No Such Thing As A Fish - 413: No Such Thing As Squid Playing Games

Episode Date: February 11, 2022

Live from York, Dan, James, Andrew, & Anna discuss squids, sticks, artichokes and arty jokes. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from New York. My name is Dan Schreiber, I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinski, Andrew Humson Murray and James Harkin and once again we have gathered around the microphones of our four favorite facts from the last seven days and in no particular order here we go. I'm with fact number one and that is James. OK, my fact this week is that actually squids don't play games. It's not so much a fact as like a passive-aggressive message to Netflix.

Oh yeah, got their IMDB ratings when James Harkin gets onto it. I think you'll find. Is that show anything to do with squid playing games? No. It's just a silly thing. Basically I was reading about play and about games and the evolution of playing and I wanted to see what animals do play and what animals don't play and for obvious reasons I thought I'd see if squid play games and I found an article in the Journal of Current Biology

called Fun and Play in Invertebrates by Sarah Zelinski and she says there is no evidence in play for cuttlefish or squids as defined by Berghardt's five criteria. There's like these criteria you use in biology to find out if someone's playing or if something is playing I should say so they do something that's not functional, they do it voluntarily, they do it different to the way they normally do it so it's slightly changed, they repeat it and they do it when they're not under stress and if they do all those things then that counts as play. It's interesting that not under stress is a criteria for play because I think I was

pretty stressed throughout the playground years. You weren't playing when people were holding you down on the floor and I was working, avoiding being it and it was hard and I lost all the time. And I suppose one kind of interesting thing about that is most invertebrates don't, so invertebrates things without a backbone, most of them don't play but octopuses that are very closely related to squid they do play so it's kind of interesting that those two related things do. So have we had them in tanks and sort of like plop chessboards down and sort of like

monopoly? Have we actively tried to get them into the play? Monopoly. No they don't do that but they've studied them many times over the years and with things like octopuses they've just noticed that they happen to do this so octopuses will, they'll kind of get like a little crab and when they're full so they don't want to eat the crab they'll do it like a cat does with a mouse so they'll catch it and then they'll let it go and go a little bit further and then they'll catch it again and stuff like that.

And so that counts as playing because it's just for fun. It's like not exactly the same as catching a crab but it's very slightly similar to catching crabs. I feel like squid have a bit of a reputation as kind of the poor cousin of the octopus because the octopus is so charismatic, is so intelligent, we keep being told they're as intelligent as a bright 12 year old, they could do GCSEs all of this and squid at sort of the... They could bully Andy in the playground.

And squid are kind of the thick cousins and sort of you know they're just good for calamari but they're brilliant, they're really brilliant and there are so many varieties of squid as well so one of them I found out in the course of this squid game thing Grimaldi toothis bonplandi okay, this is a particular kind of squid and it is a squid which uses a squid within a squid method of catching prey, it is so cool. It has these tentacles right and you know nice long tentacles and they look in low light and it swims in an area of the sea with quite low light, in low light the ends of these tentacles look like baby squid okay and they leer in predators and it flaps them around like a

baby squid bobbing around helplessly and it leers in predators, the kind of predators which like to eat baby squid and then ahaha it eats the predators which turn up expecting a helpless baby. That's amazing. But it might be quite confusing if like your hand looked like your child, would that not be weird? Yeah. Like you might accidentally feed it or put a nappy on it or something?

True. I think it's more like they're just doing finger puppet shows to each other which is really entertaining. But lethal finger puppet shows you know. Ah yeah, sure, where you eat the audience at the end, that's how mine always went, it's a good. Yeah they are quite, so there's one squid called, confusingly called octopiutis deletron but it's a squid non-noctopus and it's, I think it's the only squid they've found so

far that intentionally rips off its arms and it does it to defend or attack and this. What? How? So attack? Yeah. Does he rip off an arm and hit someone with it? I think it's more like distraction. That would be distracting.

If you're in the middle of a boxing fight with Chris Eubank Jr. and he pulls his arm off you'd be like what? Yeah and then he can clock you in there with the other arm still attached but it's gonna be his last fight. So yeah, this woman was studying them and a quarter of these squid have at least one blunt arm, a lot of, as in an arm which was missing a bit and they can ditch them at any kind of joint, they can ditch them at various bits up the arm so you only need to drop the bit that's being threatened and it's so cool, this researcher was called Stephanie Bush

and she collected a bunch of squid to put in tanks in her lab and loads of them immediately shed their arms at her trying to get away and she said there was one of them which was when in the lab it grasped the bottom of the container with its arm hooks, they've got little hooks on their arms, it's summer salted repeatedly and released ink as it detached part of all eight of its arms. And as they release the arms they flash because you know they can emit their own light squids so all the arms got released and then flashed lightning bolts through the water. That is amazing.

This is horrifying. They're also one of the few squid that has a penis, the oxtapotuthis deletron was it? Yes. They have a penis and they have sex by depositing sperm on the body of the females, the males do. Although I say females, actually they're pretty indiscriminate because they live where it's quite dark and researchers have looked at all the different squids that have squid semen on them and it's pretty much 50-50 male and female.

Right. They'll just, if they see a squid, they'll go for it. Oh cool. They're desperate. Yeah. That's amazing. A lot of these squids go their whole lives without meeting another squid. Really?

This is why they're so desperate. Yeah. So when they see one you can't blame them. Right. It's kind of sad. It's kind of sad. Have a chat first or a drink and just go straight in for the shag. I was looking up squid games and I actually found something the opposite to what we're

talking about which is humans trying to get squids in competition. So there's an all England squid championship that takes place. Really? That's amazing. Annual championship. So what this is is there's 74 competitors that go out and they spend five hours hoping to catch over a hundred squids during the course of the day and then yeah they find the longest one.

