100: No Such Thing As A Zillion And One

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Hi, everyone.

Just before we start this episode, I wanted to drop in that it's our 100th birthday.

We have been going for 100 years.

Time has flown.

No, it's our 100th episode.

And so, happy birthday to us.

Thanks so much for sticking with us for 100 full episodes.

And this is just the 100th.

Have I said 100 too many times?

It's no big deal.

It's just 100.

It's just 100.

Just 100.

100.

For all the show.

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.

I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Chaczynski, James Harkin, and a special guest making his second appearance, his first being as a secret track on our vinyl.

It's Stone Sour and Slipknots front man, Corey Taylor.

And once again, we've 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, Corey.

Oh, the honors, yes.

My fact is a million seconds is 11.5 days.

A billion seconds is 32 years.

So that is bizarre because just basically because of the vast difference, you think that a billion is a bit more than a million.

And when we talk about billions and trillions, when you hear about trillion-dollar debt or billion-dollar debt, you kind of think they're essentially the same thing.

And

I know, I know, so I only just found out there's no zillion.

I thought that was a thing.

I'd always realize it's a billion, billion, zillion.

Not a thing at all.

Well, it jumps to, I think, there's one in between, but there's a Google and then there's a Google Plex.

Is that right?

Those are massive, yeah.

Which are

quite large.

So a Google is one with 100 zeros, and a Google Plex is one with a Google zeros.

You can't write out a Google Plex because there are more zeros than there are atoms in the universe.

I think so, yeah.

That's the problem.

That's the problem for me.

Otherwise, we'd all be doing it.

That's why we let the computers do it.

I mean, come on.

But so wasn't it the case that billion in America used to be a different billion to we've half copied America but half not copied it so a billion means two different things now.

So a billion in America is a thousand million and in the UK it's generally a thousand million now but also sometimes it's a million million.

Since 1974 they officially have the standard where we have the American short billion now.

I can only apologise.

Sorry.

But it's a lot easier for us all to become billionaires.

Well, I guess so.

Yeah, that's why we all are.

Why are the only billionaire sitting at the stage?

Do you know how long ago it was a trillion years ago?

A trillion years ago.

I know exactly how long ago.

It was a trillion years ago.

In seconds, please.

No, do you know how many a trillion seconds ago?

How many years ago that was?

So is that

a thousand billion?

Yes.

Okay.

So it's 31,710 years ago.

And that was about the first time humans started eating porridge.

Really?

Wow.

That's good.

What a a big day.

I wonder what they ate up until that point.

Oh, yeah, breakfast, nothing.

Breakfast, nothing.

Breakfast, porridge.

Yes, we're still eating it.

Yeah, I mean, I'm a billionaire.

I ate meat carved right off the animal that struck the table.

That's probably what they were having before they were having porridge.

Yeah, well, I was just going to say, you know, we've gone, you know, I've gone backwards.

You know, I'm keeping it real.

Was there anything else that was going on then, do you know, James?

Yeah, it was about the same time as the first cave paintings in Europe.

I believe Bruce Forsyth was also born.

Right around that.

Hey, it's the one English joke I had.

Sorry.

Strong cultural reference.

So impressive.

Hey, I know my thing.

What would be the American version of that, someone who's like really old?

Of Bruce Forsyth?

Yeah.

Maybe, but I don't even know if he's still alive, Bob Hope.

Bob Hope.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He has died as well.

He did die, yeah.

He made it to 100, though.

Yeah.

Although, it turns out, I was reading this thing about Bob Hope that he actually lied about his birthday just for a sort of like, he just knocked it a year younger.

He was only like 26.

No, no.

No, so he, I think, just for some kind of reason, he knocked it a year back.

So, secretly, he knew he'd hit 100.

Yeah.

But he couldn't tell anyone.

So then when he hit 100 officially in the country, they're like, happy birthday, but he would have been over it by then.

Yeah, well, he's

just greedy, and he's shot himself in the foot there.

He shouldn't have lied and I didn't like Bob Ho.

One of the great things the Buddha could do, apparently, according to Buddhist legend, is count really, really high.

Really?

Oh my.

He, well, super high, James.

I'll tell you how high.

A mathematician asked him, What's the highest number you know?

And so the Buddha said, Well, I know this number is a bit different.

Yeah,

he could name it, though.

He's the guy who probably came up with Zillion in a panicked moment.

Oh, like a Zillion, I can count up to right before he said gajillion.

And then the mathematician said to Buddha, what about a Zillianum one?

In your face, Buddha.

And on this basis, a great religion was founded.

There was a really good article in I09, which I love, about how we can't even comprehend this million, billion, these massive numbers thing.

