553: No Such Thing As A Shooting Star

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

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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 Gothenburg.

My name is Gang Schreiber.

I am sitting here with Anna Toshinsky, 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 Andy.

My fact is that the novel Dune, one of the greatest sci-fi novels ever, was rejected 20 times before being printed by a publisher who specialized in car repair manuals.

This is

because this is the book festival here in Gothenburg.

One of the themes this year is space.

This is about a book about space.

Taking into consideration that we only have an hour, can you explain what Dune is?

Oh,

it's so great.

It's a sci-fi novel.

It's set on the desert planet of Arrakis, and it's all about the rise of a young messiah, or is he?

Paul Atreides.

And of course, there's the Håkonen family, and there are giant worms.

It's a fantastic,

fantastic work of 60s sci-fi.

Frank Herbert, right?

Frank Herbert was the author.

Yeah.

And it had been serialized in a magazine, but it's really long.

I mean, it's really long, Dune.

And it was way too long to be a book, according to most publishers.

You've got to look at it.

And no one wanted to print it, even in three volumes.

They just said no, thanks.

So it got lots of rejections.

And then he met a guy called Sterling E.

Lanier of Chiltern Books, and they specialized in car repair manuals.

And they had some magazines as well, like Jeweler's Circular and Dry Goods Economist.

So

it's that like just a goods economist magazine, but it's very, very dry.

Very dry.

No jokes in there at all.

And they had done some sci-fi books before.

It wasn't their first.

Some sources online say it's the first time they did it.

They had a little line in there.

They've recently kind of bought another publisher, hadn't they, called Greenberg Publisher.

And Greenberg was a sci-fi publisher.

Exactly.

And that had been started by a guy called Martin Greenberg, who was also the first publisher of Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy.

So they did have a little bit of

a lot of stuff.

But it wasn't a success even with that little bit of background.

Sales were so bad that Lanier was sacked a year later.

So for all the publishing people who are in the room today, don't take risks is the message.

I remember when you read this book, Andy, because you did it on a no-such thing as a fish tour when we went to Australia.

And Andy's one of those people, when he starts a book, he needs to finish it.

And this book has, what, like six appendixes and appendices at the end.

I used to be sat next to Andy on the plane, and it's a long flight to Australia, and I got zero chat from him.

He was the most dull man on tour reading.

Those were the days, weren't they, when Andy didn't talk to us.

I've actually started reading it this week.

Oh, yeah.

And I've got 40 pages in.

And I'll be honest, I am one of those people that doesn't have to finish every book I read.

Would you say it's more or less exciting than a car repair manual?

Oh, that's interesting because I've never read a car repair manual, even though I've owned many cars.

Right, yeah, fair enough.

Do you know, James, you'll hate this.

James has a big fear of mushrooms, but there is an origin story to this whole Dune saga, which is that Frank Herbert loved studying fungi, and it was mushrooms that inspired him to do Dune.

This is according to a book called Mycelium Running.

The author, Paul Sametz, sat down with him, and he basically said the magic spice, which is in the book.

So that's like the drug that they're all going to be.

Exactly.

That's the spores of the mushroom.

The bending of space and time.

That's him tripping on mushrooms, psychedelia.

that's when he was off his tits.

The giant worms, those are maggots digesting the mushrooms that he would have witnessed in the process of studying them.

So it's basically a tribute to the mushroom.

And also he made huge contributions to the world of mushrooms, didn't he, Frank Herbert?

What?

As well as writing an apparently unsuccessful book at the time,

he apparently, and this is according to Paul Stamitz, and who was really good mates with him from the 80s, he said that Frank was this avid mushroom collector and he got really upset when he would have to throw away less than perfect wild chanterelles.

So instead, he mixed it with water and salt and made a big slurry paste and he spread it around the bottom of new fir trees.

And then a load of chanterelle mushrooms grew there.

And this may not sound exciting at all to anyone here or me, but to mushroom people, to mycologists, they had no idea that mushrooms could grow at the base of young trees.

So he discovered that by placing a slurry of old mushrooms at the bottom of a young tree, you could make some new mushrooms.

Wow.

And that does sound like an important contribution to me.

Yeah, yeah, and more important than Dune, maybe?

Yeah, definitely.

Maybe.

Wow.

40 pages in, I would say yes.

900 pages in, I can tell you.

And the other cool thing about Dune, so it's set on a deserty planet.

It's all very, very sandy.

And he was inspired to write this in part by some real-life dunes.

So you can visit.

I think, in fact, they run tourist visits to the dunes of Florence, Oregon.

And they were threatening to overrun the city in the early 20th century.

Yeah, but he hated these sand dunes, didn't he?

Well, the sand dunes were widely hated because they were encroaching on the city.

They'd move.

And

he was researching a program by the U.S.

Department of Agriculture.

And they were fixing huge grasses into these dunes to stabilize them.

European beach grass, it's called.

And it's got very deep roots.

It locks the dunes in place.

And the plot of Dune is about this desert planet and how it can be turned green again.

I mean, really?

Exactly.

And over the course of the novels, slight spoiler, the planet goes from desert to green and then back to desert.

And that's what's happening in the desert now in Florence, Oregon.

Giant worms?

No.

They are now trying to get rid of these grasses, which they introduced as an invasive species 100 years ago because they're messing up with the ecology of the region.

The pretty sacred thing is happening all over again.

See, it's a premonition book, basically.

Kind of, yeah.

You're telling me humans introduce a new species to try and fix stuff and it actually went even more wrong than it was before.

