600: No Such Thing As The Doughnut Ambassador

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Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you from the QI offices in Hoburn.

My name is Dan Schreiber.

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

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 Anna.

My fact this week is that in the 1940s, a mystery man traveled America measuring the holes in doughnuts and passing a ruling on what size they should be.

Pervert.

I mean,

it's got pervert written all over it.

That didn't even cross my mind.

And now I'm looking down all my research on this guy and questioning his motives.

Yeah, I didn't as well.

Why is he a pervert?

What's just it's weird having an obsession with measuring holes and putting your mucky little fingers in there.

And like, what are you doing?

Has he got mucky fingers?

Because they've got sugar on them because of all the doughnuts.

We don't know he wasn't a good hand washer.

In fact, we know almost nothing about him.

What was he measuring the holes with?

That's what I want to know.

Come on, people.

Okay, now I get it.

Edward Falaska was a perfectly innocent doughnut aficionado.

And this, I started looking into this because there's a picture that occasionally pops up online of a man who's holding up a big sign with three pictures on it.

And the sign says, size of doughnut hole down through the years.

And then there's three pictures of doughnuts in 1927, 37 and 48.

And there are just these, all these reports in the late 1940s of this guy, Edward Fulaska, going around America and announcing that doughnut holes will be shrinking.

And that, he says, is because people were getting dunkered dimples

from handling the existing size, which I think meant if the hole's too big, you leave a dent in your doughnut when you dip it.

Pervert.

Pervert, pervert, pervert.

I'm sorry.

This is just a screen spot.

Also, this was the 1940s.

The world had big things on its plate.

No longer.

Nah, they've forgotten all that.

It's 47.

First half of the the 40s was a very stressful time, is all I was saying.

But second half was Donut City.

No, you're right.

You're right.

Maybe he was in the war.

And, you know, when peace comes, I'm going to get back to doing what I love.

I'm thinking PTSD.

Actually, that was the most plausible explanation that I found.

Bullet holes, isn't it?

Oh, yes.

It's the D in PTSD for donut.

I didn't know that.

I did not know that.

So there's a great photo, isn't there, of him holding up a board and he's pointing to three different donuts over the years.

That's the the one that's in the middle of the day.

That's the one in that.

Exactly.

And that photo, we have that thanks to a Smithsonian collection of donut ephemera, which is collected by Sally L.

Steinberg.

She is the donut princess of America.

And she wrote a book.

So appointed.

She wrote a book called The Donut Book: The Origins, History, Literature, Law, Taste, Etiquette, Traditions, Techniques, Varieties, Mathematics, Mythology, Commerce, Philosophy, Cuisine, and Glory of the Donut, which I found a copy of, and it is insane.

It's an insane book, but it's so brilliantly researched.

And she's the person who has this photo that we now know of as a result of her.

So you thought the Smithsonian had very serious things in its connection.

It doesn't.

It has donut ephemera from this girl who was the granddaughter of that.

I think the reason she calls herself a princess is because she was the granddaughter of Adolph Levitt, a refugee from Russia in the 1920s who made America's first doughnut machine.

So it got called the Donut King and she's his offspring.

Because obviously Russia did away with their monarchy, didn't they?

In the start of the 20th century, but they didn't figure for the donut monarchy did they indeed they were chasing him down for decades actually a lot of stalin's resources went into tracking him down he was supposedly inspired so it goes back to the war actually where people were cooking biscuits and dough and they were putting them on bayonets and giving them out to soldiers so you would have the hole so that like you could kebab it um that's that's there's lots of stories about how he had the inspiration that's one that's mentioned i think it's definitely true that they did have doughnuts in the war though isn't it yeah in the first world war they had the salvation army Army volunteers who went there on the front line and they just went there to make various sweet meats and cakes and stuff.

But they realized that doughnuts actually, you don't really need many ingredients for them.

You don't need to bake them.

You can just cook them in oil.

So they're really easy to do right on the front line.

And I think the popularity of doughnuts, people put it down to that because the servicemen came home and they kind of got a taste for the doughnut.

Quite brave, these...

They were called the dough lasses.

The Salvation Army.

And there were some men in the tents as well, the Salvation Army tents and plenty of of women too.

And they were sort of looking after the American soldiers.

And sometimes they got shrapnel in the tents.

They were that close to the front lines.

And that's how sprinkles were born.

And didn't they?

They used soldiers' helmets as frying pans, as cooking.

They didn't have any of this.

This is amazing.

The whole of war was just a doughnut production unit.

It was.

That was what it was for.

Is it a bayonet charge they're doing, or are they just bringing us some lovely new doughnuts?

Is that jam?

Yeah.

Open your mouths.

Cross your fingers.

No, they did.

They said they used soldiers' helmets.

They'd ask for a soldier's helmet to double up as a frying pan because they didn't have any of the equipment

at first.

Well, this is what they claimed, but I don't believe these women because they also claim.

Your catchphrase.

There were two women who started it, really.

It was their idea.

And Helen Purviance, who was one of those, another person.

Another pervance.

She wrote that in one day, her and her one colleague, Margaret, who were making these in their frying pans, using their shell casings as rolling pins, she wrote they'd make in one day 2,500 doughnuts, 100 cupcakes, 50 pies, 800 pancakes, and 255 gallons of cocoa.

Which, James, you've worked in catering.

That's a lot.

That's not possible.

War catering, isn't it?

Can we talk about the mad doughnut myth?

I think this is not true of doughnuts in general.

Okay, go on.

Okay, so I'm going to counter it.

I think it might be true.

Oh, okay.

Well, we're in New England.

They had been brought over as oily coeucs, which is the Dutch word meaning oily cakes.

Just cakes cooked in oil.

And then in New England, there was a woman called Elizabeth Gregory, and her son was a ship's captain, and she wanted to feed him, you know, keep him well fed at sea and all of that.

And she put nuts in the center of the little cakes she made.

There was dough in the middle, dough, nuts, doughnuts.

