No Such Thing As A Fish - 230: No Such Thing As Tinder For Sloths

Episode Date: August 17, 2018

Live from the Wilderness Festival, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss how the Macarena could save your life, the secret penis code in the Bayeux Tapestry, and the one thing more painful than childbirth (for sloths).

Bum, bum, bum, bum. I'll take a bath tomorrow. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from the Wilderness Festival. My name is Dan Schreiber, and I'm sitting here with Anna Chisinski, James Harkin, and Andrew Hunter Murray.

And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with our first fact this week, that's my fact. My fact is, according to a new scientific study, the best way to perform CPR is to do it while humming the Macarena. How cool is that? And I think they recommend humming it because they probably don't believe if you're trying to save someone's life and you're going, humma dumba dumba dumba dumma macarena, you're the right person to be doing it.

And they have your lyrics that you just said then. Does anyone know the actual lyrics? I think everyone knows the word macarena and know the word in that song. Yeah, exactly. But what it is about this song is that it has a BPM, so every song has a beat per minute, and this BPM is 103. And as a result, when they're trying to teach people the perfect pounce that you need on a chest as you're trying to save someone's life, the macarena happens to be the perfect amount. And before that, they used to think it was staying alive by the Bee Gees.

That's right. Because that's about 103 or 104 as well. Yeah. But actually, also, maybe it's supposed to be about 100 is the best, right? But macarena is good because everyone kind of knows the beat of that, so it's good to do. But I thought I'd look at some others. There are 100 beats per minute. So if anyone's having a heart attack, you should try these ones.

Crazy in Love by Beyonce, Independent Women by Destiny's Child. Any of these work. Hips Don't Lie by Shakira. That's my favorite. Or My Chemical Romance, Dead. Yeah. Not a good one. That's not a good one.

I found a few more. So Simon and Garfunkel, Bridge Over Troubled Water. If it's just a nice mood, you want to chill everyone else. Sometimes the situation doesn't need something fun, OK? Sometimes poignancy is needed. Well, the way they sing that on the X Factor, which is the slowest song in the history of time. Oh, OK. What about this one?

It doesn't have obvious beat. It doesn't have any beat. You just you'd pause on. Like a bridge. That is not. You do slow. Tadadadadadadada Macarena. The Andy knows the lyrics.

I think surely the Macarena is a bad one because no one's ever been able to hear it or hum it without actually doing the dance. And as soon as they're doing the dance, very difficult. And also if you watch anyone doing the dance a lot of people, they lose their rhythm almost immediately. Don't they? And half of them are doing one thing and half of them are doing something else. Ideally, what you want is four people who need it surrounded you, right around you so you can turn to the next person. Start administering it, get to the next. It's a good way of multitasking and fair sharing.

So Macarena is by Lost Del Rio. Yes. OK, and this is very much a one hit wonder, isn't it? They never had any other hits of... James, I have got at least one of their other hits right here on my paper. Go on. It's Macarena Christmas. It was released about 18 months after Macarena and it is, I kid you not, the worst song ever released.

It's a medley of Jingle Bells, Joy to the World, Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and the Macarena. Oh, wow. It's often they just break off and they do a bit of Macarena. They released, I think, five or six albums. One of them was Macarena Non-Stop, which is a compilation album. It only has eight tracks and five of them are the Macarena. But do you know what's amazing about Lost Del Rio, this band? They got together in 1964, I believe it was, 62 or 64, the same year that the Rolling Stones got together.

They had their hit 32 years into their career. That was finally, they were like, should we give up? I'm sure we're going to hit it one day, mate. Let's do it. And they did. And then they must have thought, wow, we've made it. And that was the end of their career. Yeah. They're still going. They're still performing.

But are they? When I was researching this, I read an article from 1999, the headline of which was, does anyone remember the Macarena? I mean, and that's, what was that about? What a stupid article. Everyone remembers the Macarena. I watched a video. You know, you can see these on YouTube where they show teenagers stuff from the 90s or whatever and see if they know what it is.

