No Such Thing As Sunscreen for Flies

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss smoking, sinking, sailing and sunscreen. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com http://nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish http://apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon http://nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Edited by James Harkin Produced by Leying Lee Team includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia Get NordVPN two-year plan + four months extra ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fish It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:10Speaker 03

  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 am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is James.

• 1:35Speaker 04

  Okay, my fact this week is that in 1965, you could try to quit smoking by swapping normal cigarettes for ones made of lettuce.

• 1:44Speaker 03

  Did you look as cool?

• 1:48Speaker 04

  You're not smoking a whole lettuce, I'm guessing. Yeah. That would look cool. I think they looked more or less like cigarettes. So this is a fact I read on the blog Boing Boing, which is a lovely blog which sort of collects fun things off the internet. They found it from Atlas Obscura. And it is all about a guy called Puzant Torigian, who's from Hackensack, New Jersey, and He created a brand of cigarettes called Bravo. Bravo cigarettes contain nothing but lettuce, which was dried and cured and made to look like tobacco. And they were marketed as tasting, well, pretty close, like a cigarette. But they didn't have any of the nicotine or tobacco tar in. And this guy Turigian, he thought that they were going to be the next big thing. And for a couple

• 2:33Speaker 04

  of years in the 60s, and then again later, which we might come to, they became very slightly popular.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  I wonder how many lives this guy saved cumulatively.

• 2:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:44Speaker 05

  How many packets were sold? How many people smoked them? How many people didn't get addicted? Because they were really quite, not that cigarettes taste nice, but you know what I mean? These tasted even.

• 2:53Speaker 04

  I think people who smoke cigarettes quite like the taste of it sometimes.

• 2:56Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 2:57Speaker 04

  But like, in this particular case, I don't think they ever really caught on. They never caught fire, put it that way. His idea was that you would get the physical and the psychological satisfactions that you would get from smoking. So you open the packet, you take off the little bit of plastic, you take the cigarette out, you light it, you put it in your mouth. And then that kind of is quite a lot of the stuff that people like. It's the habit.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely.

• 3:24Speaker 04

  But they were not very popular. One researcher said that they were like smoking a potato. And another said, if I had a choice of a punch in the head or one of these cigarettes, I would take the punch in the head.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 3:35Speaker 03

  What a weird thing to say about cabbage. It's like smoking a potato. It's like, no, you've literally got the thing you can compare it to there. It's like smoking a cabbage, actually.

• 3:43Speaker 04

  Well, lettuce.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:45Speaker 04

  Well, I suppose lettuce is more like cabbage than it is like potato.

• 3:48Speaker 06

  But I think they probably resent being confused with it constantly. I would if I were lettuce.

• 3:52Speaker 04

  Did you see why he chose lettuce?

• 3:55Speaker 06

  No.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  So this guy was working for a cigarette company. And someone said, why don't you come up with a new kind of cigarette that people won't get addicted to? And he said that he chose lettuce because it was the first thing he found in his fridge when he opened it.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  That's quite impulsive because the name Bravo, that came up immediately as well because he told his wife, who was Italian, about the idea. And she said, oh, Puzant, Bravo, Bravo. And he went, yes, and that's what we'll call it. That could have all happened in one trip to the fridge, I'm guessing.

• 4:24Speaker 04

  He could have invented a type of cigarettes that had eggs in them. And they were called, what a fucking stupid idea.

• 4:32Speaker 03

  He did try a lot of different things, though. He filed a patent to turn any leafy green into a cigarette. And it's mostly to do with drying the leaves and all of it.

• 4:41Speaker 04

  There is a leafy green that people do like to turn into cigarettes, isn't there? No, Andy, no.

• 4:46Speaker 03

  Not familiar with it. But he tried, he tried so many. He tried carrot tops, the leaves at the top of a carrot. Tomato tops, can't get much out of that, I guess. He tried cabbage, he tried grape leaves, rhododendrons. Apparently, most were awful and made him feel quite sick.

• 5:01Speaker 04

  Rhododendrons would make you feel really sick. They're poisonous, aren't they?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:05Speaker 04

  They could make you, the Romans or the Greeks made rhododendron honey, which would make you go crazy.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  Yes, of course, mad honey. Maybe it's a different bit. Or maybe no one ever tried enough of these to make it at all dangerous.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Bravo's lasted until 2010. Stunning.

• 5:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so they went out of business, actually. So they went out of business in the late 60s. And there was like, he borrowed, this guy had borrowed some money from a company called General Nutrition. And there was quite a big acrimonious lawsuit because they said, well, you owes all this money, you got to give it us back now. And he said, no way, I'll give it back when I can. And I said, well, we'll give us a patent then. And he said, no way. And in the end, everything just closed down because they kind of got stuck. But then he relaunched them in 1997 using enzyme-treated lettuce. And it was these ones that carried on until the 21st century.

• 5:57Speaker 06

  Carried on limping, presumably, into the 21st century.

• 6:01Speaker 03

  But his motives, I think, were really nice because he wasn't trying to become a multimillionaire off his new cigarette empire. He wanted people to get off cigarettes and then stop smoking Bravo as well. He had no interest in them because he wasn't quite sure if that had long-term effects, you know, of inhaling lettuce that we don't yet know that might come down the line.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  Well, anything that creates smoke, you're inhaling the bad, you know, things like tar and stuff like that. So it is going to be bad for you, isn't it?

• 6:27Speaker 04

  It's going to be, it's going to give you a cough to start off with, but that's just the tip of the iceberg.

• 6:31Speaker 06

  It took longer than I thought, actually. It happened.

• 6:34Speaker 03

  Still caught me by surprise. He lived till 99. So clearly, he was doing something, right?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  The age of or the year of?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 6:45Speaker 04

  Died at age 36, 1999. Yeah, yeah.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, age of 2021, he made it to.

• 6:51Speaker 06

  Did he?

• 6:52Speaker 03

  Pretty good.

• 6:52Speaker 04

  One other thing about him is I read a newspaper interview with him and they asked him, you know, what is this like? And he said, oh, it tastes just as good as normal cigarettes. And to prove it, he broke one in half and ate it.

• 7:07Speaker 04

  I love that.

• 7:08Speaker 03

  That's so good. They did recommend that you smoke an entire carton before you decide you don't like it. That was part of its publicity. It's like, just give it a chance.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Give it 20 chances.

• 7:18Speaker 03

  20 full bags.

• 7:20Speaker 04

  We should do that for our podcast, shouldn't we?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  Listen to 640 episodes before you stop, guys.

• 7:26Speaker 06

  It only gets good at about 600. I mean, people say that about quitting smoking. I think the most common advice I read online about people who've successfully quit smoking is them saying, just smoke as many cigarettes as you possibly can, one after the other for hours and hours until you regret it. And that seems to be the only way that reliably works because you feel so sick and revolted by it.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  Interesting advice.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:46Speaker 06

  And, but you won't go on forever. That's the thing. You'll stop after a couple of hours. And I'm not necessarily advising this. Take it up when people have read it.

• 7:53Speaker 05

  Well, e-cigarettes were invented slightly as a way to help people as a kind of bridge off smoking. Obviously, there's now an enormous vaping industry, which might have some effects that we don't know about yet. But, you know, certainly they seem to be not as bad for you as cigarette cigarettes. But the man who invented the modern e-cigarette is a guy from China called Han Lick. And he invented it to quit smoking, only to find that he was then both vaping and smoking at the same time.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  I read an interview with him and he said, he claimed that the only reason he smokes is so that he can taste the cigarettes and that when he's making new e-cigarettes, he can compare and contrast them.