And supposedly her son, Hansen Gregory,

put the hole in doughnuts because he was a ship's captain.

He was at the wheel having one of his snacks.

A terrible storm blew up.

He was trying to control this big ship's wheel.

He jams his doughnut

and away this.

Are you deliberately making up extra stuff now?

This is the story.

This is never what he's doing on the ship's wheel to control the doughnut while he's helming the ship threat.

That makes total sense.

He's trying to control the ship and keep his lovely doughnut.

I actually think, Handy, that you were not going to go down any of this route.

But as soon as I said that, I believe it, you thought, right, what is the most ridiculous thing I could possibly say?

Well, what's the back end of that story?

They make it through the storm.

He removes the doughnut and everyone goes, what's that?

I think that's it.

Is that it?

He claimed that he did claim that he had made the hole himself, but he claimed he'd done it on purpose rather than jamming it on the wheel later.

Yeah.

Yeah, with good reason, because it wasn't cooking properly on the inside.

So I'm skeptical about Elizabeth Gregory putting the nuts in the middle, but I think he just said it wasn't cooking right on the inside.

So I thought I'd take the inside out and then it cooks right.

I'm with Anna I think the nut thing doesn't make sense because the word nut just means a cake like ginger nuts or biscuits or whatever but the fact that it was invented by him and he put the hole in the dates do work.

Okay, okay.

So it definitely was invented somewhere around New England and it was definitely around that time when we first see doughnuts with holes in.

And he was really proud of it.

Like if he didn't do it, he really embraced the idea that he did.

He definitely thought he did.

He did.

Or he wanted to convince the And he would say, when an interviewer asked him in 1916, when he was 85 years old, how he felt about it, was he pleased when he got the results of this first doughnut ever that he made?

He said, Was Columbus pleased when he landed in America?

What year was that?

That was 1916.

1492.

It was 1916.

And I know what you're going to say.

We had bigger fish to friends.

Another period of total war, which for America at the time.

America a Halcyon time of peace.

Do you know the idea of dunking doughnuts?

Very big in America.

I'm not sure if it's massive here.

Is it massive here?

Do you mean the shop?

I mean, the act itself of doing it.

I don't think it's a big thing here.

But in America, it was.

And there's a lot of theories about who was the first person to do it, where it came from.

The ship's captain,

whose doughnut fell overboard

during the Boston tea party.

This is delicious.

Well, the Donut Princess has put forward a few theories in the donut book.

One is that she said that it began in the Civil War.

It was inspired by soldiers dunking hardtack into coffee, hardtack being a type of biscuit that they would put in or a cracker.

But then there's this other theory that a Hollywood actress who was really big called Mae Murray.

So namesake of you, Andy.

She was sitting in a cafe.

She was holding her donut and it slipped out of her fingers and fell into her coffee.

And she picked it out.

And the person with her did the same thing to make it look like it it was intentional.

And because so many people were watching, they went, Wow, what's that?

And it became a fad off the back of this famous actress.

Wouldn't you love to be a person who was famous or respected or feared enough that you could do something really stupid?

And it became copied and trendy.

The other day, I was playing golf, and someone said to me halfway around, oh, your flies are undone.

Imagine if the next day you come into central London and everyone's got their flies done.

Yeah, that's the value, isn't it?

That does happen.

And there'll be many examples of that.

Knowing our

bit of behind-the-scenes inside baseball, here you know, our Google document where we put what subjects we've researched each week so that we don't go in different directions.

We all spelt the word doughnut differently, right?

And I spelt it the American way, D-O-N-U-T, because I just think everyone knows what you mean, and it just saves a few characters.

But the interesting thing about that, I think, is the original spelling was D-O-N-O-T-E-S

for doughnuts,

donutties, Donottes.

That's from 1782.

And then we have donuts with D-O-U-G-H,

nuts, which is the British way of spelling it.

And that kind of takes over and becomes the main thing.

And then the spelling D-O-N-U-T, which is how Americans spell it, there's a journalist called Kate Taylor for Business Insider who looked at this and found that basically, if you look at where Dunkin' Donuts opens throughout America, you can see where the spelling changes.

And the spelling basically changes wherever Dunkin' Donuts goes, people start spelling it that way.

Well, they used to spell it with the U-G-H.

Yeah, yeah.

And obviously, now Dunkin' Donuts is ubiquitous in America, so everyone spells it.

That's very interesting.

Well, that makes sense because you're in all the old newspaper archives.

The Americans are spelling it with a GH.

But I must admit, I put it in our public doc, public to the four of us, with a GH, but in my private notes, it's too much effort to put those extra three letters in.

And I just give it a little bit.

Ouch.

Sorry.

You keep saying Dunkin' Donuts.

Do you know in America it's no longer called that?

It's It's now just called Dunkin'.

They've lost the donuts.

And I think it's largely because

as the donut ambassador not weighed in, the donut archduke not made a statement.

Well, it sounds like they don't sell as many donuts as they used to back in the day.

They're largely a coffee at restaurant place.

Duncan is what they're called colloquially, you know, that people just say, let's go to Dunkin'.

So it's gone.

Except globally, we've still got it as Dunkin Donuts.

I think we should not leave out the world's leading donut consuming country in this.

San Marino.

San Marino.

And that's by sheer volume.

It's not per person.

It's just amazing.

No, I've seen the claim in various places that it's actually Canada.

Yeah, I saw that.

It's amazing, though, isn't it?

Tim Horton's is the chain.

And a hockey player.

Yes, now, sadly, no longer with us.

I don't know.

Related to the

sound.

I don't believe so.

But yeah, it's a big to skate over, and he would put doughnuts on the end of his ice skates.

well they can be dangerous uh in uh the doughnut princess's book she cites a few times where donuts can lead to major issues under a title called what can doughnuts do on the highway i saw a man stuff a chocolate doughnut in his mouth then his car skidded into two cars for a three-car crackup so Just a word of warning.

