Episode 107 - Nicholas Summers

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Now, this month I spoke to famous scuba diver and author Nicholas Summers, who has been in the spotlight recently due to his views about the Titanic.

In our interview, we covered his life as a scuba diver, the surprising link between diving and the dairy industry, and of course, his controversial work with Titanic director James Cameron.

Hello, I'm Nicholas Summers, and I'm a professional scuba diver.

Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us today.

A very famous scuba diver.

You're not just a scuba diver, of course, you're an author.

You've got a series of books, Diving for Beginners, How Not to Die and Enjoy Yourself.

That was a big hit earlier this decade.

Then he followed that up, of course, with So You Didn't Die, Intermediate Diving for Dummies.

And then finally, he recently brought out, Remember, You Might Still Die, diving for the professional.

Yes, that's right.

It is, of course, quite a dangerous hobby.

A lot of people sort of think it's something that you pick up on holiday.

You know, you're there with your family, you've got on your Ryanair flight, you've gotten off, you've still got your case.

And before you know it, before they've even unpacked, a lot of people are donning the gear and they're heading down to the harbour and they're jumping in.

And by all means, please, please do that because it's really rewarding to see so many people getting into the hobby.

But you can very much die.

You know, a lot of people, they don't think about propellers, the local fishermen.

Those big giant clams that you can kind of open up and you can go inside and then

exactly.

And they will close.

So yeah, you know, I've heard a lot of stories.

People sort of write into me and they say, you know, thanks so much for your books.

I would never have tried scuba diving otherwise.

A member of my family was.

unfortunately caught inside a clam, managed to get them out in time,

had to rush them to hospital, ruined the holiday.

But that initial magic experience by diving into the sea was just fantastic.

And it's that sort of story that really makes me pick up my pen, makes me sort of don on my BCD, stick the regulator in my mouth, and really start writing.

Okay, so you do you do write in full scuba gear?

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, it's that's important for my process.

I can't really think unless I've got a full covering over my eyes and my nose, snorkel in my mouth.

So yeah, very much full gear, flippers.

And actually, depending on how creative I'm feeling, I'll sort of inflate my BCD.

Sorry, what is a BCD?

So a BCD is sort of the crucial part of your diving equipment.

And that's the item that will allow you to float to the surface or sink to the bottom.

Okay.

Because I thought that was...

Sorry if I'm wrong.

Maybe this is the old-fashioned way.

I thought that was to do with how much piss is inside the wetsuit.

Yes, well, the piss, so we're looking at from around the early 80s was a sort of turning point in scuba gear.

Before about 1985, 1986, it very much was piss.

They've now replaced that with air because they found that while scuba diving, a lot of divers, obviously, your main breathing equipment is your tank.

Before 1985, that was also filled with piss.

So partly because we lost so many souls to that sort of old-fashioned equipment, and also, I guess, the rise of the environmental movement sort of put an end to that because, you know, people like Al Gore started saying, you know, we're seeing a lot of turtles with piss poisoning.

And that's largely due to the sort of uptake in the sort of passion for scuba diving around the early 1980s.

And really, the professional scuba divers, myself included, did think, you know, maybe Al's got a point.

Perhaps if we replaced the piss with air, it might make it a more enjoyable experience and also allow us to breathe underwater, which

should be quite good.

Yeah, and I think the death rate did plummet after that, but it's important to say the death rate is still very high.

And would you say that, you know, those people you mentioned going on holiday, taking the family, jumping in.

Is part of the fun, the fact that there's a high chance you're going to die?

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, you know, if you think about all of the different types of recreation, bungee jumping, cliff diving, that thing that people do when they have a can of lager and they shake it up and then they stab the bottom of it and they try and suck all the liquid out

firing into the back of your throat.

I mean, it all comes with risk.

And often, you know, I've been on dives when there's maybe 20 people in the party and we all sort of salute each other, jump off the boat, knowing full well about three of us are going to come back.

But it's part of that sort of gamble.

And you obviously take parties out diving.

You're a teacher.

You take first-time divers out.

How rare is it that you all come back?

And if you do all come back, is there an element of disappointment there?

Yeah.

Well, I would say in my entire career, there's maybe been two or three times all of us have come back.

And, you know, they'll look at me and they'll say, Nicholas, we're all still here.

You know, what's going on?

They'll start throwing their fins at me, their masters snorkel.

And then often I'll say, you know, listen, guys, look at Philip over there.

His eyes are rolling in the back of his head.

He's got the bends.

He's got two or three hours to live.

And that's when you sort of feel a kind of, you know, like an audible, ah, he is going to die.

He's going to die.

Just not straight away.

Just not straight away.

I'd say, you know, of those two or three times it's happened, on two occasions they've been happy with that.

The third occasion, we've left Philip on the boat and we've all dived back in.

Looking for that more immediate death.

Maybe it's a clam-based thing.

Clam-based thing, someone getting caught in the propeller.

The captain of the boat that I use occasionally just gets a shotgun and starts firing into the water.

He's a bit of a kooky guy.

You know, I have said on occasion, you know, Jose, please don't do that.

And the other people I've been taking out diving have said, Nicholas, what are you doing?

No, no, no, no, no.

Absolutely, Jose, keep doing that.

We love it.

Barbara's lost her arm.

That's exactly what we're paying for.

Do you ever take Jose down on a dive?

He doesn't scuba dive because I tried to teach him, but really,

as much as the joy in scuba diving comes from that risk of death, you do also want to take in in some of the sort of aquatic environment, some of the

magnificent fish, turtles, sharks.

When I took Jose down there, we just jumped in, we started descending, I looked over and he was holding two grenades in his hand.

And I thought, ah.

As we descend, I look over again.

He's taken both pins out.

shoved both of the grenades into the mouth of a turtle.

I must say, I've never seen anything like it.

Unfortunately, if it was any other animal, I think it would have been contained to that sort of small environment.