That

astonishes me.

It's amazing.

How many copies did you say, Andy, that it saw this?

Like 14 million, 20 million?

It's a big, big, big seller, right?

It's had a huge cultural impact.

I was trying to find out a few things of where it's bled into pop culture and so on.

There's a great story that Iron Maiden, the band,

they named a song Dune, and it was inspired entirely by the book, but they had to ask, or they wanted to ask, permission from Frank Herbert to say, Would you give us your blessing?

And they got a statement back from him, a little message that said, Frank Herbert doesn't like rock bands,

particularly heavy rock bands, and especially bands like Iron Maiden.

Absolutely have to change it.

The title's now to Tame a Land, if anyone knows that one.

Can I tell you, Iron Maiden anecdote?

Me and Anna once went to a pub quiz with Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden, who's a weak singer.

And we sat with him through the whole quiz.

We did the quiz, I think we won the quiz, in fact.

And Anna was sat with Bruce the whole night and chatting to him and whatever.

And the next morning, I said, what did you think of Bruce?

He's a nice guy, right?

And Anna said, oh, yeah.

I said, have you not heard of Iron Maiden?

And she said, oh, I thought that was a made-up band.

What?

I thought that Iron Maiden only existed in that song that goes, listen to Iron Maiden, baby.

Teenage Shirt band.

Yeah, I thought Teenage Dirt Dirt bag the song invented Iron Made in wow.

It was astonishing when I learned I'd done a pub quiz with him.

Amazing.

Wow.

Wow.

Frank Herbert had some gigs before his June breakthrough and he was a wine critic for a while.

Was I see?

And he was a very, very assiduous at whatever he did, he was very devoted.

I think this is why June is 19 million pages long, is because he really researches everything.

So as a wine critic, he not only insisted on being trained up on knowledge of all wine, he insisted on being trained to make wine himself, which actually is quite suspicious and is what I would insist on as well, by being a wine critic.

But yeah, and he was a wine critic, and then he was a speechwriter for a Republican senator who I tried to find.

He was called Guy Corden.

It was in 1955.

And I did a troll of the newspaper archives looking for Guy Corden's name being paired with worms or mushrooms or space and nothing.

It was nothing.

He was very anti-Soviet, wasn't he?

Back in the year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's in the middle of the day.

He was part of that kind of McCarthyism where they're trying to root out all the commies.

I think he was a cousin, distant cousin of Joseph McCarthy.

That is, Herbert was, yeah.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Was he?

Yeah, he was.

You see that, I think, in some of the novels, don't you?

There's kind of a kind of an anti-communist

angle.

I believe so, yeah.

So, and the movies, obviously, we've all watched the Dune movies.

I watched the David Lynch one this week.

The big one.

When was it?

The big one.

That was like a one-way.

Yeah, so there's the massive ones that have been coming out in the last year or two.

But in 1984, David Lynch shot a version.

And it's weird, I would say.

That's so odd for David Lynch.

But weirdly,

it's just not quite weird enough to be David Lynch.

So it's like in that uncanny valley of not being weird enough to be weird.

It's really, really strange.

But they filmed it in Mexico, and it was in an area where they had lots of rocks and plants and stuff like that.

But they needed it to be like June where none of these things existed.

So apparently, they spent two months stripping all of the plants, all of the animals from this area so they would look like Dune.

Oh my god.

Why don't we go to Namibia or somewhere which has vast rolling sand?

Probably a tax thing.

Tax thing.

Yeah.

So some very famous names in the movie Sting the Musicians in it.

And one other person who's in it is Patrick Sewart of Star Trek.

It's so weird.

Honestly, like you watch it and suddenly Captain whatever he's called comes in.

Yeah.

But you know what's even weirder about that?

This is why it's so weird.

David Lynch hired Patrick Stewart and then when Patrick Stewart showed up he went this is the wrong Patrick Stewart.

He got the wrong guy.

Patrick Stewart, Captain Picard, was never meant to be in it.

There's another actor called Patrick Stewart and it went to the wrong person.

But was he already a sci-fi?

He was already doing stuff.

No, I don't think so at that point.

He was like a theater guy, wasn't he?

Yeah, he was a theater guy.

And so then he got on to the set and did exactly what you did with Bruce Dickinson, which is he was introduced to Sting and had no idea who he was.

It he was like, dude, what else do you do?

And he's like, oh, I'm a musician.

He's like, oh, that's really cool.

I'll check your stuff out.

That's exciting.

What's it called?

And he's like, with the police.

And he thought, oh, that's really nice.

And Armed Service had put together

a band and you probably play fairs and stuff.

Yeah, that's so good.

This first film that was released, so

you saw it last night, right?

Yes, I did.

Was it easy to follow, hard to follow somewhere between...

It was hard to follow, I'll be honest.

It's quite baffling because they try and crowbar a big book into a sort of longish film but it's that's a real squeeze it is such a complicated film to watch supposedly um that when the first film came out audiences in the cinemas were given a small printed glossary of terms to help them understand what was going on i could really have done with that one i'll be honest i've seen an original copy of these things the typeface is so small that in a dark cinema you would be looking for ages for the term mu'adib or whatever it is yeah and by the time you look back you'd there it would be another scene it just seemed like a terrible idea i think they they put the lights on before that and went everyone have a quick read familiarize yourself with what's coming up memorize the glossary

brief idea so we've got the modern dune movies and then there was the david lynch in 1984 but there was meant to be another one in 1974 which was going to be directed by a guy called alejandro yudorosky and he basically said i want to make the full version of this.

