178: No Such Thing As A Cup Full Of Nessie

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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 Covent Garden.

My name is Dan Schreiber and I am sitting here with James Harkin, Anna Chaczinski 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, Czaczynski.

My fact this week is that one of the costume designers on Star Wars also made a moose suit for scientists to help them sneak up on moose.

Or moosees.

Or mooseuch.

Or mees.

Is moosuch the actual plural?

Yeah, because it's a Native American word and that's how this particular tribe pluralises it.

So what's the advantage of sneaking up on a moose?

Well, if you want to hang out with them, which these scientists did, so they were studying moose in the Yellowstone area and I think they were specifically at this time looking at how they were responding to predators.

So wolves, numbers had declined in Yellowstone and moose had got used to living without them.

And then, I think they'd come back.

The scientists wanted to see if moose had forgotten how to escape wolves.

And so, then he needed to put wolf, poo, and we where moose lived to check how they responded to the threat.

And so, this researcher called Joel Berger asked a woman who worked on the set of Star Wars to make him a moose suit so he could go and deposit moose, poo, and we around moose.

Yeah, because they did used to, before the moose suit came along, did attempt to sort of throw balls of poo and we

out at the moose in order to attract them towards it, but they couldn't throw far enough, so they ended up just littering the landscape.

They still sometimes use balls, they use snowballs.

So they get snowballs and they'll put, sometimes they even put human wee on because they want to see how they'll deal with humans.

So they'll wee on a snowball and then throw it towards the moose.

Yeah, that's right.

And they would slingshot them as well.

And Joel Berger wrote about this.

He's written a book called The Better to Eat You With.

And he describes the moment where he first he hit, it's like this eureka moment where he's in the place observing the moose and he says to his colleague wait I've had a brilliant idea I'm gonna wee on the snowball but then he he says he's run out of wee because he recently went to the loo so he just instead of explaining that properly I would say you've run out of weeks

again

okay

but he his wee stockpile was depleted

So he just made a snowball with his hands and then turned to his colleague and said, quick, piss on this so I can can throw it at the deer.

I think his colleague is his wife, is it not?

This was a male colleague, not his wife.

Maybe he's got more than one colleague.

Yeah.

Probably not after this experiment.

Probably goes through colleagues quite quickly.

I've been to Yellowstone and seen the moose and you can drive right up to them and they just sit there.

Oh, yeah.

So I don't know why he needs to sneak up on them.

Yeah, that's a really good point.

Are they actually Yellowstones or are they urine coverage with snowballs?

It was just called National Park before he got that.

Well, this is the thing.

So when they do it in the experiments with the snowballs, they also use human faeces and they have to use used toilet paper, I think, because they say, well, we're going to do this in a safe, biodegradable way rather than just pooing into a snowball.

Yeah, that's interesting.

I think I would take the poo and then put the snowball round it.

That's how you do that.

Pop the poo into the snowball.

Yeah.

Yes.

Well, everyone's got different methods, James, and we'll see whose is more effective.

I don't think you'd be very good at this, Andy.

I'm lethal in a snowball fight, though.

You have to wait for the other team to contract dysentery, though, don't you?

Meanwhile, you're being pelted.

It's a long technique, James, but come the next snowball match in two days, they are going to lose.

So, the idea with this moose suit is that they wanted to sneak up on the moose in order to get close enough

by tricking the moose into thinking they were fellow moose.

And so this is who he did do it with his wife, who's written up in all the articles as Miss Cunningham.

So, Miss Cunningham and Dr.

Berger got inside the moose suit.

She was the back, he was the front, and they walked up to the moose.

I don't think the moose took to them too well, from what I read.

Oh, he said it worked quite well in the end.

He managed five successful deposits, but maybe they didn't like it at first.

Did they make it realistic?

As in, did they push the real wolf droppings that they were testing the moose with out of the back end of their costume moose?

No, because they don't want the moose to think that wolves look like moose.

That all wolves come disguised as moose.

Yeah, it's a wolf in moose clothing.

So the moose I was saying is just a human in moose clothing to mean.

And who's shitting wolf shit?

Yeah.

This is just a way to really confuse a lot of moose, isn't it?

Yeah.

But the moose wouldn't be able to make the connection between the poo they'd seen coming out and smell it and think, oh, that's woo- that's...

Of course they would.

That's what animals do all the time.

Animals are always smelling poos and being able to recognize other animals.

But I don't think that a moose is clever enough.

I'm sorry if this is slandering the moose community.

To see a scientist dressed as a moose pushing a wolf poo out of a fake moose costume and then go over and sniff it and think that's a dangerous animal.