Yeah. Every single one of them knew what the Macarena was. Yeah. No one knew the band, but they all knew the song. Yeah. And in 2003, so that's 10 years after the record was released, they were still making a quarter of a million dollars a year in royalties. Wow. And it's extraordinary.

The original Macarena dance, there was an original. This, that was the second dance. It was when they made the video, when there was a remix done of the song. What was the first one? The first one was an incredibly complicated flamenco dance that was done in clubs. You would have to be an expert in order to do it. It had doubled the amount of moves that the original verse had. Wasn't it invented by a, like a random aerobics teacher or dance teacher or something?

Yeah, Mia Friar. Yeah, yeah, or Mia Fry. She was in the video clip and so she wanted something that kids could dance to and adults who have to go to nightclubs but don't know how to dance could dance to. So the four of us bow to her and say, you've saved us. Actually, Macarena, it's about a woman called Macarena. But the name Macarena was originally Magdalena and it was just a word for like a sensuous woman and it comes from Mary Magdalena. Then it was a word for any kind of prostitutes and then it was a word for a sensuous woman. So really it should be hey Magdalena.

Hey prostitutes. Well, and it's about a woman who prostitutes. In the song, the lyrics are actually the woman saying, don't worry about my boyfriend. He's gone off to fight. You two are his best mates. Do you want a shag instead? Is that Macarena? It's not a good message to be sending 12 year old the discos.

No, this is this is just a little nugget I enjoyed. It went to number one in France. It went to number one in a number of countries, but not in the UK. Not in the UK, interestingly, because it was beat by TLC. No, wannabe by the Spice Girls. No. Wow.

That's bad luck, wasn't it? Because it's like the biggest song of all time. But yeah, there was a big there was a big gasp around the room that 20 year old chart news. Yeah. Hey guys, I'm blur beta aces to number one as well. What? What? Do you think they were probably sad, but quietly confident going, it's all right.

We've got Macarena Christmas in the bag. We'll be we'll be back. And then two become one came out and they had to dance. So in France, they went to number one. Do you know what song they knocked off the number one? Oh, is it a French song? No, no. Is it during a regret re-end?

The only French song anyone knows. No, it was the theme tune to the X files. Yeah. I don't know. That was number one. That was number one in France. I think that was number one in the UK. Oh, it did well in the UK.

Isn't that tubular bells? Mike Oldfield did a cover of it later. How weird is that? You're thinking the exorcist. Yeah, yeah. Shall we talk about CPR? Yes, yeah. If you have a problem with CPR, as in, so a lot of people are quite light

and it's you need a lot of pressure to get someone's chest deep enough to get the blood flowing while you're waiting for the ambulance. So if you are light, a tip is to jump on the person who you're trying to administer. So you could actually be doing the Macarena. Well, kind of yes, you could. Wow. Sorry, I say tip and there's no medical advice on this stage. I think that's fair to say.

Yes. Don't use this tip. There is a doctor, though, who does recommend using the feet. I think people have said, especially if you're a bit older, you've lost some of your muscle strength. But also advice now or advice releasing 2010, it's always changing, is don't do the breathing anymore. None of the snogging.

You just do the hands to the heart, don't you? You just do the heart pump. So you do the bit that isn't so much fun. Yeah, exactly. Just the jumping up and down. The mouth to mouth one is really weird because it kind of was discovered in the 18th century. And then it just got forgotten about for about 50 to 100 years. And basically no one did it at all.

And then it came back. And the reason they stopped it is because they realized what was coming out of your mouth when you breathe and it's carbon dioxide. And they were saying, well, what's the point of breathing carbon dioxide into someone's lungs because they breathe oxygen? Yeah. And you know what the answer is? You know why that's not true?

No. It's because when you breathe in and breathe out, you actually only absorb about 40% of the oxygen. So there's still plenty of oxygen in your breath and any kind of oxygen is better than none. OK. So how long if we started, if someone breathed in at the edge of the room here and then they passed the breath around the room, how long would it be before there was no point in that exercise?