Humans haven't evolved to comprehend them.

Like when we were, you know, 3,000 years ago, 4,000 years ago, we didn't need to think about anything except people in our immediate vicinity.

We didn't have much astronomical knowledge, stuff like that.

So we didn't have all these big numbers.

So, this article, it was written by someone called a mathematician called Spencer Greenberg, is talking about how you can make numbers be more manageable or make huge things seem more manageable.

So, like, for instance, the time thing is one, so you say you could do this over a certain amount of time.

Another one is breaking stuff down.

So, if you say the US has $17 trillion of debt, the best thing to do there is actually say that's $54,000 of debt per person.

See, this is the problem, because you say,

How many dollars was it for every person in America?

54,000.

So I can't picture 300 million people, which is about the population of the USA.

So that's where it all falls down, unfortunately.

It's a manageable amount of money for an unimaginable.

A lot of Americans can't handle 54,000

numbers.

In Germany, after the war, they had very bad inflation and things started costing, you know, 10,000 marks.

Well, this is after World War I.

Yeah, exactly.

And they had this mental disorder called zero stroke or cipher stroke, where people just kept writing down zeros all the time because they just couldn't deal with these massive numbers.

Really?

And you would ask them, how many kids do you have?

And they'd be like, I've got 10 trillion children.

Or how old are you?

I'm 7 billion years old or something.

Wow.

That's so interesting.

Because they just couldn't deal with these massive numbers.

Wow.

In 2009, Zimbabwe printed 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar notes.

I have one.

Do you?

And it's worth like something ridiculous, like 20 pounds or something, I think.

Yeah, I think I bought mine for about a fiver.

Nice.

Okay.

You've got it on the cheap.

James collects these kind of things, though.

Just so he can pull things out of his wallet to impress you.

James literally has two tickets to the gun show.

Like, he literally has two tickets to the gun show.

I was in Florida, and there was a gun show going on, and I didn't want to go to it, but I wanted the tickets, so I just bought some tickets.

I've actually been meaning to ask since you did that what a gun show is, and it's gone so long that I just haven't now.

Does everyone else know what a gun show is?

You just go along and look at guns, and I think you can buy

a pageant for guns.

do you dress them up yeah is it like crafts for guns a little more explosive

if i'm honest the funny thing is i i have a house in las vegas and there's kind of an there's almost like a perpetual gun show going on in that and there because like and it's like this giant warehouse just full of dealers who are just showing you ar-15s m16s rocket launchers minis like and then there's then they have a range out back so It's like, well, go test fire it before you buy it.

You know, it's like a test drive for a car, you know, but you go out back, all right, here we go.

And then it's just, it's very loud.

I'd be so tense all the time.

The funny thing is, they advertise it.

They advertise for it at the airport.

So you're on the moving walkway and you're just driving and there's this chick with a gun and a bikini and you're like, hey, that's a place to go.

I don't think they sell boots, but I'm sure they're working on it.

Yeah.

Las Vegas is very much the James's shirt of America.

There's a permanent gun show going on at all times.

Quite, quite.

Yeah, 24-7.

Lock it in.

Amazing.

This is an amazing thing.

I can't believe I didn't know about big numbers.

So there have been two attempts in human history to estimate the number of particles in the universe, I think, or two that have two big ones that we know about that have been written down.

So one of them was by Archimedes.

So this was

over 2,000 years ago.

And he was estimating the number of grains of sand in the universe, actually, but now we know how many particles in a grain of sand.

Arthur Eddington, 2,000 years later, estimated the number of particles in the universe.

They came to exactly the same number.

No, no, isn't that completely insane?

Was he just kind of copying off of Archimedes?

Wasn't that in ancient Greek, Mr.

Eddington?

Well, never mind that.

Never mind that.

How pissed off would you be, though, when you realize you got the exact same rhyme as Archimedes?

I was like, kidding.

Really?

This was five years.

I think you would add an extra couple to the end.

It's like 10 to the power of 72 plus 7.

So it doesn't look like you copied him, right?

Well, there was a thing about Everest, because they measured Mount Everest and they found it came to a really annoyingly round number.

Is that right?

Do you remember this?

So is it actually not the tallest mountain in the world?

Yeah.

You know that?

I don't know if I've said this on the podcast before.

Last year was the first year that no one's reached the top of Mount Everest in 41 years since it became a lot of the time.

The top shepherds went on

No, it was just the conditions were really bad.

Because there were a few avalanches, they closed off a couple of routes, but they didn't close off like the extreme routes.

And the last chance was in December.

Someone got really close and then had to come back down.

This is the first year.

Really?

Yeah.

And it lost an inch last year from the earthquake.

