Good Job, Brain! - 10: Animals Are Weird

Episode Date: May 7, 2012

Chris said it best: nothing that man can think up in science-fiction stories is crazier, creepier, and more disgusting than nature. Mother Nature is a very odd gal. We share our research on weird animals and behavior, and shocking animal ingredients in our everyday lives. ALSO: pop quiz!, famous paradoxes, and how to memorize very specific parts of the male anatomy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media podcast. Hello, awesome, amiable and acute aficionados. Welcome to Good Job Brain, your weekly quiz show and offbeat trivia podcast. This is episode 10. And of course, I'm your humble host, Karen. And along with me are... I'm Colin. Dana.

And I'm Chris. We are your... We got alliteration. I didn't forget that. We are your quintessential, quizzical quartet of qualified, quotable questioners. Wow.

That actually, that little bit of alliteration was from listeners, Randy and Janine, who emailed in. And you have to say, we've been... That was a good one.

We've been getting a lot of emails with some awesome alliteration, so keep them coming. So we have to outsource our alliteration now. I love the crowdsource. Well, it's just, I mean, yeah, it's just so much cheaper overseas. It's true. It's true.

We can't compete with that. And speaking of listeners and mail, we issued another listener challenge last week and Colin. Yeah, so this one worked out even better than we had hoped. So the challenge, just to very quickly recap, it was at the end of a double letter quiz. I had said there were two words, 12-letter words that you can type, just use your left hand on a standard keyboard layout. And we were actually looking for the answer we were looking for was

stewardesses with the double S there to fit the criterion of double letters. A little bit politically incorrect. I suppose their flight attendants these days or maybe even for a while now. But several listeners went above and beyond the call of duty. So we also had submitted one that I didn't even have in mind, which is After Effects. Did you verify it? I did. I verified it. It's actually, it's way older than I thought.

I mean, I looked at the earliest cited use of After Effect was in the 1600s. So it is a bona fide. That's a word with double letters, too. Double letters, that's right. No hyphen, nothing like that. One solid word. Older than stewardesses, even. Oh, good point.

Good point. So we have two awesome answers there. So if you put stewardesses or After Effects, you rock. Yep. We got our winners that we randomly selected. Josh from Australia, Emily from Illinois, Natalia from New York, Genevieve from Montreal and Chase, who along with other

suggested after effects that we didn't know. Well done. Good job, guys. You are educating us. I actually found that I can type every word on the typewriter with only my left hand. I can do it with just one finger. Whoa. Yeah, we had to weed out the 900 smart ass answers. And wow, this is our

10th episode, double digits. Hard to believe. That's awesome. I've actually noticed that Pub trivia has been blowing up in the podcast world just recently. A couple days ago, NPR just released their Pub Trivia podcast game show, and the BBC also just released a general trivia podcast. So make sure you get your trivia fix. So just let it be noted that we staked out the territory before NPR and BBC.

It's tough to compete with two of the largest governments in the world. We only had that Kickstarter. They have the ability to tax people. We have stickers. That's right. We have stickers to send to listeners, the internet. They have the police. Yeah, that's true.

They can jail us. Oh, man. All right, let's jump into our general trivia segment. Pop quiz, hot shot. Everybody get your phone yard buzzers, ready. You know mine is ready. All right. All right.

We got our random trivial pursuit card here. Blue Wedge. What is Canada's largest province in area? Oh. I'm going to guess Alberta. Incorrect. Saskatchewan. Incorrect.

I just like saying Saskatchewan. It is Quebec. And of course, Prince Edward Island is the smallest province. Oh, PEI. Very, very tiny. Pinkwich, pop culture. What TV show takes place in a law firm with a unisexed restroom? Dana.

Pallie McBeal? Correct. Yes. Yellow Wedge. What was the most popular name for boys born in the United States from 1961 through 1998? Wow. Is it Michael?

Correct. Oh, wow. All right. Shot in the dark there. You grew up with a lot of Michael. I did grew up with a lot of Michaels. I know many mics and Michaels. Jacob became the most popular boys' name in 1999.

All right Purple Wedge The characters in From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankenweiler I love Frank Weiler Beloved Children's Book Yes

Hideout in what museum Is it the Met? No, yes Yes Yes No, yes, no I was like oh This would be so embarrassing

To not get it right I love that book Metropolitan Museum of Art Nice That was when the two kids camp out in the bathroom and then they live in the museum. Green wedge for science. And this is kind of topical.

What species has the longest tail of any land mammal? It's weird. Is it like a monkey? I just thought they would have these really long. I just imagine them with these long tails. No. The longest tail. Oh.

Is it a lemur? Incorrect. It is giraffe. Oh, really? I guess that makes sense because they're kind of just scaled up. Right, right, right, okay, sure. Oh, that's a really good one. That's good.

