No Such Thing As A Toilet Break For A Tuna

Live from the Royal Institution, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss big fish, big pencils and a big coincidence. Missed out on this live show? Get in-person or streaming tickets for the London Podcast Festival here: nosuchthingasafish.com/live http://nosuchthingasafish.com/live 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. Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things Are Fish. Before you fast forward, we have news of some live shows coming up, which you can go to live in London, or you can stream. But first of all, let me tell you about today's show, which we recorded live at the Royal Institution in London. It is one of the most venerable places in the entire United Kingdom. It's where multiple elements were discovered. It's where some of the great scientists in history have spoken, and then they let us four dogs turn up. I really hope you enjoy this show. It was the first of four that we did. They will go out over the next four weeks. They were brilliant audiences every night. I'm sure you will enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoyed recording them.

• 0:43Speaker 00

  And if you would like to come to a live recording, then guess what? We are doing a couple more in September. On Saturday, the 12th of September, we are returning to the London Podcast Festival at King's Place, which is near to King's Cross Station in North London. And at 7pm, we'll be doing a live recording of the main episode. There are not many tickets left for that, so if you want to come to that, then get in there quick. But even more excitingly, I think, is that at 4.30pm, we will be doing our first ever live, drop us a line. It is our audience feedback show. It is normally only available for people who are members of Patreon, but you could be there. If you want to ask your question, or send us an extremely pedantic email, you could

• 1:28Speaker 00

  be there in person. If you bought tickets to the show already, or if you buy tickets, then email [email protected] and let us know that you're going to be there. Let us know what your question is, or your piece of pedantry. Let us know your bonus bream. Let us know your thanks but no thanks, and we might well read them out. Both of these King's Place shows will be livestreamed and available on catch-up, and you can get a discount if you buy tickets to both shows, either in-house or on livestream. So go to nosuchthingsoffish.com/live to get tickets for that. And in the meantime, please enjoy this week's episode of No Such Things Are Fish, recorded live at the Royal Institution. Okay, on with the podcasts.

• 2:22Dan Schreiber?

  Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Things Are Fish, a weekly podcast, this week coming to you live from the Royal Institution in London.

• 2:39Dan Schreiber?

  My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tashinsky, Andrew Huntamari, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

• 3:00Speaker 02

  My fact this week is that the building we are in contains the former world's largest pencil.

• 3:09Dan Schreiber?

  There's a photo of it behind us, and that is, that's a big pencil.

• 3:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, but we're burying the lead here, because that is an even bigger ruler than the world's largest pencil.

• 3:17Speaker 00

  No, Andy, we're burying the lead.

• 3:20Dan Schreiber?

  There we go.

• 3:22Speaker 00

  Oh, come on. There's gonna be another 59 minutes of this, guys.

• 3:27Speaker 02

  Yes, that is, in fact, in this photo, carrying that pencil is the man who made it famous. Famous being a stretch. But, this was in 1968, that it had its debut. And, as you probably know, this room is famous for very excellent, interesting lectures before we got here. And someone who gave a lecture was a physicist called Philip Morrison in 1968, and he opened his lecture with a huge penny on the floor, and he said, okay, who's gonna come up and measure this penny? And he pulled out this huge ruler, which people in the room can see, a 12-foot-long ruler, to measure it with. And then, he said, okay, and let's write down how big this penny is. And for no particular reason, he produced an enormous pencil.

• 4:12Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 4:13Speaker 02

  To write that down.

• 4:14Speaker 00

  I think there was some reason behind it, right? Because he was like, doing a lecture about things that are very, very big or very, very small. So he's imagining what it would be like if he was a Lilliputian.

• 4:23Dan Schreiber?

