No Such Thing As A Fish - 308: No Such Thing As The Land Of Flying Sheep

Episode Date: February 14, 2020

Dan, Anne, Anna and Andrew discuss Ringo Starr's exorcism, driving with a pavlova, and the tiniest classified thing at GCHQ. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi guys, just before we start this show, here is a warning. We have a special guest on today. Yes, very exciting guest. A author, a published author. A published author? I can't believe we've pinned her down. But one of the ways we have pinned her down is that she works in the office with us. It's Ann Miller. You will have heard her before. That's right. Ann Miller has just released her debut children's book. It's so good. It's called Mickey and the Animal Spies and it is the story of a young girl who gets recruited into a secret organization called Cobra. But it is not manned by humans, but by animals. That's right. I realized I'm not a child, but I have actually read it and I genuinely loved it.

It's like a fantasy book that you wish you'd had if you were sort of seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirty-four. I'm not a child either. However, I do have the reading level of a seven year old and I have to say I think any kid who gets this book will be fascinated. They'll know Morse code at the end of it and they will just want more and they're going to get more because it's part of a trilogy. It is. Yes. And it does have code scattered throughout it. So it's almost a mini activity book and yeah, it features some cracking animals that's cats in it. There's rats. There's complex characters. So maybe you don't love it first, but you grow very fond of. There is a Cobra because it's a very funny pun on the real life Cobra organization and then Cobra the snake.

It's a brilliant book. Go get it. And to get it, you should go on the Internet where you can buy books or you should go to a bookshop where you can also buy books and just ask for Mickey and the animal spies by Ann Miller, who joins us on today's show. So let's get to it on with the episode. 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 am sitting here with Anna Chasinski and Drew Hunter Murray and Ann Miller. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order,

here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Ann. My fact is that even the dust at GCHQ is classified. So what does this mean? So I went to, uh, it's a great exhibition on at the Science Museum, which is 100 years of GCHQ and they've got things that have never been seen before. And one of the facts I found there is that when they have things that need to be taken out of service and machines, paperwork, things like that, it gets ground down to become electronic waste and it's dust, but it's certified. So I can't just go in the bin because it's so, so, so secret what they ground up to, even the ground up stuff

is secret. So they dispose of it really securely somewhere, do they? They do not discuss how they dispose of it. Wow. Can you imagine being a double agent and going to the Russians and go, I've got my hands on some classified dust and you show them the dust? I don't think they'd be happy. I don't think they'd consider it classified. Well, they might because another thing I found at the museum was these things called microdots. So this is very tiny coded messages. So it would look like it's just like a little very small polka dot print and when you bring out a lens, it will magnify it and you can read like, I saw Anna on the bridge at two o'clock, meet at five or something. So, you know, the dots, they get very, very small and they're still very,

very secret. So everything is. If you're wearing a polka dot dress, for example, and you know that one of the dots is the microdots, you have to remember really carefully which one it is. The best place to hide something is where lots of things look the same. Yeah. Sounds like a great exhibition. It was so fun. We've got dust. We've got tiny dots you can't read. Tons of machines as well. I just like the idea of, is it like the hardest jigsaw you've ever done, piecing the dust back together? Do you think you collect the dust, spew it on the floor and then have to put it back in order? I suspect that you can't repiece the dust now, but maybe you could one day.

That's like the worst IKEA assembling, isn't it? We've got you a computer. Here it is in dust form. So, this is not the first time that this kind of rubbish has been useful in espionage. So, during the Cold War, there was an operation called Tamarisk, if you guys heard of this. So, the USA and the UK and France, they all had military liaisons in East Germany and the Soviets were allowed some in West Germany. So, it was supposed to be a way of lowering tensions by having a bit of representation on either side, but basically it just turned into legalized espionage because obviously people sent spies to do that, to work in those missions. And the Western officers launched this operation where they would gather up paper from Soviet bins

and sometimes they had to gather up used toilet paper because a lot of people would not give toilet paper in the Soviet mission on the Soviet side. So, they would use confidential paper as toilet paper and then the Western spies had to go through gathering pooey paper from bins, basically, which had classified information on it. That's useful though because you can also report back on their diets. All the information you possibly want. And it was one of the most successful operations of the whole Cold War was gathering information from pooey bins. But I think part of the thing is you don't, there's so much work in making things secret, but there's other things you give away just by your choice of toilet paper or your dust and