So if you draw a picture of a giraffe, make sure you put the tail on there. It's the longest. Yeah. Or if you're playing pin the tail on the giraffe at your birthday party. Yeah, well, you have to drag it across the floor. Kids are like tripping over. Okay, last question. What fitness practice uses the electric chair, spine corrector, and last.

Ladder barrel. Fitness practice? Oh. Colin buzzed. I was going to guess chiropractic, but it's not what I was. Yoga. Close, but. Oh, really?

Pilates. Pilates. I didn't buzz. I didn't buzz. I think they were yoga positions. Dana got it. That's what I thought. Some pilates.

Pylates. Pylates. All right, we have our Kickstarter backer question. This is from Josh Hicks, actually from Saskatchewan. Oh. your favorite word. Frank Edwin Wright the third is the drummer of what band? And the hint, he's better known by a pseudonym.

Frank Edwin Wright the third. By a pseudonym. And there is a clue in his name. Frank Edwin. Frank Edwin Wright the third, known by a pseudonym. And there's a clue. Is there a clue in his name to the name of the band or a clue to his pseudonym? To his pseudonym.

To his pseudonym. This is... It seems like it's right on the tip of the day and it's time... Okay, I'm guessing, and I also think it's wrong, but I have to say it. Is it YouTube? Incorrect. It is...

The band is Green Day, and the drummer is Trey Cool. What? The third. I knew his... They're from Berkeley. I know. We're recording here in Berkeley. We should have gotten that.

Yep. And Josh is a big music fan, also a big Green Day fan, and a big Apple and Star Wars fan as well. All right. We've got to meet this guy. I know. It's right up Colin Sall. And this one is from Ben Rosenthal from Wyoming, Minnesota. Who was the first U.S. president born in a hospital?

I believe that was Jimmy Carter. Yes. Where were all the previous presidents born at home? Yeah. I mean, yeah, at home. It wasn't typical to go all the way to the hospital to give birth to a baby. They just have like midwives come and... Yeah, if that.

conduct their business. Yeah. Conduct their business. Help with the lady business. It wasn't considered like an illness to be pregnant, you know. You gave birth to a baby. It happened all the time. Interesting fact about Ben.

He once drank a ham smoothie. What's the hand smoothie like? I'm curious if it's like vanilla ice cream too or something. The bacon milkshake that we talked about last episode. I think it's you blend up a bunch of ham and soy milk and shug it down. It's just pureed ham. With the soy milk, you're right. You've gone all the way to liquefying the ham.

You know, I better lighten this up a little bit with some soy milk. Well, I mean, then it's kosher. Some yogurt in a banana or something. Some ice cubes. All right. And so our topic of the week for our 10th episode is, it's going to be interesting. We're all about weird animals and weird animal stories this week. We're snooping around the door.

You ain't not got a hound dog It's doping around the door You can wag your tail But I ain't going to feed you no more And you know, I'm going to put the disclaimer out there That might get gross We've compiled a couple of the I wouldn't say the weirdest

But it's up there Some of the weirdest animals and animal stories So I found this article And it was called Honeybees Exploding Testicles Which, of course, I had to click on that. It was fascinating. I did not realize this. The way honeybees reproduce, the queen is kind of nurtured in the hive and is fed royal jelly until she becomes sexually mature.

And then she does this mating flight, and she has about a dozen male drones with her. And then when they have sex, the male drones like break off their genitalia inside of her and then die. Oh, wow. And then the next one comes, and he pulls out the genital. you're from the one before, and then, like, and then they die. And they just keep doing this. Uh-huh. Now, is each one fertilizing her as it goes?

No, each one is thinking like, my testimony won't get stuck in there. Oh, no. The guy before me was dumb. Oh, no, no. They know what's going to happen. That is devotion to a cause. Oh, going out with a bang. That's what you call going balls out.

Yeah. Or balls deep. Obviously, not all of these male bees successfully impregnate her, right? Or do they all successfully impregnate her? Or is it, yeah, last one and wins kind of. These are all excellent questions. You didn't get that far in the argument. I was more focused on, like, looking at the little picture of the beach in Atlanta.

No, you said they explode. What's the explosion? Is it the fact that they break off? I think that was a very dramatic. article title that made me click through. So it was sensationalistic. Was this the weekly world news? No.

Maybe what they meant is an explosion of testicles. There's so many. There's so many of them. I verified it. I looked at the different honey bee sites. You looked at bee testicles. I was looking at all the diagrams. It's fascinating.

There are. I mean, it's definitely one of those examples where mating is the last thing that you do in your life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There is a crazy one called the male wasps or the male wastes spider does something even like some is related but it's even more gruesome where they don't

actually have external genitalia necessarily so they'll um they'll ejaculate and then they have like a little appendage like an arm or something and it push it inside of the female and break it off and then immediately the female eats them well you know she needs some nourishment here she's with child it's a long day yeah she needs a snack wow wait so is this was spider a spider or a wasp. A spider. Okay. Yeah. That's not very good naming. Yeah.