  Gulliver's Travels, yeah.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  That's true. They were called the Gulliver's Lectures. Yeah, it did feel like, you've made your point with the ruler, and now you could just do it with a normal pencil. But, he went to the trouble, and that's what we love. And yeah, it was about how crucial size is in science, so things act really differently. If they're really, really, really big, like, you know, universe scale, compared to really, really, really tiny. And he got some little children to come up from the audience to operate it. And it was a great lecture. I watched it. It was excellent. I really like how things were different back in the day, as I say, audience of 10, 11-year-olds. One quote from it is, "Of course, you know very well that the theories of Euclid simply do not apply in the non-Euclidean geometry of a sphere."

• 5:04Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  The 10-year-olds nodding along.

• 5:08Speaker 00

  I think they cover that in K-pop Demon Hunters.

• 5:12Dan Schreiber?

  So how big, oh, okay, it's got, how big is this pencil?

• 5:15Speaker 02

  It's hard to picture, isn't it? So it's like, so the ruler was 12 foot, so I guess the pencil's about 9 or 10 feet. It's hard to imagine.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  How big are these desks?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, this must be four or five.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Do we have anything in the building that's roughly the size? Do we think of the pencil?

• 5:36Speaker 03

  For listeners at home, Dan has just come in, holding, did he say 9 foot long?

• 5:42Speaker 00

  I think it's shorter, because how tall are you?

• 5:44Speaker 03

  You're about 6 foot, right? Pop it on the ground.

• 5:46Dan Schreiber?

  I am, I'm 6'1".

• 5:48Speaker 03

  It's been sharpened a bit.

• 5:49Speaker 00

  It's been sharpened, yeah.

• 5:51Dan Schreiber?

  I've literally just been told that it was taller, but they have used it and it's been sharpened, so it's, it keeps getting shorter.

• 5:57Speaker 00

  Is it lead? Does it work?

• 5:59Dan Schreiber?

  It is. This is a real pencil. You can see that it actually says HB on it.

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Yep. This guy was really interesting. Philip Morrison, he had been at Los Alamos for the nuclear testing.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:12Speaker 00

  And he transported the core of the test device, so the nuclear core, to the test site on the backseat of a Dodge sedan.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  So good.

• 6:22Speaker 00

  Then he was one of the team, and he was the head of the team that loaded the atomic bombs onto the aircraft before it went to Japan.

• 6:29Speaker 03

  Really?

• 6:30Speaker 00

  And then he became like a real anti-war person, and a real pacifist after that.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:36Speaker 03

  Careers are so long and varied, aren't they? As in, if you, like, if while he was...

• 6:39Speaker 00

  We could do this podcast for 50 years.

• 6:40Speaker 03

  I know, I know, I know. But if while he was supervising the team that were loading the nuclear bombs onto the planes, you could have said to him, look, in just over 20 years' time, you're gonna be messing around with a giant pencil, that would have reassured him a bit, maybe.

• 6:53Dan Schreiber?

  Would it? Or would he think, has the bomb changed us so much that we are a tiny race of humans, no taller than a coin? Yeah, this is, this was part of a lecture, which is one of the great things that this institution has been doing for many, many years. And I was being told beforehand, no matter who was coming in, no matter how famous they were, there was no introduction, they would just walk onto stage, they would not say anything to the crowd, they would not say thank you for coming. They wouldn't do any of the stuff we did, basically, at the beginning of this show, because the information was the star. So when we were waiting prior to this show coming in, we were sat in a room at the back, and that was the room that for many, many years, over 100 years, scientists would be

• 7:34Dan Schreiber?

  locked in for 10 minutes before their lecture started, so that they couldn't run away from doing the lecture. And this was based off a story of a scientist called Wigstone, who supposedly got cold feet, and he ran away, and Michael Faraday had to come at the last second and do his speech on behalf. Now, the records are so amazing here, we know that didn't happen. It never happened. It was, it was all a myth. They can see that he was ill, he wasn't coming in, Faraday was ready to do it. But they love the idea of it so much, that they did then just start locking scientists in the room for 10 minutes prior to the lecture, and they've been doing that ever since.

• 8:11Speaker 02

  A lot of them are still there, by the way.

• 8:12Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Michael Faraday?