you've got to be careful. Yeah, they all like scented toilet paper. They must have, you know, expensive tastes. Is that a useful thing to know? Sure. Which shops you might find them in. Did you know that GCHQ was not recognized officially until 1994? Yeah. So, it's like bizarre GCHQ and MI5 until there was like an official acknowledgement. There was a parliamentary act which basically said what its role should be. Basically, all anyone knew was from me infleming in John Locari. Yeah. And whenever a Bond film comes out, recruitment applications peek at GCHQ. Everyone's like, I'll give that a go. Even though they've said that James Bond wouldn't get a job there, haven't they? Why? Because he's reading alcoholic. And also not emotionally

intelligent, which is fair enough. So, I was reading an article, which is like an inside GCHQ, which always, there's not that much in them because they can't tell you that much. But the article was in the FT and it interviewed the head of GCHQ, who's called Jeremy Fleming as an Ian Fleming. And the article was written by the FT security editor, David Bond. Come on. Do you know that the head of IT at GCHQ is AI? What? Okay, that's not true, it turns out. I misread the article. It's a guy called Al, but it looks like AI when you read it. But what's interesting about him is he's dyslexic. He's the

head of IT and he's dyslexic. And I was reading this in an article. His name is actually LA, isn't it? So, this was an article written in The Times. A journalist was allowed into GCHQ to do this article. And it was very funny because they had, as the journalist went in, all these A4 bits of paper, blue tacked to walls saying, caution, journalist interviewing, keep all conversations to official. And everywhere this journalist went, that's where they saw. But they were doing an article about the neurodiversity program at GCHQ. So, there are 300 men and women there who all have dyslexia or autism or asperges and face blindness, for example. So, there's one lady who works there who's a former chemist called Jill and she's their

intelligence analysis. She can do that and she's ahead of it, but she struggles to recognize her employer's face who she's worked with for eight years because of this face blindness disease that she has. So, it's an extraordinary article about the people that they hire there. I read one as well where, and they sent a journalist in for the day and like, like they're saying, be careful what they say. And someone was told that he was allowed to go around the building and that was fine. He's allowed to go in for like six days, but he wasn't allowed to go into the canteen where people may be discussing things informally. The fire room is fine for the canteen. Just starve him out, basically, eventually. And that's part of the

thing with the baristas, isn't it? They have a cost of coffee. But yeah, it's a coffee shop in GCHQ as well. And they have to undergo regular spy training because it's not like a regular. It's really funny. You've got different levels of security you need to be able to pass. If you write 007 on the side of the cup and say, is that 001? A completely different agent person. Just blown two agents cover right there. They did have a building in London which they ran for 66 years and never acknowledged until they just left. They left last year and it was apparently intentionally boring. You know, it was designed to look just like a really drab office near St. James's Park, actually. It's where it is. Anyway, they moved out in 2019 and then they

said, aha, with GCHQ all along. But the BBC sent some reporters to ask people in the area, what do you think that building was? And they said, oh, it's the spies, isn't it? MI6, Secret Service, something. They're all spies anyway. Every day they're going in with their trench coats on and they're magnifying glass. You're having your book launch in a spy building, aren't you? In the original GCHQ building. Yeah. So I've been, when I go for a walk on my lunch break, I walk past this building and you sort of look around at the plaques and they're looking for facts. And there was this plaque on the wall that said it was the original home of GCHQ. They only

unveiled the plaque. I think last year the Queen came to unveil it for the centenary. And here's the best bit. There are hidden messages on the plaque because it's the GCHQ. Black. No way. What was the message? I don't know. Oh, they've just told you there's a hidden message, but can we go and find it? We need to go and find it. I actually don't know what it is. I've been walking past that plaque many times. I never thought to look for a code and now I'm trying to go on lunchtime. Yeah, I think we should. I love the fact that you say you wander around looking at plaques, looking for UI facts. We're never off the clock here, are we? Let's have a nice lunch break, clear my head. We're gonna have to move on in a sec to our next fact.