What are the chances of the Donut Princess watching you in a car eating a donut leading to a crash, right?

What's her outfit like?

That's probably what put him off when he was driving.

He's like, my God, that woman's dressed in just two donuts over her nipples

that would be such a bad nipple cover because it would be the only bit that internet

didn't cover wouldn't it that's what makes it sexy

you get that you get the donut and you get the nipple access i was reading that have did you guys come across this thing that in france anything that is a sweet fried cake has the nickname of nuns fart oh

that's a nun fart is a specific

cake i think it's it's because it's so light it's so light and airy that it's a nun's fart it's like a profiterole no that's not the story that i read oh god okay according to the donut princess the

okay now because we know what a nun's fart is now i'm thinking that maybe not everything the donut princess is saying it might be true so no she definitely saw someone crash a car after eating a chocolate doughnut

She says that a long time ago, there was a nun called Agnes, and Agnes and her fellow nuns were in the kitchen making some stuff.

And one of them had some sweet dough on on a spoon and agnes farted really loud and it made the other nun laugh so much that she dropped the dough into the water with the oil in it frying it

and what this is the smithsonian's leading doughnut ephemera expert who is putting this in her brilliant book uh and uh yeah and so that became the byword for it was like it's it's a nun's fart because it inspired the dish in which religious track did the nuns record this for posterity

one of us has got to write this moment down.

That's very funny.

I thought it was just because it was a lovely light cake, but now I realize it's because of Agnes.

A specific incident.

Oh, my goodness.

Agnes.

Agnes the nun.

Why do cops like doughnuts?

That's the myth, isn't it?

Yeah.

I don't think it's a myth.

They do buy doughnuts.

Yeah, they do.

Why?

Because

they have like a deal.

Do they get like 20% off every purchase?

No.

If you're on a steak out, it might be your last day on the force.

Yeah.

But you're having to sit out there for 24 hours while the hoodlums are doing whatever they do inside.

That's it.

Can you hang it around your gun?

Is it so that it's?

I was in the middle of a bit of whimsy here.

Oh, sorry.

Sorry.

Sorry.

I got too excited.

They're tired, so they need to drink coffee.

And what goes with coffee donuts?

Well, not far off, actually, yeah.

Sort of irritatingly, considering it was whimsy.

Basically, it was the sort of the idea of it comes from the 50s.

It was when cops were often on the late night beat, and they were the only snacks available.

They were the only only shops open a lot of the time because they have a morning rush and they would have to stay up late baking away for the mornings.

So it was one of the only options available to them.

I want James's whimsical The Wire version.

I want that to continue rather than that.

Quite mundane, quite prosaic.

Explanation for, yeah.

Sorry, yeah.

Can you make something better up?

Like the donut princess?

My guy's my dad's retired now.

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Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that scientists are using poetry from the past to protect porpoises.

Beautifully alliterated.

Is that the most alliterative fact we've ever had, do you think?

I think so, yeah.

If it had been to protect slugs, would you have still put it forward as a fact?

I would have still said the word scientist at the start, but the rest of it might have been different.

Sonnets from the 17th century to save slugs.

Anyway, sorry, porpoises.

Yeah, so this is a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and they looked at 700 ancient Chinese poems dating back nearly 2,000 years and then they've managed to work out the habitat that has been lost in the time, which is extensive.

So is it like someone in the fifth century writes a poem saying, oh, I saw a great porpoise over here and it reminded me of...

Yeah, so we know where on the Yangtze River.

So this is all on the Yangtze River in China.

That we know where they will have lived, where they will have written, where they will have visited.

And they write about porpoises because porpoises are really big, they're really obvious, they're quite active on the surface of the water,

especially when there's thunderstorms.

They kind of jump around and try and catch fish.

And so, that's obviously quite a moment for someone to write poetry about.

So, yeah, there's lots of examples of it in history, and they've kind of mapped it out.

And then they looked at actual science and they said, Yeah, it's the same as what actual science says.

That's really cool.

So, it kind of fills in the gaps a little bit.

Yeah, it's brilliant.

One of the poets was an emperor.

It was one of the

donor emperor.

Qian Long, he was sailing across the Yangtze River, and yeah, he wrote, Porpoises chased moonlight on silvered tides as dragons summoned storm clouds loom in sight.

And that was used as part of the world.

Very cool.

Yeah.

And of course, dragons have died out now as well, haven't they?

So that is one of the problems because a lot of the things that people wrote were metaphorical.

So you're not always, you have to kind of read the poem, understand the poem, and then work out: are they talking about a porpoise that they've seen or are they talking about a long-lost love?

Yeah, particularly in China, you're right all of this stuff is like chanlong himself he had a concubine who was called the fragrant concubine and she's doesn't say much for the rest of the concubines

so he he met uh i'll go for the fragrant one again

yeah

he was overseas and he smelt her and he was like oh my god i've never smelt anything like you before he was oh he didn't smell her from overseas yeah he was overseas yeah was she also overseas though he was obviously he was next to her guys he was next to her i imagine he saw picks up her smell and like a a cartoon character floats towards her.

Well, he fell in love with her and he was like, I must make her one of my concubines.

And a deal was struck.

And she came back and she was bathed in camel's milk all the way as she was coming back to make sure that her fragrance remained there.

Preserved the fragrance.

But then we don't know if she was real or not.

That suggests that she smelled like camel's milk, doesn't it?

Hang on, wait, was the porpoise and she was called known as the fragrant porpoise woman.

No, no, no.

I was saying that all these metaphors, dragons and so on, were used.

Like even in his life, we have a concubine who's written about and we don't know if she was real or not.

It's all a sort of media.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, maybe I've been misunderstanding poetry all my life so far, but sometimes when I read poems, I don't assume that it's all based in scientific and historical facts.

Well, it depends on the poet, doesn't it?

Philip Larkin, if he says, I found a hedgehog, you sort of trust that.

These ones are finless porpoises, aren't they?

Yes.

Which are very cool.