So it was going to be a 10 to 14 hour long movie.

He had an extraordinary cast lined up.

Everyone from Orson Welles, David Carradine, who was Kill Bill, Geraldine Chaplin.

Orson Welles, he managed to convince to come onto the film by saying, I will pay you really well, but also I'll get your favorite gourmet chef to prepare your meals every single day.

And he was like, Great, I'm in.

That works.

But it never happened.

And he had a bit of a fallout with Frank Herbert over the writing process of it.

But this director believed that he didn't need to talk to Herbert because Herbert had extracted the novel initially from the collective unconscious of our world, and so it was plucked from some soup of ideas.

I'm sorry, it's

a good anti-copyright argument, isn't it?

When you're taken to court, well, it was all lingering in the air.

It was an enormous kind of beer mother-themer thing, and unsurprisingly, it never got made.

But he hired Salvador Dali to be in it, and Dali insisted on only being in this film if he could become the highest-paid Hollywood actor ever.

I think he must have been doing the whole thing as a joke, but so Frank Herbert agreed and said, Fine, I will pay pay you $100,000 an hour to act in this film I'm doing.

And then he reduced Dali's scenes so that he only needed him for an hour.

And he set up the rest with a robotic it says a robot lookalike.

No, I don't, a robotic lookalike.

I don't know if that means a lookalike to Dali, who was also kind of a robotic actor, or if they actually got a robot who looks like Dali to do it.

In those days, that's just going to be a microwave of the mustaches.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley small family farms protect the land and the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.

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I need to move us on guys.

It is time for fact number two and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that the largest known star is 3,000 times wider than the Sun and is coincidentally called WHO.

Yes, so this is WOHG64,

which I am choosing to pronounce WOAAAAAAAAAA.

And it actually gets its name because it was discovered by astronomers Bent Vesterlund, Niels Ollander, and Lager Hedden, who I think might be Swedish actually.

They're certainly

in this part of the world.

And the first letter of each of the names is WOH, and that's how it gets its name.

It actually kind of works if you mix it up, like how

the size, ow!

No!

Oh, no, no, no, you're

Yeah, this is amazing.

So, yeah, and it's a massive old star.

If you can imagine the Sun as a tiny grain of sand, then this star is about the size of a basketball.

What?

No.

Whoa!

I walk into them, don't I?

And it's kind of interesting because it's much cooler than you would imagine.

I mean, it's cooler in that way, but cooler, as in it's not very hot, than you would expect from this kind of star.

We don't really know why, and it's kind of at variance with the current theories of how stars are made.

So, that for scientists, we find that really, really interesting when something doesn't quite fit in with

our rules.

Yeah,

something else is going on that we can discover.

It's one of those things like the mushrooms at the bottom of the tree, you know, it's really, really exciting for the people who know about how stars are made.

And then for a lot of us, it's like, oh, okay.

Yeah, but

another point of analogy with it, if it was placed where our sun is, we would all be inside it now it's it would come out as far as Jupiter in fact it would come out way way way way way further than the Earth at the moment yeah so it's not that hot sounds like we'll be fine

yeah just a nice warm

yeah exactly I like that the the instrument that we use largely to observe it is called the very large telescope yes yeah science is great

because we've got an extremely large telescope haven't we which

yeah yeah there's an and isn't and I think there's one bigger than that they are working on I can't remember what it is it's not the enormously large telescope.

Oh, it's the Very Hungry Telescope.

The Very Large Telescope interferometer that they're using to view whoa.

It's strong enough that it would be able to make out a tennis ball that is on the opera house in Oslo from this room.

But that's how, yeah, how good they are.

Well, that puts it in context for me.

You dear kid.

I was hoping for the people of Gotham there

that they might know where Oslo is.

I couldn't even point to Oslo from here.

So I, yeah,

that is amazing.

Did you say interferometer?

It's an interferometer, yeah.

I'd never heard of that.

Well, let's move up.

Have you guys, do you know what the name of the most distant planet that we have found in the far reaches of the solar system is called?

No.

No.

It's called Far Out.

Hang on,

it's called Far Out, or at least it was.

It was only the record holder for two months before they found something even further, which they called Far, Far Out.

Very cool names.

Some suns, or some stars, sorry, are actually really not that hot.

I get quite excited when you learn about stuff in the universe that you can sort of imagine making contact with.

Like, in fact, I was saying to James earlier that there's a fact I read once that is if you fell into a black hole that's a thousand times bigger than the sun, theoretically you would survive.

Now, obviously you wouldn't for lots of reasons, but it wouldn't crush you theoretically.

And I just like that because it's like, Ranald, me, a tiny human on Earth, could survive that.

And I was amazed to read equally that there are these things called brown dwarfs, which are, they're often called failed stars.

So they're stars that they're not big enough to sustain nuclear fusion at their core.

But their surface temperatures are so low, some of them are as low as about like a mug of tea.

So if you touched it, it would feel like just a blood warmer.

That's

it.

Yeah, isn't that fun?

They can get hot though, mugs of tea, can't they?

Yeah.

This is like a mug of tea when you've left it too long.

A mug of tea when you sip it and you go, oh, bollocks, you have to chuck it away.

You know

those kind of failed stars, if they had a bit more mass, they would become stars, right?

And the level that you have to get to to become a star, that area is called the genes instability, which I think sounds like something a bit rude in your trousers.

Got a bit of a genes instability going on.

Don't mind me.

There are some stars, aren't there, which are kind of rogue loose stars.