Just about the actual recruitment process and what it takes. It's quite fun to read about. So the initial interview that you get for GCHQ is designed to test your knowledge of technical subjects such as how a smartphone works. So I wouldn't pass that phase, but many do. And then you get this interrogation about your private life. And often you're just out of university and they interrogate you basically about your sexual history. And so one of the girls who joined, I think she was 22 at the time, she had the vetting officer knew more about me than anyone else alive. And, you know, you have to discuss everyone you've ever shagged with them and all of your friends and family. You get drug tested. So you get a bit of hair clipped off. This seems

like a real oversight. For instance, one person got this done, went to the hairdresser the next week and the hairdresser was like, Oh my God, you've got this random bald patch on the back of your head. And then you've got to come up with a cover story and say, Oh yeah, just trying it out. Wow. That's probably your first test as a spy. That's another reason why James Bond probably wouldn't get in as a spy, actually, because the interview process to discuss everyone he'd ever slept with would be so long. He's still going on. He's in a room somewhere. I read a piece of somebody who does recruitment for MI5, just known as Joe, and they basically explained that some candidates who come have got some strange ideas about what actually the job involves,

because James Bond, I guess people, I'm really scared to say this is not what the job is like. And some of the questions Joe was asked included, Do I have to wear my own clothes to work? Should I wear a disguise instead? And do I need to dump my partner to work here? Because if I do, I will. Okay, it is time for fact number two. And that is Andy. My fact is that people drive more carefully if they have a Pavlova in the car than their own child. So this is an experiment that was done. It was a survey done slightly as a PR stunt by an insurance firm in Australia. They asked drivers about their behavior. First of all, they just said, What makes you drive more carefully? Would you drive more carefully if your child was in the car? Half of all parents surveyed said, Yes,

absolutely. Only 12% of those people said they would be more cautious if they were driving a Pavlova around Pavlova and meringue and cream based pudding. Yeah. Okay, good. And a child is like a smaller version of a person. Anyway, they tested it with a small sample admittedly only 20 drivers. But over an eight day period, they were asked to drive alone with a child and with Pavlova. 95% of them, 19 out of 20 drove more carefully with a Pavlova on board, which was way more than were more careful with their children. And what did the schools say when they dropped off a Pavlova at school? Nobody noticed the difference. Very impressive. I think it makes sense. Makes perfect sense. Daniel, the only one who's got a child is slightly worried. That's true. Why do you think

it makes sense? Sorry, I think you have to explain that. Well, if you've had anything in the back of a car that is of a sensitive nature, of course, you're going to take corners less sharply. Of course, babies are very resilient. Well, you can't put a seatbelt around a Pavlova. You could probably get it some sort of transportation device, like on those cupcake carriers, like with a belt. Yeah, that's true. So maybe this solves all the driving issues that we have in the world. Just anyone who's a bit of a dangerous driver, pop a Pavlova in the back, and we're just going to solve everything. I am looking at more Australian studies about drivers. And one was about how people, when they first get their license, are very cautious, very

careful. And as we drive them for longer, some people are a bit more distracted. We sort of start, some people, some people start to see it as time taken out of their day. So what they did was they parked by a road and they took photos of anyone they saw doing incorrect procedure. And pictures they got included people eating cereal at the wheel, brushing their hair and reading books while driving around Australia. That's what it is. That's speed reading. I mean, did you guys know there's no safety difference between using a phone while you're driving a handheld phone and a hands free phone? Really? Yeah. So I actually learned this. I went to a magic show at the welcome center and it was about... I have fact-checked

this afterwards. It was about the science of misdirection and the fact that we don't notice things and the fact that we can be so easily distracted. And study after study has found that if you're on a phone, you're four times more likely to be involved in an accident completely regardless of whether it's handheld or hands free. And it's just because it's the concentration that's distracted, not your actual hand. And so it found that, for instance, specifically if you're on the phone and someone on the phone says, oh, do you remember where you put the bananas or whatever? Yeah. And you have to find... Yeah, we're going to need to slice them up for the puff over. You're like your heads in your kitchen rather than on the M6. Your heads in your kitchen,

not literally, but metaphorically. And that apparently reduces your field of vision to about a quarter. Your field of vision that you can concentrate on to about a quarter if you imagine that other place. I was looking into a few road safety things as well. So this was for pedestrians rather than for how you drive safely. There was one idea that was put forward back in the 1930s, which didn't unfortunately happen, but I love the idea of it. So imagine you hit by a car and the car does a hit and run, disappears on you. Cars were going to be designed with this little disc that shoots out of the car when a hit and run happens so that the person, if they were so knocked out, they couldn't see the license plate or anything, grabs the disc,