They're, I believe, the only freshwater porpoise in the world.

Every other kind lives out at sea.

And porpoises are just a family of toothed whales, small whales, basically.

But Finless really gave me pause, and I was really surprised to read that.

And it turns out they do, I was thinking they were just, how do they move?

They're just like a sausage.

They're just like a sort of grey sausage in the water.

It turns out they just don't have a dorsal fin on their back.

Yeah, they do have flippers on the front.

Interesting.

Yes.

Oh, yes, yes.

I kind of find it really interesting and very surprising, having read this, that...

dolphins and porpoises are not the two most closely related animals to each other.

Oh, what?

Isn't that weird?

Well, you would think that who is most closely related to a porpoise?

A dolphin.

Absolutely.

But actually, it's not that at all, is it?

Who is a hedgehog?

It's the other little toothed whales.

Yeah.

Basically.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Looks-wise, I feel quite bad for them because they're basically conflated with dolphins.

And essentially, they're like when they're whenever they're described, they're like fat, snub-nosed, spade-toothed dolphins.

That's why when you're like, what's the difference between the porpoise and the dolphin?

It's like a dolphin has a beautiful, elegant long-nose, porpoise has this squashed thing.

I think they're charming.

And they're stocky.

They're stocky, though.

Come on, they're broad, aren't they?

They're all stocky.

When would you see a thin dolphin?

Yuck.

Have you guys seen, there's a Wikipedia page which is sort of known for its joke.

So it's the list of cetaceans, and it's got all the whales, dolphins, and porpoises listed down.

Like a cetacean-needed kind of thing.

Exactly.

So what they have is that they have the name of the animal, and then they'll say how many are in the wild, and then they have a photo.

And if they're missing a photo, they say cetacea-needed.

Oh, that's very good.

It's very good.

And the list, I i think used to have more but it's down to one now it's just got one cetacea needed which is the durani yagala's beaked whale and there are photos out there but just no one's put one on wikipedia so if anyone out there wants to fill the final cetacea needed to spoil the joke wow is that the reason they haven't put it up because they want to keep the joke that's what i was thinking but it's pretty depressing reading as well by the way you know despite the really great gag because it does show how many are left in the wild of certain porpoises and dolphins and whales and it's really scary it's it's these one these ones are down to about 1200 Yeah.

They've had a very very slight bounce back but the numbers are still so much lower than they were even 30 years ago.

It's because the Yangtze has a lot of sand mining, much of it illegal and it obviously just completely like messes up their habitat, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The Vaquita is probably the worst, right?

Yeah.

In a good way.

Yeah.

There was how many do we reckon?

About a dozen.

In 2021, the estimate was 10 porpoises remaining in the wild.

The problem is that there's a fish called the totoaba

and their swim bladders are are very popular in chinese medicine they're known as aquatic cocaine they go for yeah they go for like fifty thousand dollars per bladder it's meant ways the vaquita related to the vaquita

ba so people fish for that fish and then they end up damaging the vaquita the fishing nets just happened they're the same size but the vaquitas live off mexico yeah but it's crazy that the demand for something in china is massive chinese ones they used to have similar fish in china but they died out and so they go to the Mexican ones instead.

Chinese beds and does have quite a lot to answer for, doesn't it?

When you read about extinctions of the loss of animals, I've got to say, though, the prices...

they are eye-watering.

And you can kind of see where the poachers are coming from.

Oh, I'd do it.

I'd kill the last eight in a heartbeat.

That's going to get me a million dollars.

It's mental how expensive they are for a swim bladder.

It's crazy.

And also, maybe they're all experts, but I wouldn't be able to tell a Toto Aba swim bladder from a COD swim bladder.

No, you're right.

There's, in fact, do you know what, guys?

There's money to be made here in faking swim bladders, and we'll protect the Vaquita at the same time.

Okay, all right, we'll head to shop at no such thing as a fish.com.

Oh, my God.

Can we talk about the harbour porpoise, please?

Because that one's not doing so badly in endangerment terms, relatively.

And they are amazing.

So this is a thing specifically about their mating.

And if you want to see a harbour porpoise mate, there's one place in the world to go, and it's the Golden Gate Bridge.

Ah!

Because they hang out in the sort of narrow channels of water under that, very romantic.

Wait, when you say one place, is this like the Sargasso Sea for eels?

All harbour porpoises from all around the world congregate under the Golden Gate Bridge.

No, no, no, it's just a good place because you have a great vantage point through the slats, like a pervert, basically.

And you, and it's called the funnel of love, is where these channels are that they mate.

Cool.

Did you guys read about the mating process?

No, it's crazy.

It takes one second.

Okay?

So basically, the female will surface surface for air.

That's her big mistake.

She very briefly swims along the surface at which point a nearby male will just prang himself at her like a torpedo approaching 100% of the time from the left-hand side.

That's important.

The female has about half a second to assess whether she wants to raise this male's offspring and either twist towards him or away from him basically.

So if it goes wrong, he just goes boyoing,

bounces off, like corkscrews out of the water and goes off.

um and if it goes right then is that there's a very very very quick coupling and then you know

for one second and then you know she she might well be pregnant um but it's really interesting is this evolutionary race going on the male's penis is very asymmetrical and it might be because males have worked out the optimal angle to approach from

to give themselves a chance and the female's reproductive tract is very complicated potentially because the female's trying to in evolutionary terms have a bit more control over this procedure And scientists have worked all this out.

Males have approached from that side to get around the vaginal folding.

So you could tell if you, if you were a female and you turned around, you'd know that this person's interested in you because of the angle they're coming at.

Well, he's swimming towards you with a penis, a third the length of his body very, very fast.

So like the signals are not mixed.

This is not a rub and thicky moment.

And their testes go massive.

They got big testicles in breathing season.

The total body mass can go in the testes can be represented as four to six percent of their body weight.

Um, it would be three kilos for you, Dan.

Yes, nice, all right.

