In short
Podcast Episode Summary: No Such Thing As A Shark With A Ponytail
Episode Details
- Podcast Title: No Such Thing As A Fish
- Episode Title: No Such Thing As A Shark With A Ponytail
- Guest: Sara Pascoe
- Hosts: Dan Schreiber, James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Ptaszynski
- Release Date: [Date Not Provided]
- Episode Duration: [Duration Not Provided]
Episode Overview The episode features Sara Pascoe joining the hosts to discuss various intriguing topics, including the surprisingly youthful age of Saturn's rings compared to sharks, the quirky adaptations of spiders, and an unusual dive into film history with Ridley Scott's *Blade Runner*.
Key Topics and Facts Discussed
- Saturn's Rings vs. Sharks
- Fact Presented by Sara: Saturn's rings are younger than sharks.
- Details:
- Saturn's rings may be as young as 10 million years and no older than 100 million years, based on dust accumulation observed by the Cassini spacecraft.
- Sharks date back approximately 450 million years, with early ancestors identified through fossil records.
- Debate: The hosts discuss the validity of these claims and the challenges of accurately dating cosmic and prehistoric entities.
- The Evolution of Sharks
- Sharks have survived five mass extinctions due to their adaptability and diverse habitats.
- The Greenland shark is highlighted for its impressive lifespan, potentially up to 500 years, making it a remarkable species within the shark family.
- Film History: *Blade Runner*
- Fact Presented by Andrew: Ridley Scott acquired the title "Blade Runner" from a William Burroughs novel without adapting the original story.
- Details:
- The title was derived from a treatment of another book by Alan E. Norse, creating a complex lineage of adaptations.
- The film's exploration of human identity and artificial intelligence remains relevant in modern discussions about AI.
- Psychological Studies on Disgust
- Fact Presented by James: People are less likely to wear clothing associated with historical figures like Hitler unless it has been "purified" by someone perceived as good (e.g., Mother Teresa).
- Details:
- This study reflects the "contagion concept" in psychology, where people believe that objects can carry the essence of their previous owners.
- The significance of cleaning methods on willingness to wear such items is discussed, including boiling to eliminate associations.
- Fishing Spiders: The Fen Raft Spider
- Fact Presented by Andy: A spider species in Norfolk can catch fish.
- Details:
- The Fen Raft Spider is known for its ability to hunt fish by running across water and using vibrations to detect prey.
- The conservation efforts led by Helen Smith to reintroduce this species in Norfolk are highlighted, showcasing human dedication to preserving unique wildlife.
Key Takeaways
- The episode illustrates the interplay between science, history, and psychology, presenting facts that challenge common perceptions and provoke thoughtful discussions.
- The comedic and engaging interplay among the hosts, along with their guest, adds an entertaining layer to the exploration of these diverse topics.
- The conversation encourages listeners to appreciate the strange and wonderful connections in nature and history, while also reflecting on societal perceptions of figures associated with negativity.
Conclusion This episode of *No Such Thing As A Fish* presents a fascinating mix of scientific facts, historical anecdotes, and psychological insights, all delivered with humor and wit by the hosts and guest Sara Pascoe. The diverse topics stimulate curiosity and invite further exploration of the world around us.
For more information on episodes, live shows, and merchandise, visit [nosuchthingasafish.com](http://nosuchthingasafish.com).
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:00Hi 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 Weirdos Butt Club with fellow Fish alumnus Cariad 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 sarah pascoe.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 sarahpasco.co.uk to get tickets for her show but in the meantime please enjoy our show on with the podcast
1:33Hello 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 Pascoe. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favourite 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 underlining the word fact there for reasons that will become clear. My fact is Saturn's rings are younger than sharks. Okay. Duh, duh, duh. No, it's duh, duh, duh, duh.
2:12So when you say fact. Yes, exactly. 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.
2:54And I thought, there's a sitcom. Italy decided, no, we'll have our own one. Our spaceships will be in the shape of boots. And what are the Italian astronauts, stereotypical Italians? Are you thinking a low, low style? Yeah, 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. To talk about Italian men. And here's mine about Marianne Luigi. They're fixing the spaceship. There we go. The ship needs plumbers. Yeah, exactly. There's something for everyone.