Whoever named it. Boo. But speaking of cool names, the animal I want to share with the world is called a Peppa, Peppa. It's very, very cute. And that's as cute as it goes. It sounds like a child's cartoon. Pippa Pippa, also known as the Surinam Toad. The Toad itself, it's pretty cute. It's kind of stocky. It's kind of flat. It's brown. Another disclaimer.

I'm going to describe this animal, and it sounds both gross and fascinating. If you want to learn more, I just want to warn you. If you Google it, the images are a little bit unsettling. Oh, my. Because it's a little bit unnatural. So when the female, Pippa Pippo toad lays a bunch of eggs and the males come to seminate the eggs, he rubs the eggs across her back. Okay. And so all these eggs that are fertilized are on her back,

And the eggs sink into her skin, the skin of her back, they all kind of become pockets. And it looks like, like a weird, irregular beehive. Okay. Kind of like, you know, when you have a rash and you have a bunch of bumps next to each other, it kind of looks like that. But it's across this, this toad's back. And so these become little pockets and eventually become little cell chambers where the eggs, they fertilize. And usually, you know, with frogs and toads, they become tadpoles, and then they grow feet and become frogs or toads. Right.

The tadpole stage is completely, entirely, it happens in her back. Oh, my God. And so when it's time for, you know, the babies to come out from her back, they're already baby toads. And so you have this weird Frankenstein growth on her back that looks like a horrible rash. It's pulsating. It is pulsating, and these little frogs shoot out of her back from these bubbles. It's, it makes me realize that nature is so messed up.

Because you look at it, you're like, that is so unnatural. It makes me think of, you know, in like the space anime or that, like, Robotech where you've got the ships with all the missiles fire out all at once. I'm imagining except it's little baby toads. It is. It is. They shoot out and they begin their lives. It is very, very fascinating. I'm oddly fascinated by this, but when you look at the pictures, just be warned.

You're not just frogs, just like popping off like gremlins off another frog. It's almost like a lovecraft, you know, kind of weird creature. Nothing that man can think up in terms of science fiction stories is crazier and creepier and more disgusting than nature. So, everyone. In the grand tradition of radio from which podcasts came from, I prepared for you all a lovely little narrative story. It is called the dog. It is called The Dog with PICA.

Ooh, are you doing voices, too? Sorry, what is PICA? Oh, it'll come out in the story. Gather around, children. Scooch, scooch. There was, there once was, a 15-year-old boy who lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, back in the 1930s. And he had a little mixed breed dog whose name was Spike. He was white with black spots.

They think he was part pointer and part something else. And Spike had a little habit of eating things that were not food. Which a lot of dogs do, right? Yes, yes. But over the course of Spike's time on Earth, he would eat handkerchiefs, he would eat stockings. He once ate a high-eye ball. More worryingly for his owners, Spike would eat pins and tacks. and Spike would eat nails.

And Spike would even eat razor blade. So amazingly, Spike must have had a real iron stomach because all of these things, he would poop them out without incident. Even the razor blades, tax, nails, everything. Wow. Now, this disease is, or this syndrome's phenomenon is known as PICA in humans and in animals, is consuming things that are not food.

Sometimes this can be psychological, you know, just for some reason people start doing it because they acquire the taste for it. Like sometimes pregnant women can like crave, crave dirt or you know or crazy crazy things their brain is telling they should consume like the toilet paper or sometimes people and certainly dogs can start doing it because of an imbalance of nutrients like if you're iron deficient you might start eating metal um you actually seek it out yeah well i mean they say that you know if a dog eats metal and likes it he'll just keep eating metal you know they're

dogs sure now these days a family whose dog did this would probably take the dog to the vet or call Cesar Milan or, you know, whatever, and try to, like, work this out. But of course, back in the 30s and St. Paul, Minnesota, like, it's a dog. If the dog eats things and dies, you get another dog. You know what I mean? Like, you know. But also not leave out nails and tacks and razor blades. Well, also, you wouldn't leave that stuff out. But if the dog is going to go up and start eating them, it's sort of like, you know, the mindset at that time is just sort of like, well, it's a dog, you know. But what that young boy did do was he wrote into a popular newspaper feature series at the time called Ripley's Believe it or not.

And he wrote all about his dog Spike Who would eat tacks and nails and razor blades And things like that And he wrote about it And because Ripley's Believe It or Not Of course had Robert Ripley's illustrations Of all of the crazy things That Ripley would encounter as in his world travels

And he would draw them That was the whole kind of the allure That boy drew a little picture of his dog And they actually published it in Ripley's Believe It or Not credited to that young man And that little boy grew up to be Charles Schultz creator of the comic strip Peanuts and creator of Snoopy and yes and that little you know the little dog that he drew for it please believe it or not

ate tax and nails and razor blades his dog Spike and you know was was clearly the real life inspiration for Snoopy and and excuse me yeah I may be stealing your thunder here but Snoopy's brother was named Spike was named Spike indeed yes I didn't know Snoopy had a brother Snoopy has a massive extended family I remember Spike was when he lived out in Arizona and he had like a little pencil mustache, right? Yeah, he was like the Badlands version of Snoopy. He had a little pencil mustache. He did. Like a hat and like...

