Eddie the Eagle and Ski Jumping

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined by the incredibly funny and the absolutely charming Zoe lions . If you watch QI, which I bet you do if you listen to this, then you will know all about Zoe. She's always fantastic when she comes on our show. She's also brilliant on all the other things she does. Uh mock the week is probably what I mostly associate her with. But yeah, she's a brilliant comedian. She's so funny. She's so nice and so quick. I mean, all these comedians are, but Zoe, honestly, she is so quick off the blocks, it's unbelievable. And actually, what a nice segue. Uh, she has a podcast out all about running. Her podcast is called The Running Joke. It's with her and Esther Manito, and they just talk all about running. You don't have to be a fast runner to enjoy it. It's for everyone, really. Even if you just plod along at your own pace, but it's for you. It's extrem ely accessible. It's extremely funny, as you would expect everything to be that involves Zoe. And highly recommend you get that. It's called the Running Joke, and you get it wherever you get your podcasts. While I'm here, like always, I should remind you about Clubfish. Go to patreon.com/slash clubfish. If you would like to get involved there, just sign up. You don't need to give us any money, and you will get extra little bits every now and then, like a newsletter that we're currently doing, which has lots of behind-the-scenes stuff, or you can give us a little bit of money every month, help support the podcast, and you can get ad-free episodes, you can get bonus content, you can get merch, you can even get a shout-out on our other show, LittleF ish. There's all sorts there for everyone. Go to patreon.com slash clubfish to learn more about that. But in the meantime, please enjoy this show, which I'm absolutely certain you will with the incredible Zoe Lions. Okay, up 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 am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Zoe Lyons, and once again, we have gathered round 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 Zoe. Thank you very much. And I've brought a lovely little fact along for you this week. Um apparently researchers have discovered that humans may have evolved to run long distances as a result of their endurance pursuit hunting skills. So the idea being that humans would pursue its prey for long, long periods of time to exhaust it. They'd use a technique of sort of running in in the in the heat predominantly to so um so that the animal become completely exhausted and can suffer from heat exhaustion. Eventually tire. We don't know how long it would take to tire. But I'm guessing quite a while if you want to over one mile, almost every animal in the world beats us. Yeah. Or at least any mammal, not like not insects don't, but like uh a house cat would absolutely batter us over a mile. Right But the further and further we get, the closer we get to them, and eventually over a couple of days we beat everyone. And is that is that because we've got things like energy buzz? It's largely Gatorade that has helped us become the dominant species. Yeah, yeah. Whereas cats, silly things, don't listen to things like that over the time. Yes, yes. So we've got longer legs. We've got a longer leg , but also we've got um I'm gonna say cracking buttocks. Do we? Yeah, we've got really good buttocks that help. Thank you for noticing. Thank you for noticing. You're the first guest we've ever had who noticed that. Yeah, cracking buttocks. It's the only reason on the podcast is a sit round with a selection of absolutely cracking buttocks . Um cracking buttocks is a great name for a podcast. It is, isn't it? But we've got cracking buttocks, we've got long uh tendons um and we've also got an incredible ability to sweat profusely which is a That has been mentioned. Yes, yes, I've been c cracking a window in a minute. Um so it means that whereas a deer or another mammal might suffer with the heat over the long long endurance runs, we are able to literally sweat it out. We can just get it radiated and chuck it away and that's really I also read that the upright thing is really interesting because us being upright means that when we're running we can separate breathing in and out and our strides, right? If you're a quadruped and you're running with your legs going in and out, you're sort of moving like an accordion. You know? Oh yeah. So you sort of you're sort of having to time your breathing. You're getting squeezed at various points. And this of course is why horses and dogs are famously bad runners. Um I'll tell you what, when I do running, I sound a bit like an accordion when I'm wheezing around. That wheezing sound. Yeah. But we can breathe independently of our stride, which is helpful when you're running on very long list of it. So you run a lot, right? Yeah, I've gone through phases of running a lot. I am now getting back into it and um I really, really it really took off me during the pandemic when we could do nothing else. So I started running and didn't really stop. Um without fear. And it culminated in my brother and I uh running from London to Brighton. So we did yeah, we did. How long is that? That's a hundred kilometres. Wow. Which sounds more it's sixty miles, but I always say 100 kilometres because I think that sounds more impressive. Triple Fegs, isn't it? Is there a big old hill right near the end? Right . Right at the end. Very, very close to the end. Ditchling beacons. It is ditch ling Beacon. It's an absolute bastard. Why has it been a nightmare for you, Andy? Well I cycle London to Brighton's. Oh yes. Everybody complains about that when they cycle it. It's a real pain. And it's it's quite a thing right at the end. Right. And we hit it it you know, was like two o'clock in the morning by the time we hit that. So did you do it in one go? We did it in one go, yeah. Yeah. It took a very, very, very long time. The reason I asked you that so is because when I was running, you tend to you do breathe on your steps, don't you? It's like a rhythm. You try and breathe when you're stepping. Yeah. Is that right? Well I now that I'm getting back into my running and I just did a half marathon a couple of weeks ago, I have a sort of meditative thing in my head where I asked a long distance runner once, he used to run hundreds of miles. I said, What do you think about? And he said, I just go, One, two, three, one, two, three and I went, Really? Psychopathic. Yeah. Sorry. Because he waltzing this right. Skip ball change, skip ball change, one, two, three. And shuffle, shuffle, shuffle. Shuffle, shuffle, yeah, yeah. I mean he did pretty well, but it's partnered in it backwards and heelsah., ye Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. When they came to the lifts it all fell apart. But I do that now when I'm running I got but I don't I don't stop at three, I go to eight. And it really helps with the breathing. It's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, and it becomes so meditative It becomes so meditative and it sort of tunes into your way of thinking and the sort of flow of your brain and the flow of your breath and do you know what might have happened to you during that one run between London and Brighton? At the end of it, you