No Such Thing As A Fish - 100: No Such Thing As A Zillion And One

Episode Date: February 12, 2016

Dan, James, Anna, Andy and special guest Corey Taylor discuss noisy silent discos, squid holograms, and a trillion seconds of porridge for breakfast.

Hi everyone, just before we start this episode wanted to drop in that it's our 100th birthday. We have been going for 100 years Time has flown. No, it's it's a hundredth episode and so happy birthday to us Thanks so much for sticking with us for a hundred full episodes and this is just the hundredth Have I said hundred too many times? It's no big deal. It's just a hundred just a hundred 100 roll the show Hello, and welcome to another episode of no such thing as a fish a weekly podcast coming to you from the qi offices in Covent Garden My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Andy Murray, Anna Czazinski, James Harkin and a special guest making his second appearance His first being as a secret track on our vinyl it's stone sour and slipknot's frontman Corey Taylor and once again, we've gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days

And in no particular order here we go starting with you. Corey. Oh the honors. Yes My fact is a million seconds is 11.5 days A billion seconds is 32 years So that is bizarre because just basically because of the vast difference you think that a billion is a bit more than a million And when we talk about billions and trillions when you hear about trillion dollar debt or billion dollar debt You kind of think they're essentially the same thing and

Yeah, I know I know so I only just found out there's no zillion. I thought that was a thing I don't know It's a billion billion zillion not a thing at all. Well, it jumps to I think there's like there's one in between But there's a there's a google and then there's a google plex. Is that right massive? Yeah, which are you know quite quite large So a google is one with a hundred zeros and a google plex is one with a google zeros Because you can't write out a google plex because there are more zeros than there are atoms in the universe That's the problem. That's the problem for me. Otherwise, we'd all be doing it But so it wasn't the case that billion in america used to be a different billion to we've half copied america

But half not copied it. So a billion means two different things now So a billion in america is a thousand million and in the uk it's generally a thousand million now But also sometimes it's a million million. Yeah, since 1974 they officially had the standard where we have the american Short billion now. I can only apologize. I'm sorry But it's a lot easier for us all to become billionaires. Well, I guess so. Yeah, that's why we all are Am I the only billionaire sitting at the stake? Do you know how long ago it was a trillion years ago a trillion years ago? I know exactly how long ago it was a trillion in seconds, please

No, do you know how many a trillion seconds ago? How many years ago that was? So is that a thousand billion? Yes, okay So it's 31 710 years ago, and that was about the first time humans started eating porridge Really? Oh, that's good. What a big day I wonder what they ate up until that point. Oh, yeah breakfast nothing breakfast nothing breakfast porridge Yes, we're still eating it. Yeah, I mean I'm I'm a billionaire I eat meat carved right off the animal It's probably what they were having before they were having porridge

Yeah, well, I'm just saying, you know, we've gone, you know, I've gone backwards, you know, I'm keeping it real Was there any was there anything else that was going on then? Do you know James? Yeah, it was about the same time as the first, um, cave paintings in europe I believe bruce four scythe was also born Such a strong cultural reference so impressive. I know my thing What would be the american version of that someone who's like really old and of of bruce four scythe? Yeah Maybe but I don't even know if he's still alive bob. Hope. Yeah He did die. Yeah, he made it to a hundred though. Yeah, although it turns out

I was reading the saying about bob hope that he actually lied about his birth date just for a sort of like he just knocked it a year younger He's only like 26 No, so he I just think just for some kind of reason he knocked it a year back So secretly he knew he'd hit a hundred. Yeah, but he couldn't tell anyone So then when he hit a hundred officially in the country, they're like a happy birthday, but he would have been over it by then Yeah, well, he's just greedy any whatever. He shot himself in the foot there. He shouldn't have lied One of the great things the buddha could do apparently according to buddhist legend is count really really high Really, um, he well super high james. I'll tell you how high a mathematician asked him

