557: No Such Thing As A Sweater For Einstein

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Hello, and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast.

This week coming to you live from Manchester.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunt and Murray, and James Harkin.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days.

And in no particular order, here we go.

Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that for Einstein's 70th birthday, mathematician Kurt Gerdel gave him a sweater and a paper which proved time travel.

Whoa.

But he didn't give him the ability to go back to his 60th birthday.

No.

I know what you're all thinking.

Bit dodgy.

We're not certain that he did give him the sweater.

Okay.

Brilliant.

A lot of places say that he did.

Some places say that his wife Adele knitted it and he never gave it to him.

But, you know, I'm going to say that.

Why would he have never given it?

Is that about his embarrassing thing where you think it might be awkward?

He won't like it.

Yes, she backed out, apparently, and they gave an etching in its place.

What?

Whose wife Anne?

einstein's wife's wife oh girdle okay okay okay so i should say who girdle is yeah does everyone everyone knows who girdle girdle this does sound like an item of clothing a kurt girdle like that would be a good thing to give someone for their present like a sort of a sexy present a sexy yeah you probably wouldn't give einstein a kurt girdel for his birth hand not a 70th well sorry girdle was a mathematician german uh early 20th century he loved his logic and i'm talking mathematical logic so it's you know it's very complicated complicated, weird stuff.

But he basically just liked disproving stuff and kind of finding holes in things using his logical skills.

And this was one of the things he basically.

Yeah, why does he appeal to you?

So strange.

He sounds amazing, though.

Yeah.

He was in a sort of archetypal obsessive genius.

So for example, here's an example.

He used an alarm clock.

but to help him to go to bed.

Okay.

Go on.

I think because he was so deep in his work that he needed to set an alarm clock and then it went off.

He was like, oh, I must go to sleep.

It's one in the morning again.

I've been doing maths.

That's kind of

a good idea.

So I should just explain his proof of time travel

just quickly, if you will.

Just 30 seconds.

Well, this was because Einstein had just come up with his theories and he was going into it and using his logic to see what could and could not be true.

And he came up with this idea of you fly your rocket really, really, really, really fast and you go in a great big curve.

And because the universe is rotating and because light isn't going parallel, it helps you to go back in time.

It's the real basics.

I know I missed out lots of steps there.

But the main problem with it is that the universe is not rotating.

Oh.

Right, yes.

So that means that all of his theory is completely up the Swanny.

And it's really sad because he said this to Einstein.

And Einstein lived for another five or six years.

And Gödel used to message him every now and then or ring him every now and then and say, have they found out that my thing's true yet?

He's quite chicken of it.

Yeah, yeah.

But surely if we simply got the universe to start spinning, we could get this going.

Sure.

Yeah.

It's worth

spinning it.

Because he said as well, if he proved it, if he proved time travel existed, then what he was really proving was time didn't exist.

Yeah.

Yes, it's basically kind of, which is sort of what Einstein had done already, right?

So general relativity had said time is sort of like the same as space and it probably curves around on itself.

Again, this is really for toddlers.

None of it is true.

But

the time jab idea is that you could skip from one bit to another.

But the crucial thing was that Gerdel's proving you could go back in time, because Einstein obviously had already said you can go forward in time faster than we already do.

That's the idea in all those sci-fi films where if you go

out into very, very distant space, you can come back to Earth and you haven't aged at all, but your daughter is older than you are now.

That thing, that's completely uncontroversial and would happen.

Everyone knew that.

But that's not useful for people because they want to go back and visit people who have died.

And so, yeah, he said this, and it upset people, didn't it, when he said that time travel could exist to the extent that Stephen Hawking, amazing scientist number three, said this presents too many paradoxes and crucially, the paradox that says if you can go back in time, you could go back, murder your former self, but then you wouldn't exist to go back in time to murder yourself.

You know, that the classic sci-fi, the grandfather paradox.

All the the people who have done that, they've already gone.

Yeah.

Because they did go back and murder themselves.

It's fine.

But they weren't there.

No.

Here's some time travel paradoxes seeing as we're on the subject.

Yeah.

What do you think the bootstrap paradox is?

So sort of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps.

Exactly.

That's the phrase.

But you go back and you tell yourself about the horse.

You win money on a bet and you become very rich.

That's the fact for the future paradox, yeah.

Well, it's officially known as the bootstrap paradox.

Okay.

And the idea is that it can't be true because things would just come out of nowhere.

Like as in, you know, I would go back in time, tell myself how to invent fidget spinners, and they come out of nowhere.

But that didn't happen.

Do you know what I mean?

I saw what you would do, James.

That is so tragic.

I did spend about half an hour trying to think, what would I do?

Yeah, yeah.

It's amazing.

It's amazingly hard to think of fidget spinners now.

Do you know what I mean?

Like, does anyone here still use a fidget spinner regularly?

Right?

Okay, that.

What do you mean?

That's interesting.

What do you mean it's hard to think of them now?

Well, they were such a big thing

six years ago.

Yeah.

And it's hard to remember now that everyone else.

Quite a lot has happened since then, hasn't it?

Yeah, I suppose.

It feels like the whole world's got a bit more complicated since fidget spinners.

Do you think that's when the ball set in?

Is when we all put them back in the drawer.

Yeah.

That was a distraction from the time travelers of the future.

They gave us the fidget spin.

We didn't notice Trump.

It's just a.

That's it.

Can I mention a few things about Girdle?

Because I have no idea what you guys are talking about on snow.

So, a fascinating character, clearly, as we're saying, he arrived in Princeton while Albert Einstein was there.

And Einstein loved him.

He loved him so much.

And he used to walk to work just so that he could walk with Gödel.

And he would do his stuff there and then go home so he could walk home with him.

It was this amazing pairing.

And people used to just be amazed if they had any contact with Gödel.

