111: No Such Thing As Snappedy Chat

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Hey guys, James here.

So we have an announcement to make before we start today's show, and that is that we have been offered our own TV show on the BBC.

On BBC2, it's going to be on at the end of May, and we are absolutely delighted.

Slash terrified.

Very terrified.

So what's going to happen is we're going to do a pilot very soon and you can get tickets to come and see that if you go to qi.com slash fish events and the podcast you're about to hear is actually another kind of pilot that we did so you'll kind of see that the facts are a little bit newsy but actually we get into the podcast pretty quickly so you might not even notice.

Okay on with the show.

Hello, and welcome to No Such Thing as a Fish.

My name is Dan Shriver.

I'm sitting here with Anna Chacinski, James Harkin, and Andy Murray.

And once again, we have gathered round to discuss the most interesting facts we found from last week and in no particular order.

Here we go.

Starting with you, James Harkin.

Okay, my fact this week is that this week the Queen will celebrate her 669th birthday

because she's a lizard, they're all lizards,

lizards, those famous animals that live for 600 years

because she's a sponge.

She's a very ancient sponge under the sea.

So, why?

Why are the

okay?

So, what this is basically is: we all know the Queen has her actual birthday, which is this week, and she also has an official birthday, which is when all the parties are and stuff like that.

But she also has official birthdays in all the different Commonwealth countries.

And so, I went through all of them and found out when the dates were.

And some of them kind of coincide with each other.

So this took me quite some time to work out.

And I worked out that she has had 668 birthdays and her 669th will be this week.

Wow.

And actually, there are some countries that used to be in the Commonwealth which aren't anymore.

There's quite a lot of them and I couldn't really be bothered working them out.

But I kind of assume the Queen isn't really celebrating those anyway.

So yeah, I'm going for 669.

You're saying she could be even older?

No, no.

She could be a thousand.

No, no, no.

She's still the age we think she is.

She's just celebrated a lot of birthdays.

Okay, got it.

I worked out that if she is that age, 669 years old, she was born.

Which she isn't, by the way.

But it means that if she is,

then while all of us are here in 2016, she's actually living in the year 2592.

And And that's very exciting.

See, I worked it out the other way that she was born in 1347.

I think we're both wrong.

We're actually recording this on Wednesday, so

she's celebrating it today and tomorrow, which is Thursday the 21st.

Today she started celebrating by visiting the Royal Mail and looking at.

What's to look for cards coming in?

Money!

Yeah, she went to the Romel sorting office and had a look around there.

I think there's.

Are you sure she wasn't picking up a parcel?

Yeah, that could be it.

No, no, she was, I think they had a new stamp out or something like that.

She is, and do you know the tweet that she tweeted?

Because she tweets, obviously.

Does she?

Yeah.

Unlike you.

For unlike me.

Our 669-year-old queen is more modern than I am.

Yeah, so she sent a tweet out.

It's from her Twitter feed, which I think is like at British Monarchy or something.

And it showed the people at the Royal Mail singing happy birthday and then it said the first of many renditions of happy birthday for the Queen.

And I thought that was quite cocky.

What if that's the only one?

She's gonna feel like an idiot.

So the Queen is is ninety in human years and six hundred

six hundred and sixty nine in queen years.

But other things that she is as old as in human years,

television,

liquid-fuel rockets,

Winnie the Pooh,

and the drug PCP.

And she, I believe, is going to celebrate by combining all four of those things.

Does she still send around?

She doesn't still send cards to every single 100-year-old, does she?

Well,

she does, but you have to apply a few weeks before.

But you do get a card.

And you also get a card from Ian Duncan Smith.

Oh, no, you won't.

No, you won't anymore, sorry, because he's just resigned.

But you get a card from the Work and Pension Secretary, so now you'll get one from Stephen Crabb, guys.

Pretty cool.

And then a long letter from Ian Duncan Smith saying, You want to hang out?

I've got nothing on.

Do you know who takes over if the Queen were to become infirm in some way, but without abdicating or anything like that?

Ian Duncan Smith?

No, Michael Gove.

What?