What's the highest number you know and so the buddha said well, I know this number. That's a bit different He could name it though. He's the guy probably came up with zillion in a panicked moment But like a zillion I can count up to right before he said good jillion And then the mathematician said to but what about a zillion and one? Uh in your face buddha And on this basis a great religion was founded There was a really good article in i09 which I love about why how we can't even comprehend this million billion these massive numbers Think humans haven't evolved to comprehend them like when we were, you know, 3000 years ago 4000 years ago

We didn't need to think about anything except people in our immediate vicinity. We didn't have much astronomical knowledge stuff like that So we didn't have all these big numbers So this article it was written by someone called a mathematician called spencer greenberg is talking about how you can make numbers Be more manageable or make huge things seem more manageable So like for instance the time thing is one so you say you could do this over a certain amount of time Another one is breaking stuff down. So if you say the u.s. Has 17 trillion dollars of debt the best thing to do there is actually say that's $54,000 of debt per person

See this is the problem because you say how many how many dollars was it for every person in america 54,000 So I can't picture 300 million people which is about the population of the usa so that's where it all falls down unfortunately It's a manageable amount of money for an unimaginably a lot of americans can't handle 54,000 In germany after the war they had very very bad inflation and things started costing, you know, 10,000 marks and this is after world war one Yeah, exactly And they had this mental disorder called zero stroke or cipher stroke Where people just kept writing down zeros all the time because they just couldn't deal with these massive numbers Really and you would ask them how many kids do you have and they'd be like i've got 10 trillion children

Or how old are you i'm seven billion years old or something So interesting because they just couldn't deal with these massive numbers. Wow In um 2009 Zimbabwe printed 100 trillion zimbabwean dollar notes. I have one Do you and it's worth like something really like 20 pounds or something? Yeah, I think I bought mine for about a fiver. Nice. Okay. You got it on the cheap James collects these kind of things though just so he can pull things out of his wallet to impress you James literally has two tickets to the gun show like he literally has two tickets to the gun show

I was in florida and there was a gun show going on that I didn't want to go to it But I wanted the tickets so I just I've actually been meaning to ask since you did that what a gun show is and it's gone so long that I just haven't now Does everyone else know what a gun show is you just go along and look at guns and um, I think you you can buy them and Pageant for guns Do you dress them up? Yeah, is it like crafts for guns a little more explosive? If i'm honest and the only thing is I I have a house in las vegas and there's kind of an There's almost like a perpetual gun show going on in that and there because like and it's like this giant warehouse

Just full of dealers who are just showing you ar 15s m16s rocket launchers Minis like and then there's then they have a range out back. It's like walk on test fire it before you buy it You know, it's like a test drive for a car, you know, but you go out back. All right here we go And then it's just it's very loud. I'd be so tense all the time. The funny thing is they advertise it They advertise for it at the airport So you're on the moving walkway and you're just driving and there's this chick With a gun and a bikini and you're like, hey, that's a place to go I don't think they sell boots, but I'm sure they're working on yeah

Las Vegas is very much the um, james's shirt of america because there's a there's a permanent gun show going on at all times Quite quite Lock it in Um, this is an amazing thing. I can't believe I didn't know about big numbers Yeah, so there have been two attempts in human history to estimate the number of particles in the universe I think or two that have two big ones that we know about that have been written down So one of them was by our comedies. Uh, so this was um Over 2000 years ago and he was estimating the number of grains of sand in the universe actually

But now we know how many particles in a grain of sand Arthur eddington 2000 years later estimated the number of particles in the universe. They came to exactly the same number No, no, isn't that completely insane? Was he just kind of copying off of Ancient greek mr. Eddington I'll piss off would you be though when you realize you got the exact same rise It's like I think you would add an extra couple to the end. It's like 10 to the power of 72 plus seven So it doesn't look like you copied him, right?

