605: No Such Thing As A Shark With A Ponytail

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Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the wonderful Sarah Pascoe.

Now, there is no one, I don't think, in Britain who doesn't know who Sarah Pascoe is.

And probably if you listen to this show around the world you'll know her as well because she has been on fish before but just as a quick reminder she is an incredible stand-up comedian and TV presenter who is a good friend of ours she does a podcast as well she does a show called Weirdo's Buck Club with fellow fish alumnus Carrie Ed Lloyd but she is on all the panel shows she's been on QI a million times she's absolutely brilliant we love having her on all of our shows.

But one important thing to say about Sarah is that she is currently on tour if you would like to see her show and you live somewhere in the uk there is an extremely good chance that she will be coming to your town in november or in the spring next year and to find out the shortest amount of travel you will have to make to get to her shows you must go to sarapasco.co.uk slash tickets her website is s-a-r-a-p-a-s-c-o-e.co.uk because that is how you spell her name.

So go to sarapasco.co.uk to get tickets for her show.

But in the meantime, please enjoy our show on with the podcast.

Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Sarah Pasco.

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 fact number one, and that is Sarah.

My fact.

And I'm underlying the word fact there for reasons that will become clear.

My fact is Saturn's rings are younger than sharks.

Duh-duh-duh.

It's during

the fact that it's so when you say fact,

and you underline it.

Weirdly, we've never had a guest underline the headline fact before, and it makes me instantly suspicious.

Yes.

Well, age is but a concept.

And when I looked into the inverted commas proof of both of the ages, Saturn and sharks, I felt like, well, there's lots to debate here.

Okay, okay.

So do you stand by it or not?

Like if you had to bet your life on it.

I would have to do more research, probably.

So let me tell you where the whole aging of Saturn's rings comes from.

So there's a Cassini spacecraft, combination of NASA, the European Space Agency, and also the Italian Space Agency, which means they're not in the European Space Agency.

And I thought, there's a sitcom.

It's Italy deciding, no,

we'll have our own one.

Our spaceships will be in the shape of food.

Are the Italian astronauts?

stereotypical Italians?

Are you thinking a low-alow style?

Yeah, and all of the other spacemen are eating the tubes of paste food and they've still got spaghetti pomodoro.

it's creating a big mess in the spaceship all the italian astronauts typically like to stay in the mothership yes

and here's mine about marianne luigi and they're fixing the spaceship there we go

needs plumbers yeah exactly

there's something for everyone so the hassini spacecraft did analysis for a really long time of what the rings were composed of they're mostly ice and that ice is made of water which then of course i had a question mark what is other ice made of they kept calling it water ice.

But then I realised I'd gone too far off the fact.

Okay.

Come back.

1% of them is dust.

And they've measured the rate of accumulation, how dusty they're getting, and then work backwards from that 1% to say they can't be any older than 100 years, 100 million years, I should say.

And they could be as new as 10 million years old.

Wow.

So that's from the amount of dust accumulation.

The reason, and I'll sort of stress this straight away, that they could be a lot older, is because they could be cleaning themselves because there's a pull from the planet which takes a lot of debris away from it.

So, basically, when micrometeoroids hit the rings of Saturn, they are either vaporized or they've pulled towards Saturn's magnetic field, which would explain why there would be less dust there than you could completely just age it.

All the dust that's ever been collected by Saturn's pull hasn't stayed in the rings, essentially, which is where aging them that way could be slightly contentious.

Okay.

And what about sharks?

Okay, so sharks, they're saying, they're claiming, I don't know what you've written down, that they are 450 million years old.

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

And they're evidence for this, some scales, no teeth.

They've got some fossilized scales from 450 million years old, which they're saying is the earliest fossil of a shark-like creature, which is not a shark, is it?

That's a shark-like creature.

And then no no teeth.

So, are we thinking a gummy shark?

Like, no teeth?

Big scaly fish.

Or a big scaly fish.

I know she knows what a shark is in lots of ways.

But hang on, Sarah, all of this smacks of a woman who submitted a fact and then researched it.

Yes.

Yes, Your Honour.

What's the accusation there, Andy?

As I said, she did what we asked her to do.

No, because some people, it's like their actual passion.

Is that what you mean?

No, no, no.

Some people are like, oh, I wrote a book about those rings.

It's funny how honest you are.

I just like it.

Because, you know,

a lesser researcher might have just said, yeah, I'll just sort of fudge that.

I would have done that.

Yeah.

And I would have gone in and said, so the fact is that the rings are this old and sharks are this old.

One's younger than the other and that's it.

No.

Actually, what I did write down was that Cassini spacecraft born on the 15th of October 1997.

So it's a Libra.

Oh, wow.

That is good.

Getting my astrology and astronomy all in the same

explanation.

So sharks have survived what are the five.

Yeah.

The five known mass extinctions that we've had on this planet.

Are they involved somehow?

It does seem suspicious.

Always there.

Yeah.

I think it was after the first mass extinction that teeth suddenly became a part of their life.

Yeah.

Although the jaws were different in those earlier creatures.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because now they have jaws that open really widely, which means they can swim faster and they can eat prey bigger than themselves.

So that's exciting.

But that's much more recent.

We're talking 150 million years ago with those recognizable actual sharks.

And like 10 million to 100 million with the rings of Saturn,

what are you saying is the closer scale than 400 plus?

Okay, so here's the timeline I wrote down.

So I wrote, sharks, so the earliest fossil was the late Ordovician.

Ordovician period.

So basically that would make them older than dinosaurs and older than trees.

Really fun.

Trees are 360 million years old, which is fun.

Would they know anything about tree?

As in, like, they're not seeing trees anyway, right?

So that's irrelevant to their world.

Well,

you get like tree fall in the

middle.

So they might see a fall in front of them.

They might see a log.

But they can't fall before they exist.

That's the thing.

If a tree falls before it exists,

does it make a nice nearby shark?

Does it splash?

They've famously got good hearing sharks, so that would be

good distances.

Or is it smell?

Smell.

Can they smell shark?

Very few people say, shh,

sharks near my.

They tend to say, don't bleed into the water.