In 2012 it was won by a guy called David who was a reigning champion. He'd won the previous year but in 2012 there was terrible weather conditions and it was really really rainy and no one was catching any squids. And he happened to notice just before he was sending his reel back out that right on the tip of his little hook was a tiny squid a third of an inch long and it was the only squid caught that year. So the 2012 winner of the all England squid championship was a third of an inch long. I want to watch that documentary and put it on Netflix called Squid Game 2.

No one must have believed that squid when it got back to its friends and said guys I just won squid of the year. He would have got semen all over him from every rich way. Well, while we're on that. Good. And we were obviously going to be at some point. At some point. At some point.

Let's get there now. The northern pygmy squid. Did you hear about this? Oh yeah. So this is a squid where the female fertilises her own eggs. Okay. It's bizarre. As James said, the male kind of attaches the sperm to the body of the female.

So it's not a kind of mating as we would understand it. But there's this. You would understand it maybe. I like my sperm to spot it on my shoulder and you know I can dip in whenever I like. Well. You know. Female choice. I'm just going to cut that out by the way.

And when Dan goes, fact number two, Anna Tyshinski, it'll just be like, my fact is I like semen on the back of my shoulder. It's just less effort. Sorry, Andy. No, no, no. Well, you would fit in like a charm into the northern pygmy squid society, Anna, because the male attaches the sperm to the female and then it goes through. It sort of gets into her body somehow.

I'm not exactly clear on the mechanism, but it gets into the female's mouth when she's ready to inseminate. And then she bites a hole in each of her eggs and just, you know, deposits a bit, squirts a bit of sperm into each of the eggs to fertilize the eggs. Wow. So she is doing the fertilizing at that point. Bizarre. That's very cool.

That's like in in vitro or it's like a test tube, baby. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Those guys are pretty cool. They're just like on the back and when they're kind of swimming around, if they get tired, they can just stick themselves to a bit of seaweed. Wow.

And they just watch things go past. That's great. And then unstick themselves and then swim around again. That's so cool. And we say they don't play. Come on. Yeah! Did you guys ever do a fly wall when you were kids, where you would do a somersault against

a velcro wall? Yeah. That's just like that. No. Well, we didn't have a velcro wall in your house, sadly. What are you talking about? What did you keep your velcro wall in? It was next to the Bounty Castle drawing room.

So on actually how they reproduce, there's this really interesting thing that they've recently discovered, which is it's about the egg mops. So I quite like this, that when the female deposits all her fertilised eggs, they're called mops and they're in these big piles and she sticks them to the ground and then male squid are attracted to these. And that doesn't really make any sense because they've already been fertilised, so they're no use to the males. But what it means is there are fertile females in the vicinity because they tend to kind of

hang out together. And not only this, the male squid are attracted to the egg mops and then they come up to the egg mops and they kind of hug them, very weird, and sort of stroke the eggs. And we didn't really know why they were doing this, but it turns out that there's a chemical on the eggs and as soon as the male squid sort of stroke and hug the eggs, they get this chemical on their arms and it turns them into like raging maniacs. So they go from being really chilled to being super aggro and this means that they fight other males in the vicinity and the women's just back there, the females just back, and

they're like, okay, yeah, all right, he's got some good biceps, I'll take him. And yet, yet, when I go and hug the children at the local playground and then get into a fight with another bloke just outside it, I'm off to leave the park. Wow. It's a good trick. It's amazing. That's amazing. That's so cool.

Do you know a squid have won two Nobel Prizes? Have they? Yep. No, they haven't. Yes, they have. Someone's won a Nobel Prize, then it's been about them. They don't play because they are all work and they follow that work into the Nobel Prizes. They did all the work, really, the humans got the, you know, the humans, Andrew Huxley

and a few others and Bernard Katz got the awards, but basically it was from cutting up squids. So I think the squids deserve a bit of credit. Okay. And the reason is they have massive nerve fibres in their body, right? Our nerves are really, really thin, really tiny, you can hardly see them. But in a squid, they're massive and you can see them. And originally they thought there were blood vessels, they're so big, but that means that

you can do loads of stuff to these nerve fibres and you can learn about how they move electricity from one place to another, you know, you can see what's inside them and stuff like that. So people studied them and they won Nobel Prizes for it. That's very cool. Cool. Nice. That is cool. I'm still giving the humans some credit for that.

Yeah. 50-50. We need to move on to our next fact in a second. Oh, no. I read an article on something called Mel Magazine Online. I think they were a bit short on ideas and they wanted to piggyback on Squid Game. So they asked a group of squid fishermen who are in the squid game if their job is anything like the TV show.

Oh, boy. One of them said that in the show, most people are looking out for themselves and that's very similar to squid fishermen because they have secrets about how to attract squid and many of them will not share the knowledge with other people. Well, that does happen a bit in Squid Game. Exactly. Does it? I mean, it's still a bottom of the barrel commission for this magazine.

Another person said, squid fishing is actually really fun and it's a family-oriented sport so it's nothing like Squid Game. The only asshole thing I do in squidding is when I'm pulling up a squid, they tend to squirt out the ink as they come out of the water. So if you aim that at the person next to you, they tend to get up out of the ink. That's really fun. They're their own little water pistols. Yeah.