So he is he's the Lord Chancellor at the moment, and it's I mean, the last time it happened was in the nineteenth century with George III, but the Lord Chancellor.

I seemed like Michael Gove was that old.

Old Lizardy Gove.

No, I think what is it not that he gets to kind of say that they have to have a regent and the regent will probably be Prince Charles?

Oh, I'm not sure.

I thought it was that he carries out the royal duties.

Gets into bed with Prince Philip.

Call him Govie.

Oh, there goes the OP.

There's a lot of stuff going about,

sort of little bits of trivia about her this week because of her birthday.

One I really liked, she doesn't have a passport.

Because in the British passport, there's a thing saying that she requests that all of anyone holding a British passport be allowed into those countries.

So therefore, because she's made the request, it's kind of said, I've requested, but can you get my mates in as well?

And so

she doesn't need to physically carry it.

I think it's that, or she needs to hope someone in front of her in the immigration queue has the British passport and she can go just read the name.

But I'm quite confused about this because she also doesn't have a driving license, famously.

She doesn't need to have a driving license, even though she drives.

So I don't know, A, how she buys alcohol.

I think she might just about pass for over 21.

But B, how does she, when she was walking into those countries, any of us could impersonate the Queen.

We could all just put on a wig and say, I'm the Queen.

I don't need a passport.

Let me into your country.

They say, oh, do you have a driving license to prove who you are?

No, I don't have a driving license.

Google it.

And

you're in.

Worth a try.

Worth a try.

Although the Queen does muck around with her own identity a bit.

So recently, one of the former Royal Protection Officers told the story about because he worked with her for about 30 years.

And she was out for a walk near Balmoral, her estate there.

And they bumped into a group of American tourists.

And they said,

They spoke to her, they said, Does she live in the area?

And she said, Well, I've got a house in the area, which is very modest.

And they said, Have you ever met the Queen?

And she said, No.

And then she pointed at the Royal Protection Officer, and she said, But he has.

That's crazy.

Wow!

She gets some good gifts, birthday presents, and general presents whenever she visits anywhere.

And so they range from I think last year a horse breeder called Christina Patineau gave her five thousand pounds worth of stud sperm, of horse sperm,

so that she could sperm up the horses.

Pounds worth, not pounds of.

There's one tired stallion.

Way back and think of the queen.

Two OBEs down

it's just you and me now, Andy.

Did they actually give her the sperm itself?

Because I heard that this lady, Christina Patino, offered to let one of the royal mares visit her stallion, Big Bad Bob.

But she gets quite cumbersome gifts, and I always wonder with this sort of thing how she gets them home.

So Brazil has given her two sloths.

She got a Maori canoe when she went to New Zealand.

You put the sloths in the canoe.

What, you think she rowed home?

She also got given seven kilos of prawns

on one occasion.

Oh my god.

She already

sent seven kilos of prawns.

I think that's a very fascinating sentence.

It's got possibility.

The Queen sent an email in 1976.

Before.

Nope, there's the most boring sentence I've ever heard.

This sledging goes too far.

In Malvern.

There it is.

What did the email say?

Do we know?

No, I know her username, though.

Oh, go on.

Oh, really?

Yeah, Big Bad Bob.

No.

It was HME2, Her Majesty Elizabeth II.

And it was an extremely boring email.

I think it said this is Her Majesty the Queen sending an email or something like that.

It was really awesome stuff.

Anything else before we move on?

She's been to the moon, in a sense.

Keep talking.

When Apollo 11 landed on the moon,

Neil Armstrong took out a special message, a congratulatory message saying well done on getting to the moon and left it there.

Deliberately.

I think his instructions were to just leave it in a metal canister on the surface of the moon.

And the message was from the Queen.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's not going to the moon.

It's not like everyone who's got the birthday letter from the Queen says, oh, the Queen came around to my house in my 1000.

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Okay, let's move on to our next fact.

Time for fact number two, and that is Anna Chacinski.

Yeah, my fact is that the Brazilian vice president accidentally released his presidential acceptance speech by sending it to the wrong WhatsApp group.

I should add, so he claims.

There's scepticism about this.

But yeah, I don't.