3:32So 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 realized i've gone too far off the facts okay come back uh one percent of them is dust and they've measured the rate of accumulation how dusty they're getting and then work backwards from that one percent to say they can't be any older than a hundred years a hundred million years i should say and they could be as new as 10 million years old.
4:07Wow. Okay. 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 then you could completely just age it all the dust that's ever been collected by saturn's pool hasn't stayed in the rings essentially which is where aging them that way could be slightly contentious okay um 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 their 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 okay and then no teeth so are we thinking a gummy shark like no teeth big scaly fish or a big scaly fish i know what i know is 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 Your honour What's the accusation there Andy That she did what we asked her to do No because some people it's like their actual passion Is that what you mean Some people are like oh I wrote a book about The 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.
5:54Yeah, 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, that is good. Getting my astrology and astronomy all in the same explanation. So sharks have survived 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.
6:32Yeah. 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. Okay. 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? Here's the timeline I wrote down. So I wrote sharks as the earliest fossil was the late Ordovician period. So basically that would make them older than dinosaurs and older than trees.
7:11Really fun. Trees are 360 million years old, which is fun. Would they know anything about trees? As in like, they're not seeing trees anyway, right? So that's irrelevant to their world. You get like tree fall in the... Absolutely. So they might see a fall. They'll see a log for sure. But they can't fall before they exist. That's the thing. If a tree falls before it exists, does it make a noise? Does it splash and go on? They've famously got good hearing sharks, so that would be good distances. Or is it smell? It's smell. Can they smell trees? Very few people say, shh, there are sharks nearby. They tend to say, don't bleed into the water.
7:45There are sharks nearby. So we've got a mass extinction event. In the Permian period, that's 252 million years ago, or around then, 96 % of marine life was wiped out. So we had bigger sharks. And there is fossil records, just teeth of these massive sharks. No, you're saying just teeth. Earlier on, it was like, oh, they don't even have teeth. Exactly. How suspicious is this? I forgot Pascoe's casebook. 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 they're so varied as a class of creatures.
8:18so you get sharks that live on the bottom you get sharks that live in the main water column you know higher up in the tops 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 right 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 yeah which 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 yeah arguably there is a greenland shark out there alive that was born before galileo first looked at them yeah 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 it's amazing that's mad potentially there's one out there that was yeah yeah we've got the topic sharks yeah um give us a shark then favorite shark i'll tell you mine yeah okay wow let's guess i'm gonna guess hammerhead no james yeah hammerhead i do like hammerheads they're really They're the youngest species, apparently.
9:46The newest one. Really? Well, I found 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. But they walk on the fence. Andy's bottom sharks is my Channel 5 series of the future.
10:10People who want to watch a show about animals are going to be very disappointed. 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 wow that is cool can they swim they can swim yeah but not very well i 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.
11:06So later people think we didn't have any sharks. They'll be like, there's no evidence. Yes. They all crumbled away. Can I give you guys my favourite shark? It's from this morning. The programme. Philip Schofield was a shark.
11:24No, this is a listener email from Alison Molenkamp who sent us an email this morning on the day we record this, headlined, Ghost Shark Sex Teeth. Okay. This is crazy. And you opened it? Oh, yeah. It's great for Andy's bottom sharks. Basically, there's a thing called a ghost shark. It's also known as a spotted ratfish. I suspect it prefers to go by ghost shark. I'll take the other name badge. Why did you say first year? Someone trying to push a cool nickname on themselves, right? Spotted ratfish. 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.
12:04And 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. It turns out they're not scales, they're actual teeth. They're literal teeth sticking out of its head, which it uses to grip onto the female during sex. It's got a head hand. It's got a head hand, which it uses for sex grips. and just to hold on to her fins. Does the female have one on her head to hit the other guy's one away? She has nothing, just a ponytail.
12:37I think she's got nothing. 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 think it's shaped like teeth. But I think the teeth evolved from the skin. So it was scales around them I've got harder and harder. Which seems to be the same as this other idea. It's just utilising. Oh, they're also good for this. Imagine Sabrina Carpenter's album cover. Because everyone was really sort of anti it. And saying, you know, it's been done before.