would have been shorter. Yes. You would have been about half an inch shorter. Yes. Because your spine gets so compressed as you're running that you literally lose height. So that would have recovered about 20 to 48 hours afterwards. But because of the length that you ran, not only might you have been shorter, but your brain might have been six percent smaller. Wow. Or up to six percent smaller. Really? Yeah. Well I mean I did question every moment of it after like there was a bit where I was going, why on earth are we doing this? Well this is it's what ultramarathon runners experience and it's basically when your body has run out of things to burn or is running out of things to burn, there's a fatty substance in your brain that coats around nerve cells called myelin and your brain just starts eating itself. Oh my goodness. Yeah. And that takes like six months to recover from Yeah. So you might have been half an inch shorter and six percent less intelligence. Right. I was completely delirious by the end. It does awful things to your body. I hadn't trained running and eating, and my I I I told my brother this as we set off and he went, Oh my god, really? I said, Yeah, I'll be fine. He went, You mean you've never run and eaten at the same time? I went, No, I'm sure it'd be absolutely fine. Anyway, can't you stop? Well I mean yes, but it's but it's but it's your body can't quite digest it. Let me just say it was quite catastrophic. Oh yeah, yeah, it was. I finished the race but not in the shorts I started in. Yeah. There's a definite cracking butt on that one. I was reading about this. So ultramarathons can induce consequences of all sorts through the world. We're all adults here. Come on, Andy. What do you mean? Okay. This is a piece on I think it was running world. If you've ever seen post race urine samples, you will know that things can be bad. I have seen a few pea cups after hot gruelling ultramarathons, and they could serve as the set location for my next big game show. Coca-Cola, tomato soup, or urine. Wow. It can be brown. It can have pulp. Apparently. Who's this? It can have bits. You don't want to know what that is, apparently. I mean it gets Oh gosh. But yeah, I guess if it like like I've had friends who've done like um the the marathon de sable in the in the Sahara and And that you know, that is intense. Absolute intense and the level of dehydration must be just yeah. Yeah, yeah. You'd be weing out all sorts of it well, dust I would imagine by the end of that. Yeah. So the idea that we've evolved to run is also the idea behind maybe barefoot running. Some people think it's healthier to run without shoes than it is to run with shoes. And I think the studies look at it and probably say that it's better to be barefoot than to just get a pair of trainers off the shelf. But if you get really specialist trainers, they're probably better still. They're so bouncy these days. Or it's I'm wearing basically two mattresses strapped on a feet. It's um it's I've got a new pair of shoes and they are bouncy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And they do help with the knees and everything. 'Cause I'm getting older as well, so it's you've gotta be careful of the joints and everything. So yeah, two big bouncy pairs of shoes. Speaking of bouncy, some people think that the obvious next step from barefoot running is completely naked running. Oh I'm gonna I'm gonna disagree with that and just say chaffing. Chaffing is bad. I was thinking there would be less chaffing if there was less clothing. No, skin on skin is not good. It's not good. Yeah. But there are some manufacturers that make something called naked shorts. They're about as naked as you can get with but they're still shorts. They still preserve your modesty. Right. But they're like you can hardly feel that they're on there. I was talking to somebody about this the other day about naked running, funny enough. And the thing is you know, we've got sort of high-tech running gear, it's designed to sort of pull the mo moisture away from the skin so you do retain you stay drier. But if you've just got sweaty skin on sweaty skin where ver that may be, whichever bit is touching which other other bit, um you will get problems. And it's things on a long distance on little things that you don't think about, like a label in your shorts can just over time you know, take a leg off . And also once it gets in your head, that's the thing, isn't it? Yeah. So you're running. And basically if you're relatively fit, you can keep running. But your brain is always telling you to stop unless you're an athlete. Yeah. Your brain's always saying, Oh, I'll just get to that next lamppost and then I'll stop. Yeah. And so if you feel anything like a little label, your brain is just saying, I need to stop. Stop and sort that label out. That that's a very interesting point. And there's a I've only found out recently there's a technique of running called Jeff ing, which apparently is what these hunters used to do as well. Um, which is a combination of run walking, and it's after a guy called Jeff Galloway, who was an American Olympian. And it's used by a lot of runners now, where you do uh conserve energy going up slight inclines or um if you if to to stop long term fatigue, walk for a bit. So it's running and walking. It's a combination of both. And apparently people are doing really, really good times on long distance runs by using that combination of running and walk and Jeffing it. I didn't realise I was actually a professional athlete just walking for a bit. Can I ask a question of you, Zoe? Yes. As the champion runner around the table. Um do you smile? Oh well while I'm running. Yeah. Well , not according to the race photos that I just got through, uh which were I'm going to say alarming. Okay, okay. In the late latest one, I look weirdly like David Cameron. Yeah. Right. Just like bitterly disappointed and puffy in the face. Is there a race photo that's kind of like a roller coaster photo? Like is there a spot? Yeah, yeah. It's a spot that just takes everyone. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I oh I do not look good in those photos. I think I'm smiling, but I'm clearly not I'm weak. Yeah. Because it could help. Right. Really? This is a there's there have been lots of obviously so l so many people are interested in what helps and h doesn't help when you're running. Um if you smile, it doesn't have to be a real smile. Yeah. You just have to stick one on. Okay. It means you will use a bit less oxygen, you'll you will run a bit more economically and your internal perceived exertion is low er than people who are frowning while they're running. I get that. I do understand. It goes back to what you were saying about saying stop, stop, I must stop. Apparently, if you change your internal monologue, and this goes back to Jeff Galloway, apparent ly tr trained people to uh think of positive words and his words were I've written them down, it was really lovely. It was um rela x, power, glide. Fantastic. So if you have those words going around in your head as you're running , that will help. So I'm gonna smile. Well this is why I'm gonna start shouting at joggers. Cheer up, yeah. Why don't you try relaxing? Is it the old thing that you used to see on greetings cards, which is like