There are sharks in the microwave.

So we've got a mass extinction event in the Permian period.

That's 252 million years ago, or around then, that 96% of marine life was wiped out.

So we had bigger sharks, and there is fossil records, just teeth of these massive sharks.

Now you're saying just teeth.

Earlier on, it was like, oh, they don't eat.

Exactly.

How suspicious is this?

I forgot Pascoe's case book.

You always find crimes and then investigate them on this show.

Do you know why they keep surviving all of these mass extinctions?

It's really interesting.

It's because it's because they're so varied as a class of creatures.

So you get sharks that live on the bottom, you get sharks that live in the main water column, you know, higher up in the ocean.

You get small sharks, you get big sharks, you get sharks that are, some sharks are even mostly vegetarian.

Yeah.

You get just sharks of every different kind.

And that's why always a few of them will fit through the keyhole of whatever life survives the mass extinction.

Which is amazing, isn't it?

So I did go down, one of my tangents was the Greenland shark,

which grows incredibly slowly, which is a really good example of what you're describing.

They don't become sexually active until they're over 100.

Yeah.

Which is really inspiring.

But here's an amazing thing about them.

It's been estimated that they can live probably up to 500 years.

There's one that's been found that definitely is around 400 years old.

Now, the rings of Saturn, the first observation through a telescope was Galileo in 1610.

Arguably, there is a Greenland shark out there alive that was born before Galileo first looked at them through a telescope.

I thought you were going to say that could have seen the rings of Saturn through that telescope.

Unless it fell into the water.

Unless they could hear it.

I don't think that's going to happen.

But it's amazing, isn't it?

I'm glad that potentially there's one out there that was, yeah.

Yeah.

We've got off the topic.

Sharks.

Yeah.

Give us a shark, Dan.

Favourite shark.

I'll tell you mine.

Yeah, okay.

Wow.

Let's guess.

I'm going to guess hammerhead.

No, James.

Yeah.

Hammerhead.

I do like hammerheads.

They're really good.

They're the youngest species, apparently the newest species.

Really?

Well, I've got another one that's been quite new.

I think it's maybe not quite as new as hammerheads, but the walking sharks that you get off the coast of Australia.

And they live on the bottom.

They're one of Andy's bottom

sharks.

Yeah, yeah.

But they walk on the bottom.

Andy's bottom sharks is my Channel 5 series of the future.

People who want to watch a show about animals are going to be very disappointed.

I don't know.

It's very much an urban dictionary thing.

No, these are like walking sharks.

Yeah, and they use their fins and they walk like geckos on the bottom of the ocean.

I think that's cool.

Wow, that is cool.

Can they swim?

They can swim, yeah, but not very well.

It's quite like the thresher shark.

Oh, yeah.

But it's just, it's an odd move that they use, which is, it's been described as extreme yoga.

Basically, if they're coming up to a fish, rather than directly eat it, they'll bring their tail up back around them and slap it and stun it.

Wow.

Yeah, that's great.

That's really great.

Because usually a lot of them they'll eat by opening their mouths and just swimming with their mouths open and seeing what goes in there, right?

Yeah.

And there's a big problem with that.

A paper I read just this morning, which was that basically because the water is more acidic in the oceans now, it's rotting their teeth.

And so they have quite crumbly teeth now, sharks, compared to what they were 100 years ago.

So

later, people think we didn't have any sharks.

They'll be like, there's no evidence.

Yes.

Yeah.

They all tumbled away.

Can I give you you guys my favorite shark yeah it's from this morning the program

philip scofield was a shark

um no this is a listener email from allison mollencamp who sent us an email this morning on the day we record this oh yeah headlined ghost shark sex teeth okay this is crazy and you opened it oh yeah

it's a great for and it's bottom sharks

basically there's a thing called a ghost shark it's also known as a spotted rat fish.

I suspect it prefers to go by ghost shark.

I'll take the other name back.

Like someone trying to push a cool nickname on themselves, right?

Spotted rat.

No, it's ghost shark, actually.

Yeah, that's what they call me at University.

So it's not a true shark, but it looks a lot like a shark, you know, and it gets called it.

And it's got a thing on its forehead called the tenaculum.

It's got these tiny protrusions on it.

And scientists have just today published a paper about what this thing is.

And what it is, is this little thing sticking out of its head has these scales on it and it turns out they're not scales they're actual teeth they're literal teeth yeah sticking out of its head which it uses to grip onto the female during sex okay it's got a head hand it's got a head hand which it uses for sex grips and um

does the female have one on her head to like hit the other

guy as well away but she has nothing just a ponytail

um yeah and so one of the scientists responsible carly cohen said this feature flips the long-standing assumption in evolutionary biology that teeth are strictly oral structures.

I thought that their skin was teeth as well, though.

I thought the technology.

I think it's shaped like teeth.

But I think the teeth evolved from the skin.

So it was scales around the mouth got harder and harder.

Which seems to be the same as this other idea.

It's just utilizing.

Oh, they're also good for this.

Imagine Sabrina Carpenter's album cover.

Because everyone would really sort of ante it and say, you know, it's been done before we've moved past it.

Imagine if it had been this ghost shark holding onto her.

She's sort of on her knees knees with yeah,

but she's sort of being held by you know, looking up at her.

But I think next album, yeah, next one, that's true, actually.

Or maybe chapel rhone.

I've said imagining your TV programme.

I've imagined lots of the dancers at the beginning, because it's got this like Euro trash feel.

Yeah, and they've all got like big, big shark heads, and then they're all wearing chaps.

So that when they turned up, turned around, you could see their bottoms.

Do you remember that Super Bowl when they had the dancing sharks?

Yes, like that, but a bit sexier.

Yeah,

that with chaps on.

Yeah.

and is it just me enjoying these dances

you speak to camera at the beginning like hi i'm andy and here every week is shark week

and then it's just like a branchy castle and stuff like that i'll do it yeah i will take that job

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Okay, on with the podcast.

On with the show.

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

My fact this week is that because he didn't like the name of the novel that he was adapting into a movie, director Ridley Scott bought the film rights to a William Burroughs novel called Blade Runner just so he could steal that title instead?