And anyway, you can't do one of these stories without finishing it. And now you know the rest of this. Wow. That is really good. One of the things that interested me when I was doing some of the animal research I kept coming back to is host manipulation. You guys familiar with this concept. Sounds like some alien stuff.

Yeah, it is, you know. In fact, it is very much like alien. So it's sort of related to paracetism and symbiosis, but host manipulation is basically the phenomenon where one animal takes over another animal and basically turns it into a zombie, for lack of a better word. So there have been a lot of these stories on the Internet in the last few years. You may have heard of zombie snails or zombie ants or zombie caterpillars or zombie crabs crabs. And this is what they're talking about is host manipulation. So the one that was just in the news recently, I guess, there's a fungus. in Brazil.

This attacks Brazilian ants. And what the fungus will do is it attaches to the ant's body and makes its way into the ant's brain and will start controlling the ant's brain and nervous system. And at that point, the ant is still alive but this fungus is basically dictating its actions.

It's like a zombie. So what the fungus will do is manipulate the ant to climb as high as it can on trees and get it up, way up, and basically affix itself to the tree. So the ant can't move, it's stuck there, and then the fungus continues to grow and continues to grow until it reaches enough of a state that it can break out of the ant's body and then propagate on that part of the tree.

So it's moving, it's moving the ant into a place where it can reproduce more. Because it can't move by itself. That's right. That's right. Oh, my God. That's so scary. It is so weird. It is so weird. The thing is it's like, it's not like a lot of the zombie ants or zombie cockroaches.

It's like another insect or. another creature affecting another this is a fungus it's like it's weird hive mind plague like collective thinking like it's not like they have a central nervous system right right right it makes it even I mean like I think we hear these stories and we want

to like assign some motivation to the infesting and but it's even harder with a fungus as you say yeah some of the ones that get even crazier are there are two or three stages involved so the zombie snails and again talking about things that are hard to look at on the internet if listeners if

If you just Google or go on YouTube, you'll find this eventually, the zombie snails. But be warned. Be warned. There's pulsing involved. Fairly warned, be the. So there are flatworms. And the flatworms, and the flatworm, it's a life cycle. So I'll jump in at one point in the life cycle.

So the snails eat these flatworm eggs. And the eggs will hatch inside the snail's stomach into little brood sacks. And even just the word, I'm already creeped out. I like it, actually. It sounds like a baby, baby Bjorn kind of thing. Yeah, oh, you're brood sack. Oh, he's sleeping in the brood sack. Yeah.

Oh, we put these on the registry. We got two broodsacks. Oh. So they'll navigate into the snail's eye stalks, the tentacles that they used to sense light and navigate around with. And they hijack them. They take over the snail stalks,

and they are literally pulsating and moving with the little flat-worn brood sacks in there. So what they do is they short-circuit the snail's ability to sense light. And they drive the snail essentially into light open areas, making it visible for its predators, like birds, for instance. So a bird will come down and eat the snail or sometimes even just eat the eyestalks. That's all really you need. Because it looks like a word.

Right, right. It's writhing around and pulsating. Exactly. That's the other part of it, right, is that it kind of attracts the bird's attention. Hey. Eat me. Hey, bird. I'm a riding brood sack inside of an eyestock.

it wriggles in a way to suggest just that sentence. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, we've all been in singles bars. We all know how this works, right? I'm so drunk. Oh, my God. There are no guys who want to talk to me. You shouldn't buy me any more, Drake.

I'm so drunk. So these brood sacks encased in the tentacles or the snail, they end up inside the bird's stomach, and that's where they finish their gestation cycle. So they essentially lay more eggs inside the bird. The bird poops out the eggs. And the snails eat the poop. That's right.

And then you're back at the beginning of the life cycle with these poor zombie snails. The circle of life. It's beautiful. Beautiful in its own way. Beautiful and it's horrific terror. Okay. Mother Nature is beautiful, but Mother Nature is a twisted, twisted woman who all of this

is by design. Like, it's not, this is how these flatworms exist. It's by design that they infect the eyestocks. And it's like, man. I think we nailed it earlier. I think that Mother Nature is a Lovecraft fan. She is. Gross.

Obviously, a lot of these animal stories is always about reproduction. And which is a good segue because we're going to take a break and we're going to do a mnemonic today. Oh, good. I've never taken a break. And our mnemonic today is kind of related. It is. is, how do I put this?

