No Such Thing As A Fish - 605: No Such Thing As A Shark With A Ponytail

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Sara Pascoe joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss fishing spiders, Blade Runners and Hitler's jumpers. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Cl...ub Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the wonderful Sarah Pasco. Now, there is no one, I don't think, in Britain who doesn't know who Sarah Pasco is, and probably if you listen to this show around the world, you'll know her as well, because she has been on Fish before. But just as a quick reminder, she is an incredible stand-up comedian and TV presenter, who is a good friend of ours. She does a podcast as well.
Starting point is 00:00:27 She does a show called Weirdo's Buck Club with fellow Fish alumnus Carriad Lloyd but she is on all the panel show she's been on QI a million times she's absolutely brilliant we love having her on all of our shows but one important thing to say about Sarah is that she is currently on tour
Starting point is 00:00:45 if you would like to see her show and you live somewhere in the UK there is an extremely good chance that she will be coming to your town in November or in the spring next year and to find out the shortest amount of travel you will have to make to get to her shows, you must go to sarah pasco.com.uk slash tickets.
Starting point is 00:01:03 Her website is S-A-R-A-P-A-S-C-O-E dot co-U-K because that is how you spell her name. So go to sarapasco.com to get tickets for her show, but in the meantime, please enjoy our show. On with the podcast! Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Sarah Pascoe. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Sarah. fact, and I'm underlying the word fact there, for reasons that will become clear.
Starting point is 00:02:03 My fact is Saturn's rings are younger than sharks. Do, do, do. No, it's da, da, da. So when you say fact, yes, exactly. And you underlined it. Weirdly, we've never had a guest to underline their headline fact before. And it makes me instantly suspicious. Yes.
Starting point is 00:02:21 Well, age is but a concept. And when I looked into the inverted commas, proof, Of both of the ages, Saturn and sharks, I felt like, well, there's lots to debate here. Okay. Okay. So do you stand by it or not? Like, if you had to bet your life on it? I would have to do more research, probably.
Starting point is 00:02:39 So let me tell you where the whole ageing of Saturn's rings comes from. So there's a Cassini spacecraft, combination of NASA, the European Space Agency, and also the Italian Space Agency, which means they're not in the European Space Agency. And I thought there's a sitcom. It's a decided note We'll have our own one Our spaceships will be the shape of boots Are the Italian astronauts
Starting point is 00:03:04 Stereotypical Italians Are you thinking a lo-a-low style? Yeah All of the other spacemen are eating the tubes of paste food And they've still got spaghetti Pomodoro It's creating a big mess in the spaceship All the Italian astronauts typically like to stay in the mothership Yes
Starting point is 00:03:21 To talk about Italian men And here's mine about Marianne Luigi and they're fixing the spaceship. The ship needs plumbers, yeah, exactly. There's something for everyone. So the Hacini spacecraft did analysis for a really long time of what the rings were composed of. They're mostly ice, and that ice is made of water,
Starting point is 00:03:41 which then, of course, I had a question mark, what is other ice made of that they kept calling it water ice? But then I realized I'd gone too far off the facts. Okay. Come back. One percent of them is dust, and they've measured the rate of accumulation, how dusty they're getting, and then work backwards from that 1% to say they can't be any older
Starting point is 00:04:00 than 100 years, 100 million years, I should say. And they could be as new as 10 million years old. Wow. Okay. So that's from the amount of dust accumulation. The reason, and I'll sort of stress this straight away, that they could be a lot older is because they could be cleaning themselves because there's a pull from the planet, which takes a lot of debris away from it. So basically, when micrometeoroids hit the rings of Saturn, they are either vaporized or they've pulled towards Saturn's magnetic field, which would explain why there would be less dust there than you could completely just age it. All the dust that's ever been collected by Saturn's pool hasn't stayed in the rings, essentially, which is where ageing them that way could be
Starting point is 00:04:42 slightly contentious. Okay. And what about sharks? Okay, so sharks, they're saying, they're claiming, I don't know what you've written down, that they are 450 million years old. Yes, okay. Right, okay. And their evidence for this, some scales, no teeth. They've got some fossilized scales from 450 million years old, which they're saying is the earliest fossil of a shark-like creature,
Starting point is 00:05:10 which is not a shark, is it? That's a shark-like creature. Okay. And then no teeth. So are we thinking a gummy shark, like no-tee shark? Or a big-scaley fish? Or a big-scale fish. knows what a shark is in lots of ways.
Starting point is 00:05:25 But hang on, Sarah, all of this, all of this smacks of a woman who submitted a fact and then researched it. Yes. Yes. Your honour. What's the accusation there, Andy? As I say it. No, because some people, it's like their actual passion.
Starting point is 00:05:41 Is that what you mean? No, no, no. Some people are like, oh, I wrote a book about the rings. It's funny how honest you are. I just like it. Because, you know, a lesser researcher might have just said, yeah, I'll just, I'll just, I to sort of fudge that. I would have done that. Yeah, I would have gone in and said, so the fact
Starting point is 00:05:56 is that the rings are this old and sharks are this old. One's younger than the other and that's it. No, actually what I did write down was that Cassini spacecraft born on the 15th of October 1997, so it's a Libra. Oh, that is good. Getting my astrology and astronomy all in the same
Starting point is 00:06:12 all in the same explanation. So sharks have survived what an... Five, yeah. The five known mass extinctions that we've had on this planet. Are they involved somehow? It does seem suspicious. Always there.
Starting point is 00:06:27 I think it was after the first mass extinction that teeth suddenly became a part of their life. Yeah. Although the jaws were different in those earlier creatures. Yeah. Yeah. Because now they have jaws that open really widely, which means they can swim faster and they can eat prey bigger than themselves. So that's exciting. But that's much more recent.
Starting point is 00:06:45 We're talking 150 million years ago with those recognizable actual sharks. And like 10 million to 100 million with the rings of Saturn, what are you saying is the closest scale than 400 plus milgale scale? Okay, so here's the timeline I wrote down. So, I wrote sharks as the earliest fossil was the late Odovian, period. So basically that would make them older than dinosaurs and older than trees, really fun. Trees are 360 million years old, which is fun. Would they know anything about tree? As in like, they're not seeing trees anyway, right?
Starting point is 00:07:17 So that's irrelevant to their world. Oh, damn. You get like tree fall in the... So they might see a fall They'll see a log But they can't fall before they exist That's the thing If a tree falls before it exists
Starting point is 00:07:29 Does it make a note? Does it need by shark? Does it splash and go off what's that? They've famously got good hearing sharks So that would be good distances Or is it smell? A smell? Can they smell trees?