which has the details of the owner of the car. That's a great idea. Yeah, and they never implemented it. I don't know why possibly maybe the disc might have, you know, decapitated someone as it shot out of the car. Just involuntary business card dispersal basically. I like this weird kind of gadget that was added to Volvo's actually in 2007. It was a car safety thing. It was a smart key. It was a remote smart key, which we have now. So you can open your car from 100 yards away or whatever. And it contained a highly sensitive heartbeat sensor. It advertised itself as a world first, and that meant that when you went to unlock your car, it told you if there was somebody hiding in it. Hiding in it? Yeah, that's right. It flashed. So if you have 50 yards from your car, you unlocked

it, it would give you a little flash to say, there's a person in there, get your weapons out. Really distinguish like human from like vole. No, it specified it will tell if there's a human or an animal. So you wouldn't know if it was just a mouse scuttling around or a person hiding in your boots. Yeah, better safe than sorry though. But that's never a thing that I've ever thought to check. Well, it's a good way of making you all extremely paranoid now when you get into your cars. But you know, there's always that thing where you're driving, where you have this panic that you're going to look in the rear view mirror and you'll see someone rising up behind you. I've never had that. That's the movie. I've never had that, Anna. Do you get that?

Yeah, of course. Every time you're driving on your own at night. It's someone on top of the car. It's tapping. It's the one you've got to watch for. Oh, wow. That was a good story when I was a kid. Okay. Do you have a big rug on your back seat, which could cover a murder? Just remove the rug. Well, it might be weird. I think we've mentioned this, but when the Berlin Wall, when people were trying to get across, there was that couple where the lady who shouldn't have gone across was sewn into the seat of the car. Oh, yeah. So that's another spot you've got to worry about. Yeah, check inside the seat. Check inside your seats. Check underneath the big rug.

If you didn't spot him on the roof before you got in, that's your own problem. This study that you were mentioning, Andy, this was done in Australia, right? And so, Australians are very proud of Pavlova because we invented it. Been a lot of dispute with the New Zealanders about who invented it, and then I learned neither of us did. Turns out it's German. Is the latest theory. I love that there's theories of Pavlova origin. Right. So what's the German origin? It's named after Anna Pavlova, the ballerina, because she was touring in Australia and New Zealand at the same time in the late 20s. So that's why both countries think they invented it.

But really, there had been Pavlova style recipes. You know, you need meringue and cream and fruit since the 18th century in Germany. So one of them was called a Schaumtorte or foam cake, and another one was called Spanish Wind Tort. So they had the thing that just didn't call it Pavlova. I don't know if I'd put the word wind in a recipe now, just unless it was sort of a bean recipe or something. She apparently, Anna Pavlova, had more food named after her. The only one that I could find was Frog Legs, Ella Pavlova. Is it because she was a ballerina? Yeah. And so had legs. Yeah. I was famous for having good legs. Famously known as sports people have legs.

You know, so she was an excellent ballerina, not just a ballerina. So good and so popular that when she died in 1931, she died of pneumonia. And in fact, when she died, she was diagnosed with pneumonia, told she'd have to have an operation that would mean she could never dance again. And she said, no, I'd rather be dead. So she died in 1931 of pneumonia. And the next show that she was scheduled to do, the audience came and they put a spotlight on an empty stage and the spotlight followed around exactly where she would have been. And they just watched that instead. Isn't that cool? That's cool. Not a good excuse to die, though, the whole dancing thing, I would say. Well, if it's the one thing you love. If I came back home and they were like,

Dan, you've got pneumonia, we'll give you an operation, but it means you can't podcast anymore. I think Fanella would have an issue if I said, actually, send me to the grave. I'd love for you to have that operation personally, to speak for myself. Okay, it is time for fact number three. And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Ringo Starr's grandmother performed exorcisms on him to cure him from being left-handed. Wow. Was she reported to child services or was that that was before? It's a different time. Different time. Did it work? It did. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, for many years it did.

Because I thought that he said in one interview that he plays with the right-handed drum kit, but he sort of leads with his left hand. He does most other things left-handed. Yeah, exactly. It partially works. Maybe by exorcism, she actually just bought him a right-handed drum kit. I think that's why it says it'll be easier for you. Why was she going around doing exorcisms? So Ringo Starr's grandmother, Annie Bauer, she was born in 1889. She was known in Liverpool as the voodoo queen of Liverpool, certainly within the family. That's what she was famous for.

