No Such Thing As A Pastronaut

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss kitchen hygiene, a Commander-in-Chief, and NaHCO3. 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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Stop the podcast.

• 0:01Speaker 01

  Stop the podcast.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.

• 0:05Speaker 01

  That's right. So, everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?

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  Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.

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  Progressive offers customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.

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  They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, and baby gates of insurance.

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  Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.

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  Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states. On with the show.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Hi, everyone. Well, to this week's episode of No Such Things As Fish, I have some very exciting news for you, especially if you're the kind of person who likes live podcasts. Because, that's right, we're gonna do some live podcasts. They will be on the 21st, 22nd, 23rd, and 25th of July at the Royal Institution in London. We'll be performing at the Lecture Theatre, which is the home of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. It's an extremely venerable place. Not sure quite why they're letting us go there, but they are. And the shows will be a whole lot of fun, I am sure. Now, the reason I'm telling you today is because exclusive pre-sale has begun for Club Fish members. So if you want to guarantee your tickets,

• 1:29Speaker 02

  you will have to go to patreon.com/clubfish and join now. That will get you access to the pre-sale for the next seven days. And if there are any tickets left, they will go on sale on Friday, the 5th of June. It's not a very big theatre. It's a lot smaller than the venues we normally play. So it's up to you if you want to push your luck or not. But one more good thing to say is that on the 21st of July show, there will be online livestream tickets available. So if you don't get tickets, or if you live somewhere that is way too far from London for you to get tickets, then you will be able to get tickets there. So, anyway, all the information for this is available now for Patreon members at

• 2:10Speaker 02

  ...com slash Club Fish and the information will be available for everyone else next Friday. So listen up there. Now, before we get on with the podcast, I do believe Dan and Anna wanted to tell you something very exciting that has been happening at QIHQ.

• 2:25Speaker 00

  That's right. So QI has created self-guided walking tours of London, not just any walking tours, walking tours full of amazing weird QI facts narrated by none other than an up-and-coming talent, Stephen Fry.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  That's right. Stephen will be taking on a tour around Westminster and that tour begins at Big Ben. There's the tour of the city and Bankside, which starts at St Paul's Cathedral, and it is just ram-packed with the kind of facts that QI is the best and only place really to go to for.

• 2:55Speaker 00

  That's right. So if you want to find out why Londoners used to take baths with geese, or how John Cleese pranked Michael Palin at the Globe Theatre, then look up Voice Map on the App Store. It's a GPS-activated app that lets you explore at your own pace and accompanies you with these facts.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  That's right. And also it will take in your phone's location. So if you happen to be in a spot that's relevant to the tour, Stephen will just start talking to you from your phone. It's absolutely brilliant. Who doesn't want that? Injections of Fry into your daily life. Get it now. As Anna says, it's on the App Store or go to voicemap.me/qi. Okay.

• 3:31Speaker 00

  On with the show.

• 3:49Speaker 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 Holborn. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Hunter Murray and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go, starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  My fact this week is that the reason chefs started wearing hairnets around food was to keep the hairnet industry going.

• 4:21Speaker 03

  Mmm.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  This is, it's amazing.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  I don't think of it as being an industry even.

• 4:27Speaker 02

  Someone has to make them.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Exactly, someone's gonna make them, I just, exactly, someone's gonna make them, I just never, just never thought about that.

• 4:34Speaker 00

  You never think about the hairnet makers, do you Andy?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  I imagined it would be like a cottage industry, some kind of village in the north of England where they're all made.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:41Speaker 00

  Maybe in the 1500s perhaps, but I think now, like everything else, some giant city in China.

• 4:49Speaker 00

  Where they're all made. So, hairnets, nothing to do with hygiene, it turns out. This is because bobs happened in the 1915s, 1920s, that is, women had had long hair, suddenly the bob became fashionable, short hair, and they didn't need hairnets anymore. So for hundreds of years, women had worn hairnets to sort of keep their hair tidy, they lie in hairnets to stop messing up on their pillows, they have it so that it keeps the curlers in, the bob meant none of that's necessary, the hairnet industry plummets, and the hairnet maker, Vanida, the biggest hairnet maker around in the US, hired marketing bloke, Edward Bernays.

• 5:26Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 5:27Speaker 03

  We've talked about before, haven't we?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  I think we have mentioned him before.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  I think he invented, did he invent egg and chips or something?

• 5:33Speaker 03

  It was, bacon and eggs. Bacon and eggs, he made that the American breakfast, he was the one, he was that PR spin master, he's the one who made it so that women became a massive market for the cigarette industry, sticks of joy or liberty.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Tortures of liberty.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  So he was hired by the hairnet makers, and he, because he was a PR genius, he did two main things, he got in touch with loads of celebs and said, hey, start talking about how great long hair is, because we need to get hairnets going again. And then B, he thought, I'm gonna sort of spread this rumor that it's really unhygienic to have hair fall into your food, so in restaurants and stuff, if hair gets in the food, that's very bad. So he spread this rumor that, you know, you'll get all sorts of diseases from that, and within a couple of years, it was state law throughout the US to have hairnets in restaurants if you were working around food.

• 6:19Speaker 02

  So people didn't used to care if you got hair in their food?

• 6:22Speaker 00

  They liked it, it was actively sought out.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  You know that joke, wait, wait till there's a hair in my soup. Don't say it too loud or everyone will want one. That was based on real life.

• 6:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, it wasn't a joke. Yeah, that was just what you'd say.

• 6:33Speaker 03

  You, you used, apparently it used to be more that you would say, oh, you're, you're, you're around like a hair in a soup.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  It sounds like that's annoying though.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  But you would never send it back, whereas it was ju- yeah, it was annoying.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Something that happens.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. It's just something that's inevitable.

• 6:45Speaker 00

  I mean, it is gross finding a hair anywhere that's not on someone's head. Let's be real. So fair enough. I think I'm happy.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Or another part of the body, like.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  You can eat hair.

• 6:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, you can eat hair.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:56Speaker 02

  I think the point for me is if you see a hair in the soup, it means that they're not necessarily paying attention to the other parts of hygiene.

• 7:03Speaker 01

  It's the brown M and M.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  There you go.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It's the brown M and M's.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, if I see a brown M and M in my soup, then first of all, I think it's probably something else.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  What was the band?

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Van Halen.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  Van Halen, that was it. Bernay, single-handedly probably is responsible for the reason the hairnet industry is back. But the reason it almost toppled was because of one person as well, which was Irene Castle, who was this big dancer. She did the foxtrot. She was very famous for it. And 1915, she got her haircut into a bob. And by 1918, it was being reported that 20,000 women weekly were adopting this new hairstyle.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, and it was called the Castle Bob initially, Bob's World. And it was a very liberating thing for women. This is why people, society was afraid because women loved it.

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Bernay said of that, her net makers are in a state of panic. Harkin manufacturers are laying off workers and the hair comb industry is in disarray.

• 7:55Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  The entire economy was about to plummet.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. I found the most valuable hairnet ever.

• 8:02Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:02Speaker 01

  Well, this is the most valuable one I've been able to find.

• 8:05Speaker 03

  Of course.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Any guesses as to the value in pounds sterling?