Well, there was a thing about everest because they measured mount everest and they found it came to a really Annoyingly round number. Is that right? Do you remember this? So is it actually not the tallest mountain in the world? You know that I don't know if i've said this on the podcast before last year was the first year that no one's reached the top of mount everest In 41 years since it became a popular shop has went on strike No, it was just the conditions were really bad because there were a few avalanches They closed off a couple of routes But they didn't close off like the extreme routes and the last chance was in december Someone got really close and then had to come back down. This is the first year

Really? Yeah, and it lost an inch last year from the the earthquake. So you think it would have been easier If you tell me if everest lost an inch and lost it is quite cold We know exactly what that feeling is like It's like it's really chilly, I mean I don't care. I'm not going to climb you tonight Okay, it's time for fact number two and that is chasun ski Yeah, my fact is that star trek was almost not commissioned because the pilot was considered too erotic Now this fact entailed googling the phrase star trek erotic, which is quite dangerous

I see you have a lot of paper there So what's that? Well, so this was a pilot called the cage. That was the name of the episode It was sent to mbc in 1964 and actually I was very skeptical about how erotic it could really be because it's star trek But it does sound quite raunchy um, it was uh, the Idea of the show was that a planet let out a call for help to the guys on the spaceship on the, you know, star trek spaceship I'm obviously showing how much I know about star trek

Spacious star trek that was the original plan for the name of the ship And yeah, so they went down to this planet and actually it was a plan and there was a beautiful alien on this planet to seduce the star trek spaceship crew members and Because she had to have sex with them in order to repopulate this planet because it was suffering from you know Population crisis so it was about someone being planted to seduce Captain Kirk who wasn't captain Kirk at the time. No, it was captain pike. It was captain pike Yeah, didn't like was in the yeah, then well they brought it back because then they were able to use pieces of the original pilot in the episode. I can't remember the name of it, but it has to do with

uh, spock is on trial captain pike has been destroyed and he's in this chair and uh captain kirk is testifying on his behalf and they keep cutting to A footage of the original pilot cool. I was kind of a trek I liked I wasn't a trekky, but I I used to watch it all the time because it was on uh In repeats, so I watched it when I was a kid, you know, and uh, I was just fascinated by it. It's like, why does the future look so old? Yeah, I mean I mean there's you there's that used future look and then there's like well christ That's like from the seven I read that the original plan for mr.

Spock or one of the original things for the design of the character was that he was going to not eat anything That he would instead he would have a plate in the middle of his stomach and energy which struck the plate would be his food So you just feed off the you know, it's a cosmic radiation hits the plate. It'd be like, um, you know photosynthesizing I suppose so Sounds great James's dream. Yeah, don't have to waste all this time having meals all the other day Dan was saying to me the other day. It's so relentless having to eat all the time is three meals a day. We don't talk about it more It's bullshit. We're just again. I need to feed this thing again

We have discussed this and it's like my greatest joy and I can't believe you want to take that away from it I love eating. Yeah, I love it. But sometimes I'm just like I just want a day off That's called the five two diet There are products being developed though, which are um I can't remember the name of them, but they are basically Nutritious mush, which really doesn't taste very much at all. But it is selling as much Oh, wow And there is a sea slug that's managed to get genes out of plants so it can eat like an animal

But it can also photosynthesize So I would like to get these plant genes into my body so I can sometimes photosynthesize as well Wow, so while sunbathing you're also eating. Yeah, basically. Yeah, that is the dream actually thinking about it now That's not my dream I hate to sunbathe. I love to eat. It sounds awful My favorite thing I found out about star trek generally so created by gene roddenbury Uh, and there's a lot of rules. He wrote this kind of bible for star trek of what would be if you if you made an episode My favorite one is that he believed that there was no chest hair in the future

It's captain Kirk in all the shots where he's naked. They were shaving his chest Because there is no chest hair in the future. He thought ahead. He thought evolutionary. Oh, so it's not a fashion thing in the future He's not shaving it every day. He just doesn't grow it. He thinks like the pinky toe. We would just phase that out Because why not? It makes sense. I mean if you think about it like well, and I guess I'm the only one who can really recall it But then when when the one episode where everyone goes a little crazy and sulu is running around with the sword Completely, you know, he's got a bald chest, right, you know Yeah