Cool. Oh, I so want to know what the techniques are to lure a squid in. Like do you put like... Oh, you get little kind of... The old Japanese way what they would do is they'd have lures that look a little like baby squids. Right. But when they squirt the ink, it produces a thing which is roughly the size and shape

of a squid. Oh, yeah. And so the predator is momentarily confused. What am I going for? Which of these two... So clever. It's like leaving a hole in the wall that's the shape of you or something. Yes.

If you run away. Yeah. Can I just say one thing about animals playing? Yeah, sure. There's a woman called Linda Sharp who studies lots of different types of play in animals and says basically we all say we know why animals play, social bonds, preparing for adult life but actually we've got no idea. It's probably just because it's fun.

On a case in point, she said she was watching some elephants and there was an elephant at the top of a slope and it saw another elephant, it's a muddy slope, saw another elephant at the bottom of the slope and it starts walking up towards this elephant at the top of the slope and when it's halfway up, the elephant at the top gets on its bum, like tucks its legs in and sort of toboggan's down the slope, straight into the other elephant so it takes some bows out, they roll down to the bottom of the hill, they tumble around, have this big old fight and then eventually she saw they've sort of dusted themselves off and then they were like okay we'll climb up the slope now, they climbed up the slope, they got halfway

up, there's a third elephant at the top, we've seen it all. It's all exactly the same thing. That's amazing. That's awesome. We need to move on to our next fact, it is time for fact number two and that is Andy. My fact is that in 1935 New York issued a total ban on the possession or supply of baby artichokes. This was sent to me online actually by at Fodsox, so thank you Fodsox.

This is a fact about the 30s war against the baby artichoke or specifically against the mafia through the medium of the baby artichoke. It was the main war of the 30s wasn't it? The artichoke. It was the main war for most of the 30s and then there was a very strong late entrant unfortunately. I think in America it was the main war for all of the 30s. That's a very good point.

Are you giving the artichoke credit here in the way that James is giving the squid a Nobel Prize? No, I'm not giving the artichoke any credit. I'm giving the mayor of New York who was Fiorella Laguardia, so Laguardia Airport, named after him. He was a big deal and in 1935 he walked into one of the biggest markets in New York City and he announced baby artichokes there off the menu and it was going to start the day after Christmas and he said, I like artichokes, particularly with Hollandaise sauce, but the

ban will remain in force until the grip of the racketeers is broken. And basically it was because the mafia controlled the baby artichoke supply and made a load of money supplying New York with baby artichokes and it was one of their major things. It was illegal alcohol, drugs and then baby artichokes. They forced the restaurants to buy them, didn't they, and made them really, really expensive and cornered the market and they bought them at cheap prices too. They squeezed the farmers at one end and then they squeezed the restaurants at the other end.

Very clever. Didn't he lift the ban within a few days? Oh yeah. Because he was like, actually I really like artichokes. No, no, no. Because he liked artichokes. No, he won't. He beat the mafia in three days.

Because basically there was this one guy, a mafia boss called Ciro Teranova and he was known as the artichoke king. But the only thing I know about artichokes is they make you fat, so I don't know. But anyway, so he was the one who was in charge of it and when LaGuardia said, you can't sell artichokes, then he had no one to sell his artichokes to and all the shops said, okay we're not going to do it. One or two people did carry on selling them but they all got their licenses taken off them.

Right. And then within three or four days it was obvious that he wasn't going to be able to apply his words in New York anymore. Okay, cool. Yeah, it was a rapid turnaround. Yeah, it was real. Yeah, yeah. Most of them were coming in from California, that's where they were all grown.

And there were stories that mafia agents would go to California, they would intimidate the growers of the farmers into lowering their prices. They would even, this is reported at the time, I don't think it's true, threatened aerial gas bombing of the farming fields. I saw reports in the newspapers that that happened but again it might not have been true. But the interesting thing was, because that was happening in California and this guy was working, the artichoke king was in New York, suddenly it was in two states, which meant it was a federal case, which meant that they could get all their federal people involved,

which suddenly made it a really big deal. If it was just in New York it would have been hard for him to do anything about it. Interesting. Do you remember we did a fact a very long time ago about Marilyn Monroe being named artichoke queen? Oh yeah, yeah. And the theory that the reason she was named that was because they were trying to give a bit of sort of gloss back to an industry completely dominated by the mafia.

I thought you were going to say it was because she was married to the artichoke king. They ruled over all the artichokes. I've just realized that artichoke king sounds like something that a mafia boss would do to you, doesn't it? Subject someone to a real artichoke king by stuffing those weird white front things in the artichoke down your throat. That's how you do it. You'd make them eat that middle white bit.

I know, you are terrified. I'm just, I'm frightened of artichokes. The spurt of shoulder bandits tried again last night. And it was just baby artichokes then, it's very specific, isn't it? Yes, only the baby artichokes. Because they're quite similar. The mafia could have branched out into just the slightly bigger ones, but they didn't think of that, I guess.

Not so smart. Yeah. Because I think actually the only difference is that baby artichokes don't even have the chokey bit. They don't have the annoying fuzzy bit that I don't like, right? And they're not even younger. It's a real misnomer. They just grow lower down on the artichoke plant.

So I think they're from the same plant, but they don't get as much sunshine, so they don't grow to be as big. And yeah, they're just more tender and nice, easier to eat. Is that like how baby carrots are not really a different kind of thing? They're just... I think they're just chopped up carrots, aren't they? Yeah, I think they might be, but I've never been confident enough to say, and I really regret bringing it up now.

Lisa's got a thousand people in York looking at you when you're saying that. It's like an anxiety dream. And that's like Jerusalem artichokes as well. Sorry? Jerusalem artichokes. Oh, yeah. Not from Jerusalem. Not artichokes.