• 8:08Speaker 02

  What's, you're gonna have to tell us more about it.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  Is it like Marilyn Monroe's hairnet?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  It's one, it's a celebrity's hairnet. It was sold at auction in 2003. I'm not gonna say who wore it though. I just want a bit of a blind punt. I want a blind punt on this of the value.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Beyonce and it went for 400,000.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  But I'm not going to specify which currency.

• 8:31Speaker 00

  Bruce Willis, 400 quid.

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Bruce Willis?

• 8:35Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 8:35Speaker 00

  An ironic thing he did.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:39Speaker 02

  I'm going to say Elsie Tanner from Coronation Street and two and six.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  That's, can I change my? No, you can't. James has already won it. This was one worn by Ina Sharples on Coronation Street. And it was sold at a Cornish auction house for 50 quid.

• 8:58Speaker 02

  50 quid?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  The buyer wished to remain anonymous.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Did you, Dan?

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Was it signed?

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Bits of it were. The holes get in the way.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  That's the only person I could think of who wears hairnets.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it's the only, I think it's the only hairnet that's ever been auctioned, I suspect.

• 9:14Speaker 00

  I can't believe that. If you know of a more expensive hairnet.

• 9:17Speaker 01

  Podcast at QI.com. Oh, what am I doing?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  You know, when I was in China, there was a fashion among trendy young women to, you know, those like sort of big hair curlers that you get to make a perm? They would get one of those, the biggest one you could possibly find, and then attach it to the fringe and just wear it all the time. That's a cool fashion, isn't it?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  It's a cool look. Cause that's a bit Coronation Street, isn't it?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  Being seen in your curlers.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  The first I thought was Coronation Street, but in China, it's the height of fashion.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  In Corrie, is it a bad thing to be seen out in your curlers? Is it like, oh, she's got no self-respect?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. What would happen is like some ruckus would happen in Weatherfield. And then one of the women who's inside doing the perm would sort of have to run outside in the

• 10:03Speaker 01

  Dressing gown.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Dressing gown and stuff and the curlers. And they'd be like, ah, what are you doing, Jack?

• 10:08Speaker 01

  We've all been there. It's good. It's good.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  That's basically all episodes of Coronation Street for the last 60 years.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Love it.

• 10:17Speaker 00

  Well, on China, China kept the hairnet industry going. So people decided they wanted hairnets made of human hair around the turn of the 20th century.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Really?

• 10:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Make them out of human hair. Cause then they're sort of invisible. They disappear into your hair.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  That's just a wig, isn't it?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  It's a wig but with most of the hair missing.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 10:36Speaker 00

  So a net just made out of woven hair. So that it looks realistic or so that it sort of disappears into your hair.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:43Speaker 00

  Um, anyway, they, Americans imported them from Germany for ages, early 1900s. And then someone opening their hair net from Germany, found a little cut, newspaper cutting in Chinese. And they went and investigated the German factories and they'd been importing them from China, where a million women were employed making hairnets out of men's hair. So it was the time in the Manchu dynasty where men had those long plats at the back. So there was a lot of long hair to be cut off.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  I'm sorry.

• 11:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  A million women.

• 11:11Speaker 00

  That's correct.

• 11:12Speaker 01

  I know that China's got a big population.

• 11:14Speaker 03

  It does.

• 11:14Speaker 01

  But at the time, it would have been.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  It was smaller.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  Two hundred million, three hundred million, like two hundred million tops.

• 11:20Speaker 00

  And I want to correct myself, it was only half a million women.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Oh, well.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  Oh, that's completely.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  But there was a big mirror at the side of the factory.

• 11:29Speaker 00

  There was a shortage of nurses in China as a result.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  I'm not surprised.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  I'm not surprised.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  And what was the controversy with this? Because that does sound above board. It's guys cutting off their hair, it was being made into hairnets. Was it that Germany was palming it off as if they were making it?

• 11:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, Germany was claiming they were making, but they were actually exploiting cheap Chinese labour, which thank God we don't do anymore.

• 11:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Um, in order to import.

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Agreed. When I say what's the problem, that wasn't part of what I meant.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  It's just capitalism, guys.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  I'll give you a hairnet controversy, just while we're still on those. Um, in 2000, a British celebrity did not wear one.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  And it led to, led to controversy.

• 12:06Speaker 02

  I'm gonna say enemy of the podcast.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Who's that?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  Greg Wallace?

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Not Greg Wallace, another.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  I thought it might be an on the suit man who doesn't really need one, but they wanted them to wear it.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  I'd say this man didn't really need one, even in 2000 when he was a younger man. He's not with us anymore.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Dan does an incredible impression of him.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  Oh, that could be anyone.

• 12:25Speaker 00

  Oh, Prince Philip.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Prince Philip.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  Prince Philip was visiting a factory in an Australian place called Wagga.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  Which we've talked about before, because it's spelt Wagga Wagga, but it's pronounced Wagga. Once.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Just that?

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 00

  And you only say one Wagga?

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 00

  That's wild.

• 12:46Speaker 02

  It's got a silent Wagga.

• 12:47Speaker 01

  It's got a silent Wagga.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  That's extraordinary.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  If you've ever been to Wagga, mama, that's where it's from. It's misconception that that's ancient. Anyway, Prince Philip was in Wagga. And he was visiting a cheese factory, but there were shots of him released to the public that showed him surrounded by people wearing hairnets and he was leaning over a big vat of cheese. But they said they were considering saving the 24 cubic feet of cheese, which they might have to destroy, and releasing a batch of Prince Philip cheese. I think that's not a nice product.

• 13:18Speaker 02

  I don't think so, no.

• 13:19Speaker 00

  A dam would pay a lot for that.

• 13:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know me. And that was 2000.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And just to think, just three years later, the most expensive hairnet will be sold at auction.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  It was a big era for hairnets, wasn't it?

• 13:33Speaker 01

  I did a deep dive on BBC news stories that involved the word hairnet. That's where those both came from.

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Right. A deep dive.

• 13:41Speaker 00

  How deeply talking here?

• 13:42Speaker 01

  I went back a quarter of a century. What do you want?

• 13:46Speaker 00

  You know, around the same time as this hairnet debacle that I mentioned, not your Prince Philip debacle, America's first female self-made millionaire happened, made herself. And she made it in the hair product industry.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Really?

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah. America's first female self-made industry was a woman called Madame C J Walker. And she specialised in haircare products for African American women. And she made herself a millionaire. She was literally, she was the first member of her family born out of slavery. Born into complete poverty, orphaned, married at 14, widowed at 20 with two kids, became a millionaire. She used to sell sulphur and she was a very good marketer, because I don't know if it worked to actually do much good to hair. It just stank like sulphur. But she made herself a millionaire from it.

• 14:30Speaker 02

  Good there.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Cool.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Um, hygiene in kitchens.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Probably, we can say, Karam did a little bit, but Escoffier is the main one. We mentioned Escoffier a little bit in the past. He is like a big, famous, old chef who worked at the Savoy in the late 19th century, I think. Uh, but he basically got into the Savoy kitchen and other ones and just saw that they were really horrible places to work, you know, lots of smoke. People weren't really doing any hygiene, any sanitation, anything like that. If you had any hydration at all, it came in the form of wine. You just drink a load of wine. Uh, so he kind of invented the idea of the tall hat that they wear, uh, the neckerchief that you have to kind of keep all the sweat in. Uh, and he also commissioned a French doctor to develop a special barley drink,

• 15:20Speaker 02

  uh, that he would give to all of his chefs so they could keep hydrated without drinking any wine. Mmm, nice.