But do you not see that they might be confused?

I can see they might be confused.

No one's debating that.

That is fair.

But this is, so you ask if this was realistic, and I guess she was quite a good costume designer because because Star Wars is quite a big um but it was made of styrofoam and cloth and a lot of them seem to be made of styrofoam so sci- scientists quite often want to sneak up on animals for various reasons and styrofoam seems to be the material of choice.

So someone this year in Montana dressed up as a grizzly bear in Glacier National Park in Montana to try and scare mountain goats.

And again, styrofoam costume.

Right.

And is that to train the goats to be afraid of bears?

Yes.

Wow.

That sounds good.

It's because, do you know why they've stopped being afraid of predators generally?

Sorry, what animals are we talking about?

This is mountain goats.

Mountain goats.

Is it because there aren't enough predators around to be afraid of?

We're back on urine and feces.

It's due to human urine.

So there was a piece in the New York Times last week about how in this national park, all the mountain goats are flocking towards where humans go because they wee along all the trekking tracks.

And the wee is full of salt, and goats love salt.

So human urine creates salt licks.

And so now they've just stopped being nervous about predators because they spend so much time around humans.

So how do they scare them?

Do they just run up to them and do they rip them apart with their bear costume and hands?

That's not scary so much.

That is scary.

You wouldn't say terrible news.

Someone recently got scared by a bear, and then you read the small print, it turns out they got torn to pieces by it.

And it's poor encourage etes ultra.

All the other goats would be very scared.

That's true, yeah.

If you invited all the goats to an event, so there's going to be a massive urine lump for you all to to lick, and then a bear turns up and rips the goat to pieces.

You stop licking urine lumps.

And also, sorry, is pour encourage les ultre a real phrase that people use?

I was quite scared by that phrase.

Yeah, me too.

I thought you just messed up what you were saying, but you carried on.

I was going to address it after the podcast.

You're right, mate.

It's a French phrase.

It's obviously a French phrase.

It's an English podcast.

Ah, yeah, I forgot that.

Sorry.

I was thinking of my other podcast.

Are you actually a Frenchman in an Andy costume, all

hey um we lost an sorry do you want to I want to tell you about pour on corruption oh yeah sorry yeah yeah it's a phrase so let's we know what it means oh you don't yeah yeah oh yeah we know what it means but for the people at home who don't maybe

you did you explained it anyway because you explained what would happen with the bear killing one goat and then yeah i know but i just think dan's being a bit cocky there so we definitely know what it means when he didn't know what language it was a second ago

so we uh we lost a iconic man in a suit this week um the sad passing of a man called haruo nakajima who was for the first 12 godzilla movies godzilla

spent his the first well spent a large chunk of his career inside the same godzilla suit so they use the same actor he's like andy circus for uh the lord of the rings trilogy you know he's just used as the cgi guy he was the same guy in every suit my face then when you said andy serkis in Lord of the Rings, was the same as your face when Andy said the French phrase.

So Andy Serkis was Gollum in Lord of the Rings.

But he wasn't in a suit, was he?

Because I think I've seen clips of that and he's like a CGI film.

He's a CIGIS.

He's a motion capture guy.

And he also is the chief ape in the Planet of the Apes films.

Yes.

And what else did he?

Tintin, he's Captain Haddock.

Is he something else in King Kong?

King Kong.

He is King Kong.

Boz King Kong.

He didn't play Godzilla in the recent.

But I would go and see a circus show, which was Andy's Circus as all the animals that Andy Circus has played over the course of his career.

And they're all Andy Circus in different costumes.

What about he was in Little Dorrit as one of the bad guys?

Would you include that?

Yeah, 100%.

Okay.

But anyway, so

this guy was famous in Japan for being Godzilla, and he was in it for 12 movies.

He's just passed away, age 88.

And in order for him to properly understand how Godzilla might move, he spent a lot of time at the zoo watching the elephants and bears to see how they walked and how they...

So he claimed that he did method acting on how Godzilla would exist.

He took it really seriously.

Yeah, so we lost him this week.

A very iconic man in a suit.

On Star Wars as well, sort of in costume news of Star Wars, for a very long time, they lost...

Obi-Wan Kenobi's robe, the one that Alec Guinness wears in the movies.

And so it was a shame because it's such an an iconic thing.

They obviously didn't realize at the time how iconic it would become over the years.

But it was found in 2005 and it was in the shop warehouse of this company called Angels that does costume lending for movies and for Halloween costumes and so on.

Angels.

Yeah, Angels.

In fact, there used to be one, or there still might be one.