• 8:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:30Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 8:30Speaker 04

  That's what he said.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 8:31Speaker 06

  So he claims constantly having to test them, isn't he? Every day, I have to check. I forget what it tastes like.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  But I think that a lot of people are not that happy with him because he sold the patent to like a big tobacco company, didn't he?

• 8:44Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 8:45Speaker 04

  So, and the idea is that the big tobacco companies are quite happy with vaping because it keeps people doing something.

• 8:51Speaker 05

  Yeah, people are still hooked.

• 8:52Speaker 06

  I'm kind of fine. I'm with him and I'm fine with. I'm just putting my cards on the table. Big tobacco companies have the infrastructure, don't they, to suddenly market and all the places they used to market before? Whatever gets people off smoking feels like a good thing.

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 9:04Speaker 06

  But that's just my opinion. And it's not as good, it's certainly more effective than the advice I kept reading, researching this. When you type in online, vegetables, cigarettes, quit smoking, you get this constant AI advice saying, it is a common method to try and quit smoking to replace a cigarette with raw vegetables like carrots or cucumbers because it replaces the cigarette in your hand and you can munch on them. And I just want to imagine suggesting to a real addict that they try replacing their cigarette with a raw carrot.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm on 20 cucumbers a day at the moment.

• 9:34Speaker 05

  Bugs Bunny was actually, he was just, he was just desperately trying to quit, you know? Yeah. Can I tell you one, my favourite method to quit smoking?

• 9:42Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:42Speaker 05

  Alan, you'll hate this because you're a shill for big tobacco, clearly, but this was an invention in 1972. It was patented by a guy called Lewis Tople. He patented not a kind of cigarette to help people stop smoking, but a cigarette case. But it had a mini record player inside it. And whenever you moved the case to open a cigarette, it plays the sound of someone coughing desperately.

• 10:05Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 10:06Speaker 05

  And it's to remind you that these are really bad for you.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 10:09Speaker 05

  I don't think he ever produced it. He had the idea and patented it.

• 10:12Speaker 03

  It's the audio version of the pictures you now get on cigarettes.

• 10:16Speaker 06

  It feels like someone definitely saw that and went, do you know what might be easier than this? Might be, Tople, is actually if we drew something.

• 10:23Speaker 04

  And then when you opened the case, did like a load of horrible phlegm sort come out?

• 10:29Speaker 06

  It's like that 4D cinema experience.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I found there's been some very creative methods to get people to quit smoking. This is a nice one that was developed by a Turkish man called Ibrahim Yusel, which is every day he would wake up and put a big cage around his head, lock it up and give the keys to his wife and daughter. So he was only ever allowed the cageless head at meals. When they would unlock the cage and he would sit there under their supervision. And then, once the meal was done, they put this big cage back over his head and that was his day. Kind of looks like an astronaut's helmet, but it's a wiry cage, so you can see, like a, like a cage, in fact.

• 11:10Speaker 04

  What about those, like, really long cigarette holders?

• 11:14Speaker 05

  Flappers would have in the twenties.

• 11:16Speaker 06

  You think you could insert it between the bars?

• 11:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:19Speaker 05

  To the determined mind, it's possible to get out.

• 11:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Oh, that's great.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:24Speaker 06

  I don't know. I, I think his wife and daughter left him and the only consolation is that he formed the band Daft Punk.

• 11:32Speaker 06

  At least made something out of it.

• 11:34Speaker 05

  All right, how about an ad campaign?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:36Speaker 05

  To stop people smoking. Have you heard about Nicotine?

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Nicotine? I feel like I have heard of him. Was it in Britain?

• 11:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 11:43Speaker 05

  It's a campaign.

• 11:44Speaker 04

  In the nineties, maybe?

• 11:46Speaker 05

  Eight, nineteen eighties. It was, uh, Nicotine was the arch enemy of Superman. And there was a campaign to stop children getting into smoking.

• 11:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:56Speaker 05

  Saying, uh, Nicotine is trying to recruit children to his army of smokers. Unclear what this army is gonna do.

• 12:03Speaker 04

  Well, they might march for a while, but they're gonna need quite a lot of breaks.

• 12:09Speaker 05

  And basically, the children were asked to sign an anti-smoking pledge. And you get some badges and you get some, a poster and that kind of stuff.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  I wouldn't be surprised if I did that.

• 12:17Speaker 05

  That's also, well, you might have been one of the eight hundred thousand children in Britain who requested one of these packs.

• 12:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:23Speaker 05

  It's quite impressive.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  No way.

• 12:24Speaker 05

  I don't think it affected smoking rates long run, though, unfortunately.

• 12:26Speaker 06

  No, because every single child aged ten says, smoking is disgusting. I hate that my parents do it. I'll never do it. And aged fourteen, they're smoking. Sadly.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  I don't think that's quite true anymore. Like, I'd say smoking is much less common than it used to be.

• 12:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:41Speaker 04

  And I wonder if that's a legacy of Nicotine.

• 12:44Speaker 05

  Legacy of Nicotine.

• 12:45Speaker 06

  It's a long, um, thing.

• 12:47Speaker 05

  And it explained, why does Superman not smoke? You can get this. This is gettable. This is how the campaign explained why Superman would never touch a cigarette.

• 12:54Speaker 04

  He has super breath, so if he breathes in really quick, the cigarette will fire through his skull backwards.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  Got it in one.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  No, no. It's so, it's boring playing these games with James. He always just gets it right.

• 13:06Speaker 05

  No, there is a famous thing.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  Cause you can't, you, you can't smoke when you're flying, famously.

• 13:11Speaker 05

  This was the eighties. You could do anything while flying. No, there's, there's a thing. What has Superman got that would deter him from smoking?

• 13:19Speaker 04

  Lois Lane didn't like it.

• 13:21Speaker 06

  The ability to get changed really quickly. He needs both hands for that.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  He's got underpants on the outside of his.

• 13:27Speaker 03

  A dog?

• 13:28Speaker 05

  Powers. A dog? Is a dog one of his powers?

• 13:31Speaker 03

  No, I was saying that as you said that.

• 13:34Speaker 04

  He can fly.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  He can fly? He can see through things?

• 13:38Speaker 05

  Thank you. Oh my god.

• 13:40Speaker 03

  See the lungs.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  He can see the ad- the lungs, I mean.

• 13:44Speaker 05

  See the lungs. My god. That was the longest minute of my life.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  And he's got super hearing, so presumably when he opens up his vinyl cigarette case, it's blasting into him.

• 14:00Speaker 03

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

• 14:04Speaker 05

  My fact is that the longest traffic jam in history lasted eight years.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Wow, this is.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's a biggie.

• 14:13Speaker 03

  How much longer than the second place traffic jam?

• 14:16Speaker 05

  I think about seven years, seven and a half years.

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Okay, yeah.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  So what hap- like, I've known traffic jams so bad where people just get out of their cars and then go home and then come back a few days later and have to pick up their cars. And that makes the traffic jam worse. So is that what happened here?

• 14:33Speaker 05

  It's about something that happened in 1967. There was a very brief but very lively war between Israel and Egypt called the Six Day War. And when, when the war broke out, Egypt's first move was to close off the Suez Canal, right? So running, uh, top to bottom from the Med to the Red. That's how you can remember where the Suez Canal is. Goes from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, right?