So you think it would have been easier.

Yeah.

You tell me if Everest lost an inch.

Well, it is quite cold.

We know exactly what that feeling is like.

It's like, it's really chilly, honey.

I don't care, I'm not going to climb you tonight.

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

Yeah, my fact is that Star Trek was almost not commissioned because the pilot was considered too erotic.

Now, this fact entailed googling the phrase Star Trek erotic, which is quite dangerous.

I see you have a lot of paper there, which is

so what's that?

Well, so this was a pilot called The Cage.

That was the name of the episode.

It was sent to NBC in 1964.

And actually, I was very skeptical about how erotic it could really be because it's Star Trek, but it does sound quite raunchy.

It was

the idea of the show was that a planet let out a call for help to the guys on the spaceship, on the Star Trek spaceship.

And I'm obviously showing how much they know about this.

The Star Trek spaceship.

Star Trek.

That was the original plan for the name of the ship.

And yeah, so they went down to this planet, and actually, it was a a plant, and there was a beautiful alien on this planet who seduced the Star Trek spaceship crew members, and because she had to have sex with them in order to repopulate this planet, because it was suffering from a population crisis.

So it was about someone being planted to seduce Captain Kirk, who wasn't Captain Kirk at the time.

No, it was Captain Pike.

It was Captain Pike.

Captain Pike was

in the yeah, well, they brought it back because then they were able to use pieces of the original pilot in the episode.

I can't remember the name of it, but it has to do with Spock is on trial.

Captain Pike has been destroyed, and he's in this chair.

And Captain Kirk is testifying on his behalf, and they keep cutting to

footage of the original pilot.

I was kind of a trek.

I liked it.

I wasn't a trekkie, but I used to watch it all the time because it was on

in repeats.

So I watched it when I was a kid, you know, and I was just fascinated by it.

I was like, why does the future look so old?

Yeah.

You know, I mean,

there's that used future look, and then there's like, well, Christ, that's like from the 70s.

I read that the original plan for Mr.

Spock, or one of the original things for the design of the character, was that he was going to not eat anything, and that he would, instead, he would have a plate in the middle of his stomach, and energy which struck the plate would be his food.

Yeah.

So he'd just feed off the, you know, if the cosmic radiation hits the plate.

It might be like, you know, photosynthesizing.

I suppose so.

Sounds great.

Sounds like a good idea.

It's James's dream.

Yeah.

To have to waste all this time having meals.

Well, the other day, Dan was saying to me the other day, it's so relentless having to eat all the time.

It's three meals a day.

I think we don't talk about it more.

It's bullshit.

We're just, again, I need to feed this thing again.

I know.

We have discussed this, and it's like my greatest joy.

And I can't believe you want to take that away from us.

I just can't eating.

Yeah.

I love it, but sometimes I'm just like, I just want a day off.

Day off from eating.

That's That's called the 5-2 diet.

There are products being developed, though, which are, I can't remember the name of them, but they are basically nutritious mush, which really doesn't taste very much at all, but it is selling us on this mush.

Oh, wow.

And there is a sea slug that's managed to get genes out of plants so it can eat like an animal, but it can also photosynthesize.

So I would like to get these plant genes into my body so I can sometimes photosynthesize as well.

Wow.

so while sunbathing, you're also eating.

Yeah.

Basically.

That is the dream, actually.

Thinking about it now.

It's not my dream.

I hate to sunbathe.

I love to eat.

It sounds awful.

My favourite thing I found out about Star Trek generally, so created by Gene Roddenberry.

And there's a lot of rules.

He wrote this kind of Bible for Star Trek of what would be if you made an episode.

My favourite one is that he believed that there was no chest hair in the future.

So Captain Kirk, in all the shots where he's naked they were shaving his chest because there is no chest hair in the future he thought ahead he thought evolutionary oh so it's not a fashion thing in the future he's not shaving it every day he just doesn't grow every day

much like the pinky toe we would just phase that out

because why not

make sense i mean if you think about it like well and i guess i'm the only one who can really recall it but then when suit when the one episode where everyone goes a little crazy and su's running around with the sword completely you know he's got a bald chest Right.

You know?

Yeah.

Spock, when he's fighting Kirk on the planet and they have to fight each other, bald chest.

Or maybe Klingons just didn't have chest.

I'm not sure.

No, Vulcans.

Yes, they're right.

God, what the hell was that?

You know what?

Not a real person.

I'm going to walk away from the table now.

I'll come back in a second.

Turn has just saved us a lot of posts.

That's true.

Never had a bad thing.

So-called QI.

The worst was when we had Daniel Radcliffe on QI and he got the rules to Quidditch wrong.