There's a story of someone saying that they were in a supermarket one time and they found the philosopher Richard Rorty standing in a total daze and they were like, UK, what's going on?

And he said in a whispered tone that he'd just seen Gerdel in the frozen food aisle and he was just so starstruck to see this genius.

That's interesting because like towards the end of his life his diet really changed and he would only eat butter, baby food and laxatives.

He had a really tragic end to his life.

He thought he was being poisoned, didn't he?

And so he didn't eat to kind of show that to sort of defeat the people who he thought were poisoning him, but that meant he couldn't.

Well, it was his wife, Adele.

He would have her taste everything that he ate.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

But yeah, he made Adele cook for him because hers were the sweeter version is that he made Adele cook for him because she was the only person he could ever trust.

And then when she got sick and went into hospital in the 70s, late 70s, was it early 80s?

Then he did die because he couldn't eat anything else.

And he was very, very troubled.

I mean, it's not worth being an amazing mathematician because you are going to be troubled.

Can I tell you guys about his time as a spy?

I don't even know this.

This is amazing.

Okay, so grew up in Vienna, left for Princeton in 1940, right?

There was a Viennese physicist called Hans Thuring who wanted to warn the US government and the US president about the risk of the Nazis developing a nuclear bomb.

So Hans Thuring wanted to contact Einstein to pass the message on.

There's no way of contacting him from Vienna without the Nazis reading the message, intercepting the call, bugging him, whatever.

Can't be done.

So he thought, Gödel, Gödel is going to Princeton.

Okay, so I'll give him the task of warning Einstein.

He is the message.

Gödel then gets trapped in this nightmare of bureaucracy.

He can't go.

You know, he has to apply for a visa, then the US consulate is sort of swamped.

The Nazi bureaucracy, he then is declared fit to serve in the German army.

Nightmare, nightmare, nightmare, nightmare.

He can't get out of Vienna and get to Princeton and tell Einstein.

Eventually, he got out.

He went to the USA through Moscow, Vladivostok, Japan, San Francisco, all the way across America to Princeton.

Took him two months and then when he got to Einstein he just said oh Hans Thiring says hello by the way

just completely forgot to pass on the message about the Nazis developing a nuclear bomb oh my god there's so many stories where he seemed such a liability in that kind of respect like there was um so when he was in America he got the chance to sit the citizen test and he started reading the Constitution and he worked out that the Constitution, the way it was worded in America, legally meant that it was possible for someone to become a dictator and set up a fascist regime.

No, definitely not possible.

No, I don't think, really don't think that possible.

When does this show go out?

We're recording.

In late October.

So he basically was heading towards going to do his oath, and Einstein went with him because he was like, I know you're going to cop this up.

So they arrive, but then the judge, who is presiding over the whole thing, sees Einstein and goes, oh my God, please, gentlemen, come up to my room.

And so they go up and they sit with him.

And Einstein's freaking out.

Gödel's having a chat.

And the judge says that Germany was under an evil dictatorship.

Fortunately, that's not possible in America.

On the contrary,

says Gödel, and starts to explain what he found.

And the judge and Einstein just went,

and he took the oath and got it.

But yeah, he really,

what a liability.

That was the classic sort of wanting to use logic to prove things right.

So he also used logic to prove that God existed, but he wouldn't publish it because he thought that if he did, then people would think that he thought God existed.

When actually it was just a mathematical bit of fun that he was doing.

Right.

Was it a bit of fun?

I don't know if a bit of fun was one of the top elements of his character, I have to say.

Well, for him, maths was fun.

Yeah.

I don't think it was.

I disagree.

I think he was a very sad person.

But I do think he might have had the one joy in his life might have been Adele, who was such an interesting person to marry, right?

Because she was a dancer.

She'd been a dancer in a cabaret club called The Moth in Vienna.

She was like not well educated.

I just like the idea of a nightclub called The Moth because with all the dancers just constantly battering away at the centre.

That was what it was.

And she got very concussed.

And that's why she married this weirdo.

She was a foot care specialist.

Just what a strange person for, you know, for him to marry.

And she really protected him.

Like, he was quite dappy, as Dan says.

He was a bit like, didn't quite know the right way to behave socially a lot of the time.

And at one point, when he was living in Vienna, he was mistaken for a Jewish person at a time when anti-Semitism, of course, was incredibly rife.

And he was attacked and beaten up by Nazi thugs, and she beat them off with her umbrella.

Really?

Yeah.

That's very cool.

He hated chatting with people, right?

Like, that was part of that character.

When he really wanted to avoid someone, he would schedule a rendezvous at a precise time and place and then make sure he was not there.

That's tremendous.

We've got to move on in a sec, by the way.

He was, This is a

sort of related thing about him avoiding people.

He nearly wasn't understood at all after his death, as in all his papers.

And it was thought that they were in code that nobody could understand.

And actually, it turned out it was a thing called Gabelsberger script.

And that was a special German shorthand.

And Goethe was almost the last.

He was in the last year of people who ever learned this specific kind of shorthand.

Nobody else knew it.

And obviously, he lived for decades after that.

So 50 50 years later, you're just faced with these squiggles.

You think, I have no idea what this is.

And he was in the very last class way back in the 20s to learn it.

So cool.

One more thing on time travel, maybe.

So Back to the Future, we mentioned earlier.

In Back to the Future 3,

I believe...

How did they get to 88 miles an hour?

It's on a train.

Well, use a train to push the car.

To push the car, yeah.

Well, the climactic bit.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I read.

They just used the car.

Yeah, go on.

I read the user manual of of the DeLorean car

from back in the day, and it specifically says on page 35, to avoid damage to your vehicle, do not attempt to start the engine by pushing with another vehicle.

Really?

So they may have gone in the future, but they've lost their warranty.

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It is time for fact number two, and that is MyFact.