Because four to six percent doesn't sound much, but then three kilos would be it.

That how much is that, like at least twice as much?

Well, I'd have to contact my tailor.

Um, yeah, bad news, though, for harbor purposes in Britain, uh, we have some pollutants called PCBs, polychlorinated biphenyls, uh, and they were used in like old light bulbs and hydraulic fluids and stuff like that.

But they were used for many, many years.

They're banned now, but they're still in the environment.

And if a horpoise has too much of that, then their testes will shrink.

Oh, man.

Another thing about harbour porpoises that I think this might explain why they can only mate for one second is because they have to be eating all the time.

Oh, really?

So they live in cold water, which requires lots and lots of energy, and they're quite small.

And so they can only eat really small fish.

And so they need just hundreds of them.

And there was a study that found that they can hunt up to 550 fish per hour.

And they have a 90% hunting success rate as well, which I think is up there with dragonflies, which I think we've said are the most successful hunters.

But yeah, if you're eating 500 fish an hour, you just don't really have time to do anything else at all.

And you're saying they have to be eating just

to maintain their body weight.

Yes, I think they lose, they would lose 10% of their body weight a day if they didn't eat.

So they die very quickly.

They disappear.

Gosh.

I know, what an easy diet, though.

Imagine if you were told you were going to lose 10% of your body weight a day if you didn't eat.

The Zempic of the sea that I've got in there.

I can still imagine it getting to about 5 p.m.

and me seeing that key line pie in the bridge and thinking, oh,

I'll start tomorrow.

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

My fact this week is in Canada, tractor tires are filled up with vegetable juice.

This is so interesting.

It's a ballast thing.

So you've got tractors with the center of gravity is way off and you could tip over.

That's very, very dangerous.

So you need to counter that weight.

Now, so instead of putting air into these giant back tires, beet juice is something that is used a lot.

And for various reasons.

One is that in Canada, it gets very cold.

If you put water in there, that could freeze.

So that's really bad for the whole tractor in its own right.

So they use this because it can get really cold and not freeze.

And you've got a, yeah, you put a straw straw in nice little drink there you go on a cold day i could just want to say as well like ballast is not just used to stop you tipping it's to give you grip so let's say it's a really muddy day or even an icy day and you want to get your tractor to go down a muddy field then you need the weight in your tires to help you get grip yeah

ethylene glycol is used as well but the problem is that is toxic so if it leaks out of the tire uh animals around who are eating it can die so they don't like to use that and then windshield washer fluid is used.

That's very good as well.

Yeah, that's very good as well.

I didn't think you got windshield washer fluid in that quantity.

Well, you don't really get juice in that quantity either, so you've got to go to specialist places to get it.

That's a very good point.

I think windscreen fluid is also flammable.

Oh, cool.

I mean, not cool, but you know.

So that's another reason why you might want to go for the beet juice.

Oh, dangerous.

There we go.

I've retaken that.

We should say, just a little shout-out to the commercial name for this beet juice, which is RimGuard.

Yes.

The heaviest non-corrosive tyre ballast on the market.

And I went to their website and the two options are find a dealer of RimGuard or become a dealer.

I was incredibly tempted to click option two and book it.

Anyway, would anyone like to buy, if any listeners would like to buy 300,000 gallons of RimGuard, please contact, please contact me.

I wonder why you came in such a big overcoat today.

You want a bit of RimGuard, mate?

God, your Rim's gone.

Anyway, yeah.

Tractors.

Tractors.

Invented, I think, in Britain.

Ooh, couldn't agree more.

Britain, Britain, Britain.

All right.

Probably the first version of them was you would get two traction engines, two big steam engines on either side of your field, and you put a big rope between the two of them, and then you would attach something to the rope, like a plowing machine, and you would pull it from one side of the field to the other.

And that was before we had any kind of like tractors like we know them today.

I think that's a good shout.

Yeah, traction engines.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a real mystery about the tractor, which is why it took so long to catch on.

And it comes up a lot in conversations about like what we can expect from Andy.

So it's often used in chats about how long we should expect driverless cars to catch on.

Why isn't AI moving as fast as we think it is?

You know, a new technology comes along.

Everyone says, as they did in the 1910s when tractors came along basically like to mechanize farming everyone said well this is going to revolutionize farming immediately and completely replace horses and incredibly by 1942 in britain horses still outnumbered tractors by 30 to 1 on british farms it it took until the late 1950s for tractors to overtake horses so that's like half a century and um yeah it's a it's an example of slow diffusion where everyone said this is it end of horses and actually horses are just really good because they're flexible and they don't use up fuel.

They don't use fuel.

There was a depression, so people didn't really have the money to make the big tractor investments at the time, but they did have the money to employ some bloke to look after the horses because labor was cheap.

They weren't that good at first, like they didn't have pneumatic tires, so they just sank in the mud quite a lot.

Right.

Yes, the tyres were solid rubber or solid metal in some cases.

They were not very useful.

This is a really interesting thing about the change it made.

So in 1910, the USA had 25 million horses and mules on its farms.

By 1960, there were 3 million left.

So that is a huge decline.

And they'd been replaced by 5 million tractors because one tractor can do the work of lots of horses, basically.

Well, in 1963 million, I find still really surprising.

Yeah.

That's that many.

America's big, isn't it?

But in 1910, this is the other thing that tractors changed.

One in three Americans worked on a farm.

Wow.

One in three.

Wow.

And by 2010, a century later, it was 2% of the workforce working on the farm.

1910.

That's wild.

It is.

It's a massive shift over the last hundred years.

And the same will be true in lots of other countries, obviously.

I'm surprised it's one in 50 now.

Yeah.

When you think how big cities are and how much of the population lives in cities.

Yeah, get more tractors, lads.

Why are you still hand-pulling these plows?

Well, that might be including people who work on farm shops and things.

I don't know.

Yeah.

People who work in the Whole Foods probably can't serve them.

No doubt.

That's technically agriculture.

You've got the Amish, of course, who don't love using tractors.