No.

Oh, my God.

How many emails have we had about that?

Well, maybe that's why Potter won so many matches.

Screw the rules.

I'm a maverick.

I'm ready.

On the Vulcan thing, we have done this in a previous episode, but if you don't know it, you might like it.

Which is that he was originally meant to be Martian.

He was meant to be from Mars.

But when they were writing the scripts and getting everything approved, the people at the studio said, we think you need to change it because by the time this series goes out and it's in its second series or something, we will have landed on Mars Mars and we will have seen Martians and something.

Yeah, and they were like, and that would make your series just look ridiculous.

That's.

He also had

red skin at first.

He was supposed to have red skin, Spock, but then it was in black and white a lot of the time and it turned out it looked like he just painted himself black, so he couldn't have red skin.

Oh, really?

But also on skin painting, in that pilot, the seductress, this woman who's supposed to seduce them all, is green.

And so she had to be painted in thick green paint, and it's quite hard and time consuming to do that and so that it shows up properly on camera.

They filmed a test thing to see how it would work on camera.

They sent it away to you know be re, you know, to be properly done.

They got the video back and she looked normal skin color and they were like my god this hasn't worked and so they went through it all again made it a bit thicker a bit brighter green sent the video you know sent the film away to get the video converted to get the video back got it back again and they were like what is going on she's still peach coloured with a tiny bit of green tinge and it turned out the colour technicians when they got the film had gone well this is obviously an error they didn't mean to

Something's gone wrong here.

They stayed up all night every time trying to make her skin skin color together.

It's hilarious.

James, didn't we do a thing about how early TV or early film stars, did they wear green makeup?

You know who did that?

Max Factor.

Really?

That's where the name Max Factor comes from.

He was like the greatest, at the time, he was the greatest film makeup artist.

And as they were starting to go from

like silent film to like the different

the different types of film and everything, it looked very oily, very, you know, very, just very much like they were just painted with a bunch of oil.

And when they went to technical, so yeah, and so he spent, I want to say, two years developing what is now widely known as like the standard for film makeup.

And that's why, and that's after that, he started his own cosmetics line, and that's where Max Factor comes from.

Oh, that's awesome.

That's very cool.

T.S.

Elliott used to paint his face a tiny bit green, and no one really knows why.

So, maybe he was just desperately hoping for a film deal.

Light up.

When are they going to bring the wasteland to Hollywood?

Now, talking about Star Trek, before we move on, a lot of people probably don't realize that one of the first interracial kisses on television was between Uhura and Kirk.

Yeah.

And at the time, it was very, very risque.

Yeah.

And they almost pulled it because the censors thought it would be too inflammatory.

And honestly, they got a few letters, but other than that.

Really?

Oh, really?

Yeah, because

I don't know if this is why they were able to pull it off, but they were both under the spell of, I can't remember what the character's name was, but they were basically forced to do it.

And that's how they were able to kind of get it through.

But yeah,

that was the first interracial kiss on television.

I read that Uhura was going to leave, but then Martin Luther King talked her out of it and said, you know, you're a trailblazing kind of African-American woman who like no matter what you think is happening children watching you are seeing a black woman in space at the time was so radical.

Yeah, yeah, it's one of the things I give credit for Roddenberry.

Like he looked so fast.

I mean, he was very misogynistic,

but he looked so far past color, religion, artists.

He did.

And like that was the theme of a lot of Star Trek episodes, really, wasn't it?

It was like this strange other alien, which actually isn't that strange, which is not.

And it was weird because, like, a lot of the characters were not white in the 60s when that was a radical thing to do.

Yeah, Mr.

Sulu, you had, yeah, just even on Chekhov, who was Russian

at the time, right in the middle of the Cold War.

Yeah, yeah.

Just one last thing on censors.

Yeah.

Because I was reading about the history of censorship on American TV.

Oh, boy.

So, in 1931,

cows were not permitted in cartoons to have udders.

They had to be pictured in a skirt.

In a skirt.

This is 31.

This is 31.

What happened again later?

Because I found another source, a really good book called America's First Network TV Sensor, which says that in 1958, cartoon cows were only permitted wearing skirts.

Was there a specific length of skirt they were allowed to wear?

Well, they weren't allowed to wear a mini skirt or anything like that.

It had to be quite a floral, nice, loose, flowing number, so you couldn't see their legs.

Yeah, that's where did they put it?

I think this is why then they said cows had to stand upright because they first had them on four legs.

And they had it halfway down their torso, and then it touches the ground.

There was that thing off the internet the other week about where do you put a dog's trousers?

Like, do they go around all four legs or just the back two legs?

If a dog wore trousers.