My Fact this week is that the author of the international best-selling book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, which taught readers to be financially intelligent, is currently $1 billion in debt.

$1 billion.

$1 billion.

It's a lot.

It's a lot of dollars for one person to be in debt.

Has he ever been a rich dad, or is he...

He was a rich dad.

So Robert Kiyosaki is his name.

It was a novel narrative, basically, where he tried to use an analogy of having one dad and a stepdad, one of which went down the classic road of going through business the normal way, and then another one who was independently financial as a result of the path that he'd chosen.

And it was showing how you could go from rags to riches basically by not doing the normal thing.

Massive seller.

Some numbers say it sold as many as 40 million copies worldwide.

That would be about a billion.

Did he buy them all?

Wait,

how has he done this?

How has he ended up so indebted?

Well, in the article that I read about it, he says, I'm $1 billion in debt, and I don't mind.

He's kind of fine with it.

It's because he doesn't have to deal with it, right?

As he says, it's the government's problem at this stage.

That's kind of true of debt.

Yeah, he says he uses debt as money.

It doesn't work.

It doesn't work for a while.

It does work for a while.

It doesn't work in a shop, does it?

Just say, just put it on the tab again.

At some point, does it work?

That's what a credit card is.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

So this guy's just got the biggest biggest credit card and he's got a $1 billion overdraft on his Sainsbury's credit card.

It is sort of true to who he is, right?

Because he's sort of saying cheat your way into financial health.

And I really couldn't work out what I thought of him because the book, he says it's non-fiction and he claims it's a very true story.

His dad was the poor dad.

His best friend's dad was the rich dad.

And they took financial advice from the rich dad who basically said, People are idiots.

Poorer people are idiots.

People who aren't upper class are idiots because they

think that the way to get rich rich is to work really, really, really hard and save all your money.

That's bullshit.

All you've got to do is make money work for you.

That's what rich people are doing.

And it is sort of true, right?

Rich people get their millions and they invest them sensibly and they get all this advice and they make loads more.

But the thing is, this dad didn't exist.

So he made up that story.

What do you mean?

Which dad didn't exist?

The rich dad.

Only the poor dad exists.

And I think that might be a lesson to take away from this.

Yeah.

He's had multiple companies that all have largely gone under.

So in 1977, he had a company called Rippers, which were nylon and velcro wallets.

So you get your Ripper.

And went bankrupt.

Just didn't work out.

His Rich Dad, Poor Dad company, Rich Global.

Global, ready to lose money on a wallet company.

That's quite...

How can you screw up a wallet?

He turned Rich Dad, Poor Dad into a company.

So it became the Rich Dad Company, Rich Global LLC.

That went bankrupt as well in 2012.

The other books.

Do you know the names of the other books?

He's written 26.

Which one do do you want?

Rich Dad's Cash Flow Quadrant.

Oh, yeah.

Sounds dubious.

Rich Dad's Rich Kid Smart Kid.

Sort of reverse it.

Rich Dad's Retire, Young, Retire Rich.

Okay.

Rich Dad's Guide to Becoming Rich Without Cutting Up Your Credit Cards.

Rich Dad's Who Took My Money.

It does feel like he's just put a load of words in a hat.

Oh, yeah.

But a lot of them are rich and die.

It's true.

And then he wrote, We Want You to Be Rich.

Two Men, One Message, co-authored with Donald Trump.

And

yeah, they paired up because basically

Richard K.O.

Kissinger.

He sounded like such an on-the-level businessman before you said he was doing business with Donald Trump.

How sad.

Yeah.

No, they found each other because both their books, The Art of the Deal, did massive, best book ever.

And the other one was really well received as well.

So they thought, let's come together.

And they wrote two books in total with each other.

Yeah.

Wow.

The first self-help book was called Self-Help, I think.

The idea of a self-help book is named after this book by Samuel Smiles.

And his book came out in the same year as On the Origin of the Species and sold a fuckload more.

Really?

And his idea was basically: all you have to do is work really, really, really, really hard and you'll make loads of money.

So it's kind of like, there's some advice in there, but it's mostly a list of really rich people who, you know, slept two hours a night.

More successful people, right?

I read it.

It's really weird because it is just, it's literally mini-biography after mini-biography after minibiography.

There's a biography of about a thousand people in there.

You've got Galileo, Robert Peel, Prime Minister,

James Watt, everyone successful, and just what they did and what they did always sounds really unappealing and like they had no fun.

And he said that what you need to do is work hard like these people and not have what normal people have, the perverted life.

Right.

Uh-oh.

Wasn't he great-great-grandfather or great-great-something of Bear Grylls?

He was, yeah.

That's it.

Samuel Smiles bear grills, both sentence people.

Ah, yes.

Interesting.

Food for thought.

What does bear grills mean in a sentence?

As in the right to bear grills.

Or you have lots of grills if you're from London.

I've got bear grills.

Bear grills, yeah, yeah.

Self-help was so influential.

It was one of the first ever books translated into Japanese.

Okay,

from English to Japanese.

And Japan had been a really closed society until very recently before this.

And basically, that was the first book translated into Japanese.

All the books he mentioned in Self-Help, this is how successful Self-Help was in Japanese, all the books he mentions in the book then became bestsellers in Japan.

Yeah, right.

And all the books he did.

It was a hellish job for the publisher.

So the publisher published that and then went, oh shit, I've got to publish another thousand books.

What are we going to do with all the money we're making?

What are you talking about?

You're right.

Napoleon Hill, have you heard of him?

Yeah, of course, yeah.

Think and Grow Rich.

He wrote Think and Grow Rich, which, as far as I can tell, is just a con, right?

It's like, if you think of something, the world will give it to you.

If anyone knows the book by Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, massively, I'm not saying that's a con because I don't know whether she's still active in suing.