So Brazil has been in a bit of turmoil recently, a political turmoil.

The president, Dilma Rousseff, has just

Congress, the lower house in Brazil, has just voted to impeach her.

But before they voted to impeach her, the vice president, Michelle Timer, was obviously practicing his, oh, when she gets kicked out, I need to make a speech and I better work out what that's going to be.

And he recorded a 15-minute long speech and then sent it, he said, intended to send it to one friend and accidentally sent it to the WhatsApp group that must have been just below, which was a whole bunch of MPs and lawyers.

We've all done it.

But sending a 15-minute speech by audio, that's going to take ages on WhatsApp.

That's going to load.

So either he put it down or he spent spent 15 minutes going, ah, ah!

Terrifying 15 moments in politics.

No, there are theories that this was an intentional move to state that he did not feel good about the current president.

But yeah, he says WhatsApp error.

So they've just voted, haven't they?

The lower house, you said, to impeach the president.

The thing is, the lower house is also in a bit of turmoil.

I didn't realize that Brazil has quite as big a corruption problem as it does.

So of the five hundred and ninety four members of the Congress who voted, sixty per cent of them are currently under investigation or facing investigation for and I'm quoting here serious charges like bribery, electoral fraud, illegal deforestation, kidnapping and homicide

I think, yeah, that's Congress and the Senate, the five hundred and ninety four.

So it's in both houses, so at the moment it's just gone through Congress and there are like three hundred and three out of 513.

But then as soon as the vote goes to the Senate, an even higher proportion of them are really corrupt.

And the three people in line to replace her when she is impeached are all also facing criminal corruption charges.

It's a real good situation out there.

That's true.

And they're all protesting at the moment, aren't they, in Brazil?

They are.

I read that in the last year there's been more protesters in Brazil than the entire rest of the world combined.

What?

Wow.

It's like literally like three million at a time just complaining.

Yeah.

That's cheap.

Just complaining.

Just complaining.

The Hawkins attitude to democracy and the will of the people.

I just go out in the streets of my placard and I go.

But isn't it the case as well that they had the pro-government protesters and the anti-government protesters and they've just put a big wall in the middle of them?

Yes.

They've thought, well, what's a good example from the past where a massive wall between two groups of people who disagree has solved a problem?

Yeah, two meters high, right down the middle of the capital city.

Wow.

That's amazing.

Just taking it back to the kind of incompetence of politicians with social media, I found one that has really good intentions, but it has slightly gone wrong as well.

So I don't know if you guys know this, but on Twitter, Sweden has a country that has an official Twitter account.

Oh, yeah.

So it's at Sweden.

And so you think, okay, who runs at Sweden?

They made the decision that they're going to allow their own members of the public run it one person at a time, one week a time.

So they just hand it over.

And so the current person running it is called Isabel.

This is her pinned tweet.

I don't do Fika.

I don't do dating.

I drink beer and fuck.

That is the

official first tweet you see from Sweden.

Did you see that as well?

That you can ring up Sweden.

Has anyone seen this?

This is pretty cool, isn't it?

Like they have a phone number and you can just call up and they just connect you to a random Swede.

That sounds great.

What?

So, so someone's at home and their phone's ringing, you just pick it up and.

You sign up for it, you sign up for this thing, and then someone from anywhere around the world at any time can just ring you up and say, Hi, is that Sweden?

And you say, Yeah, I'm into fucking and all that.

Or whatever.

I'd sign up for it if it was ring a British person.

Would you really

dial a Brit.

Would you?

Because, like, in the office, you don't really like talking to us.

No, but I you notice I constantly stare at my phone looking haunted and alone.

Um so on politicians and social media, um Jeremy Corbyn has been doing a big social media push and has joined um Snapchat.

I see.

Which yeah.

Which is what exactly, please?

So I'm pretty sure.

I think is it where people send naked photos of themselves to the people they're having affairs with?

Yeah, and then they just.

I'm not sure that's exactly what Jeremy Corbyn will be doing for it.

But yeah, it's that one where, yeah, the photo disappears.

You probably all know that.

So he's joined Snapchat and he's posted a few photos.