13:10We've moved past it. Imagine if it had been this ghost shark. She's sort of on her 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 Roan. I'm still imagining your TV programme. I've imagined lots of the dancers at the beginning. It's got this like Euro trash feel. And they've all got like big, big sharp heads. And then they're all wearing chaps. So when they turn around, you can see their bottom. Do you remember that Super Bowl when they had the dancing shark? Yes, yes. Like that, but a bit sexier.
13:42Yeah, that with chaps on. 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 bouncy castle and stuff like that. I'll do it. Yeah. I will take that drop.
14:05Okay, 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. Yeah, 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. It's a solid commercial title for a movie. If you don't know Philip K. Dick, he was a pretty extraordinary sci-fi writer.
14:42He 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'd 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.
15:20So put it down. So he didn't end up even reading the book he made into a movie uh 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 yeah 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. So William Burroughs had read a different book by a guy called Alan E.
15:55Norse, 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 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.
16:45Just a good character name. Great name. Striking name. 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 he won the Nobel Prize for Medicine he was a doctor. Paul Nurse What's all these doctors called nurse?
17:20I have tried to find a nurse whose name was Doctor but I haven't succeeded yet but I'll keep looking He wrote under the name Dr. X didn't he? Oh did he? Yeah he didn't really use his name because he didn't want people to know he was writing 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 um 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 the official one according to ridley scott is the final cut which doesn't have the narration it's 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 dollars and it made about 40 million dollars 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's the first thing they brought out on dvd oh 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 and it is a suspenseless thriller, which I think is to a certain extent true.
18:40It was sort of slow. Was it 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. 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 tell if they're human? Well, this is the Voigt-Kampff test, which I've got the questions of if you want me to test if you're a robot. Like a personality test to see if we're robots. I don't need the test. I'm well aware.
19:11Make 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 sort of a little bit upsetting. you have a little boy and he shows you his butterfly collection including his killing jar oh dear it doesn't have a question mark on it but I guess it's testing do you have an emotional reaction to that, ok here you go describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother killing jar single words fun, sexy
20:03I'd also like to enter the word sexy for down the line 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 I guess yeah it's supposed to make you feel if you're upset about that you're probably human yeah I 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 movie and in the book, they have a machine that specifically is looking directly into your eyeball. So it's the dilation of the pupils. Exactly, it's monitoring. The question is answered by your body, I guess, isn't it?
20:39Exactly. 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 sharks, isn't it? What 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.
21:14So, you know, do you see what I mean? 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?
21:46It's really, when I read it, it's incredibly poignant for what's going on right now in the world of AI. Like 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.
22:15We need to ask the person who wrote the script. Yes, exactly. Call Hampton Fancher. Quite clearly a robot panicking and trying 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 uh-huh was off the back of the original um 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 burrows turned his work into a novella what that means is that he wrote the novel of the pitch of the film of the novel oh 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 it's so weird it's so strange 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 yeah even that movie that i just mentioned taking tiger mountain which was the adaption of the blade runner original book pre-burrows yeah yeah there was a movie that was made which was based on a art film by Albert Camus, his book called The Stranger.
23:46They 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 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 so they're not really listening properly.
24:26That 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 stock. I think in the future they're going to say do you know the famous TV show Andy's Bottom Sharks was actually based on a podcast and 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 yeah this goes deep doesn't it really does go deep isn't it true that the alien world um the blade runner world are one world together My wife told me this, but she's watched them all and I haven't.
25:12But 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 Weyland-Utani Corporation. And that might get a mention in Blade Runner. 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. So he was a beat 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.
25:53That's his version. 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 Rich parents He got an allowance from his parents until he was nearly 50 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 like pretty much and it prints out it 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's sort of allowed blade runner to right yeah yeah yeah okay sure so philip k dick took drugs as well yeah until the same things and apparently end of his life he sort of saw like a rosy mist and all these kind of yeah 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 dress sorry there's information coming
27:40okay 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 theresa 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 bought it she's bought it right for it she dry clean it after hitler has anyone cleaned it ever well this is a study um called the contagion concept in adult thinking in the united states uh 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.