I'm saying that the book that is based on

is a con.

Yeah, yeah.

So that, right, that first one is the con.

And he's definitely dead, right?

He's so...

Well, this is the interesting thing about him.

He is,

but he was involved with this bizarre cult.

He had loads and loads of failed businesses.

Are the cults still suing?

They have gone out of business as well, so it was fun.

They were called the master metaphysicians, and they came up with this scheme of raising an immortal human.

Okay, so they adopted this baby girl, a real human baby girl.

She was called Jean Gaunt.

They pronounced that they were going to raise her a vegetarian.

So good, tick.

Once more.

And

they all liked it, but they were too weak to say anything.

If you like that comment, please ask one of your stronger, meatier brethren around you to give a loud roar of approval.

But they adopted this girl.

I mean,

this baby child, they adopted into this cult, and they said, we're going to make her vegetarian.

And also, we're only going to think positive thoughts about her.

We are going to surround her with this kind of bath, this ambient bath.

That's tough as a parent, though, isn't it?

We all love our kids, but always positive.

Yeah, you're absolutely right.

And they said no one tell her about the concept of death, so she just won't know that that's a thing that you wish to do.

Napoleon Hill was her godfather.

This was in 1939, this was happening, so everyone involved is long dead.

And is there a big reveal where actually she's Taylor Zwift?

It worked.

They eventually just returned the baby to her mother and sort of said, stuff.

But after 15 months, it just didn't work out.

She would be, what, kind of 80, 80 something now, so she might be, she might

have been around here.

It may have worked.

yeah can't believe they gave up after 15 months jesus christ all parents want to do that for god's sake

but yeah that book as well that is possibly the best-selling business book of all time to think and grow rich they estimate about 80 million copies have sold and the idea of that was napoleon hill interviewed Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in America, most successful men.

Carnegie set him on a 20-year challenge to go and interview all of the most interesting people around the US.

And multiple people who've studied the life of Napoleon Hill, looked through all this stuff, have all said, we don't think he ever met Andrew Carnegie.

We don't think he even met any of these people in the book.

It's astonishing.

This is the best-selling and is it like the other people are kind of happy to be mentioned because it shows that they're really, you know, successful at this point.

I think most of them were dead.

So Carnegie was dead at that point.

Edison, I think, was dead at that point.

The old Andrew Antony, get out clause, make sure the people are dead and they can't complain about the fact you've lied about them.

And what's so weird about that is that the person who wrote what i think is probably the most famous self-help book of all time how to win friends and influence people you know everyone's heard of that everyone knows the phrase it was the first sort of modern day genre self-help book by dale carnegie who was actually born dale carnegie

but he gave a speech once in carnegie hall and thought hey andrew carnegie was successful i'll name myself after him instead and change the spelling of his name that's not much of a change so it's not a huge change no but it was an amazing book i self-help is a bullshit genre really isn't it But this,

oh, well, we can talk about it later.

No, I'm sure it's fine, but this really was quite good.

The idea of it was be sincere, be kind to people, be interested in people.

He said you can win more friends in two months by being genuinely interested in people than you would in two years by getting people to be interested in you.

And the only reason he wrote it was because he wanted to write the great American novel, really desperate to wrote this whole novel.

This is early 1930s, went to the publishers and they said, This is terrible.

You can't write novels stop trying i thought you were going to say i'm afraid so this is moby dick you've just written it out again

and he he did keep he wrote in his private time too dale carnegie he wrote he kept a folder which was entitled damned fool things i have done yes oh and any social misstep he made any faux pas if he ever made someone feel awkward or uncomfortable he would just write it down and file it away and so he could kind of learn from it so he was kind of walking walking the walk of self-help as well.

I'd keep one off the back of reading that book.

Do you?

Yeah, yeah.

I have one.

I have an idiot diary and it is full.

Yeah.

Do you really?

It's on a daily.

Yeah.

So

Del Kandiga would sometimes, mostly he would dictate them to his secretary because he was very successful at this point, but sometimes he was so embarrassed by whatever he'd done or said that he would just privately write it out in hand.

You must have read a lot of self-help books, Dan, right?

And one day you're going to find the one that works for you and it's all gonna turn around which is the best one which is the best i love that one it's a genuinely good book it does seem like a genuine and a genuine book yeah there was one written by his wife wasn't there mrs dale carnegie uh which was called how to help your husband get ahead no

no way if you have a job or career of your own would you be willing to give it up if it would advance your husband's interests

If not, you are more interested in promoting yourself than promoting your husband.

No.

Hey, Mrs.

Carnegie.

Yeah.

He.

I'll get that for that one.

Yeah.

One of the fun things about the internet coming to rise in Kindle books and all that sort of stuff is you suddenly get access to all these books that you never knew existed.

And the self-help genre has some extraordinary ones.

I found one called How to Land a Top Paying Pierogi Maker's Job.

Now that's dumplings, right?

So How to Land a Top Paying Dumpling Maker's Job by Ashley McFadden.

But then this one got me, which was by Donald L.

Wilson.

Natural bust enlargement with total mind power.

How to use the other 90% of your mind to increase the size of your breasts.

Oh, so it only works on your breasts.

You can't stare across a room.

I'm trying to help you.

You gave up your career for me.

Let me give something back.

It is time for fact number three, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that during the Mexican Revolution, the women in the army traveled on train roofs because the horses took up all the room inside the carriages.

Right, that sounds bad.

It does, but it sounds bad.

Have you ever tried to persuade a horse to stand on a train carriage roof?

It's very hard.

Have you ever tried to persuade a woman to stand on top of a...

No, I never have.

I never have.

bad thing.

You only ever book one seat, don't you?

And then it's laps or room.

One of the big issues, apparently, is the beating sun.

Like,

it's a very hot place to

be on top of a train.

I mean, it makes sense.