Starting point is 00:07:40 Very few people say Shh There are sharks me by They tend to say don't bleed into the water There are sharks so we've got a mass extinction event in the Permian period that's 252 million years ago
Starting point is 00:07:52 or around then that 96% of marine life was wiped out so we had bigger sharks and there is fossil records just teeth of these massive sharks I'm saying just teeth earlier on it was like
Starting point is 00:08:03 oh they don't even have teeth how suspicious is this I forgot Pasco's case book you always find crimes and then investigate them on this show do you know why they keep surviving all of these mass extinctions it's really interesting
Starting point is 00:08:13 is because it's because they're so varied as a class of creatures So you get sharks that live on the bottom, you get sharks that live in the main water column, you know, higher over the ocean. You get small sharks, you get big sharks, you get sharks that are even mostly vegetarian. You get just sharks of every different kind.
Starting point is 00:08:32 And that's why always a few of them will fit through the keyhole of whatever life survives the mass extinction of them. Which is amazing, isn't it? So I did go down. One of my tangents was the Greenland shark, which grows incredibly slowly, which is a really good example of what you're describing. They don't become sexually active until they're over.
Starting point is 00:08:48 100. Yeah. She's really inspiring. Here's an amazing thing about them. It's been estimated that they can live probably up to 500 years. There's one that's been found that definitely is around 400 years old. Now, the Rings of Saturn, the first observation through a telescope was Galileo in 1610. Arguably, there is a Greenland shark out there alive that was born before Galileo first looked
Starting point is 00:09:13 at them through a telescope. I thought you were going to say that could have seen the Rings of Saturn. the rings of Saturn through that telescope. Unless it fell into the water. Unless they could hear it, I don't think that's going to happen. It's amazing, isn't it? Potentially, there's one out there that was, yeah. We've got up the topic.
Starting point is 00:09:30 Sharks, yeah. Give us a shark, then. Favorite shark. I'll tell you mine. Yeah, okay. Wow. Let's guess. I'm going to guess Hammerhead.
Starting point is 00:09:41 No. James? Yeah. Hammerhead. I do like hammerheads. They're really good. They're the youngest species, apparently. The newest one.
Starting point is 00:09:47 Really? Well, I found another one that's been quite new. I think it's maybe not quite as new as hammerheads, but the walking sharks that you get off the coast of Australia. And they live on the bottom. They're one of Andy's bottom sharks. But they walk on their fence. Andy's bottom sharks is my Channel 5 series of the future.
Starting point is 00:10:10 People who want to watch a show about animals are going to be very disappointed. It's very much an urban dictionary thing. No, these are like walking sharks, yeah, and they use their fins and they walk like geckos on the bottom of the ocean. Wow, that is cool. Can they swim? They can swim, yeah, but not very well.
Starting point is 00:10:29 I quite like the thresher shark. Oh, yeah. But it's just, it's an odd move that they use, which is, it's been described as extreme yoga. Basically, if they're coming up to a fish, rather than directly eat it, they'll bring their tail up back around them and slap it and stun it. Yeah, that's great. That's great. That's really great.
Starting point is 00:10:46 Because usually a lot of them, they'll eat by opening their mouths and just swimming with their mouths open and seeing what goes in there, right? Yeah. And there's a big problem with that paper I read just this morning, which was that basically because the water is more acidic in the oceans now, it's rotting their teeth. And so they have quite crumbly teeth now sharks compared to what they were 100 years ago. So later people think we didn't have any sharks.
Starting point is 00:11:10 There's no evidence. Yes. They all crumbled away. Yeah. Can I give you guys my favorite shark? It's from this morning For the program Philip Scalfield was a shark
Starting point is 00:11:21 No this is a listener email From Alison Mullencamp Who sent us an email this morning On the day we record this Headlined Ghost Shark Sex Teeth Okay This is crazy And you opened it
Starting point is 00:11:36 Oh yeah It's great for Andy's bottom sharks Basically there's a thing called a ghost shark It's also known as a spotted ratfish I suspect it prefers to go by ghost shark. I'll take the other name, but why don't you so fast, yeah. Someone trying to push a cool nickname on themselves, right? You're supposed, no, it's ghost shark, actually.
Starting point is 00:11:57 Yeah, that's what they call me at university. So it's not a true shark, but it looks a lot like a shark, you know, and it gets called it. So, and it's got a thing on its forehead called the tenaculum. It's got these tiny protrusions on it, and scientists have just today published a paper about what this thing is, and what it is is, this little thing. sticking out of its head has these scales on it. It turns out they're not scales. They're actual teeth. The literal teeth sticking out of its head, which it
Starting point is 00:12:23 uses to grip onto the female during sex. Okay. It's got a head hand. It's got a head hand, which it uses for sex grips. And just to hold onto her fins. Does the female have one on her head to, like, hit the other guys one away? She has nothing. Just a ponytail. Yeah. And so one of the scientists responsible, Carly Cohen said, this feature flips the long-standing
Starting point is 00:12:45 assumption in evolutionary biology that teeth are strictly oral structures. I thought that their skin was teeth as well though. I think it's shaped like teeth. But I think the teeth evolved from the skin. So it was scales around them. I've got harder and harder. Which seems to be the same as this other
Starting point is 00:13:01 idea. It's just utilising, oh, they're also good for this. Imagine Sabrina Carpenter's album cover, because everyone was really sort of ante it and say, you know, it's been done before we've moved positive. Imagine if it had been this ghost shark. She's sort of on her knees with Yeah, because she's sort of being held by, you know, looking up at her... But I think next album.
Starting point is 00:13:19 Yeah, next one, that's true, actually. Or maybe chapel rhone. I've still imagining your TV program. I've imagined lots of the dancers at the beginning, because it's got this like Euro trash feel. And they've all got like big, big sharp heads, and then they're all wearing chaps. So when they turn around, you can just see their bottom.
Starting point is 00:13:37 So do you remember that Super Bowl when they had the dancing shark? Yes, yes. Like that, but a bit sexier. Yeah, that with chaps on. And is it just. me enjoying these dances? You speak to camera at the beginning, like, Hi, I'm Andy, and here every week is Shark Week.
Starting point is 00:13:54 And then it's just like a bouncy castle and stuff like that. I'll do it. Yeah. I will take that job. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hi, everyone. We'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Squarespace.
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Starting point is 00:15:34 What a coincidence. Okay. Listen, enough of us, back to the show. On with the podcast. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey, everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by ExpressVPN. That's right.