Just in Soho.

Yeah, just around the corner from us.

And

yeah, they found it in there and it spent the sort of 30 years that it's been missing being rented out during Halloween

Yeah, for fancy dresses, for people dressing as monks.

So it would be a fancy dress costume.

It made it into a few movies unknowingly, like The Mummy.

It's in The Mummy.

Yeah.

So this is in 2005, they found it again.

And yeah, it was someone working there was like, this feels like this is not your regular monk costume.

How did they know it was his?

Did it have his name tag in the back?

So, yeah, I couldn't find that detail.

What I do know is that

the creator of the costumes, the original Star Wars costume designer, different to the one you're talking about, about, Anna, he verified that it was that.

He said, yeah.

So there must have been something on it to identify it.

The Angels is amazing, though.

I didn't know this place exists.

It basically supplies costumes for all the best films.

So

three of the five nominees this year for best costume, all the costumes came from this place, Angels.

It's been supplying Hollywood film costumes since 1940, since the 1940s.

So I think its first Oscar was in 1948 for Hamlet, and its most recent is the Grand Budapest Hotel.

And it's just this one place in London that everyone goes to get costumes.

And it supplied my costume a few years ago in 2012 when I went as a Mayan.

Did it?

Yeah.

That wasn't in the article I read, actually.

No.

It will be now.

They'll do an update.

That's got to go in.

Costumes.

Yeah.

Did you see in the news this week that in Game of Thrones, Jon Snow's cape is made out of an Ikea rug?

No.

That's so funny.

To present the Channel 4

Oh, no, here we go.

Deliberate ignorance, Fianna.

I actually.

I've never seen it, but do they all have capes with quintessentially IKEA type patterns on them?

That's the

ladder that's going up the wall.

It's just a load of Billy Buck cases.

It's really annoying because there's one bit missing, and that's a key scene in the TV series.

And the other big Game of Thrones news is that there was a big battle this week, not too much of a spoiler, and it featured half of all the stunt performers in the UK.

Whoa!

And most of them were set on fire.

And they beat the world record for most people set on fire at one time.

That's amazing.

Presumably, the officially recorded most people on fire.

Well, Guinness doesn't recognise the record,

but people in the industry kind of know what the record was.

They think it was there were 13 burning actors in Saving Private Ryan.

And in Braveheart, there were 18 people who were partially burned.

So they were kind of the record.

They've gone up to 20 people set on fire at the same time or 73 people set on fire over the course of a show.

Bloody hell.

Are they all okay?

They are, but it's quite weird because they put this gel on you and they set fire to you and it's the gel kind of keeps the heat away from you.

But you can't breathe while it's happening, otherwise you breathe in the fire.

So you have to hold your breath for like 30 seconds.

And it's like doing an underwater scene, apart from it's much more dangerous because if you breathe in, you're just going to breathe in fire.

This is insane.

Surely we have CGI that can replicate fire fire that doesn't involve people having to inhale flames.

I think the old ways are the best.

Yeah.

It's exactly the opposite of an underwater scene, James.

I just want to pick you up on that.

Yeah.

You're right.

But yeah, and apparently one big problem is after it's finished, after they put you out, you kind of lie on the floor and you have to lie there for a few minutes because if you stand up, you might get reignited by accident.

And that's one of the most dangerous things because there's a lot of fire around.

this sounds like a ridiculous program they don't have any of that on the channel for news

well that one good thing is that ikea stuff is often flame retardant so that might be a good you know use for that that's good you might watch one of

jon snow could have put everyone out with his cape one by one

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

Okay, my fact this week is that Switzerland has 18 living ex-presidents.

Okay, so funny.

I think that's quite a lot.

It's a huge number.

Because how many ex-prime ministers have we got?

Four or five?

Yeah.

Four.

We've got Major, Blair, Brown, Cameron.

That's it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Four.

As far as I could see, to come up in a sort of runner-up in that, it was Italy with prime ministers.

It looks like they've got ten

who are still living.

Yeah.

But Italy goes through governments like I go through Pants.

Once every couple of years.

With a huge amount of corruption along the way.

But Switzerland, it is a bit of a cheat because their presidency is very unusual and they only have like a one-year president each time and it rotates with everyone who's in the cabinet.

And so, all you have to do is get elected into the cabinet and then wait your turn until everyone else has become president, and then you'll automatically become president.

And also, there's no maximum number of times that you can be president, so you can just sit there, and it's like the record is six times.

And there are quite a few people who are currently in the cabinet who are just waiting for another go.

Yeah, but they're doing other stuff as well.