If a dog wore trousers.

Well, it would wear two pairs of trousers, wouldn't it?

Well,

you should have told the internet two weeks ago because they were all arguing about it.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

So then, even in 1940, there was

a cow called Elsie, the Borden cow, who was a real cow fearing in a live-action film.

And they said the udders should be suggested rather than shown.

We'd rather see the bulge than the action.

My country sometimes.

It's pretty weird.

Okay, it's time for fact number three and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the Swiss city of Lausanne has banned silent discos for being too loud.

They're party animals in Switzerland.

It's great, isn't it?

So, why?

They make a lot of noise, apparently, because

while you've got the headphones on, you're listening to music, and it's supposed to be silent, a lot of people are just singing along or kind of bouncing around or

shouting at each other

by the way.

Yeah, they uh at download, they have a special tent specifically designed for silent disco.

Okay, now I was wandering around the grounds one time trying to find one of the tents where my buddies were going to play.

Yeah, wandered into the silent disco tent and was assaulted by this.

I mean, it's

full contact.

Like, it's like,

I mean, they're just screaming,

stomping.

It was much louder.

And then you look around, it's like, these people are having fits?

What is happening?

I just backed out.

I'm not turning my back on them.

Screw that.

I mean, but I mean, they've got the lids on.

You know,

I'm giving it large.

And I was terrified.

I never went back.

So I think we're saying that Los Sala has done the right thing.

They are on the right track.

I like a silent disco.

You can have the music nice and quiet, and you can wander out if you, you know, you can turn it right down.

I love it.

It really suits me.

Everyone else is rocking out a download and Andy's listening to radio four.

And now the shipping forecast.

Woo!

Dogger!

Fairbank!

So maybe we're saying this is a sensible thing.

It seems that way, yeah.

I wasn't really au fait with the silent disco, but it seems that, yeah, they're right.

They're really good.

But the thing is, you get people, because often they have two DJs or even three playing different tunes.

So people are dancing to different rhythms and different beats.

So people, it's sort of, I think people care a bit less what they look like when they're dancing.

You don't get as much kind of posy dancing.

Yeah, because you could be saying, I'm totally in rhythm, by the way, to what I'm listening to.

You just don't know that.

It's not obvious when you're not dancing in tune or singing in tune, I guess.

A lot of them have their eyes closed.

Constantly running into each other.

At different tempos.

So it's like, it's honestly, it's like watching watching CCTV footage of like the damned just outside the gates, you know, just getting ready.

Do you know where Silent Disco comes from?

No.

Or when it comes from.

So this is, well, the theory online is that it dates back to a 1969 Finnish sci-fi film called, I'm going to mispronounce it as well, Russian Aya, which means time of roses.

And people all wear headphones to a party.

And that's the first

time that was ever seen in popular culture.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Wow.

And they were definitely listening to stuff.

Because sometimes, I didn't want to admit this, but I put my headphones on in the office so people don't talk to me, but I'm not actually listening to anything.

Is that so?

Yeah.

Well, you've lost your advantage now.

Were they doing that?

They were all just like, I'll go to the party, but I'm not speaking to anybody.

Keeping my headphones on it.

That's really interesting.

Because when was.

So 1969.

And it's set in 2012.

So when was the audio, like, sorry, when were cassettes, audio cassettes invented?

Oh, 80s?

Because what were they listening to?

Late 70s?

Yeah, because was headphones even a concept of a thing you can do?

They just held off backgrounds.

Yeah, absolutely.

In America, the giant headphones have been around for quite a while.

They kind of went hand in hand with the hi-fi system that were sold in like the early 60s.

The first ever jukebox was made by Edison, and he had some kind of music system, and there was like stethoscopes that would come down, and like five different people would kind of put the stethoscopes next to their ears and listen.

So that's kind of headphones.

And they used to come with a towel that you could clean it after, well, before you would use it.

That's fantastic.

Just so you wouldn't catch ear diseases on people.

Those famous ear diseases.

There's a guy called George Foy who lived in New York where it's loud and he had some kids who are making noise and he decided he would go on a quest to find the quietest place on the planet and he's obsessed with finding quiet places.

But he says and he's been inside the anarchoic chamber in

Massachusetts.

Minneapolis.

In Minneapolis.

And he's clarified that there is no such thing as silence and he said he found it really annoying going inside this chamber which didn't drive him mad like it drives other people mad.

I have read that the longest anyone's ever spent in an anarchoic chamber is 45 minutes.

He beat that.

Did he?

Yeah, because he was fine with it.

They actually had to kind of break the door down to get him out.

Did they?

He was just having a great time.

Why do they not have a handle?

That's a design.

Wow.