But because of the turtle's shell, it completely shattered.

There's underwater shrapnel everywhere.

It took out between 90 to 95% of all of the aquatic life in about a 30-mile radius.

And I thought, we're going to have to get to the surface here.

We're going to have to ascend.

We throw a couple of OK signs.

I'm gesturing to Jose to sort of go up.

We get back on the boat and I say, you know, what the hell happened there?

What the hell happened there, Jose?

And he just started firing a shotgun into me.

You write in your book, you know, I've had a quick read of your book, and there's a very moving passage where you talk about how once you've been diving, any other form of recreation doesn't really measure up.

You talk about going to the cinema in your book.

You talk about going to see Jumanji, a film that for someone who hasn't scoop dived, I mean, that's an absolute roller coaster ride of thrills and spills, adventure,

Robin Williams doing what he does best.

And you talk about sort of feeling entirely numb throughout the entire film and leaving and feeling like that hadn't had an effect on you at all and feeling like, am I an alien?

Has something gone wrong?

Yeah.

I mean, once you've been scuba diving, you pretty much know once you start that hobby that there's going to be very few things that thrill you any more than that.

I personally was pretty disappointed with the Jumanji film.

You know, I got caught up in the kind of the atmosphere, the excitement when that film came out.

And I thought, you know, this might be it.

This might be the one thing.

If there is one thing that's going to thrill me more than scuba diving, it will be Jumanji.

So

just to be careful,

I did go to the cinema in full scuba gear, sat right at the front.

But yeah, I was the conventional elements of that film that thrill people just didn't do it for me.

That's really sad.

And actually, I've sort of found myself in some legal troubles when people have brought cases against me for trying to accuse me of trying to bring Jumanji down.

And that's not what I'm doing.

And that's now a federal crime in the U.S.

That's correct.

Yeah.

I think at the time I was charged on multiple state grounds because I did fly over, like a lot of people, to the states for that initial release of the film Jumanji.

So I was in the States.

I was charged by the state of Florida, state of Texas, and the state of Arkansas for not enjoying the film Jumanji.

And then, of course, about 15 years later, they brought that federal case against me.

I was quite disturbed by what I'd heard about Nicholas feeling nothing during a screening of Jumanji.

And so, I spoke to friend of the show, TV doctor Dr.

Sam Archer, probably best known for BBC One's Lunchtime Stethoscope and Channel 5's Laxative Roulette Live.

I was interested to know: is what Nicholas had described something that is diagnosable?

It's something I've seen quite a lot.

We call it adrenal diluvian syndrome, which is essentially your body is so flooded with adrenaline that the ability to enjoy mid-90s family movies almost evaporates completely.

Okay, and how would you diagnose that?

What we'll do is we'll sit them down and in a clinical situation make them watch this film and see if there's any spike in excitement in their brain chemistry.

Okay.

Not many people know this, but the machine MRI used to stand for maybe RoboCop cop is interesting and you would lie someone down in the mri and play robo cop to them and then just see if there was any spike of interest that's sort of where it started robo cop's quite old now most people know the twist so obviously it needs to be updated hence jumanji i mean you would you would say wouldn't you that until jumanji came along robo cop was very much the most exciting film you could watch i think you would have called it the Jumanji of its day if in that day people knew what Jumanji was going to be, which of course they didn't didn't, because it was in the future.

I mean, Jumanji has been with us as a culture in the background, I think, you could argue for thousands of years.

It's always kind of been there.

It wasn't until they actually made the movie that we sort of crystallized Jumanji into something we could watch with the family.

Before that, it was just a kind of ludic sense of playfulness and adventure that sort of seemed to exist as a kind of aura or wisp.

in the air around us.

Exactly.

To borrow a motif from the film itself,

it was sort of a bongo drums humming in the background that sort of grew louder and louder until eventually we discover Jumanji.

So if we have anyone listening who is involved in one of those life or death pastimes that's brought them so much excitement, for example, you know, scuba diving as we've talked about, or there are plenty of others, horse riding, dipping your genitals into a bucket full of scorpions.

There are plenty of people out there doing that kind of thing, and they may well have had that experience of going to watch Jumanji or RoboCop and feeling nothing.

For those people, can you give them any hope from the medical community that something can be done to row them back from this in some way?

I just encourage these people to realise that they have peaked adrenaline-wise, that they need to lead a life where adrenaline doesn't feature at all in their day-to-day existence.

They need to seek out the kind of experiences that elicit no thrills whatsoever.

A fully zero-adrenaline life.

Yes, exactly.

One of the most effective treatments for this we've found is going to see the book book tour of any comedian.

You will go thinking it'll be funny, but it's a book tour.

So

yeah, yeah, yeah, deeply tedious.

Nicholas explained to me that he got his start in scuba diving through his father.

My father was a dairy farmer.

He specialized in the production of condensed milk, which involves transporting hundreds, if not thousands, of cattle to very, very deep depths, keeping them there for about six to nine months, and then the milk that they would otherwise produce due to the pressure is condensed, it's pumped to the surface, you have condensed milk.

So, just to be clear,

they are living in a kind of what would the word be, like a sort of aqua base?

Aquabases, they exist, yes, but the most common form of condensed milk farming is actually the old-fashioned scuba suits that people might know, the sort of big metallic

with the kind of diving bell helmet.

Exactly, the diving bell helmet.

A lot of people think that those were designed for humans.

No, no, no, no, no, they're not.

They are very much cattle suits.

Right, that's why they're so bulky.

Why they're so bulky and

the four arms and legs, as people like to say, are actually just for the four legs of the cow.

And the big bell is for the others.

Oh, so hang on.

So where's the cow's head?

The ass.

if of the suit if if you were conceiving it to be worn by it by a human being the ass of the suit is sort of a bit baggy, so the cow is sort of hunched slightly.

I think when people would have seen those suits, you know, and as you say, we assume that they're for the human body.