Amazing.

Brilliant.

Really good.

It's, yeah, it's quite, it's quite fascinating.

So I've just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is a book by Philip K.

Dick.

And it's a great title.

It's a great title.

He's absolutely a great title.

What is wrong with that?

It's a commercial title for a movie.

If you don't know Philip K.

Dick, he was a pretty extraordinary sci-fi writer.

He was writing in the 50s and 60s, and he has had so many of his books that have gone to the big screen.

So you might have seen Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger, The Adjustment Bureau, Minority Reporter, Scanner Darkly, and Blade Runner, probably the most famous of all of those, starring Harrison Ford.

And so initially, Ridley Scott was brought onto this project, and there was a screenwriter on it called Hampton Fancher.

And Hampton Fancher decided that while he was writing it, he would put in the drafts the name Blade Runner, which he'd seen from another book.

And it was just there.

And Ridley Scott, who took on the project, started reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, but didn't like it, so put it down.

So he didn't end up even reading the book.

He made it into a movie.

He saw that title on the screenplay and said, this is way better.

Let's use that.

But obviously, it was connected to another book.

So he literally bought the movie rights to that and used nothing but the title.

So can I ask a question?

You said it was by William Burroughs.

The

yeah.

But he didn't write the original.

So what's going on there?

So, okay, so this is so weird.

It just gets so complicated, this story.

The book that William Burroughs had written was called Blade Runner the Movie.

The movie, yeah.

So William Burroughs had read a different book by a guy called Alan E.

Norse, and that was called The Blade Runner.

And so Burroughs' book was a treatment for a movie that he wanted to have made.

But was his book based on Norse's?

book or was it a different story?

Yeah,

it was basically a movie treatment.

So Norse's book was, the reason it's called Blade Runner is is because it's about a guy who takes medical supplies across America.

So literally scalpels and smuggling them.

Yeah, because it's basically an anti-NHS book, isn't it?

Basically,

in America, if you've got money, you can't pay for your own healthcare.

You have to only go for the government thing.

And the government thing isn't very good.

And so you have these sort of dodgy private doctors who will do your stuff for you, but they need the scalpels.

So they need the Blade Runner.

And the main protagonist in that book is called Billy Gimp.

Just a good character name.

Great name.

Striking name, Billy.

It's hard to think of names for characters, isn't it?

Absolutely.

You've got to say what you see.

Look around you.

Whatever you see first.

So the thing we've all glossed over, there have been a lot of names flying about.

Hampton Fancher, Ridley Scott, none of them very likely, right?

The original book that used the title Blade Runner was by this guy, Alan Norse.

I pronounce it Nurse.

And he was a trained doctor.

Oh, lovely.

And do you remember there was a scientist about 20 years ago who won the Nobel Prize for Medicine?

He was a doctor.

Paul Nurse.

What's all these doctors called nurse?

I have tried to find a nurse whose name was Doctor, but I haven't succeeded yet.

I'll keep looking.

He wrote under the name Dr.

X, didn't he?

Did he?

Yeah, yeah.

He didn't really use his name because he didn't want people to know he was writing.

Clever.

Okay.

Dr.

X, but he mostly wrote abusive 140 character messages.

So Blade Runner, I actually bought it the other night to watch.

Yeah, because I haven't seen it in years.

So this is the other fascinating thing about the movie Blade Runner.

There's been, since its release, seven different versions of it that have come out.

It's constantly being revised by the director and by the production companies.

So there was a director's cut that came out, which actually wasn't a director's cut because someone else put it together.

Ridley Scott just gave an approval, but the official one, according to Ridley Scott, is the final cut, which doesn't have the narration.

It's the first year anniversary one.

It was the only one that he was allowed to do, the cut that he actually wanted.

And also, the story of it is quite interesting in that so it was made for about $30 million

and it made about $40 million at the cinema.

So it did fine, but it didn't do that well.

But when they re-edited it, it was amazing and it was the first thing they brought out on DVD.

Oh, was it?

And then it did so much better

with a sort of slight re-edit.

Yes, it wasn't popular at first and it got some really bad reviews.

One of the reviews said Blade Runner is a suspenseless thriller, which I think is to a certain extent true.

It was sort of slow.

It was intentionally slow.

It is quite slow.

For anyone who hasn't seen it it's about harrison ford who has to chase down a load of robots who are running around dressed up as humans and the main point of it and the main point of dick i think and i haven't read that or seen the movie but i think it's like can an android tell if they're human and if so how do you how do you tell well this is the the

questions of if you want me to tell you have you like a personality test to see if we're all humans i don't need the test i'm well aware

that make a lot of sense of a lot of things in your life in the book itself do you know what they're called?

All these replicants?

I thought they were called replicants.

That's in the movie.

Is it?

Yeah, in the book, they're called Andes.

Lovely.

Are they?

The plot thickens.

Stop finding crimes.

So this, so here we go.

Let me find.

So some of them actually are sort of a little bit upsetting.

You have a little boy.

And he shows you his butterfly collection, including his killing jar.

Oh, dear.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it doesn't have a question mark on it, but I guess it's testing: do you have an emotional reaction to that?

Okay, here you go.

We can all go around.

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.

Killing jar.

Single words.

Fun, sexy, embarrassing.

I'd also like to enter the word sexy for Donald's mind.

Sigmund Freud says you get full marks.

So this one, my briefcase, nice, isn't it?

Department issue, baby hide.

100% genuine human baby hide okay so it's so i guess yeah it's supposed to make you feel if you're upset about that yeah you're probably a human yeah or you have a strong reaction you don't just take it on face value you have an emotional reaction i think that's the test and in the in the movie and in the book they have a machine that specifically is looking directly into your eyeball so it's the dilation exactly it's monitoring the question is answered by your your body i guess isn't it yeah exactly it is a good film and it is a good book the book's great yeah Yeah.

But I think they are quite ponderous.

Come at me in the comments if you disagree.

Tell us a film you like then, that you prefer in this sort of genre.

He likes Pacific Rim.

What's Pacific Rim?

Well, big monsters have started coming up through the cracks in the ocean floor from another dimension.