It is, this is, this will be very helpful for biology students. Sure, men, men's students, perhaps, or? Yeah, men who are interested in men's health or anybody who are interested. If you happen to be a budding urologist, maybe you're completing your studies. So today's mnemonic is, helps you remember the sperm pathway through the male reproductive tract, how the sperm moves from point A to point B. The various parts of the anatomy involved. And a human.

In a human. In a human. I think this was on ER at one point. Really? As in this mnemonic, yes. It is seven up. S-E-V-E-N and up. Okay.

And what does that stand for? Kind of fitting. Seven up. It stands for, so S, the first letter of each of the word. So the first S is seminiferous tubular. Uels, E stands for epididymus, V stands for Vastephyrins. The second Ejaculatory duct, and the N actually stands for nothing. Okay.

Okay. So it's not a perfect mnemonic, but yet just have to remember that that doesn't mean anything. It's better than Seve-Up. Yeah, Seve-up, Seventh-up. So N for nothing, and then up urethra and penis. Okay. So once again from the top. Seminephreus tubules.

Epididimus, vast deference, ejaculatory duct, nothing, urethra, and penis. Yay, penis! I have passed my boars. I'm now a licensed urologist. The standards in California are shockingly low. There's only one question on the exam. You just need to memorize that nomadic. Chris Collar, penis.

Hello, I'm Chris Kohler. Freelance urologist. You should like snap a glove while you say that. Why is your business card written on the back of a bus transfer? So hopefully no one will ever forget how a sperm travels through a human male reproductive I just hope that there is some listener out there and he or she's in medical school and is like, yes, I need to know this. A lot of mnemonics get used in medical school. I have been led to believe that I mean, because you have to memorize like, you have to memorize all the different

pathways that things take in the body and just the volume of information yeah and so you've got it's got to be like this then this then this then this then this and this and this and this and this and this and this and so you all you you come up with demonics to help you do that and chances are yeah someone needs the spurn pathway maybe it's you maybe it's you maybe it's yeah maybe you know submit your favorite medical mnemonics to jbb.podcast at gmail.com yeah one may appear in a future episode your door from No Frails with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first

five orders. Shop now at nofrails.ca. Okay, jumping back to our weird animal topic. I change sheds just to hide in this place, but I'm still, I'm still an animal.

Nobody knows it but me when I slip, yeah, I slip, I'm still an animal. There are a lot of everyday things that we, as humans, use that you don't know, animals are somehow involved in them. And in past episodes, we talked about, you know, the civet coffee and the anal beaver juice used to flavor vanilla. And we have a bunch more. The one that I always like, just because it's so simple. And after you hear it, you're like, oh, is Shalak.

You know, we know Shalak, the thinner, you varnish thing, or not varned, but you cover things. Shalak comes from the shell of the LAC beetle No! Yes, yes, yes, yes. The LAC, the LACC, shell plus lack, shell, shell, lack. Shellack comes from a lack shell.

So, yes, exactly. So specifically... I thought, I mean, shellac is used for what, like, furniture? Oh, man, it has... So the more I read into this, it had all these uses that I didn't even know that it had.

So, I mean, the typical use... You can put it in your coffee. Yeah, it tastes... Well, actually, it is edible. It is... It is non-toxic. You can eat shalac. Well, so we all, I think that we all know shalac mostly from wood and furniture and, you know, walls or things like that.

So, you know, but it is edible. It's non-toxic. It's fully organic. One of the, one of the uses of it that I didn't know this, if you ever eat on, like, pills or candies, you know, it's got the little glossy coating, that's shalac. Huh. If you see on ingredients for something, if you see pharmaceutical glaze or confectioners glaze, that's chelac. They put bugs on everything. I think I had always thought that confectioner's glaze was, oh.

Oh, like sugar-based or something. No. Confectioners glaze, pharmaceutical grays, food-grade glaze is all shrug. At least it's not snail's ice stocks or whatever. Hey, you never know. You never know. It's something. It's probably some donuts.

Yeah, and it's interesting the way they harvest it. So I guess I had assumed it came straight from the shells. Specifically the female Lack Beetle, only the female Lack Beetle for some reason. They leave the resin. It's like a resin that they leave on the trees where they live. They make these little tube-like tunnels to make. from branch to branch. So what people will do is they harvest these little tubes.

They scrape all the resin off. You melt it down. You filter out the debris. So it's liquid. And then you let it cool into sheets. And then they break it up into it or grind it into a powder. And then when you're ready to use it as shalak, you dissolve the powder in alcohol. That sounds really labor intensive.