You're very exposed.

Yes.

They do have big sombreros, though.

I'm looking at a picture.

They do.

And these women famously wore big sombreros.

And I mean, I think traveling on top of a train sounds super fun.

But

so I don't mean to have presented this fact as an anti-feminist thing.

They probably wanted to do it.

But this was...

There's the anti-feminism.

Sorry.

This was the Mexican Revolution, which I'm sure I didn't need to remind you.

Round from 1910 to about 1920.

And they were quite famous, these women.

They were known as soldaderas.

And they existed before the Mexican Revolution, in other Mexican wars in the 19th century.

They were largely women who traveled with their male family members, their husbands or their sons, to provide them with cooking, nursing, company, because that wasn't really provided by the state to the army.

So, you know, armies would travel with their partners.

There was one soldier who was once asked why he was making his wife come into battle with him, and he said, Shall I starve then?

Who shall make my tortillas but my wife?

They do sound very cool.

Yeah.

Are they the same as Las Adelitas?

Yes, they are the same.

Adelitas was a name that was introduced in the revolution, and it was after an apparent companion of Pancho Villa, who was one of the many revolutionary heroes, but she didn't didn't actually exist, but they were named after her.

Okay.

Okay.

Because

some of the women just fought as women.

Yep.

Some of them dressed up as men and then fought.

Yep.

Some of them dressed as men and then just decided to stay men

after the revolution was over.

Emilio Robles

was born Emilia Robles and then just fought as a commander in charge of hundreds of men.

won lots of respect, apparently through drinking and womanizing.

Yes.

Okay.

And then

um lived lived out the rest of his life as a milio married a lady adopted a daughter yeah and that was that yeah yeah absolutely and they're still they're known of and spoken of today the ones who fought often the ones who fought rode side saddle and they really rode in long dresses and they kicked up dust with their horses to disorient the opposition which i'm sure wasn't the main um method of attack but the other thing is that a lot of them had this braided sort of buns on the side of their head

and george lucas told Time magazine that that's where he got his idea for Princess Leia's.

No way.

Yeah,

in one of the museums of Star Wars, they have a photo of Clara de la Rocha, and you can see the Leia buns there.

So, yeah, the Mexican Revolution gave us Princess Leia.

Should we say what the Mexican Revolution was about?

It was about giving us buns for Princess Leia.

Yeah, so completely, yeah.

Freedom for Mexico, basically.

From whom?

Dictatorship.

Dictators and the capitalists.

From Porfirio Diaz, who was in charge for quite a long time.

And he held a banquet to celebrate more than a quarter of a century of stability.

And about two weeks later, the revolution broke out.

Don't go.

Just in the nick of time, he got there then.

It was really crazy, wasn't it?

Because it was about 10 years of someone, he was overthrown.

Yeah.

And then the guy who replaced him was overthrown.

Yeah.

And then maybe the next guy, I think, was also overthrown.

A lot of turmoil.

It was very complicated.

Imagine a country having several leaders in the space of a few years and having going to absolute...

It was one of my favorite moments of it was during some of this turmoil.

We've all got a favorite moment, guys.

The Mexican Revolution.

There was a guy called Victoriano Huerta, and he was actually the person who, the second dictator, who deposed the good guy.

So Huerta

besides that.

We had to simplify it somehow.

There's good guys, there's bad guys.

Huerta, bad guy.

Deposes Madero, good guy.

But he's like, okay, I want it to look a bit like the presidency I want to have now is legitimate.

But what I've done is I've deposed and actually executed oops, the current president and the vice president.

So he made the person who'd been third in line to the presidency president for literally some say 15, some say 45 minutes, just so that this guy could appoint him.

He's past the Liz Truss of the Simulation.

I mean, he didn't necessarily want it.

He was literally there so that he could make Huerta Secretary of the Interior, which meant Huerta was next in line for the presidency.

And then Mr.

15 Minutes stepped aside and was like, Oh, Huerta, you're next in line.

Who does that fool?

It doesn't fool anyone.

It's weird.

What's the fucking point?

Just kill the third guy as well and steal the presidency.

Don't have killed the first or second.

I mean, just, yeah, yeah.

No, good at good, good advice.

Don't kill anyone.

That's the message.

Pantrovilla?

Oh, yeah.

Panchovia was a great, great general, and he is famous mainly in the war for having struck a deal with the mutual film company to sell the film rights for his own battles in exchange for cash, basically, and propaganda venue.

And there are lots of myths saying, like, they made him retake battles, like entire battles.

If they sell, sorry, we didn't have the camera running.

It's solidly hard to get everyone involved in that retake.

Just picking up bodies from.

So

there's a bit of back and forth about it, but basically it does seem absolutely true that he got 20% of the box office from the films of his own battles.

Amazing.

There was a fantastic film crews would often wait for a battle to die down, and then they would approach some nearby soldiers and say, look, can you recreate what just happened?

So that did actually happen.

That definitely.

I mean, lots of this did happen.

Yeah, yeah.

You would wait for it to die down, wouldn't you?

As a guy just armed with a camera.

But some of it they filmed and it wasn't regarded as dramatic enough and it had to be restaged.

Yeah, I mean, and but some of it they would ask nearby soldiers to reconstruct.

And there's a fantastic moment where a group of Mexican soldiers realized that they are being portrayed as cowards in the film that is being shot at them.

They decide to start fighting for real, and then an entirely new battle breaks out because they were so unhappy with the way they were being portrayed in the film of the battle that just said so weird.

I love it.

I love it.

In 1914, there was the New York Times wrote a news announcement which said, Pancho Villa, a general in command of the Constitutionalist Army in northern Mexico, will in in future carry on his warfare against President Jueta as a full partner in moving pictures venture with Harry E.

Aitken.

It's an astonishing announcement.

And he did it.