We've got to build giant robots to fight them.

Wow.

That's an exciting episode of Andy's Bottom Shots, isn't it?

All I'm saying is, in Pacific Rim, everyone knows who is and isn't a robot, and we can crack on with the real meat of the film, which is beating the monsters, the kaiju.

So, you know, do you see what I mean?

Like, Harrison Ford isn't interrogating the robots.

So, you don't like subtlety.

I'm saying I like obviousness.

There was one of the reviews of Blade Runner when it came out that said some of the scenes seem to have six subtexts, but no text and no context either.

Wow.

So, I think it's so interesting because the questions that they were asking then about what are the capabilities of these machines that are working alongside us are the questions that we are continuing to ask.

The only thing that's changed is the technology.

We're still asking those same things, aren't we?

It's really, when I read it, it's incredibly poignant for what's going on right now in the world of AI.

It's extraordinary.

I guess that's the thing of a good sci-fi writer like Philip K.

Dick.

It's looking forward and seeing the problems we might run into.

But it's also worth saying the book is incredibly different from the movie.

So there's an idea that you're asking the question, is Harrison Ford a replicant himself?

Harrison Ford said he wasn't.

Ridley Scott said he was.

So we don't even know from the filmmaker's side which one is which.

Which one of those two people wrote the neither.

We need to ask the person who wrote the scripts.

Call Hampton Fantasy.

Quite clearly a robot panicking to try to think of a human name.

Have you guys seen the movie Taking Tiger Mountain?

No, what happens in that?

I think so.

What happens in that is what happens in the Blade Runner, the original book, because it eventually was adapted into a movie, and that was starring Bill Paxton.

So the novel that William Burroughs wrote, Blade Runner Brackets, a movie,

was off the back of the original Alan Norse novel, Blade Runner.

Yeah.

And it was a pitch for it to be a screenplay.

And then he realized it probably wasn't going to be adapted.

So he turned it, Burroughs turned his work into a novella.

What that means is that he wrote the novel of the pitch, of the film, of the novel.

Interesting.

And then Philip K.

Dick was asked to write the novel of the movie.

Of Blade Runner, yes.

Of the book that he wrote.

Of his own book.

Yeah, but he refused.

Brilliant.

Because he thought that if he did that, people would stop buying his book.

Yeah, wouldn't that have been amazing?

It's so

weird.

It's so thrilling.

It's just the whole.

I mean, this is probably the most confusing section we've ever done for an audience trying to piece these together.

We need a big wall chart, don't we?

With lines.

Even that movie that I just mentioned, Taking Tiger Mountain, which was the adaption of the Blade Runner original book.

Pre-Burrows.

Yeah.

There was a movie that was made, which was based on an art film by Albert Camus, his book called The Stranger.

They filmed the whole thing, but they didn't do any dialogue for it because they thought they'd do that post.

A new director came in, used all that stuff, but applied the Blade Runner to it.

Guys, will you think of the editor, please?

When you're saying these facts, it's so confusing.

What's going to happen, James, is

this section of the podcast.

In years to come, there are going to be seven or eight different cuts of this section of the podcast.

There'll be the Harkin cut, sure, but there'll be the Schreiber cut.

But people quite often listen to podcasts to fall asleep, and this bit they'll think is their subconscious, chopping it into different pieces and making it confusing because they're not really listening properly.

That sort of makes you think we must have enough stuff filmed by now that we can basically make anything new.

Let's just use our existing.

I think in the future they're going to say, do you know the famous TV show And These Bottom Sharks was actually based on a podcast.

Yeah.

And bizarrely, Andy, what you just said with having extra footage that we can just reuse, that actually happened for Blade Runner, the movie itself.

Because in the final scenes, they used shots from the shining that weren't used in the main movie.

Yeah.

And included it as sort of background shots.

So the shining is in the Blade Runner movie.

Bloody hell.

Yeah.

It goes deep, doesn't it?

It really does go deep.

Isn't it true that the alien world and the Blade Runner world are one world together?

My wife told me this, but she's watched them all and I haven't.

Interesting.

I think there's like one mention in like the second alien that says, yes, they're definitely the same world.

That's terrific.

Because it might be things like the same company operates across reality.

Because in Alien, the whole thing is the Wayland Utani Corporation.

And that might get a mention.

I don't know.

That's brilliant.

Can I tell you a thing about William Burroughs?

Yeah.

The author who wrote played one of the movie.

One of these things.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So he was a sort of beak generation writer, very interesting.

person.

I didn't really know anything about him.

The only thing I'd vaguely heard of, which is the awful thing in his life, which is that he and his wife once had taken a huge amount of drugs and he tried to do a William Tell act shooting something off her head and he missed and he shot her and he killed her.

That's his version.

Yeah.

He was a really strange guy.

Oh, yeah.

He was very eccentric.

He was on huge numbers of drugs his whole life.

He said that he could just stare at his shoes for eight hours a day and frequently did.

But do you know how Burroughs had this lifestyle and was able to just sort of muck around?

So where his money came from?

Yeah.

Rich parents.

He got an allowance from his parents until he was nearly 50.

Right.

But the reason he got an allowance from his parents until he was nearly 50 is that his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs I,

our William Burroughs was the second, he had invented the Burroughs adding machine.

It was a calculator.

And pretty much every business in America bought one of these adding machines.

It was incredibly useful.

Is it one of those ones that you see in old movies where they kind of, it's like a big calculator and they go, ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-ba.

Pretty much

prints out a real yeah, exactly.

And it was, yeah, it was one of the biggest American computing companies in the 50s and 60s.

And what is this?

It's a robot, a thinking machine.

Oh, I see.

And it's, it sort of allows Blade Runner to

right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

So Philip K.

Dick took other drugs as well.

Yeah.

Into the same things.

And apparently, end of his life, he's sort of sort of like a rosy mist and all these kind of

things.

He had, he, in his final period of his life, it was in 1974, he saw a fish symbol a necklace on a woman glow red and he felt information suddenly just was transmitted to him and he believed that it was from an alien species that's quite an excuse when you're staring at a woman's breasts

sorry there's information coming from

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

Okay, my fact this week is that most people wouldn't wear a sweater owned by Hitler, but they might if Mother Teresa wore it for long enough in between.