• 15:26Speaker 00

  Sounds like it was just beer.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  Um, it could have been.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  Barley water.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  It could be barley water, like you have at Wimbledon. Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  I do like, I like a bit of barley water.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  You do surprise me, Andy.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  We've been to the pub enough times. Okay, a glass of wine, pint of riddles for Dan and Andy. Oh, another barley water. Okay.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, small. Yeah, yeah. I love that. I hadn't clocked that the chef's outfit would largely be to keep you out of the food that you were making.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, kind of. And the white bit was from Karam who came before him and that was to show off if there's any stains and stuff so you can see.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  And if they're saying, is it good or bad? Like, it's good because it shows that you've been near the food?

• 16:03Speaker 02

  No, it's bad. And it shows that once there's so many stains that your shirt is no longer white, you probably need to swap it for a white one.

• 16:10Speaker 00

  Gotcha. Yeah, fair enough. No, just checking because I'd be suspicious that you're not the real cook.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Oh, like never trust a skinny cook, that kind of thing.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Same with your, same with your bed sheets, for instance. You know, white bed sheets because they're suspicious. No one's ever slept in them.

• 16:24Speaker 00

  Exactly. I need to know.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  You can tell a few stains are on.

• 16:27Speaker 00

  They need to be tried and tested. I want to be the 10th or the 11th user.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Whenever you visit a travel lodge, you're like, there'd have to be a few stains on this at least.

• 16:36Speaker 00

  Yeah. And you do the quick, the hand test to make sure it's a bit damp. Yeah.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  I've signed up to Food Safety Magazine off the back of this research. Right. They haven't asked me for any money, but I am willing to pay.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  It's an American publication and they do a, well, as it sounds, it's Food Safety Magazine. Yeah. They've got their own podcast.

• 16:55Speaker 02

  Do they?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Any nuggets from them? I only got as far as the initial sponsorship advert, which is by, they're sponsored by IFC Chlorine Dioxide Treatments. Okay. But where, where, guys, we're, we're available to advertise chlorine dioxide treatment. Is all your research time now taken up with? Membership. Membership forms. Managing memberships mostly.

• 17:18Speaker 02

  Is it because you have so much fun doing our inbox that you just want more and more emails to go into your personal inbox?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's becoming a bit overwhelming. The heritage crafts industry, the lighthouse people, the, what's on the wallpaper history society?

• 17:36Speaker 02

  The Earthweb Society.

• 17:37Speaker 01

  The Earthwebs, they still haven't got in touch. They've got £5 of my money. I've heard nothing from them. They've gone underground.

• 17:48Speaker 00

  Stop the podcast.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  Stop the podcast.

• 17:50Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  That's right. So everyone talks about how challenging it is to raise kids, but what about protecting them? I'm talking outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks, baby gates. Where do you even start?

• 18:03Speaker 00

  Yes, it is a nightmare. Well, protecting your home and your auto is a great place to start.

• 18:10Speaker 01

  Progressive offers customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage for you and your loved ones.

• 18:16Speaker 00

  They're basically the outlet covers, kitchen cabinet locks and baby gates of insurance.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Don't wait. Get your quote today at progressive.com.

• 18:23Speaker 00

  Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states. On with the show.

• 18:32Speaker 01

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

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Okay, my fact this week is that the fourth US president, James Madison, liked to get piggybacks off his wife.

• 18:45Speaker 01

  Really sweet.

• 18:45Speaker 02

  We all would, wouldn't we?

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  If it was possible.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 18:48Speaker 00

  Would you? Because I think it probably is. I reckon Paulina could go a couple of yards.

• 18:54Speaker 02

  I'm afraid, I don't think so.

• 18:56Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  I think I'm a bit heavy for her, as much as she has been to the gym recently. Suspicious amount, in fact, but never mind, let's move on.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  She's not getting any fists, though.

• 19:08Speaker 02

  So I read this on the website of James Madison's Montpellier, which is a plantation house of the Madison family, and the anecdote comes from someone who was talking about the guided tour that they'd been on and all the facts that they'd learned there. And I think we've said before on this podcast that James Madison was five foot four.

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  So he's very small, he's about the same height as Helen Mirren, Kevin Hart, and the official cutoff for height to join the US Air Force.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 19:35Speaker 02

  But he was a very small man, and it meant that his wife could carry him. And the anecdote goes that he and some of his friends are in the gardens, and they were messing around and joshing around, and they would have races, and during these races, sometimes Dolly Madison, his wife, would carry him.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Great stuff. I didn't realise that the thing that was holding other presidents back from piggybacking on their wives was the fact that they were too big for their wives to carry them.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  What did you think was holding them back? Dignity or?

• 20:02Speaker 00

  Maybe dignity. Why would you? There are other modes of transport that are faster, more convenient.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  It's been such long times since anyone gave me a piggyback.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  What's been holding you back?

• 20:11Speaker 01

  I haven't asked.

• 20:13Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Do you want one after the show? I would love one, actually.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  All right, would you?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  I really would. It's just nice to get a piggyback from someone, isn't it?

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think, like, if you go to gigs, sometimes people might carry you on their shoulders.

• 20:24Speaker 00

  That's a shoulder ride. It's a completely different cut, and you can't, it's like comparing chalk and cheese.

• 20:29Speaker 01

  Well, also the kind of gigs I'm going to are mostly like the Barbican or... Maybe Junior Glynnborn, but there are very few people riding on each other's shoulders.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Folks are just clarinetting, so just handy.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Chalk and cheese both begin with C H, of course, which makes them a little bit similar in the same way that piggybacks and shoulder rides are quite similar.

• 20:48Speaker 00

  Really good point.

• 20:50Speaker 01

  So Madison?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  Had, as we've said, the shortest presidency?

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Uh, no.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Well, he, he was only five.

• 20:56Speaker 02

  William Henry Harrison.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  He was only five foot four, so he had the shortest.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 21:03Speaker 02

  Who's the shortest prime minister? Liz Truss must be there or thereabouts.

• 21:07Speaker 00

  What a good question. I think Thatcher was pretty short, wasn't she?

• 21:10Speaker 02

  Was she?

• 21:11Speaker 01

  Come on, guys, you can't just pick the women.

• 21:13Speaker 00

  I'm just saying the women, aren't I?

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Women on average are shorter than men.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Average they are, I know. I was surprised at Helen Mirren's five foot four.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 01

  That has taken me by surprise.

• 21:20Speaker 00

  Yes, yes, that's a good, that's a good fact.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  Um, but prime ministers, uh. Shortest PM, I feel like Disraeli would have been quite diminutive. It'll probably be one of the 18th century people who hasn't fed well enough as a child. William Pitt the shorter, it was Pitt the shorter, yeah, yes. I want to say Churchill, but I think that's just because he looks like a baby, so I'm, I'm. Yeah, you're projecting that a lot. I'm projecting his height.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Anyway.

• 21:44Speaker 00

  Is this what the podcast has become? You guys just speculate about something no one knows the answer to, they'll be quite boring facts anyway.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  It's more like a shitty quiz show now, yeah. Madison, James Madison.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, here's the big deal. One of the early ones, so like one of the founding fathers, friends with all the big guys that you've heard of, but probably of those first four or five, the least famous, I would say, maybe John Adams a little bit, but.