I've been to a semi-anicoid chamber.

It was a semi-one.

What?

Where there's some noise?

Yeah.

Because that seems to defeat the choice.

I was with you.

Yeah, you were.

It's the echo.

It's the lack of echo.

So you can make noise, but it's just it won't bounce back at you.

And so with this one, there was a floor which was just normal, and all the other walls were kind of had this special stuff that stopped any echoes.

And was it weird?

Yeah it was really weird.

It was odd.

Really, really weird.

Yeah.

Do you know the most echoey place in the entire world?

It's this massive oil tank in Scotland.

It's in a place called Inchendown and they They dug these huge oil tanks into a hillside during the Second World War to store millions and millions of gallons of oil because they need to fuel ships which were moored at the nearest naval base but they didn't want it to be a risk of bombers, you know, long-range German bombers, so they had to dig it into the hill.

The only way to get in is through one of these four tiny pipes.

They're 46 centimeters across, so it's a squeeze.

But when you get inside there, they've gone inside and tested it.

And the way you test it, by the way, is firing a blank, a pistol

loaded with blanks and see how long it takes.

See how long the echo takes.

Why can't you just say echo?

Like any normal change?

It's just a standard way of doing it.

There are more modern ways.

But the echo in this chamber lasts 112 seconds.

You're kidding.

Wow.

Oh my god.

No.

We played a place the other night.

It was this hall in Frankfurt in Germany.

And the delay in there was seven seconds long because it was just so cavernous.

And even when you get people in there, like, I mean, it's such a battle for us to dial in the sound and everything to fight that.

Wasn't that unbelievably distracting?

Well, we bring our own

PA system with us.

So we're able to really control that.

Plus, we have

probably one of the best sound guys in the business.

he is able to really control that you know and he's he's spent so many hours and so many you know just he he knows how to really dial it in yeah it was pretty intense so that was seven seconds that was seven seconds

i can't even 112.

i mean it's it's incredible

that means it's just hanging there too i mean and i mean at something like that the decay rate has to just be in just sick because it's just It's feeding itself, man.

I'd love to go in there and do some vocals.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I've done vocals at the bottom of a well before.

Really?

And yeah, I don't really recommend it because you're wet.

So was this part of like a plan?

Yeah, you just decided to record some stuff for Slipknot.

And we were recording out, it was when we were doing All Hope is Gone, which was the fourth album.

And we were out at

our buddy's, it was a place called Sound Farm.

Basically, he lives there, and he's got a studio there.

So we were doing a lot of like experimental stuff, you know, just to kind of get away from like the Pro Tools plugins and everything like that.

It's like, let's try and capture something unique.

So they, they, they fished me down the bottom of this well because, you know, you had a proper well down there.

It was deep, very dark.

And of course, we waited until the sun had gone down to do it.

And I was like, this was poor planning on my part.

But then we fished a telefunk in U87 down.

And

I was able to kind of do, and it was just this kind of spoken word thing that we were just doing.

But the reaction just that picked it up was really, really cool.

So I love doing stuff like that.

I'm all about it.

Is it true?

Because it's online this about you that your vocal range is

the biggest ever.

What was it?

No, it's not big.

It's in metal.

Apparently, I have a pretty good range.

It's five and a half

octaves.

But I didn't even know that, to be honest.

I was like,

because this is the good thing about the internet.

It's like, well, I can't sing that, but I can sing this.

I mean, that's really, that's the end of my gig.

But so that rate, the high range, the scream, got you into getting a gig on Doctor Who, right?

Well, yeah, well, the low growl was what did it.

Yeah.

And the guys who directed it, Daniel Harrow, who I just saw last night, he came with the gig.

They were like he and a couple of the producers, a lot of the people, they were like huge Slipknot fans growing up.

And I'm like, wow.

And they were like, when we we played in Cardiff last year where they film and they took us to the Doctor Who experience.

So I'm just freaking out, you know, like we were there for hours.

And they were like, we've got to go.

We gotta get it.

And I'm like, but no.

They took us to BBC Cardiff or BBC Wales, excuse me.

And they walked us through some of the sets and everything.

And then they were like, so we've got this idea.

And I'm like, yeah.

And I described the Fisher King, who's

the alien who I provided the screen for.

And then

Peter, and I can't pronounce his last name.

Seraphinovich.

there it is thank you thank you for that because I butcher it every time I try to say it um he did the spoken the the spoken voice and I was the I did the growl so it was kind of a cool mashup

a duet yeah

basically essentially yeah I mean I let him take the lead

he's pretty good still but yeah so I just I went I'd screamed for about 45 minutes and they were like we've got plenty that's it and then I went and did the gift we actually only asked for three seconds but thanks for that

You've quite overdid it.