I think it's worth a try, isn't it? All right. I feel an experiment coming up. OK. I think we should start with that topless guy. You and that. Oh. But people have tried all sorts of weird CPR over the ages.

There used to be the barrel type where there was a big round barrel and you were sort of strapped to it, face down with your stomach over the barrel. And I don't know how you did this so quickly when someone was obviously dying of a heart attack in front of you. And then as the person who was saving them, you sort of stood in between their legs and you roll them on and off the barrel, don't you?

And the idea was that it eventually forced your heart into going again. That's quite a good idea. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like one of those, did you ever go to playgrounds where you would run on a barrel that span round and round? Yeah. But I've seen cartoons where that happens.

Right. Well, that's medical advice from the Victorian age. Hey, we need to move on to our next fact, surely. Oh, can I just... So you know how people are always giving mouth-to-mouth and CPR to animals weirdly successfully? What? No. Yeah, they're constantly...

Yeah. You know how people are always giving mouth-to-mouth to animals weirdly successfully? There was a guy this year... Are you going to talk about the guy this year with the frog? There's a guy this year who did it with a frog after the frog. What's happening here? Oh, is this your fact?

No, it's not mine. Actually, mine was the one I was going to say, Dan. Let's do your fact. You do the frog thing. Let's... No, this was a deer. And it was a deer who was drowning in a swimming pool and an RSPZA officer was called.

And he got the deer out of the pool and he gave it chest compressions and CPR and mouth-to-mouth, gave it a kiss of life until it choked. He said it properly like in films, coughed water into his mouth. And then he started choking. And it then had to give him CPR. Where does the frog come into this?

Yeah. Anyway, the deer got up, he brushed it down, and then he said the deer looked at him and then ran away. Sweet. Yeah. It's a good story, Anna, but I just wonder, has anything happened with any smaller, maybe amphibious animals? No, it hasn't. I think we're moving on. Interestingly, a frog was involved in a...

This is a great story. There was a... I can't wait. This guy was walking just minding his own business when he came across a snake on the ground and the snake was choking. And he thought, I'm not going to give CPR to a snake. How could you tell a snake is choking?

It was sort of like doing that. OK. Yeah. And suddenly, out of its mouth, shoots a frog. So it swallowed the frog, but the frog forced its way back out. OK. But in the process, died. The man saw the frog and he gave CPR to the frog and he brought it back to life.

Yeah. And he brought the frog home. What happens to this snake? He doesn't feature in the rest of the story, really, I don't... What happened to the fly that I imagined was the initial thing that would swallow it. All right, look, we need to move on to our next fact. It is time for fact number two and that is Chazinsky. My fact this week is that Donald Trump

negotiated an extremely bad deal for himself when he wrote The Art of the Deal. This is because a... So Tony Schwartz was a guy who ghost wrote The Art of the Deal with Trump and he gave a talk a while back and he openly said, Trump negotiated an extremely bad deal with me.

I got a great deal out of it. He did an unheard of thing. So there was an advance of half a million dollars for The Art of the Deal and Trump gave his ghostwriter 50% of the advance and then 50% of all the royalties. So this guy has just been making millions and millions from this book. This is unheard of in publishing.

I think someone who a negotiating professor called Deepak Malhotra said there is not a better deal out there in the world for ghost writing. And then when the book came out, Trump hosted an absolutely massive party, didn't he? In Trump Tower, I think it was. There was a big red carpet, loads of celebrities came.

There was a giant cake replica of Trump Tower. And then he went to his ghostwriter and he went, well, you owe me 50% for the price of this party. And the ghostwriter went, I don't think so. And he ended up paying about £1,000 just for the drinks that him and his friends had. Oh, really? Do you know what the inspiration for the book was?