• 14:55Speaker 04

  Nice.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  And it's a canal. And there's a bit in the Suez Canal which is called the Great Bitter Lake, which is basically like, you know, when you're driving along a very narrow country road and there's one of those passing places? It's like that, but it's 100 square miles. And then basically, so the war broke out and all the ships that were sailing or halfway through, they got stuck in the Great Bitter Lake. About, I think it's 14 or 15 ships. And there were like hundreds of thousands of explosive devices in the water and there were bits of bridge and there were sunken ships. There was no way through. So they just, these ships were just stuck there for, you know, weeks. Months and then eventually eight years and it was only after another war in 1975

• 15:39Speaker 05

  and a load of demining and all of this and you know like peace breaking out that finally they got to go home. By that, by the time they got out, only two of them could actually sail anymore. All the rest had to be just tugged to be broken up for scrap and things.

• 15:52Speaker 06

  Please let's not advertise that it takes another war to reopen an endlessly closed strait, okay? I'm sure there are other methods.

• 15:58Speaker 05

  It's the second bonk on the head. That's what it restores your memory to.

• 16:01Speaker 04

  I can just imagine the meetings. It's like, have we tried another war, guys?

• 16:07Speaker 06

  It is amazing. It feels like the mood really took some peaks and troughs, didn't it, along the way? Because all these crews just trapped there. And the first month, it was described as a little bit like a holiday. Suddenly, these people are, you know, you don't have to get to work anymore, you're stuck. And then the second month, it was really, really bad. Third month was terrible. And then all the crews of the ships, I think, kind of started getting together. They realized that with teamwork, they could do things like create their own social events, have card games together, have their own mini Olympics.

• 16:38Speaker 05

  It's really cool. And it was, it was eight different nations as well, these boats. It's not like it was one fleet. You had the UK, you had West Germany, Sweden, France, the United States, Poland, Bulgaria, there was more. And they became the Great Bitter Lake Association. They had a swimming pool on one of the boats that they'd go and do races on there. It sounds incredible.

• 16:56Speaker 04

  The idea is that all these boats were carrying different cargo. And so they were like, okay, we're hungry. Which of the ships has got the sandwiches? And they're like, okay, well, we'll give you some of our sandwiches and you can have some of our hula hoops. And then the other one's like, well, we've got some orange cordial here. And then between them, they could all have everything they needed.

• 17:15Speaker 05

  One of the ships had a refrigerator bit because it was transporting food. It was transporting 300 tonnes of pears and 8 million eggs.

• 17:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:24Speaker 06

  You don't want to be devouring them on the eighth year, do you?

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Just check the date. It's fine. It's fine. Can I won't stop being a fuss bot. No wonder the sailors said after a few weeks, I can't bear to see another pear. I think they just ate pears for several weeks. Oh my god.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  We've run out of cigarettes. It's okay. West Germany's got 20 tonnes of lettuce.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  It's like the outbreak of civilization in a way, isn't it?

• 17:48Speaker 04

  Is it?

• 17:48Speaker 05

  The Barter economy, like they've developed their own stamps and they developed their own postal system and all this.

• 17:54Speaker 03

  These stamps were drawn by the, by the crew.

• 17:57Speaker 05

  So cool.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  And they were used as legit stamps, as if they were from a country, which is really cool. I went on eBay and yes, and there were some stamps from the collection of one of the guys who was on the boat.

• 18:09Speaker 04

  How much?

• 18:09Speaker 03

  30 quid a stamp.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  30 quid a stamp?

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, I couldn't tell if it was a collection of four or a singular stamp.

• 18:16Speaker 05

  Well, you'll find out when they arrive.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:18Speaker 06

  So they sent letters out with the stamps on. Did, did the envelopes contain letters saying, also, please get us the fuck out of here?

• 18:24Speaker 05

  So they started rotating after the first difficult bit where they were all, it wasn't like the same crews were eight years old at the end. They, they were able to circulate in and out. So you'd go and do like however many months on board ship and then thankfully you'd get a break.

• 18:37Speaker 04

  And then slowly there will be fewer and fewer people because they realised, actually, we don't need the guy who looks after the eggs anymore because they're just gonna go. And like there was many hundreds of people to start, oh, there was hundreds of people to start off with. And by the end, there was like a few dozen people.

• 18:51Speaker 06

  I mean, why do you need people to be there in large numbers at all to guard the, after a while, when it becomes apparent that the ship is just gonna fall apart? Is it in the hope that you'll be able to maintain the ship and they can go?

• 19:01Speaker 05

  Some incidents, you know, because it is a hostile environment with all the sand and all the heat and all of that.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  Definitely guarding as well because people strip those ships.

• 19:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. I remember I read about this when that big ship got lodged in the Suez Canal a few years ago.

• 19:16Speaker 06

  The Ever Given, was it called?

• 19:17Speaker 04

  The Ever Given, yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  Such a bad name for a ship.

• 19:18Speaker 04

  So when that happened, basically all the historians went, oh, this has happened before, guys. We can do our little thing.

• 19:25Speaker 06

  Yes, maybe that's when I read about it. Yeah.

• 19:27Speaker 04

  I'm sure that's when I did, but that I was reading back about the Ever Given. 10% of the world's trade was blocked. Thank god that never happened again with any straits in the Middle East. And. People went on to the internet because you know you can follow all the ships. Um, like you can do it with aeroplanes as well and see where all the different ones are going in the world. Well, they follow, they looked at where the ship had been and the week before it had gotten stuck, it had drawn the image of a penis in the Red Sea.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  Amazing.

• 19:56Speaker 04

  Uh, like it had done a few sort of like turns back and forward to kind of work out which way it was going to go.

• 20:01Speaker 06

  Oh, it wasn't deliberate.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  It wasn't deliberate.

• 20:05Speaker 04

  A lot of people thought, well, these guys are taking the Mickey. They like they draw a penis and then they deliberately get stuck.

• 20:12Speaker 06

  I am always upset on behalf of pilots who draw penises in the sky, sometimes on training exercises, that they always get in real trouble. There's a real sense of humor failing, I think, in the RAF and the Navy over stuff like this.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  I think unless you're actually firing smoke out of the back of your airplane to make an actual penis in the sky, you should be allowed to do what you want.

• 20:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Do you know when the Suez Canal was built?

• 20:33Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  Approximately.

• 20:35Speaker 05

  Early 20th century?

• 20:36Speaker 04

  Um, you're close. I would say 7th century B.C.

• 20:42Speaker 05

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 20:44Speaker 04

  So this is the Canal of the Pharaohs, also called the Ancient Suez Canal. Uh, and it was, we're not sure exactly when it was first cut, but it was probably by Netto the Second around 600 B.C. And then it was redug or maybe completed by Darius the Great in around 500 B.C.

• 21:02Speaker 05

  All the way?

• 21:03Speaker 04

  It went all the way. So you could, that was navigable by smaller boats, obviously. Like the Suez Canal could send big tankers through, but this one was just like little boats.

• 21:11Speaker 05

  That's amazing.

• 21:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, that is.

• 21:13Speaker 04

  Uh, 1869, the actual big Suez Canal. Yeah. Uh, and it was built mostly by the French, who were having a, a lot of time in North Africa around then. Uh, and the idea was, this is quite a famous story again, but, um, everyone was ready to go through. It was this opening of the Suez Canal. Someone was going to cut the ribbon and all the ships were going to go through. But because it's a canal, you can only really get one ship at a time.