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Starting point is 00:16:38 That's EXPR eWSVPN.com slash fish. And you can find out there how you can get four months extra free. That's absolutely right. We all use VPNs. And you could get a VPN to by going to expressvpn.com slash fish to get your four extra months. Okay, on with the podcast. On with the show. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact.
Starting point is 00:17:09 My fact this week is that because he didn't like the name of the novel that he was adapting into a movie, director Ridley Scott bought the film rights to a William Burroughs novel called Blade Runner just so he could steal that title instead. Amazing. Brilliant. Really good. Yeah, it's quite fascinating. So I've just read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,
Starting point is 00:17:29 which is a book by Philip K. Dick. And it's a great title. It's a solid. Why is wrong with that? commercial title for a movie. If you don't know Philip K. Dick, he was a pretty extraordinary sci-fi writer. He was writing in the 50s and 60s, and he has had so many of his books that have gone to the big screen. So you might have seen Total Recall with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Adjustment Bureau Minority Reporter, Scanner Darkly, and Blade Runner, probably the most
Starting point is 00:17:54 famous of all of those, starring Harrison Ford. And so initially, Ridley Scott was brought on to this project, and there was a screenwriter on it called Hampton Fancher. And Hampton Fancher decided that while he was writing it, he'd put in the drafts the name Blade Runner, which he'd seen from another book. And it was just there. And Ridley Scott, who took on the project, started reading Do Android's Dream of Electric Sheep, but didn't like it. So put it down. So he didn't end up even reading the book he made into a movie. He saw that title on the screenplay and said, this is way better.
Starting point is 00:18:27 Let's use that. But obviously, it was connected to another book. So he literally bought the movie rights to that and used nothing but the title. So, can I ask a question? You said it was by William Burroughs. Yeah. But he didn't write the original. So what's going on there?
Starting point is 00:18:42 So, okay. So this... It just gets so complicated, this story. The book that William Burroughs had written was called Blade Runner, The Movie. A movie, yeah. So William Burroughs had read a different book by a guy called Alan E. Norse. And that was called The Blade Runner. And so Burroughs' book was a treatment for a movie that he wanted to have made.
Starting point is 00:19:04 But was his book based on Norse's book or was a different story? Yeah, it was actually, it was basically a movie treatment. So Norse's book was, the reason it's called Blade Runner is because it's about a guy who takes medical supplies across America. So literally scalples and smuggling them. Yeah, because it's basically an anti-NHS book, isn't it? Basically, in America, if you've got money, you can't pay for your own healthcare. You have to only go for the government thing and the government thing isn't very good. And so you have these sort of dodgy private doctors who will do your stuff for you,
Starting point is 00:19:39 but they need the scalpel, so they need the blade runner. And the main protagonist in that book is called Billy Gimp. Just a good character name. It's a great name. Striking name. Billy Gim. It's hard to think of names for characters, isn't it? Absolutely.
Starting point is 00:19:51 You've got to say what you see. Look around you. Whatever you see first. So the thing we've all glossed over, there have been a lot of names flying about, Hampton, Fancher, Ridley Scott. None of them very likely, right? the original book that used the title Blade Runner
Starting point is 00:20:05 was by this guy Alan Norse I pronounce it nurse and he was a trained doctor Oh lovely And do you remember there was a scientist About 20 years ago
Starting point is 00:20:15 He won the Nobel Prize for Medicine He was a doctor Paul Nurse What's all these doctors called Nurse I have tried to find a nurse His name was Doctor But I haven't succeeded yet But I'll keep looking
Starting point is 00:20:24 He wrote some of the name Dr X didn't he Oh did he Yeah yeah He didn't really use his name Because he didn't want people to know he was writing. Clever.
Starting point is 00:20:33 Dr. X, but he mostly wrote abusive 140 character messages. So Blade Runner, I actually bought it the other night to watch. Well, film. Yeah, because I haven't seen it in years. So this is the other fascinating thing about the movie Blade Runner.
Starting point is 00:20:47 There's been, since its release, seven different versions of it that have come out. It's constantly being revised by the director and by the production companies. So there was a director's cut that came out, which actually wasn't a director's cut,
Starting point is 00:21:00 because someone else put it together. Ridley Scott just gave an approval. But the official one, according to Ridley Scott, is the final cut, which doesn't have the narration. The 25th year anniversary one, it was the only one that he was allowed to do the cut that he actually wanted. And also, the story of it is quite interesting in that. So it was made for about $30 million. And it made about $40 million at the cinema. So it did fine, but it didn't do that well.
Starting point is 00:21:22 But when they re-edited it, it was amazing. And it was the first thing they brought out on DVD. Oh, was that? And then it did so much better with a sort of slight. re-edit. Yes, it wasn't popular at first. And it got some really bad reviews. One of the reviews said Blade Runner is a suspenseless thriller, which I think is to a certain extent true. It was sort of slow. Was it intentionally slow? It is quite slow. For anyone who hasn't seen it, it's about Harrison Ford who has to chase down a load of robots running around
Starting point is 00:21:48 dressed up as humans. And the main point of it and the main point of Dick, I think. And I haven't read that or seen the movie. But I think it's like, can an Android tell if they're human? And if so, How do you tell it? Well, this is the Voigt-Camp test, which I've got the questions of if you want me to test. Have you? Oh, is it like a personality test to see if we're robots? Or humans.
Starting point is 00:22:08 I don't need the test. I'm well aware. Make a lot of sense of a lot of things in your life. In the book itself, do you know what they're called all these replicants? I thought they were called replicants. That's in the movie. Is it? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:22:19 In the book, they're called Andy's. Loftly. Are they? The plot thickens. Stop finding crimes. So this, so here we go, let me find. So some of them actually sort of a little bit upsetting. You have a little boy, and he shows you his butterfly collection,
Starting point is 00:22:37 including his killing jar. Oh dear. Yeah. So, I mean, it doesn't have a question mark on it, but I guess it's testing, do you have an emotional reaction to that? Okay, here go. We can all go round. Describe in single words, only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.
Starting point is 00:22:53 Killing jar. single words fun sexy I'd also like to enter the word sexy for down as much Sigmund Freud says you get full marks So this one My briefcase, nice isn't it Department issue baby hide
Starting point is 00:23:14 100% genuine human baby hide Okay So I guess it's supposed to make you feel If you're upset about that You're probably human Yeah I have a strong reaction you don't just take it on face value. You have an emotional reaction.
Starting point is 00:23:27 I think that's the test. And in the movie and in the book, they have a machine that specifically is looking directly into your eyeball. So it's the dilation of the people. Exactly. The question is answered by your body, I guess, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. It is a good film and it is a good book.