For The Book of The Art of the Deal? No. It was a popular article all about Trump in GQ. And it was a popular article, as in that issue of GQ's sold world, because Trump was on the front cover, he was a businessman at the time. And then they thought,

well, why don't we see if we can turn this into a book? So they tested out what the book would look like. They designed a dummy cover and then it had a picture of him looking heroic on the front. And then they wrapped it around a thick Russian novel and thought what it would look like. A thick Russian novel. Guys, the clues were there from the start.

Wow. No? Okay. All right. On we go. What's exciting is you've all heard something that won't be in the actual show when we release it. So that's...

He has a bad record of deal-making, though, right? He's... This was actually an article by Jonathan Friedland, I think, in The Guardian, pointing out his deal-making history. But so, The Apprentice, first series, extremely successful. So he asked for an increase in what he was paid.

I think it's per episode. So he got £50,000. He asked for an increase to $1 million. But that's good deal-making, isn't it? That sounds like good deal-making. He ended up with $60,000. Oh. But no, a lot of people say not a good deal-maker.

Someone else who's done a deal with him said, he seems way too keen. You've got to seem cool. He sort of paces around the room like he's wearing a sign saying, desperate. And who said that, Vladimir? What was he called? He chose to remain anonymous.

Do you know he released a novel years ago? Really? Trump Tower. And then he effectively unreleased it in that the novel still exists, but he took his name off. So it was ghost-ridden by someone else. And he had his name, though. It was a Donald Trump book.

It was called Trump Tower. And it was a book based on an idea for a TV show that he developed, which was meant to be Trump Tower done like the TV show Dallas or all those American soaps. It was the life of all the people that worked in Trump Tower. And they got a pilot, but the pilot didn't get made.

So they ended up doing this book. And on the front, it said it was the sexiest novel of the decade. Wow, which decade? It was 2011. Was it? Oh, 2011. Yeah.

It's a current. He's predicted we still cannot top the sexiness of this book. Wow. It was an erotic novel, wasn't it? Yeah. It was the first novel. And so I was reading some snippets of it.

It is. This is how erotic it is. So someone walks into a room, a guest in Trump Tower, and sees at least six women not wearing tops and says, I must be dead. I've gone to boob heaven. That was an actual line in an actual novel. Just very quickly, he's also really good for books,

Donald Trump, because anytime he tweets about a book that he doesn't like, it does really well. So for example, Fire and Fury became massive off the back of him, taking it down. And there was a very famous, he's a civil rights icon in America called John Lewis. And he wrote a number of books. And he wrote a tweet saying, I don't think

he's fit for president. And Trump took him down massively. As a result, the sales increase of his books were over 100,000%. And in the weekend of the tweet, seven of the top 20 books were attributed to John Lewis. All his books just rose to the top. So he's actually good for book sales if he hates you.

The John Lewis brand is very different in America, isn't it? I've got a couple of bad deals from history that I've researched. So the fact being that Trump negotiated a bad deal for the art of the deal, I thought this was quite fun. In America, the NFL, there's a team, the Green Bay Packers. And they had a player called Mirror. M-I-R-E-R. Yeah, I never heard of him.

OK, he was a big deal back in the day. And his contract, he was so wanted by this team that his agent put a clause in the contract that they eventually, the team had to sign. And the clause was that Myra would be paid under all conditions. And then this is the clause, up to and including the end of the world.

Including the end of the world. So if some people survived, and he was one of them, and they were one of them, they would still pay him for all the apocalyptic future that they lived through. Imagine if they were the last two people are there. I've got a bad deal. Oh, yeah. So there's a famous story about the Dutch buying Manhattan

Island from the Native Americans for a very small amount of money. And them thinking, oh, these Native Americans, they don't understand the value of property, and they don't understand the concept of property rights. They absolutely did. The problem was, the Dutch bought Manhattan from the Canarsie Native Americans, who happened to live next door in Long Island,

and did not live in Manhattan. They only used the Island of Manhattan to get drunk in. And the Dutch showed up, and they offered to buy the place from these people, saying, is this your place? Oh, great. We'll buy you this for it. So it's like going to a pub and offering a random man standing outside the pub, quite drunk, 100,000 pounds for this building.

