzer on that.

And initially, it was a balloon, and you blew into a balloon, and then you put the end of the balloon over a sort of a bottle of chemicals, which changed from purple to yellow, and it didn't work very well because there was no measure of how drunk you were, it just changed from purple to yellow.

And he went, I don't know, how yellow is that?

Is that like yellow enough?

Is that bright enough yellow?

Yeah, let's arrest him.

We need to move on very soon.

I read that the word, do you know where the word taxi comes from?

No,

taxis

arrangement means movement in Latin.

Yeah, it comes from the word taxi meter.

Isn't that weird?

What was the taximeter before a taxi then?

It had a different name, but then someone invented the taximeter and they were like, oh, that's a fantastic.

What are we going to put this in?

Yeah.

So they built a car around it.

Okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the Gulf Corvina fish has such loud sex that it can deafen dolphins.

That is.

They shouldn't be listening, the perverts.

So, the Gold Carvina is a Mexican fish.

They have sex in huge orgies with lots of these fish, and they have mating calls that sound like rapid-sounding pulses, like a machine gun.

And you get a whole load of them together because it's an orgy, and that's what happens, I believe, in orgies.

And apparently, it sounds like a crowd cheering at a football stadium or a really, really loud beehive.

And there was a guy who studies them called Timothy Rothwell, and he said that the sound was literally so loud that he had to shout to talk to the rest of the team when he was studying them.

And he's above water, so you can still hear it there.

Yeah, it's incredible.

I listened to a sound file of it today, and

yeah, you could sound only, I know, right?

Missing out on the good stuff.

It does sound like a sort of

kind of like a machine gun sound that you were talking about.

I imagine, you know when in Australia when you press those buttons to cross the streets and it just goes

like that?

Yeah.

That's actually, not many people know that that's the sound of a fish.

Little known fact.

And this kind of audgy thing, frenzy thing that they do basically sees all of the world's adult Corvinas Corvinas gathered in less than 1% of their usual home.

So they all come from all different places, they all come to this one place.

So it's like everyone getting into one cupboard for the audio.

What?

Not really.

It's less than 1% of their usual home.

Yeah, but that...

It's like that.

But everyone in your home.

So which will just be you and your girlfriend, I guess.

It's just like you and your girlfriend getting in a cupboard.

I worked out the numbers, and it was

a bit like everyone in London going to Disneyland once a year to have sex.

That size.

And that, I know, is a contravention of park rules.

I don't like it.

And how do you know that?

That's why you guys have to do it in the cupboard now, right?

Everyone knows, is Disneyland or a cupboard?

It's actually really inconvenient for these fish that they they do this, right?

Because, yeah, as you say, they all gather together to have sex, and they're really tasty, they're a delicacy.

And fishermen go to where they gather to have sex, and then they make this huge noise to really advertise exactly where they are.

And so fishermen know exactly where to go to fish for them.

It's not the worst fish sex tactic.

So there is a fantastic book by Mara J.

Hart.

It's called Sex in the Sea.

I highly recommend it.

It's all about this sort of thing.

I don't recommend.

Nelly, you mind why I recommend it.

Or for that matter why I bought it, but

it has information

about

fish.

You were very disappointed it was a non-fiction book, weren't you?

Anyway, no, there are fish called Grunion, and they, to have sex, throw themselves onto land, which is very inconvenient because they are fish.

And the female has to dig a hole in the sand and then bury herself in the sand until there's only her head sticking out.

She starts laying eggs, and then the male jumps on her and spoons her and has sex with her.

And he uses her as a slide for his sperm, which lands on the eggs, and then they have to try and catch a wave back.

It sounds like the most inconvenient mating ritual you can imagine.

And yeah, she can't breathe through any of it.

Right.

So it's so unpleasant.

And they're orgies as well, aren't they?

So often she's got a few males curved around her while suffocating to death, whilst attempting to procreate.

It's a very bad deal.

We actually have it quite good, guys, by comparison.

I started reading about, so dolphins are going deaf off the back of these fish having sex, and I was looking into dolphin sex to see what they...

And

this is really cool.

This is a...

Did you watch Flipper 3 in the course of your research?

So

this is Australian scientists have found that dolphins, they've observed them doing this new thing where they come to surface and they pull like a banana shape.