Some of his first ones, a few of them were sideways, and

one of them was extremely blurry.

And then most of them are just of him signing forms.

But yeah, and he's also joined Instagram and his first post was of a Tannux tea cake.

So it's very it's very exciting, actually.

It's very exciting stuff going on in Jeremy Corbyn's social media company.

No, it's good to see them embracing it.

I think it's really cool.

But yeah, they do get it spectacularly wrong sometimes.

On Twitter, there was, I thought this was great, there was a Dutch politician.

This was back in 2011.

I apologize for the rudeness of this in advance.

But

he was sending a text which he thought he was sending to a lover, and

he accidentally tweeted it.

And

the.

So the translation of the tweet roughly goes, as you throbbingly climax for the first time, I feel

in my mouth

as if they were the nectar of love.

Right?

He didn't lose his job off the tweet, but he did gain 20 new followers.

So sometimes it works in their favor.

Just some basic facts about this kind of thing.

Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp and that kind of thing is so popular now, a lot more than any other kind of ways of communicating.

So there are 60 billion messages every day through some kind of messenger.

And that's versus 23 billion by text message.

And that means in two days there are more messages sent than humans have ever been alive.

Whoa.

Oh, God.

Yeah.

It's absolutely massive in Brazil as well, isn't it?

That's why I think so I think Brazilians send twice, use WhatsAz app on

none of these words were familiar to me before today.

I'm really struggling with them.

She called it snappity chat.

Brazilians

use social media even more than I do.

No, they spend twice as much time on social media as Americans, which I would have thought is going over 100% of the time that you're alive.

In China as as well, ginormous.

So they have a version of Twitter out there which is called Sina Weibu.

It's ginormous.

Stephen Hawking joined it just a couple of days ago.

He got 2 million followers in 24 hours.

Like that's just how quickly and what a massive group you can get.

But he had 2 million and 20 after he accidentally.

Well, he is sending his tweets in Chinese and apparently just from the reports I'm reading that people are saying, I have no idea what he's saying.

It's in Chinese, but I have no idea what he's saying.

But I'd like to just say thanks for being on here.

So they kind of really appreciate the fact that such a cool guy's on there, despite the fact he's making no sense for his tweets.

There is a Chinese, I think it's a Chinese instant messaging app, and I think it's a dating app.

I'm going off memory here, so I'm not sure on the details.

But if you send a message which says something like, Do you want to get a room?

or something like that, if you put in particular characters, it flashes up with a warning saying, Are you sure about that?

Oh, yeah, that's amazing.

If only your throbbingly nectar man

had

had that.

So about presidents and stuff like this, so President Obama is the only person outside HBO who's going to watch Game of Thrones before it goes on air.

Okay.

Now we know his real agenda.

And there was a journalist who was called Vanessa Golumbevsky who thought if the President has a file of Game of Thrones, then surely I can get that file through freedom of information.

And so she's going to President Obama saying, I want this file through freedom of information, and they're going to see if they can get it.

But the only problem is that the average amount of time to get a file is 121 days.

And by that time, we'll have already seen it by about two months.

It's the principle.

It's the principal, exactly.

But it's a nice idea, isn't it?

Just on world leaders, I was reading today that Vladimir Putin did a QA, a sort of big wide Q ⁇ A where anyone could ask questions.

And I looked through the Q ⁇ A, they translated it into English, and my favorite question was from a 12-year-old girl who asked him who he would save if these people were drowning, the Turkish president or the Ukrainian leader.

Who would you save if that was the situation?

12-year-old girl.

And Putin said, if someone has decided to drown, it's probably already impossible to save them anyway.

He did say, oh, but we would lend a helping hand to whoever is in need, but that was his first response.

Okay,

it is time for fact number three, and that is Andrew Hunter Murray.

My fact is that a German city is fighting global terror by banning number plates starting with IS.

Every little helps.

Yeah, absolutely.

As is the city of Marburg in Germany, and if you want to get a special licence plate, what's it called?

Like a one-off personalised.

Personalised licence plate.

With IS at the start, you will no longer be allowed to do that.