• 21:36Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 21:37Speaker 04

  Uh, so there's a French yacht called Legle, which means the eagle, uh, which is right at the front. And at dawn, that's going to go. But at the same time, there was a British commander. George Nez, who was in command of HMS Newport, who wasn't very happy about being at the back of the queue. So when it went dark at night, he kind of sneaked his boat right down to the front. Put it in front of this French yacht and then everyone's like, sacrebleu. What is gonna happen here? But because he's in the front and it's a canal, no one can overtake him. So he managed to go through first and he got an official reprimand by the British Navy. But then was secretly celebrated and promoted to captain.

• 22:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. Q jumping. That's a hanging offence in Britain.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  I'm shocked. That's amazing.

• 22:27Speaker 05

  Can that happen in any other sport? The Formula One, could the guy at the back just slowly, hey? Creep to the front. Wow. Traffic? Traffic.

• 22:39Speaker 04

  So before we go into traffic, can I just say one thing about the Strait of Hormuz?

• 22:43Speaker 05

  Ooh.

• 22:44Speaker 04

  Which is kind of similar to this in many ways. And there's a very strategic bit of water and it's sometimes closed. We don't know where the name Hormuz comes from. It might have come from a Persian word meaning place of dates. Or it might come from the name of a Zoroastrian god who was called Hormoz. But another theory is it was named after Ifra Hormidz, who was the mother of King Shapur II of Persia, who ruled between 309 and 379 AD. She was famous as like a regent, so the king was very, very young. And in fact, he was so young that he became king before he'd been born.

• 23:24Speaker 04

  So his father, let's say, or brother or whatever had died, they needed the next king. They knew he was hopefully going to be born at some stage. I assume they were guessing it was going to be a he, because in those days you weren't sure if it was going to be a he or a she. And in order to crown him, the crown was placed on Ifra's belly.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  Lovely.

• 23:43Speaker 04

  Wow. So they had a proper crowning ceremony where she got her tummy out and they put the crown on top of her.

• 23:48Speaker 05

  And then when he was born, they probably said, the baby's crowning, like, we know. Very good. Because crowning is the thing when the head comes out. Absolutely.

• 23:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 05

  Nice. Same thing, guys. That's technically a very good. Technically, it had all of it there, yeah.

• 24:02Speaker 04

  Technically, it had the setup, the punchline and the explanation. It had everything that a perfect joke should have. Okay, sorry.

• 24:10Speaker 06

  Traffic. Do you know how bad it is for you being in a traffic jam?

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 24:14Speaker 05

  Probably, probably fine.

• 24:15Speaker 06

  Well, it's bad.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 24:16Speaker 05

  It is bad for you.

• 24:18Speaker 06

  Your blood pressure goes up so much, more than I expected it to. So there was a study in Beirut that measured the blood pressure of drivers who were pulling into a service station in traffic jams, and then those who were pulling into service stations when there wasn't any traffic. The ones in traffic jams had an average blood pressure of 142 over 87. The ones not in traffic jams were 123 over 78.

• 24:40Speaker 05

  Oh, that's quite different.

• 24:41Speaker 06

  It's a big difference. And also, do you think it'd be worse or better if you were running late at the same time?

• 24:45Speaker 05

  Uh, I would think worse.

• 24:47Speaker 06

  It's not? Makes no difference.

• 24:48Speaker 03

  Oh, okay.

• 24:49Speaker 06

  So it doesn't matter if you're late or not in a traffic jam, your blood pressure's still rocketing. Which rings true, like, the number of times I'm sitting in traffic, being so stressed, and then don't you finally have to go, "Hold on, I'm not, I don't need to be anywhere."

• 25:00Speaker 03

  But if you were gonna miss your plane, that surely is more...

• 25:03Speaker 06

  Does the same.

• 25:04Speaker 05

  When are you ever driving anywhere with no time constraints, unless you're on holiday? You know, there's always something you're trying to get to. That's the way you're in the bloody car in the first place, isn't it?

• 25:10Speaker 06

  Oh, Andy, your life sounds so stressful.

• 25:12Speaker 05

  What, you guys are just going for drives all the time? Your life sounds very relaxing. A bit too relaxing.

• 25:17Speaker 04

  If you're gonna go to the shops, you have to be at the shop at exactly 12:49.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  Well...

• 25:22Speaker 06

  You've got a very stringent shopkeeper, haven't you?

• 25:25Speaker 05

  It's 9:58, I need to get to the shop, it's about to close, please. But you said this is Beirut?

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 25:30Speaker 05

  So that is quite a geopolitically fraught place. I imagine lots of blood pressure is quite high in Beirut.

• 25:34Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  I also think, like, in different countries, like, I don't know if you guys have driven in different countries, but some of them, you get much more stressed than others.

• 25:42Speaker 05

  Driving is, driving cultures.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  I've never driven in Beirut, but I can imagine it might be similar to other places where I've driven where it has been quite stressful.

• 25:49Speaker 05

  Do they have Magic FM in Beirut? Because that would bring, that would calm things right down.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  That's smooth.

• 25:53Speaker 06

  Maybe that's what they need.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Just have a cigarette. That'd be great for anxiety.

• 26:02Speaker 03

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in 1953, a town called Never Sink was sunk.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  This is a, this is a amazing little place, Never Sink, because it's very important for New York City in particular. It's a reservoir, but it wasn't a reservoir prior to 1953. Prior to that, it was a town and it had a population of about 300 and it had businesses and it had houses, but they needed somewhere to create a reservoir and Never Sink was picked. And so all the residents had to move out. They had to move Never Sink down the road. They had to reset up their lives.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Do we know why it was originally called Never Sink?

• 26:43Speaker 05

  I tried to find out. I just couldn't find it.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  No, we don't. There's a few, there's a few possibilities.

• 26:47Speaker 04

  Named after George Never Sink?

• 26:52Speaker 03

  No, I'm not, I'm not quite sure. And also, there's a, it wasn't the only place that was flooded. The other place that was flooded at the same time was a place called Bittersweet. And Bittersweet, we do have a slight idea of how that could have been named. It was a plant that grew in abundance and...

• 27:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, bittersweet's a type of plant.

• 27:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so they, they think it might be that, but we don't know.

• 27:12Speaker 05

  There is a Never Sink River.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Ah, okay.

• 27:13Speaker 05

  So it was, the town was of course named after the river. I don't know why the river got its name, but I did read on Wikipedia that it's considered by many to be the birthplace of American dry fly fishing.

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Dry fly fishing?

• 27:25Speaker 06

  You got so excited about that. Have you subscribed to a magazine or something?

• 27:30Speaker 04

  What is that?

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Oh, Dan, you can't see that phrase and not Google what it is.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  I became so bored.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  Is it fishing with a dry fly?

• 27:40Speaker 05

  It's got to be.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Or is it fly fishing where there's no water?

• 27:44Speaker 03

  Oh, maybe you're catching flying fish. So you're just there with a net rather than a, catch them as they leap out.

• 27:50Speaker 04

  Or is it like fly fishing where you don't drink alcohol?

• 27:53Speaker 05

  Oh my God, I gotta look it up. All right.

• 27:55Speaker 06

  Or when no one's allowed to make jokes throughout the day of fishing.

• 27:58Speaker 05

  Not a problem for me.

• 28:00Speaker 06

  All fishing with Andy is dry fishing.

• 28:04Speaker 05

  Right, here you are, you monsters.

• 28:05Speaker 06

  You're really looking it up, okay.

• 28:06Speaker 05

  Dry fly fishing is an angling technique where you have an artificial fly which floats on the surface of the water and doesn't sink.

• 28:14Speaker 04

  Oh, okay.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  So...