Yes. Yes. It takes thousands and thousands of individual Beatles contributions just to make, you know, a few hundred grams of shalac. So how do they make it today? The same process. The process is unchanged. Yeah, it's harvested. The beetles leave it behind. You can't force them to produce it. So you harvest it from the trees where they live. You melt it down. Oh, you're not actually eating the beetles. It's the resin secreted from the beetle. That's right. That's right. Like honey. It's secreted from the shell of the lac beetle. Right. So it's a sort of a byproduct. In addition to the glazes, I was just telling you, before they started using vinyl LPs were made out of Shalak. Because if you get it up in a dense enough, quantity you can mold it and form it and press it and it holds its shape really well that's cool yeah i always associated shellac i mean like at home depot it's always with like varnish or paint thinner

or or any of that stuff yeah yeah yeah and obviously those to me you know our chemicals are very harsh chemicals and shellac is i had the same assumption yeah originally but put it in your coffee and i guess it fell out of favor for more like you know synthetic varnishes and things like that because it's it's not as durable as like a polyurethane yeah good one you know you know I mean, bugs and insects do all kinds of things naturally, and then once we find out that we can benefit from those products that they produce, you know, then it's a question of how do we get them to do it more efficiently, right? And so we have apiculture, right, which is the word for beekeeping.

But also, I think you can also refer to other type of insect keeping as well, but primarily known for, yeah, for beekeeping, essentially. So, okay, so primarily, I'll put this question to you guys. what is the primary product that, what is the primary thing that bees in beekeepers keep bees? What is the primary thing that they keep them to do? Karen. Honey. Incorrect.

Wrong. Pollination. Pollination. So, let's talk about the great state of California, where we all are right now. I found out that California's Central Valley produces somewhere between two-thirds and 75% of all of the almonds used in the. The world. Wow. When you eat almonds in Japan, when you eat almonds in China, those almonds probably came from

California where they are raised. California cannot actually grow all of those almonds using just the natural resources in California. Okay. The reason we were able to have so many almond trees and whatnot, you know, planted is because you have to, almond trees are very, very resource hungry and you have to have bees pollinating those trees. You must.

You have to have it. But there's not enough bees on all these man-made forests of almond trees, right, to do it. So what, so, okay, there are something on the order of between two and three million colonies of bees in the U.S. today. A million of those colonies, which aren't actually located in California, are trucked in from the Midwest for almond season. And they actually trucked those bees in. in so that those bees can pollinate the almond trees when it's time to do that in the middle of the season. That is cool.

They're like vagabond bees. Oh yeah. Well, a lot of these bees are from North Dakota and it's beekeepers in North Dakota and other Midwestern states. And they actually make as much money during the California almond season as they do selling honey. That's amazing. And the primary use, okay, two thirds of all of the bee colonies in the U.S.

about our traveling bee colonies. This is the traveling bee circus, and they will come to your town for a fee and pollinate your plants, because there aren't enough bees just naturally hanging around where they actually grow food to grow all that food.

So they're just bees for hire, just always on the moon. Bees for hire. Here's my card. Wow. That is so cool. So they truck them in, they pollinate the almonds,

and then they truck them back home, and they might go off to pollinate some other crop later. They're traveling bees That's more than the U.S. Or doing the national freelance tour Pollinating your crops

And so basically So like the world's almond supply Depends on beekeepers Who live in North Dakota You know coming to California too I love the involved nature Of these kind of things Because I mean I did

I did know that almost all the almonds I didn't know the exact number It came from Central Valley But I had no idea that it was so dependent On this other whole other industry And growing there Wouldn't it be cool to be the driver of said precious bees.

It's like, what's your job? It's like, you know, I'm the bee handler. Like, I drive these bees around. I get them to the different gigs. They're like the roadie. They're like wee-roids. I smell a Jason Statham movie. Jason Statham in.

Buzzed. Everybody right. Buzzed. So my weird animal use find is actually, I'm a big Futurama fan, Matt Groening cartoon series. And in one very, very good episode, they talked about ambergris. And ambergris is actually, I can never find the right ways to put these in non-gross words.

So it is a bi-product. So it is a solid, waxy, bi-product substance, and it's produced in the digestive system of sperm whales. And so, you know, sperm whales, they eat weird things out in the ocean. They eat like squids and different smaller animals. And things like squids that have beaks who are weird, sharp, cartilage, or bones, I mean, it's a little bit, you know, hard to pass in their digestive system. So their system secrete ambergris to help ease the passage, and it kind of cushions it, and it's waxy and it's soft,

and it kind of softens the edges. Hello, sperm, Miles. Are you having trouble passing through that latest carapace who accidentally ingested? Try ambergris. If you Google this and you look at a quote, fresh ambergris, it looks pretty gross. Never Google image shirts anything Karen ever made on any of these podcasts ever. It kind of looks like it's like a weird alien pod. It's bumpy and it's kind of waxy and kind of shiny and it's gray and it's green.

Here's the fun fact. Ambergris gets built up, you know, as the sperm eats all the beaks and the weird things. in the ocean, and the sperm whales puke it out. They puke out, and it gets washed up onto shores. And so fresh ambergris, when you see it on the shore, it looks like kind of like an alien baby, and it smells like what you would think whale vomit smells like. Right. I had always heard, I wasn't totally sure how it created, but I had always heard that it was just smells absolutely foul. It's completely disgusting. But it has uses. It does. And so here's some adjectives describing the smell of ambergris, fishy, fecal, foul, oily.