So they're doing a lot of it.

You know, that probably takes quite a lot of labor.

yeah but I was looking into the Amish's use of tractors because you know you picture an Amish horse and cart right and you picture a horse drawn plow so these are the people who don't like to use any technology in Pennsylvania yep okay

so I big shout out to our Amish listeners we should say yeah I'm I'm pro this so they don't use tractors do they use podcasts I think there's quite a lot of variety within the Amish community and I think if you're at the quite technological end you might be listening to a podcast right now well write in if you're Amish and you listen and tell us how please do write in with your quill

just get us on tick tock guys

but they don't use tractors just because they think it's a slippery slope to cars basically well the ballast means it's not a slippery slope that's maybe they haven't discovered the vegetable oil in which case um so there's lots of amish websites that say you'll have a tractor on your farm and it'll run little errands it'll carry hay bales around it will fill up silo but don't use it in the fields because then you'll get a taste for how good they are at driving.

And the next thing is you'll be on the roads.

And actually, a lot of RNF people use the old tractors with just the metal tyres because they really damage roads.

So that's to remove the temptation.

So if you've just got metal,

what are they called?

Those spikes that you have for proper traction on old metal tires.

Winter tires.

Lugs.

Lugs.

Then you, you know, you can't get onto a road because you'll ruin it.

So you're stuck in your field.

Right.

Anyway, I thought, you know, that's important.

Certainly how I got into driving.

I started in a tractor and now I'm knee-deep in Masarafis.

It's a nightmare.

Well, that's the original Lamborghini was a tractor.

Right.

Yeah.

So Ferruccio Lamborghini founded his tractor company way before he founded it as a car company.

See slippery slope.

They still make them though, because

Clarkson's farm here has a Lamborghini tractor.

Yeah.

And he got really rich after selling a lot of them.

And so he started buying nice, expensive cars.

And he bought a Ferrari.

And he was really annoyed with how the clutch worked in one of his Ferraris and he was also really annoyed that when he pointed it out the sales team were just really bad with him so he got into an argument with Enzo Ferrari and said you need to make this better and he said go away and so he went I will and I will invent my own car which is a better version of your car so the Lamborghini was built to spite the Ferrari that's a proper rivalry but it started with tractors I read um guy there's a book called Lamborghini Supercar Supreme which was written by like a big historian of this time and they think even though Lamborghini said that this is what happened, and even Ferrari said this is what happened, they reckon it probably didn't happen, and it was all marketing stuff.

That's why kill the joy of the story.

I know

we can accept that these two people might have elaborated on the stories, but they've said it.

And then they attach doughnuts to the exhaust pipe.

Lamborghini, a lot of these people actually started because they were into car racing.

And Lamborghini was into car racing for a very short amount of time.

He entered one of his early cars into the 1947 Mila Miglia road event.

And two-thirds of the way through the race, he crashed into a cafe and never raced again.

And apparently, he crashed his car into the cafe, and the cafe owner was like, Whoa, whoa, whoa, discombobulated.

And he said, I'll have a glass of wine, please.

Brilliant

to toast the end of my racing career.

And they didn't give him a glass of wine, did they?

Well, it's a cafe, it depends what time of day it was and what they like.

Italy.

Oh, if it's in Italy.

You think even if someone's crashed their sort of tractor race car through the wall of your cafe, you're serving them wine?

I think I would do that because then I'd be to the police, look, he's been drinking.

Yes.

But I think all of these are kind of slightly exaggerated.

They're all terrific.

They're all worthy of the donut princess herself.

Can I talk about my tractor hero?

We've all got one.

Okay.

Robert William Thompson.

He was a Scottish engineer.

He made the first mechanical road haulage vehicle.

It was a steam traction engine.

So he invented the pneumatic tyre in the 1840s, really before there were decent roads for a pneumatic tyre, also before there were cars, and in fact, really before there were bikes.

So he had invented something that the world wasn't yet ready for.

He's running around with the steering wheel going

anything I can do with this.

It's going to change the world.

And he invented it, but there was a lack of demand.

as I've said, and the rubber was really expensive, so he couldn't make it commercial.

And so he went off and invented the self-filling fountain pen instead.

Wow.

He was such a great inventor and engineer.

And he had invented these tyres and he tried them in Regents Park.

There was a big trial of two carriages next to each other, one with pneumatic tires, one without.

And the pneumatic tire one was much nicer to ride in and much more smooth and comfortable.

But yeah, there just wasn't the demand.

If you, like, let's say you know how to make cars, which I certainly don't know how to do that, but a lot of people do.

And you think, okay, well, I've also made a time travel machine.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the time before cars and I'm going to make the first car and I'm going to be, you know, my kids will be billionaires.

You can't go back too far, can you?

No.

You have to go back to the time just before the first one was made.

Because if you do go back too far, they don't have roads.

You're right.

The conditions need to be in place.

Otherwise, you then have to invent the road and you don't know how to invent the road.

Luck would have it, you brought a fountain pen with you.

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Stop the podcast.

Stop the podcast.

Hey, everyone.

This week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Calm.

you know what, Dan?

We've been doing a few live shows in the last couple of weeks.

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Totally agree.

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Okay, on with the podcast.

On with the show.

Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.

My fact is that if civilization comes to an end, one of the best places to be is a cafe in Fort Mason, San Francisco.

Is that so?

You got a good view of the pauper, Shaggin.

You've got to have to occupy yourself in the aftertimes.

It's going to be one of the few things that is entertaining.

No,

this is quite a cool thing.

It's a library that's called

the Manual for Civilization.

And it's a collection of 3,500 books, basically, which contain the operating instructions for Earth, how you would start civilization again from scratch if you had to.

And it's run by this organization called The Long Now,

who are

they quite sort of eccentric, but they say we need to be focusing on the next 10,000 years.

You know, we've got problems which are immediate, but actually

we've got to preserve civilization.

Yeah, yeah.