• 8:15Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 8:16Speaker 03

  He was incredibly popular, because it was the early days when he was doing it. Yeah, 19 series of lectures, and his most famous one, I think he delivered it several years, maybe, was called The Chemical History of a Candle.

• 8:25Dan Schreiber?

  Hmm.

• 8:26Speaker 03

  And it's one of those wonderful things, because it sounds wonderful, it's one of the most successful science books ever. And his basic point was, so much of what we know about science can be encapsulated in a candle, whether that's what the wick is made of, what the, sort of what the air around it does, the sort of flow of air when it's burning, the science of combustion, all of these things, come together in the form of a candle. It was written as a book, which I think might be still in print today, nearly 200 years later on. And he was dead against writing it as a book, because he said, the point about science, to communicate it to people, is it has to be in a live environment. Lectures are an important way of properly communicating science to people. And then, in the 1850s, there was a massive wave of séances, which swept across London,

• 9:09Speaker 03

  and he thought, okay, maybe not enough people know any science. And so he thought, right, okay, I will do it as a book now, because it can, you know, get the word out a bit more.

• 9:17Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  And I got, I got the book out of the library today.

• 9:20Speaker 02

  Did you?

• 9:21Dan Schreiber?

  Did you?

• 9:22Speaker 00

  They still have his notes here, don't they? I think. And the papers are singed, and no one knows really how they got singed, I think, but he'd used a lot of fire in his experiments. He would get saucers and fill them with brandy, and then set fire to them, so we think that's probably what happened. But...

• 9:41Speaker 02

  Makes sense.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  He was allowed alcohol on stage, we're not allowed alcohol on stage. So once again, it's one rule for Michael Faraday, and one rule for the rest of us.

• 9:50Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Speaker 02

  Would we have been allowed alcohol if we could also bring a live flame on stage?

• 9:54Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:55Speaker 02

  It was in 1825 that the first Christmas lecture happened, and actually, that one was quite boring, and it was a series of 22 lectures. And Faraday quickly stepped in and said, you know what? Let's go six lectures, and let's make it all about demonstrating science. So they all had to have big set pieces in them. So John Tyndale, who took over from Faraday, and by the way, if you're Googling him, he is not the chairman of the National Front in the 1970s. Never lectured here, as far as I know. John Tyndale, the physicist, 19th century. In 1867, he put solid carbonic acid in his mouth, and then he breathed out over a candle while this was in his mouth, and the candle turned blue, and then it went out, because the carbonic acid made his breath so chilled.

• 10:38Speaker 02

  And he said at the time that if I'd inhaled with that in my mouth, I would have died.

• 10:44Dan Schreiber?

  Ah.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  That's the kind of tension people were bringing to the lectures. If he coughed or sneezed because it's such a dangerous substance.

• 10:51Dan Schreiber?

  Well, how about this one? 1938, so a bit more recent, the Christmas lectures had a boy, maybe about 10 or 11 years old, same as the boys who had the massive pencil. A boy coated his hands in water and then the scientist delivering the lectures put his hand in a, put the boy's hand in a stream of molten lead. And that, and he was fine, but that's an example of the Leidenfrost effect where, you know, the, the, the, uh.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  It's like if you get a, if you get a really hot pan and you pour water on it, it kind of bounces around.

• 11:24Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, the water evaporates on contact and it makes this tiny, tiny protective layer between you and the molten hot lead. But he was fine. And maybe, and maybe, you know.

• 11:32Speaker 00

  I think that's amazing because that was in 1938, right? And that kid's parents had let him come to this lecture when the year before Julian Huxley, who was their secretary of the London Zoological Society, had brought a live lion into the bit.

• 11:46Dan Schreiber?

  Wonderful.

• 11:48Speaker 00

  He'd brought a lion cub, some snakes, crocodiles, a red kite, and then before even the animals came out, he'd shown a short film of a load of baby seals being clubbed in the Arctic.

• 12:00Dan Schreiber?

  And we have the video now.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  And there are photos of this as well, of the kid stroking the lion as they were doing it. And it turns out, I didn't know this, they used to do that in London Zoo. If you went to London Zoo in the 1930s, you could go to what they call Pet's Corner and just stroke a lion.