Not even any kind of artichoke. What the fuck is going on? Yeah. The guy who first found them decided they tasted a bit like artichokes, so they must be artichokes, I think. Okay. Yeah. Don't know where the Jerusalem bit came from.

I do. Well, I love the Jerusalem bit. This is one of my favourite etymologies. This is because... So they look like sunflowers, Jerusalem artichokes, on obviously not the gross tube a bit, but the bit that grows out of them look like sunflowers, and Europeans discovered them in the 1600s. There was a French explorer, and brought them back to Europe, and they got to Italy, and they were called girassole, as in sunflower, as turns round with the sun.

So the word for sunflower in Italian, and girassole gradually turned into Jerusalem. Very good. That's cool. Oh. I like it. Yeah. Do you know that the Italian word for mafia, or for a mafia clan, is cosciosca, or sosca, and that means artichoke heart?

No way. Interesting. Is it because they're tightly bound together? He's only gone and got it. Yeah, that's exactly right. They have to. So the artichoke leaves are all really close together, and that's what the mafia clan is like.

Nice, and they can't be separated. Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's cool. Very difficult to eat. But it can be done. Can be done. Do you know how we got the artichoke in the first place?

No. Did you just screw it? No. Well, it's from... No. Actually, we didn't know this. Waitrose? No.

It's a couple of thousand years old. It dates back to ancient Greece, the artichoke. And it comes from a time when the Greek god, Zeus, fancied a woman called Kinara, or Sinara, and he installed her in heaven as his kind of mistress. But then she kept on sneaking back to the mortal plane to see her family, and Zeus fan out about this, and he got really annoyed and turned her into an artichoke. Ah, and that's how we have artichokes. And that's how we have them.

Yeah. OK. Well, I actually believe James's version about us just growing them. You choose what you want to believe. Yeah. Just very quickly back to the mafia, I was very surprised to discover that they're just involved in so many different rackets, aren't they? And in 2014-ish, they started getting into wind farms.

So they went green. Oh, they're very ethical. Always open. Yeah. So they're known as the eco-mafia. And in Sicily, wind farms are a massive deal there now, and the money that is being generated from selling all of the power across Europe is such big money that that's their thing. So yeah, it's just such a bizarre…

I suppose those big blades can cut off the horse's head, please. They're also into organic food as well, the mafia at the moment. Yeah, yeah. They're such hipsters these days. Well, I say that. They're into getting cheap food from Eastern Europe and then relabeling it as organic and then selling it off. Oh, see.

Yeah. OK. Yeah. I was shocked, shocked as someone who lives in East London at the level of contamination of what claims to be organic food by the mafia. So believe me, if you think you've got extra virgin olive oil at home, you probably haven't. This is… They're adulterating all this stuff.

And actually in Italy, the police employ special tasters who are specifically trained to spot fraudulent food to taste lots of types of olive oil. Do you need a sweet gig for the police to have? They do things like they whiten mozzarella with detergent, they make bread with asbestos. OK, is it getting less sweet as a gig, as you say this? Yeah. Wow. But extra virgin olive oil, adulteration of that is the biggest source of agricultural

fraud in the world. And 60% of extra virgin olive oil that's sold is not that, is not extra virgin. Wow. So what is it? Just straight up shit oil. Oh, right. It's just adulterated with less good quality oil. It's not urine or anything.

You'll be fine, you won't notice the difference, but you're being bamboozled. OK, that sounds fine. And that's the spirit which broke the mafia in 1935. I'm just a bit worried that we're giving the mafia a lot of shit in this podcast and I kind of want to distance myself a tiny bit. Oh, wow. You keep giving me that shit oil. I'm fine.

My family, Mike Living, thank you. Bring it on, lads. What's the other game? This is an extra virgin over here that you will not get any earlier than that. It is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that until recently in the Chinese city of Chongqing, you could hail down a stick man to carry your bags by shouting, bang man! Which is a fun idea and a mysterious fact to say without explaining it.

So I almost want to just leave it at that. What do you mean by a stick man? It's like someone, like one of those people that tells you where the gents' toilets are. They don't tell you where the toilets are. They do. They indicate where it is. I think by the time you're seeing the stick man, you've found the toilet, James. Put one on the door.

I'm over here! Quick! Free me! There's a stall for you, quick! Oh no, don't go in. There's a guy having a massive shit stand! It's not one of the toilet warning signs. So these are men called...

It's actually bang bang. But we discussed this and we decided if you shouted bang bang as an ignorant English person, then they'd probably know what you meant. And it's the name for these stick men. So they're people who carry sticks around and they're extremely populous in, like, up until the early 2000s really in Chongqing. And they're porters. And the reason that they remained in that city is because the terrain is very hilly.

It's lots and lots of winding alleyways and lots of steps connecting one place to the other. And you can't really get a car or anything round. It's even hard to get a bike around it. And so all you can do is, you can say, I've got 17 heavy suitcases and here's a small guy with a stick. Can you carry them all please? And they do it. It's unbelievable the loads that they carry.

There's not as many these days as though they're kind of going out business a little bit. Yeah, there was a documentary quite recently called The Last Generation of Bang Bang, which was explaining that kind of these people have got other jobs now, like delivery people, like, I don't know, delivery or that kind of thing. Whatever the Chinese equivalent is. That's a lot of people do that. But they were really popular. There was a soap opera called Mountain City Bang Bang Men, which was all about them.

Really? And there's also a drinking game. If you're a student in Chongqing, then you might play this game. And the drinking game is basically whenever you see one of these guys, you drink. Oh, right. Wow. Wow. That was a game.