So has she won this in like an eBay auction?

Like how did she get her hands on this border?

She's bought.

Did she dry clean it after Hitler?

Has anyone cleaned it ever?

Well, this is a study called The Contagion Concept in Adult Thinking in the United States by Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rosen.

And there's lots of different things that they did with this imaginary jumper.

So they had different people wear it.

So it might be Hitler, but it might be a lover of the person you're interviewing.

Or it might be someone they really admire.

Or it might be that they rub it in dog poo

or various different things.

And then they try and ameliorate the effect by giving it to a nice person.

Or they might clean it with detergent or just with water or boil it or deodorize it.

This is all imaginary.

This jumper.

This is all all made up.

And did they ever show you a picture of the jumper?

Yeah.

Or have you imagined it?

You imagine it.

It's simply a question of: would you wear this jumper if this had happened to it?

And then they took all of the different results of what everyone said and then generalized to the entire world.

So, but actually, they generalized to people in the US.

And the reason being that there's this kind of thing called the law of contagion, which is a folk belief that you get all around the world, where if you have been in contact with an object, then people think some of your attributes go into that object.

It happens in Papua New Guinea, it happens in Africa, it happens in medieval Europe, you get it quite a lot of.

But this study was to see if it happened in the US as well.

And what they found is the basics is that people would not wear anything that was worn by Hitler, but they might wear it if someone good, like Mother Teresa or someone sexy had worn it in between.

And they would probably...

Are we saying Mother Teresa is not sexy?

i'm sorry

she looks so much like danza more

yeah so princess diana someone else who's sort of seen as good sure absolutely yeah yeah because at the start they interviewed people and said who do you think is good who do you think is sexy who do you think is trustworthy uh and with the sort of washing and stuff like that basically if you wash it or if you deodorize it or if you air it out people are slightly more likely to wear it but if you boil it then they're really more likely to do it.

So if you get Hitler's jumper and you give it a good old, very hot wash, then people are more likely to wear it after that.

I mean,

do we know what is it wool?

Yeah.

Because I did try to find evidence of any of Hitler's jumpers going up for auction.

Oh, yeah.

He doesn't seem to have been a big jumper guy.

No.

There's very little.

He was jacket, wasn't he?

He was more jacket.

Well, one of his jackets did.

In 2016, there was a buyer who spent £600,000 at a single auction on Nazi memorabilia, including things like the brass canister that contained the hydrogen cyanide that Goer killed himself with.

I mean quite abstrue stuff and quite gory stuff.

But one of the things was £210,000 on Hitler's jacket.

Right.

And the buyer was a nameless man from Argentina who declined to give his name.

It's a joke, isn't it?

No.

What?

No.

No.

He said, I'm not going to tell you my name.

I'm from Argentina.

I'm from Argentina.

Oh, my goodness.

I know.

So we can only speculate.

Yeah.

Crakey.

There was a thing,

this guy, Paul Rosen,

very interesting character because he's sort of known as the leading authority on disgustingness.

He spends his life studying disgusting stuff.

And he was saying, if you were put off by the idea of Hitler, to what level would that bleed into your life?

Because, for example, any glass of water that you drink in Europe will contain a few molecules that would have passed through Hitler.

And so

if you found that out, does that put you off drinking?

Like to what level level are you not wanting any association?

And that's why I have my water shipped in.

From Argentina.

Yeah, no, you're right.

I mean, if you...

And did it, sorry, just to ask.

No, no, I'm not sure that he's put that to the study yet.

He was sort of talking about the extremes of where you could take the association with Hitler as a contagion.

And this was done a few years ago, wasn't it?

The study, Jack.

1994.

Yeah, yeah.

So, I mean, I don't know how Hitler's reputation has been in America over the last few years.

Kim Kardashian, a Hitler jumper.

Everyone will want one.

She'll be stretching that out.

I'm sorry, but she and Adolph did not have the same characteristics.

And so this is relevant in real life.

It's not just an academic thing.

So things like drinking water.

So you mentioned the Hitler water thing, Dan.

So Hitler never went to Singapore, but Singapore, as far as I know,

I mean, his allies got there.

Never mind.

The point is, Singapore purifies water from sewage water, water, right?

And people drink it and it's fine.

I mean, it's absolutely fine this water.

It has been treated.

It doesn't contain any contaminants, anything that make you ill.

It is clean water.

But in lots of other places around the world, places which don't have like the space constraints of Singapore, people object massively to this.

And it's to do with this contagion theory.

So that is relevant to how we run ourselves.

It's like the idea of it.

It's the idea.

I mean, the water effectively has been boiled.

Yes, but our brains are just never going to keep up with something that high concept.

Like, we're always going to add one and one together and go, that's the sewage.

Yeah, yeah.

What if Hitler's jumper was turned into a scarf?

Well, exactly.

Well, so he unraveled all the wool and made something different.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, does that make a big difference?

It makes a little bit of a difference.

So they asked people if it had been re-knitted, gashed, unraveled, cut up, and burned.

Would you wear it afterwards?

And burning had the best effects, although it's not going to look good at Berg's jumper.

If it's re-knitted, some people are more likely to a little bit but burning and boiling seems to be people will forgive any item of clothing if you do that and the area of this I found interesting in disgust is disgust and arousal okay did you look into that no

no Andy too busy living it I don't know what that means

well it is well it is really really really interesting in human psychology so it's um a bi-directional psychology okay so the two things coexist disgust and arousal.

I knew about this because I had read probably in Mary Roach's book, Bonk, about the fact that when women are aroused, they will do things that they consider disgusting when they're unaroused.

And that just makes such basic sense for evolution in that sexual...

But Sarah, do you mean like if I got my wife aroused and then I suddenly say, great, take the bins out.

Well, this is what they do in tests because you can't.

No, but this is the thing.

So I don't know if your wife...

There's a really good example because I've been doing it.

I've seen it so many times.

It's cruel.

So basically the really common sense thing is if you ask a woman what do you think of the idea of this sexual act and let's say something really

oral sex.