Starting point is 00:23:43 The book's great, yeah. Yeah, but I think they are quite ponderous. Come at me in the comments if you disagree. Tell us a film you like, then, that you prefer in this sort of genre. He likes Pacific Rim. What's Pacific Rim? Well, big monsters have started coming up
Starting point is 00:23:59 through the cracks in the ocean floor from another dimension. We've got to build giant robots to fight them. Wow. That's an exciting episode of Andy's bottom sharks, isn't it? I'm saying this. In Pacific Rim, everyone knows who isn't a robot
Starting point is 00:24:10 and we can crack on with the real meat of the film which is beating the monsters, the kaiju. So, you know, do you sort of mean? Harrison Ford isn't interrogating the robots. So you don't like subtlety. I'm saying I like obviousness. There was one of the reviews of Blade when it came out that said some of the scenes seem to have six subtexts, but no text and no
Starting point is 00:24:28 context either. Wow. So I think it's so interesting because the questions that they were asking then about what are the capabilities of these machines that are working alongside us are the questions that we are continuing to ask. The only thing that's changed is the technology. We're still asking those same things, aren't we? It's really, when I read it, it's incredibly poignant for what's going on right now in the world of AI. It's extraordinary. I guess that's the thing of a good sci-fi writer like Philip Dick, it's looking forward and seeing the problems we might run into. But it's also worth saying the book is incredibly different from the movie. So there's an idea that you're asking
Starting point is 00:25:01 the question, is Harrison Ford a replicant himself? Harrison Ford said he wasn't, Ridley Scott said he was. So we don't even know from the filmmaker's side, which one is which. Which one of those two people wrote the... Neither. We need to ask the person who wrote the script. Yes, exactly. Call Hampton Fancher. Quite clearly a robot panicking of trying to think of a human name. Have you guys seen the movie Taking Tiger Mountain? No, what happens in that? I think so. What happens in that is what happens in the Blade Runner, the original book, because it eventually was adapted into a movie, and that was starring Bill Paxton. So the novel that William Burroughs
Starting point is 00:25:39 wrote, Blade Runner, Brackets, a movie, was off the back of the original Alan Norse novel, Blade Runner. Yeah. And it was a pitch for it to be a screenplay, and then he realized it probably wasn't going to be adapted, so he turned it, Burroughs turned his work into a novella. What that means is that he wrote the novel of the pitch of the film of the novel. Oh,
Starting point is 00:26:03 interesting. And then Philip K. Dick was asked to write the novel of the movie. Of Blade Runner, yes. Of the book that he wrote. Of his own book. Yeah, but he refused. Brilliant. Because he thought that if he did that,
Starting point is 00:26:16 people would stop buying his book. Yeah. Wouldn't that have been amazing? It's so weird. It's so strange. It's just the whole... I mean, this is probably the most confusing section we've ever done for an audience trying to piece these together.
Starting point is 00:26:27 We need a big wall chart, don't we, with lines? Even that movie that I just mentioned, Taking Tiger Mountain, which was the adaption of the Blade Runner original book. Pre-Barrows. Yeah. There was a movie that was made, which was based on a art film by Albert Camus. His book called The Stranger.
Starting point is 00:26:46 They filmed the whole thing, but they didn't do any dialogue for it because they thought they'd do that post. a new director came in, used all that stuff, but applied the Blade Runner to it. Oh, guys, will you think of the editor, please, when you're saying these facts. It's so confusing. What's going to happen, James, is this section of the podcast, in years to come, there are going to be seven or eight different cuts of this section of the podcast. They'll be the Harkin cut, sure, but there'll be the Shriver cut.
Starting point is 00:27:15 People quite often listen to podcasts to fall asleep, and this bit they'll think is their subconscious, chopping it into different pieces and making it confusing so they're not really listening properly. That sort of makes you think, we must have enough stuff filmed by now that we can basically make anything new. Like, let's just use our existing stock. I think in the future they're going to say, do you know the famous TV show and these bottom sharks was actually based on a podcast? And bizarrely, Andy, what you just said with having extra footage that we can just reuse, that actually happened for Blade Runner the movie itself, because in the final scenes, they used shots from the Shining that weren't used in the main movie, yeah, and included
Starting point is 00:27:54 it as sort of background shots. So the Shining is in the Blade Runner movie. Bloody hell. Yeah. It goes deep, doesn't it? It really does go deep. Isn't it true that the alien world, the Blade Runner world, are one world together? My wife told me this, but she's watched them on, I haven't. Interesting.
Starting point is 00:28:12 I think there's like one mention in like the second alien that says, yes, they're definitely the same world. That's terrific. Because it might be things like the same company operates across because in Alien, the whole thing is the Wayland Utani Corporation. And that might get a mention in Playwright. I don't know. That's brilliant. Can I tell you a thing about William Burroughs? Yeah. The author who wrote... Played one of the movie buckets. One of these things. Yeah, yeah. So he was a big generation writer. Very interesting person. I didn't really know anything about him. The only thing I'd vaguely heard of, which is the awful thing in his life, which is that
Starting point is 00:28:44 He and his wife once had taken a huge amount of drugs and he tried to do a William Tell Act shooting something off her head and he missed and he shot her and he killed her. That's his version. Yeah, he was a really strange guy. Oh, yeah. He was very eccentric. He was on huge numbers of drugs his whole life.
Starting point is 00:29:02 He said that he could just stare at his shoes for eight hours a day and frequently did. But do you know how Burroughs had this lifestyle and was able to just sort of muck around? So where his money came from? Yeah. Rich parents. He got an allowance from his parents until he was nearly 50.
Starting point is 00:29:17 Right. But the reason he got an allowance from his parents until he was nearly 50 is that his grandfather, William Seward Burroughs the first, our William Burroughs was the second. He had invented the Burroughs adding machine. It was a calculator and pretty much every business in America bought one of these adding machines. It was incredibly useful. Is it one of those ones that you see in old movies where they kind of, it's like a big calculator and they go, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then like, like, pretty much. And it prints out.
Starting point is 00:29:44 Prints out a real, yeah, exactly. And it was, yeah, it was one of the biggest American computing companies in the 50s and 60s. And what is this? It's a robot, a thinking machine. Oh, I see. And it's sort of allowed Blade Runner to, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:30:02 Yeah, sure. So Philip K. Dick took loads of drugs as well. Yeah. Into the same things. And apparently the end of his life, he sort of like a rosy mist and all these kind of, yeah. He had, he had, in his final period of his life, it was in 19. 1974, he saw a fish symbol, a necklace on a woman glow red, and he felt information suddenly just was transmitted to him. And he believed that it was from an alien species.