Spock when he's fighting kirk on the planet and they have to fight each other bald chest Or maybe klingons just didn't have chest hair. I'm not sure no volkens Yes, they're right. God. What the hell was that? You know what? I'm going to walk away from the table now. I'll come back in a second. Dan has just saved us a lot of posts Never The worst was when we had daniel ragcliffe on qi and he got the rules to quit it's wrong No, I got how many emails have we had about that? Well, maybe that's why potter won so many matches

Screw the rules I'm a maverick. I'm ready On the vulcan thing we have done this in a previous episode, but if you don't know what you might like it Which is that uh, he was originally meant to be martian. He was meant to be from mars Oh, when they were writing the scripts and getting everything approved the people at the studio said We think you need to change it because by the time this series goes out and it's in its second series Is something we will have landed on mars and we will have seen martians Yeah, and they were like and that would make your series just look ridiculous

That's He also had um red red skin at first. He was supposed to have red skin spock And but then it was in black and white a lot of the time and it turned out it looked like he just painted himself black So he couldn't have red skin. Oh really? But also on skin painting in that pilot The seductress this woman who's supposed to seduce them all is green And so she had to be painted in thick green paint and it's quite hard and time consuming to do that And so that it shows up properly on camera. They filmed a test thing to see how it would work on camera They sent it away to you know be re you know to be properly done

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

Something's gone wrong here So they spent they stayed up all night every time trying to make her skin skin colored again That's hilarious james. Didn't we do a thing about how early? TV early film stars. Did they wear green? Better on the black and white camera. That's right. You know who did that max factor That's where the name max factor comes from. He was like the greatest at the time. He was the greatest film makeup artist and as they were starting to go from Like silent film to like the different uh the the different types of film and everything

It looked very oily very, you know very just very much like they were just painted with a bunch of When they went to technical level. So yeah, and so he spent I want to say two years developing What is now widely known as like the standard for uh film makeup And and that's why and that's after that he started his own cosmetic line and that's where max factor comes from T s elliot used to paint his face a tiny bit green and no one really knows why So maybe he was just desperately hoping for a film deal When are they gonna bring the wasteland to hollywood? Now talking about star trek before we move on a lot of people probably don't realize that one of the first

Interracial kisses on television was between uhura and kirk. Yeah, and at the time was very very risque And uh, they almost pulled it because the the sensors thought it would be uh too inflammatory And honestly, they get they got a few letters, but other than that Yeah, because yeah, and it and I don't know if it was this is why they were able to pull it off But they were both under the spell of I can't remember what the character's name was But they were you know basically forced to do it and that's how they were able to kind of get it through But yeah, that was that was like the first interracial kiss on on television. I read the uh uh hurrah was going to leave Yeah, but then martin luther king like talked her out of it and said like, you know

You're a trailblazing kind of african-american woman who like no matter what you think Is happening children watching you are seeing a black woman in space And at the time was so radical. Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the things I give credit for ronberry like he looked so fat I mean he was very misogynistic But He looked so far past color religion. He did You know like that was the theme of a lot of star trek episodes really wasn't it? It was like this strange other alien which actually isn't that strange

Which is not and it was weird because like a lot of the characters were not white in the 60s when that was a radical thing to do Yeah, mr. Sulu you had yeah, just even on Russian at the time right in the middle of the cold war. Yeah Just one last thing on sensors Yeah, because I was reading about the history of censorship on american tv. Oh boy. So in 1931 Cows were not permitted in cartoons to have udders They had to be pictured in a skirt Yeah

In a skirt this is 31 This is 31 what happened again later because I found another source a really good book called america's first network tv sensor Which says that in 1958 cartoon cows were only permitted wearing Skirts was there a like a specific length of skirt. They were allowed to wear like they weren't allowed to wear a mini skirt I had to be quite a floral nice loose flowing number so you couldn't see their legs Where did they put it? I think this is why then they said cows had to stand upright because they at first had them on four legs And they had it halfway down their torso and then it touches the ground

Does that thing off the internet the other week about where do you put dog's trousers? Like do they go around all four legs or just the back two legs or what if a dog wore trousers? If a dog wore trousers well, it would wear two pairs of trousers, wouldn't it? Yeah Well, you should have told the internet two weeks ago because they were all arguing about it. Um, that's amazing. Yeah So then even in 1940 there was um, uh, a Cow called elsie the board and cow who was a real cow Fearing in a live action film and they said the udders should be suggested rather than shown