Okay.

That's codidian.

Sorry, go on.

So very soberly, most people don't really like the idea of it, but when they're aroused, that goes out of the window.

And it only seems to happen with women.

But I looked into, I read three studies, and they're all university students.

And I worry that that's because 22-year-old students are just disgusting anyway, like the men.

So they're very difficult to study.

But what they do, they make them watch arousing videos and then they get them to do different tasks.

And some of them are like, eat, have a bite of that biscuit, and it's next to a living worm.

And people who have watched

some soft core erotica are more likely to bite the biscuit and say they didn't disgust them.

Wow.

It's amazing.

And they're much more likely to touch what they're told is a bowl of used condoms if they've watched this sort of soft pornography than if they've watched a video of the Olympics.

They just show them physical activity or sexual activity or obviously control group.

Yeah, and this is men or women or both.

Both, but the results seem to be showing a lot more for women.

It's a taking an idea for a restaurant.

Doesn't matter how good the food is, but you just put porn on the TVs all the time.

Yeah.

And people will enjoy the food more.

Yeah.

Welcome to Andy's Bottom Feeders.

Did you read about this, these studies that have shown that conservative people find things more disgusting than liberal people?

And it's to such an extent that if you put

a scanner on someone's head and you look at their brain, you can show them one single image of, say, some food with maggots in, and you can measure their brain activity.

And you can tell with a 95 to 98% accuracy whether they would vote conservative or liberal.

There's lots of reasons why they think it might be the case.

Obviously we don't really know, but it's basically conservatives are a bit more trusting of their natural reactions and liberals are more likely to do something called cognitive reappraisal, which is you see something disgusting, but then you think, well, actually, it's just natural that maggots eat food because they're animals as well.

You kind of think about it yourself and come up with reasons about it rather than just trusting your initial reaction.

So can we run elections based on this?

Like, do we need to bother with all the bits of paper and the boots?

Can't we just all get our heads scanned and be told lib dem or whatever?

Yeah.

Like a sorting hat, but it's full of maggots.

That's where for trust.

We've sorted it out.

We would have saved the government billions.

One of us here is likelier to be disgusted than the rest of us.

Who could it be?

I love Tories.

Is it me?

Is it someone from the north of England?

It's not about being from the north of England.

Gender?

It's not gender.

Oh.

Is it...

Glasses, wearing glasses?

It's not people.

It's like, guess who now?

Is it who?

Is it people who like golf?

Is it like people who like golf?

It's something one of us puts in their mouth on a regular basis.

Oh.

Smoking?

No.

Being vegan.

Oh.

Being vegan.

If you come off meat for a month, you are likelier to catch disgust.

So the more people cut out meat during, say, they're doing Veganuary,

the more their meat disgust will grow.

So, I mean, it's actually not, I mean, because you've been a vegan for ages.

Well, I've been a vegetarian since I was seven.

I was talking to someone recently, and actually, when I speak to people who, you know, give up meat and come back to meat, they have such a different response because for me, it's like cannibalism.

And obviously, I don't talk about this when they're eating their food, and it's just a personal actually, I don't say it out loud because it's not a moral judgment.

I do understand that people get to choose their own food, but for me, there's no difference between a beef burger and oh, yeah, this is a human.

A man burger, yeah, a man burger.

Yeah,

long pig, as they call it.

Why are you saying it's such creepy roundy?

I was trying to keep it.

You know what?

He likes it.

He does this all the time.

Just a lot of these words come out very, very creepy.

As they say, I think animalism is creepy.

And I'm not afraid of saying that.

So, Paul Rosen,

I mean, he's done so many studies on this, and all of them are interesting.

I find I'm just, it's so fascinating what he's done.

So, here's a really interesting one.

This is all about food, right?

And this is, I think, from 1986.

And he's just been doing this decades.

He reported that most participants showed a preference for a normally shaped piece of fudge over fudge shaped like dog feces.

Now I would say so far so obvious, right?

Many were far less willing to hold fake vomit made of rubber in their mouths than a clean new rubber sink stopper.

Again.

Yeah.

But I know he's telling people it's clean.

That's the thing.

It's just it's the association.

You do.

If you go to any tourist shop in England, you can buy poo-shaped candy.

Yes.

I've had a version of this in my life where

my son, he got really obsessed with the toilet brush.

And so obviously there's two things we had to do.

One is I had bought a brand new toilet brush for the toilet and I bought him his own toilet brush and it's from the same place.

And no one's comfortable with him playing with it because it's a toilet brush and it's never been used in the toilet until he did.

He did start using it in the toilet because he wants the reaction.

But at the beginning, it was just Christmas and everyone was acting like I was weird.

No, I get that completely, I understand, but it's just a brush.

The first ever Christmas tree was made out of toilet brushes and painted green.

Yeah, so in a way, you would be a very fast, very Christmassy this year.

Everyone's getting one there

with a fun fact attached.

And I need it more.

The cake was was a bed and the smell never me.

Downy rinse fights stubborn odors in just one wash.

When impossible odors get stuck in,

stop the podcast.

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On with the show.

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

My fact is, there is a spider in Norfolk which can catch fish.

Yes.

Do you know what the creepiest thing anyone can ever say to you?

It's what Carrie had said to me yesterday.

She said, Andy text me, is Sarah scared of spiders?

Oh, yeah.

It's a creepy thing to hear, isn't it?

I asked her not to pass that on.

She told me that as well, which made it creepier.

He said, not to tell you I've asked.

Oh, dear.

And you're not too scared of spiders.

I'm not scared of spiders, no.

Some people are very funny about them, obviously.

So I just wanted to check that before we...

Oh, you were asking just to see if we could even talk about the concept of spiders.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay.

And this is the Queen of the Marsh, the Fen Raft Spider, Norfolk, and Suffolk as well.

Sorry to any suffocators who are listening who thought I'd be missing you out.

And it's just a really cool spider.

It's just about the biggest in the UK, I think.

How big is it?

Show me your hand.

About that big.

Great.

Okay, so it's massive.

Absolutely massive.

Yeah, yeah.