So you'll have to leave Marlburg, get it done somewhere else where it's legal and then go back to Marburg.

That will cost you petrol and it slows down.

IS.

Yeah.

I didn't realise that licence plates are so strict.

So the D VLA is extremely strict about the licence plates that can go out.

And so they they have a meeting every six months, I think, where they go through and work out all the possible combinations that could be construed as rude.

And so that's.

That sounds like a great job, doesn't it?

So fun.

Yeah.

So much imagination required.

A lot of them I couldn't quite work out why they would be rude.

So it's a 49-page document, the latest one, and it is very good reading.

None of it is appropriate for tonight.

For instance, there are two-letter combinations that are banned.

Two of the two-letter combinations are MN and NF, and I have no idea why they're rude.

Naughty fisting.

Could you tell me a kind of fisting that isn't naughty?

There's a sentence I never thought I'd say to that.

I'm just doing a survey.

Could you?

But yeah, they go through and they list all the two-letter combinations that are bad, all the three letters that are bad, so you're not allowed on any number plates.

C-U-M-C-O-K.

I think I'm allowed to say all of this because I'm just spelling it out.

CNT,

you're an abstract because you're not a car.

Always shattering my dreams, Andy.

BNP, yeah.

I think that's a real slap in the face.

If you're a political party that's not even allowed on number plates.

So I wonder if instead of naughty fisting, it's National Front.

Could be the National Front.

Oh, you see.

I think it's Naughty Fisting, guys.

Oh, but there are some which are really sort of, you can't have VA61ANA because it looks a bit like

vagina, right.

But to me, that looks like vagiana.

So it's a very odd, sort of the rules are really, you're not allowed to have A11NOB, all knob,

which, if you get that number plate, is an accurate description of what you are.

A lot of these aren't personalised though, so don't hold it against that.

A lot of these are number plates that would be in the standard rotation, but they have to specifically remove them, like MA55TBT.

You see, it takes a lot of thought.

See if you can work out this one.

Wait, hang on, I didn't get that one.

Hi, Anna, let me show it to you.

That's very rude.

All right, I've got.

See if you can work out this one.

X351ARO.

Well, this is great radiality.

And if you're playing along at home, you can write it down.

No, so that is, look at it backwards in mirror writing, and it spells out

oral sex!

It's because if you're looking backwards in your car, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, they have to test that.

They have to test the mirror writing.

Yeah.

Smart.

So clear.

Although the R would be backwards, so it'd be like Russian yah.

Have you guys heard?

James is super fun to have a road trip with, by the way.

There's a new app that's out, which seems quite an exciting idea.

It's called Plext and the idea is that when you're driving you need to have so you need to hope this person has the app as well, but you can text their license plate and the text gets through to them.

So if someone's driving in front of you and you and this is what they kind of think it's made for, it's like someone's driving in front of you and they're doing a really good job.

Why don't you text them?

But you're not allowed to text while driving.

I know, I don't know how the system works, but that's what it's meant to be.

It's meant to be allowing you to communicate with other drivers to tell them good things about their their driving.

I think that's entrapment legally, isn't it?

Isn't that when you persuade someone to do a crime and then you convict them of that crime?

Well, when they're basically on the Catherine Ceter Jones film.

When they finish their

journey and then they'll safely retrieve their phone from the glove compartment where we all put it when we drive.

And then they'll turn it on and then they'll get the message saying, good job.

Maybe.

Some comedy about ISIS?

Yes.

That's why everyone came tonight.

So in the news this week, there was a guy called Franco Roberti, who is Italy's top prosecutor, and he says that stoners who are trying to get marijuana legalised are helping the fight against ISIS.

Really?

How quickly the stoners turn.

Whatever, yes, we'll do it.

The idea is that the Italian mafia and ISIS are working together to kind of bring marijuana over from North Africa into Italy.

And they reckon if it was legal, then they wouldn't have that way of making money.

Wow.

So,

on the subject of ISIS, I don't know if there are any Archer fans in the room, but everyone should be on.

Yeah.

Of

the Radio 4.

The Archers.

Not the Archers.

Archer, the car.

Oh my God, I've just lost everyone.