it takes fewer muscles to smile than frown or whatever else? Is it to do with that? All right. Yeah, it takes fewer muscles still to stuff that card up somebody's arsehole so it's like Shove that where the sun doesn't shine. Very funny. There is of course one animal that can outrun all humans. I know you said that almost every mammal is better. Really? Over long distances? Over long distances? Yeah. A heron. Okay. Heron. But that it's cheating if you're running with your wings in the air. Absolutely. Yep. Well she she's broken various records. She's run at one point five hundred and sixty miles in six days. Oh my goodness.. Yeah But there's been a bit of a scandal about her. Ooh. She's lost her support from Lulu Le Mon. Okay. Oh, so Lulu Lemon is what, a clothing company. Clothing company. They do very, very expensive sports gear, don't they? And basically her husband was found to have been editing Wikipedia entries of other runners to remove various runs that they had done and various achievements that they made. I think the implication is to make uh to make his wife look better. Yes. Oh dear. Apparently she didn't know about it, but it's it's caused a bit of a my wife does that with other podcasters on Wiki and it's I don't see what's wrong with it. You'll find no trace at all of off-menu on Wikipedia. It's a huge show. It should be there. Okay, it is time for fact number two , and that is my fact. My fact this week is that celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain used to chop his onions with a knife from outer space. Correct , correct reaction. Yeah. Um so I I discovered this. This is there's an amazing photo on a blog of a photographer called David Scott Holloway who has this beautiful shot of this knife that used to belong to Bourdain. And it was a knife that featured origin ally in a TV show that Bourdain had done where he was meeting a lot of master craftsmen who were involved in the world of food. And one of the people was Bob Kramer. And Bob Kramer makes knives where he blends steel and meteorite together. And there's a huge waiting list of people who request them, and largely they're brought at auction these days. And Bourdain said it was his favourite knife. Um and so now Bourdain is dead and a lot of his stuff was auctioned, so it went up for auction. Oh what did you I was I was outbid unfortunately I was outbid before it started, uh 'cause the opening price was fifty thousand. Wow It went for two hundred and fifty thousand American American dollars. Okay, okay, okay. And it wasn't so you weren't gonna pay that. Oh, I'm not interested in an unsigned space knife. Are you kidding me? Can you put it in the dishwasher? That's what I need to know. Pretty wild, isn't it? Yes. Um actually all my knives cut onions perfectly well. Yes. So, you know, was this that much better that it's worth that, do you think? Well this I mean, this is Bourda in saying that it is, so we have to go by him because obviously we haven't it's just cool, isn't it, that it's made of a meteorite. It is just cool. Um and does Kramer does he still make them? Yeah, I believe so. Yeah. Um it's kind of his thing. But so there are some of these meteorite knives out there. It's not it's not just it's not a one-off. It's not a one-off, no. I think I have heard that every Toby Carvery in the UK has one meteorite samurai knife. Yeah, that's what they use, you know. Right, yeah, yeah. I think he gets his meteorite off eBay as well. He's like there's so much meteorite on eBay. Why do you c source your meteorite? Well probably to call it a meteor meteorite. Wow. I have some meteorite at home, which I just bought off eBay. Oh yeah? Yeah, you can't just buy it. They're not very expensive, little bits of meteorite. How do you verify it's meteorite ? Like to your when you feel it, are you like, well that doesn't feel very worldly? It's in a it's it's in a tube you've got a tube. But it has a little um little thing next to it saying this is a meteorite. I was about to say where does it come from? Outer space. I think it's from Morocco. That's so cool. How did you come buy that? I just bought it for my wife for Christmas. It was very cheap. Was it? Well, cheaper than you'd think. I can't remember exactly how much, but that's fascinating. Because then you can do a kind of follow yonder star thing, can't you? What do you mean? I've brought well, you know, the the Christmas story. You see the star in the sky. Yeah. Well, I've captured that star and I've bought a bit of it. The stars aren't of steel though. Well, let's press on two. Can I tell you my favourite knife? Yes. So have you heard of Kinmen? Who? Kinmen is an island. Tiny Taiwanese island. Very close to the mainland of China, right? Right. So there was a spell of um weirdly, um China and Taiwan, they used to not get along very well. And there was a spell before they became one country. Exactly Time of recording and all that. Um no th they would bomb each other. They would shell each other. And I think they would do it on alternate days of the week. So China got to bomb Kinmen on like Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays and then and and K Kinmen will bomb on Tuesdays, Thursdays, Saturdays. I think it had Sundays off. Anyway, for years China had this shelling campaign against Kimmen, and you know, there were just artillery shells hitting the island all the time. There are now knife makers who have these huge stocks of old artillery shells which are made of really high quality steel. Because you do need for artillery, you need good steel. And the blacksmiths all over the island produce these amazing knives and you can buy them. It's really sort of the plow shows, isn't it? I mean it's probably you know have they started throwing the knives back at just for cooking, I believe. Yeah, but they've got it a lot of it still left. They used to make them out of gold. Oh nice. Ooh, quite soft. Quite actually quite soft but quite heavy. Okay. Uh and I was reading the Oxford Companion to Food and they said that the only real danger comes from if you drop it on your foot, basically, a gold knife. Silver cutlery, silver spoon, ball with a silver spoon in your mouth, for instance. Silver is quite poisonous if it gets tarnished. Like if you cut eggs with it, the sulfur sort of reacts with the silver and it can become mildly poisonous. So if you crack your boiled eggs with a silver spoon, it's the sulfur is inside the egg, so it's not the shell which is made of calcium it's the inside of the egg. But if you eat eggs with a silver spoon it will get tarnished and it's mildly poisonous. Wow. And Napoleon III he gave his most honoured guests aluminium cuttery. Okay so everyone else used gold, but the really best ones used aluminium. Right. Why? Because at the time aluminium was way, way, way more expensive than gold. This is in the eighteen eighties. Actually, before the 1880s, it was very difficult to get aluminium. You'd get bauxite, you'd have to get it out of there. It took ages and ages to get this out, and you could only get tiny bits out. But then there's a thing called the whole hero process, which changed it so that in eighteen fifty two aluminium was one thousand two hundred dollars per kilo and by the early twentieth century it was one dollar per kilo. Oh poor investment of the da y