We'd rather see the bulge than the My country sometimes Pretty weird Okay, it's time for fact number three and that is james Okay, my fact this week is that the swiss city of losan has banned silent discos for being too loud They're party animals and switch that's great, isn't it? So why they make a lot of noise apparently because while they're while you've got the headphones on you're listening to music And it's supposed to be silent a lot of people are just singing along or kind of bouncing around

I've whittled each other Yeah, they uh at download They have a special tent specifically designed for silent disco Now I was wandering around the grounds one time trying to find one of the tents where my buddies were going to play Wandered into the silent disco tent and was assaulted by this I mean it's It's cool contact like it's like I mean there's say like screaming

Really stomping it was much louder, and then you look around. I was like these people having fits What is happening? I backed out. I'm not turning my back on them I mean, but I mean they've got the lids on you know Giving it large and I was terrified that I never went back So I think we're saying that losan has done the right thing. They are on the right track I like a silent disco. You can have the music nice and quiet and um, you can wander out if you you know, you can turn it right down I love it It really suits me

Everyone else is rocking out at download and Andy's listening to radio 4 And now the shipping forecast Dogger fairbank So maybe this we're saying this is a sensible thing it seems that way Yeah, I wasn't really olfay with the silent disco, but it seems that yeah, they're right They're really good But the things you get people because often they have two uh djs or even three playing different tunes So people are dancing to different uh rhythms and different beats

So people it's sort of I think people care a bit less what they look like whether dancing you don't get as much kind of Posey dancing. Yeah, because you could you could be saying I'm I'm totally in rhythm by the way to what I'm listening to You just don't know that it's not obvious when you're not dancing in tune or singing in tune. I guess A lot of them have their eyes closed It's very at different tempos So it's like it's honestly, it's like it's like watching cctv footage of like the damned Just outside the gates, you know, just get ready Do you know where silent disco comes from no or when it comes from so

This is well the theory online is that it dates back to a 1969 finish sci-fi film called I'm going to mispronounce it as well Which means time of roses and people all wear the headphones to a party and that's the first Time is it was ever seen in popular culture. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah They were definitely listening to stuff because sometimes I didn't want to admit this but I put my headphones on in the office So people don't talk to me, but I'm not actually listening to anything. Is that so yeah Well, you've lost your advantage now. Were they doing that? They were all just like I'll go to the party, but I'm not speaking to anybody

That's that's really interesting because when was so 1969 and it's set in 2012 So when was the audio like sorry when were cassettes audio cassettes invented a word 80s Because what were they late 70s? Yeah, because it was headphones even a concept of a thing you just held on In america the giant headphones have been around for quite a while They kind of went hand in hand with the the hi-fi system that were sold in like the early 60s The first ever jukebox was made by Edison and he had some kind of music system And there was like stethoscopes that would come down and like five different people would kind of put the stethoscopes next To their ears and listen. So that's kind of headphones

And they used to come with a towel that you could clean it after well before you would use it That's fantastic. So you wouldn't catch ear diseases off these. There's famous ear diseases There's a guy called george foie who uh lived in new york where it's loud and he had some kids who were making noise And he decided he would go on a quest to find the quietest place on the planet And he's obsessed with finding quiet places, but he says and he's been inside the anechoic chamber in uh, Massachusetts Minneapolis Minneapolis, um, and he's clarified that you can't there is no such thing as silence And he said he found it really annoying going inside this chamber which didn't drive him mad like it drives other people mad

I have read that the longest anyone's ever spent in an anechoic chamber is 45 minutes. He beat that Did he yeah, because he was fine with it. They actually had to kind of break the door down to get him out It's just a great time. Did they not have a handle? That's a design flaw Um, I've been to an anecho I've been to a semi anechoic chamber. Yeah, wait, what's a semi one? What where there's some noise? Yeah, because that's because of defeat. Oh, yeah. I was with you. Yeah, you were Yeah, um, it's the echo. It's the lack of echo so you can make noise But it's just it won't bounce back at you. And so um with this one