Starting point is 00:30:27 That's quite an excuse when you're staring at a woman's breasts. Sorry, there's information coming. Okay, it's time for fact number three. And that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that most people wouldn't wear a sweater owned by Hitler, but they might if Mother Teresa wore it for long enough in between. So has she won this in like an eBay auction? Like, how did she get her hands on this? She's bought it.
Starting point is 00:30:57 She's bought it, but high for it. Did she dry clean it after Hitler? Has anyone cleaned it ever? Well, this is a study called the Contagion Concept in Adult Thinking in the United States by Carol Nemeroff and Paul Rosen. And there's lots of different things that they did with this imaginary jumper. So they had different people wear it. So it might be Hitler, but it might be a lover of the person you're interviewing.
Starting point is 00:31:22 Or it might be someone they really admire. Or it might be that they rub it in dog poo or various different things. And then they try and ameliorate the effect by giving it to a nice person. Or they might clean it with detergent or just with water. or boil it or deodorize it. This is all imaginary, this jumper. This is all made up. Okay.
Starting point is 00:31:45 And did they ever show you a picture of the jumper? Yeah. Or have you imagined it? You imagine it. It's simply a question of, would you wear this jumper if this had happened to it? Right. And then they took all of the different results of what everyone said and then generalized to the entire world. So, but actually they generalised to people in the US.
Starting point is 00:32:05 And the reason being that there's this kind of thing called the Law of Contagion, which is a folk belief that you get all around the world. where if you've been in contact with an object, then people think some of your attributes go into that object. It happens in Papua New Guinea. It happens in Africa. It happens in medieval Europe. You get it quite a lot of.
Starting point is 00:32:25 But this study was to see if it happened in the US as well. And what they found is the basics is that people would not wear anything that was worn by Hitler, but they might wear it if someone good, like Mother Teresa, or someone sexy, had worn it in between. and they would probably know... Are we saying Mother Teresa's not sexy? I'm sorry. She looks so much like Dan's mom. Yeah, so Princess Diana,
Starting point is 00:32:52 someone else who's sort of seen as good as good. Sure, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Because at the start, they interview people and said, who do you think is good? Who do you think is sexy? Who do you think is trustworthy? And with the sort of washing and stuff like that,
Starting point is 00:33:04 basically, if you wash it or if you deodorize it or if you air it out, people are slightly more likely to wear it but if you boil it then they're really more likely to do it so if you get Hitler's jumper and you give it a good old very hot wash then people are more likely to wear it after that
Starting point is 00:33:22 I shrink though I mean do we know what is it wool because I did try to find evidence of any of Hitler's jumpers going up for auction he doesn't seem to have been a big jumper guy no it's very little his jacket wasn't he who's more jacket well one of his jackets did
Starting point is 00:33:39 In 2016, there was a buyer who spent £600,000 at a single auction on Nazi memorabilia, including things like the brass canister that contained the hydrogen cyanide that Goer and killed himself with. I mean, quite astrue stuff and quite gory stuff. But one of the things was £210,000 on Hitler's jacket. Right. And the buyer was a nameless man from Argentina who declined to give his name. That's a joke, isn't it? No.
Starting point is 00:34:04 What? No. He said, I'm not going to tell you my name. I am from Argentina. Oh, my goodness. I know. So we can only speculate. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:34:13 Crakey. There was a thing, this guy, Paul Rosen. Paul Rosen. Very interesting character because he's sort of known as the leading authority on disgustingness. He spends his life studying disgusting stuff. And he was saying, if you were put off by the idea of Hitler, to what level would that bleed into your life? Because, for example, any glass of water that you drink in Europe will contain a few molecules that would have passed through Hitler. And so if you found that out, does that put you off drinking, like to what level are you not wanting any association?
Starting point is 00:34:46 And that's why I have my watershipped in from Argentina. Yeah, no, you're right. And did it, sorry, just to ask. No, I think, no, I'm not sure that he's put that to the study yet. He was sort of talking about the extremes of where you could take the association with Hitler as a contagion. And this was done a few years ago, wasn't it, the study, James? Ninety-94. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:35:08 So, I mean, I don't know how Hitler's reputation has been in America over the last few years. How fashion has changed. Kim Kardashian and a Hitler jumper. Everyone will want one. She'll be stretching that out. I'm sorry, but she and Adolf did not have the same characteristics. And so this is relevant in real life.
Starting point is 00:35:27 It's not just an academic thing. So things like drinking water. So you mentioned the Hitler water thing, Dan. So Hitler never went to Singapore. But Singapore, as far as I know, I mean his allies got there never mind the point is Singapore purifies water from sewage water
Starting point is 00:35:44 right and people drink it and it's fine I mean it's absolutely fine this water it has been treated it doesn't contain any contaminants anything that you make you ill it is clean water but in lots of other places around the world places which don't have like the space constraints of Singapore
Starting point is 00:36:00 people object massively to this and it's to do with this contagion theory so that is relevant to how we run the idea of it. It's the idea. I mean the water effectively has been boiled. Yes. But our brains are just never going to keep up with something that high concept.
Starting point is 00:36:16 Like we're always going to add one and one together and go, that's the sewage. Yeah. Yeah. What if Hitler's jumper was turned into a scarf? So they unravelled all the wall and made something different. Yeah. Does that make a big difference? It makes a little bit of a difference.
Starting point is 00:36:29 So they ask people if it had been re-knitted, gashed, unravelled, cut up and burned. would you wear it afterwards? And burning had the best effects, although it's not going to look good at burns. What I'm wearing, yeah. If it's re-knitted, some people are more likely to a little bit, but burning and boiling seems to be people will forgive any ice of clothing if you do that.
Starting point is 00:36:52 The area of this I found interesting in disgust is disgust an arousal. Okay. Did you look into that? No. No. Andy? Too busy living it. What?
Starting point is 00:37:02 I don't know what that means. Well, it is. Well, it is really, really, really interesting in human psychology. So it's a bi-directional psychology. So the two things coexist, disgust and arousal. I knew about this because I had read probably in Mary Roach's book, Bonk, about the fact that when women are aroused, they will do things that they consider disgusting when they're unaroused.
Starting point is 00:37:27 And that just makes such basic sense for evolution in that sexual... But Sarah, do you mean like if I... Got my wife aroused. Yes. And then I suddenly say, great, take the bins out. Well, this is what they do in tests, because you can't. But this is your thing. So I don't know if your wife, it's a really good example.