Anyone got anything else?

An amusing noise complaint.

Oh, yeah.

I saw.

So this is a big sign that somebody left outside someone else's house when that person had been keeping them up all night with their loud music and their partying.

And the sign says, to the people that kept us awake all night by singing on the balcony, 2.23 a.m., pinball wizard, three out of ten.

Your performance of this would cause the band more shame than Pete Townsend's liberal attitude.

3:15 a.m., walk this way,

the lowest point of the performance.

I hate this song.

One out of ten, but then 8:20 a.m., so you know, this has gone in a while.

Tiny Dancer, actually, very good, seven out of ten.

I think they're a bad critic, because that's very good, seven out of ten.

It's a little bit

harsh, isn't it?

Yeah, it is harsh.

All right, time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact this week is that the giant squid's brain is wrapped around its throat, so if it eats anything too large, it risks brain injury.

It feels like a design flaw, doesn't it?

It does.

So good.

I know, but they've got to do a lot with a little space, because they've got this thing called the mantle, which is basically everything except the tentacles, and they have to fit a huge amount of stuff in there, and so they feed through this sort of the hole in the middle of the mantle, and they, you know, they have a beak, and they have all sorts of strange features.

And so, their brain is wrapped around their esophagus.

Yeah, how stressful.

Every meal.

Every meal.

That would put me off eating if I was going to be brain-damaged.

You just have to chew.

You just have to chew.

That's all it is.

Yeah.

And there's one of the very few things that we know about the giant squid because we know so little.

We don't know how they hunt.

We don't know

how many species there are.

They think there might be up to eight different species of giant squid.

So they've obviously got eight tentacles, but then they've got two feeding tentacles as well.

So the feeding tentacles tentacles can stretch out to 33 feet.

That's what they found in like so imagine you've seen like a squid ages away and you're like, I'm pretty safe here.

They can just lob these two feeding arms and grab you and bring you back like a big tongue on a lizard.

But they won't be able to swallow you, Dan.

You're way bigger than that.

In my head, as I said that, I was a fish.

Yeah, yeah, I was picturing myself swimming along going, oh, I'm safe here.

Eating Nemo.

They are huge.

They are the size of a bus, aren't they?

They are enormous.

They're

a bit more, yeah.

Some of them are as long as so basically the maximum length, including the tentacles, is 13 meters.

Yeah.

And half of them will be the feeding tentacles.

But still,

that's big.

That's a cheat, though, I would say, because if you grew like an eyebrow hair really, really long, you could say, wow, I'm actually this length.

Because those are just two little tentacle arms.

You count your legs when you're talking about how tall you are.

Well, I know, but

you count your arms, which are your feet.

Yeah, but if I'm talking about a bus, I'm not going to talk about a bus that has two extra poles hanging out at the top and going, get on my massive

poles.

There was footage of that one

kind of washing up next to a ship.

I want to say it was fishing just off like maybe the Alaskan coast, but it was, I mean, quite big, and it was caught in one of the nets, and it took them forever to disentangle.

Yeah, I mean, it was, but it was big.

I mean, it was, I mean, and this was a big ship, you know, one of the crabbing ships.

And Christ, it was half, like, maybe three quarters as long as the ship itself.

I was like, oh, God, no.

Someone called, like, the squid police in Weymouth, I think.

The squid police.

The squid police.

Yeah.

Is that the official name?

Yeah, that's who you call it.

It's 9910.

99 tentacles.

Oh, well done.

Someone called the squid police, saying that giant squids washed up on a beach, and it turned out to be a mink whale, which is huge.

So they look like whales when they're dumped on beaches.

They're these huge formless lumps.

Lumps, right?

Wow.

Yeah.

And they have the biggest eyeballs in nature, don't they?

Yeah.

Gigantic eyeballs.

So all animals, I think, the eyes evolved one time, but I think the squid, I think the eyes evolved completely separately, even though they do exactly the same thing.

So it's like eyeballs have evolved twice in two different types of animals.

I think that's right.

Is that because of the depths that they have to do?

Yeah, I think that's right.

Probably.

I was looking into why they have these enormous eyes, and there's a really good paper from 2012 by a team led by Dan Eric Nilsson, shout out to him, that it's to help them spot sperm whales who are their main predators.

So he did a paper and the question was why do they have eyes and the answer was so they can see things.

No, no, hang on.

But why they're three times wider than almost any other animal, apart from colossal squid, which are the other kind.

Anyway, never mind them.

So sperm whales are the main things that hunt them and 600 meters down using an eye that size, you could spot 120 meters away a sperm whale.