No,

just sitting there in the mountains,

but you don't get any extra power at all as president, do you?

So they've just got this rotating council of seven who are all exactly on a par, and then you just get to be called president for a year.

It's like a children's game.

It's a bit like, I don't know if this is like this, but it sounds a bit like, do they have like a council in Star Wars, which is a bit like that?

Like a council of Jedis.

Oh, the Council of Jedis, yes, yeah, yeah.

There's a thing like that, yeah, yeah.

I think that's in the prequels.

It's in Phantom Menace, so

Samuel L.

Jackson.

That's the one, if you're going to watch one, that's the one.

Samuel L.

Jackson and

Yoda.

There's a new, I think it's a new species of bat that has been named after Yoda.

Is that?

Yeah.

And there was a headline about it in the Times a few days ago, and it said, named after Yoda, new bat has been.

That was the headline.

In the Times.

Wow, isn't that amazing?

And so the president is what you might call Primus Interpares, which obviously I don't need to explain what that is to Dan.

But it is, it's the first among equals.

So everyone's equal, but they're kind of, they take the ceremonial, you know.

It's like Dan hosting the podcast.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a bit of power.

It's not quite that.

I would say Dan's the fourth among equals.

And they can go on state visits, but technically they don't call them state visits because of this equality between all of the cabinet.

And so if one of them came to Britain on a state visit, we would call it that, but they wouldn't call it that.

They just call it a foreign visit.

I think it would be funny if all seven of them had to come and sit on the same chair whenever they had to do a state visit.

That would be amazing.

I would watch that.

And they have to answer in one voice when they're answering questions on the press, like in that improv game.

Yeah.

Or the other improv game where you say one word at a time.

Yeah, I could do it that way.

So, do you think that's how they decide policy?

Is they play that one word at a time game?

Let's try it for British policy.

We

should

make

Yetis

illegal.

There we go.

We've got a policy already.

Damn it.

Sorry, Dan.

You screwed yourself there.

That's why they've never been seen.

No, it's incredible.

So you said, yeah, two people have held the post six times.

One of them, the record, is being a cabinet minister for 31 years.

Wow.

31 years, just sitting in the cabinet.

They're not just doing that.

They're making policy.

They're working very hard.

Absolutely.

No one's disputing the might of the Swiss state.

I think that's important that we say that.

But they maintain their other job, right?

Like the president in 2014, their job was also being foreign minister.

They didn't stop being foreign minister.

That took up most of their time.

That's their main job, as it were.

Presidency was a sort of sideline.

So I've been researching ex-presidents in general a bit.

So did you know that Joe Biden can never drive a car again?

But he's not

president.

No, but he has been ex-vice president.

So ex-presidents and vice presidents are not allowed to drive after they leave the White House.

But are you using ex-presidents as a catch-all term to refer to presidents and vice presidents?

Because I'm sure that is what the vice presidents do.

I bet Joe Biden does.

I've been the vice president of the United States of America.

It's very useful on the lecture circuit.

And this isn't a law either, but it is a secret service rule, as it were.

As in the Secret Service says, well, we really think you shouldn't drive.

And most people basically stick to it because someone else is driving you around, I guess.

But George Bush, W drives around his family farm with a truck, and that's about as far as he's allowed to drive.

Are they looked after for the rest of their life by the Secret Service?

You get Secret Service protection for the rest of your life.

Right.

Is that the same with Prime Ministers, do you think?

I think if you started a war in Iraq, you have a lot of security forever.

I think if you're Gordon Brown, you just know

a policeman might ring up once a month to check you're all right.

Because David Cameron was at Wilderness when we were there, wasn't he?

Yeah.

And he had some goons around.

Apparently, he did, yeah.

He did.

But I missed him.

I know.

We normally catch up at those things.

Guys, is this something everyone knows about Switzerland?

That what is the capital?

Oh, Bern.

I think there are five.

Whoa.

You're hedging your bets to the pub quiz.

I think it's like the cabinet.

There are loads of capitals, and none of them is more important.

Oh, or they each become the capital on a rotation basis.

Nice.

You're all wrong.

It doesn't have a capital.

That's why I didn't answer, because there is none.

Okay.

so obviously, everyone thinks that Bern is the capital of Switzerland, but I just did had no idea that it has no official capital, so its constitution doesn't mention it.

It's a de facto capital, isn't it?

It's a de facto capital, but there was a committee that was set up by this seven-person council in 2002 to actually start work on making Bern the proper capital, and then it was suspended in 2004 and not resumed since, because it was too difficult a job.

All I'm saying is, if you're in a pub quiz and they ask you that question, go for my answer, not Anna's.