• 22:05Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 22:06Speaker 02

  He was president during the War of 1812, when the British burned down the White House, and he was the one who had to leg it with Dolly, in fact.

• 22:14Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:15Speaker 02

  Uh, and there's a story that Dolly grabbed the portrait of George Washington before they left because she was so patriotic, she was like, we definitely need to keep this. Forget about all the cutlery and stuff, I'm going to take this. But I think it's, it's not exactly a myth, but it's an exaggeration.

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Well, she, she certainly said it, um, so she claimed it, and we should say, when we say she grabbed it, there's no claim that she grabbed it, as with all these things in that age, she stood by ordering people. Who were enslaved to her to grab it. But yeah, she got, she got some people to take the portrait off the wall, she claims and roll it up.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Fifteen year old Paul Jennings, who was born into slavery, but he's a very interesting guy. He, so he and two other servants helped to pull this portrait off the wall and haul it out. He later on, I think he gained his freedom. He planned the largest ever mass escape from Washington DC in history in 1848 of those who were still slaves. And he wrote the first White House memoir ever.

• 23:14Speaker 03

  Did he?

• 23:14Speaker 01

  It was called A Coloured Man's Reminiscences of James Madison. So he was a big deal.

• 23:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, fascinating life. And because this had happened at the age of 15, you know.

• 23:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  And he lived, I think, to a ripe old age.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 23:26Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Madison was a great writer as well. So for example, George Washington gave an address to Congress, April 30th, 1789. It was the first presidential inaugural address that was drafted by James Madison. There was a response from the House of Representatives to what he had said in this speech. And that was written by James Madison. So James Madison wrote the reply to the speech that he wrote. The president wrote back to the reply and that was also written by James Madison. So he was playing as the writer. It's wild.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Keir Starmer wishes this is how politics were still done. And Kenny, I will now write your reply to me and I'll write my response to that.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  One biography reported, he was a miserable public speaker who tended to lapse into inaudible mumbling. He had very poor health and I don't think, I think he was very impressive as an intellectual powerhouse, but he was not physically imposing or, you know, a brilliant speaker or anything like that.

• 24:18Speaker 02

  Well, thankfully, America never got any more presidents who just mumbled incoherently.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Yep, fine. So he did have these health problems and he had these attacks in quote marks, which were sort of similar to epilepsy. But it's not certain whether, you know, because diagnosis from that, from now till then is quite tricky. But apparently he refused to travel to Europe in case he had an attack and fell into the sea.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  He was also really important in the Louisiana Purchase.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  Which I had not properly understood. I thought, big deal, it's Louisiana. It's actually fifteen modern states, part of all of them. It doubled the size of America and it was owned by

• 24:56Speaker 02

  France.

• 24:57Speaker 01

  That's right. Yeah, he was really key in the purchase. That was under a previous president, I think, but he was, he was very instrumental in it. And that blocked Spain and France from further colonization.

• 25:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  I think that was what King Charles made a joke about in his speech recently.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  He said, we'd all be speaking French if it wasn't for us.

• 25:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  Yes, right.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  And he made a joke about burning down the White House in 1812, didn't he? He made a lot of Madison-centric jokes.

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:21Speaker 02

  Now I'm wondering if Madison Wright had written that speech at all.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Do not open till year 2026. And where would you guys say he sits in the, the sort of list of influential presidents? Because it sounds like he kind of shaped the country, but it's not a name that I would say as a non-American that you would put up there as the Rushmore, right?

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Honestly, my only list of American presidents goes in chronological order.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  So I have him fourth.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Well, that's pretty high. That's pretty good. But it's kind of like how your early birthdays are more significant than later ones.

• 25:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Like turning twelve, turning seventeen, turning twenty-four. When you turn twenty-four, that's a big deal.

• 25:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, sure. You learn to walk and you learn to speak and you learn to do all this between second and third birthdays.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 02

  But just because it's, all that stuff happens nice and early.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So Madison, he did do the Constitution and he did do all of Washington's speeches and stuff. But yeah, there was lots of that stuff happening at that time.

• 26:14Speaker 01

  That's because Washington was just crapping and sleeping all the time as a one-year-old.

• 26:19Speaker 00

  He once had his hat stolen and it meant that he couldn't leave the house for days.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Uh, why were you not allowed to leave the house without your hat?

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Well, you could, but it was a bit embarrassing socially, wasn't it? It was like leaving, leaving the house without your trousers. And this is an anecdote he told to a pal in his old age. So I think he was dryly witty. He's a very understated president. There's not that much like flashy stuff about him. But I think he said funny things. And he once said to his friend in old age, did I ever tell you about the time my hat was stolen? He said, I was staying in Williamsburg and my hat was stolen out of a window that I'd left it on. It was nabbed. And I was about a mile from the palace that I had to go and visit people in, but I was kept from going there for two days by the impossibility of getting a hat of any kind. And he said, at last I obtained one from a little Frenchman who sold snuff. Very coarse. An extremely small crown.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Wait, snuff was?

• 27:07Speaker 00

  I believe the snuff was very cool.

• 27:08Speaker 02

  All right.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  Not necessarily.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  The Frenchman wasn't saying, fuck off, it's my hat.

• 27:15Speaker 00

  But yeah, I like the idea. You lose your hat, then you're imprisoned.

• 27:18Speaker 01

  What a stupid place to leave your hat, if that's the most important thing. On a window, sir. Yeah, on an open window. Yeah.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  Glue it to your head.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Back to Dolly for a second.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  Oh, yes.

• 27:28Speaker 02

  She popularised ice cream in America.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Did she?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, she used to do these sort of parties on Wednesday nights where everyone was allowed to have ice creams. And the interesting thing about that, because we mentioned another African American self-made millionaire. The person who made her ice cream was someone called Augustus Jackson. And he kind of came up with the idea of adding salt to the mixture, which helps. I think we've said before, that's kind of the best way to make ice cream because you add salt to it and it does an endothermic reaction, which makes it cool down quicker.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  But that was his idea. And then from being the White House ice cream person, he started some ice cream shops in Philadelphia and became one of the wealthiest men in Philadelphia because he was the ice cream maker to the president. And then he did his own shops.

• 28:19Speaker 01

  Very cool. She was very interesting though, Dolly, because she was born a Quaker. And her father, who was called John Payne, had been kicked out of the Quakers because his starch business had failed. And apparently the Quakers were really down on that sort of thing. You failed in your starch business. No, sorry, you're out.

• 28:39Speaker 02

  Really?

• 28:39Speaker 01

  I know, I'm surprised by that because they've got such a great rep.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they're very into hardworking business people, aren't they?

• 28:45Speaker 01

  Ah, yes, that's a good point. Well, anyway, then she had an early marriage and she was widowed. And then I think Madison saw her in the street and said, who's that widow? And.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  How did he know? Was she wearing a big W?

• 28:57Speaker 01

  I don't know, I don't know.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Did you check that he didn't leave his hat next to his widow?

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Amazing. And then he intervened with Aaron Burr, who was a friend of his, and Aaron Burr of, like, co-star of Hamilton fame. And then, but anyway, so she'd been widowed and then she and Madison get together and then they get married. And then when they got married, she was kicked out of the Quakers. So she and her father alike had both been kicked out of the Quakers, but for different reasons.