So their head goes up and their back goes up and they sit there like a big banana.

And that's apparently really attractive.

And they're like, well, look at the banana.

And

that's like a new mating thing that we've not noticed before.

This was last year that we discovered this.

And also what they do is

these are humpback dolphins.

They dig down and they break off coral and they wear them on their nose as a little hat.

So they hat, yeah.

And again, so the mid-banana move with coral on their nose,

and people or other dolphins are looking at them going

sexy.

Yeah, that's sex, yeah.

Although they like to avoid males sometimes, so dolphin females are often really hassled by the males and kind of gang-banged.

And so they really will have lots of males chase them at the same time, try to have sex with them, and they flip over in the water and they stick their reproductive parts out of the water and the males can't get to them at all.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They also slap them in the face with their tails quite a lot when they're being chased.

Yeah.

Sorry, I said coral sponges.

They put sponges on their nose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That makes more sense.

Yeah.

I was looking at some fish sounds.

Oh, yeah.

It's because underwater creatures have the most amazing ways of making noise and it works completely differently underwater.

So clownfish make a chirping noise by gnashing their teeth.

They literally, the only way they can communicate is by snapping their teeth together.

They're oyster-toed fish, they make a blare-like a folkhorn noise by contracting their swimming bladders.

And there's gourami, which snap the tendons of their pectoral fins.

So they basically clap their fins together, I suppose, in order to communicate with each other.

But they can be super loudfish.

They have been known to keep people awake at night, haven't they?

I think we've covered various things in the past.

A lot of the facts here are going to keep me awake at night.

But I think the problem was, is that Jacques Cousteau did a documentary, didn't he, in 1956 called The Silent World.

Oh, yeah.

And it was all about the underwater.

But basically, his diving tanks masked all the sounds of the water.

So he was like, oh, it's so quiet in here.

And actually, that's just where his microphones were.

And so lots of people thought it was really quiet.

But like you say, Anna, it is loud as hell.

It's noisy, even though it doesn't really work very well with our ears.

Because I thought this was really interesting.

So sound waves, because they travel a different way in water to how they do in air, and we've got air in our ear, that's why sound is messed up for us underwater.

But that's also why whales, you know, they have huge amounts of wax in their ears.

So, you see whales' ear wax, it comes, you know, many, many inches long, ear wax, and that's kind of the same density as water.

So, that means that the sound waves can travel into their ears and they'd be fine.

But it's assumed that if they came up onto the surface, they would be deaf in air.

Really?

So, yeah, that's how you make a fish deaf.

Just on sex sounds, peacocks have been observed observed on land as opposed to

peacocks have been found to be doing a false sex sound in order to attract mates.

So what will happen is while they're mating, they have this sound that they do, which is which they'll just go the whole way through.

Do it now, come on.

I haven't annoyingly could not find that audio file.

But so they make this sound, and then the thing is it's a very loud sound that the male makes so while it's happening other females in the area will hear it at a distance and go, oh, that sounds like a good guy to reproduce with, which is what they're trying to do.

So that's what they listen out for.

And if they, the reason that that's good, that sound, is it means that someone has picked them as genetically

good to reproduce, and so that's very important.

So peacocks that are not good at reproducing genetically have worked out this trick where if they just make the sound even though they're not having sex, female peacocks will hear them in the distance going, Whoa, that guy must be awesome, and

head over to do it.

Andy, we've discussed this before, I think.

So, a lot of animals do these fake calls, but there are some where they can't do fake calls, isn't it?

And I reckon it's

Elans, they click their knees or something like that.

Yes, they do.

And that is a thing which is attractive to women if they click their knees, but only the big ones can make the noise, and it's impossible for the small ones to fake it.

Yes, that's an honest signal.

Whereas the peacocks can just stand in their windows going, oh, wow.

Oh, yeah.

What's that?

Oh, yeah, I know I'm good.

What?

Great.

Wow.

Okay, that is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would 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 accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

James, at James Harkin, and Czechinsky.

You can email podcasts at qi.com.

Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, our Facebook page, which is no such thing as a fish.

We have a website, no such thingasafish.com.

Put no such thing as a fish in the internet.

You'll get something.

And we will be back again next week with another episode.

Guys, you have been amazing.

Thank you so much.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.