So in Archer, this TV series.

Archer, yeah.

It's about.

all right hang on hang on a bit quickly the Archers

it's about the same

stoner just is cheering at everything

he doesn't know what's going on

so baked out of his gorb in the front row

you've read those words in a book handy

drug language of the streets fifth edition

is this ever gonna am i in archer

The main character Archer and all his colleagues work for a company called Isis.

There's a bunch of spires called ISIS.

And in 2014, when things started kicking off a little bit elsewhere,

then the programme makers decided they had to change the name.

So Isis, as everyone who watches Archer will know, has been removed from Archer.

And actually, there was quite a good episode at the beginning of series, I think it was the first episode of series five or six, where you saw in the background, as Mallory was on the phone to Archer, you saw in the background two trucks with Isis' logo disappearing into the sunset.

But But this created a serious problem because it's a really popular show and they had shed loads of merchandise.

All of which is.

So they just shipped it off to Syria.

You joke.

The creator, Adam Reed, said that in a board meeting he suggested this jokily and was met with an icy silence.

So he should have been here and said.

But he also said that he complained that I gave my dad one of the ISIS hats, and in the end, he had to call me and say, you know, son, I'm not going to be able to wear that hat anymore.

I'm getting some weird looks in the hardware store.

So I have a list of places which have had to change their name, which were called ISIS and have decided that it's not worth it anymore.

So there's a mobile banking app,

there's a nail salon in Oakland, California, a Danish pudding company, a Belgian chocolate firm, and a wife swapping club in Leeds.

And presumably, they were just getting too much confusion from people.

People go there and engage in all sorts of fun and frolics, and they say it's not worth the agro.

So there was the nail salon in Oakland.

They changed their name because people were genuinely making rude comments and rude phone calls saying, I can't believe you guys, you're psychos.

And they got some good feedback though, because one person wrote an online review of, I remind you, a nail salon in California saying, in the last week, ISIS gave me a real nice treatment.

Don't know why we are bombing them.

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Okay.

It is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact.

My fact this week is that the North Pole is on a head-on collision course with Greenwich, London,

where we are right now.

This has just happened 20 years ago,

but we've just noticed, it's been going one way, it's been heading towards Canada, the North Pole, and mysteriously, they have no idea why, it's suddenly just flipped.

Not a complete flip, but it's changed direction, and it is now headed along Greenwich Meridian, so it is heading right here where we are right now.

We could be the North Pole in about a lot of millions of years.

You know, they do know why.

Do they?

Have they worked out?

That's what they've discovered this week.

I should have read the article.

So, this, to be clear, this isn't the magnetic North Pole, which also moves quite a bit.

This is the geographic North Pole.

So, this is just the Earth wobbles on its axis because it's not a perfect sphere, it's got kind of lumps and bumps on it, and it's got different masses in different places.

So, if you imagine sort of spinning a sphere round, then it's gonna like move around.

It's as if the Earth is like a basketball and you're kind of spinning it on your finger, and your finger is where the South Pole would be, and then directly above it is where the North Pole would be.

It's exactly like that.

And thank you very much for the metaphor, James.

Simile.

And what's happened is they thought at first the reason it was moving was because of the Greenland ice caps melting, but actually they've been doing this study since 2005, and they've realised that what it is is water loss from Eurasia, bizarrely, which sort of changes the masses in the Earth.

So a huge mass of water has been lost from India and from Asia.

And that's just changed the sort of weighting and the lumps and bumps in the Earth, and it's caused the Earth to start spinning a bit differently, start pivoting differently.

And it's gradually creeping towards us.

But it has happened very suddenly, hasn't it?

We should say the speed at which it's moving, which is 17 centimetres a year,

which is about the same as hair growth.

Yeah, the funny thing about that is because I remember reading a good few years ago that Russia found the geographical North Pole and put a pole in there at the bottom of the ocean and put a Russian flag on it because the geographic North Pole was kind of disputed between Canada, Denmark, I think, and Russia.

And Russia wanted to say, no, it's ours.

And they put a flag there, but it's not there anymore.

It's like 17 centimeters away from us, but still not exactly where they said it was.