• 29:23Speaker 02

  Did she get kicked out for marrying?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  For marrying out of the faith, basically. Which, yeah, yeah, which she had done, and they, yeah. She was, um, she was very popular, wasn't she? And her funeral, it's the largest funeral that Washington DC had ever seen at that point. Yeah, she was a very big public figure. Congress adjourned and so did the Supreme Court and they all joined. President Zachary Taylor escorting the coffin. And then she became a sort of merchandise item. Kind of like, if you imagine after her death, kind of like how Diana, you know, you'd see her on plates and posters.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  And ice cream, Dolly Madison ice cream.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. She became a product. Is that a brand?

• 29:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a brand that went until the 1980s, I think.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  And it was spelled differently.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, they spelled it wrong, didn't they?

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Everyone spelled it without an E until there was a New York Times article in like 1950s. It was like, Dolly Madison's spelled with an E.

• 30:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, we should say, we haven't said yet, her name is spelled with an E.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  But I think that was implied by my story, wasn't it?

• 30:15Speaker 01

  No, it's true, but anyone listening will have probably been thinking Dolly like Parton all this time, you know. I think she was one of the very few women ever to be first lady for more than one president. Cause when Madison became president, she had already been first lady de facto for Thomas Jefferson.

• 30:32Speaker 00

  As in like organising his parties and stuff, not shagging him, right?

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I, no comment. Definitely organising parties.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  I'm not sure shagging the president is part of first lady duty, certainly at the moment.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  But basically before, before, you know, she was involved, there were like, it was quite fraught relationships between the, as it was the Democrat Republicans, wasn't it, as one party and the Federalists as the other. And relations were very fraught and they would easily turn to quarrels and violence. And basically these mixes that she held enforced pleasant hanging out and basically allowed a more of a political culture to emerge that would not be based on violence. And then Madison became president later on and she, she helped him throw his balls. And that was very important.

• 31:18Speaker 00

  The phrase enforced pleasant hanging out is quite Orwellian, isn't it?

• 31:21Speaker 02

  What it is we're doing now.

• 31:25Speaker 00

  Andy's parties are like, I am enforcing some pleasant hanging out for 10 minutes.

• 31:31Speaker 02

  Get your barley water.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  Dolly was the first person to send a telegraph. The first normal person, not professional person, whose job it was, like Samuel Morse, to invent the telegraph.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 31:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  What did it say?

• 31:44Speaker 00

  It was one of those really, really boring ones. So Samuel Morse, who invented the telegraph, had laid a line of wire between Washington and Baltimore. And really tragically for President Tyler, who was the president at the time, Morse said, right, shall we get the president to send the first telegraph? And the whole crowd went boo, no, he's shit, because they all hated him. And everyone said, get Dolly, Madison's widow, everyone loves her, she's a laugh. So she was called for and she was asked what she wanted to say. And when you're put on the, on the spot like that, you can't think of anything. So she just said, okay, send it to my friend, Mrs Wetherd, who lives there, saying, Dolly Madison sends her love to Mrs Wetherd.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  That's all right.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and everyone was like, Dolly, this is going to arrive in 15 minutes, she'll be able to reply. And actually, Mrs Wetherd didn't get it for another six days because there was no means of getting the telegraph from the station to her house at the other end.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Lovely.

• 32:33Speaker 00

  And then she replied by letter, saying, I went to the station, but the, the equipment had broken and so they couldn't send a reply. So it took about three weeks to transmit the message and get a response.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  All right. A bit harsh on Tyler, I think, who in my list is probably the 10th president.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, but back then, that was the last.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  That's true.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Piggybacks are nothing to do with pigs.

• 32:59Speaker 02

  Is that true?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  So what are they? It comes from, originally from pick pack, which just meant carrying something on your back. And then that became pick back. And pick back dates from 1736, but pigs don't do piggybacks, of course. It's a silly, it's a silly thing to say.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  If a pig looks like it's giving another one a piggyback, they're probably having sex.

• 33:18Speaker 01

  Well, exactly.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  I'm not giving you a piggyback anymore.

• 33:28Speaker 03

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, that is Andy.

• 33:32Speaker 01

  My fact is that the world's oceans contain 38,000 billion tonnes of baking soda.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  What a thought.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 02

  Well, they're big, aren't they, oceans?

• 33:45Speaker 01

  They're big, but 38,000 billion tonnes?

• 33:47Speaker 02

  To me, honestly, that could be one part in a quintillion.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Or it could be half of all the water. I just can't judge it.

• 33:57Speaker 03

  And is that, are those in like deposits underneath the?

• 34:01Speaker 01

  I'm so glad you asked. No, so this is, um, this is mostly in the form of dissolved bicarbonate. Okay, so the thing we're talking about now, get excited, guys, is sodium bicarbonate. And this, uh, I found in a report in The Guardian, which is all about a new plan, basically. It's an idea, a proposal to lock up carbon and carbon dioxide in the ocean by adding alkaline chemicals, right? So the ocean is becoming more acidic because of all the carbon that we're adding to the atmosphere. That's a problem. It leads to big problems for fish and it leads to big problems for all sorts of marine life. So you could theoretically do a thing called ocean alkalinity enhancement. You add alkaline chemicals to the ocean. That helps the ocean absorb more carbon, you know, slows down global warming.

• 34:44Speaker 02

  Can I just say, we've said over the years so many times that these great ideas tend to sometimes fuck up to a massive extent. Is there a chance that this might happen here?

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Always a chance. Um, but there's been a recent experiment, a small scale one, uh, called Lock Ness, which took place where? That's right, the Gulf of Maine.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  You can imagine my disappointment when I discovered your factors about the locking ocean carbon in the north east shelf and slope project.

• 35:12Speaker 01

  But they, they tried it. They released 65,000 litres, which is not a tiny amount of this alkaline chemical to see what happened. And the alkalinity went back to pre-industrial levels in the area and it didn't harm any creatures that they've been able to tell. So as you say, there is always a risk it'll be done wrong or that it can't be done at scale, but it's a, it's a proposal.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Wait, sorry, but can I ask about the 38,000 billion tonnes of baking soda in the oceans?

• 35:34Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 35:35Speaker 00

  What's that about?

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Well.

• 35:38Speaker 02

  That's just evidence that it already, some of it's there, or?

• 35:41Speaker 00

  Sounds like a lot of it's there. There's naturally occurring bicarbonate and sodium ions, which I guess together are bicarbonate of soda.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, HCO3, so that's hydrogen, carbon and a few oxygen molecules, is baking.

• 35:55Speaker 00

  It's baking without the soda.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Yes, because then you need to add salt to make it, to make it baking soda. But basically, this is the boring technical bit. When carbon dioxide dissolves into seawater, it forms carbonic acid and then that breaks down into hydrogen and bicarbonate. So.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Right. A follow up question. 38,000 billion.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:15Speaker 03

  I'm sure there must be a numerical word for what that is without the billion, right?

• 36:19Speaker 01

  Pass over to my colleague with the maths degree.

• 36:21Speaker 02

  38 trillion.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  And every bit deserved, I'd say, that maths degree.