• 28:17Speaker 06

  Okay. So we're all glad we are, aren't we? Thank God.

• 28:20Speaker 04

  We could leave that hanging.

• 28:21Speaker 06

  No, we wouldn't.

• 28:22Speaker 03

  That's a really good point.

• 28:23Speaker 06

  Much like the fishing rods in dry fly fishing.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  So a little fly is just on the...

• 28:29Speaker 05

  As easy as it looks, Anna, I know, I know.

• 28:30Speaker 06

  It's tough, isn't it? Because you've got to reel them in. Okay, go on, Dan.

• 28:33Speaker 03

  Oh! Sorry, I'm just trying to get my head around it. You put a fake fly on the surface of the water and the fish comes to eat it.

• 28:39Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 28:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's like fly fishing.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  I just didn't know they ate flies.

• 28:42Speaker 04

  They do eat flies, fish.

• 28:43Speaker 05

  Do they?

• 28:44Speaker 04

  But also, your fly, it's called a fly, but it might not necessarily look like a fly, it might look like a little fish.

• 28:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. Now it makes sense.

• 28:51Speaker 06

  Um, New York reservoirs...

• 28:53Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 06

  Is what we were talking about.

• 28:55Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 28:56Speaker 06

  Um, so that's my, that's my link. Um, and I don't know if this was the same reservoir, the Ashokan, and I might have mispronounced that. Ashokan.

• 29:05Speaker 05

  That'll be it.

• 29:07Speaker 06

  There we go. Um, but this is the reservoir which supplies about 40% of the drinking water in New York that was dug between 1909 and 1914. And one of the interesting things about digging reservoirs and, you know, sinking all these towns is that you also sink the cemeteries and the graveyards and you have to relocate all the bodies.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yes.

• 29:24Speaker 06

  And I was just, I just looked this up because I was like, what do they do with all the bodies? And you do have to dig them up, partly out of respect, but also because, if you can guess...

• 29:32Speaker 05

  You've got drinking water.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  You're drinking the water, so you just don't want it full of corpses.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  And aqua ghosts.

• 29:37Speaker 06

  Those swimming ghosts, yeah.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  Wait, hang on, but you're, so you're having to dig up the bodies?

• 29:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, so they dig up all the bodies. So there's a cemetery in New York called Bushkill Cemetery, which is the cemetery which has 2,720 bodies from the 32 graveyards that had to be dug up to make way for Ashokan Reservoir, and they just tossed all the bodies in a new one.

• 29:59Speaker 05

  But surely, I'm showing my ignorance here, but surely, if you'd done the burial properly, these people are six feet down, the water's not going to be interacting. Like, water goes through all sorts of cobblestones before it gets to our town.

• 30:11Speaker 04

  I do think, I think a lot of... It is gonna be in America, these are not gonna be like 12th century burial grounds like you might get in England, are they?

• 30:20Speaker 05

  There'll be recent people.

• 30:21Speaker 04

  Relatively recent people.

• 30:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 30:22Speaker 04

  People might want to visit those graves.

• 30:24Speaker 05

  Oh, for sure, for sure, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That, no, that makes complete, the cultural thing absolutely makes sense.

• 30:28Speaker 06

  But it is contemporary. Yeah, yeah, I know, I agree. Maybe some coffins are more leaky than others.

• 30:33Speaker 04

  Also, do you remember my sister had a house where she lived next to a graveyard? And my other sister wouldn't eat the potatoes that she grew in her garden because she thought there might be dead bodies in there. Yeah, I think people are a bit icky about that kind of thing.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  Because when you're making a reservoir, you can't put a top all in down, can you? Because it's such a huge area. It would not be practical.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  They don't sell them anywhere. Not that big.

• 30:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  So I'm mentioning moving graveyards. There's a fantastic airport, Savannah Airport, which is in Georgia. And they needed to expand and have more runway, but it ran into the farmland and family house of a family called the Dotsons. And the Dotsons had graveyards of some of the family members that were buried there. And so they did a deal where they sold it, but they kept two of the Dotsons still buried there.

• 31:20Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 31:21Speaker 03

  And so there's a runway where as you're going over, it's runway 10 in Savannah Airport.

• 31:25Speaker 05

  There's not a bump on the ground. There aren't two lumps on the ground.

• 31:28Speaker 06

  I think there are, aren't there?

• 31:29Speaker 03

  There's two tombstones laid flat down that you go over as you're, like to the rise of the plane.

• 31:35Speaker 05

  That feels like a hazard.

• 31:37Speaker 03

  Done the safety stuff, guys.

• 31:38Speaker 05

  Of course they have.

• 31:39Speaker 06

  It's for clickbait. Don't worry about the planes.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  The nearest one of these to where I grew up is Lady Bowe Reservoir in the Pete District. And there was a village called Dewan Village, and I've driven past this a million times. And apparently when you go past it, sometimes you can hear the sound of the church bells ringing from the former.

• 32:05Speaker 06

  Because it was sunk under the, under the reservoir.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  I love all this stuff. It's so metal. It's so cool.

• 32:11Speaker 03

  I, I wrote about this one time, this church specifically that you're talking about. When they got rid of all of the, of the town there, one of the things that they left was the, the tall turret of the. Of the church. So a mutual friend of ours, David Bramwell, also lived very close to that. And he remembers that when there was a drought, the water goes down and the church spired. You can see it, right? And he remembers seeing it as a kid. And then he started researching it. And it turned out that in 1947, it was blown up. And that doesn't exist anymore.

• 32:42Speaker 04

  What?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  And so many people have a memory of seeing it, including

• 32:47Speaker 04

  That's weird.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Hilary Mantel talks about her family reporting seeing it as well.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I thought you could see that. And if you'd have asked me, have you seen that as a kid, I would have said yes.

• 32:56Speaker 06

  That's what's that called? It's got a name.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  Mandela Effect.

• 32:59Speaker 06

  Thank you.

• 32:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 06

  It's a Mandela Effect.

• 33:01Speaker 05

  The Ghost Church. What are you guys talking about?

• 33:02Speaker 06

  On Ladybauer, which is a very cool thing. First of all, it's very cool reservoir because it's got these giant plug holes that are quite, I mean, just Google them. They're amazing. That create these massive whirlpools. So you get people who row across the reservoir and almost get sucked into it. But also, when they were building the reservoirs in that area, there are three reservoirs in that Derwent Valley area. I hadn't realised that they build an entire town for all the construction workers who were working on the reservoir. So there's a town called Birchinley, which housed about 1,000 construction workers and all their families. This is in the early 1900s.

• 33:36Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 33:37Speaker 06

  And it's called Tin Town. And everything in it is made of John Lloyd, our boss's favourite material. It's all corrugated iron and it's amazing. And they had a pub, they had shops, a post office, a police station, they had bathhouses.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  It must, if you're one of the original village, and you get kicked out because they're going to put something there, and another village gets made right next to it, you must think they're taking the piss.

• 33:59Speaker 05

  All the people who are working to kick you out of your village and flood your home.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 05

  No, it is, it doesn't, I don't understand what they're building though, because I presume you just need a bowl of water, or a bowl of land, rather.

• 34:10Speaker 04

  Oh, Andy. To build a reservoir, you think all you have to do is just dig a bowl of water?

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Well, you find a bowl and fill it up. What do you do?

• 34:17Speaker 06

  Building a dam, I think is quite a big.

• 34:18Speaker 05

  Not a dam, a reservoir.

• 34:19Speaker 06

  No, no, they're made by building dams.

• 34:20Speaker 04

  Usually.