Are they gonna send someone, do you think, all the way there to move it?

Yeah, maybe, although it's down at the bottom of a very, very cold ocean, so I think maybe not.

I discovered a fact this week, which I think is really, really interesting, which is in 1985, did you guys know this?

Neil Armstrong went to the North Pole.

Did he?

Yeah.

Did he go in the sense that the Queen went to the moon?

No, because.

The Queen went, but with a letter from Neil, which he left.

No, Neil Armstrong went to the North Pole with Edmund Hillary.

So the first man to reach the top of Everest went with the first man to stand on the moon, and with Steve Fawcett, who was the first person to go around the Earth.

How do we not know this?

I know, isn't that really odd?

So they flew there.

They didn't actually do the trek.

They flew there and they landed and they went to the pole and it was with Edmund Hillary's son as well, who's also a big explorer.

And then on their way back, they were staying in a hut which was still in icy conditions and the storms around them, the icy storms, were so great that they got stuck in the hut for a number of days.

And all they could do was chat.

And apparently, it was the first time ever that Neil Armstrong completely opened up about his experience on the moon.

He'd never done that before to anyone.

And so, Peter Hillary, who's the son of Edmund Hillary, has the total scoop on what was said because no one else is alive who was there in that room.

And what happened?

He said, I was all right.

He just said, you know,

he said, left a letter and he came back.

No, but isn't that amazing?

Neil Armstrong and the person who organized it wanted to bring the people who'd done firsts to the place on Earth

where they'd never been before.

Okay, so it wasn't a big coincidence.

They didn't all get there and go, well, you went to the moon.

Are you serious?

I went.

Okay.

No.

They had the North Pole Marathon this week.

Did you see that?

Yeah, it was won by a man from Arkansas and he ran the race in five hours, 17 minutes.

But the record is three hours 36 minutes.

And the reason is because it really, really matters on the conditions.

Like, it's not like the London marathon where you've got a bit of rain or something that makes a difference.

It makes a massive difference.

They call it the coolest marathon in the world.

And they have polar guards all along the route.

Wait, hang on.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Are the guards?

I see what you're saying here, Eddie.

It's people guarding against polar bears.

Shame.

Because I would run faster.

I looked into the marathon as well.

The first one happened in 2002.

It hasn't been going that long.

And it only had one participant who

was also the organiser.

Yeah, and the entire course is floating on top of, obviously, on 14,000 feet of Arctic Ocean.

That's the interesting thing about the ice, which is that it might be the last time ever that people ever walk to the North Pole.

Or it won't happen that often because the ice is melting and there's not much way to water.

And even if you are walking to the North Pole, the ice often moves southwards.

So you can be walking for days and days and be further away than you were when you started.

Oh, wow.

Oh, my God.

That's horrible.

Yeah, I read there was a guy called Wally Herbert, and he was trying to.

Wally Herbert?

That's two words meaning you're a bit of a div.

Really?

Yeah.

But he was an amazing explorer.

So he was trying to prove, because there was a lot of dispute about whether or not Peary was the first person.

So he was trying to recreate the trip and see if he'd made it there.

So the idea is that Robert Peary claimed to have walked over the North Pole, but people kind of not sure whether he did or not.

Yeah, they weren't sure.

So he tried to recreate it.

His conclusion was that Peary didn't do it, that he did in fact doctor the books.

But in doing so, Wally Herbert became the first person to do it.

So you obviously have to use compasses and work out where the North Pole was and because of the shift that's going on all the time it's hard to tell.

So they did this marathon trek this one day and they got to this point where they thought let's stop and let's see where it is and they realized they'd walked past it.

They got to it, kept walking, didn't bother to check.

So suddenly they were just like, oh my god, what are we going to do?

Let's walk back.

And Wally Herbert said, no, let's not walk back.

Let's go to sleep.

They went to sleep.

And because of the way that it was shifting, in the morning, they were back at the spot where the North Pole was.

Oh, were they?

Because they worked out the hours of the shift that would happen.

So he slept his way to the North Pole.

Don't say it like that.

You sound like a bitter rival.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

See you next week.

Goodbye.

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