Starting point is 00:37:45 It only won't so many times. It's cruel. So, so basically the really common sense thing is, if you ask a woman, what do you think of the idea of this sexual act? And let's say something really quotidian, like oral sex. Okay. That's cotidian? So very soberly, most people don't really like the idea of it. But when they're aroused, that goes out of the window.
Starting point is 00:38:12 And it only seems to happen with women. But I look into, I've had three studies, and they're all university students. And I worry that that's because 22-year-old students are just disgusting anyway, like the men. So they're very difficult to study. But what they do, they make them watch arousing videos, and then they get them to do different tasks. And some of them are like, eat, have a bite of that biscuit, and it's next to a living worm. and people who have watched a soft core erotica are more likely to bite the biscuit
Starting point is 00:38:40 and say they didn't disgust them. Wow. It's amazing. And they're much more likely to touch what they're told is a bowl of used condoms if they've watched this sort of soft pornography than if they've watched a video of the Olympics. They just show them physical activity
Starting point is 00:38:53 or sexual activity or obviously a control group. Yeah, right. This is men or women, or both? Both, but the results seem to be showing a lot more for women. It's got me an idea for a restaurant. Oh? Doesn't matter how good the food is, but you just put porn on the TVs all the time. And people will enjoy the food more.
Starting point is 00:39:10 Yeah. Welcome to Andy's bottom feeders. Did you read about these studies that have shown that conservative people find things more disgusting than liberal people? And it's to such an extent that if you put a scanner on someone's head and you look at their brain, you can show them one single image of, say, some people. food with maggots in, and you can measure their brain activity, and you can tell with a 95 to 98% accuracy, whether they would vote conservative or liberal. Wow. Amazing.
Starting point is 00:39:44 Yeah. There's lots of reasons why they think it might be the case. Obviously, we don't really know, but it's basically conservatives are a bit more trusting of their natural reactions, and liberals are more likely to do something called cognitive reappraisal, which is you see something disgusting, but then you think, well, actually, it's just natural that maggots eat food. because they're animals as well. You kind of think about it yourself
Starting point is 00:40:06 and come up with reasons about it rather than just trusting your initial reaction. So can we run elections based on this? Like, do we need to bother with all the bits of paper and the boots? Can't we just all get our heads scanned and be told, Lib Dem, or whatever? Yeah.
Starting point is 00:40:19 Like a sorting hat, but it's full of maggots. It's worth for trying. We've sorted it up. People have saved the government billions. One of us here is likely to be disgusted so the rest of us ooh who could it be I love tourists
Starting point is 00:40:37 is it me is it someone from the north of England it's not about being from the north of England gender it's not gender oh is it glasses wearing glasses it's like guess who now
Starting point is 00:40:51 is it people who like golf it's not people who like golf it's something one of us puts in their mouth on a regular basis smoking no being vegan Oh, being vegan.
Starting point is 00:41:05 If you come off meat for a month, you are likely to catch disgust. So the more people cut out meat during, say they're doing veganry, the more their meat disgust will grow. So, I mean, it's actually not, I mean, because you've been a vegan for ages. Well, I've been vegetarians since I was seven. I was talking to someone recently. And actually, when I speak to people who, you know, give up meat and come back to meat, they have such a different response.
Starting point is 00:41:27 Because for me, it's like cannibalism. And obviously, I don't talk about this when they're eating their food, and it's just a personal, I actually don't say it out loud, because it's not a moral judgment. I do understand that people get to choose their own food. But for me, there's no difference between a beef burger and, oh, yeah, this is a human child. A man burger.
Starting point is 00:41:44 Yeah, a man burger. Yeah. Long pig, as they call it. Why are you saying it's such creepy, Andy? I was trying to keep it crazy. You know what? He does this all the time. Just a lot of these words come out very, very creepy.
Starting point is 00:41:58 As they say. I think nobel is creepy. I'm not afraid of saying that. So, Paul Rosen, I mean, he's done so many studies on this, and all of them are interesting. I find it's so fascinating what he's done. So here's a really interesting one. This is all about food, right? And this is, I think, from 1986.
Starting point is 00:42:16 And he's just been doing it decades. He reported that most participants showed a preference for a normally shaped piece of fudge over fudge shaped like dog feces. Now, I would say so far so obvious, right? Many were far less willing to hold fake vomit made of rubber in their mouths. than a clean new rubber sink stopper. Again, yeah. But I know he's telling people it's clean, that's the thing. It's the association.
Starting point is 00:42:41 You do. If you go to any tourist shop in England, you can buy poo-shaped candy. Can you? I've had a version of this in my life where my son, he got really obsessed with the toilet brush. And so obviously there's two things we had to do. One is I bought a brand-new toilet brush with a toilet, and I bought him his own toilet brush, and it's from the same place. and no one's comfortable with him playing with it
Starting point is 00:43:05 because it's a toilet brush and it's never been used in the toilet until he did start using it in the toilet because he wants the reaction but at the beginning it was just Christmas and everyone was acting like I was weird no I get that completely I understand but it's just a brush
Starting point is 00:43:19 the first ever Christmas tree was made out of toilet brushes and painted green yeah so in a way you would be a very festive very Christmassy this year everyone's getting one then with a fun fact attached Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.
Starting point is 00:43:39 Stop the podcast. Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Saly. Dan, you know me. I'm always going around the world, dragging my wife to some terrible museum or weird geological formation. And when I do that,
Starting point is 00:43:54 I go to a different country and I always need data. And it's so hard to find the right, data plan most of the time. Yeah, that's right. I honestly get shivers down my spine whenever we do with Saly ad when I think back to all of those trips over the years where I was just using my phone overseas, racking up bills that basically ruined the holiday when I discovered how much I'd spent while I was out there. Saly gets rid of all of this because it means you can go to over 200 destinations around the world and be able to use the Saly app to find you the best rates, the most reduced prices
Starting point is 00:44:26 while you're there so you can comfortably use your phone without any worry. Over 200 destinations. I didn't even know there were that many destinations. So good news, Polina, plenty more obscure geological formations to go and see. Oh, I'm so sorry, Palina. I'm so sorry. If you at home would like to get Saly, then the way to do that is to download the Saly app and use the code FISH at checkout.
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Starting point is 00:45:08 All right. On with the show. On with the podcast. Okay. It's time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy. My fact is, there is a spider in Norfolk which can catch fish. Do you know what the creepiest thing anyone can ever say to you?