Oh, yeah.

They're hyper-dense.

They're about the size of our sun, but they're many, many, many thousands of times the mass.

And they're just barreling loose through space.

Wow.

As in they're not in a proper system.

Oh, that's amazing.

Rebels.

They are.

Like in Street Fighter, like one of those Ryu balls.

What?

You know, a cool game.

I didn't, again.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.

I don't think it needed that

layer of really nice analogy on top.

I just like to paint pictures, Andy.

But it is.

It's just like those.

It's a random loose fireball just barreling through.

And there's never been one, I think, that's entered our solar system or anything like that.

But if one does come this way, we're knackered.

Oh, yes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's quite sweet about stars is, aside from these sort of Clint Eastward loner stars, they're basically all, or 80, I think estimated 85% of them, come in pairs.

And I actually find it amazing.

If you're looking at the sky and you see a star, it's probably two stars.

And if you look through a a really powerful telescope, you'll see two.

So, yeah, 85% of stars are binary stars.

Not our sun, it's one of our sun's on the special ones, which is on its own, I think.

And mostly, I think their primary star, and then companion, which is like a smaller guy rotating around it.

And the only way we know how big any stars are, like, the only way we know how big this largest known woe star is, is because they're in pairs.

And so, you take the Barry Centre, which is

the Barry Centre.

Yeah, yeah, it's not an East Enders thing.

It's like

we've performed at the Barry Centre, it's in South Wales, isn't it?

Yeah, all stars rotate around South Wales.

The Barry Centre is the centre around which the two stars in the binary system rotate, and so you measure their distance from that and you watch them rotating, and you hopefully watch one eclipse the other from Earth, and you see kind of how long one takes to cross the other, and that's how we know how big they are.

So, solitary stars, the only way we know how big a star that's on its own is, is that we compare its brightness to the brightness of these binary stars whose size we know, and we say, okay, well, we guess it's about that size.

Oh, interesting.

Except the sun, because we're really close to the sun, so we can measure that with a tape measure.

So it is amazing thinking of just how different everything else is to here.

Okay.

Because here we have

conference centers and we have book festivals and we have wine glasses and we have tables and I'm just pointing at things.

We've got Dune.

We've got Dune.

I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

Get this.

99.9% of all matter that we have observed in space is not solid, or liquid, or gas.

It's plasma.

Because that's what the state of matter that stars are in.

There's loose ions, electrons, and it's a kind of suit.

So our sun is plasma.

There's a bit of plasma on Earth, lightning bolts, and neon signs, different forms of plasma.

And those two things, 99.9% of the universe is plasma.

On TVs, plasma as well.

Yes.

I think it's the same stuff.

I think it might be the same.

Is it the same?

That's a good point.

I don't know.

You know, shooting stars are multicoloured.

When you see a shooting star, but you need to look really hard, which is hard to do because obviously they appear and then they disappear quickly.

But it's because when, so they're obviously a meteor flying through the Earth's atmosphere and they're burning up in the atmosphere.

But because the meteors are made of lots of different elements, as they burn, they kind of react with the gases around them and they create like magnesium oxide or whatever or you know all the different oxides which burn with different colours so if you look closely you'll see bright blue they're bright purple they're bright fireworks i guess right they are a firework a very quick firework yeah yeah but some animals you know who see like pigeons see in more frames a second than we do don't they so they probably when they see a shooting star it's probably like a firework

i'm not actually convinced that shooting stars exist to be honest because you've never seen one well no because my wife always sees them because there's one and i turn around and it's not there i think think the only logical thing is that they don't exist and everyone's having me on.

Yeah.

Huge.

What do you think of that?

Oh.

Sorry.

I've got some really exciting space news from the last couple of weeks.

Oh, yeah.

So there is a spacecraft that is going around the moons of Jupiter because it's looking for life in our solar system.

And good news, we have found life in the solar system.

This probe has managed to find life.

We haven't.

And it hasn't been.

Are you breaking the news of

light?

They just should have gotten an REBC with this.

On August the 20th, they were flying by and they pointed their telescope at a planet called Earth.

And they found that, yes, indeed, Earth is habitable.

That's so funny.

But obviously, it is important because it shows that it's working.

Yeah.

Right?

You know, if they pointed at Earth and it says, this is

habitable.

That is playing on easy mode.

I've I've got a neighbor who's got a really interesting space story.

So he's an artist, and he did this really beautiful piece that's our solar system.

And so I have a print of it in my son's room as well, Will's room.

And a guy in America, who's one of the co-hosts of Radiolab, one of the massive podcasts, he had it on his wall in his son's room, and he kept looking at it.

And Venus had a moon called Zuzbi.

Z-O-O-Z-V-E.

But he was like, well,

he knew science.

He knows that Venus doesn't have a moon.

So what the hell was going on there?

He started looking into it more and more, and he got in touch with Alex, who is the illustrator, Alex Foster.

And Alex said, I just found it on some little slip of paper, right?

It turns out, for a very brief moment, a quasi-moon had been discovered going around Venus in 2002 and was given the name 2002 VE.

But Alex misread it as Zusbi

and put it on this thing.

Now, there are certain rules about when a quasi-moon can be named.

There's a planetary naming system that goes on.

One thing is you have to have had a paper or a book written about it.

So between 2002 and this being drawn and then this discovery by this radio lab guy, a paper had been written.

So officially, it can now be named and it has been officially named Zuzvi.

So the picture is now accurate.

Amazing.