And she was sort of known as a sort of 20th century witch. She used to concoct her own remedies. She would make potions when she was sort of looking after sick people. She used to invoke Satan. She used to try and expel Satan from people. So to sort of bring him out, doing exorcisms on various people. And so when she saw that her grandson was left-handed, she thought that's the devil. Left-handedness is associated with that. I'm going to get rid of him and she spent years. Get rid of him. The devil. Oh, sorry. And so she spent ages trying to exercise it out of him. But what's truly interesting about this

is that Ringo says it's for this reason that he developed what became the unique drumming style that he had because he drums on a right-handed drum kit. But as a left-hander, it takes him just a split second more, like a tiny microsecond more to get to that bit of the drum. And that gives him a sort of lazy drumming style that's slightly off time, which gives it a swing. So the negative interpretation is that had he not been exercised as a child, he might have been a better drummer. No, because he's a less unique drummer. He's an incredible drummer. We should talk a bit about the book. You've got this from Dan, because this is from a book called Is It Tune In? Yeah.

It's The Biography of the Beatles by Mark Lewis. And this is an amazing book because it's nearly a thousand pages long and it ends in 1962. Yeah, it ends as they're releasing their first single. It is good to have that warning that it ends after a thousand pages just as they start, I think, before you embark on the book. It's like that where it's not when you're reading a novel and like it's sort of like really crunchy and you're as you're really near the end and you're like, they can't wrap this all up. And then you're like, no, 10 pages to the end. What, they're going to cover their whole career? And then they did quite well the end. I like the fact that he found the first fan of The Beatles, tracked her down. She was an Irish

woman called Pat Moran, who lived in Liverpool. And there's another churchy devil connection here, because her father sent her to confession for talking about The Beatles too much, which apparently classified as a sin. God, you're clutching at straws if that's your sin. You've got to start rebelling more. Well, they were all because The Beatles had a very odd effect on girls in that period in the 1960s. There was a book that came out about them that said John Lennon was told girls in the audience were actively touching themselves in the audience and orgasming while they were playing on stage. They had this kind of craze. And that was in the 1960s. That's a very different world to what we...

I don't know. It was a liberated time. Everyone was on ass. But they were the people liberating... By causing a lot of public masturbation. So on the way people behaved around The Beatles, they had to be quite heavy security for them all the time. And in fact, they changed the way that the Japanese police operate. So the Japanese police today were white gloves. So if you ever go to Japan, you've seen the police that wear white gloves. And a lot of people have wondered why it is. It's a Michael Jackson tribute, isn't it?

And a lot of people think it's Michael Jackson tribute. But actually, a huge misconception is actually because The Beatles when they were in 1966 and the police chief, who was responsible for the police force there, said that there had to be a layer of propriety added between the police and the women. They were inevitably going to be touching as they dragged them away kicking and screaming from The Beatles. And so he said they all had to wear these white gloves. And it was... And he was interviewed in 2010 and he confirmed that. And it was to reinforce this thing called Reigi Tadashisha, which is sort of a notion of propriety.

But that's interesting because I think because the Japan subway is famously very, very, very, very busy. And they have people whose job it is to push people into the carriages to crown more people in. And I'm pretty sure they wear white gloves. So maybe it's to make it a bit more polite rather than shoving you. It's officially shoving you. But that move is where they get the song. In fact, that's where they got the inspiration for their song. All you need is glove. It's a restaurant. Glove me do. A lot of their songs have the word love in them. Let's go. So the Hamburg days were extraordinary. This is the two years before they basically got into

the charts in the very start of the sixties. And they lived in Hamburg basically in this storage room behind the stage where they performed in this seedy bar. And they sort of lived on fold out beds and they had to shower in the public bathrooms in the bar. And that's when they actually got spotted by George Martin, I think, who basically sort of made the Beatles. But he thought they were kind of crap in a lot of ways. So he thought they couldn't write songs. They were really keen to write their own songs. And I think he wanted them to release a cover as their first kind of number one, what he intended. And he said, their songwriting was crap. The first records we issued were Love Me Do and PS I Love You,

which are not exactly Cole Porter, are they? Which actually, if you listen, it is fair enough. But yeah, he thought they were crap. When they were in Hamburg, they obviously not making very much money at all. I think they got £2.50 per show. And they had to do four shows on a weeknight, five on a Saturday and six on a Sunday. It's like a Panto schedule. Yeah, it really is. And then they got an offer from a rival club. And so the boss of the first club they've been working at reported George Harrison to the police and got him deported. And then the same manager really had it in for them. He got McCartney, I can't believe this, he got McCartney and Pete Best arrested and deported for setting fire to a condom. I don't understand why. Surely it doesn't take two people