Because one, you'll get the point, and two, it'll take you a long time to write about this council in 2002.

Yeah, and they don't give you much room sometimes on them.

Sorry, is it Bernard?

Am I saying Bern in this pub quiz?

I think Bern in the pub quiz, yeah.

But if I answered that, well, really, Geneva is the financial capital and Lausanne is the industrial capital and Bern is the political capital and there are a couple of others, would I get the point?

No.

You can only put one answer down.

Because otherwise, you could put every word that's ever been invented as the answer to every question.

Yeah, but they never give you that long.

Just because this is about Switzerland's government, it is unbelievable their system of referenda.

And so, in the past 20 years, they've had more than 180 referendums or referenda.

The runner-up is Ireland, which has had 22, and Latvia, then which has had eight.

They just have them constantly about everything.

It's bizarre.

And one of the ones they had, for instance, was the one in 1959 as to whether women should be allowed to vote.

And they voted that down.

So, that was a referendum that only men could take part in because women still couldn't vote in 1959.

Most men in Switzerland voted against women getting the vote, and they didn't get it until 1971.

So, all you need is a hundred thousand signatures from registered voters in order to have the referendum.

So, that's why it can happen so easily.

It's just people need to sign up.

There was a party that tried to have a referendum called the APPP,

and they were trying to ban the use of PowerPoint in Switzerland.

And the APP claimed that 2.1 billion Swiss francs was being wasted on PowerPoint presentations from the sort of like taking people away from their jobs to see PowerPoint presentations and so on.

They said 85% of workforce people saw no point in a PowerPoint presentation.

Did they have a petition about that then?

Yeah, I think they do.

And I think they failed to get the 100,000 people to sign it.

What I was thinking is that their PowerPoint presentation, for short, would be the APPP PPP.

That is great.

That's like someone trying to do my initials and then really stammering suddenly.

So when you become a member of the party, you have to buy the party manifesto, which is set out in this book called The PowerPoint Fallacy.

And it's authored by the guy who founded the party, who's called Matthias Poem.

And he was asked in an interview, so is this just a promotional gimmick for your book?

And he said, yes, it is a tool to promote my book.

And then he said, There's like further reasons for him doing it as well.

But, like, yeah, basically, it was set up to sell his book.

Cool.

Yeah.

Fair enough.

At least he's honest.

Yeah, but that existed.

That was a party.

Wow.

Well, a party.

One guy.

One guy.

That's true.

Yeah, I don't know how many people sign up.

A lot of my parties are like that.

Okay, it is time to move on to fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that a New Zealand scientist is planning to hunt for the Loch Ness monster inside of a cup.

Quick, quick search.

Or big cup.

Yeah, true.

Actually,

it's a small nessie.

Yes.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, no, it's a big, it's a large cup.

It's a couple eithers.

It's a few cups.

Basically, the idea of this is that a New Zealand scientist called Professor Neil Gemmel

has been promoting this thing called e-DNA or EDNA.

And the idea is that we can now, taking samples of water from various lakes and oceans and so on, can analyze the DNA that's found inside each cup and they're able to diagnose what animals are in there, what animals aren't in there, if they're meant to be in there.

It's a sort of new system of being able to count up fish and any ocean life of a specific area with accuracy from within just a bit of water.

The idea behind going to look for Nessie is he's effectively doing this as a publicity stunt to promote the idea of e-DNA.

This basically got picked up by the papers.

This was never his intention.

When he announced the idea that he wanted to do more stuff with e-DNA, a cryptozoologist got on contact with him and said, could you do this for the Loch Ness?

And he said, you probably could, but I'm not planning to do that.

The papers kind of reported that he said, yes, that's what I'm planning on doing.

And as a result, when he'd go to schools and everywhere else to talk about it, children would ask him specifically about Loch Ness.

And using Loch Ness, he started explaining the procedures and people were just way more interested generally.

So he's now up for the idea of doing the Loch Ness thing because people are actually listening.

It's insane you have to do it via the Loch Ness monster.

Do you know what he should try next?

Is organizing a Swiss referendum?

Well, the other thing about it is that there's now a massive library of fish DNA.

Because obviously it's no good finding a bit of DNA and then thinking, well, what did this come from when you don't know the DNA of, let's say, a cod.

So there was a massive drive organized by a scientist who is called Jesse Alsubel.

They did 500 expeditions and they got basically thousands and thousands of specimens of animals from all over the oceans.

So now they have this huge library of tens of thousands of fish DNA samples and now they can actually match it up to something.

So that was the big fingerprinting drive.