It's broad.

It's north of the broad.

And it's another great story of reintroduction.

They got down to a very, very few left.

And then the people who live around there, who work in conservation, have restored their habitat a load and they've been breeding them up.

And the RSPB recently announced not so insy wincy spider makes incredible comeback.

And they're really cool.

And they're not interested in your house.

They don't like you.

If you don't like spiders, don't worry.

They're not coming for you.

Yeah.

And they can basically sit on top of the water, which is the most fascinating thing.

If you watch a video of it, Fenrft spider, they are the raft.

Yeah.

It's extraordinary.

It's the hairs, isn't it, on the legs that allow them to do that, I think.

And that also helps them to feel vibration.

So if a fish is going past, they can just feel the vibration on the little hairs and go...

And they run across the water and eat the fish.

They grab the fish.

I mean, they're sticklebacks, obviously.

It's not salmon or anything that they're catching.

But they are.

They're pretty cool.

They're slightly big relative to the size of the spider itself.

You know, because the spider can go underwater as well.

So it will go down on the branch of a vine or whatever that's going into the water.

It will just hang out there.

It can stay there for about an hour.

And I've seen videos of, you know, little creatures coming up and launching like a spider would and bringing it back in and consuming it.

And they're close to the same size as the spider.

Can we talk about Helen Smith?

who's the heroine of this whole story of bringing the spiders back into the Norfolk Broads.

So she hand-reared 3,000 baby fenrath spiders in her own kitchen.

And these were the first ones that they put into the water.

And eventually some other charities got involved and they eventually put 30,000 in.

But she definitely started it.

And she would line up every single one of these spiders in an individual test tube.

Because if you put two of them in a test tube, they just eat each other.

So they had to be all kept separate.

And then she had to personally feed them flies for a full year so that they would grow big enough to let them go.

30,000.

3,000 she did, and then eventually it was 30,000.

Wow.

And she had to collect the flies herself because they eat like.

There's things I want.

to make fun of her a lot, but I'm also really scared of her.

I think that's the kind of person you don't want to make an enemy of, someone with access to 3,000 spiders and with that kind of attention to detail.

That's what you should have asked Carrie to ask.

You're scared of Helen.

Yeah, I'm really scared of Helen from Norfolk.

She had to get these fruit flies and apparently the best place to get them was from compost heaps or horse dung.

And so she said...

How aroused was she?

She said she had spent a lot of time with a sweep net following ponies and waiting for them to poo just so that she could get the flies when they first arrived on the poo.

Isn't that mad?

Imagine the neighbours, the people who didn't know what she was doing.

All of her behaviour.

Do you want to come in for a cup cup of tea

she's a hero what a don so cool and you now get spider tourism people visit these nature reserves because their webs are i mean they are massive and their webs are massive too their webs are apparently the size of a normal pizza yeah wow and then um obviously they when they give birth there's thousands and thousands more oh yeah so little baby ones yeah right in the sacks they're really good mums uh the female friend not all spiders are not all spiders are well the female she has an egg sack yeah uh which is just a big bag of eggs, and she carries it around for three weeks in this bag.

And if it gets too cold, she will lift the bag up towards the sun.

And if it gets too hot, she will dunk it in the water to cool it down a bit.

And she goes that whole time without eating because you know, busy.

And then she spins this nursery web, as it's called, the size of a pizza, and suspends that above water.

And if you go to the Norfolk Broads to see these things, you can see these discs just off the path in the water, these nursery webs full of the spiderlings.

But yeah, spiders.

Well, these ones, just one more thing about these ones.

They're one of only two spiders protected in UK law.

Really?

Yeah, the ladybird spider is the other one.

It's the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981.

So if you intentionally kill, injure, or take a raft spider, then you are guilty of an offence.

And if you say that you're intending to sell one as well, that's illegal.

On the dark web,

brilliant, very good, very, very good.

Other animals that you are not allowed to kill in the UK: the wart biter grasshopper, the trembling seamat, the slow worm, the glutinous snail, the small blue butterfly, and the large blue, basically any blue butterfly.

That's why we can't do I'm a celebrity, get me out of here in this country.

Yeah, we have to go to Australia where we could eat everything.

Did we say the glutinous seamat?

No, I said the glutinous snail.

Oh, there was a seamat.

It's a trembling on the side.

Trembling seamat.

Trembling seamat.

That's an amazing thing.

I've never heard of that.

They live in the sea around the United Kingdom and they're basically algal mats, I think.

Trembling.

Kind of knock off SpongeBob square pants, is what I'm hearing.

Yeah.

I'll give you that.

Are they just terrified the whole time?

They shouldn't be because they're protected.

Yeah.

No, it's rising sea levels, global warming.

Are we the only people that are worried?

I think they're scared of Andy's bottom sharks.

Just to bring that back again.

Do you know that spiders can envenomate you after they've been squished?

So this was a story from this year in California.

There was a 37-year-old woman who went to the emergency room because her eye was all swollen and goopy and felt like it was burning.

And apparently, 20 minutes earlier, her husband had killed a Western black widow spider with a hammer.

It splattered in all directions and some of it went in her eye and she got envenomated.

Oh my god.

How closely was she looking at the spider spider

before we hammered it?

There's so much of that story that's horrible.

She hammered a spider to death.

It's an awful story.

I think what I'm saying is don't squash spiders.

No.

Nope.

Yeah.

No.

There's no need to.

No, they're our friends.

Well, black widow spiders are not our friends.

But they're still important to the ecosystem.

Absolutely.

But so am I.

That'd say human beings.

There's too many of us.

Yeah.

Not you personally, but in terms of the ecosystem.

No, no, that's fair.

But if we're going to start with anyone, Andy, we might as well, you know.

I feel like I've had a good run.

I always say to my daughter, whenever there's a spider, I'm like, spiders are our friends and they're really important.

And I am actually terrified of spiders, so I don't really believe it when I say it.

I mean, I do believe it, but I'm like hiding my affairs.

You have to show that you're not afraid, which is tricky.

Do you find that it helps you?

That it's helping your response to spiders that you now can't

be able to measure it.

I suppose so.