to set fire to a condom. One to hold a condom, one to light the match. They're trying to light a match with one hand. We should say we're talking about their Hamburg days, but Ringo wasn't there for the Hamburg days. So they were a five-man operation. Many people say the superior version. So that was with Pete Best and Stuart Sutcliffe. Yeah, just on the fact Pete Best left the Beatles and he didn't go on to anything major. So Ringo Starr, as well as the Beatles, his other big thing was he was the voice of Thomas the Tank Engine, series one. And I found another sort of rock connection of someone who left a band just before it got big. And it relates to Thomas the Tank Engine. Timothy Steffel was the lead singer of a band called Smile and then he left because he

thought the band was going nowhere. So the guitarist and the drummer brought in a new singer called Freddie Mercury and that band was Queen, obviously. And so Smile was Roger Taylor, Brian May and Timothy Steffel. Steffel left, but he found a second career as a model maker for all the trains on Thomas the Tank Engine. For Ringo Starr. That was incredible. Because the fact controller in Thomas the Tank Engine was played by Bill Wyman after he left the Rolling Stones. You're kidding. I'm kidding. Damn, for God's sake. Sorry, I was getting so excited. I think it's time to come in threes. Yeah, exactly. There's probably one more rock connection with Thomas the Tank Engine we're out of the way of. Listeners, find it. Just one, another thing

about Ringo's life post Beatles. Possibly the highlight of his career was when he did a pizza advert in 1995. This was a seminal moment because it was when the stuffed crust of pizza hut fame came into being. And it was this great advert where he sort of throughout the ad, he's pretending he's getting the band back together and it's like, oh, I've got to convince them. Oh, they'll never do it. Come on. You should watch the advert. Getting the band back together. I mean, Lennon had been dead for 14 years at this point. Yeah, it was a sick advert. Okay. So he makes it seem like he's going to resurrect John Lennon's dead body. He probably needed his grandmother for that. So he's in this advert saying,

I'll get the band back together until it becomes clear at the end. What he's actually saying is, I'm going to convince them all to eat pizza crust first. And then there's this really awkward moment where in the final scene, his three apparent bandmates come on and start eating it crust first. Anyway, it's a humorous advert. The amusing thing is he's never eaten a pizza in his life. If you watch that advert, as it goes towards his mouth, the advert ends because he's allergic to all the ingredients of pizza. All the ingredients of pizza. Every ingredient. Yeah, he's allergic to onions, garlic, spices. He's allergic to all this stuff. Nevada pizza, Nevada curry. We need to move on. Can I just mention one last thing? And then we'll move on. And so Pete Best, the original

drummer, he was kicked out, which was devastating for him, but he continued to be a musician after he got over a bit of a depressive stage. And he went on to release an album called Best of the Beatles, which a lot of people accidentally bought by mistake thinking it was a compilation of their greatest hits. It was the best of, not the best of. Exactly. The best of the Beatles. What do you collect the wrong words? Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Chasinski. My fact this week is that baby albatrosses can take up to six days to peck their way out of their eggs. Imagine being trapped somewhere in the dark six days. It's like the Great Escape. And this is called pipping. So what happens is they've got the egg tooth, which a lot of birds have, which is a

sort of hard projection on their bills. And they peck away at the shell from the inside. And on average, albatross chicks take about 3.5 days to emerge. But some of them are weaker ones, the thicker shelled ones, they take up to a week to get to make their way out. Yeah. And I think part of them will emerge and they can sort of be fed. So you do see eggs with sort of a head sticking out. It's like you've gone on the couple of days left, mate. But if you're going to help them by feeding them, could you not help them open their egg? You've got to let kids learn for themselves, Sam. Your albatross is stuck. Okay, time to fledge. I'm not ready to fledge on the egg. They sometimes lose their eggs, albatrosses. So most of them keep them in a nest. And we should

say there are 20 species of albatross, which I don't know. But some of them, waved albatrosses, quite mobile, and they will move their egg around their territory with them as they go. And frequently, they just lose them. 80% of the eggs which don't hatch are because they get lost. Really? Yeah. Are they always getting calls from some sort of restaurant saying, excuse me, sorry, I think you left your egg under our table. But albatrosses are generally, apart from the ones who lose their eggs, quite good parents. So albatrosses couple up and they say these parents are up to 50 years, but they're not completely monogamous. So they did a study of 75 different albatrosses and 10% of them had different fathers to the albatross, raising them.