• 36:28Speaker 03

  Well, this is quite a problematic headline, isn't it? The number's wrong. It's got nothing to do with the Loch Ness monster and it might fuck up our oceans.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  I don't, it's not going to any worse than they've already been. I promise that. Basically, this is about this stuff baking soda, which I did not realise exists naturally in the world. I thought bicarbonate soda, the stuff everyone has in their cupboard when they're trying to bake a cake, I thought that was made rather than, some places you can mine it out of the ground.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just rock, isn't it?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are massive deposits in Wyoming and Colorado. Wyoming's Green River Basin contains 127 billion tonnes of this stuff called Trona.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  How is it not rising all the time whenever it gets hot?

• 37:11Speaker 00

  Do we know if the amount of bicarbonate of soda, which I think is fair to say is in the ocean, because just in case there are real pedants out there, it does require sodium, but there are lots of sodium ions in the ocean as well.

• 37:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not in the, it's not like, it's not like there's a pile of it at the base of the ocean. Exactly. I think this is, this is the scientist who was talking about it saying, this is how much you could get out of the ocean.

• 37:31Speaker 00

  Yes. Do we know if it's the right proportion of that compared to the ocean to make a giant cake? Like, is it an ocean cake?

• 37:38Speaker 01

  What a good question.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  How much flour would we have to dump into the Atlantic?

• 37:42Speaker 01

  A lot.

• 37:43Speaker 00

  I live next door to a mill, actually. I could see if they've got any.

• 37:47Speaker 02

  Going to bear. And the other good thing about bicarbonate, which is in the ocean, is if it gets near any calcium, then it can turn into calcium carbonate, which is shells of clams and mussels and crabs and stuff like that. So that can get locked up inside the animals, which is a really good way of sequestering chemicals.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  This is how some things like oysters are sort of technically carbon negative. They just grow in the sea, they form this shell, which as long as you're not burning the shell, which most people don't do, then it's just the carbon is staying locked up in there.

• 38:20Speaker 03

  Yeah. Wow, that is very interesting. Bicarb is cool stuff. Everyone's got it, but I didn't know anything about it.

• 38:24Speaker 02

  I've got some in my cupboard that when I first got married and started making cakes for my wife, I bought and have not opened it since. And what I learned is it goes off, right? I thought it probably didn't, but I think it stops working as well because oxygen gets in and it.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  You're joking?

• 38:41Speaker 00

  It does. I've, I've never started baking a cake without realising that my bicarb won't work because it's too off to be functional anymore. It's so annoying.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Really?

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I go through it quite fast.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  Do you?

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it's, I think it's crazy that it lasts 50 million years from when it formed under this lake in Wyoming. And then, once you get into your cupboard.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Two years. Oh, sorry. That's done. Yeah.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Baking soda though, it's used in the medical industry as an injectable product. It helps for people who are undergoing cardiac arrest, people who are having heart surgery, chemotherapy, they often use it for. There's been huge problems because there's been shortages of it. And it's so essential that they've had to put off surgeries or send patients to other hospitals because it's such an essential item.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Is it that they get to the cupboard and think, oh, it's gone off? I should have done more surgeries with it.

• 39:28Speaker 00

  And it's basically this, it's basically this quality of it to make something alkaline, isn't it? So if you have acidification of your blood or if you have been poisoned and your kidneys have stopped working, so they can't keep the blood pH good anymore, you just like eat a bunch of cake or have bicarb injected into you.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Yeah. You've got bicarb in your stomach all the time, whether you've eaten some or not, because the mucus lining of your stomach has got bicarbonate in it. And that's what stops the acid from eating away at your stomach lining.

• 39:58Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 39:58Speaker 01

  And yet, when I leave it out of my cake recipe and just tell my guests, look, it's in your stomach already. So can you just eat this completely flat dough and just let your stomach do it?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  It's actually B E Y O on the. BYOB, where the B stands for bike up. Brilliant.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  True baking powder. There was another thing called pearl ash, which was a kind of baking soda. But true baking powder was invented by someone we've come across before, a man called Alfred Byrd. And Alfred Byrd created Byrd's custard powder.

• 40:28Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 40:29Speaker 02

  Because his wife was allergic to eggs. So he thought, well, I'm going to make this powder that will make you custard, but you don't need the eggs in it. But his wife, who was called Lady Byrd, later.

• 40:40Speaker 03

  Brilliant.

• 40:41Speaker 02

  She was also allergic to yeast. So he developed baking powder because she couldn't put yeast in her bread. Then he gave it to troops in the Crimean War and they became huge.

• 40:52Speaker 00

  What a great husband, though.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 40:55Speaker 00

  Good guy. You don't get a lot of those around that time, you know, it's important to call them out when you do.

• 40:58Speaker 03

  Yep. Other businesses that are to do with baking powder that were interesting from the early days, 1891, William Wrigley started a soap company. And as part of trying to shift the soap, he gave baking powder alongside it. It proved so popular that he then became a baking powder company because it was way more popular than the soap. So he thought, okay, how are we now going to get baking powder shifting? So he added two packs of gum that you would get along with the baking powder. And then everyone was like, this gum is amazing. And so that became the business. And that's where it finally ended. Wrigley's gum, as we know it, is that. That's the journey it made to get there. Yeah.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  That's great.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  Wow. Baking powder, of course, not the same as baking soda, we should say. So baking powder is when you've added the acid to the alkaline. And then you add the thing that stops them reacting with each other straight away. So you add like a buffer. So that's how they're different.

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Yes. If you add baking soda, you then need to add an acid in your recipe, something like buttermilk or whatever.

• 41:54Speaker 02

  Here's something you can make with baking soda. Get your dried marrow fat peas. Put them in water, add baking soda, rinse them and you get the northern delicacy, mushy peas.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  I didn't know mushy peas are made with baking soda.

• 42:12Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  But the problem is, apparently, according to what I've read now, by adding that baking soda, it basically removes all of the vitamins.

• 42:20Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 42:21Speaker 00

  Really?

• 42:22Speaker 02

  All of the goodness.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 42:24Speaker 00

  Oh, dear.

• 42:25Speaker 02

  And there was an American writer with the brilliant name Tabitha Tickletooth in 1860, who wrote, "Never, under any circumstances, unless you wish entirely to destroy all flavour and reduce your peas to pulp, boil them with soda. This favourite atrocity of the English kitchen cannot be too strongly condemned."

• 42:45Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 42:46Speaker 00

  That's great. So mushy peas are just a way of making peas really unhealthy?

• 42:49Speaker 02

  I'm afraid it appears that it might be.

• 42:51Speaker 01

  That's devastating, because whenever I get fish and chips, I think, well, this is all, this is all like batter and chips, but at least, at least there's a small green pile of mushy peas.

• 43:00Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Wow. Tabitha Tickletooth.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  I know.

• 43:04Speaker 01

  Oh, man, that is a sitcom. It's used for everything, though, baking soda.

• 43:09Speaker 00

  Every problem you have that you Google, they recommend baking soda, don't they?

• 43:12Speaker 01

  It's in some fireworks, it's a disinfectant, it can be a fire extinguisher, it prevents sheep bloat, it's in mouthwash, it polishes silver, deodorises furniture. It does feel like what is your luxury item to Desert Island Discs. That's such a good shout. It feels like that's what it should be.

• 43:28Speaker 00

  It doesn't work. I've tried for all that cleaning bullshit, they always say, oh, baking soda and vinegar, you try it and then you think, oh, fuck it, I'm getting some bleach.

• 43:35Speaker 02

  Fuck it, I'm buying a new pan.

• 43:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly.