Starting point is 00:45:28 It's what Carriad said to me yesterday. She said, Andy text to me, is Sarah scared of spiders? That's a creepy thing to hear, isn't it? I asked her not to pass that on. She told me that as well, which made it creepy. He said not to tell you I've asked. Oh, dear. And you're not too scared of spiders.
Starting point is 00:45:48 I'm not scared of spiders, no. Some people are very funny about them, obviously, so I just wanted to check that before we. Oh, you were asking just to see if we could even talk about the concept of spiders? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. And this is the Queen of the Marsh, the Fenraft Spider, Norfolk, and Suffolk as well. Sorry to any Suffolkers who are listening who thought I'd been missing you out. And it's just a really cool spider.
Starting point is 00:46:09 It's just about the biggest in the UK, I think. How big is it? Show me your hand? About that big. Great. Okay, so it's massive. It's broad. Yeah, yeah.
Starting point is 00:46:16 It's broad. It's Norfolk broad. And it's another great story of reintroduction. They got down to a very, very few left, and then the people who live around there who are working conservation have restored their habitat load and they've been breeding them up. And the RSPB recently announced, not so incy-wincey spider makes incredible comeback. They're really cool. And they're not interested in your house. They don't like you.
Starting point is 00:46:39 If you don't like spiders, don't worry. They're not coming for you. Yeah. And they can basically sit on top of the water, which is the most fascinating thing if you watch a video. It's Fenraft Spider. They are the raft. Yeah. It's extraordinary.
Starting point is 00:46:52 It's the hairs, isn't it, on the legs that allow them to do that, I think. And that also helps them to feel vibrations. So if a fish is going past, they can just feel the vibration on their little hairs and go, and they run across the water and they grab the fit. I mean, there's sticklebacks, obviously. It's not salmon or anything that they're catching, but they are. They're pretty cool. They're slightly big relative to the size of the spider itself, you know,
Starting point is 00:47:14 because the spider can go underwater as well. So it will go down on the branch of a vine or whatever that's going into the water. it will just hang out there. It can stay there for about an hour. And I've seen videos of, you know, little creatures coming up and launching like a spider wood and bringing it back in and consuming it. And they're close to the same size as the spider. Can we talk about Helen Smith? Yes. The heroine of this whole story of bringing the spiders back into the Norfolk Broads. So she hand-reared 3,000 baby Fenraf spiders in her own kitchen. And these were the first ones that they put into into the water. her. And eventually some other charities got involved and they eventually put 30,000 in. But she
Starting point is 00:47:56 definitely started it. And she would line up every single one of these spiders in an individual test tube. Because if you put two of them in a test tube, they just eat each other. So they had to be all kept separate. And then she had to personally feed them flies for a full year so that they would grow big enough to let them go. 30,000. 3,000 she did. And then eventually it was 30,000. And she had to collect the flies herself Because they eat like fruit flies I want to make fun of her A lot
Starting point is 00:48:27 But I'm also really scared of her I think there's a kind of person You don't want to make an enemy of someone with access to 3,000 spiders And with that kind of attention to detail That's what you should have asked Carrie had to ask Are you scared of Helen? Yeah, I'm really scared of Helen from Norfolk She had to get these fruit flies
Starting point is 00:48:44 And apparently the best place to get them Was from compost heaps or horse dung and so she said How aroused was she? She said she had spent a lot of time with a sweep net following ponies and waiting for them to poo
Starting point is 00:49:02 just so that she could get the flies when they first arrived on the poo. Isn't that mad? Good Lord. The neighbours, the people who didn't know what she was doing. All of her behaviour. Do you want to come in for a cup of tea?
Starting point is 00:49:15 She's a hero. Yeah, what a don. So cool. And you now get spider tourism. People visit these nature reserves because their webs are, I mean, they are massive and their webs are massive too. The webs are apparently the size of a normal pizza. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:49:27 Wow. And then obviously when they give birth, there's thousands and thousands more. Oh, yeah. So little baby ones. Yeah, right. In the sacks. They're really good mums.
Starting point is 00:49:36 The female Fenraud. Which not all spiders are. Not all spiders are. Well, female, she has an egg sack. Yeah. Which is just a big bag of eggs. And she carries it round for three weeks in this bag
Starting point is 00:49:49 and if it gets too cold she will lift the bag up towards the sun and if it gets too hot she will dunk it in the water to cool it down a bit and she goes that whole time without eating because you're busy
Starting point is 00:49:58 and then she spins this nursery web as it's called the size of a pizza and suspends that above water and if you go to the Norfolk broads to see these things you can see these discs just off the path
Starting point is 00:50:10 in the water these nursery webs full of the spiderlings but yeah spiders Well, these ones, just one more thing about these ones, they're one of only two spiders protected in UK law. Really? Yeah, the ladybird spider. This is the other one.
Starting point is 00:50:26 It's the Wildlife and Countryside Act of 1981. So if you intentionally kill, injure, or take a raft spider, then you are guilty of an offence. And if you say that you're intending to sell one as well, that's illegal. On the dark web. Oh, brilliant. Thank you. Very, very good.
Starting point is 00:50:48 Other animals that you are not allowed to kill in the UK, the wart bite of grasshopper, the trembling seaman, the slow worm, the glutinous snail, the small blue butterfly and the large blue, basically any blue butterfly. That's why we can't do, I'm a celebrity, get me out of here in this country. Yes, you have to go to Australia where we can eat everything. Did you say the glutinous seamat? No, I said the glutinous snail.
Starting point is 00:51:13 Oh, there was a seaman. It was trembling or something. Sea mat. That's an amazing I've never heard of that. They live in the sea around the United Kingdom and they're basically algal mats I think Trembling Seamats. Kind of knock off SpongeBob SquarePants
Starting point is 00:51:27 is what I'm hearing. Yeah I'll give you that. Are they just terrified the whole time? They shouldn't be because they're protected. Yeah. I know it's rising sea levels, global warming. I'm not the only people that are worried. I think they're scared of Andy's bottom sharks
Starting point is 00:51:42 just to bring that back again. You know that spiders can envenomate you after they've been squished. What? So this was a story from this year in California. There was a 37-year-old woman who went to the emergency room because her eye was all swollen and goopy and felt like it was burning. And apparently 20 minutes earlier, her husband had killed a western black widow spider with a hammer. It splattered in all directions and some of it went in her eye and she got envenomated.
Starting point is 00:52:12 Oh, my God. How closely was she looking at the spider? Before we hammered it. There's so much of that story that's horrible. Oh, yes. It's hammered a spider to death. It's an awful story. I think what I'm saying is don't squash spiders.