Oh, no, people are so much more sober now. So Chongqing has, it's got a huge population. It's like 32 million at the time where they were sort of at the peak before the decline. There's about 30,000 stick men that were in operation. I was reading Chongqing in my head. I was like, I know this place. How do I know this place? And it's because it has my favorite rail station in, so a metro station, a train station in Chongqing,

which is they have them very high up, kind of like monorails that go round through the city. And one particular path that it needed to take was going to be in the exact spot where they were building a residential building, which was 19 floors high. What's up there? Yeah. So between floor six, I believe, and floors nine, I think those are the right ones. They're suddenly in a residential building, a train that just goes through the building, stops in the building as well. Wow.

Yeah, so it's in stop in the building and they had to soundproof all of the apartments to make sure that all the noise wouldn't get to them too much. Oh, my God. Yeah, how cool is that? That's really cool. That's incredible. Yeah. I'm just sort of carrying extremely heavy weights. Oh, yeah.

It is kind of unbelievable. So there are lots of people, particularly people who are mountain porters, so this is, you know, very high altitude environments, can carry unbelievably heavy weights. So they studied mountain porters in Nepal. There was a scientist from Belgium called Norman Hegland, and he was a muscle physiologist, and he thought, I've got to know what is different, like what is different physically about Nepalese mountain porters? Because they, on average, the guys he studied weighed about 56 kilos, but they can carry 68 kilos. They can carry more than their own body weight, and they're carrying it uphill, steep uphill, and he studied them,

and he found nothing different physically about them, except that they're just extremely tough. Yeah. That's the only thing he found. On average, they can carry 90% of their body weight. The heaviest load he found was 175% of the guy's weight that he was carrying. That's really cool. And by comparison, physically fit Westerners, you know, backpacking or whatever, you can do about 25% of your weight for a couple of days, and then it really, really hurts.

And these guys have just done so much of it. Yeah, but the other thing that he said that he noticed is that they're incredibly slow. They just keep to a pace. And so, for example, if they were going to a Saturday market and they were running late, they would get up late before, you know, early in the morning, and they would just rather walk there at their super slow pace rather than in any way be fast. Oh, really? They'll go through the night.

Yeah, they'll go through the night. Like, fast is just not an option for them. They'll just, they pace themselves. But basically, the lesson seemed to be, we're really pathetic in the West. I mean, that was his conclusion, wasn't it? He was like, well, it turns out there's not a special gate that they have that's really great. They're not actually using oxygen much more efficiently. We can just actually carry way more than 25%.

So next time you offer to help someone with their bags, think twice, okay? Because we should be carrying this amount as well. Well, there are some people in Europe who do this as well. So in Slovakia, in the Tattris Mountains, there are a load of hostels that are really high up, but there are no roads that get there. And so they have to take everything up there. So they'll take, if they need a refrigerator up there, they'll strap it to the back and just walk up. If there's a microwave, they'll strap it to the back and just walk up.

And the record, the amount that the strongest person that's ever taken up to these hostels in Slovakia, it was going to the Lako Kalunga Castle Hotel, and this guy carried 207 kilograms on his back to this place. And that, if you don't know what that is, that's the equivalent to carrying a red deer, an upright piano, or all of Little Mix. Wow. Wow. That's really put Little Mix into context for me.

We've all learned something from that comparison. Little Mix, we're the same as one red deer. I reckon. Either Red Deer are a lot bigger than I thought, or Little Mix are a lot smaller. The clue's in the name, the Little Mix, obviously. Which Little Mix, because there were four, but now there's three. It's the four. The four, yes.

It's context. Which sugar babes line up could he possibly have taken? I was reading about porters, generally, and just seeing what roles they've played in history. And I found a really fun thing, which is in 1930, a porter carrying some luggage led to the creation of the association for mutual help of the French nobility. And this was... It's a bit late for them, I think, by then, isn't it?

Because it wasn't without 150 years earlier. This is the thing, right? It's basically looking after all the noble people who fell from grace. So two people were walking along, they were having their luggage carried, and they suddenly noticed the person carrying the luggage was someone of noble stock. And they thought, hang on a second, what's going on? Why are you doing this menial job when you should be glorified in your family's right to be great? And they said, we need to give you some money.

And they thought, what if this is happening elsewhere in France? And so they set up this association, and people can still, to this day, apply for... Yeah, please send my kid to a good school, because we don't have enough money. But we're from noble background, look at our surname. And they bust a bunch of French people. You know what, if you're going to give some money to charity, perhaps there are a few others other than the posh French people.

Absolutely not. I'm changing all my direct habits right now. This is on... They need another revolution. Did they learn nothing? I want to know how they noticed that the guy carrying the bags was of noble stock. That's the big question for me. Like, did he have a birthmark? He was bleeding, his hands were bleeding because of the blisters, and I guess the blue blood, does that give it away, maybe?

But what was it? Do we know what it was? They just recognised maybe it was his manner, maybe it could have been an old friend from school, I don't know. I bet he was just like, do you know, my great-uncle was the Baron of Orly. Wow. This is about carrying heavyweights. It's not actually about humans carrying heavyweights, but some dung beetles, which are called onphophagous taurus,

they can pull 1100 times their own weight, and it's very impressive, and it's entirely evolved because of their sex life. Interesting, because I assume that all they're carrying is dung. Well, dung is big relative to them. Oh, yeah, I'm not saying that. But in fact, you're right, sorry, it's not because of the dung moving. So the females will dig a tunnel under a cowpat. That's where they create this kind of tunnel of love where they're getting ready to mate.