28:31And 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 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 right and then they took all of the different results of what everyone said and then generalized to the entire world so um but actually they generalized to people in the u.s 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 u.s 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 theresa or someone sexy had worn it in between and they would probably not are we saying mother theresa is not sexy she looks so much like dan's mom
29:51yeah 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 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 shrink though i mean do we know what is it wool yeah because i did 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 it's there's very little um his 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 Goethe killed himself with.
30:51I mean, quite absolute 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. From Argentina? I am from Argentina. Oh, my goodness. I know. so we can only speculate yeah crikey there was a thing this this um this guy paul rosin paul rosin yeah 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.
Read the full transcript
31:39And so if you found that out, does that put you off drinking? Like to what level are you not wanting any association? That's why I have my water shipped in. From Argentina.
31:54Yeah, no, you're right. And did it? Sorry, just to ask. 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, James? 1994. for yeah yeah so i mean i don't know how hitler's reputation has been in america over the last few years but um how fashion has changed kim kardashian and a hit the jumper everyone will want one she'll be stretching that out i'm sorry but she and adolf did not have the same characteristics and so this is relevant in real life it's not just an academic thing so things like uh drinking water so you you mentioned the hitler water thing then yeah um so hitler never went to singapore but But Singapore, as far as I know, I mean, his allies got there.
32:39Never mind. Point is, Singapore purifies water from sewage 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 can make you ill. It is clean water. But in lots of other places around the world, places which don't have 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 our societies. They don't 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.
33:16Like, we're always going to add one and one together and go, that's the sewage. Yeah. Still, yeah. What if Hitler's jumper was turned into a scarf? So he unravelled all the wool and made something different. Yeah. 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 um would you wear it afterwards and burning had the best effect although it's not gonna look good 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 um the area of this i found interesting in disgust is disgust and arousal okay did you look into that no no no andy too busy living it what 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 um i knew about this because uh 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 the sexual well but sarah do you mean like if if i got my wife aroused yeah and then i suddenly say great take the bins out well this is what they do in tests because you can't but this is the thing so i don't know if your wife there's a really good example because obviously in so many times
34:50it's cruel
34:54so 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 quotidian like oral sex okay that's quotidian 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've had 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.
35:31And 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 a video, a 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, then if they've watched a video of the Olympics, they just show them physical activity or sexual activity or obviously a control group. Yeah. And this is men or women or both? Both. But the results seem to be showing a lot more for women.
36:01Give me an idea for a restaurant. Oh. 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.
36:16Did you read about 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 could tell with a 95 to 98 % accuracy whether they would vote Conservative or Liberal. Wow, amazing. 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.
37:04You 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? 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? Like a sorting hat, but it's full of maggots. It's worth a try. We've sorted it out. We've saved the government billions. One of us here is likelier to be disgusted than the rest of us. Ooh, 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.
37:45Gender. It's not gender. Oh, is it? Glasses, wearing glasses. It's not glasses. It's like guess who now. Is it people who like golf? It's not 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 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 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...
38:32Actually, 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 child. A man burger. Yeah, a man burger. Long pig, as they call it. Why are you saying it's such a creepy word, Andy? I was trying to keep you crazy. He does this all the time. Just a lot of these words come out very, very creepy. As they say. I think journalism is creepy. 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.
39:08I find 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. 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 the association you do if you go to any tourist shop in england you can buy poo shaped candy i've had a version of this in my life where my um my son he got really obsessed with the toilet brush and so um obviously there's two things we had to do one is i bought a brand new toilet brush with a 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 were being very festive very christmasy this year everyone's getting one then with a fun fact attached
40:38okay 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 do you know what the creepiest thing anyone can ever say to you That's what Cariad said to me yesterday She said Andy texted me Is Sarah scared of spiders? That'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.
41:19Okay. And this is the Queen of the Marsh, the Fen Raft Spider, Norfolk, and Suffolk as well. Sorry to any Suffolkers 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 Norfolk 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 load and they've been breeding them up.
41:51And the RSPB recently announced not so incy wincy spider makes incredible comeback. 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. Fen raft 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 vibrations. So if a fish is going past, they can just feel the vibration on their little hairs and go...