That kind of the large ass section we thought was just for the kind of dump truck ass.

No, no, no, no, no.

That is very much for the cow's head.

It's not stopped people with dump truck asses wearing those suits.

Anyone with a dump truck ass, it fits them perfectly like a glove.

But the initial design, very much for a cow's head.

And the conventional sort of bell section, like I say, is for the udders.

You'd attach some pipes, stick the cow down there, and it's those pipes that would sort of milk the udder while it's at deep depth.

But you took a different path.

You decided you were going to become a commercial scuba diver instructor and everything you've become.

Why did you leave behind condensed milk?

Well, that's a good question.

And I think it's a question that anyone who has been brought up with very successful parents in a particular industry has to grapple with.

I think ultimately.

Sorry, I mean, I'm just an elephant in the room.

Your father is Paul Boff.

I mean, anyone listening will know who that is.

Yeah, that's huge in the dairy industry.

I wondered when his name was going to come up.

Yeah.

It's, it's, and actually, this has been a bit of a record for me

the time we've been talking.

His name usually comes up more quickly.

And a great man.

And, you know, I don't want to take it, you know, thank you.

I know that you probably don't, you know, you are your own man.

You are successful.

But you are the sort of Paul Boff.

You obviously changed your name from Boff to Summers.

Yes.

Was that

to try and get away out of his shadow?

Is that what we're talking about?

It's a big shadow that my dad casts, yes.

So is it fair to say then that you decided to go into scuba to try and forge your own path in life?

And as you say, get out from under that big Boff shadow.

Yes.

And, you know, it's not a huge departure.

You mentioned the sort of word scuba there.

That's an acronym for the breed of cattle used in the condensed milk industry.

Is it?

That's right.

So the S is Shetland.

The C is the Chillingham, Chillingham cow.

The U is the Ukrainian grey.

Right.

The B is the Belgian red.

Okay.

And the A is, of course, the big boy Aberdeen Angus.

And is that because those are the breeds that are best suited to being sent down and doing the whole condensed milk system?

That's absolutely right.

They're some of the largest cows.

They're built for pressure.

And boy, do they get some of that.

You know, there's a lot of pressure down at 3,000 feet below the surface.

And we've just found over the years that they are the most resilient cows.

Your smaller cows would just implode.

Yeah, I was thinking if you took down a pygmy limousine, for example.

Gone.

Really?

I mean, you've barely broken the surface and that's imploded.

Really?

As beautiful as they are, they are not built for the water.

And sometimes you just show one of those cows a glass of water and they will implode.

I don't know what it is.

I think mentally they feel the pressure and they implode.

The human cost of the condensed milk trade is awful.

That's interesting because obviously people think a lot about the ethical side of whether it's okay to do that to cows and to put them under water for all that time.

And obviously,

I don't want to talk about the rights and wrongs of this.

People can make their own mind, but people say it's unethical and that, you know, it's like the veal trade.

It's something where we maybe shouldn't

consume condensed milk.

But, you know, this is going on and people think about the welfare of the cows, but it's very rare that people actually mention the welfare of the human beings who are having to go down with the cows and

plug them into the milking machines and all the rest of it.

Yeah.

I mean, these people risk their lives every day.

For instance, they could be gobbled up by one of those giant clams that we see sort of popularized in cartoons.

What happens then?

Awful.

They get eaten by the clams.

A lot of these people will then turn into pearls.

and that pearl will often have the face of the deceased sort of etched into the pearl won't it yes I believe the term I'm not a jeweller but it's a milky scream is what you see there and it's you sort of if you look deep into the pearl you'll see someone sort of in anguish their final moments

And as we all know, as is the tradition, if you break that pearl open, which obviously not many people do, you hear the last words of the person as they died.

And that's usually something like, oh, for fuck's sake, something like that.

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God, that big clam.

Ah, my legs, that kind of thing.

It's not really worth it because you can sort of guess what their last words are going to be.

Is there any way in which this industry could be safer?

Luckily, there are people who are better adapted to milking the cows.

The people that we refer to in the medical community as having a dump truck ass.

A big beehind, the Jell-O-On Springs.

And that's great for two reasons.

Firstly, often the dump truck ass is too big for the clam to get its mouth around.

So you can escape.

And the second is obviously that you can absorb a lot of the pressure that you experience down in those depths.

And I guess the third reason is

you do look very good in jeans.

Yeah, so are you telling me that then, you know, if you're someone with that real like Pixar mum ass,

that actually the atmospheric pressure of thousands of tons of water at those depths somehow doesn't affect you.

Yeah, exactly.

If you're rocking and this is incredible, if you are scowing to great panhams, then you should be perfectly fine to exist down there.

Last question, Dr.

Sam, on this.

How many people every year are killed by those giant sort of man-size clams at the bottom of the sea?

Every year.

Every year, yeah.

100 million.

I could have spoken to Nicholas all day about condensed milk.

Of course I could.

But I felt I had to broach the topic of the controversy that he has created in recent times with his views about the titanic

nicholas questions the official narrative around the titanic sinking although he does agree that the boat was hit by an iceberg i do believe it it hit the iceberg but i ascribe to the theory that the ship sank as a consequence of carrying illegal tins of beef Okay, so illegal tins of beef, what, so many, and we're talking about the weight of that, of those tins dragging it to the bottom of the seas?

no no um the weight was fine um

everyone knows that the titanic is comprised of 16 compartments yeah and 15 bulkheads right now

if there were no tins of beef in the titanic it would have hit the iceberg Those bulkheads would have closed.

The water would have been contained at the front of the ship.

And that was the idea of why it was unsinkable and all this stuff.

Exactly.

Hence, it's unsinkable.

But

in fact, the ship was carrying millions of tins of illegal black market beef, which were being held inside the Titanic so that when it hit the iceberg, the water poured in, the bulkheads tried to close, but it was being clogged by tins of beef.

And where was this beef from, and why was the Titanic full of beef?

Yes, that's a good question.

Bruce Ismay

was the chairman of the White Star line, and he was very much the sort of brainchild of

this luxury transatlantic travel.

And he was chairman of the White Star Line and he came up with this idea of having a luxurious cruise that would travel between the UK and America.

But that requires a lot of money.

And around 1912, who had money?

The black market beef traders of Southampton.

Belfast and Portsmouth.

Right.

So Bruce, in all of his wisdom, thought, hang on, if I'm actually going to make this dream of mine a reality, I'm going to have to get

some of these funds.

So he wasn't able to get a normal bank loan or find financing a different way?

The draw of

those gangs was quite strong at the time.

If you wanted a ship to dock off one of those ports, which of course the Titanic wanted, you really had to get on the good side of the beef black marketeers.

I see.

They really had control over those ports.

So while he could have had a bank loan, sure, he could have made the Titanic sure, but where is that docking at?

Yeah.

You know, where is that sailing from?

Exactly.

And I say Southampton and Portsmouth, around 1912, you could not find a port that wasn't controlled by beef black marketeers.

So there was this meeting in Southampton.

They met at a milkshake bar.

Down on the docks, I imagine, you know, pretty sketchy place.

You know, we imagine it now.

We all know about those milkshake bars back then, you know, dockside fights, you know, all life was there.

Covered in milk.

Yeah, exactly.

All of them covered in milk.

Everyone had that milk moustache around that time.

And actually that was that was a

surefire sign that someone was a member of one of these beef black marketeer gangs.

Oh, so that's how you knew who to approach?

Exactly.

That's how you knew everyone in those gangs had a milk moustache.

Because somebody like Bruce Ismay, you know, for him to go to one of those dockside milkshake bars, you know, he's from the higher echelons of society, right?

Exactly.

So that must have been a you know, pretty big thing for someone like him to stoop to go down to the dockside milkshake bar.

Yeah, I mean, pretty scary stuff.

You know, like you say, this man's used to champagne.

He's not used to the sort of the dirty milkshakes of Southampton.

So it would have been a big moment, but you know, that's how you know that Bruce's dream really, really was pretty serious.

You know, someone doesn't go to a milkshake bar without knowing what they want.

So he met with the gangs.

He explained his dream.

He said, you know, listen, I want the most luxurious cruise liner to depart from here and take people across the Atlantic.

And, you know, I'm sure he would have been a bit scared, but a couple of milkshakes later, you know, some shots of condensed milk maybe.

They were actually getting on like a house on fire.

So initially, the discussion was around transporting a couple of thousand tins of beef, but Bruce was so high on the sugar of the milkshakes milkshakes that he ended up promising the transportation of about four to five million tins across the Atlantic.

Right.

So when the when the Titanic took off and there's those, you know, there's film, isn't there, of the people waving it off and that's right.

People up on the balconies waving.

We just have to imagine that then below decks, it's just tin after tin of that beef.

Well, you've got to ask yourself why they're on the deck.

You know, why are they waving?

Why are they on the deck waving?

I've seen the footage like everyone else.

They're on the deck.

There's thousands of them.

They're waving.

You know, everyone's like, oh, they're so happy.

It's what a wonderful moment filled with hope.

They're waving for help.

You know, they've gotten on that boat with their cases.

They've tried to go into their cabins and they've been turned away.

You know, I'm sorry, it's full up.

What do you mean it's full up?

It's full of beef.

Hang on a second.

The ship's, you know, it's blowing its horn.

Honk.

It's departing.

Everyone's rushing up to the deck.

They're waving.

They've got their handkerchiefs.

They're saying, Help, help, help.

This thing's full of beef.

You know,

I can't get below deck.

And everyone on the harbour thinks they're just happy.

They're waving back.

You know, good luck.

Well done.

And they're going, help.

You know, seriously,

it's full of beef.

Oh, enjoy your time.

Wait till I got it's but this thing is it's gonna blow it's going down

And lo and behold, then they hit the iceberg.

And as you say, the system didn't work because it was all clogged up with beef.

Some people have felt that you've gone too far with some of the things you've said.

Your claim that, for example,

a high number of the deaths were caused because

the lifeboats were full of beef.

Yeah, that's right.

Again, these beef black marketeers, after that milkshake meeting with Bruce Ismay, had him sign on the dotted line that if anything goes wrong, he's got to save the beef first.

So, in my opinion, nobody should have died on the Titanic because there were enough lifeboats.

But after striking the iceberg, it's going down, and everyone's thinking, okay,

uh-oh,

at least we've got the lifeboats.

Hang on, what's he saying?

And you're hearing right across the whole boat, tins of beef first, tins of beef first, then women and children.

More after this.

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remembering bits that I had to get rid of.

Normally for time, it's not because they're not good enough.

It's because every episode, if I just left everything in that we recorded, would just be hours and hours long.

So it was fun going through that stuff.

There's some really fun off cuts there from the likes of Paul F.

Tompkins and of course pod favorites like Mike Korsniak and Co.

Lots of good stuff there.

There's also the audio of a live stream event I did last year, which was with Dr.

Sam Archer and the Ask Vet Bob Truskothik.

We did a kind of live Ask a Vet versus Ask a Doc.

That's up there.

I've also done a collaboration with another MaxFun pod called Sound Soundheep,

in which my character from Beef and Dairy is interviewed by a CEO who's like two inches tall called the Tiny CEO, which doesn't make much sense if you haven't listened to their show, but it's good fun.

Also, you can find in this year's bonus stuff a video of last year's live show, which was at the London Podcast Festival, which I think is the best live show that we've ever done.

And I think it's better than the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics.

There, I've gone there.

I've said it.

It's got projections and costumes and all that kind of stuff.

And I think it's really worth watching.

All that bonus stuff is there for you.

Also, for those newly signing up at the $10 a month or people upgrading their membership to $10 a month, you get the Beef and Dairy Network Pin Badge.

We've done a number of pin badges over the years.

This year's one is a very special one.

It's the crest of the Wyoming Cattle College of the Internet.

So you can wear that proudly and show people that you have

learned at that esteemed academy.

Also, at the higher tiers, there are various gifts available.

There's a MaxFun bag.

There's a MaxFun bucket hat.

Go and check that out at maximumfund.org forward slash join.

But the main thing, really, I think, is that

by signing up to support, you guarantee the future of the show.

And I guess I just want to say, like, I do not take for granted how amazing it is that enough people chip in some money so that I can spend proper time on this show, pay all the contributors, and try and make a show as good as I can make it?

And if over the years you've enjoyed listening, think of it as giving us a tip.

It's good to support the things that you like, because if you don't, then who will?

And if you like the show and you think it's worth something, then why not?

Kick us some dosh.

Anyway, I'll stop going about this now.

This is my final ask.

Why not go to maximumfun.org forward slash join?

Back to the show.

Back to my big interview with Nicholas Summers.

Why do you think this isn't well known?

Was this covered up?

You know, why?

Obviously, we've seen the film Titanic.

That's where many people will get their knowledge about this particular event.

In the film, of course, the main characters go below deck.

You'll remember them having sex in a very sweaty Model T Ford.

He sketches her breasts.

She dances with some carefree Irishmen.

You're saying that none of that could have happened because all those areas were just packed full of tins of beef.

That's right.

There is no way that that would have happened on the actual Titanic.

And I'm glad you've brought this up, actually.

I'm glad you brought this up because you say there's been a cover-up.

I would agree with that.

But there's one person who's tried to blow the whistle on this, and that's James Cameron.

But that's his movie.

It's his movie, that's right.

But I met James in Southampton at one of those sort of preserved milkshake bars that I frequent.

And the National Trust, I think, own a number of them and keep them as they were.

Yes, that's right.

And this one in Southampton is thought of to be the original milkshake bar.

And it really is a fantastic example of a milkshake bar.

They've kept all of the original features.

The filthy glasses?

The filthy glasses, exactly.

There's a lot of excrement on the floor.

You know, they've really, really kept it the way it used to be.

Dog fights?

Dog fights, a lot, a lot of dog fights, a lot of cock fights as well.

A lot of of cock on dog as well really and dog on cock right so yeah they've got a lot of that and uh i was there on a saturday morning as i always do straight down to the milkshake bar and i sat down and there was this guy just on the bar head in his hands and he and he had this big folder and on the front of this folder was just the word titanic so sorry when when was this this was a couple of years before he made the film so that folder may have been him working on the script maybe exactly right so um he it very well might have contained the original script.

And so I went up to him and I said,

hi, James.

I'm Nicholas Summers.

I know who you are.

You're a big Hollywood heavyweight.

It's great to meet you.

What the fuck is this?

You know, what is this that you've got here?

And he said, you know, it's my,

I'm making this film with Kate Winslow and Leonard DiCaprio.

And he said, I'm working on the Titanic.

And I started asking him about it.

And I said, you know, there's been no mention of beef, James.

And he said, what do you mean?

And I told him the whole story and he was completely taken with it.

I never, never, you know, a lot of people take a little bit of convincing.

He straight off the bat, he was, oh my God.

I think, you know, for me, certainly, things start making sense once you hear the theory because you think, well, of course, yeah, of course.

All the questions are answered.

It feels like that final jigsaw piece is coming into place.

It feels like James Cameron had that same experience.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And he said to me, he said, Nicholas, I'm going to get you on this feature.

And so I was his main advisor throughout the filming of the Titanic with Kate and Leonard.

You know, he'd say, he'd do these shots, he'd do these scenes, and he'd look at me and he'd say, Nicholas, what do you think?

And I always had the same note.

More beef.

More tins of beef.

More tins of beef, James.

Anything below deck was full of beef.

So all of those scenes were very much filmed with the tins present.

Not many people know this, actually.

It might be a podcast exclusive.

I was the on-set doctor for the blockbuster film Titanic.

No way.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was a fun few months.

That shoot

didn't come without its fair bit of drama, though.

Mainly, people were coming to see me because they'd either had an injury because a can of beef had fallen on their head, or they'd tripped over a can of beef, or they'd scratched themselves

on the jagged edge of a can of beef that had maybe been partially opened.

So as a doctor, then, were you attending to the likes of the big hitters?

Your Billy Zanes, your Kate Winslets, your Leonard DiCaprios?

Yeah, lots of fun days on set.

Me and Billy Zane.

I saw Billy Zane a lot, actually.

He's sort of, well, man.

There's a thing where he's sort of a form of eczema where your skin is very oily, particularly the bottom of your feet, which means that you can, if you wanted to, sort of glide everywhere.

you know you'd often see him and he it was almost like he was on wheelies he would glide everywhere is there not a sort of patient confidentiality confidentiality thing here where you shouldn't be telling me exactly about billy zane's eczema um i used to think that and then i remember once at a at a premiere for another film of his three i think it was called some people called it temptation island in other countries and he turned up at the red carpet and uh he was gliding around everywhere and it looked a bit like sort of the red carpet had been overrun by snails but i looked down at that clear trail and went that's not a snail trail that's that's a zane train as we used to call them that's interesting because i I remember at the time when that movie came out, people were like, What's going on at this red carpet?

And they assumed he was standing on a Roomba.

Yes.

He'd super charmed.

I remember the Roomba stories.

I remember his publicists getting very angry.

Well, I remember all the rumours about it that were flying around.

Or should I say, Roombas?

The Roomba mill went into overdrive.

I love to laugh.

Yeah, but no, as I say, that's his

slick, slick soles that he was able to sort of glide around on.