But both the male and the female albatrosses will go and be with other albatrosses, but they'll always come back to their home albatross. Yeah. Well, but so they are 100% faithful as as a let's say married couple, let's say in quotations, they they pair for life. If this is your view of faithfulness as a married man, and then I tried to think of another's listening right now. What I read was there was a book that came out called The Thing with Feathers by Noah Stryker. And Noah Stryker did basically a table of bird divorce rates for this book. He looked at 100 or so different species of birds, and he built the divorce rates. And at the top of the most faithful in terms of remaining

with a single partner for their whole life was the albatross. And flamingos were right at the bottom. They have a 99% divorce rate. Wow. Yeah. But basically what we're saying is albatrosses have open marriages. Yeah. They have open marriages. Yeah. Okay. Do you know why albatrosses tend not to go to divorce lawyers? Because the bell too big. Bells are huge. When one of us can immediately guess the punchline to your door, it is worth reconsidering. There's quite an interesting thing actually about these sort of open relationships. And this is related to the Laysan albatross, which lives around the Hawaiian Islands. They have this word gender imbalance. 59% of them are female on there. And that's just because a lot of females

immigrated there. So they often separate in their flying season. And this means that 31% of Laysan albatross pairs are female on female. They raise chicks together. So the males will inseminate a series of females and can only raise one egg at a time. And so the other women who've been abandoned by their man find another lady and they raise the egg together and they will stay together for a lifetime, just like just like male female pairs. And they're pretty successful raising the chicks. The Laysan albatross is really interesting. They do their courting via a dance that they have, which is an established dance. What they do is when they're about three years of age, they go back to their birthplace and they all meet there and they learn the dance as a group.

And then eventually they find their partner when they're ready to court. It's very intricate. Yeah. But it does take years of practice. So actually, we've got these people who listen to our show who are so great called Michelle and Chris. And they work with albatrosses out on Goff Island, these really endangered albatrosses. Where's Goff Island, sorry? Goff Island is in the South Atlantic. So yeah, they work with them. And anyway, one of them wrote to me and said the display is it's like head bobbing, it's wings spreading, they make these bubbling sounds in their throats. And yeah, they practice for years and years before

they're ready. Imagine if you're flirting, you had to practice flirting for... I mean, I did. And for years and years, you know, I was interested. So this is ringing a lot, might be an albatross. They do have kind of singles bars where they go. Some species do. Well, yeah, they have things called gams. So this is for Southern Bullars albatrosses. When they're aged about eight years old, the males all go ashore and they make a nest. And then the females visit and they have a look around and they, you know, whether they like it or not. But they only form a pair in their fourth year on shore. They've already been through three years of prospecting each other and checking each other out. It's like university. It's exactly like university.

Pair up at the end. Yeah. And four years. So we know it's a Scottish or American university for Oh, I have. So my favorite albatross is, have you heard of Albert, the lonely Scottish albatross? Albert very sadly was blown off course in the South Atlantic in 1967 and rocked up in Scotland where he's been living as a bachelor ever since. Yeah. He's not yet found a mate. Can't he pair up with a puffin or something? Size difference. And these things don't get in the way of true love. Yeah. So he's living between. Yeah. He lives between the outer Hebrides and Shetland. Are there people around where he is or is he just monitored?

He's been seen by birdwatchers, but I think he's looking for albatross as not people. Just hanging out. As a birdwatcher, if you're spending your whole life around blue tits and sparrows, that is fucking exciting when a giant albatross appears on the horizon because they aren't massive. They've got, I think their wingspan, the wandering albatross wingspan is 3.5 meters is it? 3.5. They're ridiculously huge. Anyway, I just want to talk about the Tristan albatross, which is the second biggest albatross. So people thought it was in the same species as the wandering and then it split away in 1998. Anyway, these are the albatrosses that our friends and podcast listeners Michelle and Chris look after on Goff Island because the most amazing thing has been

happening to them. So they're obviously huge, but they don't have any natural predators because they're alone on this island. And so they have no defense mechanisms. So invasive mice arrived on the island a few decades ago and they've just been eating them. So these, it's unbelievable. So these tiny little mice, you'll get a 20 gram mouse and it will just eat away at 10 kilogram albatross chick. Or sometimes they'll even eat the adult. So the adults will stay with the chicks and let themselves be eaten by mice because they're so afraid to leave their chick. It's really, really sad. And so they become critically endangered because of this. They must have, they sit there. What do you mean they have no, they can move. They sit there. They lost the

ability to think if I smack it with my giant wing, it will fling off. They don't have the ability to think that. That is incredible. So what is happening? So what's happening is this team of people have gone out there. And so these three guys, two of whom are Michelle and Christopher, are now trying to save the albatrosses, essentially by killing all the mice. And we're getting them back guys. But it's, yeah, it's a good cause there. I think there are 1500 to 2400 pairs left at the moment. And it's quite funny when you look them up on Wikipedia, it said, because albatrosses fly hundreds of thousands of miles so far, but they only breed in this tiny island. So they have an occurrence range of 5.4 million square miles and a breeding range of