But if I'd been at a banquet and somebody beside me was having gold cutlery and I was having aluminium cutlery, my nose would have been slightly out of place, I think. So I think I would have wanted to be a perception together. In those days the Washington Monument has a big load of aluminium on the top of it because at the time it was so expensive. But now you could just do that for 20 quid. I got a question for you, Zoe. So you've been on MasterChef. Yeah. Right. On your MasterChef when you go and cook there, yeah. Do they give you the absolute high quality, amazing knives? Or is it like all other TV, they just give you the cheapest stuff they could find? Well, I did end up with a lot of blue plasters on my digits so they were quite sharp knives. They were sharp knives, yeah. So they were good. And the other thing that absolutely lacerated to pieces is those little graters, you know the loser the you think you'd use for for nutmeg and garlic and ginger. I had no knuckles for a few months. Yeah. Um can I just quickly qualify who this Anthony Bourdain guy is? Because a lot of people might not have heard of him. But he was this sort of um rock and roll chef. He was a bit counter-culture. A lot of people relate him to people like Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, because he had quite a debauched life and he did a lot of drugs and even his origin story of becoming a chef, which he writes about in what became quite a cult, iconic book, Kitchen Confidential. He says that when he was seventeen he was working as a dishwasher for a wedding reception, and later on in the evening he saw the bride and the chef having sex by the garbage and he thought, okay, that's the job for me. Yeah. Um and he he was a guy who made multiple different kinds of TV shows. He went to he makes that sound so much cooler in the book. He really does. You've read it haven't you? I have read it, yeah yeah he's got a very funny anecdote about his he he's going up for this huge chefing job and the proprietor of the restaurant and the the manager of the whole thing they,'re interviewing him and they're grilling him. And it says to him, What do you know about me? And and Anthony Baudin doesn't know much about this proprietor at all. And he's going through in his head, the whole chapter of the book. He's thinking about how the ways he can answer this question: Shall I be honest? Shall I be blah? Shall I shall I say this? Shall I flatter? Shall I do a bit of you know criticism? And eventually he s decides to be honest. He says, Next to nothing. What do you know about me? Next to nothing . And the interview goes incredibly badly from that boy Nobards and he leaves and he doesn't get the job. And four days later he's replaying it in his head, like, how did I get that so badly wrong? And he realizes what he was being asked was, What do you know about meat? Oh not what do you know about me and he says next to nothing the worst answer. Unless it was a unless it was a vegan restaurant. Exactly it wasn't restaurant and he just Yeah, yeah. It's good. That's really funny. I like how he became this big selling author because Kiss Jin's confidential. I say a cult book. At the time, it was massive. Spent forty-four weeks in the uh bestseller list in America, translated into twenty-two languages. It's still constantly in print, uh reissued. Um and it's all because while he was a chef, he got drunk and he decided to write an article called Don't Eat Before Reading This. And he sent it to the New Yorker and he never intended it to be published. He was just drunk and he sent it and they went, This is amazing and they published it and it got such a response that publishers got in touch saying, Can you expand this into an entire book? Yeah and that I read the article yesterday and it's pretty I've worked in a kitchen and I would say it's pretty spot on really. Yeah, yeah. Like for instance he says that all the new food comes in on a Tuesday. So whatever you do, don't go to a restaurant on a Monday. Yeah. And also a lot of chefs take Monday off. So you probably don't have the best chef and you definitely don't have the best food. This isn't in all restaurants but it's in quite a lot of them. And he said that there was another thing called save for well done. So if you find a piece of meat and uh it's like it's really not very nice or you drop it on the floor or it's just really awful, you only give it to people who order it well done because they're such philistines that they wouldn't know the difference between good meat and bad meat. Oh, yeah. That's great. Um have you heard of maybe my favourite um carver of all time? Just we're on slicing meat and all of this. Oh yeah. A Renaissance Italian called Vincenzo Cervio . And basically lots of houses used to have their own professional carvers. That was a sign that you were doing really well. Wow. I know. Um you that showed you were kind of Sir Billy Big Balls, you know. It's like a forty two inch TV today. Exactly, exactly. And they would just arrive, slice the meat, slice off certain cuts, and they do a really good job of it, and then your guests would help themselves and that was Oh, they didn't live with you. They were hired for an occasion. No, there's some there are records of courtly carvers from the fifteenth century where they would live and that was their job. Yeah. Which is just incredible. You you would hold the carvership. Yeah. It's quite a big deal. And this is sort of why the idea of Toby Carvery does feel a bit ancient and medieval despite not being special . Sorry to cast a special. I love that you sold it like that. That's why they call it the cavalry, isn't it? It sort of sounds like you're partaking of this ancient I'd been to one. You get ten percent off if you break BYOL. Yeah, yeah. Um It's the sort of place where you can get all the meats, isn't it? It's very small the meats. It's big franchise, right? All the meats. Oh yeah, it's a big chain, yeah, yeah, across the country. Anyway, Chervio could carve a goose in mid-air. He would while he was playing. Him or the goose. He would arrive. You're all asking the right questions. He would arrive holding a goose on a big fork, right? Holding it up. So the goose is impaled on the fork, he's holding it upright. It's d it's been cooked. Um and he would gracefully carve it away with his free hand. Oh, okay. Like basically all Italians did it like that and it was the Germans who did it where you stick a fork on the table and cut it that way. How interesting. 'Cause this he wrote this book with eighty six chapters about the carving of particular foods and the duties of a carver and he said that carving on a plate is just incredibly pathetic and basic. And anyone who can't carve in midair so the meat lands hot, hot and perfect on the plate is doing it wrong. He was like the salt bay of his uh of his time. Um Zoe you were on Master Chef, was that because you are a good chef? Or did you just put in a good audience? It's usually to do with my availability down . Anything I've ever been on has usually been aligned with my availability. But um I do like food. Right. Yeah, I like food a lot. Um but I have such a I've got a very scatter gun approach to cooking. Sometimes it's excellent, sometimes it's really not. And I still and it's took me a long time to get out of that thing of well if one chili in it is good, five is gonna be amazing. And I'm very proud to say that I have cooked something that Greg Wallace just took one bite of went, I can't actually eat that. And I was like I made his face go numb. I put so much I made a medieval chicken pie. I don't know what I was thinking, I was panicking at this point. And I put so much clove in it, I numbed Greg Wallace's face. I think that's when the wheels started to come off . Yeah. So much clove. Clove. That's a clove is drawn. Because clove I I think dentists used to use clove, didn't they? It has a numbing effect. And I was like, this is tasty. So I just kept putting more and more and more and more in and basically I made an anesthetic pie. What's a medieval pie? I feel like that's got like pigeon in it. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Clove clove is a vegetable, isn't it? Spices. The Emperor has no cloves. Yeah. Okay, it is time for fact number three, that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that the steps to get semen from a shark are number one, get the shark to lie on its back, and number two, remove the semen from the shark. The first of these is by far the hardest. Welcome to Shark Semen Academy. It's a two part course. So first of all, seaman, I'm talking about ejaculatory fluid, not sailors. Great point. Just gotta make that clear. But this is an article that I read on interestingengineering.com and it's about an Australian team who are collecting semen from wild male leopard sharks. Uh to boost the population and genetic diversity. It's called the Great Australian Stegostoma Semen Expedition. It's easy for you to say. And the way that they do it is that they turn the shark upside down because if you turn sharks upside down, they go into something called tonic immobility where they're like hyp notized. Yeah. There's a few different ways to do it, but that's that's the main way. It's crazy that various animals because it's it's sharks and a few other things have this tonic immobility, isn't it? I've heard some theories that humans do it. Really? I don't think this is true for sure, but like sometimes if people get in very, very stressful situations, they just kind of shut down. Is that kind of thing? Just find it crazy that some animals have effectively a factory settings position. Like you put the shark upside down and then it and it happens. Yes. Yeah, what I loved about this story was it's not it's it's not all sharks. Yeah. Okay. Not all sharks And not hashtag not all sharks. And um I read somewhere it went, it's less successful with great whites. I wonder how they found that out. Well this is the big question because we know that you know the the famous thing of saying who was the first person to have the idea to pull the oddness of a cow to get milk? Who's the first person to flip a shark and discover not only that it goes into this state, but it lasts for about fifteen minutes? This I wonder how many lives were lost in the scene of the moving process. One thing is that there have been examples of animals doing this to sharks. So there was a witness um in California who saw a female orca holding a shark upside down to uh kill it, basically, to suffocate it to death because it couldn't breathe. So it is possible the humans saw that and then copied the other animals. Yes, I guess. Is there an evolutionary benefit to tonic immobility for I don't know what it is if there is. Yeah. It could be like that uh thanatosis where you pretend to be dead and other animals will leave you alone. But it feels like they can't get themselves out of it. Like they can't stop after ten minutes. No. You know, they have to just wait until it wears off. It's so weird. I don't know. It's so weird. It could be just like a quirk of like you know the their design. Because they've got so many sensors, haven't they, on the front of their noses. Yeah. And they're really hypersensitive to it. Yeah, they've got things called ampules of Lorenzini which pick up electrical signals. Yeah. So they can almost the same way that you can taste an onion, they can taste electricity through these ampules. They can I I I think I'm right in saying a shark can pick up when an animal is in distress because of the change in the screaming, their legs their legs come off. Well like like heightened um uh heart rate and the electrical impulses. Oh gosh. Okay, so the reason we're talking about sharks is because you have swum with sharks. Yes. Yeah. Did your heart did your heart rate go up, sorry? Yeah, well I've been I was aware of that piece of information when I was in the water with sharks going. I must appear calm in case they pick up on my electrical impulses going through the fing roof at this point. Um What sort of sharks? I've dived with various sharks. Uh bull sharks, tigers, um oceanic white tips, reef sharks, uh whale sharks. Scallop hammerheads and giant hammer. All at the same time. All at the same time. No, no, different dice. Different. It's like Pokemon. It feels like you do the model. Threshers also seen the thresher. This was training for experience in Greg Wallace, wasn't it? That was it, that is it. That was all training just to numb Greg Wallace's face. Where I just rubbed him on his nose and he flipped over on his back. Um are you trying to swim with as many chalks as possible? It feels like this can't be an accident. I used to be I used to have what I would call probably a normal level of fear around sharks. I just you know I the first time I saw a shark in the water, I really did feel my heart rate go through the roof. It was in the Egypt, diving in Egypt, and a shark came out of nowhere, and I was like , but then once that fear went down, I went, My god, they're beautiful, they're so beautiful. So since then, we've sort of tried to tailor our diving in order to see specific species, and I'm slightly obsessed with just the beauty and shape of of hammerheads. And I always wanted to see a hammerhead. And um the the first time I saw it, I turned around, I was on a dive in Mexico and there was one behind me and I just burst into tears in my mask. Yeah. What's the biggest shark? Uh well the biggest one that we heard was it was quite funny. We were we were on a dive, we were w at a cleaning station where there were sharks being cleaned by little fish and we were watching these sharks and we' likere, these are beautiful. There would think they were Galapagos sharks and black uh black tips. And all of a sudden, my friend turned around. And uh if you've ever wondered whether it's possible to hear somebody scream underwater, I can tell you it is. Yeah, uh, because going right behind us, obviously just looking at all of our backsides as we were facing the other way, it was an enormous tiger shark. Cracker gas. Cracker gas. And I think They are less fussy about what they eat, should we say. Okay. Yeah, so they will be a little bit more opportunistic. Yeah, yeah. But it was just clearly going past all of our bums going, not that one, not that one. That's got a bit of meat on it. Um And you you could do the uh the n s note rubbing on a tiger shark. That does work as well. It is how people have saved their lives in the past. Yeah when being approached by sharks. Yeah, right. Or indeed save sharks. So th so obviously there's lots