He sort of wears shoe tops, so it looks like he's wearing shoes.

What you don't realize is there's no sole on that shoe and it's just his slick real sole.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just his skin underneath.

Is it true that part of Billy Zane's success as a Hollywood actor and the reason why he made it, and boy, has he made it,

is that with him, you don't necessarily have to do a dolly shot.

You can get him to glide towards the camera rather than moving the camera towards him.

Oh, the amount of money you save.

Saves a lot of time on set.

Exactly.

Plus, you don't have to get him a car onto set.

All you need to do is book him a hotel at the top of the hill and have the set at the bottom of the hill.

And you can guarantee he'll be on time every single day.

Nicholas had told me that the film Titanic was filmed with millions of tins of beef on set.

But as we all know, when you watch the movie, you don't see a single tin of beef.

There's not a single tin of beef.

And what happened was we'd wrapped on the film.

Everyone's happy.

Everyone's whooping.

You know, we're getting the champagne out.

Suddenly, there's three execs that I see come.

Studio execs.

Studio execs.

They've arrived.

James starts looking a bit nervous.

He sort of goes over, starts talking to them.

They're looking very, very serious.

James then beckons me over and I thought, hang about, what's going on here?

So I walk over and they go ape shit.

These three studio execs go absolutely ape shit.

I've never seen anything like it.

And all they could say was,

what's with the tins of beef?

What's with the tins of beef?

And Leonard started crying.

He went to pieces entirely.

Kate was consoling him.

And at this point, you know, it's deafening, these three execs.

The room goes quiet.

And, you know, they're saying they've spent millions of pounds on this production.

And they can't see.

F all, you know, in the footage because it's surrounded by tins of beef.

You know, I said to them, I said, we sent you the script.

They okayed the script.

And then they come back at me.

They say, well, yeah, sure, but you didn't say everything was going to be surrounded by millions of tins of beef.

So we've got the final movie, Titanic.

There's not a single tin of beef there.

Does that mean that the whole thing was reshot?

Like, what happened?

Three letters, C-G-I.

Right.

The studio execs came in with

a Windows computer.

And they open up this laptop and they put it in front of my face and they just say,

Windows.

And this is probably Windows 95 of that?

Windows 95.

Exactly.

And that might be the first time you'd seen Windows 95.

I had no idea what they were talking about.

Right.

Okay.

They march off.

Before I know it, I'm going to the cinema in my scuba gear.

I'm getting down there.

I'm sat on the front row.

I'm looking at the screen and I'm not seeing a single tin of beef.

And I'm furious.

So they CGI'd out every single tin of beef in that film?

Using a Windows 95 computer.

Remember, James Cameron came to see me days after the premiere of Titanic, and he was in a bad way.

What the execs had done to his

vision, his film, he was devastated.

He was drinking a lot of alcoholic milkshakes,

about nine or ten a day.

But you could tell that even when he sort of ran out of those, he was just combining any dairy product with any wine that he could get his hands on.

The nadir of this was

he had had a thing where he got some mascaponi cheese and combined that with some very cheap Pinot Grigio he got from a garage and made what he called Pinot Chizio,

the odour of which still haunts me to this day.

He'd gone so far that he was actually giving that out as Christmas presents.

I ended up having to treat a number of celebrities who he'd sent this to.

I remember Billy Zane came into my surgery and

his feet are completely dried out.

As a result of the Pinot Chizzio.

Yeah, he tried to have have some of it and

well, it hadn't agreed with him.

I've got still got on my phone a screenshot of a text message from Sigourney Weaver where she'd just written, it stinks, it stinks so bad.

My guest room is a write-off.

And when you think about how smelly something would have to be for you to go to the lengths of texting a doctor, I mean, that's smelly.

She didn't even want medical advice.

I just told her, you know, you're never going to sell this place.

Best option for you is to bulldoze it and sell the land to the military.

military james was a total mess you know he called me up hundreds of times i could tell he'd been on the milkshakes um and you know i'd go down to the milkshake bar on a saturday and i looked at him he looked at me his eyes were completely bloodshot he'd bet so much money on the dog fights that he'd lost it all that that he was actually going to compete in the next dog fight versus a dog versus a Rottweiler, I think it was.

And I thought, this is serious.

We're going to lose James.

And I looked at him in the eye and i knew the next thing i was going to say was going to be incredibly important it was going to save this man's life

and i said the only three letters that i knew would would shake him out of this

c g i

right windows 95 and he looked slightly confused at me

And I said it again:

C G I

Windows 95.

And for the first time in a long time, I saw that cheeky glint that he used to give me on the set when we were piling the tins of beef high to get ready for the next shot.

And he stood up,

he picked up the stool that he was sat on, he launched it across the room, and he marched out of that milkshake bar.

And I never heard from James again

until

the release of a little film called Avatar.

There I was at the premiere of Avatar.

I was in my full scuba gear.

That was the very first time

that I had gone to the cinema and had done really anything other than scuba diving, where I felt the same passion,

the same level of excitement that scuba diving has given me.

So, in contrast to your reaction to Jumanji.

Precisely.

The CGI technology that these studio exec assholes used to completely bastardize and destroy mine and James's vision in Titanic.

James had done the incredibly clever thing, with my help, to take that power back from them to create

the greatest film ever made.

And actually, now I think of it,

I wonder whether, and you can tell me if I'm right or wrong, the subtext of the story of Avatar,

the blue space alien type people versus the kind of mechanoid human people, is actually telling the story of you and James versus the studio execs.

I'm so glad you picked up on that because I often tell people that I worry that I come across as a bit of an egomaniac, but I'm so glad you got that same impression.

James told me that that is what the film is about.

You know, there's all this talk of, oh, is it a kind of metaphor for the environment or fossil fuels and drilling?

It's not that.

It is entirely the retelling of mine and James's experience in creating Titanic, starring Kate Winslet and Leonard DiCaprio.

