#15 The Life of a Fish

The World's Most Boring Podcast - Bore Me to Sleep presents episode fifteen: The Life of a Fish. If you are lying awake tonight, staring at the ceiling, unable to quiet your thoughts, or if you simply enjoy falling asleep to slow, monotone talk about something it is perfectly fine to miss entirely, this episode was made for you. We spend a long, unhurried, thoroughly uneventful hour exploring the daily lives of fish. Not in a way that will keep you awake. In quite the opposite way. We wade gently through topics including how fish sleep without eyelids, the parrotfish and its nightly mucus cocoon, the tuna's frankly unnecessary top speed, the five-hundred-and-thirty-million-year history of fish on Earth, the deep ocean and the anglerfish with its built-in lamp, the mudskipper and its inexplicable decision to climb trees, the myth of the three-second goldfish memory, how fish communicate using their swim bladders, the toadfish that keeps houseboat residents awake off the coast of North America, the extraordinary navigation of Pacific salmon returning home to spawn, the blobfish and its perfectly reasonable approach to life at the bottom of the ocean near Australia and New Zealand, the white sand beaches made from parrotfish excrement, coral reefs including the Great Barrier Reef off Queensland, fish scales and shark skin and competitive swimsuit design, and the quiet collective intelligence of a school of fish. The episode ends in a long, dreamlike, increasingly surreal drift through everything we have covered, designed to carry you gently from almost asleep to completely asleep without you noticing the transition. This is not an exciting podcast. It is not meant to be. It is boring in the most deliberate, carefully crafted, and genuinely restful way possible. It is ideal for insomnia, for racing thoughts at bedtime, for anxiety that spikes at night, for people who use sleep meditations or sleep stories or white noise or rain sounds or nature documentaries to fall asleep, and for anyone who has ever found that the best thing to listen to at two in the morning is someone calmly explaining how a blobfish feels about pressure. It is also ideal for people who simply like falling asleep to talk radio, podcasts, or monotone voices, and who want something that will not suddenly become interesting right when they are on the edge of sleep. You will not miss anything important if you drift off. That is the whole point. We are now one thousand subscribers strong, which means one thousand people have decided that boring is exactly what they need, and we think they are absolutely right. If you have a topic suggestion, a question, or something you find magnificently dull and want to share, please write to us at [email protected]. We would be very pleased to hear from you, at whatever hour you happen to be awake when you should not be. Sleep well. The fish are still swimming.