But the thing is, and I don't know, and this goes... Sold. This goes back to, like, who found out about this? Because after a long time of oxidation, ambergris, the substance, that particular odor actually starts becoming sweet-smelling and musky. It's dated back the ancient Egyptians actually would burn ambroseph. as kind of like incense, because it would release a nice odor after oxidation, not the fishy state. And in modern Egypt, they actually use ambergris for scenting cigarettes.

Around the world, ambergris was used in perfumes and colognes. Like a perfume base, right? Or a base for it, right? For that musky smell. Obviously, a lot of people raise a stink about it because they're like, oh, it's animal. No pun intended. Yeah. Like, oh, we don't want animal products in our perfumes or in our kuzons.

were in our cosmetics. Right. So now people have used some sort of synthetic agents. But like the real hardcore old school perfumeries still use whale vomit in their base. I know how they figured out that if you let it oxidize, it smells sweet. Like who wants to touch like fishy poo smelling crap on the piece? They just leave it out. They just leave it.

They're like, back the next day to see if it's gone. It's not gone, but it actually smells better. They're like, it couldn't smell any worse if we leave it here. It doesn't smell that bad. Does it smell good or does it just not smell as bad? Get to Toronto's main venues like Budweiser Stage and the new Roger Stadium with Go Transit. Thanks to Go Transit's special online e-ticket fairs, a $10 one-day weekend pass offers unlimited travel on any weekend day or holiday anywhere along the Go network. And the weekday group passes offer the same weekday travel flexibility across the network, starting at $30 for two people and up to $60.

for a group of five. Buy your online go pass ahead of the show at go-transit.com slash tickets. So speaking of kind of surprising ingredients to food, I found out that a lot of bagels and some some baby foods and other personal products have. Oh, no. It's not even, it's not bad. It's a little weird. It's duck feathers and human hair. There's this enzyme in both of those called L-sistine. and it basically it's a dough conditioner so it makes bagel softer and there's a way to make it synthetically but it's really expensive so like your bagel might have like ground up duck feathers or human hair it goes into the dough or it's in the into the dough okay it's an ingredient okay all right ground up duck feather it must have a yeah it must have a different name yeah yeah whatever look maybe well that's why it's disguised with the scientific name but that's that's where it comes from sure well yeah like like anal beaver juice sure castorian yeah exactly right guys whatever you know what it's butchew I like bagels I'm sure of eating a lot of hair bagels in my day I mean go to a restaurant there might

be hair in your food anyway oh foodception yeah yeah food in your food in your food in your hair back in your food circle of life that's right give us another rendition of In the circle, the circle of life. With duck feathers. Not that this is our intended goal for this podcast, but I think we, now with 10 episodes, we have a nice list of foods that, you know, a lot of us will never, ever touch because we found out what's actually in them. Can't eat bagels.

Can't eat noodles. Can't eat M&Ms because to have slack on. I've been drinking confectioners glazed by the gallon. Now I'm just going to have to curb that habit. No more pills. So that was our weird animal talk. And we are heading into our final quiz segment. And this is my quiz.

And it's not too much of like a quiz quiz, but more like a kind of a discussion. Famous paradoxes. And this will come in handy during pub quiz or any trivia competition you're in. Because there are a couple of famous ones. And here are some that, you know, you might. I eventually get asked about. Get your buzzers ready. All right.

Tell me what is Catch 22. Oh, okay. Colin. Catch 22, if I remember, was to, in the novel, the Heller novel, in order to be disqualified from flight service, you had to be insane, I guess, for lack of a better word. But in order to document that you were insane, proved that you had the capacity to recognize that you were sane. Is that close?

It is very close. So a catch 22 generally is described as a situation where a person cannot avoid a problem because of contradictory constraints or rules. So in this case, what's the character, Doc? Doc said, why any pilot requesting a psych evaluation hoping to be found not sane enough to fly and thereby escape dangerous missions would thereby demonstrate his sanity? Ah, okay. So that is the catch 22.

What is Zeno's Paradox? Chris. Zeno's paradox is Xeno, the ancient Greek, right, said if I'm walking from here to this wall, I'm never going to get to the wall because first I have to travel half the distance and then I have to travel half of that distance and then I have to travel half of that distance and then half of that distance, which means that I'll never ever get to the wall because there'll always be some distance between me and the wall. More specifically, he was describing an imaginary race between Achilles and the tortoise, right? Oh, really?

Right. So I believe the example he gave was that it doesn't matter that Achilles is the fastest being in existence. Oh, he'll never catch up to the tortoise. Right, exactly. He'll never be able to pass the tortoise because in the time that he goes, his distance, the tortoise has moved a little bit. Right. Basically, any distance can be broken down, or, you know, on paper can be broken down into infinite little fractions. of distance and you can never catch on it.