It suddenly sounds like a sexy tunnel. For the dung beetle, unbelievably sexy. And basically, so the female goes into the tunnel of weight, and then a male will go into the tunnel, right, to mate. But sometimes a male will get into the tunnel and find there's a rival male already there, and they have evolved this unbelievably strong movement where they fight, they tussle, and they lock horns, and they try and try and try to pull each other out or push each other out of the tunnel.

So as a result, they've evolved the ability to move 1000 times their own weight. However, there are some males which are not like that. They're sneaky males, they're not strong, but they are fast walkers, and they have extremely dense testicles. And they... Fast walkers with extremely dense testicles. What does that mean? Because you think that is slowing down?

Yeah. Yeah, but it could be the momentum can pull you forward sometimes. It's not like when you walk and you kind of move your arms back and forward. You could swing your testicles as you walk. Yeah, a standing long jump. You prepose yourself forward, yeah. Anyway, so they even sneak into the tunnels, attempt a shag, attempt to get out quickly. So that just the woman turns out she prefers the dense testicles to the extremely strong ones? Is that the idea? How are they winning?

It's not clear what criteria she's applying. I think if there's a male there, she'll mate with it. I've not got my head around the dense testicle thing. What is that doing? Like, what is it? They've just got... It just means they're producing a lot of sperm and they can quickly get in, mate, and get out. I guess they've put their resources into sperm quality rather than into physical power.

But how do you tell someone that your sperm quality is great? I don't think they're communicating on this level that we're... I think if there's a male there, the female will mate with it and he turns up and says... It gets in there. There's no flirting, I think. You're in a tunnel under a cowpat. I think the romance is pretty dead. Oh, dear. I was looking at other jobs that you could describe as being like porters,

and I was thinking one of my favourite things that I read a while back is that Scottish fishermen's wives were basically porters of their husbands. So this is... In the 19th century, the herring industry was massive in Scotland. Everyone was a herring farmer, herring fisherman. And the fishermen, when they went to get in their boats, they would usually have sea, like, would go from a beach. So they'd have, like, they'd go off from a beach, get in a boat,

and they don't want to get wet because they're going to be out all day and it's fucking cold in Scotland. And so the wives would always carry their husbands into the boat. So you'll see their old photos of these husbands with all their fishing tackle and their arms, and their wives just carrying them like a baby and plopping them into that little boat, waving them off for the packed lunch. That's amazing.

The man who has carried the heaviest load for ten metres in history was a guy called Patrick Barbonian, and at the end of walking the ten metres, he shouted out, Vegan power! Nice. Yeah. And he was trying to prove that you can still be strong and have a vegan diet.

They interviewed him afterwards and said, It was a bit of a stupid thing to do, and it really hurt. If only I'd had a sausage sandwich before I said no. Time for our final fact, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1994, the music group, The KLF, burned one million pounds.

27 years later, they're still not sure why they did it and have even toured the UK, asking audiences if they have any idea why they did it. So this was a very famous moment in 90s music. KLF were a massive band, justified and ancient, they were huge, their singles were massive selling, but they were very artistic and they were very anti the industry, and they decided that they were going to absolutely whiten themselves out

in a way that a band has never done before. They were going to take all their music away from catalogues that were publishing it, they were going to remove it from all shops, and they were going to take the last amount of money that they'd made, which was a million pounds, take it out of their account and take it to an island, a juror, which is in Scotland, and they went to a boat shed and they set it alight, and they burned a million pounds and there's a lot of controversy.

Did they really do it? They claim they absolutely did. A lot of people are very skeptical. There's been a few investigations into it where the BBC have seen that they've taken the money out from the bank and they've found little bits of burnt embers that matched when little numbers that would appear on specific bills kind of match the ones that were taken from the bank.

But did they really do it? Is a question a lot of people have. I think they did. James, I think you were skeptical about it. I think they didn't. Just on balance of probability, I think they didn't, they might have done. Quite often we have facts on this and I'm like, that's definitely bullshit. This one, I'm about 60-40 that it's bullshit.

For instance, the little bits of burnt notes that they found, they were found by a farmer, but it turned out that the farmer's son had gone to school with one of the band. So it's quite a nice coincidence that they found it. I read an interview with the journalist who first wrote it up. He was called Michael Pilgrim who's working for the Observer magazine and he says that he still doesn't know for sure

whether it was true or whether it wasn't true. I think that was the journalist who received the story but he wasn't there. It was Jim Reid who was there. He wrote it up. So Jim Reid thought they definitely did it, I think. This guy reckons that they definitely burnt some money because he has some of the money that was burnt in his house but he thinks possibly not a million pounds,

which I think is where I stand on it. In 2017, they were discussing it at this festival that Dan was talking about where they asked audiences why they did it and they got an economist to describe it as quantitative tightening, which is a really good phrase. And there are acts who are burning money today. So there's an organisation called Burn Your Money

which sent some members in 2017 to the island of Jura to burn some of their own money. And they even have their own magazine, this organisation, which is called Burning Issue. Why are they doing that? Just to imitate the grace? Why did the initial guys do it? Yeah, exactly. So initially, after they did it,

there was a documentary made about it because they had a friend called Gimpo who was with them, who filmed it. So we do have footage of it. Now what's his real name, was it? I can't even remember. He's got Alan Goodrick. Right, Alan Goodrick. You can be sure if he's called Gimpo,

it's probably not his real name. Oh, it could be Mark's brother. I don't know. To Mr. and Mrs. Goodrick, a son, Gimpo. So they took this video around the country and they asked these questions, why do you think we did it? Because they genuinely couldn't quite work it out,

but they are an artistic band and there's a... So I got this fact from a book that's called The KLF by John Higgs. It is genuinely, I think, the best non-fiction book I've ever read. Genuinely, it's my favorite non-fiction book. It's magical and it's not just about this band, it's about what they encompass, the worlds of the occult, the esoteric, everything that was going on in pop music.