And, you know, eventually, as you know, the blue space alien weird people rise up and they destroy the mechanoid human beings.

And that's exactly what James and I did with the creation of Avatar.

And it's that,

I've never felt anything like that.

And to this day, that's the one moment in my life where I have felt...

pure joy beyond that given to me by scuba diving.

Despite Nicholas and James Cameron creating Avatar and feeling that they had proven the studio executives who had ruined Titanic wrong, their theory that the Titanic had sunk because it was full of illegal beef was still widely ridiculed and disbelieved.

However, the success of Avatar gave them an opportunity to prove everyone wrong.

It was when James and I brought out Avatar the Way of Water that we finally realized we've got enough money here.

We've made a buck or two.

And

the only way we're going to stop people from calling us cranks is if we prove once and for all that the Titanic was filled from bottom to top with tins of beef.

And how do you do that?

You've got to get yourself a submersible.

You've got to go down to the wreck.

and you've got to recover as many tins of beef as you possibly can.

And that is exactly what we did.

Now, this is obviously huge.

And this is the thing that's, you know, some people have been saying all sorts, that you fake the footage, that, you know, ironically, that it's all CGI.

People sort of don't trust James Cameron because they know that he can create these wonderful, intricate worlds.

Maybe even he's using the specific way of water technology, which he, you know, to create those underwater worlds.

Maybe he's just done this with Nicholas Summers and they're faking this whole thing, just like the moon landings were faked.

And, you know, and

everyone knows Bill Clinton's a hologram.

And so these things are possible.

How does it feel when people say that to you?

Well, it's music to my ears in a way because you know what I'm going to say.

Whenever anyone comes at me with this diatribe, you faked it, you faked it, you faked it, boom.

Yes.

What is that?

What is that then?

No, this is a real privilege.

Can I touch it?

Of course you can.

Be careful.

Be careful with it.

Sorry, just to explain to the listener what this is.

This is a tin of beef, which, if you're to be believed, has been at the bottom of the ocean since 1912.

That's right.

It's rusty.

It's

hard to read the writing on the front, but it's an incredible artifact.

Thank you so much for bringing it along.

My pleasure.

You haven't yet opened any of these tins.

No.

But when you contacted the show and said you wanted to come on, you said that

ultimately you do want to publicly open one of the tins, prove what's inside, prove that it's beef, and also prove that if you tin beef, in your words, it could last 5,000 years.

Like this, this will be totally edible, and you'd like to prove that.

And you've decided you want to do that on our show.

And I just want to say thank you so much.

It's my pleasure for this exclusive.

It's my pleasure.

And it's a recognition of all that you do for the beef industry.

I know you here have been firm supporters of the beef tin theory for a long time now.

So, this is just in recognition to when everyone else abandoned me and James, I knew you were there supporting us.

So, it's the least we can do.

Okay, let's open that tin.

Okay,

here we go.

And we are to expect that

this beef has been perfectly preserved.

Absolutely, perfectly preserved.

Here we go.

I guess I'll do the honours.

There we go.

So just to, he's turning the little key that's on the side.

That's right.

And it's just.

Oh, we punctured it there.

Oh, God.

Oh, it's really.

Jesus Christ.

It's really.

That's.

It's a kind of swampy gas.

Yes.

I mean, I think that's...

I think that's normal.

Yeah,

that's looking good to me.

Are you sure?

I mean, should we even open it anymore?

Because that's

noxious.

I mean, that's really.

It's meant to bubble.

It's definitely meant to bubble.

I think if you...

I'm just going to finish taking the lid off and.

Oh, my God.

Yeah,

that's looking good.

I mean,

that's...

Sorry, I know you said that this tin would be able to keep beef fresh for years and years and years, but

that's a putrid meat.

No, no, it's not.

This is exactly as

the beef would have been eaten in 19.

Would those worms have been in the tin originally?

Yep, definitely.

Yeah.

Because they look like kind of sea worms.

There's definitely like a maritime worm vibe.

Yep.

i just want to say like you don't don't feel like you have to eat this just because we're on we're recording the podcast and like this is this is 25 years in the making it's really ripening isn't it the third it's getting better i just want to make it very clear that i don't i won't think any less of you for not eating this this is very obviously heavily rotten there's nothing i want to do more than to eat this beef okay there's quite a lot of eggs in it i are those all original that's that's all normal what about the tiny crabs it looks like there's thousands of tiny crabs in in there.

Nah, I think that's normal.

We could sieve it for crabs first if you want.

Okay.

Well, here we go.

First big mouthful.

Here we go.

Okay.

I can feel the crabs clawing, but I can't wait for it.

Are you taking a second spoon?

You don't need to take a...

I think you've tasted it now, so you don't need to take a second spoonful.

I just want to.

Because now you've got through the tops of the hardened carapace, there's a lot more of those miniature crabs out there.

That's the best bit.

That's often the top bit of the tinned beef was to preserve the rest.

Yeah.

And the good, the good stuff is down below.

It's grey.

I mean, there's no other word for it.

This is, this doesn't get better than this.

It does not get better than this.

Sorry.

Okay.

Well, I think you've done very well there.

And I by no means think you need to finish this tin.

Nope.

No, the whole tin.

The whole tin.

I'm not even convinced that's still beef.

I'm sorry, that's.

It's like kind of organic mulch created by hundreds of years of breeding crabs, I think.

You could eat around that.

There's a, there's that tiny.

Can you see that tiny, tiny, tiny bit there that resembles a bit of beef?

The bit that's in the mouth of the live.

Yeah.

I don't know what that is.

It's kind of a worm, a a kind of sea worm.

Yeah, that bit.

Yeah.

Do you want that bit?

That invertebrate could be a new species as far as I'm concerned.

I've not seen anything like that before.

Do you want to eat it?

No, I do not want to eat it.

I think, and I don't think you should eat it anymore either.

I think it's.