• 34:21Speaker 06

  So you build a dam and you wait for it to

• 34:25Speaker 05

  I thought you just had to find a bowl and fill it.

• 34:27Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  What, with a hose? Like, what's your?

• 34:30Speaker 05

  Just the rain will do it eventually, won't it?

• 34:31Speaker 06

  I mean, that is how they work, which I think is quite interesting with reservoirs, is that you build the dam and then you wait sometimes a couple of years for it to get full up.

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 34:39Speaker 04

  Sorry, building the dam, okay.

• 34:40Speaker 06

  But yeah, they're building the dam, so it does take a while. The Tin Town was there for six years. And then when it's finished, the whole town just disappears. But there's one left. If you want to visit Tin Town, there's one corrugated iron hut that has been reassembled in the nearby village of Hope, which is a hairdresser's.

• 34:55Speaker 03

  Is it?

• 34:55Speaker 06

  If you want.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  That's so cool. And there's a great example of it going slightly wrong in America, which is a town called Old Jefferson, which was in Tennessee. So they had this exact same thing. They had a lake that they wanted to expand so that it could act as a water supply. And this little town was sitting on the edge of the lake, so they all had to get out of there. And then the whole town was bulldozed down. They allowed for it to flood. But what they didn't realise was that there was a lot of underground caves in the area and the water simply disappeared into that.

• 35:24Speaker 05

  Lovely, lovely.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  And the town just stayed the same, just bulldozed and nothing there.

• 35:30Speaker 05

  That's very fair.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  This happens sometimes. So there was a Spanish town called Granadaia, and it was evacuated in the 1960s because the government was going to flood the town. And it took 10 years to move everyone out. You know, they were given lots of notice and all 1,000 people living there moved out. It's an amazingly beautiful town. It's from the 9th century. So it was a big decision to flood that because, you know, it's very old and all that. And the water was finally allowed into this massive new flood plain. And it just came up to make this town a lovely little island with one road in and out.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  Right.

• 36:01Speaker 05

  So there was no need to have evicted anyone.

• 36:03Speaker 06

  And did they all go back or?

• 36:04Speaker 05

  Nope, they weren't allowed. It's so often it happens. You're just not allowed, you know.

• 36:09Speaker 06

  I think they're still trying to get back in, aren't they? The descendants of the people who live there are still saying, can we please get back into our town?

• 36:15Speaker 05

  I think they're allowed to visit once or twice a year.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 36:17Speaker 05

  But I don't think they're allowed to go and stay.

• 36:18Speaker 04

  There's a famous one similar to this called Minneth Eppent, which is in Wales. And they kicked out everyone from this little village because they wanted to make a military training area during World War II. And still now you'll occasionally see people spray paint on the walls, remember Eppen because it was such a big deal in Welsh history. And the really sad thing about this is that they thought it was going to be temporary. These people left the keys in the door because they thought they would come back one day. They continued to plough the fields because they thought they'd be able to come back, but they never were. And then there was one guy called Thomas Morgan, who returned to his house every single day to light his fire as sort of a symbol of we will be back one day.

• 37:04Speaker 04

  And so the army blew his house up.

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  And said, you're not coming back.

• 37:08Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness.

• 37:09Speaker 06

  Can I ask a quick question about that?

• 37:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  Um, I return to my house every day, but I don't leave the keys in the door. I take the keys with me.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you live in a less trusting environment.

• 37:20Speaker 06

  I see, of course, if I lived in Wales, that's what they all do when they know they're coming back somewhere.

• 37:24Speaker 05

  You don't have to. What's the point of a key except to open the door? So you may as well keep them together, yeah.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  How often do you lose your keys?

• 37:33Speaker 06

  It's a lot. I should leave, I should start leaving them in the door.

• 37:35Speaker 04

  Now imagine you've left your house, you've gone away for like five years and then they go, okay, you can come back now. Oh, fuck, where's the keys?

• 37:42Speaker 06

  Such a good point.

• 37:44Speaker 04

  If you've left them in the door, fine.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  What you do is, I mean, the best thing to do is to leave the keys in the door and then just build a small metal cage around the keys, which you can then open with a lock, you know, for safety. Yeah, yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 37:55Speaker 05

  But this happens a lot. Tyneham in Dorset was requisitioned for military training and that was a war thing. And the last person left a note is on the church door saying, please treat the church and houses with care. We shall return one day and the army have just bombed, bombed, bombed the heck out of it since then.

• 38:11Speaker 03

  Well, in Wales, there's another one that was called Capel Celyn. And Capel Celyn was.

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Is that how you say it?

• 38:17Speaker 03

  Capel Celyn.

• 38:17Speaker 06

  I think it's Ca- yeah.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, Capel Celyn. And this was a town.

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Just Indian people in there, isn't it?

• 38:25Speaker 05

  You pronounce it like Donald Trump pronouncing any foreign word.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  I'll give it another round. Capel Celyn.

• 38:34Speaker 03

  Great town. Superb town. There's a town in Wales called Capel Celyn and Capel Celyn was a town that was flooded and the people who lived there only found this out five days before Christmas.

• 38:46Speaker 05

  Five days after.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  They are slow to pick up on things in Wales.

• 38:51Speaker 05

  It has been very wet lately, but this is insane.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  This is ridiculous. They found out five days before Christmas while reading the Liverpool Daily Post. It was in a newspaper that their town was going to be flooded and it was flooded so that they could provide water for Liverpool. So it was a cross-border reason and they were fuming and this became a huge, huge thing. And there were huge protests and they would go to Liverpool, but Liverpool felt like they'd bailed this area of Wales out quite a lot. And so they were really aggressive towards the Welsh people who were over there.

• 39:23Speaker 05

  Look, this is a controversial point to make, but I think we should drown loads more places. Oh, yeah. Well, where? Come on, go on. If the government would like my place at a reasonable rate, have it. I don't care. We'll need it. We'll need more water. You know, there are going to be more periods where there's much less rain, you need better water supply. And Britain hasn't built a reservoir since 1992. It's insane. Yeah.

• 39:44Speaker 04

  People keep trying, but they just do a bowl of water and just nothing happens.

• 39:53Speaker 03

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

• 39:57Speaker 06

  My fact this week is that in Europe, it is illegal for sunscreen to be tested on animals. In America, it is illegal for it not to be tested on animals.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  What? Does that mean that any sunscreen that's sold in Europe can't be sold in America and vice versa? Or is this just when you're creating it?

• 40:15Speaker 06

  I think it can't be sold there. Certainly under European law, it couldn't be sold there. It's like any sunscreen that or any ingredients in sunscreen or any fully made sunscreen cannot be made or sold there if it's been tested on animals. And in the US, regulations say sunscreen, sun cream, as we call it, is an over the counter drug. So it counts as a drug there. So the rules are much more stringent. Drugs usually need to be tested on animals, not always, but basically I was reading the FDA site, Food and Drugs Administration site, and it does specify, it's trying to basically say, we don't do that much testing on animals. So it says, we don't require sun cream to be tested on large animal species like dogs or primates. And we try to minimize testing on rodents and.

• 40:59Speaker 05

  What's left? You're going to rub it on a fly?

• 41:01Speaker 06

  Well, they specifically say they minimize testing in rodents. They don't stop it testing in rodents. They just say, we don't demand. And six month toxicity studies, which I think probably means that they don't rub it on rodents and then leave them for six months and then test if it's caused damage. So they still tested on, basically, the website was a very long-winded way of saying, we test these on rodents and we have to. Whereas in the EU in 2013, the sale and marketing of all cosmetics, sunscreen included, and their ingredients was banned. Now, there's lots of grey areas. There's this bizarre thing.