I remember finding a pill outside my house.

which I thought must have been some drug dealer had dropped it or something and it was called Z-O-M-G, like OMG, but with a Z at the start.

And I put a picture of it in the internet and said, Does anyone know what drug this is?

And apparently, it just was 20 milligrams

of paracetamol.

I love you bringing up the police.

I found a drug test.

It's called Boots, and they have all sorts of stuff.

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

My fact this week is that in 18th century Japan, you could eat a vegetarian goose.

Hmm.

Wow.

And do you mean that the goose itself is not eating meat?

No, an actual vegetarian option.

In restaurants in 18th century Japan, this is just them being way ahead of their time.

I came across this in a book from 1790 called Recipes from the Soy Garden, or I think it's finally been reproduced in English and it's been titled Recipes from the Garden of Paradise or something and it's by a guy called Yuan Mei who was China's most famous poet so you'd expect him to be writing recipe books and

he had a recipe in there for mock roast goose and he said the way you made it was you wrap yam in tofu skin and that was it and I couldn't find many more details on how to do it but I imagine you get a load of yams you kind of sculpt it into the shape of goose and then you wrap it in what's actually this thing called yuba which is a really interesting ingredient.

But it's the skin that you get on the top of soy milk.

So, you know, if you have normal dairy milk, then you have that delicious skin on the top of it.

Soy milk, same thing.

But they would peel it off very carefully, hang it up, and then allow more and more skin to form.

And that's a really crucial ingredient of its own.

And you'd wrap the yam in that.

And actually, they'd make some stuff just from that yuba, didn't they?

They made vegetarian stuff because when it comes out, it's really sort of like plasticini, and you can mold it into any shape you want.

And so you could shape it into any meat you wanted.

So there were dishes like Buddha's chicken, Buddha's fish, Buddha's duck, molded pig's head, molded ham, and they were all made out of this yuba that was just put into different shapes.

It's very cool.

I didn't realize that it was virtually invented, the idea of this fake meat, as a transition to get you to just being a vegetarian.

It was like weaning you off the real deal.

So you would slowly get the sensation that you were eating this thing still, but it wasn't what what it was and then eventually be like well yeah i don't really fancy meat anymore and then you go straight to the veggie stuff yeah but you are full vegetarian if you're eating yam in the shape of a goose i think that's fine you don't need to go any further that's fine yes but sometimes you need the psychological reasoning to go oh i'm still having i guess like today if you have an impossible burger or something it's like a transition to yeah because you still kind of want the taste of meat but you yeah i know but i think you're there i i really do it's okay keep eating the yammy goose but i do

I'm just stuck on the fake meats now, which I'm really.

They're really

sort of fascinating as well as pretty good, a lot of them.

Anyway,

one of the things.

Sorry, I've completely lost my train of thought.

Can I just quickly just add to that?

I'll get back.

We've just got to sit in silence for like a minute.

Shortly.

I'll do it.

I don't know.

I believe in you.

You don't.

The pressure's on.

I think if you had a bit more protein in your diet, you wouldn't have this problem.

So, all I was going to say was that it's almost all the way through history.

So, tofu was invented in about 200 BC, was when it started being invented.

It's almost all either religious reasons or times of extreme economic hardship where there just isn't any meat to go around.

And those are the two the two huge factors until recently when it's been more of a climatey thing.

But in the 1990s, Cuba had a big economic crisis.

And they made a thing that was steak, but it was made from breaded and fried grapefruit rind.

And it was, I mean, they had a lot of...

Wow, an even less delicious part of a grapefruit, which already is quite quite disgusting.

There was soy piccadillo, which I found described in the Havana Times as the worst ground meat-like substance that any human beings ever tasted in the 20th century.

Wow.

So it is, yeah, it doesn't always work.

In the Oxford Companion to Food, which I think we've all dipped into from time to time, and in England is probably the Bible of facts about food.

When you go into the fake meat section, they say that bread people

is part of this whole thing.

And bread people is basically a human made out of bread.

I guess it's a bit like a gingerbread people.

Yeah.

Right?

So is it a mythical sort of like?

No, it's just like, it's literally just like a loaf of bread, but it's in the shape of a person.

And they say...

Do you say?

Well, they say, and they also confine you to food, that it is almost universal through all cultures of history.

Well, they've always had a bread people.

They've always had bread people.

And they say that they are a form of guilt-free cannibalism.

Oh, that's what I was wondering.

Is that the transition away from eating human?

It says the taboo of eating fellow humans is almost universal.

And so we have to eat bread instead.

Wow.

I don't know what these celiac gluten-free people do.

They probably keep doing the cannibalism.

You've got to.

You've got to.

I did read that in the Second World War, people were encouraged to eat meat substitute, and brown bread was advertised as a meat substitute because it has, I think it had slightly more protein, I think, than white bread.

So it was all over the newspapers and stuff.

You know, hey, rather than eating a steak, try a loaf of brown bread.

Yeah, it is true.

One of the founders of alternative meat, as it gets called, or sort of artificial meat or cultural meat, was a guy called Willem van Ehlen.

And he was Dutch, and he had his experience in the Second World War, his formative experience, because he was in a prisoner of war camp, a Japanese one, and food was incredibly short.

And he was very lucky to live and not starve.

And a few years after the war he went to medical school in 1948 and he found that researchers there, they were trying to grow some cells in a tank.

They weren't trying to grow it for meat, they were trying to grow it as a skin graft thing if you'd be burned, you know, to craft on your skin.

And his first thought, because of his formative experiences in the war, were, I wonder if we could eat that.