I'm not going to do my recycling because what's going to happen in 10,000 years?

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

So it was a phrase that was coined, I think, unknowingly by Brian Eno, the musician.

He was talking with Stuart Brand and a few other guys who are the founders of Belong Now.

And they were saying all this stuff about, remember how back in the day people used to talk about the year 2000 and all the like what's going on in the year two and we don't do that.

We don't talk about the year 3000 in the way that they were talking about.

I think not much has changed, but we live underwater.

I think philosophers have talked about this for years.

That's a huge change as well.

The infrastructural changes that's good.

I don't mean not much has changed.

How do trains work underwater?

What are you saying?

Okay, Buster's been talking about it, but not many other people.

But yeah, so like in the Long Now Foundation, for example, we're not living in the year 2025.

We're living in the year 02025, which I really like.

Yeah.

It's quite teenage to do.

Like they were founded in 01996.

Yeah, I mean, everything that I read about these guys, it does sound like teenagers who have just read a book for the first time going, oh, the dude, what about this?

Well, Stuart Brand, the founder, he's part of that old counterculture America.

He was part of like, you know, LSD and all that.

He had these big hippie ideas of changing the world.

And so he's, yeah, those little things, I think they were a bit sort of hippie-ish in their own way.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, it's a very good thing to be focusing on.

Obviously, I mean, it's what it's largely what responsible people who look to the future do focus on.

But what I quite like is that this cafe, which has the big library in it, doesn't it?

So the cafe is called the Interval.

And it was founded with such great ideals.

And it reminded me a little bit and I say this with complete fondness of QI actually set up its own bar many years ago and I'm sure many other people have done this thought I'm gonna set up a cafe but the idea is that everyone's gonna have amazing conversations so the idea of this cafe is everyone will be discussing topics relating to long-term thinking how to save the world in 10,000 years and you go to the trip advisor reviews and the only thing they say is God the cocktails are good

and that was true of the QI club as well the cocktails are amazing I want to just say on the record that I disagree.

I think we should be looking at the problems that are immediate and deal with those.

And I don't think we should be saying, yeah, we don't need to save the popxies because we need to worry about what we're doing in 10,000 years.

It's just a lot easier to kick it down the road.

I think, to be fair, that is what they're about.

I don't think they're saying, let's forget about it.

They're looking to extend ourselves to 10,000 years.

You don't think so?

Well,

it's hard to allocate your resources.

The stuff that the world is losing now, like biodiversity and things like that, I think is a really, really immediate and pressing concern.

And then, you know, you have to preserve it for a long time, but sometimes you have to put out the fire that's burning now rather than say, hey, maybe this fire will spread, man.

Yeah.

No, sorry.

That's not.

No, I'm just saying that Stuart Brand is, he created the whole Earth catalog.

He's the whole Earth catalogue.

It was an idea of going, where are we now?

What do we need to look at?

How do we save things?

It's a big collaboration project.

Well, explain this, Dan.

Why are they building a clock in a Texas mountain which will function for the next 10,000 years and which you won't be able to visit?

Well, you mean the one that was conceived by a millionaire, funded by the world's richest man, and built in his private space pot inside his mountain?

That's right.

Yeah.

Well, that does sound like it'll help us in the long term.

Guys, when you put it like that,

now I sound like a horror.

No, no, no.

Jeff Bezos has funded it.

It's simply called The Clock.

And that's not what I call him.

Yeah, and Brian Eno's involved in that too.

Yeah,

he's a founding member.

I think it it like ticks once a year or something, does it?

I remember reading about it.

Like, as in,

instead of ticking once a second, it ticks once a year, and the cuckoo comes out once every millennium or something.

I think that was the original thing, but for some reason they changed it, and it plays a tone every thousand years instead of the cuckoo.

But originally, they were going to go for the cuckoo.

Probably because they thought, well, the cuckoo will have died out by then, and we don't give a fuck about that.

They're not about saving stuff now.

They are about like

whatever's in charge in 10,000 years, save that.

It's more about the idea is to change your manner of thinking, not think about the modern day just about what's happening today and tomorrow, but to think in the long term.

That's their idea.

Okay.

Yeah.

Like, you know, go on a diet today and next week you'll feel better rather than eat chocolate today.

Well, they would be more like, well, maybe I should buy some really, really big clothes because I'm not going to have a diet for a while, but I know that in 20 years' time I'm going to be morbidly obese.

That's actually a really good.

You should start marketing big clothes um this library has 3 500 books as mentioned um i found a list of some of the books that are in there um because they are they are interesting what are the books that are please tell me the donut princess's book is

there's dirt the erosion of civilizations there's six ian mbank novels um they have quite a lot of sci-fi as you might expect from some sci-fi thinkers i was i was talking to a scientist the other day who said that a lot of scientific ideas are inspired by reading nothing but science fiction so they are they're valuable things, I think.

Completely.

But I think they haven't chosen all the books yet.

As of the year 02014, they only had about 1,400 nominations for their library.

And of those, 200 were sci-fi.

And I just think if you need a book on like how to build a water wheel and you've accidentally got all five Dune novels in your...

Well, Dune is in there.

I know, of course, of course, it's in there.

They will be useful for kindling.

That's true.

I wonder if they have The Buck.

Have Have you guys heard of The Buck?

This was the third most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time.

It's a book that I own as well.

I have one.

It's 2.3 kilograms, so almost as heavy as Dan's testicles if he was a porpoise.

And it was written by a group of escape room designers.

And the idea is this one book will help you restart civilization if you have it.

So on the first page, it tells you how to make string and how to start fire and how to make wheels.

And then it goes all the way to the last pages, which tells you how to to play football and how to make sex toys right and stuff like that well ironically my testicles are the other thing you need to restart civilization so that's true

that book and my balls are the other their sex toy that they came up with was a five foot tall fountain and you pour water into it and as the water goes down it creates a vacuum that makes a sucking action on a handy attachment that you can attach to yourself Do you think the fountain?