There was a flaw which was just normal and all the other walls were kind of Had this special stuff that stopped any echoes and did it was it weird? Yeah, it's really weird. It was really really weird Yeah, do you know the most echoey place in the entire world? It's this massive oil tank in scotland It's in a place called inching down and they they dug these huge oil tanks into a hillside during the Second world war to store millions and millions of gallons of oil because they need to fuel ships Which were were moored at the nearest naval base, but they didn't want it to be a risk of bombers You know long-range german bombers, so they had to dig it into the hill

The only way to get in is through one of these four tiny pipes. They're 46 centimeters across So it's a squeeze But when you get inside there, they've got inside and tested it and the way you test it by the way is firing a blank A pistol with loaded with blanks and see how long it takes how long the echo takes Why can't he just say echo like any normal person does it's just a standard way of doing it There are there are more modern ways um, but the echo the echo in this chamber lost 112 seconds. You're kidding. Wow Oh my god, no, we played a place the other night It was uh, this this hall in frankfort in germany and the delay in there was seven seconds long

Because it was just so cavernous right and even when you get people in there Like I mean it's it's such a battle for us to dial in the sound Yeah, we need to fight that wasn't that unbelievably distracting. Well, we bring it We bring our own uh, our own pa system with us. So we're able to really control that plus we have Uh, probably one of the best sound guys in the business He is able to really control that, you know, and he's he's spent so many hours and so many, you know, just He knows how to really dial it in. Yeah, it was pretty intense. So that was seven seconds. That was seven seconds I can't even imagine 112. I mean, it's it's incredible. It's just hanging there

And I mean it's something like that the decay rate has to just be and just sick because it's just it's feeding itself Yeah, yeah, that's I'd love to go in there and do some vocals. Oh, wow Yeah, like I've done I've done vocals at the bottom of a well before really. Yeah, I don't really recommend it Because you're wet So was this part of like a plan or did you just decide to do it stuff for slipknot? And we were recording out it was when we were doing all hope is gone, which was the fourth album And we were out at our our our buddies this place called sound farm It's basically he lives there and he's got a studio there

So we were doing a lot of like experimental stuff, you know Just to kind of get away from like the pro tools plugins and everything like that It's like let's try and capture something unique So they they they fished me down the bottom of this well because you know, you had a proper well down there It was deep very dark and of course we waited until the son had gone down to do it. I was like this was poor planning But then we fished a telephone can you 87 down and um, I was able to to kind of do and it was just this kind of spoken word thing that we were just doing again But the the reaction just picked it up was really really cool. So I love doing stuff like that

I'm all about it Is it is it true because it's online this about you that your vocal range is That's the biggest It's it's in metal Apparently I have a pretty good range five and a half Octaves yeah, octaves But like that but I didn't even know that to be honest, you know, like I was like Because this is a good thing about the internet. It's like well, I can't sing that but I can sing this

I mean, that's really that's the end of my gig. Yeah But so that right at the high range the scream got you into getting a gig on dr. Who right? Well, yeah, the well the low growl right was what what did it? Yeah, um, and then the guys who Uh directed at daniel harrell who I just saw last night. He came to the gig They were like he and a couple of the producers a lot of the people they were like huge slipknot fans growing up and I was like And they were like they they when we we played in cardiff last year where they filmed and they took us to the doctor who experienced so I am just Freaking out, you know, like we were there for hours and they were like we got to go They took but they took us to uh, uh, bbc cardiff or bbc whale, excuse me

And they walked us through some of the sets and everything and then they were like so we've got this idea and I'm like, yeah And it described the fisher king who was the the the the alien who I had provided the screen for and then Uh, peter and I can't pronounce his last name sarif sarif and a wish. There it is. Thank you. Thank you for that because I butchered every time He did the spoken the the spoken voice And I was the I did the growl. So it was kind of a cool mash-up A duet. Yeah, it's basic essentially. Yeah, I mean I let him take the lead He's pretty good