But sperm whales have got sonar so

they can identify a giant squid from a long way away.

So it's really just to give them any kind of advantage and a head start in getting away.

And lots of sperm whales, when they wash up, when they die, they've got scars all over them, which we think are from grappling with squid.

No, is that what it's from?

I was wondering what that was when I was looking at the pictures of those ones that washed up.

They've got those scratches all down their backs.

Yeah.

Wow.

And they think that about three-quarters of everything sperm whales eat is giant squid from the number of

squid beaks they find in the stomachs of the whales.

So that it's a huge, they have these enormous battles underwater.

It's probably one happening right now.

You know, squid ink.

So it's not personally, but we have mutual friends.

Yeah, it's a metal band, you guys.

Yeah, they're from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Shout out, Squid Ink.

Squid Ink.

So

they actually do two batches of squid ink that go out when they're using it as a defense system.

So the first batch is kind of pure ink.

It's very inky and it's meant to create a blob so they can create a distraction.

The second batch is a more mucusy

little bit of ink.

So it's mixed with mucus.

And the idea is that when they spit this out, that they are creating a shape that looks exactly like them.

So it's like a decoy.

It's like this with this weird squid looking decoy.

It's like a squid hologram.

Exactly.

And they've got video observation of animals that were going after the squid, then going for this and being like, whoa, where's the squid?

And he's off.

That's so good.

Yeah,

I love that.

Yeah,

that is rad.

That's intelligent.

Male squid have to be quite careful what they do with their sperm because the way they inseminate a lady squid is they deposit these sperm packets, these spermatophores, into a little pouch on her body.

But she loves to eat them.

That's really what she likes doing best, is to get, like, reach around with her tentacles, pick the sperm out, and eat it.

So that's obviously a problem for the man, because, or the male squid,

because that means that he, you know, he doesn't get his offspring out of her because she's just eaten his potential offspring.

If I had a nickel.

Sorry, I was miles away.

You can empathize.

There you go.

So when she eats the sperm that you may have deposited on her,

it actually helps her to develop her unfertilized egg and so helps out the next guy, his competitor that comes along.

Wow.

So you've got to really make sure that...

So that's why sometimes when you deposit your sperm into a female's pouch, they try and get it really really deeply in because so that she can't actually reach around to it and and get it out

another species called the coastal squid and it's usually the bigger males that are successful with the females but there are also sneaky males or sneaker males and they're much smaller but what they do is when the female is about to lay her egg she lays it out of her front and they deposit sperm on her face and then when the egg comes out then it kind of collects their sperm and their sperm's much bigger than the other males.

I'm not sure we can safely say anything about it.

Yeah, I'm back here just fighting my tony.

Corey's like, those nickels are really piling up.

Oh, God.

Giant squid have penises, but other squid don't.

Do you think they ever

trick people by saying, I have a giant squid penis, and then it's unclear which bit the giant is referring to?

I like to think they do.

I hope they do.

Yeah.

So you're saying it's like, sorry, are you saying that it's a giant squid penis

or a giant squid penis?

It's actually an extremely small giant squid penis.

Of all the giant squid penises I've had to deal with.

And I'm just saying, there's been quite a few.

Yours is by far the smallest of the batch.

I was just reminded of that.

Are you saying four candles?

Yeah.

They're saying four candles.

That was the the original.

It's four candles.

In an original draft of the sketch, it was about giant squid penises.

I've learned so much today.

I'm so happy.

So, this is a really gross idea.

So, there was a woman in South Korea recently who was eating squid.

So, we all eat squid.

We call it calamari for reasons I don't understand.

But she was eating some boiled squid in a restaurant, and she suddenly felt a pain in her tongue.

And it turned out the squid wasn't quite dead, and it was a male squid, and it had deposited its sperm packet into her tongue.

So, she felt horrible pain in her tongue and then felt lots of stuff crawling around inside her tongue and had to go to hospital.

And they took out a whole bunch of sperm.

And apparently, this does happen a bit.

Like, there's been reports in Japan of it happening.

That's so fucked up.

I will never fucking eat that shit again.

Oh, my God.

Fucking hell.

Fuck.

Vegetarianism, here you come.

It had to be in the tongue.

Why?

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thanks so much for listening.

If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on Twitter.

I'm on at Schreiberland.

James.

At X8.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter M.

Corey.

At Corey Taylor Rock.

And Shaczynski.

You can email podcast at QI.com.

Yep, that's right.

Or you can go to at QIPodcast.

That's the group Twitter handle.

Or go to no such thingasafish.com.

That's our website.

We got all our previous episodes up there.

Thanks so much for listening.

We'll see you guys again next week.

Goodbye.