You know,

he had just been so hungry for such a long time, it had really sort of imprinted itself on his consciousness, and that set him on the path of developing cultured meat.

Wow, you'd be nervous around him, I think, whatever.

And he exposed body parts.

It's almost like in a cartoon where he turns around and looks at you and you've turned into a roast chicken.

It was a bit like that for him, yeah.

That's incredible.

Apparently, peanut butter was invented largely as a substitute for people who found it really hard to eat meat.

George Washington's cover.

Yeah, I think, or it might have been a Kellogg version of peanut butter.

So, like, there was quite a few peanut butter innovations going on at the time.

Kellogg certainly promoted nut meat.

Yeah.

Yeah, nut meat.

I actually have a soy problem with substitute.

You're okay with that.

I can hardly touch your nut meat.

None of this stuff is substitute meat, though.

This is annoying so much.

Like in China, ancient China and Japan, they were just eating tofu and soy because they ate tofu and soy as well.

And this is when you read it in the 19th century when it was just coming to Britain and to Europe and like all of these Chinese Japanese recipes were coming over.

They were actually really positive.

Across the the media, they were like, wow, this soy stuff can be made into a thing that is a little bit like meat.

But because it didn't have the connotation of, oh, we're going to take away your meat and make you eat soy, then no one was negative about it.

It's really interesting to see.

But yeah, there were fake sausages.

I think the first reference to a fake sausage came in 1851.

Right.

And it was described as being by a Grahamite, which I didn't know what that was.

Do you know what a Grahamite is?

It's a religious

sausage.

Yes.

And do you know what we get from Grahamites today?

Graham's Crackers?

Yeah, I did.

I never knew this.

Really?

Which is actually a thing I only know from friends' episodes because I think they're in a...

Yeah, I'm not convinced I know what one is.

No.

Yeah.

They don't exist.

So like shooting stars.

It's all a prank.

He was a big old veggie, anyway, and he invented sort of bread.

He thought that bread had been tortured the way we made it because we ground it so hard.

So he said that we should make bread, but leave the flour much rougher and coarser.

So that's what Graham's Crackers are made of.

Okay, interesting.

No impossible foods, impossible burgers, yeah and stuff.

They are tested on animals, really?

They're fed to animals to see if they like them.

So they have this thing called heme in it, which is a vegetable-based liquid that looks a little bit like blood.

And so you put it in your fake burgers, and then when you cut into it, it looks like there's blood in your burgers, and that's what people want.

But the USDA.

These people are normal.

Yeah, no, no, like, sure, I love them.

I think they're delicious.

But the USDA said that even though they appear to be safe, they needed to be tested properly before they can go into the burgers.

And they could have done it without testing on animals, but it would have taken years and years and years.

And so they tested just on, I think, just on one animal, actually.

Well, certainly just one or two.

And the guy who was in charge of it, Patrick O.

Brown, has basically come out and said, yeah, look, we had to do it really.

And like, it was just a one-off.

And we think that overall, holistically, it's better that we did that one one small thing because, overall, it's a good thing.

You know, tofurki?

Familiar with tofurki?

So, a tofu turkey.

It's vegetarian turkeys.

It's quite American, isn't it?

It is.

It was a big thing in the 90s.

Well, the guy who invented it, Seth Tibbert, was so broke when he invented tofurki that he was living in a tree house.

And it wasn't even, he was renting a tree house rather than really.

I've actually stayed in a couple of Airbnb tree houses and they are not cheap, I've got to say.

Oh, well, he was actually, he was renting the trees.

He rented three trees and built the treehouse in between them.

Cool.

Oh, you can't do that.

What do you mean?

You can't rent a tree and then build property on...

Well, he had asked for permission to do it.

Okay.

Yeah, he had to figure it out.

Sorry.

There you go.

Thank you.

Guys, I will have to move us on to our final fact in a second.

So, yeah, if you've got anything.

Guess what?

The first meat that NASA experimented with growing so that potentially astronauts could culture their own sort of cell-cultured meat in space was?

Guess what the first meat they tried to grow?

Oh, well, steak.

Goldfish.

Goldfish?

Goldfish?

Oh my.

Yep, they took some goldfish steaks and they tried to...

Goldfish steaks?

If I order a steak and that comes, I am sending it back.

Yeah,

they were just trying to grow the goldfish possum and

it must have been like because they do grow quite big goldfish, don't they?

It's not like one of those little ones you get in the fair.

I don't think so, no.

But I think anyway, it was an interesting spot.

I don't think anyone even got to being tasted.

Yeah, right.

Can I quickly tell you, do you know why soy sauce is called soy sauce?

Because it has soy in it.

And it's sausage in it.

Dan is actually right about the sauce bit.

No, soy beans are named after soy sauce.

Come off it.

No.

How does that work?

How did they get who found the first soy sauce?

That's like a time loop there.

You grow soy sauce and you separate it into beans.

Yeah, we just got soy, which again came over from Japan.

It was about the 1300s.

It was called shoyu, the sauce that they made from beans, which they didn't call shoyu beans.

They called it something different.

And so we, for a couple of hundred years, called it, and all across Europe, variations of soy sauce.

No one knew what it was made of, so everyone tried to make substitutes out of the first ketchup was an attempt to make soy sauce.

Oh, and they tried to put a lot of fish and mushrooms and exactly.

Yeah, a lot of mushroom attempts.

And then they realized, oh, they use this weird bean.

Let's call it the soybean.

And that's why.

That's amazing.