• 12:17Dan Schreiber?

  Really? That's amazing. There used to be an assistant called Bill Coates, who would always join and he would always do the demonstrations. I mean, it might be possible. Charlotte, is it possible that he actually, oh, Charlotte's still here, did he design the pencil? He might have designed the pencil. He's that kind of guy.

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Possibly.

• 12:33Dan Schreiber?

  And one thing that happened was there was a scientist called William Bragg, who had him swallow a pressure sensitive capsule with a radio transmitter on it. And he invited kids to come up on stage to show that if you punched him in the stomach, a local speaker would go, "Wah!" And so kids, kids came up mid lecture just pounding him in the stomach while the sound was, "Wah wah!" And, uh, yeah.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  And Dan has swallowed a radio transmitter and is now going to step into the middle. Can I say one thing on the subject of good demonstrations in lectures and how important they are? This isn't a lecture that took place at the R I, but it was by someone called Giles Brindley. He was a British urologist and he found that injecting certain agents into your, and I can't believe I'm about to use these words in this room, but into your penis, made you have an erection. And this was early on in the 1960s when people didn't really know about how to do that.

• 13:28Dan Schreiber?

  So it's sort of pre, pre Viagra.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  They knew how to have erection, sorry. They, uh, they didn't know how to conjure them out of thin air, as it were.

• 13:37Speaker 00

  And sorry, this is not one of the children's Christmas lectures.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Anyway, he was giving a lecture about how he'd found this substance that could create an erection, which is very useful in urology. And he decided to demonstrate. So he showed a bunch of slides of his own member after he'd taken it. And then he said to this lecture, this audience of academics who were all in their suits, very dry, it happened in Las Vegas at the Eurodynamics Society. And he said, look, that's not enough. I could have stimulated myself with these pictures, so I'd better show you. I took some of this before I came on stage today.

• 14:13Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  And he stepped out in front of the podium and he pulled his trousers tightly around himself and, you know, anyway. And then he said, look, but that's not enough. That's not enough. And then he pulled down his trousers in front of the entire audience of very dry academics who were wondering what the hell was happening in their lives. And he dropped his pants and he revealed his member. And then as his final piece de resistance, he said, ah, but we need someone to test the tumessence. At which point.

• 14:44Dan Schreiber?

  No, this is.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  The academics' wives in the audience started screaming and he had to quickly wrap up the lecture prematurely and leave the room.

• 14:52Dan Schreiber?

  The lecture was called What Happens in Vegas Stays in Vegas, wasn't it?

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Can I take us away from this, please, and talk about enormous pencils?

• 14:59Speaker 02

  Me?

• 15:00Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:01Speaker 00

  So we said that this was a former world's largest pencil, right? Because the record has since been beaten a few times. And the current largest pencil measures 23.23 metres and weighs 98.43 tonnes. And it was made by a friend of the podcast, Ashritta Furman.

• 15:20Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  Who is basically, he spends his whole life trying to break as many world records as possible, like hopping backwards with a traffic cone on his head, things like that.

• 15:29Dan Schreiber?

  Okay.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  And this pencil is the equivalent of 1,900,000 standard sized pencils.

• 15:35Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 15:35Speaker 00

  And it's the same length as the world's longest outdoor shop pot, the largest wave in the world in 2025, and the world's largest barbecue pit. If you need some perspective.

• 15:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, thank you. It's really helpful. Well, we don't because I've actually got it back.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Can I check something with you? Is it a pencil or is it a model of a pencil?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  What's the difference?

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Well, the difference is pretty clear. If it's got a lead in the middle of it.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  It works. It has to work.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  It has to work. Then it's a pencil.

• 16:02Dan Schreiber?

  A functioning pencil, exactly.

• 16:03Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Because sometimes people do make models of pencils and they say this is the world's largest pencil.

• 16:07Speaker 00

  Do they?