I've got another sporty one. This is a Swedish soccer player called Stefan Schwartz. Do you remember him, James? True. So he was paid a £4 million deal with Sunderland for the English Premier League. The condition that he had to sign when he was signing, which for him was a bad deal, is he was not allowed to go to space.

That was the off. Oh, yeah. He wanted to be a space tourist. He was obsessed with going to space. They were like, he's obsessed so much. We just have to say, no, you've got to play football. Yeah. We're going to put that in the contract.

For me, that's a deal breaker, too. Is it? Right. We need to move on to our next fact. Shall we do that? OK. It is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that on the bio tapestry, you can tell how important

someone is by the size of their horse's penis. So there's a professor at the University of Oxford. He's called George Garnett. He has gone through the bio tapestry. The whole thing, rigorously counting the horses and their penises. Presumably there are the same number of penises as horses. Well, there might be some female horses. There are some female horses.

I forgot they didn't have penises. Yeah. I actually think they all wrote it. Or fool you. They all made you written out. I think they might be hidden by a leg. Yeah. Sometimes someone's standing in front of the horse.

Or amusingly holding a vase in front of the horse. Or the horse is wearing a pair of novelty trousers. Or it's a pantomime horse, and they famously don't have penises. Well, they have two, some of them. That's my horses. Very good point. So he counted all of these, and he points out that King Harold, who came second in the Battle of Hastings,

he has a horse which has a very large penis, but there's one larger horse penis, and that belongs to William the Conqueror. So it's a clear... The man who wins the battle has the largest horse's penis. Wow. Wow. And this is new, right?

This is a brand new tubby. No, no, 1066. Why? The study is new. This is new research. This is breaking. This is... To a lot of people in the room, this is like... This is like the Spice Girls and the Macarena all over again. Yeah.

Yeah, so this is very exciting previously neglected research. He counted all the human ones as well. He did. Sorry, there are four and a half, would you say? That's a bit harsh on the guy who had a half. It was a wound. But I think what happened was a lot of people have kind of paid attention to this in the past because in Victorian times, they were all edited out.

And there is one guy who had a pair of underpants drawn on him or tapestryed on him by the Victorians. That was in the English one, right? There's an English replica. Yes, sorry, in the replica. Yeah, exactly. But this is the first time people have looked at all of them, including the horse ones.

Yeah. Yeah. I couldn't believe... So I don't actually know much about the Bay of Tapestry not being English myself. Yeah, and it's a frequent topic of conversation in English hubs and shops. I am so lost at dinner parties every time it comes up. If you walk around the festival site here, you'll find two or three hundred people

talking about the Bay of Tapestry. It actually gets a bit boring sometimes, you know. So I literally had no knowledge of it all. So it's fascinating to know that this thing was, A, it was 68, 70 meters long, which is incredibly long. If you put that into context, that's about 30 meters less than 100. No, it's like... That would take, you say in bulk, roughly seven seconds to run.

Yeah. It's the fastest man running the Bay of Tapestry. The thing is as well is that, A, turns out it's not a tapestry at all. No. It's embroidery. So it's got the wrong name. But also, if you read the whole thing, up until recently when they decided to fix this, the final scene is missing.

Imagine reading 70 meters of story and getting to the final scene and someone's ripped the page out. As in the... It's William's coronation, isn't it? Yeah. And they added it. So they finished... Was it 2013, I think?

Yeah. It was only a few years ago. They did it on an island, on a Channel Island. There was over 400 people that did it. And one of the stitches was done by Prince Charles. So despite the fact it lives over in France, made using British royalty. Wow, that's cool. And a lot of people think it was made in Britain anyway, in Kent.