42:24And they run across the water and grab the fish. I mean, there's 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 yes the heroine of this whole story of bringing the spiders back into the norfolk broads so she hand reared 3 000 baby fen raf spiders in her own kitchen and these were the first ones that they put into 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 the uh 3 ,000 she did and then eventually it was 30 ,000 and she had to collect the flies herself because they eat like fruit flies.
43:46There's things I want to make fun of her a lot, but I'm also really scared of her. I think there's a kind of lesson 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. Are you scared of Helen? 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.
44:27Isn't that mad? Good lord. 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 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 obviously 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. The female Fenrir. Which not all spiders are.
45:00Not all spiders are. Well, female, she has an egg sack. Yeah. 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.
45:36But 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 other animals that you are not allowed to kill in the UK, the wart biter grasshopper the trembling sea mat 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 we have to go to Australia where we can eat everything did you say the glutinous sea mat no I said the glutinous snail snail Oh, there was a sea mat in there.
46:36It was Trembling or something. Trembling sea mat. Trembling sea mat. That's an amazing... I've never heard of that. They live in the sea around the United Kingdom and they're basically algal mats, I think. Trembling sea mats. I kind of knock off SpongeBob SquarePants 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. I know. It's rising sea levels, global warming. They're the only people that are worried. I think they're scared of Andy's bottom sharks. Just to bring that back again. You know that spiders can envenomate you after they've been squished.
47:11What? 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? There's so much of that story that's horrible. Oh, yes. You hammered a spider to death. It's an awful story. I think what I'm saying is don't squash spiders. No. Yeah.
47:47No, 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. I'd say human beings, there's too many of us. not you personally but in terms of the ecosystem no no that's fair if we're going to start with anyone Andy 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 atmosphere you have to show that you're not afraid do you find that it helps you that it's helping your response to spiders that you now can't maybe 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 so while when they have children to then temper it 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 realize my wife does that but that's only because you're trying to arouse her
48:56did you two down and james did you get the photo i sent you the recently not long ago of a big spider. You mean the one we didn't reply to? What was it, Mum? 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.
49:28I was interested in what you were saying about the hairs balancing on the water. I was just brushing this hair off my face, first in the morning, and then I pushed and then I heard it hit the floor and it was so massive and there's 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, 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 your spider. It was bad, wasn't it? A glass couldn't fit over it.
49:57well 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 antonette but that was my fault but oh and it was just just from a clear blue sky from the ceiling basically what the heck yeah i find it so as an as someone who spent my teenage years in australia i don't they're friendly here comparative to australia when 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 Quantock Gateway Pub in Bridgewater when suddenly oh yeah he was yeah we've all been there and he was he was bitten twice on his hand by what turned out to be a Brazilian wandering spider and that's very dangerous yes they come in like bananas don't they and this is where this came from 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 it's like a lukewarm bar yeah the spider's thinking 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 Why did they do that?
51:26I guess if Antidote stuff Yeah, you're meant to show what bit you Because you're like, we need the antivenom Sorry, I thought you meant he was recovering in the hospital And they found it and brought it in Like a visitor To apologise The worst is when I was attacked by a bear And I had to bring the bear into the hospital I was like, this is what I was attacked by 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 out into the wild. And they said we probably shouldn't worry because it was probably going to die a couple of days after.
51:54I think it wouldn't like it in pitch water. Yeah, exactly. The temperatures, yeah. Good grief. Should we have a positive spider fact? 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. That's weird, isn't it? so it's an externalization of not of consciousness but of thought is that why yeah because i guess the web if it's as far away from it feels the movement therefore your brain is registering exactly right and they 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 that there's an externalization of scents isn't it like whiskers although they'll do like um market research on what's hitting their web and sticking so if prey is hitting it and bouncing off they'll rejig 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 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 yeah yeah it's a plug but they also get 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
54:14Okay, 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 things James Harkin. Andy? Mine is Andrew Hunter M. And Sarah? At Sarah Pascoe on Instagram. Yeah, and you're on tour now, yeah? Yes, yeah, I'm 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 um 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 dot com.
55:10There'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.
From the publisher
Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.
Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon
Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish



