491: No Such Thing As The Beurre War

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Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, where we were joined at the Soho Theater by Ella Al-Shamahi.

Yes, it is Ella, our explorer friend.

She's a paleoanthropologist, paleoanthropologist.

She's an evolutionary biologist, a TV presenter.

She is absolutely badass and she came to join us on stage for a really, really fun show.

Absolutely certain you're going to really love this one.

I just messaged Ella.

She's off somewhere around the world and asked her if she wanted me to plug anything.

She said not, but I really think I should probably mention that she does have a book.

It's called The Handshake a Gripping History.

That's available wherever you get your books.

One last thing while I have a little bit of time is if you go to no suchthingsofish.com and look for the shop there, I don't think we've mentioned this for a while.

We have quite a bit of merch that you can get hold of.

There's nerdy t-shirts, there's pin badges, there's all sorts of stuff.

There is also the ultimate guide.

This was like a program that we made for our live shows.

It was put together by Alex Bell.

It's got interviews, it's got photos, it's got tons and tons of facts.

And he did a whole page on moss.

Basically, if you love the show, you will definitely, definitely love it.

So, yeah, go to no such thing as a fish.com and look for the shop, and you'll find the details there.

But anyway, let's just get on with the show live from the Soho Theatre in London with Ella Al-Shamahi.

Okay, on with the podcast.

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

This week, coming to you live from the Soho Theater.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

I am sitting here with James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Ella Al-Shamahi.

And once again, we have gathered around 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 Ella.

Whales don't have tear ducts because there's no point in crying in the ocean.

Which, all right.

I feel like I must have at some point cried in the ocean and felt a bit better for it, you know.

That's true.

No one can see you cry in the ocean is the point, right?

And this was salty when I got here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Can you not see people cry in the ocean?

With your head's underwater.

No, hold on, seriously, okay.

If you're actually properly bawling,

would you be able to tell?

You'd certainly certainly be able to tell the facial expression of someone who's crying, for sure.

Okay, so I think that's what's really amazing to me about this fact is that

when I think about whales, I think about their songs, right?

And how emotive they are, how they move people.

Like, there's been congressional hearings in the US where people haven't actually given testimony, they've just played whale song.

Wow.

And to think that those beautiful creatures who sit there, like, communicating in this way that's just like moves us, can't cry is really terrible.

But cry they cry vocally don't they yeah that's that we know about what

they do that right how is your CD selling Dan

Dan's song Shriver's whale song you sell it in shopping centers don't you dropping to sleep it's very calm

but they do do that right yes so a hundred percent they express emotion etc etc I've got a question

so if because obviously they live in water, if you cry,

water is coming out of your eyes, would it be a pressure problem?

As in, would it be harder to push a tear out of your eye?

Probably not.

I don't know.

For a whale.

Apparently they just don't have tear ducts.

So they just don't have the ducts full stop.

They've still got the ability to secrete and clean their eyeballs.

Yeah, so they've got like a useful tear basically.

Like a wind screen wall.

Like a winscreen.

Yeah, exactly.

I just want to test a misconception that I definitely had before researching this, and I wonder if anyone else in the room had it.

Right.

I have had tear ducts wrong my whole life I thought that tear ducts take the tears from wherever they're made to your eye uh-huh right right does anyone else think that

yeah some okay some not I mean not not as many as

not nearly as many as I hoped would have this made this error but no they carry tears away from the eye which I like they're the drainage bait the tear duct is the is the gutter for tears.

They get made kind of in your eyes lacrymal sac and then they run into the corner and then that collects, and then it drains into your nose.

Which is why when you cry, your nose runs.

If you look into the corner of someone's eye, you'll see a little black dot, and that's the tear duct where the tears go into.

Right, and it's just the gutter.

It's not like a sort of, I thought it was a kind of.

But so, how come our nose doesn't run every single time we cry?

It will.

It does, but it might go down the back of your nose as opposed to.

Another thing that's similar between the nose, the tear ducts, and the nose is that in whales,

they have this stuff that they put on their eyes, but it's much more viscous viscous than human tears.

And it's full of mucins, which basically means it's the same as snot, pretty much.

Not exactly the same, but it's got the same stuff in.

And they don't have to do it very often.

They only have to do it every couple of hours.

They kind of smear their eye with snot, and then they don't have to blink again for hours and hours.

Is it worth the trade-off

of never having to blink, but you have snotty eyes?

That's all I'm saying.

I would go for that.

Would you?

I would go for that.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the ocean would wash it off, right?

It does eventually, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's pretty useful.

Okay.

No, I'm just thinking, you just save all that time.

You know, constantly.

Sorry, I'm late.

I was blinking.

But you miss like a tenth of whatever's happening in the world, don't you?

That's why you need more women on this panel.

What, what?

Oh, should we have slotty eyeballs?

Such lads.

Fucking lad chat.

Come back to mine, guys.

Let's talk about fucking eyelids on whales.

Strip clubs, fuck that, we're gonna talk about the nose problems.

I preferred it, Darren, when you were doing whale sound, got to be honest.

Shall we do some lads, lads, lads stuff then?

So what is the one body part of a whale that will be able to tell you what species they are better than any other body part?

Ooh.

Oh, like what species of whale?

Yeah.

Because I know it's a whale already.

You know it's a whale.

You're like, oh, is this a pygmy right whale or is it a whatever whale?

Well, the right whale has the biggest testicle testicle in

all of the whales species.

There we go.

There's

a of all species on earth, right?

It's the biggest species.

Yeah yeah yeah it's bigger than an egg.

They're bigger.

Yeah I would have thought blue whale.

Okay Ella, do you want to have a pitch?

No geez the

that's right the vagina.

Oh

wow the

do you know what you you laugh about this I was once on camera trying to do a whale necropsy which is like the autopsy you did give an animal walking past this huge say whale, and on camera, we're like talking through all the different bits.

And then I'm about to point at something and be like, so what's that?

Because it was so huge.

Wow.

It was quite terrifying.

I've never seen one in real life, but I'm only going off what I've read.

But apparently, so there's a woman called Dr.

Sarah Mesnick who studies whale vaginas.

And she says that basically they're just a series of flaps, folds, blind alleys, funnels.

They said the first time they opened one up, they couldn't work out, like in a maze, they couldn't work out how to get from the opening to where the sperms needed to be.

They literally couldn't work out the maze.

Wow, yeah.

Like most men.

But yeah, and because they're so different in all the different species, they're a really, really good way.

If you only have one piece of a whale to look at,

go for the vagina.

Can I pick the whale's head to differentiate the species?

Is that a?

And you'll say the the vaginas are better steer.

Well, they all just look like whales, don't they?

Yeah, that's true.

That's really not true.

Well, they know.

Like, there are some of the whales, like a beluga whale, looks really different to

a sperm whale, for instance.

But a lot of the closer species do look quite similar, I would say.

Do you want a fact about whale eyes?

This is as wrong tear ducks and whales.

Lots of whales can't see blue.

Oh, that's another really sad one.

That's really sad.

They're monochromatic.

They just see shades of grey.

Yeah, it's weird.

This is so depressing.

Yeah, they can't cry.

They can't see colours.

I don't know what.

I just feel really moved by.

Everyone's moved by whales, right?

That's like a thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I think facts like that just make you a bit sad that they don't.

But they can see something very cool.

This is great.

So whales have big, big eyes, right?

Actually, not that big, as in compared with the size of the whale.

They're obviously way bigger than our eyes, but they're not huge.

And their pupils are about half as large, again, as human pupils so again not a huge discrepancy but enough that means i was reading an article about astronomy it was a brilliant article even with that smallish difference in pupil size they would be able to see twice as many stars in the night sky as we can

but they live underwater

but they do come up they do come up

although they have to remember to breathe which i think is quite amusing imagine having to remember to breathe yeah yeah it's not automatic that's incredible oh because they can commit suicide can't they

It's really dark.

It's really dark here.

Join us next week on Sad Facts About Whales.

No, they can't.

Those are the interstitials between my whale cries and my CD.

Whales commit suicide.

Anyway, listen, can I steer us away from this incessant lad chat and get us to something different, which is in Star Trek...

As part of the crew, there are whales and dolphins on the actual Starship Enterprise.

Are there?

Yeah,

there's a cetacean navigation lab, which is always alluded to, which consists of 12 bottlenose dolphins and a couple of whales that are on the streets.

Is it because they can see the stars better?

It's their echolocation and it's the navigation system.

It's space echolocation.

Yeah, so they're navigating for Captain Picard.

They're like, where should we go?

Ask the dolphins and whales.

Isn't that cool?

That's utterly bizarre.

Yeah.

Surely their echolocation wouldn't work in space.

They're probably space whales, as in they're probably...

Oh, really?

Oh, I assume they're space whales.

I think it's the future Star Trek, right?

So they must have evolved to...

Has the universe evolved to have molecules in between the stars as well?

We're going to have to move on in a second.

Oh, no, no, no.

Wait, what about crying?

So many.

Yep.

Doves don't cry.

Doves don't cry?

Doves don't cry.

I think most animals don't cry really, doesn't it?

It's true, but there's only one song about doves that do cry.

It's like Princeton released a song called When Worms Cry.

No, they do have tear ducts, gutters, and can keep their eyes moist, but they don't

do emotional crying.

Talking of birds, you know how we always think like the bird song.

Talking of birds.

Who's the lad now, eh?

So, you know how we think bird song is all about communication?

Yeah.

They've discovered that actually, no, sometimes birds are just muttering to themselves.

Apparently, sometimes they're just like,

it's just really not going well today.

I read that whales, if there's like predators around and they have their baby whales near them, they'll whisper like, guys, we've got to be careful.

Like, whales whisper.

That's pretty fascinating that they know to lower their tone.

So,

my second crazy whale fact, if I can get it in, is that since the late 1960s, blue whales have lowered their sound, so like they've got more baritone, shifting the equivalent of three white keys on a piano, which ironically used to once be made of whalebone.

And it's like it's really mad how they've completely changed as well the distance that they can communicate in.

And part of that might be a good reason.

So it might be that they have gone lower in sound because there's more of them since the 1960s, because the whaling conventions and anti-whaling and blah blah blah and all it's actually worked.

But the bad explanation is that the ocean's more acidic and therefore sound travels quicker in its own.

So it's like you can pick your explanation.

Yeah, yeah.

Be happy or depressed, basically.

Okay, great.

Bad place to end, isn't it?

Well, let me quickly tell you about some new science that's been done.

So there were some people who were swimming next to a whale.

And before they knew it, this guy who was writing about it said the water was like chocolate milk.

I couldn't see my hand when I held it in front of my face.

I had poo in my eyes, mouth, wetsuit, everywhere, and I I was soaked in it from head to toe.

Oh no.

Okay, but the interesting thing is they reckon this is evidence that perhaps whales will expel feces when they're scared as a defense technique to try and stop people from attacking them.

So that's maybe.

I have a mate who collects whale poo.

She's the Asha DeVos.

Yeah, she's really intellectual and co-wale poo.

Has she ever been covered in it, like this person?

I think there's a bit, but not quite to that extent, maybe.

I don't know.

Well, I read this article in Vice and they said if this poo nado was newly observed defense mechanism, then the divers have made a great discovery.

If not they just got covered in shit.

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

Okay, my fact this week is that in the 1950s Campbell's tried to persuade people to start drinking cocktails made out of beef soup.

No?

It sounds amazing.

It does sound amazing.

Do you not fancy that?

It was over ice, maybe with a bit of alcohol.

Lovely.

No?

Perfect temperature for beef soup.

I see.

So it was, what was the beef soup made of?

Beef.

Like beef broth or like...

Beef bouillon.

Bouillon, bouillon.

What does that mean?

Bouillon.

It was just like beef soup, basically.

It was like

soup.

I don't know what to say.

It's like camples, so they're like tens of tens of campballs.

Basically, yeah, I know, but like for any bougie women in the room, you know that there's this movement right now with like beef broth and bone marrow.

No, like bone marrow is like supposed to be really good for your gut health.

Right.

Where were IBS ladies in the room?

Oh, yeah.

Sorry, this is a bit of a laddie podcast.

We don't really

do that stuff.

This is in 1955.

And the idea was, Campbell's, they decided that this was going to be their new marketing campaign.

They sent a load of

what could just be described as cans of soup and ice buckets and recipe cards to a load of magazine editors and influencers, what we would call influencers today.

And they just said, this is the new thing.

This is what you have to do.

They did adverts in magazines.

These soup cocktails actually appeared on menus in Los Angeles and New York.

And it was all the way up until the 1970s they were saying that this is something you could do.

You could even add bitters, you could add vodka, you could add lemon, but the main benefit was soup over ice.

Yeah, and it's so disgusting.

Did they have a massive surplus or something whether they were trying to shift?

Or was it no,

it was just a, how do we find a new market?

And they, as James says, it was sent to like the Dodgers, the baseball team.

They all received it.

It was the marketing.

This is the wording that they were sending some of the stuff out with and in the adverts.

For a summertime drink, it is low in calories, less than 30 calories per generous serving.

It is inexpensive.

It is especially valuable to athletes and golfers in replacing salt loss through exercise.

Best of all, it's downright delicious.

And

they would put the recipes on the side of cans, and there was a moment where they almost made it a thing.

Yeah, there was a guy called Lester Lannon, who was an orchestra leader, and he introduced a new dance called the soup,

which you would dance after you've had a few soup cocktails.

I lack a foresight, really, that you didn't think to buy some Campbells.

We should have

added some vodka, added some because the amazing thing is, last year Campbell's did it again.

Like, this disappeared in the 70s, and then last year, the Campbell's website had a page where it could tell you how to make a mushroom truffle daiquiri, a faux mango bourbon sour, a Thai chicken negroni,

and a pork ramen margarita.

No, thank you.

Some room temperature water, please.

So fat, it's so grubby.

Who would try it?

I'd

try it.

Who would try it?

Yeah.

God, you're a lot.

Oh, you're really safe, aren't you?

It was a massive thing.

And one of the other things, which I had never read about before, but this is a thing like James has said, kind of just keeps coming back.

And this is largely down to people on TikTok sort of reintroducing this as a thing.

But there's also tomato soup cake, which is a big thing, and people were genuinely in the middle of the day.

It was in the 50s as well.

Yeah, it was in the 50s.

It does feel like people thought, well, it's the nuclear age now.

Fuck it.

Yeah.

That's just, nothing matters.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And now it's 2022, and they're doing the same thing.

It's a bad sign.

I've got a lot of tons of soup left over from COVID.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Got to do something with it.

Well, enjoy your Thai chicken negroni.

Lovely.

Can I tell you a hero of soup?

Oh, yeah.

One of the heroes of the soup world.

There's a guy called John Dorrance.

Oh, Dorrit.

John Dorrance became the head of the Campbell Soup Company through his genius.

He realized at one point, you know, because I think he was working for Campbell's, and he realized, my God, we're just transporting water, you know, because that's a huge part of the cost of soup is moving it all around.

And he invented condensed soup.

He created the magic formula.

And as a result, his family are all billionaires now.

Yeah.

Because he just thought, let's just take the water out.

That's clever.

Well, I saw, so the Dorrance family, there was a list of the richest people in the world, the richest families in the world.

So we're not talking individual billionaires.

In 2023, they are listed as the 19th richest family in the world, according to this list.

And above them is basically just a bunch of cocks.

It's

you've got in at number eight, the Cox family,

who they are the ones that have done cable and broadband, Cox Communications.

Who else have we got?

Legally, I'm feeling quite nervous.

I know.

Have you got more Cox?

Well, no, it's interesting.

There's two Coxes.

There's one that's spelt differently.

There's the Butts, the butt family, and there's a bush.

So within the top 20, four of the richest families are two cocks, one butt, and a bush.

What more do you need?

Well, there's a hunt, but it was close.

How much money was put into this marketing campaign?

Well, they were just sending stuff out.

They did do a full-page advert on Life magazine, so that would have cost a bit, but mostly it was just sending out recipe cards and stuff, so not too much.

I just find these food trends to be completely bizarre.

Like, remember that paleo trend that was going on?

Yes, the diet, you mean?

Yeah,

what was that?

You eat like a caveman, so so you eat raw meat and dinosaurs?

You eat like no, but

oh god, somebody teach them geology.

Okay, so the dinosaurs, okay?

But no, um, but um, yeah, no, that's just when you know, you just eat beef and you eat like a lot of meat and grain and stuff.

But it was really awkward for those of us that actually study human evolution because they kept asking us about it, and we were like, Yeah, I mean, two things: one is they were eating all aspects of the animal, so unless you're going to start eating the intestines of an animal and the inside of the intestines of the ant, like squeeze out the inside of the intestines of the animal and eat the eyes of the animal and the tear ducts, and then it's not really the paleo dike because that's what our ancestors were doing.

They were like being quite, you know, nose to tail, yeah, like everything.

Yeah, but then the other side of it is like, I love this whole, like, oh, the original thing was the best thing because I'm like, they were all dead by our age.

So,

oh, yeah, do you know what they were doing?

They were all all killed by dinosaurs.

That's a shame.

Yeah.

They were actually.

But anyway, yeah.

Oh, God.

We never talked about Bovril properly.

We've mentioned it once or twice.

Exactly.

Bovril.

This reminds me of your stag do, Andy.

Bovril is, it was originally called

Johnston's Fluid Beef.

And it's just...

It's ultra.

That's nice.

It's ultra-condensed, very condensed paste, which is very beefy.

And it's a bit, can we say it's a bit marmitey?

It's kind of

like you make a drink out of it.

It's like a very thick substance.

You turn it into a drink.

It's like very weak beef soup, but you drink it like tea.

Meat tea.

You drink it.

Meat tea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's a drink.

This is an English thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

This is.

But bovril used to, it used to be absolutely huge.

It was invented in about the 1870s, and it was, again, like condensing all the good stuff and the invention of stock and things like that.

But in fact, the Pope appeared in a bobrell advert at the time.

Yeah, Pope was.

It was like a TV ad.

Is that not an ethical TV ad in 1870?

Sorry, I missed the year.

Yeah, yeah, sorry.

It was only in 1900, but it was a magazine ad.

And I don't think it had full papal clearance because it showed him drinking bovril on his papal throne, and the slogan was the two infallible powers, the pope and bovril.

So it was not, it was not strictly on brand, I think, for him.

But have you heard of Chevril?

Chevril.

No.

No.

Can you have a guess?

Is it chicken bovril?

Is it a different country?

It's chevr...

Chervil.

It's not Cherville.

Cheval.

Horse.

It's horse.

And this was not an official drink, it was a siege drink during the Burr War.

The Burr War?

The Boer, Boer.

Burr?

Is that the one that keeps appearing on my iPhone that tells me to celebrate the day?

No, that's the Battle of the Boyne.

Sorry, the Boer War.

Boer War, yeah.

How would we say it?

The way you sound it, it's like a butter war in France.

B-O-E-R.

Oh, we all know.

Say it again?

Boor.

Boor.

Burr.

Burr.

Anyway, during that conflict,

it was the second of those two wars, by the way.

There was a siege.

There was a place called Ladysmith that was under siege.

It might have been the first one.

And the garrison, they were so desperate that they made themselves horse bovril, because by the end of the siege, they were so reduced to eating, you'd eaten all the food, they'd eaten all the stuff that looked a bit like food, and then they had to eat the horses.

But they had a bit of fun with it because they got to, you know, boil down the horses and make chevril.

So that just shows the cultural power of bovril.

It seems,

it might seem like I said that quite long thing for no good reason, but that's not the case.

Just, okay, do people still eat, drink bovril?

Yeah, it's very big, yeah, it's very big.

It's massive.

Really?

You would get it if you go to a football match, you would see it.

Yes.

You've been to a pub at Last Orders.

Yeah, everyone.

Have you noticed?

Everyone around you gets a steaming hot mug.

That's the final.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It keeps you warm on the walk home.

Yeah.

Bovril for your walk, sir.

You must have.

Okay, I know that's untrue.

Obviously.

Hey, ring the bovril bell down there, bobril.

This is a podcast about facts, guys.

But okay, so you guys have all had bovril.

Yeah.

Well, not.

You've had bovril.

Ella, it's like everyone.

It's very, like, and I'm not British, but I've, yeah.

Well, after this, if anyone wants bobril, we'll all go together.

Well, we've got to wait for last orders.

We've got no choice.

Well, why don't we all go and have the most expensive soup in the world?

Do you fancy some of that?

Sure.

It's called cordyceps soup.

Would you like some cordyceps soup?

A mushroom-y thing?

Yeah,

you like it.

It's got chicken, so obviously, it's veggies.

Yeah,

but we could have it without the chicken, red dates, logan berries, and cordyceps, which is a mushroom.

It's that mushroom which goes inside caterpillars and sort of makes them climb up to the top of a plant and then grows out of their brains and then makes birds eat them.

You know that mushroom?

Yeah, I do, yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Lovely parasitic mushroom.

Sure, yeah.

It goes out of the brains and then they explode and all the spores go everywhere.

Yeah.

Again, I think the room temperature water just feels

hungry.

This is the world's most expensive soup.

One bowl is $688 last time I checked.

And it's made with this stuff and these cordyceps fungi which grow in the insects and caterpillars, especially in China, in the Tibet area, they get it and it's supposed to be very good for you.

Right.

That's the same mechanism as in the TV show and the computer game The Last of Us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So

that's what it's based on.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like if the zombie apocalypse happens because some people wanted expensive soup, that's going to be so.

Can you time it as well?

You know, when we go see flowers that we know are going to bloom once every hundred years and they open, can your meal arrive as just an intact bird and then suddenly it just explodes out.

That would be great in the mouth.

Yeah.

Also, you're saying people in the Himalayas are spending $600 pounds.

No, so they take them and then they take them to rich Chinese cities.

Oh, those Sherpas, they own so much, don't they?

Yeah, honestly, those guys.

But

there was the Chinese National Games in Beijing a few years ago, and there were two athletes, Wen Shengxia

and Chu Yungxia, and they beat the world records in the 10,000 meters, the 3,000 meters, and the 1,500 meters.

And the newspapers all said it was down to this stuff, this cordycep soup that they were drinking were they getting close to the finish line and then something just erupted out of their head and pushed them over it seems looking back that it might have been due to state sanctioned doping but

who knows who knows who knows probably just that delicious mushroom soup do you know um webster in america dictionary yeah yeah um so when he was putting the dictionary together he kind of just changed certain words to what he thought was the better pronunciation,

the better wording rather, the better letters to be used in the word.

So,

yeah, so like the reason, um,

sorry, I just don't have his book on me to have looked that up.

Um,

but so the word center he changed to ER.

That's why Americans do it ER.

He's responsible.

Color, there's no you in color in America because of him.

But there were words that he tried to use, but were kind of rejected by others.

He did soup, and soup was one.

So soup was meant to be spelled S-O-O-P, according to Webster.

So the Americans might have had soup.

Yeah.

Gosh, imagine having that kind of power that you can just literally change words.

Exactly.

And island, he tried to change as well.

So island, he was going to get rid of the S.

So it was I-L-A-N-T.

So island.

And is, he was going to get rid of the S and put it as is.

Oh, with the instant as S.

Yeah, sorry.

Otherwise, yeah, yeah.

That's just I.

Yeah, yeah.

I need to move us on to our next fact.

So.

Okay.

Are you upset?

Do you want to cry?

Well, there was a

I am crying.

You can't tell because I'm crying into the ducts.

No, I was going to ask if you wanted to talk about portable soup, pocket soup.

No.

It is time for fact number three.

Well, give us portable soup.

Give us portable soup.

Well, it's also known as veal glue.

I mean, there are a few different names, but

it's basically just solid soup.

And again, it was invented in the 17th century.

It's something to carry around, something to take away to see with you.

Like a proto-bovril, really.

It's just condensing.

you boil it down, you boil it down, you boil it down until eventually you have this gelatinous chunk of soup, and then you just rehydrate it.

And so, Lewis and Clark, when they did their expedition,

they took 193 pounds of solid soup.

So, that would have fed them for ages, but they only ate it when things were really down.

And that's because it was disgusting.

Yeah, you're right.

Yeah.

We had a fact also from a listener about Lewis and Clark, which is part of the reason I mentioned this, is that when they went on their amazing Trans-American voyage, they took 150 pounds of semen with them, which was their dog.

He was called semen.

Lovely.

All right, I'm out.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that in 2003, there were 4,096 fraudulent votes in the Belgian election.

The culprit, it was later discovered, was the universe.

So, what happened is

the universe.

It's always panto season at the Soho Theater.

The universe accidentally voted in the Belgian election and it was down to cosmic rays.

So, basically, in 2003, there was a lady who was running for a unionist party, and she was called Maria Vinfolkhill.

Apologies for the pronunciation.

And it was National Election Day, and there was a precinct where they were having the votes counted.

And as they were counting it, it sort of registered 4,096, which seemed impossible because that was more than there was possible to have in that area.

So they thought something dodgy is going on.

They had every single person in computers in the area look at the machine.

try to work it out what the hell's going on.

Nothing.

Why are you guys laughing?

Have you tried turning it off and on again?

They tried that.

Sorry.

So computer people can't do it.

Yeah, they must have, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You, you're in computers.

So, they looked at it, yeah, they looked at it, and they looked at it, and they saw that 4096 was a very computery number, yes, isn't it?

Is it genuinely?

It is genuinely.

Some people here will have worked it out.

Two to the twelve, two to the twelve.

Two to the twelve.

Okay, okay, bover later.

You know,

it's two to the twelve, so in binary, it's one zero zero zero zero zero twelve times, and so one of the zeros must have turned into a one yeah so that's oh okay exactly exactly

like like a mad tiny glitch a mad tiny glitch suddenly and they couldn't work out what was and then a while later there was a conference of the american association for the advancement of science this was happening in boston and it was during a talk called cloudy with a chance of solar flares that it was revealed that they believed that it was the cosmic rays of the universe that had hit it at this precise moment, which happens a lot on our planet.

I think somebody should call Trump up or his lawyers and be like, yo, we've got you a better excuse for that whole election.

This man is just sitting here ruining democracy by like telling everybody, well, here's another excuse we can use in court.

It's actually solar flares.

And that one over there is giving you mathematical formulas.

And I'm like, no part in any of this, but carry on.

No.

I like the way that it was solar flares that changed this election.

So that old newspaper headline, which was the sun, what won it literally was true

that's very good yes yeah um we should we say what a cosmic ray is yeah so it's it sounds like a ray but actually it's not it's a they're particles they're pieces of atoms they're obviously incredibly tiny and they are passing through all of us right now even in this basement we're not safe um

they're not harmful that's the good news um but every at sea level roughly where we are every square centimetre of the planet gets hit by one uh muon every minute, and they're going at 90

muon.

It's what you make bother from.

It was discovered during, what was that war again?

A muon.

A muon.

Muon.

Yeah.

All right.

And,

but all of us now, all of us are being, like, just bang, bang, bang, muons passing right through us.

All of us now are being.

Is no one concerned, even slightly?

I'm concerned.

But you said it doesn't harm us.

It doesn't harm us at all.

I'm not concerned.

That's exactly what the muon lobby would say.

Yeah, yeah.

Here's the thing.

We say it doesn't harm us.

It absolutely does harm us because it harms the things that we use.

It harms communications.

It harms...

There's examples of airplanes literally dropping hundreds of feet because they've been hit by a cosmic ray and the system has rebooted and freaked out.

And those...

It's rare.

It's really rare.

It's really, really rare.

It's really, really rare.

So one of the problems that there is going forward is that these particles have energy and they can change, they can flip transistors, basically.

A transistor is a little switch in an electrical thing.

Now, the smaller a transistor is, the less energy you need to flip it.

And the more you have, the more susceptible you are.

And as time goes on, we have way more transistors in everything and they're way, way smaller.

So in theory, it could be worse as time goes on.

It's bad.

Yeah.

It is bad.

You said it didn't harm us.

You know what this is?

Yeah.

Do we know if people were scared, were suspicious, thought there was some kind of fraud going on?

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I mean, fortunately, because it was so obviously fraudulent that it was called immediately even by the party that they just knew.

Yeah, they were a small party, right?

So it wasn't...

Yeah, they know because in the Belgium elections, these machines, they do multiple different counts in different ways.

And if any of the counts are different, they know there's something off.

That's clever.

Basically.

Did she end up winning, by the way?

I don't think so.

No, no, she didn't.

No.

Oh, that's sad.

Yeah.

She never was going to, which hence why it was sort of...

She saw the numbers and she was like, my God, the revolution is here.

This is the way that they do the elections in this part of Belgium.

So the voters are given a magnetic card with a magnetic strip on it.

They feed that into a computer.

Then they use a light pen to point at a television screen.

And that information then goes back onto the card.

They take the card out.

They put it into an urn.

People go into the urn, they pick the cards out, they put it into another computer.

That information is sent on the internet to another computer, which is in the polling station.

That information is then put on a 3.5-inch floppy disk.

This was in 2003, this was happening, right?

And then it was sent to the head office in the area where they would then put it into another computer, which added up all the numbers.

Wow.

I think there's a lot more than solar flares going on.

That's amazing.

Yeah.

What do you think after that?

I mean, I just imagine if it had been a serious election, the mood would have been like democracy would have been at stake.

People would have been.

I'm sure the people of Belgium thought it was a serious election.

Belgium was quite chaotic.

They did, they had no

government for about five years, didn't they?

Yeah, and it was fine.

Yeah.

We could just get by.

Yeah, because have you seen how long it takes to vote?

I think I was just like, it's fine, you'll do.

Just stay where you are.

We need to be more like Makassa Indonesia, which in 2018, there was one guy running completely unopposed for mayor, and he still lost the election to none of the above.

Do you say Indonesia?

Yeah.

They have almost the, I would say the opposite system to the Belgian 2003 system.

It's entirely.

It's dictatorship.

Cross it off the touring schedule for 2024.

Looking forward to that.

They have nail-based voting.

So

you get a ballot form, ballot paper, ballot sheet.

Might just call it a ballot.

A ballot.

You get your ballot, and then you punch a hole next to your chosen candidate with a nail, and then you hold it aloft during the count, and you can see where the light shines through the little hole, and that is it.

And they introduced pens in 2014, but the authorities said you must use the pen as a nail.

Just one other election thing that I read.

Do you know who won the 2020 Nambian election?

It was a local election.

Namibian.

Sorry.

Are you using Webster's dictionary.

Sorry, I was looking for the region and I got confused as I was saying it.

So there's a Namibian.

Wait, if I take it slowly and we all concentrate, it'll be okay.

You can do it.

You can do it.

In 2020, a Namibian politician.

Guys.

If I cut out all the other stuff, it sounds like you are all massive fans of Namibia.

Hey, they have great landscapes, is all I'm going to say.

Beautiful.

No, okay, there's a local politician in Namibia who is.

I'm sorry, I'm not going to mount weird as well.

In Namibia.

Did you say Bambibia?

I don't know.

I don't know what comes out of my mouth.

In Namibia, there's a candidate.

Yeah, in 2020, there's a Namibian candidate who won a local election who is.

Can you guess his name?

Could you guess his name?

Whatever we guess is going to be closer than whatever you read.

It's a former politician, so it's a name that we know.

So it's kind of like Winston Churchill.

Kind of like that.

Tony Blair.

No.

Just because lots of children were named Tony Blair in places like Kosovo or

Tony Blackburn.

Tony Blair.

Tony Blair.

Tonybler.

It was a squashed name.

It was Tony Blair.

It was a Christian name.

Okay, so a famous politician.

Mole Mullen.

No.

That's good.

Mink County.

Big bigger than England.

Bigger?

Eric Pickles.

No, you're.

Maybe George Washington.

Really famous politician.

Yeah, that's a good one.

But no.

No.

Adolf Hitler.

Yeah, there's a politician there called Adolf Hitler.

So Adolf is actually a common name.

Was there?

Is it still a common name?

Well, I guess there's a generation that

are sort of like getting into political power age.

And Adolf Hitler said, and it's Adolf Hitler, that's his first and middle name.

And he

says, my dad absolutely knew who Hitler was.

I don't think he knew he was

a bad guy necessarily.

He sort of gives his dad a bit of coverage on that.

But he says...

Wasn't there maybe a German

colony on Saturday or something?

It was.

Exactly, it was.

So he seems, I mean, I didn't have enough time to go to a deep dive into him, but he seems like quite a cheery, happy guy.

Might be restoring the name, I don't know.

But

he said, they said, are you going to change your name?

And he said,

it's on all the papers already.

I think I'll just leave it actually, it's fine.

So he's just kept it.

And

he won his intellectual one.

Yeah, yeah, he won it.

Recognizable.

Yeah, exactly.

His Wikipedia says, by the way, it says

not to be confused with...

Exactly.

Yeah, yeah.

Not to be confused with Adolf Hitler.

And then on that sidebar it has occupation, political activist, known for sharing the name as Adolf

That's got to be the disambiguation on Wikipedia with the biggest difference in article length between the one guy and the other guy.

You don't know what he's achieved in Namibia, you know.

No, true, very true.

Do you know in it was 1964, the general election, at which Harold Wilson was the victor in?

Yes.

Defeated Alec Douglas Hume.

Go on.

Well, that's kind of hot.

Oh, Dan, where were you during my university years?

But yeah, so 1964, he says that one of the big reasons he believes that he won the election is because they managed to swing a bunch of the marginal seats that might not have gone to Labour had the turnout not have been as massive, right?

So he needed to get the turnout to be massive.

And according to him, he managed to do this by persuading the BBC to delay a repeat of Steptoe and Son, the TV series, and moving it to another time.

And as a result, no one was glued to the TV and they went, all right, let's go out and vote instead.

And he says that he thinks that that's what helped shift Harold Wilson.

Harold Wilson said that, yeah.

It's actually a bit more complicated than that.

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

It's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that the man who just broke the world record for living underwater got a visit from his 80-year-old mother halfway through to keep him cheerful.

Oh,

that's nice.

Sweet story.

Yeah.

He's a guy called Joe DiTuri, and

he's a brilliant scientist, and he's been studying how extreme pressure affects the human body over long periods of time.

And it might be helpful for space missions if humans ever go to Mars.

So, he moved to the Florida Keys.

There's an underwater lab, and you go down about 22 feet, and you're living under there.

The pressure is much higher than at the surface, obviously.

So, it's a dry environment.

You're in like a sort of pod capsule thing.

And he was doing tests on himself every day.

He managed 100 days, which is huge.

No one's ever lived that far down for that long before, unless you're in a submarine.

Slightly vexed question, never mind.

And

it's the longest underwater in a fixed structure.

Sorry, because otherwise, a lot of our listeners are on submarines, nuclear subs, and we'll get emails

eventually.

Yeah, and he just, he's an incredible guy, and he got a visit from his mum, who sounds like an incredible woman.

She scuba dived down to go up to meet him.

He was on his, so he did 100 days, and it was a bit further than the halfway, it was 81 days into it, and she scuba dived down with his brother, and there's this great photo of them just sitting in this underwater

house.

It is quite cool, and it's quite a, you know, Ellie, you're an explorer, and it's good that people go down this and do all this thing.

But it is a commercial hotel that you stayed in.

So, like, any of us, if we could afford it, could just go and live there ourselves.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

The problem is, there's so many people doing these, I'm going to stay down here, the longest attempts, that the booking is like, have you got anything in August?

Nothing?

Yeah.

Nothing.

One guy?

It's like

they don't have someone coming by and cleaning the room every day, do they?

Someone scuba diving down with a mint that they actually

will send you down pizza, though.

So it's $800 a night for two people, and there's

well, you know, some of them.

No, no, come on.

$800, that's like for, I would have expected that to be much lower.

Yeah, if you can't scuba dive, you also have to pay for a three-hour scuba diving class.

There you go.

But like some premier inns in the center of town are that at busy times.

That's not.

Yeah, I guess so.

It includes a pizza dinner, which they send out.

Apparently, I read the TripAdvisor reviews.

Apparently, the pizza is sometimes slightly damp.

Oh, really

wow um and yeah and then you can stay and then you can't fly or dive again for 24 hours afterwards because of the pressure change that you've had yeah yeah because you're pressure you'll pressurize don't yeah that's the kind of the point of his um science isn't it it's like he thinks that the pressure down there is going to help us live for a million years 110 at least so he's 55 years old and he's saying i believe that if i was living down here that would be i'd be at the halfway mark on my life expectancy so i can make it it's really it's really interesting it is interesting so I like there's two things that come to mind one is that this yeah you kind of touched on it which is like this forgive the words I'm about to use the interface between extreme adventure and science is becoming really weird and actually happened quite recently with Ocean X right

like it's just this idea that anyone can go on an expedition basically as long as you're willing to pay enough money like Even Everest, we're talking about Everest.

There's loads of people that now aren't really training for Everest and they've just got these poor Sherpas basically literally hiking them up.

And there is, I don't know, it's really weird.

I don't know how I feel about all of it.

This, you know, daturia is a legit.

No, no, no, I know.

But the thing is, it's like a lot of, um, there's now this really weird move in exploration where a lot of really big research vessels are actually also tourist vessels.

So you can get on these massive vessels that are basically like for people that are spending like £60,000 for their like trip of a lifetime.

And there's a bunch of like actual hardcore scientists in the corner doing all this stuff, but also have to give like a lecture to like all these people.

And it's just, I don't know how I feel about it.

And are they doing it to help pay for it?

That's the thing.

It's a funding issue, isn't it?

Ultimately.

So it's kind of, yeah, it's kind of a good way of making sure that your expedition happens at all.

But I get what you're saying.

It turns it into a tourist proposition.

But he's found out a lot of amazing stuff because he was down there.

He was monitoring every single bit of his body every day.

So one thing that is going to be probably annoying for the next person is that the toilet gets a lot of usage when you're down there because your bladder is really squished, right?

So he said you're constantly just going to the toilet.

Increased frequency and urgency of urination is how we put it.

And also he says that it's interesting that

your...

I'm so glad you're saying this because I've got it in my notes and you're working out a delicate look for the phrasing.

Your semen travels at shorter distance.

Your dog, yeah.

Semen travels at shorter distances when you're down there as well.

And so he...

Maybe mother's down there.

Maybe that's what stopped it.

Don't come in.

Don't scoot.

I'm down here.

I'm doing an experiment.

You can only enter by rising up through the moon pool in the floor as well.

So I'm like, go back down, go back down.

Is that going to be a problem for people having children?

Like,

he says that maybe we won't be able to continue the species beneath 22 feet under sea level, which is an interesting observation because his point is that part of the research, and this was happening a lot in the 60s,

could we set up underwater bases where people could live for long periods of times?