of sharks in the ocean with hooks are that are you know affecting them and they're strapped in their mouths and there have been divers that have learnt how to calm them down and remove the chart the the hooks and then that's such a sort of gosh, you think people who do bomb disposal underwater are a and they are but that is not taking anything away from those guys or qi.com right in if you're listening to this while you're disposing a bomb underwater I do think you're pretty cool, actually. That's a very casual approach. Um, my favourite fact about sharks I learned in researching this fact. Shark semen, as we were on shark semen at the start of this, yeah, it's extraordinary. Shark semen can last for four years after deployment. A female shark can keep sperm inside herself for four years and then say, go. The time is right. We've just moved into a new place, whatever, we're ready. Is that more about her than the semen though? As in if uh if a shark let the semen out just into the ocean and you collected it four years later floating. I don't think sharks have supersema which can just survive on the tides for four years. I think it's inside the feet. So it's something for clarity. It's where the female's keeping it. So there was a an aquarium in California which had a female bamboo shark. She laid an egg which grew into a happy, healthy young shark. She hadn't been with any males for forty-five months. Yeah. Uh and it wasn't the cause some sharks can do a kind of virgin birth pathogenogenesis where they clone themselves effectively. They produce an egg which just turns into the mother. But this was her and a male shark producing a new shark. Just imagine that. Imagine going on a date with someone and it goes well. And then five years later you get meet your son Yeah exactly or or meet your yet to be born son Exactly like that isn't it it's not like you've got a five year old it's like we're about to have a baby. Yes, yeah crazy. We mentioned before about some sharks not being that fussy about what they eat. Most of them only eat meat. But there is one omnivorous shark that I found, which is the bonnet head shark. So it's kind of related to the hammerhead, but it's just got a really kind of rubbish hammer. It doesn't go very wide. It's quite a narrow hammer. But they found that it has seagrass in its stomach, which is very unusual. It's a type of vegetable you get in the in the water. And what they think is that it eats it to kind of line its stomach and then it eats these really sort of spiky crabs and it means that the spiky crabs don't injure its stomach when it eats it. Like gavascon for sharp. That's incredible. Yeah. That's very clever though, isn't it? That's stunning. Yeah. I've never heard of a bonnet head shark. There's some weird looking sharks out there. Have you ever seen a goblin shark? Oh that is a oh that's oh it's gone really wrong. Well it's named for the fact that it basically looks like a goblin. In fact, I think it I think it's sharks are goblin sharks, aren't they? Yeah, yeah. The raggy tooth shark. Brilliant. It's just got oh it's all over the place. What's the dream shark then for you to see? Oh well it was the giant hammerheads and I've seen them and I've been very, very close. Yeah. Yeah I've had a hammerhead look me in the eye. Yeah. I've never been in the water with a great white. And I I am I am uh cautious about that. Yeah, it does sound uh sounds rather dangerous. Yes. Um I was reading about what you should do if you do find yourself with an aggressive shark or a a shark that is coming for you. Uh the University of Florida's international shark file says that if you are going to swim with sharks, to sort of help your chances, um if it's coming for you, leave the water immediately. So that's that's one of the bits of advice. Very good advice . I would never have thought of that. Yeah, but this is a this is a great one. Ideally do it with someone else so you don't become a solitary target. Yeah, well. Which is the old changing your shoes for running shoes so you outrun the other boat. I've sort of done that. Um once on a dive trip in Egypt the Egyptian Navy came and took our little dinghy away that we were using to get back and tooth to the boat. It commandeered it to move some of their own stuff, so it left us in the water with an oceanic white tip circling underneath us. And the oceanic white tips are they're an interesting shark 'cause they're the ones that you know when you hear about sort of pirates being eaten in shipwrecks or planes going down and people being eaten by sharks it's usually oceanic white tips they're they're the sort of yeah they're sort of scavenger sharks in that respect um and it was it was circling underneath us and I was in the water with this German guy who I hadn't spoken to prior to that point. Um, and I just hung on to him because he was massive, and I thought, well, if it does come first , I'm hoping it'll prefer a German Worst . Um I'll just numb you. He's more yummy, I'm more yummy. I read an account of what it's like to be bitten by a shark by a man called Eric Norrie, and Eric Norrie says it is the scariest thing that you can go through, uh even scarier according to him than some of the other things that have happened to him, which include having been struck by lightning, bitten by a rattlesnake, and nearly beaten to death by a series of monkeys. Wow. This ranked this ranked as the highest. anymore does he any prior claims hang on what was the first one hit by lightning he got hit by lightning he was been by a rattlesnake and then he was beaten, punched up by uh monkeys two separate times. And bitten by a shark. And then bitten by a shark, and that was the one. His name is Japanese for seaweed, right? Nori. So maybe he was just lining his stomach around seaweed. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. Um I feel like we're avoiding it. How do you get semen out of a shark? That sounds like the start of a joke. Very very, very carefully. You c well there are different methods. Some it's 'cause different sharks, you know, they're they vary. And sharks don't have penises in the classic human sense. Alright, so you don't hammer the head. Oh my god. Oh my god. Um they've got these claspers, which are grooved organs used for delivery of sperm, which I have to say sound quite pen isy to me. But um and they're inserted into the female's vent. Again, sounds a little bit penisy, doesn't it? And then they unfold in complicated ways. Aha, that's not what a penis does. So yeah, yeah, yeah. But you you can some of them you have to, I believe, um excite. Yeah. How do you do it? How do you do that? Well dress up as a dolphin . Cheeky little dolphin. Because I knocked out at this point. Sorry? They're knocked out at this point. Exactly. They're upside down in. But you can pop a syringe in. Uh or you can you know, they'll just feel a little prick. Uh or sometimes you can press on two 's on either side and out it out it pops. Oh that sounds fine. Yeah it does doesn't like an avocado. Yeah yeah. It is quite a job isn't it? If that is your I once met a bloke who took he he um he got venom from snakes in Australia for antidotes and um that was his job, like ty pans and all sorts. Right. And I remember saying to him, that's quite a job and he went, Yeah, it's a bit of a dead end career really He's a standard comedian, couldn't do what you do. Go, what a fun alternative ending that would have been to Jaws. Richard Dreyfus just flips the shark over and wanks him off at the end. We're gonna need a bigger bottle. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. My fact is the, British Olympic skier, Eddie the Eagle, once came second to his own helmet. So Okay, who's for younger listeners? Eddie the Eagle um is Michael Edwards is his name. Yeah. And he represented Britain at the nineteen eighty eight Winter Olympics. He is an amazing sportsman and his story is incredible. We'll get into it. But the main thing to know for the fact is that he was broke. He did a lot of his training, completely broke. He was sleeping in a caravan and he was eating out of bins. Uh like he was just having sex with a frag next ile It should have been a chef, yeah, yeah. Anyway, um so he had been training for a couple of years and he was so broke that his helmet was tied on with string. And there was one moment where he finished a jump, one of his early competitive jumps, and his helmet just snapped off him ping and it landed ahead of him. it's not like a ski race where it's top to the bottom quickest, it's a jump where you have to go the furthest. Exactly. So I didn't know anything about ski jumping. He says I may have been the first ever ski jumper beaten by his own gear. Very funny. And so yeah, he was ski jumping, Britain didn't really have a tradition of ski jumping at all. He was the first person ever to represent Britain at the winter Olympic s. And uh he's just an incredible he came dead last in the nineteen eighty eight Olympics, but he won the nation's hearts. He won the world's hearts, didn't he? He was a global sensation. Yeah. Yeah. There was there's been a film about him and um I have you met him, sorry? Yes, I've skied with him. What? Oh my gosh. Yeah, he's such a lovely guy, he really is. Um so um uh a few years I've done the um Altitude Comedy Festival out in Austria and on one of those years he was coming out and talking about the film that was just about to be released, so he was one of the guests on the festival talking about his film and one day the producer went, Do you want to go skiing with it? Uh Eddie De Eagle? And I went, Do I? That's amazing. So yeah, and the thing about him is we sort of concentrate on the fact that he was you know, he came last in the in the ski jump, but he's actually an incredible skier. Yes, he's a brilliant skier. And I spoke to him and he was saying, you know, he wanted to be in the downhill, the British downhill team, but he wasn't good enough. So he thought, well rather than give up completely, what's nobody doing? And they were like ski jumping. So that's where he went. So he had the British record for ski jumping at the time. He was no he wasn't like a complete slouch. He was ranked fifty-five in the world. He had a bad Olympics, I will say that. He came last by quite a long way, but he wasn't a bad ski jumper really. Like New Zealand are in the soccer world cup, and they're ranked 85 in the world, and he was 55 in the world at ski jumping, so that kind of goes to show that he wasn't exactly. He wasn't and he was he was a brilliant downhill skier. He was he was the ninth fastest amateur in the world. Like all the I mean, he'd been training and he'd been a brilliant sportsman from a very young age. But he came off the thing is he didn't look like a sportsman, no really like he had these round glasses didn't he uh that would mist up whenever he skied so he couldn't see where he was going. Imagine doing a ski jump and you don't know where you're going. It's terrifying. He said one in three jumps he couldn't really see where he was going. The thing about ski jumping is you go down this big ramp, you're going at about sixty miles an hour, there's a lift, you jump, and then you're trying to get as far down the slope before you hit the ground. So you're sort of moving down the slope like 10 or 15 feet above the ground . Yeah. You're never like a hundred feet in the air. Yeah. But you're all you're just trying to make the ground drops away as you have you ever stood beside a ski jump. Oh my God. I mean when you stand beside the ski jump, it's it is terrifying. It's utterly terrify my dad lived in um Norway for a while and there was one round the corner from him. And when you see the structures you're like, wow, the thought of standing at the top of that and just letting go. I went to one of the big sort of finals of the year they do like the three I can't remember what it's called, but it's like three jumps within a week of each other. And one of them's at Garmish Parkenkirchen. And I went to that mainly because the mountain is called the Wank Mountain. Oh, this is why you were one of the best jumpers in the world was Andreas Wank. Wow. Um so I wanted to see Andreas Wank on the Vank Mountain. Yeah. Uh which I did. And even it's in Germany, and even though he's German , when he came on I was by far the loudest cheerer for him, I think. Like I really got up and started cheering for him while the Germans were a bit more knee sports involvement there. You tried to turn him upside down, Kitney James Sharked him off. I really like uh the post career from the Olympics of Eddie because it's just a series of bumbling fun events. It was things like he had a five year sponsorship from Eagle Airlines and so he did adverts to them and so on. But then people wrote songs for him in places like Finland and he chartered with them, even though he didn't speak any Finnish, um he had one song which was called My Name is Eddie in the English version of it. It's called Michael. Good point, good point. And it was um it was written by a protest singer-songwriter called Erwin Goodman, and he was flown over to Finland to sing it live on TV. And when he got to the hotel room, his phone rang and said, Unfortunately, Irwin, the writer who was gonna sing it with you, has died. Um but we still need you to do it. So he had to go on TV a few hours later singing a song that he didn't really know phonetically phonetically learning. That's an easy language. Yeah, no, exactly . Stunning. But he got a hit with it. Uh there was another one called Fly Eddie Fly, which was written by Mort Schumann, who wrote the song Viva Los Vegas. I think I remember that one. I do remember that. Because he was massive. He was absolutely massive. Yeah.ah, ye The line about him, which I really like, is that he made it look difficult skiing. Which it is absolutely and you know he was he he would working as a plasterer, he had been ski ing from a very young age, he had been training for a long time. But the thing is, there's also this story underpinning it, which is about the snobby British skiing establishment. Yeah. So he actually had gotten into the English skiing squad, right? Yeah. Yeah. Uh but on day one he got into a row with one of the selectors at the club, the skiing club they were at, and he was sent home. He said, Right, you're not in the English ski squad anymore. So he thought, well I'm just gonna skip that and get into the great British squad instead, which he did, which is amazing. Um and if he jumped if he jumped seventy metres he could qualify. And so there's this constant under undercurrent of like the British