• 43:43Speaker 00

  Stop the podcast.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Stop the podcast.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  Hi, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Progressive.

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• 44:18Speaker 00

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• 44:26Speaker 03

  Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that identical twins often don't know who is who when looking at photos of themselves.

• 44:36Speaker 01

  It's crazy.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Idiots.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  Pools.

• 44:40Speaker 03

  This was a paper, it actually won an Nobel Prize a few years ago. The paper was called "Is That Me or My Twin: Lack of Self-Face Recognition Advantage in Identical Twins." So if you see someone that looks like me in a photo and you say, "Dan, this looks like you," and I say, "I don't think so," it's because I have such good self-face recognition that I'm so good at identifying myself.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  So whenever we get photos sent in the inbox of Hot Dan,

• 45:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  You always go, "It doesn't really look..." I see what they're saying,

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Because it's got glasses and stuff, but it doesn't really look like me.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  Looks like someone more attractive.

• 45:14Speaker 03

  It looks like someone really hot, yeah.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  The Hot Dans have dropped off in the inbox recently.

• 45:19Speaker 00

  Have they? Is this a new...

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, Hot Dan is a people's spot... Hot Dan's out and about.

• 45:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, okay.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  Not Dan.

• 45:25Speaker 00

  I could have stopped at that. Hot Dan, Not Dan.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  Hot Dan is Not Dan. Hot Dan is Not Dan. That's a t-shirt.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  So what they wanted to know was if you're an identical twin, what happens there? Do you mistake your twin, or do you have such great self-face recognition that you can just instantly tell? So that was the point of the test. And so they got a group of twins to sit down, and they were shown pictures of either them or their twin, and they had to make quick responses to tell. As part of a control group, they got a friend or a relative of someone close to the twins to make the decisions as well. And they discovered that, yeah, identical twins aren't actually very good at identifying themselves. They showed them a few permutations. You would see the photo the right way up, then upside down. They were less good, obviously, when it was upside down, but they still weren't great when it was the right way up.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  I mean, they are identical. But it's not like they're morons here.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  They're not identical.

• 46:19Speaker 00

  Well, they do look quite similar to each other, usually, don't they?

• 46:22Speaker 02

  They do, but think of all the sets of twins that you know who are identical twins. They are all slightly different from each other, right?

• 46:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, no, I don't. But to be fair, they were shown... You say they had to have quick responses. It was 0.03 seconds they had.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 46:35Speaker 00

  In the study.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  Okay. Considering like reaction time of a human is 0.0273.

• 46:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, so it's really a test to show that even if you barely see something, you instantly recognize yourself.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  Have we not checked that maybe all twins have very poor reaction times? That could be what we should do.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  It could be. I actually slightly tested this because my mum is over from Australia. She's a twin and we had a birthday, so her sister Rosie was over. And we have a book that was done for them of a lot of photos of them as kids and teenagers. So I showed it to them upside down to see if they could guess. And they were quite good, actually, at guessing.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  If your mum and your mum's identical twin sister had married identical twin brothers, then you genetically, understandably if you work out how the maths works, because identical twins are genetically identical to each other. Genetically, your cousins would be your siblings, right?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Genetically, yeah, okay.

• 47:25Speaker 00

  Yes, and there is an actual word for that. It's called quaternary twins. It's happened enough that people have got a word for it. There are about 300 cases in the world where identical twins marry identical twins and their kids are called quaternary siblings.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Here is something wild, which I don't think we've talked about.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Some twins.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  Can have different fathers to each other.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  Uh huh.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  We said this, this is a thing called heteropaternal superfecundation, okay?

• 47:54Speaker 00

  Catchy.

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, there are not many cases worldwide. There are fewer than 20, I think, that have been recorded. And it's where a woman releases more than one egg.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  She then will have more than one partner during her fertile window. Those two eggs are fertilized with sperm from two different men, but they are twins.

• 48:15Speaker 02

  Mm hmm, because they're both implanted into the womb at the same time.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  So you could be, you can have a twin who is also a half sibling.

• 48:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, you have to have shagged in a very short window, don't you? Because it's only about 48 hours that your eggs last.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  I left my wife in an open window.

• 48:33Speaker 02

  It was a very short window, but.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  You need to do some careful diary planning, but yeah, it can happen. We talked recently about this idea of siblings being born a very long time apart.

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Because of.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  Twin cop.

• 48:47Speaker 01

  Okay, you're jumping the gun on me, but yeah. Because you can have embryos that stay frozen for a long time and then, you know, and then implanted many years later.

• 48:55Speaker 02

  And Anna, Andy has been trying to push quite a lot of cop dramas on us. And one of them is twin cops, but the twins are born 50 years apart. So one of them is about to retire and the other one's a new rookie to the force.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, but they're twins.

• 49:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's brilliant. I love it. I love it. Why aren't you guys millionaires from this already?

• 49:14Speaker 01

  I forgot there is a TV series starring David Mitchell called Ludwig, where his twin brother has gone missing, who was a cop.

• 49:21Speaker 02

  Oh, is there?

• 49:21Speaker 01

  And he has to pretend to be his cop twin brother to solve the mystery of where his twin has gone.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  Similar, but they're missing. And actually, there's the one with Mike Bubbins in where he gets frozen and then comes back and he's the same age as his daughter.

• 49:34Speaker 01

  Yes, that's very good. Mammoth.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the two, if you put those two together, this is how we're going to sell it to the commissioners.

• 49:40Speaker 01

  It's like a mix of Ludwig and Mammoth, okay? Obvious. Commissioned now. But there are cases of twin cops, amazingly.

• 49:46Speaker 02

  Is it?

• 49:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is a, there, weirdly, there are two sets of twin cops in Wales at the moment, copping about.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  I don't find that that's surprising, actually, at all.

• 49:55Speaker 00

  Identical or non-identical?

• 49:57Speaker 01

  One is identical and I think one is non-identical.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:59Speaker 02

  As in one pair is identical.

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Jack and Tom Herbert both became officers nine weeks apart in different forces. I think they're non-identical, but Ellen and Lisa Jones, identical twins.

• 50:10Speaker 02

  But also like police families is a thing, I think. Like if members of your family are in the police, you're way more likely to become a police person.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Jack and Tom's dad is a police officer. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's cool though, we've got twin cops. So that's, that's another strand for the bitch document.

• 50:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I can already imagine when the sitcom gets made, that you can have in the sun, it'll be, we're the real life twin cops.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  Lovely.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  The PR campaign is already halfway there.

• 50:37Speaker 00

  Is it not cooler that we've got twin astronauts? And that, I don't think we've mentioned the NASA twin study, which must be the smallest sample size of any study. It's a sample size one that NASA did. Because Scott Kelly, who went into space, his brother Mark is his identical twin. And weirdly, both are astronauts, even though for the study, they didn't both need to be astronauts. In fact, it would have been better if Mark wasn't one, really. Because basically NASA wanted to study if other variables are the same. I, if you're genetically identical and one of you goes to space and then comes back, we can tell the effect that space has had on you.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  But they both went.

• 51:13Speaker 03

  No, one went.

• 51:15Speaker 00

  No, so Scott went, Mark didn't. They must have had to draw straws.

• 51:17Speaker 01

  But they're both astronauts.

• 51:19Speaker 03

  So Anna was saying it was pointless that one of them did all the training to become an astronaut.