That's good, yeah, because otherwise you've just got a bit of DNA that's completely useless.

Is this Nessie?

Don't know.

It could be Nessie, yeah, sure.

It could be anything.

You really need some kind of reference system.

It's a hard thing to research because I kept getting articles about

the world's oldest woman dies.

You just keep getting articles about people called Edna, don't you?

So, one of the ways this is going to be important is because we need to be able to keep count of our fish and know where they are because fish stocks are being depleted.

And we have a bunch of ways of counting fish.

I was reading an article, I think it was in The Atlantic, about how a lot of scientists and fishermen still just do the traditional way of counting fish, which is basically that your ownership, you've what's this?

The traditional way must be just one, one, two, two, three, fish.

Fish, two, fish, three, fish, four.

Yeah, it is this, but they spend months and months out there.

So in Massachusetts, these guys go out in a boat and they have a conveyor belt set up on their boat, and they get this huge net, and then they plop all these fish onto the conveyor belt.

And then someone's job is to pick a fish off a conveyor belt, shout what species it is, throw it into the right species pile.

Someone else's job is to like shove it up against a measuring board and automatically a magnet magnet measures how long it is.

Take a mugshot of it.

Yes, it looks exactly like that.

But then do we eat these fish or do they throw them back on?

They throw them back in.

Well, they weigh them first.

So the question is, how do they know that it's not the same

card the next time?

Yeah, what are they doing?

They didn't explain.

Hey, Jerry, this one looks a bit like that one from three weeks ago.

Are they throwing them back alive still?

Yeah.

So they're putting them on the conveyor belt, still alive.

They're shoving them up against a measuring board, still alive.

They plop them on a set of weighing skills, still alive.

And then they're sent back down, and no one believes them.

Yeah.

This is, you're right, that's the UFO of the fish world, isn't it?

So the reason that it's really hard to break out of this system, which is actually not as efficient as, for instance, using a drone to count all the fish or maybe using a DNA monitoring system, is that it's kind of like the thing Andy mentioned.

It's a referencing problem.

So because we started counting fish this way in the 1950s or 60s, the only way we know how many fish there are are compared to before is by comparing it to the previous cows.

So we just have to keep on doing this system.

If we suddenly do a new system, we'll find way more fish and we won't know how to compare it to how many there were before.

So we're stuck with it.

We're stuck with guys

touching fish.

Is come up with a new system and then do them both together for a few years.

That's a really good idea, James, and then compare the difference.

You should get on that committee.

I have a cryptozoology fact because we're on Nessie.

Yeah.

So this is a story from the BBC.

This was North Carolina last week and it was about Bigfoot Dan.

Ooh.

I know.

There was a sighting of Bigfoot.

Yeah.

Hugely exciting.

Group of hunters called Bigfoot 911.

They said they'd seen Bigfoot only for a local shaman to get in touch saying it was me.

Yeah.

I was walking around in a suit made of animal skins.

And he's called Gawain.

But the man who wrote the group said on Facebook, I want to address the recent revelation from the gentleman that stated that I saw him in the woods.

This is quite a fascinating story, but there are a few problems with it.

Number one, the creature that I saw was eight foot tall with stringy matted hair.

The gentleman in the picture does not appear tall.

Two, the creature moved with speed unmatched by any human.

But the thing is that Gawain McGregor was there looking for Bigfoot himself.

Was he?

Yes.

He wanders around dressing in animal skins, reciting what he says is a Sasquatch prayer.

And he says that he himself has met Bigfoot before, but has now been mistaken for Bigfoot.

Very good.

Are they just seeing each other constantly and thinking they're sighting Bigfoot?

They did find Nessie this year.

Did they?

They found a Nessie.

It was a nine-metre model of the Loch Ness monster built in 1969 for a Sherlock Holmes movie and sank to the bottom of Loch Ness.

And they found it with an underwater robot.

They took a photo of it.

That's amazing.

That's really cool.

Yeah, that's awesome.

Did anyone get excited initially or were they all sensible people who knew exactly what they were doing?

Nessie's deed.

Do you know, you must know about Robert Rines,

the Nessie hunter, who I'd never heard of, but is really cool.

So he's a proper scientist.

He died not that long ago.

You're already looking skeptical, Andy, but he made massive contributions to science in America, but was also obsessed with the Loch Ness monster and convinced it existed.

So he had 800 patents.

He developed this way to improve radar and sonar images, and now it's used in Patriot missiles, which they use in the military.

He found the Titanic wreck, and he found the wreck of the Bismarck.

He was one of the people on that team who uncovered the Titanic.