I can't show fear in front of my daughter.

It's a reinforced fear.

So actually, I think it's really good for lots of, you know, lots of people to walk when they have children to then temperate.

And then you go, actually, I am less panicky about it.

And if you have to be the person that puts it safely outside, you do realise.

My wife does that.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But that's only because you're trying to arouse her.

Did you too, Dana James?

Did you get the photo I sent you recently, not long ago, of a big spider in a while?

You mean the one we didn't reply to?

Was it on, what was it, one?

It was a big spider.

On email.

No, it was WhatsApp.

Oh, yeah.

I don't recall.

How big was it?

It was big.

It was a house spider, but it was a big one.

It was in my house.

It was not only in my house, Sarah.

It fell onto my naked shoulder as I sat in bed.

Andy, I've got an experience very, very, very similar where I was once cancelling a dentist appointment and I could feel a little thing of hair in my face like this.

And I was just brushing this hair off.

It was what I was interested in what you were saying about the hairs bouncing on the water.

I was just brushing this hair off my face, first thing in the morning.

And then I pushed and then I heard it hit the floor and it was so massive and there was a mirror there.

And I think if I'd actually seen it on my face, I would have died.

If I'd actually seen it on my face.

Right.

But I just felt it there.

So, like having just got out of bed.

They do come on us in the night.

They do come on us in the night.

And I did see the photo now that you say it, Andy.

I do remember.

It was

a glass couldn't fit over it.

Well, yeah, I have very narrow-necked glasses, but still,

you only drink champagne.

I shouldn't have started with a flute.

I should have gone with the Marie Antoinette, but that was my fault.

But, oh.

And it was just from a clear blue sky, from the ceiling, basically.

From the ceiling.

What the heck?

Yeah.

I find it so, as someone who spent my teenage years in Australia, I don't.

They're friendly here comparative to Australia where they kill you.

So it's, I don't find them in any way scary here.

There's a few, there was a great incident I read about where a guy called Matthew Stevens, he was a chef,

and he was cleaning behind a freezer at the Quantok Gateway pub in Bridgewater when suddenly, oh, yeah, he was, yeah, we've all been there um

and he was he was bitten twice on his hand by what turned out to be a Brazilian wandering spider and that

was very dangerous yes they come in like bananas don't they and this is where this came from is it it traveled in the bananas overseas made it to him and this is this is how intense a spider this kind of spider is once he um knocked it off of him he knocked it into an open freezer and then he drenched it in boiling water and it still was just fine.

Well that's because you've got hot and cold.

It was just a very pleasant temperature.

He was on a spa.

It's got a lukewarm bar.

The spider's thinking, oh, I will review the quantox well.

Yeah, and so they collected the spider in the jar and they brought it to where he was at the hospital.

Someone in the hospital.

Why did they do that?

I guess if he was.

I was just supposed to.

You're meant to show what bit you because you're like, we need the anti-vector.

Sorry, I thought you meant he was recovering in hospital and they found it and brought it here.

I'm like, I'll get you again

to apologize.

The worst is when I was attacked by a bear and I had to bring the bear into the hospital.

So, this is why I was attacked by it.

Yeah, but so they brought it in and it was in a jar.

And then someone who worked in the hospital saw it and thought, oh, I should put this back out and let it back loose and go into the wild.

Yeah.

And they say we probably shouldn't worry because it was probably going to die a couple of days after.

I think it wouldn't like it in rich water.

Yeah, exactly.

Temperatures.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah.

Good grief.

Should we have a positive spide effect?

Yeah, as opposed to all this scary stuff.

Some people think, and when I say people, I mean scientists, consider that a spider's web should be considered part of its mind.

Right.

That's weird, isn't it?

So it's an externalization of, not of consciousness, but of thought.

Is that why?

Well, because I guess the web, if it's as far away from the movement, it feels the movement, therefore your brain is registering.

Exactly.

And they have foresight, they have planning.

They change their web structure based on how much they have left in their silk glands.

So if they're running a bit low, they'll make a simpler web.

So it's kind of an external brain in lots of ways.

So it would be like antennae going off what Dan said in terms of, or, you know, like animals where they can feel whether they're going into a space that's too small.

Like there's an externalization of sense, isn't it?

Like whiskers,

or they'll do like market research on what's hitting their web and sticking.

So if prey is hitting it and bouncing off, they'll re-jig the web so it's got more sticky pads on it to catch more.

Or if the local prey is a different size to what they're expecting, they'll change the web based on that.

It's so cool, it's really good, isn't it?

Yeah, they are good, yeah.

They're clever.

The male Asian hermit spiders become better at fighting if you cut their penises off.

Yeah,

like what they're getting in the way, or what is it that's no.

So, what it's they're one of these spiders where after they've had sex, they usually remove their penises and keep it inside the female's reproductive tract so no other male can

as a plug.

But they also get penis.

It's not really really common in nature, yes, because it's one of the best ways of sperm competition.

Yeah.

But the other thing they do to make sure that their sperm is successful is they become very, very aggressive and they start fighting off any other spiders who come and try and mate with the female.

And so that means if you just cut the penis off, then they still get all these hormones or whatever they are to make them really aggressive and they'll just get really, really fighty.

Yeah.

What are you proposing?

There's no proposal here.

What are the ramifications to the British Army?

Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online.

I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram, James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

Mine is Andrew Hunter M.

And Sarah.

At Sarah Pasco on Instagram.

Yeah.

And you're on tour now, yeah?

Yes.

Yeah.

I'm on on tour until March 2026.

If anyone would like to come, I'm going to put in some facts about spiders.

And Helen, you've got a free ticket if you want to go.

Yeah, or you can get to us as a group by emailing us on podcast at qi.com.

All of those emails make their way over to Andy.

Andy often picks out some of them to include in our bonus show that we do called Drop Us a Line.

And that's part of a thing called Club Fish.

It's a very exciting private members club that we've set up that has all sorts of bonus material that you can get access to.

So check that out.

And you can check that out by going to our website, no such thing as a fish.com.

There's also merch up there.

Otherwise, just come back here next week because we will be back with another episode.

And we'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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