And a lot of people think it was made completely by women because of the penises, in fact. So historians think that there is the occasional erect penis on a dead soldier. And the theory is that the tapestry or embroidery was therefore stitched by women and the women were ridiculing the men for the fact that they used war to show off their manhood. So it was thought to be kind of a satirical thing women were saying. You idiots. So the people used to fight with no trousers. Yeah.

Really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The sign. Wow. There was a battle, wasn't there, where the English had terrible dysentery of diarrhea and they all took off their trousers. That was Henry V, so it was about Ajinko.

It was about Ajinko. Right. But so why are there naked people in there if people were trousers? The naked people are mostly in the margins, aren't they? Yes. So there's the main bit. There's the main strip of the bio-tapestry which is telling the main story of the battle. And then at the top and the bottom there are these margins.

So there's this amazing thing where they're, I love the embroidery because when you see old art, you assume, oh, it must be done perfect, you know, the perspective and everything. And there's a couple of moments in the tapestry where they've run out of space. So there's four people holding a chest on four sticks or two sticks, rather, four of them. And there's three of them that are nicely done, but they went a bit too high on the tapestry. So the fourth guy's head, like, just making a quick cameo into the tapestry when really it should have been gone. Very funny.

My favorite part of the bio-tapestry is the bit where Odo Earl of Kent is whispering to William telling him what to do in the battle. And it kind of makes him look like he's really the important person who was the architect of the whole invasion. But it turns out that it seems like it was him who commissioned the tapestry and gave himself a massive role in there. Well, and he was quite interesting, wasn't he? Because he was never seen with spears or anything in the tapestry because he was a bishop and

bishops weren't allowed to shed blood. So instead, he's always seen with a massive club. So they're allowed to beat people around the head, which apparently didn't draw any blood. Have you seen the reviews of the bio-tapestry? They're great. What? Well, TripAdvisor reviews everything in the world. Oh, OK.

And as with all things, the most funny reviews are the one-star ones. So there is a complaint act. There is actually one star, isn't there, Haley's Comet? Oh. Anyway, I feel like you're going to say something funny. Yeah, well, you know, thunder, Stalin. No, so the reviews are things like that. So one review says, we went on a visit to the bio-tapestry, big learning curve for some people.

We were walking along looking at the tapestry, not much to see, to be honest. All of a sudden, I see a large phallic object sewn on the tapestry. This attraction is not displayed as containing adult content. We had very young children who could see the penis, which is an outrage. I wanted to learn about medieval battles, not medieval penises. That's one star. One star. And there's another one star review which just says, nine quid in 40 minutes to see a carpet.

Nah. Nine quid in seven seconds, for who say? It was very blurry. I like the little touches in the tapestry because people used to add kind of slight digs at people or what they thought of certain figures in it. So there's one really nice bit actually where Harold first went over to see William the Conqueror in France. Him and his men then got in boats to go back across the channel to Britain. And there's such a good picture of him and all his men holding up their kind of hose and all their stockings and everything.

And they've taken their shoes off, they're carrying their shoes, and they're carrying their pets and stuff in their arms because they're wading through the water to get to their boats. And it's just exactly like when you're at a beach and you're sort of wandering in the water. They brought pets with them. One person had a dog under his arm and another person was holding a bird, which seems unnecessary. Maybe a helpful war dog or a sniffer dog or something. You know Nigel Farage wears his favourite tie as a Bayer tapestry tie because it reminds him of the last time Britain was invaded.

How long is it? It's the same thing. It's an exact replica to scale. Yeah, right. So it's just constantly dragging. He's hanging behind him. He has some bridesmaids who carry it all the time. That's interesting because when I was looking at an old old Bishop of Bayer, who was the guy who commissioned this, I went onto the BBC website and they said that he was the least popular figure in Kent's history. But then I looked up other people from Kent who were unpopular and Nigel Farage is from Kent,

as well as the most unpopular person, Nasty Nick from Big Rugger One. Don't tell these guys. They don't even know about the Spice Girls chart history yet. Nasty Nick will blow their minds. We should move on to our final fact shortly. Anything before we do? Should we go for it? Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show and that is James. Okay, and my fact this week is that if you're a sloth, every time you go for a poo, it's more painful than childbirth.