skiing establishment would just they would thought, oh come on, you're making us look a bit silly and he said when he did the actual Olympic jumps, uh the ninety meter event, which was the biggie, yeah. He said everyone else uh competing in that event had done thirty to fifty thousand jumps off that ramp in their lives. I had done five. So yeah. Yeah. But he did host a four hour press conference once because he was just such an entertaining voice the um brella. The movie that you mentioned earlier that was made. Um great mov ie. And it came about because Matthew Vaughn, who made the film, he was sitting down with his kids and watching Cool Runnings. And his kids were crying with laughter. I've had this experience recently because it was one of my favorite movies as a kid. My boys were in floods of tears. It was just the funniest thing they'd ever seen. And he was like, why don't we make movies like this anymore? And as it turned out, Eddie the Eagle was competing at the exact same Calgary 1988 Olympics that the cool runnings Jamaican bobsled team were at. So two stories where they tried their hardest but didn't have the tools to to win came out of that one Olympics. It's pretty amazing. I love stories like that. I was watching the most recent um Paralympics, Winter Olymp ics, and there was a a Haitian skier with one leg doing the downhill or the or the super G and I just thought what an incredible what an incredible achievement . Yeah. You know. Ralph Atiana. Yeah. One of the poorest countries in the world. Yeah. If not the poor, you know, and with one leg. And he was and he got down the course. It was a really difficult course. The conditions were awful and not everybody made it. And I just thought, wow, that is uh absolutely inspiring. Do you have an artificial leg for that event? Or do you have you can't you can but he didn't, yeah. Yeah. Good grief, that's amazing. Yeah, incredible. So So cool. use ski if you're doing the Altitude Festival, I'm guessing that you ski. I ski, yeah. And that is that the downhill classic what I think of. Uphill. I've never been broken the mould. Yeah. It's like coming into Brighton at the end of the marathon. Yeah, yeah. No, I I love skiing. I learned I learnt ski in Scotland and apparently if you can learn to ski in Scotland you can ski anywhere. Yeah, yeah. Tough as in Glenshea, over sheep and and rivers. Why is it tough? Because the conditions are usually pretty grim. Yeah. Uh there will be a the odd when I was I was there as a kid there would be the odd sheep running about and the whites, yeah. And you and you do laugh, but I have been blown up a mountain in Scotland. Not a euphemism. Um I have literally been the wind and the conditions were so awful. Okay. Yeah, rough conditions as well. Whenever I've been, for instance, you just can only see like about two meters in front of me. Having said all of that, and to give Glen Shea and the other ski resorts in Scotland its dues, when the weather is good, it's fantastic and it's beautiful. Yeah. You've never ski jumped, I assume. No. I would when I was younger though, I would have given it a go. Do you think I would have given it a go. The president of the International Ski Federation, Gianfranco Casper, once said it's not appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view to ski jump because he thought their uterus might burst when they landed. Well, you know. And he said that in twenty ten. Oh, okay Really? Wow, so must be correct, right? Because the landings aren't very hard. That's the thing I didn't if you do it right. Yeah. Like you know what I mean? Like you're only the last time you jump ten feet down. Okay. Let's move on. But no, I had so I didn't think about ski jumping, right? No, I've never b been skiing or anything like that. But the the thing that's so cool looking at it is the way you they make themselves more aerodynamic. And there have been all these techniques over the years of how to stay in the air. 'Cause obviously a flying squirrel would be the perfect uh jet ski jump. Yeah, just like get those get those flaps out. Yeah. Come on. Not if your uterus is gonna call it . And that that's the thing about the sport is your your costume has to be skin tight. And these have been-I'm sure you guys in the research found this this recent scandal in the skiing world of the Norwegian coaches and one former equipment manager who were caught adding crotch stitching to make the surface area bigger. And was there not a thing where people were putting injections in the penises? So this is penis gate. And this I think That's an area of York I think Penis gate I think is still under investigation because basically if you think it wouldn't have an effect just adding some extra stitching into the crotch, it doesn't sound like it would have much of an effect, right? Some research has been done which concluded a single extra centimetre at the crotch could mean you got four metres further. Wow. It's quite yeah, it's quite a lot a lot further you can go with just a little extra fabric. Which is why you're measured with a laser so that your costume is absolutely skin tight. Right. And some athletes have supposedly been injecting their penises with uh a kind of acid, sort of medical acid, to increase the circumference by a couple of centimetres. So it does which would make their pin which g would give you more surface air and could lengthen your jumps. But not but not out in front. I mean I mean my not coming second to their own helmets as well, right? 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 show. We can all be found online. I'm on at Tribaland on Instagram, James. Uh come join me on LinkedIn. Search my name. I'm on there. Offer me a job. Andy. I'm at Andrew Hunter M. And uh Zoe, where are you? I'm at Zoe Lines Comedy, I think. Yes, I am, I'm I yes, thank you. Thank you, Daddy's and so okay, you've got you've got your pod, which is very exciting. Yeah. Um and you discuss running and you have guests on all the time. You had Alice Roberts on not too long ago. Yeah, she's brilliant. Yeah. So give give everyone a quick idea of what uh So the podcast is called the Run ning Joke. I I I present it with my my fellow comedian and fellow runner Este Manito and it's about all things running and we have lovely guests on talking about all aspects of running and um taking the stigma out of running so it's for anybody and and everyone and um having read about Jeff Galloway's approach, I'll be Jeffing my way around a lot of runs. That's very cool. So available now where you get all your podcasts. Um if you want to write into us about any of the things that we've said over the course of this show, podcast at QI.com. Send us your best facts because we'll take those to Littlefish, the show that we do every Monday, or send us feedback about things and experiences you've had related to the show because Andy goes through the inbox, picks out the best, and that goes to Jewel, which is drop us a line, our mailbag show, and that's a part of our secret club, which is called Clubfish. If you're not a member of Clubfish, go to Patreon.comlash/s clubfish and check it out. There's multiple tiers, multiple things that you can do. Otherwise, just come back here next week because we're going to be back with another episode. We will see you then. Goodbye.