Zapata, who was another one did it.

Jueta did it as well.

Supposedly his deal meant that they would screen it for him so that he could censor it before it went out.

Yeah, the Mexican Revolution, it seems that a lot of the army was stoned a lot of the time.

Really?

It's kind of hard to find the evidence of this because on a lot of the marijuana websites, they just make shit up a lot of the time.

But it does seem true that actually a lot of them were stoned.

The Yaquis, who were one of the groups of peasants, they were hired marijuana.

They fought like demonic spirits.

They ground out yards and still got nowhere.

Then they staggered about here and they're confused.

I don't remember the fighting like demonic spirits element of being stoned.

I remember staggering about confused elements.

Does anyone have any tortillas?

I forgot my wife!

Did you hear about Wenceslao Moguel?

This is incredible.

Okay, this was a guy who was caught up in the fighting, as all of Mexico was.

This is 1915.

Incidentally, the reason I think it doesn't get as much play over here is that, you know, the First World War was going on for 1914 to 18.

So that attracted a lot of attention over here.

But there was a lot of stuff going on over there.

We had the big Hollywood hit, but they had the art house movie, didn't they?

That the interesting people went to see.

Wow.

Anyway, Wenceslaw Moguel gets caught up in this conflict and he was accused of being a revolutionary.

He was not tried and then he was sentenced to death

and the typical method at the time, firing squad.

And

as far as I can tell,

Moguel is more or less the only person ever to have survived a firing squad.

He was shot eight or nine times.

Okay.

The coup de grace was shot actually in the forehead.

Wow.

He survived.

He was in pain.

He was in severe pain.

But the Federellas, the people who had shot him, they just moved on to whatever they were doing next.

And incredibly, he was still alive.

He managed to crawl to safety.

He recovered from his wounds.

He lived until 1976.

How did he crawl to safety?

I have no idea.

He was permanently scarred and disfigured.

He clearly had been through something unbelievably traumatic, but he lived.

And he was known as El Fusilado, the one who has been shot.

And that was his nickname from then on.

There is a song about him by anyone know?

Robbie Williams.

Chumba Wamba.

Hallelujah.

I get knocked down and I get on again.

That's incredible.

It's an extraordinary song.

So does it count the surviving firing squad, what Pancho Via did, which he was sentenced to death by firing a squad in about 1913 when Hueta was in charge.

And

Madero, who was actually president, who was Via's ally, sent a stay of execution.

He was like, shit, Pancho Via is being executed.

I don't want that.

Sent a stay of execution to say, do not kill this guy.

Pancho Villa was standing there, firing a squad, guns cocked, pointing at him when the person arrived, waving the letter, saying, stop, stop.

And so they didn't shoot him.

That's film stuff.

Maybe that was all set up for the film.

He had a nickname as well, Pancho Via.

which also is a song.

So there's quite a lot of tunes coming out, which was La Cucoracha.

Really?

I don't think the song is based on him, but that was his nickname.

Yeah.

Is it not?

I mean, because what the hell does that mean?

The cockroach.

And the cockroach, in the most popular version of that song, is stoned.

So, oh, yeah.

But they called him the cockroach because Pancho Villa, he was like a revolutionary in northern Mexico.

He wasn't very happy about America, was kind of getting involved, and so he decided to attack America on his own with some of his mates.

And they went in and sort of shot up a town in America and then legged it back into Mexico.

And America was not very happy about that because they didn't have World War One to bother about quite yet.

And so they went in and they went after him and they went after him for years and years and tried to find him and they couldn't find him.

And that's why they called him the cockroach because it's like you know, you know, he's there under the fridge somewhere, but you don't know where he is exactly.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

One thing about Pancho Villa is, according to the new American Bartender's Guide, if you go into Mexico City and you say you want tequila estilo pancho villa por favor, which is tequila in the pancho villa style, that's the coolest way of asking for tequila.

But if you if you order it Went as Lao Moguel style, you get nine shots delivered.

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Okay, we need to move on to our final fact of the show.

It is time for our final fact, and that is Andy.

My fact is, there is a cave in Greece where water flows uphill.

How?

Well,

I should say,

I'll just quickly say what I got this.

I got this.

I recently judged a competition of a fact competition

from Dissent Magazine, which is the caving Bible, really.

And this was the winning fact.

And Dissent Magazine, I should just say, is great.

And I did look up if it could be confused with anything.

There is also Dissent Magazine, which is politics.

Descant magazine, which is a Canadian literary mag, Decent Magazine.

Just a magazine for men, I think.

Discount magazine, Decanter Magazine, and Long and Short, which is a Daxon magazine.

Oh, wow.

Oh, that's great.

Let's guess.

But this one.

Long and shots is a great name.

That's incredible.

We'll get into the fact, but this is a bi-monthly magazine.

It's been going since 1969.

I'm so fascinated by...

Did you meet everyone at Descent magazine?

How many facts came in?

It was a mostly email-based competition judging thing for me.

I didn't go to the ball, but this island is in Cephalonia,

an Ionian island, and it has a cave where the sea flows into the land.

Okay, so it goes the other way, confusing, and it makes its way through the island.

There's a kind of porous rock under the island, and it comes out on the other side of the island, right?

But

scientists were interested in what was happening to it, and they put in some very strong dye in the water, in the bit where it goes into the island's rocks to see what happened.

They used 140 kilos of dye, so they dyed a huge amount of the water.

And what they found is it emerged two weeks later on the other side of the island, which is nine miles across.

Amazing, and it emerged higher than sea level on the other side.

Really?

So, has it gone through the porous rocks, or is it flowing like the idea is the seawater comes in, and this is fresh water that's moving uphill, and the two mix, but then the seawater is denser, so it kind of pushes the fresh water upwards.