• 16:07Speaker 03

  It's clearly not. I don't like it. It feels like I'm shaming them now, but there is a giant pencil. It's in Minneapolis. And actually, it's just a toppled oak tree. I believe it's lead free. It has got a giant ferrule and a rubber on the end. And every year there is a ritual sharpening, which is good.

• 16:25Speaker 00

  But it's basically a tree that they painted to the.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  It's basically a painted and shaped tree. I feel, no, but I feel bad about it now because it's in Minneapolis and it sounds wonderful. And thousands of people turn up every year to the ritual sharpening, which does sound like my kind of people.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  So that's very impressive.

• 16:42Dan Schreiber?

  It's just for any pencil fans that might be here tonight or listening at home. That, oh yeah, a lot in tonight. Okay. A friend of ours, John Hodgman, is a friend of the leading pencil sharpener in the world. His name is David Rees. He wrote a book called How to Sharpen Pencils. And he, and it's, and it's a whole book. And he provides a service which started out as you could send him your pencil and you pay him and he sharpens it for you and sends it back. But his new service now is he will provide the pencil himself. So if anyone here wants a pencil.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it feels like the pencil is not the main cost base of his operations, is it? Just getting a new pencil? He'll just send you a sharp pencil?

• 17:21Dan Schreiber?

  Well, it's a, it's a, it's a hundred American dollars to.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  I beg your pardon.

• 17:26Speaker 02

  I think that's worth it.

• 17:27Dan Schreiber?

  Do you think so?

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Pencil sharpeners don't work. Why haven't we now had the pencil sharpener in this day and age? They always break off a pencil leg.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  I think there is a, there's a clear territory between pencil sharpeners don't work very well, which I think we can all agree on. And a hundred dollars is good value.

• 17:46Dan Schreiber?

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

• 17:49Speaker 00

  Okay, my fact this week is that one of the world's oldest cycling road races is getting much harder because people keep stealing the road.

• 17:59Speaker 00

  This is a Paris Roublay cycle race and it goes over cobblestone roads. And it's very famous because it's very, very difficult to cycle on these cobbles, especially if it's been raining or if they get muddy. And the race's nickname is the Hell of the North for various reasons we might go into. But this year, the events director Thierry Guvenau has made a plea to the public to leave the rocks in place because people have been taking the cobblestones as souvenirs. And it's hard enough to go over those guys normally, but if there's a big hole where there should be one, then you're going to get big pileups of cyclists.

• 18:34Speaker 02

  Dangerous, very dangerous.

• 18:36Dan Schreiber?

  They say the speed that you go at over those cobbles, you feel literally like you're a jackhammer, like you're just going the whole way through.

• 18:42Speaker 03

  It sounds horrendous.

• 18:43Dan Schreiber?

  It's a 160 mile long route, right? Like it's a, it's a massive race.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  It's a one, one day?

• 18:48Dan Schreiber?

  And it's one day and they do get hurt. And Theo de Ruig, the Dutchman, he was asked about it afterwards and they said, what do you think of the race? He said, it's a bollocks, this race. You're working like an animal. You don't have time to piss. You wet your pants. You're riding in mud like this. You're slipping. It is a pile of shit. And they said, wow, okay. I mean, are you going to do it again? Sure. It's the most beautiful race in the world. That's what the race is to people.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  So it's got quite a good history and the nickname, the Hell of the North, doesn't come from how hard the race is. It's named after Terry Hell. No, it's not.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Oh, I'm so excited.

• 19:30Dan Schreiber?

  Ooh, Andy, first time you've heard an audience get that that is your world.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  It's basically the cyclists drove through northern France after World War One. And there was so much rubble everywhere and stuff, it was like they were driving through hell. So it is a very, very difficult race, but the hell of the north was due to the.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Because all races were cobbled back in the day, right? No tarmac, 19th century.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  And actually, the, um, the race is the Paris Roubaix, but actually doesn't start in Paris anymore. Uh, it starts in Compiègne, Compiègne, Compiègne.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  It's good that you've. It's good that you've protected the place's identity like that.