It's just, mwah, John Higgs, stunning. And basically, what they decided was, after they went round showing this video and not getting anywhere, but getting a lot of people furious with them, that they would not talk about it for years and years and years. So they signed a contract on the side of a car, a rented car, pushed it off a cliff as an official contract

and didn't really talk about it for 23 years. Paisley came up in conversations. I bet it came up in conversations with the car rental firm. That film was really interesting because they filmed it and then they kind of destroyed the camcorder. But then the person who filmed it, who was Gimpo, said, oh, actually, I'd already made a copy of it, so we can have that instead.

And he turned that into a little film and they advertised that they were going to show it in Brick Lane in London and that anyone who turned up could get free lager. OK? OK. So lots of people turned up. But too many people turned up, so they had to cancel the whole event

and they were stuck with 6,237 cans of Tenant Super. This was on Christmas Eve and they decided to give it to the homeless because someone working for the charity Crisis said they were utterly irresponsible. I mean, that's pretty hard to work you with. I think they weren't the first people to describe them as that, I suspect.

Yeah. It sounds like the maddest experience to be on this money-burning expedition. I wish I'd been that one journalist. And they were so random in what they did. They just picked this guy, Jim Reid, and called him up. He doesn't know what he's getting into. He's told to get in the car with these two guys

and Gimpo in the back. They go to a security firm. Oh, they buy suitcases in London. Two massive suitcases. They go to a security firm and extract all of this cash and then disappear to Jura. And it sounds so annoying as well because he'd be so knackered after that long, confusing day.

And they said, OK, we're going to burn all the money tomorrow. And then Jim goes to bed, writes off his notes for the day, puts his head on the pillow, and immediately they bang on his hotel door at midnight and go, actually, we're going to do it now. Come on, we can't wait. They said it was like Christmas. You know, you're so excited.

You can't wait till the morning. And yeah, they went and they did it in this little, I think it was like a little stone kind of structure. But he said the first thing you feel is incredibly guilty as you're watching this money disappear. And then for the subsequent two or three hours, because it does take quite a long time to burn a million pounds, you are just really bored for a lot of it.

But yeah, it's so surreal. Well, the line that someone said about it was, it's one thing to start burning a million pounds. It's another thing to finish burning a million pounds. And that is something that has really made them really question everything, that the fact that they went for the whole thing. Well, it made people so angry,

because obviously they could have given that money to charity. They could have given it to, you know, members of the French aristocracy who were down on their life. They could have just kept it and pretended that they burnt it. Yeah, you know. Lots of people said that if you burn money by spending it on cocaine or whatever, then you're forgiven much more easily

than burning physical money. It feels very, very, you know, sacrilegious. But they are constantly, they were constantly doing stuff like this. They tried to spend their money in very, very creative ways. So after they'd had a really big hit, one or another with their big hits, they tried to spend the money they got from that,

getting a massive helicopter and fixing Stonehenge so that they could put it back to work again, basically. They could, come on, let's fire up the motors. I think also Bulldozer, they were going to bulldoze it down. They bought a big bulldozer to do that. And didn't they bury their Brittle wards underneath, supposedly? I think it was conveniently found a few weeks later.

You're very skeptical about this. Well, you know, it might be true, but the thing is they did have form for lots of, like, little tricks and stuff. They did, they made crop circles, for instance. There was one time where one of the guys drove around with a massive sound equipment in his car, which he claimed was powerful enough to kill livestock.

Right. He was going to kill a load of cars with his massive... Wow, I can kill one red deer with this sound system. Or four of them. You decide. And so it's two guys, the KLF. It's Drummond and Caughty. And Bill Drummond, I love reading about Bill Drummond.

His ideas are just so wonderful. One thing that he did, and I don't know if this is still going, I hope he still does it, but Bill Drummond created a soup line across the British Isles. And the idea was if anyone lives on Bill Drummond's soup line, you can look it up. If you live and your house happens to be on the soup line, you can contact Bill Drummond and he'll come to your house

and make you some soup. That's... No. Did anyone... Did it work? Can we do that? I hope it's still going. I'm not sure. But the soup line exists and he did do that. You have to plan it carefully so it didn't go through a major place. Like Belfast. That's incredible.

Wow. He sounds wonderful. The Guardian interviewed him in 2000, which was years and years after they burned the money. And they asked him, have you regretted it since? He said, no. Are you financially stable now? No, I'm not. No.

And then in 2004, he said, of course I regretted it. And so you can't work out the truth about them. No. It's really... They're really, really, really interesting people. One thing about Drummond is he does like his lines and he believes that there's a lay line that goes from Iceland to Papua New Guinea and it goes through Liverpool

and the energy of the earth comes down from space into Reykjavik, goes all the way under the earth and then comes out at Papua New Guinea and also comes out of a manhole cover in Liverpool. LAUGHTER And this manhole cover is just outside the cabin club and that's what he kind of thinks. Yeah, Matthew Street, yeah. Exactly.

And one time, he was the manager of Echo and the Bunnyman, who a lot of you will know, a band, and he got them a gig in Reykjavik, got them to play and then stood over this manhole cover to listen to see if the music came out. I did not come out. But part of his evidence is, you know Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Carl Jung apparently wrote once that he'd never been to Liverpool, but he had a dream about Liverpool and he thought, Carl Jung said, Liverpool is the pool of life it makes to live and there's a statue of Carl Jung on Matthew Street. Yeah, it's a bust that sits up in a building because there was a guy called Peter O'Halligan who'd heard.