You can have something infinite times. Obviously this is not true because then that means any movement is impossible. But it's a good thinker. But it's one of those where even though you know it's not true instinctively explaining why does somebody pretend to me the devil's ad. That, exactly.

That is the intellectual exercise here. It's to answer the question and kind of square the circle and explain why it's false. Right, right. Okay, this is a big one. What is the liar paradox? I'm going to guess it's something related to the concept of this statement is not true.

Correct. All right. Oh, really? Is that it? Liar paradoxes, this sentence is false. Oh, okay. So it's kind of like a, there's a whole series of them. You know, opposite day is one of them.

Today is opposite day. Well, so if it's opposite day. So it's not opposite. It's all just like kind of self-referential paradoxes. Another one is, it's called the Socratic paradox, which he, you know, Socrates says, I know that I know nothing at all. Sure. What is the ship of Theseus?

It's also known as the George Washington's Axe paradox. You're up on your paradoxes. I know my paradoxes. The ship of Theseus, I believe, is the one. It's a philosophical mind exercise where if a ship goes out to sea and replacements or repairs are being made on it as it goes. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Sorry, it breaks in half, essentially. I've heard two variations.

One is that the ship breaks in half and each half is repaired back. Which one is the ship of Theseus? I've heard another variation, which is the ship goes out to see if it's replaced piece by piece over the course of the voyage. By the time it comes back, is it's the same ship. It's about identity. It's about identity. Oh, I've had this axe since I was a young boy. Well, yeah, I mean, I've replaced the handle.

And then later I replaced the head. You know, but I've had this axe forever. I haven't heard that one. I like that. And lastly, this is so interesting. It's called the Abilene Paradox. and I don't think this is general knowledge so I'll explain a little bit

so basically we know the Abilene paradox in play we just don't know what's called the Abilene paradox so basically the belief is that people can make decisions based not on what they actually personally want to do but what they think other people want to do so as a result everybody ends up doing something

they think the other person wants to do but nobody wants to do it themselves so this stems from I mean this is kind of of the fundamental of a lot of group think or decision theory. And this paradox was kind of posed or the story behind it is like we have a group of family. They live in Texas

and it was a super hot day. They're having a fun time hanging out on the port playing dominoes or whatever. And then the dad was like, hmm, thinking to himself, he's like, well I don't want anybody to be bored. So he suggested, hey, why don't we go to Abilene, which is a 50

mile drive over there. It's a town in Texas and have dinner there. And And the wife is like, she personally thinks, well, I don't really want to go, but it sounds like you want to go. So, sure, that sounds great. And then the brother's like, well, if you guys want to go, then I'll go. Sounds great. And everybody ends up on the car, 50 miles in super hot weather to Abilene, have a crappy dinner and come back. And they're like, man, that wasn't worth it.

That food was done. And they're like, why did we go? Why did we go? It's just everybody decided on what they think another person like that. I've definitely gone through situations like that in my life. Yeah, yeah. Especially with a girlfriend or a boyfriend and a spouse. What do you want to eat?

Right. Do you want Mexican food? Well, I don't want Mexican food. Do you want Mexican food? Oh, I would have suggested that because I thought you didn't want you. Yeah. So Abilene Paradox. Abilene Paradox.

And we have another carryover listener challenge for this week. And I actually wrote this myself. So it'll be very hard to Google, but you would need some Googling. It's very clever. And it's very fun. I hope you guys. say it yourself. I hope you guys enjoy it.

And here it is. It's a form of a poem, and I'm going to read it out twice. It's, 19th century is the time you seek, for the great battle was fought on sea. Two sides against one, fleet by fleet. Name me the ship of doubled identity. Here it is again. Play it again, Sam. 19th century is the time you seek, for the great battle was fought on sea.

Two sides against one, fleet by fleet. Name me the ship of double identity. Get your thinking caps firmly on for this one. Firmly on. A little bit harder. And if you know the answer, email it to jb. Dot podcast at gmail.com. And out of all the correct answers, we will select a few random ones and send you

some prizes, some cool swag. And you'll feel smart. Thanks to you guys for joining me. And thanks to you guys, the listeners for listening in. hope you'll learn a lot about animal stuff and a lot about food that you should avoid because it might be a little bit gross. You can find us on Zoom Marketplace. You can find us on iTunes and also on our website, goodjobbring.com.

If we enrich your lives, give us a review on iTunes. Throw in some alliteration in there while you're at it. We don't ask for much. We read them and we laugh. We like them. We like them. We love them. So, yeah, and we'll see you guys next week.

Bye. Bye. Spend less time staying in the know about all things gaming and more time actually watching and playing what you want with the IGN Daily Update podcast. All you need is a few minutes to hear the latest from IGN on the world of video games, movies, and television with news, previews, and reviews. So listen and subscribe to the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts. That's the IGN Daily Update, wherever you get your podcasts.