• 20:07Speaker 00

  But yeah, they used to start in Paris, but then they got rid of all the cobbled roads in Paris. So there was no point starting there. So they start a bit further out where the cobbles begin.

• 20:16Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  And in fact, this was a problem, right? That the cobbles were disappearing because tarmac was invented and, um, roads kept being tarmac'd. And then in the, I think it was the 1960s or 1950s, they said, well, this race is just going to become really boring. Cause it's going to be flat and easy. And there's a guy called Jean Stablinski, who was a former cyclist. And he was also a former miner and he knew of these really cobbled paths. He won a bicycle in an accordion competition.

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Okay, okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  As you do.

• 20:46Dan Schreiber?

  As you do.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  Is this being held down the mine? Cause that is the most impractical thing you can give someone down a mine.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  The acoustics are very good there though.

• 20:53Speaker 03

  No, a bicycle, not an accordion.

• 20:54Dan Schreiber?

  Oh. I thought you meant is that how they lowered him down? They just held one end of the accordion each. Okay.

• 21:01Speaker 02

  Cycle your way up. I don't think it was down the mine, but no, he won this bicycle in an accordion competition. So he started cycling. His mum was so pissed off, he started cycling that she destroyed his first bike. Um, anyway, he basically founded this race in its modern iteration because he became a cyclist and then added cobbles to all of these roads or found lots of routes that were very, very cobbley.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  So the, the, the prize in the race is a cobblestone. Which is interesting, but it's not one of the, obviously they don't take it from a bit of the route. These are cobbles which have been blown up during the first and second world wars, right? Lots of, you know, lots of roads were bombarded and lots of them were blown up. And the cobbles were blown all over the place. And they then go into the soil and every year farmers plough up cobblestones that used to be on the roads. So it's one of these dug up cobblestones that becomes the prize.

• 21:48Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 21:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's very cool, but.

• 21:50Speaker 00

  They're really big old things, aren't they?

• 21:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause some, you get little round cobblestones, lots of places here, but these are big, flat. They're like bricks, but they are much less easy.

• 21:58Speaker 00

  So you get a cobblestone and you also get a brass plaque of your name, which goes on to the shower block, which is at the very end, there's a big old shower that all the cyclists are supposed to go to. In actual fact, it's a horrible old shower and no one really goes in.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 22:13Speaker 00

  But it's like a really famous part of the race. So you get three lots of people who use it. Basically the youngest people who are there for the first ever year. And they're like, oh wow, like I really need to try the showers because they're so famous. And then you get the really old ones who just want to embrace the history of the, of the race. And then you get a third group who use these showers. Can you guess who they are?

• 22:34Speaker 03

  People who've been injured and need to wash, uh, sort of mud.

• 22:39Speaker 00

  Well, they could still use normal showers.

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 22:43Dan Schreiber?

  The bicycles.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  The bicycles themselves?

• 22:46Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 00

  On their own?

• 22:47Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 00

  No.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  Uh, some of the race crew, the staff?

• 22:52Speaker 00

  It's not. It's the ones who are sponsored by shampoo companies.

• 22:55Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 22:57Speaker 00

  And so at the end of the race, those ones always come in, do a little bit of a rub down with the shampoo and then go straight off to their nice warm showers afterwards.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  You've just been through absolute hell for 116 miles and then you have to film a shampoo advert? That's like a bad dream.

• 23:11Speaker 02

  How many guesses do you think we would have had to have gone through before we've got to that?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Here's a, here's a very cool bit of the road crew who work on it. So there's a team of people who are employed to maintain the cobbles, not to make them nice and smooth. It's not possible, but just to make sure they're, you know, they're there and kind of serviceable. But there is a team of, um, extra employees who are hired. Can anybody guess?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  What their job is?

• 23:36Speaker 00

  Well, in the Tour de France, they have people who are employed because people draw penises on the ground.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:41Speaker 00

  And they employ people to turn them into beautiful butterflies.

• 23:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Is it that?