So this was a game-changing dream of Carl Jung's life. He was like the pool of life and then he said it's in Liverpool and Peter O'Halligan went around and he looked for descriptions that would match where Jung might have dreamed in his head and he discovered that there was this manhole sitting at the end of literally 30 seconds' walk from the cavern which is why maybe the Beatles had such mystic powers and so on.

And presumably Jung... Have I lost everyone? Presumably Jung didn't believe any of this but thought it was a chaos against anything or really believes it. I think he might believe some of that, although we'd have to get him here and we're just... I wish we could get him here. On his 60th birthday he stood for 17 hours on that manhole.

He didn't believe it, yeah. 17 hours. Thinking about life, thinking about what he was doing. Yeah, it's an important manhole. I think we've mentioned before that Jeremy Corbyn also collects manhole covers. He does. Well, he doesn't collect them. Sorry, that makes him sound incredibly irresponsible but he is an expert on them. He knows about them.

He collects him trying to tug it from out from under Jung and he's like, you're not getting this one! Just to draw us back towards the realms of the possible for a bit and that music is really interesting because they were hugely influential in starting sampling other tracks and they were one of the first people to do that. So in 1987 they sampled a passage from Dancing Queen by ABBA and ABBA were not happy about it

and ABBA sued them and said you've got to destroy all the unsolved copies of this record that you've produced, all the unsolved vinyl records. So then, the KLF, the two of them, they travelled to Stockholm to give Agnita from ABBA a commemorative gold disc. They couldn't find her because they were just walking around in Stockholm. So they gave the gold disc to a random prostitute they met in the street and came home pausing only to throw the LPs off the ferry as they went

and then they burned the rest in a field. They love burning things in fields. They love burning stuff and they love throwing stuff into the sea. It's true, it's their gem and I dig it. That trip to Sweden sounds very entertaining. They did sit outside ABBA's record label in a police car that they managed to get hold of and they blasted the record that they made

from which they'd stolen ABBA's music out at ABBA's record label and then they... Imagine being inside the office for that, that's thrilling. The police are here, what do they want? It's hard to tell. Is this a new siren? Very confusing. They killed a moose accidentally.

They hit and killed a moose on that trip and also they were shot at by a farmer who understandably didn't like the burning shit in his field but they're never getting permission for anything so the farmer's just looking out of his window and he's like, oh my God, two musicians are burning huge piles of music in my crop field and so they shot their car and they claimed they had to be towed back to England by the AA

which I didn't know the AA did call out to Gothenburg but... They're very good. Andy mentioned 2017. They had a panel to talk about why they did it so there was this thing when they pushed the car off the edge of the cliff 23 years they said we're not going to talk about it and we will in 23 years time have the answer why did we burn this money?

So they set up this big festival where they were going to answer the question in 2017 and there's an amazing hour of footage you can watch on YouTube just from one person filming the whole thing where the KLF return and they've got a big announcement and they arrive in an ice cream van and they've written a new book and their big announcement outside of trying to answer why they did the money burning

is that they're now no longer just musicians but they're in the funeral business as well and what they've done is in Toxteth in Liverpool They'll burn you in a field, they'll throw you into the ocean They've set up this idea that you can buy and I've seen it online and I almost bought a brick the other day you can buy a brick where you put in if someone's passed away a milligram I think it is

or a few milligrams of the ashes of that person and it gets baked into the brick and they're building a ginormous pyramid in Toxteth where every year they add new bricks to it and it's going to be something 30 something thousand bricks That happens to do it I think, they haven't started yet have they? Have they got planning permission from the people of Toxteth? Because I imagine there'll be questions about this huge...

Toxteth Day of the Dead, it happens on November 23 It's going to happen this year, I'm going to it Toxteth Day of the Dead? Yeah, it's a big festival, they walk through the streets It's not a big festival It's not Glastonbury It's a couple of old rockers I've never heard of it, yeah

No, it's new, 2017 was the first one So do we? 400 people and they would walk through the cities of Toxteth wearing the classic Day of the Dead sort of stuff You would buy a ticket and you didn't know what to expect You didn't know what you would do and they would take the numbers and like if you were like number one to twenty or something

you would have to form a band and then the next people would have to get a tattoo done It was like Taskmaster really, it's pretty much like that and another group had to commandeer as many supermarket trolleys as they could and stuff like that But before they did this, before they started doing this pyramid which they will probably do and they had another idea where they wanted to build a pyramid

containing the same amount of bricks as there were people born in the 20th century Quite a nice idea, isn't it? How is that? Well, unfortunately it's ten billion The Great Pyramid in Giza has 2.3 million So it would have been a hell of a pyramid As you mentioned, tiny bricks

and then they go south Are they selling those bricks in it? Is it a pyramid scheme? That's what I'm trying to say Thank you Very nice Hey, we've got to wrap up We can't ignore that

That is it, that is all of our fans Thank you so much for listening If you would like, I'm sorry If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast we can be found on our Twitter account So I'm on at Shriverland, Andy It's Andrew Hunter M

but please don't write about the pyramid scheme thing I'm sorry James? At James Harkin And Anna? You can email podcast at qi.com Yep, where you can go to our group account which is at no such thing

or our website, no such thing as a fish.com All of our previous episodes are up there There's also links to all the upcoming tour dates of our nerd immunity tour Do come and see us But I just want to say thank you so much, York That was so much fun We had an awesome time

and we will be back again next week with another episode We'll see you then Goodbye! Thank you