Is that you impersonating childbirth? I was just trying it, yes. Is that more painful than human childbirth? I believe it is because actually sloth childbirth is not that painful because baby sloths are super small. They're about 14 ounces, whereas sloth poos are at least twice as big, maybe more, and they can lose up to one third of their body weight during death. They do it once a week. It's the equivalent of if I did a poo, there would be too big to check into a Thompson's flight.

I mean, what's the purpose of your visit for a start? The stomachs physically shrink every time they do it. But how do we, has someone laid a woman mid-labour next to a sloth mid-poo? And what, judge the volume of the screaming? I think. How do we know? You're right. I mean, to be honest, there's a bit of supposition going on here, but basically it's the size,

and this is what we said this before. Unlike other animals, sloths, they only do this once a week. They go down from the bottom of their tree and they do this, and it can take up to 50 days for the food to go through the system because they're trying to get every single bit of nutrient out of it. And so by the time it comes out, it's absolutely huge. It's just fibrous mass, and it obviously must be extremely painful. Yeah.

And it's super heavy, isn't it? So, well, obviously, like a third of their body weight, and the problem with being a sloth is that you're upside down basically all of your life. And so your poo's all gone to the bottom waiting to come out, and then the only thing that stops it all from crushing the rest of their organs is that their bowels and everything like that are literally hooked onto their rib cage, aren't they? Or onto the sides of their body. Because otherwise, you know, if it was loose-hanging like ours are,

as soon as the sloth turns upside down, this enormous weight of feces would crush all of the rest of its organs. So all of its organs are kind of, yeah, hooked on. It's amazing. And then it goes down to the bottom of the tree, does its position, goes back up again, and traveling back up must feel amazing, wasn't it? Oh, yeah. They do a little dance before they have a poo every time as well.

And that's unusual for sloths, is it? Yeah. They have to dig a little hole in the ground. And the jiggling must help, mustn't it? I'm sure it does, yeah, yeah. And the thing is, one of the reasons we think that they do this just once a week is because it's extremely dangerous for them to go to the toilet, because they're nice and safe in their little tree.

No one can see them. They're really well camouflaged. They're really slow. No one can see them move. But of course, when they go down to do this, they're really kind of vulnerable. And apparently, more than half of sloth fatalities occur when they are doing their business. Well, that's the thing.

So their main predators are both, I think, tigers and eagles. Which, what a bad luck, right? Like, imagine that being your predator. You've got two predators. Oh, so it's like a type of ant and a sausage dog. That would be fine. An eagle. What organism are you possibly thinking of?

So this is the weird thing. When they're in captivity, sloths have a poo once every day, which suggests that they really, really want to have a poo once every day. And in captivity, they know they're safe. They can do. Because when you're in the wild, the shame of dying, basically, they're all dying like Elvis Presley died, aren't they? They're half of them dying on the toilet.

You don't want to risk that. And we don't know why they go down to the bottom of the tree. Well, there's a great theory. So the theory is, they have this algae on them, which grows. And some of the species of algae are specific to a single species of sloth. So it's quite specific stuff. But they're in this weird love triangle with some algae and some moths. So they go down to the ground.

There are these moths which live in their fur. And because sloths move so slowly, they can never groom themselves to get rid of the moths. Because as soon as they move their claw over to their arm, the moth just walks out of the way. That's because they can fly moths. Yeah, exactly. It's a bit of a kick in the teeth.

It's just walk away from it. I know, they just stroll off. They don't care. So the moths lay their eggs in the poo of the sloths, right? And then the moths live. They fly up when they hatch into the sloths fur. They live there. They die.