I mean, is that the best way of creating that suction with the technology you've got after reading the book?

It's use it.

Well, to be honest, they do tell you how to make electricity and stuff in the book.

So I'm not sure why, because this is right at the end they do this.

But yeah, they probably had a few pages left and they thought, well, we've got to fill up the book somehow.

So we may as well, you know.

It's a great book, though.

It does sound really interesting.

I know that it's not dealing with the immediate problems facing the world.

I do find it quite interesting to think about.

It is interesting.

The idea.

It's fun to think about in 10,000 years.

I mean, I don't know if you guys listen to the 80,000 hours podcast, but.

I've listened to the first hour.

But yeah.

They're always talking about the deep future and what we do about it.

And there was one I listened to recently where they interviewed Paul Cristiano, who's an AI researcher who thinks about, you know, how should we leave a message to, let's say, lizard people if they're the only ones who have survived in 20,000 years.

Sweetly, the first thing that happened in the interview was he said, let's say lizards are what have survived.

How can we leave a message for them once they've evolved to say, don't do this, do that.

And Rob Wiblin, who's the host, said, I must interrupt now because apparently there's some insane conspiracy theory that I've never really heard about about lizard people running the world.

And I just want to be clear.

And I was like, they're already here, mate.

What's he talking about?

Yeah, we're there.

Is that King Charles?

I did feel like you guys are so well informed, but you don't know the right stuff.

You don't know about the crazy lizard conspiracy theory.

Many of the donut royal family are actually lizards themselves.

But anyway, his solution, which I quite liked, was you need to draw attention to a spot in Earth where we can leave a message saying don't create nuclear weapons or whatever it is we want to say.

And Paul Cristiano's suggestion was there's this massive magnetic anomaly in Russia.

So if we're talking tens of thousands of years in the future, anything that you carve on a rock or a big structure you make will have like descended into the earth or tectonic plates will have moved.

But magnetism doesn't really change.

And there's this amazing thing called the Kursk anomaly, I think it's called.

And it's in Russia.

And if you go there, your compass goes totally mad.

The magnetism is insane and it's riddled with iron deposits.

And he was like, it's really easy to find quite early on in civilization once you've worked out magnetism.

Go there and then we can encode loads of, just draw loads of maps there of

basically from that message.

Have we checked that magnetic anomaly for messages from previous civilizations?

That's a good point.

Yes.

We actually have.

I've got a book called Ancient Aliens, which is I think it's kind of interesting.

Let's say humans die out,

as is probably likely over a long period, right?

But then some other animals don't die out, then what will the next big species be?

Like the lizards, obviously, they've had their go with dinosaurs, really, arguably, right?

Yeah,

it is turns-based.

We've had lizards, we've had a mammal.

Yeah, yeah.

So one idea is octopuses.

Okay,

I would happily give it to them.

Yeah, so like, let's say there's a big problem on Earth, on land-based Earth, that we've probably caused, then maybe at the bottom of the sea, they'll be okay.

And the idea is that they would probably go go straight to renewable energy because they can't really burn coal down there because they're underwater.

But what they do have is tidal power and hydrothermals, so heat coming from the bottom of the ocean.

So they will be able to go straight in at the, you know, the Tesla stage.

That's really, that's quite a comforting thought, actually.

Works octopuses.

Oh, my God.

Oh, you'll be one of the right-wing octopus journalists saying, oh, the monster wants to get off out of coal.

That's the missing lyric from the busted song, isn't it?

Not much has changed, except we are now ruled by our octopus overlords.

You've got to cut a verse, lads.

This is really an important verse.

No, cut it.

It doesn't play well with the 18 to 24 market.

Cut the octopus verse.

Okay, let's say we're going to the stars then.

Okay.

You need a crew admission which takes dozens of generations, right?

How many people do you need on your spaceship?

See, like I kind of want to go on my own.

Okay, not sure I could last the journey.

That's the octopus mindset.

You're going to love the antisocial octopus age.

Talking to other people.

Well, yeah, for like tens of thousands of years.

Well, you'll die at some point, which is the

consolation.

Probably quite early, given what my crewmates will think.

James, can you just pop in the airlock and forget?

I've dropped a contact lens.

I've just wondered if we find it.

No, so basically, the mission lasts many generations.

Sorry, that's the thing I missed out.

It's going to take centuries and centuries and centuries to get to the planet that we've picked as our our new home.

So, is the question, Andy?

Sorry to interrupt.

Is the question, how many people do we need so that we don't die out from inbreeding?

Bingo, right?

Yeah.

Bingo.

Yep.

Yeah.

Okay.

Like four?

I mean, if you shine, if you have a child with your cousin, it's basically fine.

Yes, they will have children at some point, though, won't they, Anna?

You've not thought this through.

It's exactly.

That's like, that's okay for one generation.

Yeah.

And then it gets progressively worse.

Yes, as the ancient Egyptians will tell you.

You've got to go for 6,000 years.

See, see, I'm a short-term thinker.

Absolutely.

You're not welcome.

I'm going to go around 100.

Two.

Just me and my sister.

There's going to be incest at some point.

You might as well get it over with early.

Snip it in the bud.

Let's.

One of you is right, and it's obviously James.

Who is it?

This is the easiest game shell ever when you're up against two idiots.

Send me and dance somewhere else, honestly.

Make sure you're not on the ship.

I don't think we're sending you to one of the good planets.

Adam and Dan's weird incest victim.

You're not going to get a plum posting.

Okay, that's it.

That's all of our facts.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online i'm on at shreiberland on instagram james i'm on tick tock no such thing as james harken andy i'm on instagram at andrew hunter m and if you want to get to us as a group anna you can go to instagram at no such thing as a fish twitter at no such thing or email podcast at qi.com yep or you can go to our website no such thingasafish.com all of our previous episodes are up there there's a link to some live shows that we're doing later this year uh otherwise just come back next week because we will be back here with another episode we'll see you all all then.

Goodbye.

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