31 square miles. Wow. So flipped, flipped on a different way of talking about it. There's another podcast out there talking about two mice murderers on the island. They live on this island, they just murder mice all day. I mean, the mice are impressive. They're like super mice. So to be fair, they are, I think they're the biggest mice in the world. In fact, because they've got island gigantism, you know, where you've got nothing threatening you, you're the only ones there. So they're huge. If you're on the mouse's side, they're doing bloody well. Sounds like your two friends are very small. They are. They've got island dwarfers at least, two humans. They've been there too long.

Have you guys heard of wisdom? Wisdom, the albatross. Yes, I believe I embody it. Well, I'm not sure. So wisdom is a, a latent albatross, like the ones we were talking about earlier. So she's the oldest albatross in the world. She was first ringed in 1956. She's still alive. So she's at least 64 years old. And in fact, we know she's a bit older because when she was ringed, the scientists who ringed her said, well, she's about five years old. She was still alive in 2018. And this is the really cool thing. The biologist who first found her in 1956 and ringed her was an ornithologist called Chandler Robbins. Okay. So he ringed her, went away. Then in 2002, 46 years later, he tries to ring another albatross and says, Oh, this is already ringed. And it's

the bird I ringed 46 years ago. That is a bit annoying though, isn't it? If you're hoping to get to the second albatross. It wasn't his second albatross. His whole life for the same albatross. It's incredible. He is an amazing figure in terms of ornithology and birdwatching. He died in 2017, in 1998. And that's partly, you know, albatross has often outlived the researchers working on them. Do they, do they live, do they have albatross years? Like, you know, had dog years different to human years? I think I just live a really long time. They're like, they're year as our year. Well, we don't, we don't know because people, dog years aren't really a thing except for the fact that dogs are our pets. And so we speculate

about that kind of bullshit. Whereas many pet albatrosses, dog years is not an official thing. What do you think dog years means? They don't, they don't know their own birthdays. No, it's not about celebrations. It's about time passage and lifespan, right? Yes. So the lifespan is about 60. Yeah. In albatross years? Oh my God. We're going to have to wrap up in a second. Just one more thing. Albatrosses, when Western explorers first discovered them, they thought they were sheep. No. Flying sheep. That's right. Big old flying sheep. Really? Well, this is according to these researchers that we're in touch with. But apparently the explorer, Marianne de Fresne, when, when he visited in 1772, he visited Prince Edward

Island and he just saw these huge white figures wandering around the grass and said, well, there's a whole bunch of sheep here. Great. So did he get really close up to them? Because if he did, I think the man's an idiot. He was stroking. He was going, this wool is not the same as ours. They measure their speed with their nostrils. They have these tubes inside their nose, and it's exactly the same as how planes measure their speed. So planes have things called pitot tubes, which measure airflow and pressure at the end of that tube. And that tells you how fast the plane is moving. Wow. And albatrosses can do the same thing. Wow. Yeah. I wonder where they need to know their speed. Do you think they get back and go, cracked 70?

Personal best. No, mate. There's a bill here for speeding. And it's a huge bill. Okay, that is 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, you can find us on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland, Andy, at Andrew Hunter M, and at Miller underscore and Shazensky. You can email a podcast at qi.com. Yep. You can go to our group account, which is at no such thing or no such thing as a fish.com. We have everything up there from our previous episodes to behind the scenes documentary footage that you can download. And hey, why not also go to amazon.co.uk and get and new book. Yeah.

As we said at the top of the show, it's out now. Kids will love it. Mickey and the animal spies. It's called it's all this GCHQ kind of stuff in it with codes to crack in Moscow. You'll learn more scope by the end of the book, which is amazing. And yeah, so go and get it for your kids. It's awesome. Okay, we'll be back again next week. We'll see you then. Goodbye.