Nice pretty much is all to do with sea and fresh water and their relative densities, because exactly what James says, because it comes out in Melisani Cave, which is the cave of the nymphs,

Right.

The nymphs being those horny Greek people.

Right.

Sexy.

Narrow down.

But so no human could go this stretch of order to the side.

I mean, there might be a route.

As in the internet, it's full of videos of people.

Has anyone here ever seen caving videos?

They're so upsetting.

Why?

Because there's people going through really like they're crawling with their shoulders only through these insanely tight spaces underground.

It's really

claustrophobic.

I don't think I'm claustrophobic, but you watch this and you think that is unbearable.

I like the fact that

cavers

are like Batman in that if there is a caving disaster.

They live in a cave.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh my god, I hadn't thought of that element.

Wow.

Because I was thinking about that, if there's a caving disaster, the call goes out to all cavers and they flock.

So

there was, for instance, so Wales is a good place to go

And there was a call in a place called O Goth Funonthi, which I'm sure a Welsh person will get in touch and tell me how badly I pronounce that.

It almost sounds like Gotham, in a way, like a Welsh version.

Oh, my God, this is blowing so wide open.

Right, so there was an accident in this cave where a caver George Linnane fell.

He was very badly injured, and he was a very long way into this cave, as I say, 274 meters below ground.

The call goes out.

16 teams across England responded.

300 rescuers from England, Scotland, and Wales all dropped their jobs, dropped their pens, closed their computers, got on the next train to this cave, and they all helped out, which I would say is a lot of people who are quite bored by their jobs in marketing.

And, you know, the caller said we need about eight or nine cavers, and they've gone, it's all right, I'm here, I'm there.

And they're all underground, but it is extraordinary.

If you've got someone incredibly injured, as he was, broken bones and stuff, getting a stretcher by someone who's incapacitated through like underwater, up vertical inclines, you you know places where you can only fit one human body and you're soaking wet and it took about three days I think so you're freezing cold it's extraordinary how many meters down was he

he was 274 meters and how many people answered the call 300.

So you could just do a human train

and just like grab air by the ankles and bang we go.

I feel like you've got a bit of a problem there with the other hundred nodd people who are underwater for that amount of science.

That's very very true.

So, has anyone here been down the Devil's Ass?

Yeah,

is that in Manchester?

It's not far off, it's in the Peak District.

Oh, okay.

It seemed like it was, but for listeners, the whole audience said yes to that question.

It's very famous around here, the Devil's Ass.

It's a cave in Derbyshire.

Okay, and they changed the name.

It was known as Devil's Ass, and then they changed it to Peak Cavern in 1880 because Queen Victoria visited.

But we've changed it back now.

And it's lots of awesome things about it.

It's where a lot of Britain's last troglodytes lived.

So cave dwellers lived there.

They made ropes and they would sell it to the nearby villages.

The troglodytes?

When are we talking?

They left the final time in 1915.

What?

Yeah.

And it's where the thieves' cant was invented.

So thieves' cant is a type of language that thieves used.

And it was invented by a person called Charles Hather and Cock Laurel.

And they were at the mouth of the devil's arse, and they came up with this new language that they'd be able to talk about, and the cops wouldn't understand what they were saying.

I mean, just saying Cock Laurel's at the mouth of the devil's ass is quite a confusing thing to hear.

Well, do you want to guess some thieves' cant words?

Oh, okay, yeah.

What do you think a bung nipper is?

A bung nipper.

Bung, B-U-N-G nipper.

A child who lives in a barrel.

Is it when you're caving and someone is so

up your ass in terms of like they're too enthusiastic?

So bung, as in Beavers and Butt head bung hole.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A nipper is like you're literally nipping it with your mouth.

No, I got what you got.

No, I got it.

But the thing is.

This is more about thieving than cave having.

I mean, they met at the mouth of the devil's ass.

Oh, this is about thieving.

Yeah, they're nothing to do with caves at all really.

A bung nipper.

So that's someone stealing something?

I ain't put you out of your misery.

It's just a purse.

Just a purse.

Do you know what a little snakesman is?

Little snakesman.

Yeah.

Is it like in Oliver Twist where you're like a little kid and you go in someone's deep pocket with your snake-like little arm and pull out his wallet?

You're really, really close.

Really close.

It's a small boy who passed through a window and then they'd unlock the door of the house and then the thieves can go in.

Also a scene in Oliver Twist.

God, I was just 200 pages too soon.

And finally moss.

What is moss?

Moss.

According to thieves.

Thieves.

An old person to rob, they're not going to move, they're not going to notice.

They might as well be moss and

you can just always on the north side of a tree.

Yeah.

No.

Just a weedy thief because it's wet.

Where does moss grow?

Roofs.

Someone who goes in the roof.

Who takes off the roof of a house and goes in and somehow the residents don't notice.

I'm going to give it you.

It's lead stolen from the top of buildings.

Ah.

That's very good.

So now if you're ever in the 19th century

gangs.

Love it.

Good to know.

Did you guys hear about Beatriz Flamini?

No, what's that?

She is a caver.

April 2023.

She came out of a cave, right?

And that's not interesting because she is a professional caver.

Yeah.

The interesting thing is she went in in November 2021

to that cave.

How long was that?

I think it's about 500 days.

What?

November 2020.

It's a year and several months.

Did she get lost?

She, no, it was an experiment she was doing with some scientists, but she was up for it.

She wasn't just going to do a, you know, when you're on a beach as a kid and you go and do a poo in a cave.

And I always

pause, pause.

Pause.

Okay, here we go.

Right.

There's always a moment in every podcast where someone overshares.

Hang on.

It's always that or Dan.

Everyone does this, right?

Okay, audience.

Anyone ever shit in a cave?

Oh, we do.

So what we're saying is she hadn't just gone and done a poo and got lost.

No.

Sorry, I just heard Dan say we did it in the sea.