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Lots of pink areas.

• 41:35Speaker 06

  There are grey areas in the EU. So there's basically the European Chemicals Agency, which says you have to test chemicals on animals if people are going to be working with them. But then the animal testing cosmetics law that says you're not allowed to test these on animals. And they say totally contradictory things and no one understands the European law, really. So sometimes sun cream is tested on animals, even though it's illegal, because European law's a mess.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  What about Brexit? Will we finally be able to slather sun cream on flies?

• 42:04Speaker 06

  I did have a look. I think, I think you can do that outside of the lab anyway.

• 42:10Speaker 04

  Because that's why I voted for it.

• 42:14Speaker 06

  There have been worse reasons.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  I was sat there in the voting booth with my pet fly in my hands going, one day, Jeremy, one day, you won't be subjected to this terrible UV rays.

• 42:28Speaker 06

  Poor red Jeremy. UK is basically in line with EU law on this, I'm afraid, James. So it was all for nothing for you.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Great. Wow. The first ever sun cream, I think, was tested on animals. So during World War II, there was a guy called Benjamin Green. He was an ermine and a pharmacist and he was in the South Pacific and he saw that a lot of the other soldiers were getting sunburnt and he decided that they needed protection. And so he gave them something called Red Vet Pet, a cream that you used when, let's say your dog got a little cut on it or something. The vets would put this on to stop any infection from getting in there. And what he thought was, well, I can put this on my soldiers and it will stop them from getting sunburnt. So it wasn't commercially available, that came a year or two afterwards, but.

• 43:21Speaker 05

  But he founded a firm called Coppertone, didn't he?

• 43:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:24Speaker 05

  Which was, which was the commercial version of it. So this is what I found really interesting is that, I guess, because it's petroleum, is blocking rays.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  And this is, there are two main ways by which sun cream works. It's UV filters, ultraviolet light filters, which either reflect UV rays. So literally just reflecting the light so it doesn't do damage or absorbing them. But either way, it means that fewer actually get into your skin.

• 43:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 43:50Speaker 05

  And I was trying to work out what happens when it goes in. Because I was thinking of the amount of sun cream I've put on my body in my life, right? Has it all gone in?

• 43:59Speaker 04

  You wash it off.

• 44:00Speaker 05

  But some of it, I think, little bits, end up in your bloodstream, like only tiny bits.

• 44:04Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, they do.

• 44:05Speaker 05

  And this is not a reason not to, this is not a reason that it might be bad for you. There's no evidence that it's bad for you at all. But I think the amount you put on you, enough will go in you.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  I think this is why Superman never used sunscreen, because he could see how much of it was in your body.

• 44:19Speaker 06

  Three weeks after you've put sun cream on, if you get a blood test, you can tell that you've put sun cream on. Isn't that amazing?

• 44:24Speaker 05

  Eventually, you'll be pooing it out, right?

• 44:27Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  All I'm saying is that I think it's interesting that the sun cream that goes into your body eventually comes out of you through your bottom.

• 44:33Speaker 04

  Oh, I see.

• 44:33Speaker 06

  That's what you're saying? Okay, well, there you go.

• 44:38Speaker 05

  Am I alone?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  Are you saying, no, are you saying we can use it for, we can reapply it?

• 44:43Speaker 05

  No, I'm not saying, in a pinch on the beach, you can't say. I just, I had loads a few weeks ago, so just turn over and I'll, I'll get your back.

• 44:56Speaker 06

  The old rub some sun cream on me, darling, is a much less romantic prospect, isn't it?

• 45:02Speaker 06

  Or more romantic, depending what you're into.

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Piss on it if you've been stung by a jellyfish and shit on it if you're out of sun cream. Don't mix them up, kids. So this guy, this was in World War II, as you said, James, but in 1938, there was another big moment in modern sunscreen history, which was a man called Franz Greiter, who was climbing a mountain in the Alps, and he got sunburnt while he was up there. And he thought, why can't we put something on to stop this burning? And he built a business out of it. So the mountain is called Pitzbuin, and Pitzbuin is the name of the company. It's the trading name of the company. So the inspiration was so great.

• 45:40Speaker 05

  It's all around that time, isn't it?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:43Speaker 05

  30s, 40s, everyone's kind of doing it at the same time.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  I guess chemistry's sort of just been invented, hasn't it?

• 45:48Speaker 04

  We're having a lot of petroleum derivatives.

• 45:50Speaker 05

  But I, so I was looking at why, as in, it can't be that everyone was sunburnt until the end of the 1930s. That's not practical, right? So why didn't ancient humans need sun cream?

• 46:01Speaker 03

  Was it our skin was darker?

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Well, you'd shelter at night, you mostly.

• 46:05Speaker 04

  Well, it's also not sunny at night.

• 46:10Speaker 05

  Half the problem is already solved.

• 46:13Speaker 06

  Andy's nighttime sun cream company has never taken off.

• 46:18Speaker 05

  So, no, no, I'm saying that's fine. I'm saying that's fine.

• 46:21Speaker 03

  Get up, kids. It's 2 AM, Dad. Yep, we're off to the beach. Let's go.

• 46:27Speaker 05

  So, as you say, Ted, you know, the more sun you get, the more melanin your skin produces. So your skin gets darker, you know. And, but also, the other thing is that people didn't move around much in their life, right?

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:38Speaker 05

  You, wherever you lived, your skin would acclimatize to roughly the sun intensity.

• 46:42Speaker 04

  I see.

• 46:43Speaker 05

  And it would, and it would get, become the color that can cope with that better.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  So you wouldn't get people whose genetics is related to Northern Europe moving to Australia, which is obviously a big problem.

• 46:52Speaker 05

  Exactly. And that is, the basic problem is just people are much more mobile now, and you can easily get, you know, in a couple of hours, you can get to a place which has a completely different sun profile for the skin that you have, have had and that your, where your ancestors have been living for 100,000 years. Also, everyone died at the age of 20, so it wasn't a problem. But, and people probably looked very, very wrinkly when they were youngest, because there was a lot more sun intensity around.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  But you know what? I did read a study which suggests that sun cream might have been what made. Humans survive when Neanderthals didn't, right, for instance.

• 47:25Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 47:25Speaker 04

  Because around forty one thousand years ago, the magnetic field of the earth reduced quite a lot, which meant that a lot more of the sun's rays could get onto the earth. And this is a similar time to when the Neanderthals died out. And humans could create technologies such as tailored clothing. We began to start sewing things. We started wearing more ochre, which is like a plant based thing that you can rub on yourself. We know for sure that happened because we have that leftover. And I also read strategic cave use.

• 47:57Speaker 05

  You.

• 47:58Speaker 04

  But I didn't say at night vindication. But yeah, the Neanderthals might not have been able to do those things according to this theory. And I'm sure if Ella Alshma, he was here, she'd be telling me I'm talking bollocks. Yeah, that is one theory.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  I love it.

• 48:12Speaker 04

  It was the sun cream that did it.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  Can we test if they all died of skin cancer, basically? And if they did, I think we're on to something.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Well, it could be that you could just spend more time outside generally.

• 48:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay.

• 48:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 48:23Speaker 06

  You've mentioned ochre. Coca cola is often used as a tanning lotion. This is really stupid, but it's true. I thought this is probably one of these things the media has made up as a thing.