He made massive leaps in ultrasound imaging.

He contributed to eye surgery, but he's just remembered for the fact that he was obsessed with the Loch Ness Monster.

And so, for instance, he hired a perfumer once to concoct the kind of scent that would attract a creature like the Loch Ness Monster and he trained dolphins to find it.

So he got cameras on dolphins' heads and trained them to be able to find Nessie.

But yeah, it's so weird.

He's this really cool, legit guy.

He once played a violin duet with Albert Einstein.

He was a Harvard scientist, but who also kept on trying to find the Loch Ness Monster.

It's weird, isn't it?

That is weird.

This guy's my hero.

Yeah.

He patented a form of chopsticks with hinges on them as well.

He's doubly my hero.

I was reading that in, this is about in 2012, and I couldn't find an update on this, but in America and Louisiana,

Christian schools that are sort of, you know,

sort of believe that dinosaurs existed at the same time as humans,

so creationist sort of schools,

they started teaching that the Loch Ness monster is real, a solid scientific fact, to help back up all of their creationist stuff.

So there's an ACE textbook.

This is Biology

1099 Accelerated Christian Education Inc., who published it.

And it reads, Are dinosaurs alive today?

Scientists are becoming more convinced of their existence.

Have you heard of the Lochness monster in Scotland?

Nessie, for short, has been recorded on sonar from a small submarine, described by eyewitnesses and photographed by others.

Nessie appears to be a plesiosaur.

So that's actually taught as fact within these schools.

It's quite cool.

I didn't know that Nessie.

It's not quite cool.

It's not cool.

Oh, exactly, because

plesiosaurs, I don't think they're dinosaurs, really.

Yeah, what?

So that is a massive mistake they've made there.

Yeah, they're not dinosaurs?

No, but in the same way that pterodactyls were not dinosaurs.

Yeah, but don't put saw on the end of your name and not be a dino.

Yeah, but dino is not on the front of the name.

Yeah, but saw's on the end of everything.

Also, Tyrannosaur is a dinosaur.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's like koala burs and not bears.

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

My fact is that your liver grows and shrinks by 40% every 24 hours.

I am in love with the liver.

Yeah, it's a great fact.

Wow, what a thing.

Okay, so this was based on a New York Times article I read.

It was just a sort of feature on the wasn't really a news article as such.

No, breaking news, you've got a a liver but it is so cool so the liver grows and shrinks every day it's got its own internal clock so it knows what time to do it and it's it grows and shrinks in accordance with day and night more or less so they tested mice and mice their liver expands after dark and then it shrinks back when daylight is approaching but that's because mice are nocturnal and obviously humans are diurnal so our liver grows in the morning and then it shrinks at night.

Do you think it depends like when you go to bed?

So I go to bed extremely late and Dan goes to bed relatively early.

Yeah.

So do you think his liver expands earlier than mine?

Maybe.

So your livers might be different sizes now just because of your own body clocks.

That's cool.

Would my liver get jet lag when I go to Australia?

I think all of you gets jet lagged.

Does that mean that there are British people walking around Australia with tiny livers?

Getting pickled on the beer much quicker.

I think that's what we're saying, yeah.

And Australians here have massive livers.

No, that's not what we're saying.

They have the same problem, don't they?

They would have the same problem, yeah.

So it's the size of a chihuahua.

At which stage?

Chihuahuas don't grow and shrink 40% during the day.

Full size.

Small, full-size chihuahua.

Hang on.

When the liver's at full-size.

Chihuahuas are like...

They're big, right?

Well, they're not as big as a great date.

I said a small chihuahua there.

I know, but just picture it very quickly.

A chihuahua inside me right now.

I mean, a really tiny chihuahua.

I think you mean a chihuahua without the tail.

I think when you picture it in.

They're the size of the Mexican state of chihuahua.

Right.

Okay, that is based on a mental floss article, so that is.

A mental floss are very reliable, so I don't know what they're doing.

They are, yeah.

I believe that.

A chihuahua.

Yeah.

Oh, please.

Okay.

Chihuahuas aren't that big.

They're bigger than that.

Yeah.

Anna's gesturing a really tiny dog with a hands.

Sort of mouse dressed up as a chihuahua.

Yeah, I just think it's amazing.

Yeah, it's incredible.

It is very awesome.

Is it thought to be because it's so that it can get used to rejuvenating?

Is that right?

So that if it's, you know, flooded with lots of poisonous stuff, at least it's able to like shrink and rebuild itself constantly.

It is like basically a bit of X-Men, isn't it?