My mum made us go into a cave and dig a hole and do one at least.

We're just sent out to sea to do a big floater where everyone's trying to bodyboard.

Don't try and make me the weird one here.

Okay.

but it was an experiment for it was full science about what happens to the human body under these conditions so she didn't know anything about the news in that time she was completely cut off from civilization she didn't know about the queen dying she didn't know about russia ukraine she didn't know about liz truss she didn't know anything

quick shit in the cave and come back

she

had the time of her life.

It's amazing reading her account of it.

She said it was an excellent experience.

She didn't have a bath or a shower for a year and a half.

She thought she'd been in for 160 days because she had no sense of time out there.

She, um, I just love it.

Your body goes into a weird rhythm, doesn't it?

And you kind of go into you know, 12-hour days or 14-hour days or something.

And basically, she said, I really don't want to know about anything that's happening out there, even if there's an emergency, even if there's a family thing.

I just want to try this experience properly.

So, she would get food delivered by the scientists.

They would collect every fifth poo,

and I suppose the previous four poos as well.

They didn't just collect

Every five poos she did, she got a collection done by the scientist.

Is it like one of those costa cards where you, you know,

stamp every time?

What do you mean they collected everyone?

Were they going into her chamber?

They collected her poo.

Like, she would come out to the bit where she picked up her food and, I suppose, drop off her poo, and then she would retreat again.

That's the worst deliveroo ever, isn't it?

Thanks for the tip, mate.

Deliver poo.

There we go.

Get this.

Get this.

Like, at one point, the cave was swarmed with flies, and she was just completely covered in flies for a little while, like head to toe in flies.

She didn't talk out loud except when she was filming her video diary.

When they came down to get her, she didn't want to leave.

She was annoyed because she hadn't finished her book.

She said, why are you coming down to get me?

I haven't finished my book.

How many books did she bring down?

How sort of a reader is she?

She got through 60 books.

Did she?

Wow.

That's incredible.

So I reckon the poo thing is to do with minimal impact caving, which is a genuine thing because if you go into a cave, it's a whole ecosystem and you don't want to disturb things that are going on there.

So they say things like avoid touching microbial mats so you don't want to mess with the communities that are living in the cave.

No smoking in caves.

I can't believe that.

You can't bring ciggies down because it might interfere with the bats and all sorts of other animals living there.

No recreational drugs or alcohol while caving, they say as well.

Why the hell not that?

I know, right?

You can't do that there.

Limited scratching of skin and hair because you don't want any dandruff for follicles to get off.

But then the big thing, which was a bit confusing to me, I had to look it up.

It said, always make sure to bring your burrito kit.

And your burrito kit.

Your wife, you mean.

Your burrito kit is the slang for a bag to store your poo.

So

you bring bottles to put your urine in and you bring your burrito kit to put your poo in.

And I discovered that burrito kit meant that by going to a caving slang webpage.

So I'm going to give you not thieving slang, but I'm going to give you some caving slang quickly, okay?

What do you guys think air repel is?

Air repel.

Repel as in like repelling.

Repelling as in like going down a cliff or something.

It sounds like where you just jump off one surface a very long way.

It's like I'm sailing, but you've forgotten your rope.

Sort of, it's when you accidentally fall down a cave.

There's the cardboard caver.

Cardboard cavers.

Is that someone who's not very good at it?

Oh, someone who's got the equipment, but they don't know how to do it.

It's when, at the first sign of wetness, you decide to turn back because you don't want to get involved with that.

Douching?

Oh.

It's when...

Is it where you fall down and the water goes into you?

Like

you slide down.

Yeah.

Like that's what they have that in,

what do you call it?

When you're on the back of a motorboat.

Water Water skiing.

Water skiing, yeah, yeah.

If you fall off and the water goes up you, that's douching.

I've been water skiing.

I've never had water enter me like how you're describing.

No, I've heard that too.

Have you?

I've had it.

It's the most painful thing you could possibly experience.

Wow, really?

You're a lucky man.

Wow, I must have a tiny bum hole.

There's always a second oversharing moment when you think the first one's over.

Well, anyway, it's the practice of blocking a stream at the top of a pit i've forgotten the word now doucheing sorry so you block the stream at the top of a pit only let it to go all over your friend on the rope below when they're most vulnerable so you build up the water and then it's like gunging them funny yeah can i did did everyone read the greatest story that was this week or last week of accidental caving no matilda campbell i'm playing it fast on this with the word caving

it was so good she um it's in australia obviously uh new south wales hunter valley she's on some rocks with her friends.

She drops her phone in a crevice between two rocks.

She thinks, I'll go and get that.

She went face first down into this crevice, which was three meters deep between boulders, got stuck head first, three meters down.

She was there for seven hours.

She had no phone reception.

She had one friend with her who had to be like, sorry, mate, I'm going to have to go and find someone.

And like, left her alone upside down, three meters down, squashed between rocks for ages.

Eventually, fire, ambulance, police, and a bunch of volunteers came.

And it still took them seven hours to move these boulders.

But she's such a hero.

The lead paramedic said the whole time she was so calm and collected through the whole thing.

I would have been frantic.

She wasn't panicked at all, and she was wedged in this weird S shape.

So, even when they'd moved the boulders, they couldn't really get her body out for ages.

And yet, eventually, they got her out.

And the article I read, I think, in The Guardian, said, sadly, they were unable to retrieve her phone.

Still a tragic loss.

That is it.

That is all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

Thank you, Manchester.

We'll be back again.

We're back again next week.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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Our dedicated teachers and discovery-driven curriculum nurture curiosity, inspire creativity, and build lasting confidence so your child is ready to take on the world.

Come visit one of our Bright Horizons centers in the Bay Area and see for yourself how we turn wonder into wisdom.

Schedule your visit today at brighthorizons.com.