• 51:23Speaker 02

  You can be an astronaut and not go into space.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  Well, can you?

• 51:27Speaker 02

  You're kind of, you're usually on the waiting list.

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 51:31Speaker 03

  Technically a terra naught, I guess, yeah.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Do you think as soon as you come back to earth, you stop being an astronaut again? Because someone says, what do you do? You just say unemployed.

• 51:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, because they would have been identical, like what?

• 51:42Speaker 02

  A astronaut.

• 51:43Speaker 01

  There we go.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  There we go.

• 51:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, lovely.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  But yeah, that would have been a fight, right? To have, they'd have exactly the same skills, basically.

• 51:51Speaker 02

  I don't think usually with NASA, when you've got two people going for the job, they don't have a fight.

• 51:56Speaker 00

  WWF.

• 51:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, isn't that, I thought that's how they do it. That's the videos I've seen.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  If you are an astronaut and a twin, though, presumably you're better at recognizing yourself upside down.

• 52:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Because you're flailing about in space.

• 52:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, good.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Didn't one of them become a big deal politician?

• 52:12Speaker 00

  Yes, he did. The other, the one who wasn't an astronaut, according to you.

• 52:17Speaker 00

  Yeah, he did, senator. And his wife was a congressman who was almost killed, in fact, in an assassination attempt.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  What did they find in the end? Did they find?

• 52:24Speaker 00

  Very little.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Oh, he didn't like have alien DNA or anything?

• 52:27Speaker 00

  I think it was a bit of a PR stunt, to be honest. I mean, because also.

• 52:32Speaker 03

  They did find stuff.

• 52:33Speaker 00

  No, they, they barely found anything. Because basically, they couldn't force the guy who was on earth to live the same life as Scott in the sky. Like, as they said, we couldn't force Mark to eat space food for a year and like sit on his own to get the control. So they found.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Bad news, you're not going to space. Good news, you could do all the really annoying stuff that you'd have to do if you were in space. Who in this bag?

• 52:59Speaker 02

  Yay.

• 53:02Speaker 00

  Felt like his eyeball shape changed a bit, a little bit of cognitive decline, but they did conclude that it all recovers after six months.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Okay, that's good.

• 53:09Speaker 00

  And he was back to the same level as his twin.

• 53:10Speaker 03

  Telomeres was interesting, the telomeres. The telomeres, so those are the protective ends of chromosomes and they think they shorten as our life goes on and that means that we can get certain diseases as we get older.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  I think they do shorten, don't they?

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. They shorten and they think it leads to a higher likelihood of getting a disease like cancer and so on. When Scott was in space, his telomeres grew. So space might be an interesting place for us to have longer lives.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Here's the thing, twins are more likely to survive into their 60s, according to a study by David Shero and James Anderson. Why would that be? They looked at the lives of Danish twins born between 1870 and 1900. So a lot, big old sample size.

• 53:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 53:56Speaker 01

  You've got someone to be a donor if you need a donation.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  Nice. Did you say this is 1860s, 1900s?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  I'm afraid so, so not so much donating going on.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  You've just got someone next to you the whole time, making sure you do sensible things, eat right, you know, you tell each other stuff, you know, you share knowledge.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  Hey, stop at the start of that sentence before you get it completely wrong because young people die through doing silly things. But there is a thing called the twin protective effect, which basically means that if you're a twin, you're less likely to die from unexpected causes like accidents and stuff like that. We're not sure exactly why, but it might be because you've got someone closer to you talking you out of it even, maybe, or you don't want to be so crazy because you've got a person who relies on you a little bit.

• 54:39Speaker 03

  Oh, that's lovely. Very cool. There's a, Twinsburg, Ohio, has a twin festival every year. It was founded by a pair of twins.

• 54:46Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  And as part of the twin festival every year, there's a lookalike contest.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  Oh, that's great.

• 54:51Speaker 02

  Do you have to look like the other twin? Or do you have to look like a celebrity?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  I think, I think it's the former.

• 54:57Speaker 03

  There used to be a twins restaurant in America, which was run, yeah, by identical sisters, Lisa Gantz and Debbie Gantz.

• 55:05Speaker 01

  Hey, I asked you for the bill. No, you didn't.

• 55:08Speaker 03

  It kind of is that because the restaurant, it's staffed by 37 sets of identical twins when it ran, who worked the same shift in the same station, in the same uniform. So it opened in 1994. And this is from them, their words. "We get 10 to 20 sets of multiple customers each evening for dinner, ranging from newborns, sextuplets to 95-year-olds. And when multiples come in, they sign a twin guestbook. We put their picture up on the wall. They get two drinks for the price of one. Triplets get three for one and so on."

• 55:36Speaker 01

  And so it's four twins to eat at and staffed by twins?

• 55:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  Lovely.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and these, these, these sisters.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  Why cut down your clientele by about 97%?

• 55:47Speaker 00

  And then give them all two for the price of one? How long does this business last?

• 55:51Speaker 03

  It's not running anymore. But they were, these, these twin sisters were big. They created a casting firm. So movies who needed twins, they would go to these sisters. They became the twin people of America for a very long time.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Oh, really?

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, very cool.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Alexander Graham Bell was interested in twins,

• 56:12Speaker 02

  specifically sheep twins. And he put $250,000 of his own money and much of the last 30 years of his life in trying to make more sheep give birth to twins. Because what he thought was, he saw that lots of animals, like kittens and puppies are born in like five, six, seven puppies, for instance, from one dog. But sheep were usually, they would only have one or two. And so he thought, well, what if we could make sheep have more children? Obviously loads more money for farmers. And he noticed that sheep that had more than two nipples produced more twins. So he went around the country trying to find as many multi-nippled sheep as he could.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  And then he started selectively breeding them. And the idea was he would get a breed of sheep that gave birth to way more twins.

• 57:00Speaker 00

  So when you say twins, do you mean he want like, was it like even more than two? He wanted to get, or was it just getting two?

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Well, two was his first aim, but he thought that maybe he'd be able to get multiple births. If he just kept finding more and more nipples on sheep.

• 57:10Speaker 01

  It's a fantastic, it's a fantastic excuse when you're discovered by the farmer.

• 57:16Speaker 01

  Face up under one of his sheep. Well, I'm actually a very eminent scientist.

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Three, four, five.

• 57:30Speaker 03

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

• 57:43Speaker 02

  My Instagram is NoSuchThing as James Harkin.

• 57:45Speaker 03

  Andy.

• 57:45Speaker 01

  At Andrew Hunter M.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  Yep. And if you want to get to us as a group online, Anna.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  We're on Instagram on at NoSuchThing, or you can email podcast at qi.com.

• 57:52Speaker 03

  Yes, remember that email, podcast at qi.com. It has become essential to our podcasting life because if you send an email there with some feedback, Andy will cherry pick the best of those bits and bring it to Drop Us A Line, our secret show that exists in a private members' club called Club Fish. It's on patreon.com slash Club Fish. You will see there are multiple bonus extras there, including Drop Us A Line, but we do online quizzes and you'll get Excel versions of our show. There's merch. It's great. Check it out. But also use podcast at qi.com to send us in your favorite facts. Because every Monday we will be reading out your facts as part of our new show, Little Fish. So do that now. Otherwise, just come back next week because we're going to be back with another show. And we'll see you then. Goodbye.