• 48:37Speaker 05

  An internet, it's like two people have done it in one country and then it becomes a thing globally. Yeah.

• 48:41Speaker 06

  That's what I thought because Coke have on their website a thing and they have an FAQ section. And one of the FAQs is, can I tan myself nicely by rubbing Coke all over myself? And so they have to say.

• 48:53Speaker 05

  They don't have to say anything. It's too obvious for words.

• 48:56Speaker 06

  They choose to say, as much as we love Coca Cola, we wouldn't recommend using it this way. There's no sun protection factor at all. It's a drink.

• 49:02Speaker 05

  Protect you, but would it stain you?

• 49:04Speaker 06

  So that's why it's caught on, I believe, is because of its brown colour. And people think therefore it does make you browner. And Peter Andre used to cover himself in Coke and Way to Beach. And I did go on some social media sites and I just can't tell if everyone's being ironic. But they don't seem like they're being ironic. People are just pouring cans of Coke over themselves.

• 49:24Speaker 05

  With HP Sausage.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  I think that would be even more effective, wouldn't it? That's the northern answer.

• 49:32Speaker 03

  So I think I have memories of seeing friends do that in Australia.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  It's been going on for decades.

• 49:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 06

  It's a mist that's lasted so long.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  It is sticky, but then you wash yourself afterwards.

• 49:41Speaker 05

  So what's the point? Then it comes off.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  No, no, what?

• 49:44Speaker 05

  Are you saying you've tanned and he intervened? Is this to help yourself get a tan, though?

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:48Speaker 05

  It's not to block a tan?

• 49:49Speaker 03

  No, it's to get it. It's to get a tan.

• 49:51Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 49:51Speaker 04

  It's like gravy granules during the war.

• 49:54Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 49:54Speaker 04

  People did that, didn't they?

• 49:55Speaker 05

  Yep.

• 49:56Speaker 04

  They would rub gravy granules on themselves.

• 49:58Speaker 05

  And then you just draw a seam to be the seam on your stocking or your tight, you know? On the back of your leg.

• 50:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, that's right.

• 50:05Speaker 05

  With a pencil or something. You draw all your clothes on, go around naked, no one notices.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  Clothes weren't invented till 1950. Turns out, which is why it's Neanderthal theory is still a bother.

• 50:15Speaker 05

  There is a big idea out there, and I think it's a little bit unclear in the real world, whether this is true or not, that sun cream is very, very bad for coral, right?

• 50:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 50:25Speaker 05

  And that you see this a lot, and some beaches have even said, no, you're not allowed to go in if you've got sun cream on.

• 50:29Speaker 03

  Hawaii, I think, banned at one point.

• 50:31Speaker 06

  Thailand for sure.

• 50:32Speaker 05

  There are various places. And actually, I think it is a bit unclear whether in the real world, the amount of sun cream that actually enters the water, compared, like, considering how big and diluted it will be in the ocean, whether it's genuinely bad for coral. But there is a sun cream that has been developed at the University of Derby, which is actively good for coral, which is nice.

• 50:53Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  So it's like, sort of, we've basically coral steroids in there and...

• 50:58Speaker 06

  And do you rub it on coral?

• 51:00Speaker 05

  No, you rub it on you and then you swim near the coral, I think.

• 51:02Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 51:03Speaker 05

  You don't rub it on the coral.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  Okay, fine.

• 51:04Speaker 04

  Have they tested it on coral, which are animals?

• 51:10Speaker 05

  Oh, God, I have no idea.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  Do you think sun cream is better for you if it's more expensive or cheaper?

• 51:17Speaker 05

  More expensive, of course.

• 51:19Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which the Consumer Group did a report in 2022, where they looked at some SPF 30 sun creams. Some of them were really, really posh, expensive ones, and some of them were from supermarkets, so Morrison, Superdrug and Asda. And they found that the claimed

• 51:41Speaker 04

  Was way more often correct from the supermarket ones than it was from the super posh ones.

• 51:46Speaker 06

  Was it? Was it sometimes incorrect? Because I did read that a lot of the SPF is sort of really faulty.

• 51:52Speaker 04

  They found that these expensive ones were very, very commonly incorrect.

• 51:56Speaker 06

  Really?

• 51:57Speaker 04

  But the cheaper brands usually. And of course, there will be different ones. And I'm not saying that you should all go out and buy the cheapest one you can find. But yeah, the cheap ones tended to be more or less correct.

• 52:08Speaker 06

  You can. So you get spray sun cream, obviously, sometimes. And usually that protects you from burning, but it can cause you to burn really badly.

• 52:18Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  Why?

• 52:20Speaker 05

  You don't put it on as carefully if you're spraying it? You miss bits?

• 52:23Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, some people don't rub it in properly. They just allow it to absorb.

• 52:27Speaker 06

  No, no. So aerosols, you need something like alcohol or something to make it turn into spray. And that's incredibly flammable. So if the spray isn't controlled well enough to make sure that as soon as the alcohol in it, or whatever the flammable substances lands on your skin evaporates, then it will be extremely flammable.

• 52:43Speaker 05

  You catch fire?

• 52:44Speaker 06

  You can catch fire. So Banana Boat Sun Cream had to recall a bunch of sun creams a few years ago.

• 52:49Speaker 05

  This is exactly what we didn't want to have with our sun cream. Sorry.

• 52:53Speaker 06

  Five people burst into flames.

• 52:55Speaker 05

  Did they really?

• 52:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, they did. They did.

• 52:56Speaker 05

  I'm sorry, people caught fire?

• 52:58Speaker 06

  It was generally if they're doing barbecues or lighting a cigarette or something. So you spray the sun cream on. And if you are too quick to go and toss those sausages on the barbie, they, it, you know, what it's like using an aerosol spray.

• 53:09Speaker 04

  Like hairspray, I guess, right?

• 53:11Speaker 06

  Like hairspray. So usually it means that the valves must have let out a bit too much of the spray and been faulty to allow it to catch fire. But do be careful.

• 53:21Speaker 04

  The spray stuff, interestingly, comes out in your farts, not in your poo.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you very much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found on our online accounts. I'm on at Schreiberland on Instagram. James?

• 53:45Speaker 04

  My Instagram is nosuchthingasjamesharkin.

• 53:48Speaker 03

  Andy?

• 53:49Speaker 05

  Mine is at AndrewHunterM.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  Yep. You want to get to us generally as a group, Anna?

• 53:53Speaker 06

  Instagram is at Nosuchthing, or you can email [email protected].

• 53:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, [email protected]. Remember that email address, because if you have any facts that you would love us to talk about, you can send them in there and we will cherry pick the best of those and bring them to our bonus Monday show, which is called Little Fish. Or if you did hear something on this show, or any other show that you thought, hey, I know something more about that, or I've

• 54:16Speaker 04

  had any other one of our shows.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It has to be specifically a Nosuchthing as a fish show. We will accept a few others off-menu. We will talk about them. We really love talking about My Dad Wrote a Porno. Send those in as well. But largely, if it could be about us, that would be great. And he will go through the emails. He will pick them out for Drop Us a Line, our secret bonus show, which hides in the world of Club Fish. That is a place that you will find on patreon.com/clubfish. There are so many fun things there. We have video versions of Drop Us a Line. We have extra-long episodes of the things that you've just heard. There's tons to check out. There's three different tiers. Have a look now. But otherwise, come back next week. Thanks, as ever, of course, to the wider

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Fish team, Liang Li, Ethan Ruparelia, and the other great Fishbusters who helped make this show exist. And we will be back again. We'll see you then. Goodbye.

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