Yeah, because it's really part of everyone's got this part of the body that's regenerating all the time.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So we're like part Wolverine just in our liver.

Yeah.

And we've mentioned before.

Oh, Wolverine is all liver.

Yes.

Wow.

That's good.

So we said before that if you chop your liver down to a quarter of the size, it will regenerate within a few weeks to its full size.

And I think you said that if you put a Chihuahua's liver into a Great Dane, it will grow to the size of a Great Dane's liver.

Yes.

It's mad.

So you can donate half of your liver to somebody.

Yeah.

And they, within a few weeks, will have a full liver, and so will you.

So we only need one liver for the whole human race, really.

Yes.

It's like that Greek myth where they share one eye, but if you left a bit of eye behind in the socket and then the eye just multiplied.

Hang on, doesn't Prometheus, when he's chained to the mountain in the myth, get his liver torn out by a bird every day and then it grows back?

I think they did know about it.

So they must have known.

Hang on.

How would they know?

How could they know?

But Prometheus gets his liver torn out every day and then the next day it's grown back and the bird tears it out again and that's his punishment.

Yeah, yeah.

How did they know?

They must have known.

I don't think they did.

You think it's a coincidence?

I think it's a coincidence.

I'm calling it.

So did you know that Tim Cook, you know, who's the current CEO of Apple, wanted to donate his liver, or 50% of it, to Steve Jobs when he needed a liver donation.

And Tim Cook said that he's only been shouted at by Steve Jobs three or four times in their entire career, and they worked very closely for many, many years.

And one of the times was that when he knocked on his door and said, can I give you some of my liver?

And Steve Jobs said, no, don't be an idiot.

You shouldn't have to do that for me.

He shouted at him.

Yeah, apparently he got angry because I think Tim Cook was really insistent and said, I want to.

Was it it intimate?

Oh my god,

you're dripping it on my floor.

Get out of here.

What is this?

Chop liver?

So Steve Jobs actually had a liver transplant in, I think, 2008.

Oh, we had a liver transplant in the 2000s.

And the doctor who transplanted his liver later bought his house, which is quite nice.

I went onto the old QI forums where we do our research for TV show and found a discussion between me and Andy about whether we could eat human livers

and not die, basically.

Because there's an old fact that if you eat a polar bear's liver, you'll die because it's got so much vitamin A in it.

And so we worked out how much vitamin A there was per gram in a human liver, which is 575 international units, and then how heavy our liver was, and then what the maximum single intake dose for vitamin A was in a human.

And we worked out that if you ate one and a third raw livers in a single sitting, you would probably die of vitamin A poisoning.

It might be a bit different if you cooked it, but not too different.

So, if Hannibal Lecter, for instance, ate two human livers in one sitting, he would die of vitamin A poisoning.

So, that's why they never show that scene in the film because they knew it would be unrealistic to show him eating two livers.

Yeah.

Well, the other thing that would be realistic in the film is if you eat too much vitamin A, your body stops being able to store it and you turn orange.

So, the police should have been able to find him by just looking for an orange person.

Wow.

Did you know that

you can grow a baby in a liver?

Like human baby?

Four babies have been born not out of a womb but out of a liver.

Deliberately or ectopically right?

Well or nearly.

So normally egg gets fertilized, moves down into womb.

Sometimes egg gets stuck in fallopian tube.

Problem.

It's called an ectopic pregnancy.

Sometimes one in a hundred thousand times

the egg just falls out of the fallopian tube and it wanders off through the body.

In the very very rare cases where the fertilized egg lands in the abdomen in the liver,

it's got a massive blood supply there.

The only thing it lacks is the muscular wall of the womb, so it's not as well protected, but...

No placenta though.

So how do they...

It grows.

Because food comes through it.

This is incredible.

Because it does so much.

The liver does like 500 jobs.

It does 500 jobs.

It's like the George Osborne of the human body, isn't it?

And so the last time was in 2003 in South Africa, doctors literally went into a woman's liver and pulled out a healthy baby.

That is one of the best facts.

That's incredible.

Can you imagine for the baby as well?

Half of its day, it's flat, gets 50% bigger.

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 have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James, at H8, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M.

And Shazinski.

You can email podcasts at QI.com.

Yep, or you can join us every Monday on our Facebook page for a Facebook Live, 5 p.m.

That's London time.

And we'll be there discussing the previous episode that had been played out that week and other things.

You can also go to our website, no such thingasafish.com.

We have links.

to our tour in October and November.

We also have a link to the book that we're releasing in November as well.

And we have all of our previous episodes up there.

So please go there and we'll see you guys again next week.

Goodbye.

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