Jacques Cousteau did that.

Sylvia Earle went down.

She's an amazing, amazing oceanographer.

They would go down for 30 days, 40 days, 50 days, and so on, trying to work out, can we live down there?

That was the big push.

Let's build these giant underwater civilizations, basically.

But we won't be able to ejaculate properly.

So we won't go down.

You've got to go up for that, and then you come back down.

Just a lot of like teenage boys just going, I'm just going to go for a quick

surface quickly.

Just want to see the stars.

There's a whale up there.

He can show me some cool new constellations.

I was thinking a lot about James Cameron recently

because

again, because of the Ocean Gate thing.

When I first heard about what he did in the ocean space, I'll be honest, I didn't really believe it.

So he went down to the bottom of the Mariana Trench?

Yes, he did.

He's been deeper than any person.

He's been saying that the guy who directed Avatar 2 has been deeper than anyone else on the planet.

Yeah, well, he also directed Titanic, so that's closer, right?

As a.

Well, Avatar 2, The Way of Water is a largely aquatic film, so

it's actually a more relevant thing for me to mention at this point.

Sure, Andy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Tatanev, don't know what that was about, but anyway.

Sorry.

Sorry.

I got.

Sorry, your CGI movie example, yes.

Sorry, I got really, really crossed.

Yeah.

And can I say, that was not hot, okay?

Oh, have I undone?

Anything you undid the sexiness of earlier.

The Alec Douglas Hume moment earlier.

It's so interesting because he gave up his seat in the House of Lords to run as the Conservative leader.

That's very rare.

You were saying something about...

Cameron also went down to see the Titanic, so the Marianas Trench, and that's his oceanography credentials.

No, no, no, that's not, but that's the thing.

That's not just his oceanography credentials.

So people think, oh, he, you know, so he's been to like the Titanic more than 30 odd times, and you're like, oh, that's something.

But what's actually amazing is that he is legitimately, in his own right, a deep sea explorer, not in any way as a tourist, as an engineer.

And there are all these crazy stories.

So for example, Bob Ballard, who find the Titanic.

I don't know if you guys are following this, but after the whole catastrophe with that submersible, Ballard and James Cameron came out publicly and were like, look, there were safety concerns.

There were always safety concerns.

We've tried to highlight this, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

And what was really fascinating is watching the interaction between the two of them, Because at one point, Bob Bloody Ballard turns around and goes, I mean, yeah, I'll defer to what he said about the mechanics of it.

And you're just sitting there going, Bob Ballard is respecting this guy who has won.

Like, God knows, stay in your lane.

Stop making us feel bad about ourselves.

The guy is like this incredible filmmaker and is also this incredible tech guy.

And the detail he will go into.

And then I did some digging.

And apparently, like, this has always been the case.

Sorry, this is, you've got to understand.

It made me feel really bad about myself.

So, apparently, at the age of 14, James Cameron turns up to the Royal Ontario Museum, where outside they had Canada's first permanent submersible.

And they had it out there, and then they were going to put it in the water in Lake Tehran for like two years.

And it's outside the museum.

And he writes to the museum at the age of 14, asks for a blueprint.

for the bloody submersible

and the guy, I think his name's Joe McGinnis, who's like a really, really famous oceanographer.

He's like, okay, this is insane.

Sure, I'll give you it.

And he sits there, James Cameron, 14, and tries to make it based on this blueprint, puts a mouse in it.

Tries to make his own one.

Yeah, yeah.

A small one.

Puts a mouse in it and puts it in a lake behind the Niagara Falls where he lives.

And apparently the mouse makes it, but it's slightly traumatized.

And then he's like, oh, I've got a problem with the windows.

All again at the age of 14, writes to this scientist again and goes can you help me with the window design and the guy gives him the address to a company that he can write to to get um what's it called the the purple bus what's it called purplex

why can't we

why can't i pronounce things today anyway i think um

and um and they actually send him a sample and then he attaches it and does it again and like does this whole the age of 14 you're thinking oh this guy's a genius yeah that is amazing we're gonna have to move on in a sec because we run way over.

So, yeah, we need to get out of here and get our bob rolls.

Well, I can tell you a few more things about going underwater.

So,

the word urinator

originally meant someone who dived.

Okay, that's the first use in English of the word urinator: someone who goes deep-sea diving, and then later it became someone who urinates.

Must have been a crossover period

with hilarious consequences.

It's impossible to fart past 20 metres.

A challenge.

A challenge from the people at Guinness.

Are you going to cry and fart underwater?

Is that what the aim is?

So

underwater simultaneous fart cry, one by Andrew Hunter Murray.

Wow.

This guy couldn't have farted in the whole time he was there.

He couldn't do.

Dr.

Deep Sea.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because what happens is

due to Boyle's law, the volume is much, much smaller of your farts, and your body just can't push it through.

And so what that means is as you go up, it expands.

wait that doesn't happen with the other thing does it

at the front you mean the ejaculation stuff

actually

you blast your way back to the surface

lads lads lads lads lads

okay that's it that is all of our facts thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts.

I'm on at Schreiberland, James.

At James Harkin.

Andy.

At Andrew Under M.

And Ella.

Ella Al-Shamahi.

Underscore Al-Shamahi.

Ella underscore Al-Shamahi.

Or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website, no such thingasoffish.com.

All of our previous episodes are up there, so do check them out.

Soho, Theodore.

Guys, thank you so much for being here today.

Really appreciate it.

Don't tell anyone what happened.

But that's it.

We'll see you again another time.

Thanks so much.

Goodbye.

Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We demand to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

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Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.