That algae that we talked about grows because of the nutrients released when the moths die. So the moths die. They release nitrogen. The algae feeds on that. And we think that the algae is beneficial to the sloths. We don't know how. But it's either because it camouflages them, or because maybe they groom themselves and they might eat it,

although that's a bit controversial. Also, it apparently contains some agents that kind of work against things like malaria. Right. Okay. So whatever it's doing, it's definitely helping the sloth survive. Yeah. So that's why they need to go down is for the moth life cycle,

and then the moths feed the algae and the algae help the sloth. No. But don't risk that just for the sake of nurturing a few moths who might poo green all over you and maybe camouflage you or maybe not. No. Well, another theory is that they go down and they do their business, and that is kind of telling the female sloths where they are.

And there's information in that dung that tells them that they're fit and good people to mate with. And so maybe it's like a sloth tinder kind of thing. Yeah. Wow. It's like a reproductive system thing where they're going, I'm fertile, I'm ready. So actually they go down a lot more than they usually would when they're ready for a child and as a result they build this mountain of poo going,

I want babies and that's what they see. And they're like, whoa, look how awesome this is. And then they go up the tree. That is an alarming tinder profile. Just huge steaming paws of poo. Every single sloth tinder is a different kind of poo. If you work with sloths, you're not allowed to wear perfume because their hair is so absorbent.

So they can have algae growing inside their own hair. It's very weird. It grows on the outside and also on the inside. So if you wear perfume, it can get into their fur basically and it stays with them for weeks. So you're not allowed to wear perfume. You're not allowed to wear things like suntan lotion, which is a problem because of where they live.

And you're not even allowed to wear anti-mosquito spray if you're cuddling sloths for a living. And you have to get very good at climbing trees apparently. I think the person who's done a lot on sloths recently, who's often in New Scientist and stuff, is someone called Rebecca Cliff who took a tree climbing course and still said that it was impossible. She was outsmarted and outpaced by the sloths

because by the time she got out the tree, they'd be on a different tree. And she found that she had to get Guatemalan free climbers to go and get the sloths for her when she wanted to study. I read one article about sloths in trees and that is that what they do is equivalent. You know those gymnasts who do that kind of, it's like a crucifix position on the rings.

They're like, which is unbelievably hard for humans to do. Apparently sloths just do that really easily. They can just do all of them, do that all the time. Right. But they do fall out quite a lot. One thing she said was, if you see a sloth fall out of a tree, which happens alarmingly often, they seem to just be popping out.

There was a story that babies would fall out because they mistake their own limbs for tree branches and hold onto their limbs and fall. I don't know if that's true. It's not true, unfortunately. I mean, fortunately, but it's... No, no, it's probably a myth. The babies do fall out quite a bit.

And if they do fall out, the mothers will not go down and get them. The babies are dead at that point. Whereas they will go down to take a poo. They will not go down and fetch their baby. So infant mortality very high because... So I've read they can be really fast if they want to be. Really what, sorry?

Fast. I read that the top speed of a sloth is 15 miles per hour. Oh, come on. Yeah, faster than a cat. That's if they're falling out of a tree, I can believe that. But supposedly I read this from a zoologist. It's a double bluff, basically. Their slowness is real.

It takes them 30 days to digest a leaf. They are a slow being. But when something is threatening them, they're able to be very speedy. She said faster than a cat can run on the street. No way. Yeah, no way. Probably not.

Probably not. There is a self-help book that came out in the last year or so called Be More Sloth. It's by Alison Davis. And she says that you should be more still. You should turn things upside down. Be more intentional. Be kind to yourselves and be more positive,

which apparently these are all things that sloths do. And have a very, very, very high fiber diet. Well, she says on the front cover, the winner of the race isn't always the one who comes first. Incorrect. Yeah. That's the definition of the winner of the race. Okay, that's it.

That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriveland. James. That's James Harkin.

Andi. And Andrew Hunderham. And Chazinsky. Andima podcast at qi.com. Yep. Or go to our group account at no such thing. We'll see you again. Goodbye.