But yeah, so I just I went I'd screamed for about 45 minutes and they were like we've got plenty And I went and did the gig we actually only asked for three seconds, but thanks for that. Uh, you've quite overdid it Um, anyone got anything else an amusing noise complaint Oh, yeah I saw so this is a big sign that somebody left outside someone else's house when that Person had been keeping them up all night with their loud music and their partying And the sign says to the people that kept us awake all night by singing on the balcony 223 a.m. Pinball wizard three out of ten

Your performance of this would cause the band more shame than peaked town's ends liberal attitude Three 15 a.m. Walk this way the lowest point of the performance I hate this song One out of ten, but then eight 20 a.m. So, you know, this has gone a while tiny dancer actually very good seven out of ten I think they're a bad critic because that's very good seven out of ten is a little bit Yeah All right time for our final fact of the show and that is Andrew Hunter Murray My fact this week is that the giant squids brain is wrapped around its throat

So if it eats anything too large it risks brain injury It feels like a design floor doesn't it it does so good I know but they've got to do a lot with a little space because they've got this thing called the mantle Which is basically everything except the tentacles and they have to fit a huge amount of stuff in there And so they feed through this Sort of the hole in the middle of the mantle and they you know They have a beak and they have all sorts of strange features. And so their brain is wrapped around their esophagus Yeah, how stressful every meal

That would put me off eating if I was going to be brain damaged every time I did you just have to chew that's all it is Yeah, and there's one of very few things that we know about the giants quick because we know so little We don't know how they hunt. We don't know whether how many species there are there might be They think they might be up to eight different species of giant squid So they've obviously got eight tentacles, but then they've got two feeding tentacles as well So the feeding tentacles can stretch out To 33 feet. That's what they found in length. So imagine you've seen like a squid ages away And you're like, I'm pretty safe here

Lob these two feeding arms and grab you and bring you back like a like a big tongue on a on a lizard But they will be able to swallow you down. You're way bigger than I was in my head as I said that I was a fish Yeah, yeah, I was picturing myself swimming along going. Oh, I'm safe here eating chemo They are they are the size of a bus aren't they they are enormous They Some of them are as long as so basically the maximum length including the tentacles is 13 meters And half of them will be the feeding tentacles, but still that's uh, that's that's big

That's a cheat though I would say because if you grew like an eyebrow hair really really long you could say wow I'm actually this length but because those are just two little tentacle arms You count your legs when you're talking about how tall you are If you care you count your arms, which are your feet yeah, but if I'm talking about a bus I'm not going to talk about a bus that has two extra poles hanging out the top and going get on my massive What bus of you say get on my massive pole? There was footage of that one

Um kind of washing up next to a ship I want to say it was fishing just off like uh, maybe the Alaskan coast But it was I mean quite big and it was caught in one of the nets and they it took them forever To this entangle. Yeah, I mean it was but it was big. I mean it was I mean then this was a big ship You know this one of the yeah the the crabbing ships and Christ It was half like maybe three quarters as long as the ship itself. Yeah I was like, oh Someone called like the the squid police in Waymouth. I think the squid police. Yeah, um the official name

Yeah, that's who you call it. It's 9 9 10 9 9 tentacles Oh, well done Someone called the squid police Saying the giant squids washed up on a beach and it turned out to be a mink whale Which is huge so they look like whales when they're dumped on beaches at these huge formless lumps. Wow Yeah, and they have the biggest eyeballs in nature, don't they? Yeah Um gigantic eyeballs. Um, so all animals. I think the eyes evolved one time

But I think the squid I think the eyes evolved completely separately even though they do exactly the same thing So it's like eyeballs have evolved twice in two different types of animal I think that's right. Is that because of the depths that they have to deal with? Yeah, I think that's right Probably I was I was looking into why they have these enormous eyes and there's a really good paper from 2012 by A team led by dan eric nelson to shout out to him Um that is to help them spot sperm whales who are their main predators So he did a paper and the question was why do they have eyes and the answer was so they could see things But why the three times wider than almost any other animal apart from colossal squid, which is the other kind