That's incredible.

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It's time for our final factors show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that after Bruce Lee died, Chinese movie studios tried to exploit the gap he left by immediately releasing films starring Bruce Lai,

Lee Bruce, and Brute Lee.

This is called Bruceploitation, where

after he sadly passed away, very prematurely, the Chinese studios went, America wants Bruce Lee movies.

So he did Enter the Dragon.

Quickly, let's get re-enter the dragon into production.

They like the name Bruce and Lee.

Quickly, let's just find other people and name them that in very similar ways.

Bruce Lai is now starring in Bruce Lee vs.

Superman, which is a movie, by the way, from this period.

Okay, so they didn't find people with these names, they found people and then gave them these names.

Yeah, they changed.

I think that's an easier way of doing it, to be fair.

Yeah, because if you find Lee Bruce or whatever, and he's like an out-of-work accountant, then it's going to be harder to get him in shape, isn't it?

I don't know if there's two Patrick Stewarts you're going to get.

Dan, I presume you're a big Bruce Lee fan.

yeah yeah

because you grew up in hong kong yeah yeah um have you seen the game of death uh yeah this was the movie he was making during like he died halfway through making exactly and they had a problem because they had 40 minutes of bruce lee footage and you're not allowed to make a film that's 40 minutes long so they just hired body doubles they put them in sunglasses they filmed them you know at a distance or really in silhouette or they used some footage of bruce lee's actual funeral Bit weird.

Wow.

Yeah.

Also completely ruins the point of the film, I'd guess, if you think, oh, well, there he is.

He's dead.

But anyway,

and they just sort of fattened the thing up into a Bruce Lee movie.

And it was five years after his death that they released this.

Well, that's the thing.

I mean, if you look at the list of movies, like, that was called Game of Death.

They then released new Game of Death.

Like,

Bruce Lee, the star of all stars, Bruce Lee's secret.

Bruce Lee in New Guinea.

Like, just like...

It's so weird that there was this massive demand because I hadn't, I really didn't know anything about Bruce Lee and didn't know how fascinated I'd be by him.

He is an amazing character.

But I also didn't realize he was not big really at all until he died in America.

So he was massive in Hong Kong.

He'd done, I think it was his fourth American film, Enter the Dragon, and that was really the film that made him really big and everyone loved him.

And he died a couple of weeks before the premiere, three weeks before the premiere, very, very young, very sadly in his early 30s.

And yeah, hadn't been big at all before.

then and then was this huge deal.

But the New York Times obituary, when he died, three weeks before that big film came out, said

his films were successful in New York despite unanimously disapproving reviews.

And the film Fist of Fury makes the worst Italian Western look like the most solemn and noble achievements of the early Soviet cinema.

Wow.

That's in his obituary.

Yeah, yeah.

And that's it.

It was nothing good.

It said he had begun to win audiences in Latin America.

The end.

Wow.

So weird.

Because he's, I mean, he's big all over the the world now, right?

Yeah, I think.

Because I was in Mostar in Bosnia, and there's a statue of him there in the middle of Mostar, which I saw.

And the reason that there's a statue there is because it was just after the Balkan War.

They had the Croatians, the Bosnians, the Serbians, everyone.

Everybody was Kung Fu fighting, yes.

I'm very sorry to trivialize what was an appalling conflict.

And it was a little bit frightening, yes.

But they needed the statue of someone, and they couldn't decide who to get a statue of.

And Bruce Lee was the only one that everyone agreed they liked.

That's too loud.

Really?

And it's still there in the middle of the beautiful outside of town.

It's amazing.

I'd heard of the statue.

I had no idea that was the re-engraph.

Someone stole it, right?

It was there when I was there.

Right.

I think at one point it got stolen.

They didn't see who it was.

It was as fast as lightning.

But it was stolen.

And apparently, during that fight where they they put it up as a bit of peace,

the way they faced it was towards one of the

sides.

So the statue of Bruce in his fighting stance to them was offensive because they were like, you're suggesting Bruce is on your team now.

Yeah.

He's fighting us.

I heard that as well.

Yeah.

But again, contain multitudes, Bruce Lee.

So he wrote a lot of poetry, which was published.

Former Hong Kong Cha-Cha champion.

That's a champion of the Cha-Cha dance.

Yes.

Sorry, I didn't just.

He went stuttering.

temporary localized stutter, yeah.

And his wife was Swedish, Swedish-American.

In fact.

And that was.

The wife who he cheated on to shag the mistress whose house he was found dead in.

Who was a good friend of my mum and dad?

Betty Ting,

the woman whose house he died in, knows your mum and dad.

The woman who there were conspiracy theories all over the world that she was somehow responsible for his death.

My parents started those conspiracy theories.

Sadly runs into that.

Wow.

A lot of his films, when they were filming the fight scenes,

the extras in End of the Dragon, many of them were actually in local gangs or triad gangs in Hong Kong.

So quite frequently, they would keep fighting after the director yelled, cut.

Cut.

Cut.

Yes, I have been.

Yeah, because that's the thing with Bruce Lee, right?

He was in gangs in Hong Kong.

Is that right?

He had to, yeah.

So yeah, tell the story, Dan.

When he was young, he got in a fight.

he picked a wrong fight with a gang leader, and that's the reason he ended up going over to America, because he was fleeing death, basically.

He had to get away.

That's right.

And then he, you know, he was a great martial artist, but he did lots of different martial arts.

But he always said that the reason he was so good at it is because his right leg is one inch shorter than his left leg,

which apparently helped his kicking.