Starting point is 00:52:24 No. Yeah. No. There's no need to. No, they're our friends. Well, Black Widow spiders are not our friends. However. But they're still important to the ecosystem.
Starting point is 00:52:33 Absolutely. But so am I. I'd say human beings. There's too many of us. Yeah. Not you personally, but in terms of the ecosystem. No, no, that's fair. But if we're going to start with anyone, Andy, we might as, you know.
Starting point is 00:52:47 I feel like I've had a good run. I always say to my daughter, whenever there's a spider, I'm like, spiders are our friends, and they're really important. And I am actually terrified of spiders, so I don't really believe it when I say. I mean, I do believe it, but I'm, like, hiding my own fear. You have to show that you're not afraid, which is tricky. Do you find that it helps you, that it's helping your response to spiders that you now can't? Maybe. You have to measure it.
Starting point is 00:53:11 I suppose so. I can't show fear in front of my. Yeah, because it's a reinforced fear. So actually, I think it's really good for lots of, you know, lots of people. So, while when they have children to then temper it, then you go, actually, I am less panicky about it. And if you have to be the person that puts it safely outside, you do realize. My wife does that. Oh, did she?
Starting point is 00:53:29 Yeah, yeah. But that's only because you're trying to arouse her. Did you do, Dan and James, did you get the photo I sent you the recently, not long ago, of a big spider. You mean the one we didn't reply to? Was it on, well was it, mom? It was a big spider? On email. No, it was WhatsApp.
Starting point is 00:53:44 Oh, yeah. I don't recall. How big was it? It was big. It was a house spider, but it was a big one. It was in my house. It was not only in my house, Sarah. It fell onto my naked shoulder as I sat in bed.
Starting point is 00:53:56 Andy, I've got an experience very, very, very similar where I was once canceling a dentist appointment and I could feel a little thing of hair in my face like this. And I was just brushing this hair off. It was why I was interesting what you were saying about the hairs balancing on the water. I was just brushing this hair off my face. So first in the morning. And then I pushed. And then I had.
Starting point is 00:54:13 heard it hit the floor and it was so massive and there's a mirror there and I think if I'd actually seen it on my face I would have died if I'd actually seen it on my face but I just felt it there so like having just got out but they do come on us in the night they do come on us in the night and I did see the photo now that you say it Andy I do remember it was bad as it a glass couldn't fit over it well yeah I have very narrow necked glasses but still yours are you only drink champagne I should have started with a flute I should have gone with the Mary Antoinette, but that was my fault. And it was just from a clear blue sky, from the ceiling, basically.
Starting point is 00:54:49 What the heck? Yeah, I find it so as someone who spent my teenage years in Australia, I don't, they're friendly here, comparative to Australia when they kill you. So it's, I don't find them in any way scary here. There's a few, there was a great incident I read about, were a guy called Matthew Stevens, he was a chef, and he was cleaning behind a freezer at the Quantock Gateway Pub and Bridgewater, when suddenly, he was, yeah, he was, yeah, we had.
Starting point is 00:55:13 We've all been there. And he was bitten twice on his hand by what turned out to be a Brazilian wandering spider. And that's very dangerous. Yes. They come in like bananas, don't they? And this is where this came from. It traveled in the bananas overseas, made it to him. And this is how intense a spider, this kind of spider is.
Starting point is 00:55:34 Once he knocked it off of him, he knocked it into an open freezer, and then he drenched it in boiling water. and it still was just fine. Well, that's because you've got hot and cold. It was just a very pleasant temperature. You're right. He thinks he's on a spa retreat. It's like a lukewarm bar. The spider's thinking,
Starting point is 00:55:54 I will review the quantops well. Yeah, and so they collected the spider in the jar and they brought it to where he was at the hospital. Why did they do that? I guess if you're supposed to. Yeah, you're meant to show what bit you because you're like, we need the antivenom. Sorry, I thought you meant he was recovering in hospital
Starting point is 00:56:11 And they found it and brought it in her like, yeah, get you again, to apologize. The worst is when I was attacked by a bear, and I had to bring the bear into the hospital. This is why I was attacked by it. Yeah, but so they brought it in, and it was in a jar. And then someone who worked in the hospital saw it and thought, oh, I should put this back out and let it back loose and out of the wild. Yeah. And they said, we probably shouldn't worry because it was probably going to die a couple of days after. I think it wouldn't like it in Bridgewater.
Starting point is 00:56:35 Yeah, exactly. So temperature is, yeah. Yeah. But yeah. Good grief. Should we have a positive spider effect? Yeah, okay. As opposed to all this scary stuff.
Starting point is 00:56:45 Some people think, and when I say people, I mean scientists, consider that a spider's web should be considered part of its mind. Right. That's weird, isn't it? So it's an externalisation of, not of consciousness, but of thought. Is that why? Because I guess the web, if it's as far away from, if it heals the movement, therefore your brain is registering.
Starting point is 00:57:05 Exactly. Right. And they have foresight, they have planning, they change their web structure based on how much they have left in their silk glands. So if they're running a bit low, they'll make a simpler web. So it's kind of an external brain in lots of ways. So it would be like antennae going off what Dan said in terms of, or, you know, like animals where they can feel whether they're going into a space that's too small.
Starting point is 00:57:25 There's an externalisation of sense, isn't it? Like whiskers, yeah, yeah. Although they'll do like market research on what's hitting their web and sticking. So if prey is hitting it and bouncing off, they'll rejig the web so it's got more sticky pads on it to catch more. Or if the local prey is a different size to what they're expecting, they'll change the web based on that. It's so cool. It's really good, isn't it?
Starting point is 00:57:47 Yeah, they are good. Yeah, they're clever. The male Asian hermit spiders become better at fighting if you cut their penises off. Yeah. Like what they're getting in the way or what is it that's... No, so they're one of these spiders where after they've had sex, they usually remove their penises and keep it inside the female's reproductive tracks. Oh, yeah.
Starting point is 00:58:08 No other male can... A plug, yeah. Yeah, as a plug. Oof. But they also get... It's not really common. It's not really common. In nature, yes, because it's one of the best ways of sperm competition.
Starting point is 00:58:17 Yeah. But the other thing they do to make sure that their sperm is successful is they become very, very aggressive. And they start fighting off any other spiders who come and try and mate with the female. And so that means if you just cut their penis off, then they still get all these hormones or whatever they are to make them really aggressive. And they'll just get really, really fighty. Yeah. What are you proposing? There's no proposal here
Starting point is 00:58:40 What are the ramifications to the British army? Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram, James. My Instagram is no such things James Harkin. Andy mine is Andrew Hunter M
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