Anyway, never mind them So sperm whales are the main things that hunt them and 600 meters down using an eye that size You could spot 120 meters away a sperm whale, but sperm whales have got sonar So they can they can identify a giant squid from a long way away So it's really just to give them any kind of advantage and a head start in getting away And lots of sperm sperm whales when they wash up when they die, they've got scars all over them Which we think are from grappling with squid and their enormous tentacles I was wondering what there was when I was looking at the pictures of those ones that washed up

They've got those scratches all down their backs Yeah And they think that about three quarters of everything sperm whales eat is giant squid from the number of Squid beaks they find in the stomachs of the whales So that it's a huge they have these enormous battles underwater It's probably one happening right now You know squid ink So it's not personally, but we have mutual friends

Yeah, it's a metal band So um, they they actually do two batches of squid ink that go out when they're using it as a defense system So the first batch is kind of pure ink. It's very inky and it's meant to create a blob so they can create a distraction The second batch is a more mucusy Little bit of ink. So it's mixed with mucus And the idea is that when they spit this out that they are creating a shape that looks exactly like them So it's like a decoy. It's like this this weird squid looking decoy. So it's like a squid hologram Exactly and they've they've got video observation of

Animals that were going after the squid then going for this and being like, whoa, what was the squid and he's off That's I love that. Yeah That's intelligent Um male squid have to be quite careful what they do with their sperm Because the way they inseminate a lady squid is they deposit these sperm packets These sperm metaphors into a little pouch on her body But she loves to eat them. That's really what she likes doing best is to get like reach around with her tentacles

Pick the sperm out and eat it. So that's obviously a problem for the man because uh, or the male squid Because that means that he you know, he doesn't get his offspring out of her because she's just eating his potential offspring If I are a nickel Sorry, I was miles away You can empathize there you go So when she eats the sperm that you may have deposited on her It actually helps her to develop her unfertilized egg and so helps out the next guy his competitor that comes along So you've got to really make sure that so that's why sometimes when you deposit your sperm into a female's pouch

They try and get it really really deeply in because so that she can't actually reach around to it and and get it out Another species called the coastal squid and it's usually the bigger males that are successful with the females But they're also sneaky males or sneaker males and they're much smaller But what they do is when the female is about to lay her egg She lays it out of her front and they deposit sperm on her face and then when the Egg comes out then it kind of collects their sperm and their sperm is much bigger than the other males I'm not sure we can safely say anything about I'm back here just fighting my

Cory's like those nickels are really Giant giant squid have penises, but other squid don't Do you think they ever like Trick people by saying I have a giant squid penis and then it's unclear Which bit the giant is referring to? I like to think they do. I hope they do So you're saying it's like sorry. Are you saying that it's a giant squid penis? Or or a giant squid penis. It's actually an extremely small giant squid penis

Of All the And I'm just saying there's been quite a few yours is by far the smallest I was just reminded of that. Are you saying four candles? Yeah, they're saying four candles That was in an original draft of the sketch. It was about giant squid penis I've learned so much today. I'm so happy. So this is a really gross idea So there was a woman in uh south career recently who was eating squid So we all eat squid. We call it calamari for reasons. I don't understand

But she was eating some boiled squid in a restaurant and uh, she suddenly felt a pain in her tongue And it turned out the squid wasn't quite dead and it was a male squid and it had deposited its sperm packet into her tongue So she felt horrible pain in her tongue and then felt lots of stuff crawling around inside her tongue And had to go to hospital and they took out a whole bunch of sperm and apparently this does happen a bit Like there's been reports in japan of it happening Vegetarianism here you come Okay, that's it. That's all of our facts. Thanks so much for listening If you want to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said over the course of this podcast

We can be found on twitter. I'm on ad shriverland james at eggshapes andy at andrew hunter m kory at kory taylor rock And chasinski you can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, that's right or you can go to at qi podcast That's the group twitter handle or go to know such thing as a fish.com. That's our website We got all our previous episodes up there. Thanks so much for listening. We'll see you guys again next week. Goodbye