Did he?

And he was also near-sighted, so he liked to do close combat because then he could see the person he hitting.

Well, apparently on set one day, they were in an area where the locals were very unhappy that they were filming there.

And he was talking to the director, and they were standing on a sort of hilltop, and they started getting surrounded by the locals, and they knew that something bad was about to happen.

And apparently, what Bruce did was he jumped into the air and he pulled a perfect horizontal

plank, basically, in the air.

So like the way he jumped, it looked like he was levitating and then he came back down on his legs and apparently everyone was like wow Bruce and then they didn't beat them up

At least that's the story my parents have been telling

He was supposed to be drafted by the US Army.

In fact, he was drafted.

Oh man.

But he didn't see any service because he failed a medical.

Apparently he had bad eyesight, as I said.

He had a sinus disorder and he only had one testicle.

Oh yeah.

So it's quite interesting because that means I couldn't get in the US Army because I also have bad sinuses.

But you had three testicles, which would make you.

A super solder, yeah.

Was it that one had not descended?

Yeah, it's just not descended.

Yeah, yeah.

I read that put as, so it was impossible to kick Bruce Lee in the testicles.

It's pretty cool.

That's true.

You could kick him in the testicle, though, which I should imagine had the same.

I did read, so there's a book called The Tower of Bruce Lee, which I was reading about by an author called David Miller.

And he reckons that Bruce Lee actually, really in his life, he only had a few proper fights.

You know, obviously it's mostly screen and training and all of this.

And he says, I just wanted to quote this.

I really like this line.

He was an absolutely remarkable man, but he wasn't the Jesus of martial arts, and that's the way he's often presented these days.

Could he have stuck his fingers in your eyes more quickly than anyone else on the planet?

Maybe so.

But what you have to remember is that is exactly what he would have done.

That's real fighting.

He would have stuck his fingers in your eyes, kicked you in the leg, and got the hell out of there.

Right.

That's apparently the...

Well, apparently he was so quick.

What he could do is if you laid your palm out and you had a pound coin on there,

he could grab it out of your hand before you closed your hand.

And then when you opened your hand, he had replaced the pound with a penny.

Okay.

As you were opening it.

No, so you were like, what?

So imagine like you were Bruce and I was going, so go, and I close my hand and I'm like, haha, you didn't get it.

And then I open it and I see you've changed.

You were so quick.

You took it and you put a new coin in place of my oh I suppose as you've picked up the pound you've put a penny in yeah I could do that

I could do that

he did he just set some weird targets for himself he was like the original Guinness World record breaker and then broke them and he did want to kind of hone himself into this perfect human specimen which weirdly people thought might be it why he died there was a thought that he just had eradicated from his body all extraneous anything and that sort of killed him somehow um Yeah, it's not really.

Does that bother your parents think of that one?

They're not the story at the Schreiber dinner table, I can tell you that.

I buy this.

I buy this.

So, right, because there are lots of theories.

One is that he died of a swelling of the brain, which I think is what was the official finding for the inquiry.

Yeah, I think the brain definitely did swell, but it was not why.

Well, is it because he was so, so, so fit?

He got rid of all fat, so there was no subcutaneous fat on his body at all.

That could be a problem.

So, this was his routine when he died, right?

He drank liquidized steak and cow's blood every morning.

Then he ran seven seven miles.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Goldfish steak?

Then he would run seven miles with his great Dane dog, some of it backwards, some of it up the side of trees.

Checked out, yeah.

And he was just too fit.

Also, there's another theory that he didn't have any sweat glands.

He didn't have any sweat glands because he'd had them, and this is the idea that he died of heat, like overheating, because he'd had his armpit glands removed out of vanity.

And let this be a lesson to the vein that he thought that sweating made him look bad on screen.

And then I found this the most plausible theory about his death because he'd had a brain swelling a few weeks earlier.

Well, no one knows, really, no one knows what killed him.

But almost all your sweat comes out of the rest of you.

Yes, I think he would just probably overheated anyway.

It was a very hot day, and he had this habit of whenever he was getting excited talking about a project of like doing acting out the whole film.

So the person who was with him said he'd literally acted out the martial arts of an entire film that he was planning to do.

Can you emergency get rid of the heat?

Like, can you just drool a lot?

Like, is there

to get just the liquid out of you?

Pop in a cold bath, maybe?

I don't know, but it's a shame because we never got to find out whether he achieved one thing he wanted to do, which was he, well, first of all, he was experimenting with electro-shocking himself.

So, in his sleep, he like ran electricity through his muscles to fine-tune his reflexes.

And he said that by the end of the year, he was going to be able to drive his fingers right up to the middle knuckle through pine planks.

Wow.

And we never will know if he could do that with just one finger through a plank of wood.

It's a shame that didn't come through the coffin lid.

I need to wrap this up, guys.

We've got to the end of our show.

Thank you so much, everyone, for listening to our dorky facts.

I hope you enjoyed it.

If you want to get in touch with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our social media accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James.

My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Hunter on Twitter.

Yep.

Or if you want to get to us as a group, where do we go?

You can go to at no such thing on Twitter or at No Such ThingasAfish on Instagram or email podcast at qi.com.

Yeah, and yeah, check out our website.

If anyone wants to come to a live show like this, we are doing more dates around the UK and we're going to Australia and New Zealand.

But for now, Gothenburg Book Festival.

Thank you so much.

That was awesome.

What a treat.

Absolutely awesome.

We'll be back again.

We'll see you then.

Goodbye.

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