Okay, here we go.

God, I just wish.

I wish Jose was here to finish me off.

I mean, I don't mean that.

That's just

the beef talking.

But

Round four.

I'm going to have to call Jose.

I'm going to have to call Jose.

Jose!

Jose!

Shoot my head off.

Do it!

He's not here.

There's no...

Jose!

Jose's not here.

Jose!

Please!

I can see Jose!

I can see him there!

So Nicholas is now in a stable condition.

He fell into a coma moments after you stopped recording, but he is improving.

His vitals are now relatively normal, and we're hoping he might wake up soon.

Wow, okay, well thank you so much, Dr.

Sam, for taking care of him.

Obviously, it was pretty scary for me.

It was just the two of us in the studio, and I saw things going south pretty quickly.

It was when

his eyes rolled back, his mouth started foaming, and then hundreds and hundreds of tiny crabs started firing

back out of his mouth, nose, and anus

that I thought, right, I need to call the doctor.

And thank God you picked the phone up.

Is this something that we should have maybe expected with him eating that tin of beef from 1912?

I think we're looking at a situation where he's eaten very, very old beef, beef from before a time of health and safety standards.

We're talking about cows that were fed almost exclusively on lead.

Right.

Yeah, that was what they used to do back then.

So the problem really with eating that old beef is that you are essentially putting yourself back into a time before health and safety legislation and essentially experiencing the levels of danger of an Edwardian person just in the modern day.

Wow.

Exactly.

It's like putting your stomach in a time machine and is as dangerous as that sounds as well.

And the key problem is lead.

Why was it then that so many cows in the early 1900s were eating so much lead?

Cows used to be sold at auction, and the heavier the cow, the more money you would get for it.

So the only logical thing for a lot of farmers to do was to feed their cow as much lead as possible.

This sort of reached its nadir in, I think it was 1942, when a cow was sold at auction that weighed 37 tons,

which is far too much for a cow.

By that point, I believe the cow was almost pure lead and was completely useless to be butchered.

And the butcher that bought it to turn it into, you know, steaks and things actually

just left it where it was and it became a statue.

It just became a cow statue because there was just so much lead in it.

So essentially the cow died, the organic parts of the cow naturally rotted away.

And what you were left with and what that cow had turned into was a kind of perfect cast within which to cast a lead statue of a cow.

Exactly, exactly.

Rumour has it a number of statues were created that way.

I've heard a horrible rumour that the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square was made by pouring molten lead into the corpse of Winston Churchill, but I've not had that verified, so I don't want to spread that rumour.

You don't want to spread that rumour?

That doesn't really make sense in this context.

Thinking again about Nicholas, then he's absolutely chock full of lead.

Yes.

But you say he's going to make a full recovery.

Is that true?

We're hopeful.

We're also hopeful that, as we all know, lead is very heavy, which means it sinks to the bottom, which means Nicholas might be looking at having the kind of dump truck ass that means that he himself will be able to traverse the inky depths of the oceans of the world deeper than he's ever dove before.

Wow.

So you're saying that the lead will coalesce in his ass,

creating that real dump truck situation,

and that that will allow him to be an even better diver.

So, oh, I mean, this is, I mean, way to pull a positive out of something so negative.

This is amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just can't wait to see that new ass of his.

Anyway,

thank you, Dr.

Sam.

Oh, before I go, before I go, Dr.

Sam, what do you make of his theory that the Titanic sank because it was full of tins of beef and also that the lifeboats were full of tins of beef, and that's why people died during that situation.

I think that theory is complete bollocks.

It's just not true.

That's a good point.

Okay, well thank you Dr.

Sam.

Thank you very much.

A big thanks to Nicholas Summers and Dr.

Sam Archer for those interviews.

Nicholas is still in a coma, but the good news is that the lead is beginning to sink and coalesce in one part of his body.

That's right.

That dump truck ass.

Beep, beep.

Also, I should mention that we did ask James Cameron if he would be interviewed for this program, and he declined, but he did send the following message.

Hello, and thank you for your interest in my work.

I can't be interviewed at the moment, as I'm putting the final touches to the script of Avatar 11.

In this film, a group of blue Na'Vi people discover a portal which allows them to go to 1980s, California, where they end up competing in the 1984 LA Olympics, ultimately winning bronze.

Thanks, James.

That sounds like absolute horseshit.

So, that's all we've got time for this month.

But if you're after more beef and dairy news, get over to our website now, where you'll find all the usual stuff, as well as our off-topic section, where this month we surveyed the people of Birmingham and asked them how they feel the city would be different if it had a coast.

So, until next time, beef out.

Thanks to Cody Dahler, Tom Neenan, and Linnea Sage.

And thanks to you for listening.

I know that not everyone can afford to, or simply doesn't want to,

support the show financially.

And obviously, that's totally fine.

I'm just pleased that you're listening, quite honestly.

Because it's Max Fun Drive, we are going to be doing some special stuff over the next couple of weeks.

On the 27th of March, that's a Wednesday at 8 p.m.

UK time.

I'll be doing a live stream with Professor James Harkham, historian and friend of the show.

We're going to be doing a live Ask a Historian session, where you can put your questions to the historian James Harkam.

So to watch that, that'll be on Twitch.

So 8pm on the 27th of March, twitch.tv forward slash Benjamin Partridge.

Also, there'll be another episode of Beef and Dairy Network out next week.

Because it's Max OneDrive.

Another extra bonus episode will be coming through to everyone's feed.

I'll also be doing Reddit Ask Me Anythings.

I might do some other Twitch stream things.

I'm not really a big sort of Twitch guy, but maybe I'll do that for the next couple of weeks.

I've been playing a lot with the computer game Civilization 6,

and maybe I can stream myself playing that.

But I have to say, it has absolutely ruined my life.

Anyway, for details of special stuff that I might be doing for Max Fun Drive, follow us on social media.

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