• 23:46Speaker 03

  It's not that.

• 23:47Dan Schreiber?

  Ah.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  These people have to, these crew have to eat something as part of their job. And I corrected people to crew there. Hmm. Good riddle.

• 23:56Speaker 00

  Okay, so they might be animals.

• 23:57Speaker 03

  They might be animals. Good riddle, Andy. It's cool.

• 23:59Speaker 00

  So they have to, I know, because they're near farms. So there's often like horse poo and stuff on there.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 00

  So they employ a load of dung beetles to push away the balls of dung just before the bikes get there.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  He's got it.

• 24:14Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  It's a team of goats.

• 24:16Dan Schreiber?

  Eating grass.

• 24:17Speaker 03

  Eating the veg in between the cobbles.

• 24:19Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, right.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the human, the humans are called the Foss, Fossade du Pave, convicts of the cobbles. How cool is that?

• 24:28Dan Schreiber?

  Oh, that's like a society.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  There's a human team of maintenance people too.

• 24:31Speaker 00

  They're not eating the.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  They're not eating the stuff. Well, I don't, I don't think they're banned from it, but yeah.

• 24:37Dan Schreiber?

  The method ones are, yeah. So yeah, that, that's, that's like a, that's like a crew that you join. It's a society. And that's not even when the race is happening, that's year round. They just make sure they, they love the cobble. So they're probably looking out for the cobble stealers that we're talking about. Um, this, this is a very old race, 1896. Like the, the bicycle, the bicycle proper was only invented in the 1860s. So we're talking like 30, 40 years after the invention of the actual modern bicycle, that they started doing this insane race. And even the person who did the first mapping of the route didn't want the race to happen. So basically there were two creators. There was Perez and there was Vienne. And they were like, we're going to end it in Belgium or France. We don't know which way,

• 25:21Dan Schreiber?

  but we can't be there at both ends. We need someone to start or end it. They decided Paris would start it and they needed to get the local newspaper on their team. And so the Paris newspaper sent a man called Paul Rousseau to actually ride what might be a route. And he did it and he got to the end and he was going to write immediately and say, no human should do this. This is, this is mad. This is insane. But then these two guys, Perez and Vienne, took him out to dinner, got him drunk. And then he was like, yeah, I'll be fine. He'll be good. And that's why we have it.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  That's so funny.

• 25:51Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 00

  And then like for 125 years, women were not allowed to do it until 2021.

• 25:56Speaker 03

  That's quite recent, isn't it?

• 25:58Speaker 00

  Oh, it's so long ago now, 2021. Um, and the winner was Lizzie Dainan, who's British, I think. Uh, and the sad thing about that was, and this in fairness, this happens in a lot of, um, cycle races, which is you don't watch the first hour or so, because it's quite boring. They're just going really slowly and then someone attacks and then it gets interesting. But she attacked at the very first sector. And so by the time the camera started, she was already so far ahead that no one was ever going to catch her.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 26:27Speaker 00

  And so the entire like broadcast was just her being miles in front of everyone else and just winning.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  But, oh, sorry. I thought you meant the, the people who are filming couldn't catch her.

• 26:38Speaker 02

  Surely they have invented cars for this race. I know they haven't invented women yet.

• 26:43Dan Schreiber?

  She's the only British cyclist to win this race. So it's.

• 26:48Speaker 02

  And was she, sorry, was she winning the mixed, mixed?

• 26:50Dan Schreiber?

  No, no, no. There was a, the women's, yeah. So 2021 was the first women's race. She won that. Um, Bradley Wiggins has done it quite a few times. I think he came ninth is the closest that he ever got. Yeah. Um, so we had.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Not very good.

• 27:03Dan Schreiber?

  Sorry?

• 27:04Speaker 03

  Not very good, is it?

• 27:05Dan Schreiber?

  Not coming home. No.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  Coming home.

• 27:08Dan Schreiber?

  Do you know what? Do you know, he, he's in a team. He's in Sky team. That's what he rode for it. Yeah, he was in Sky team. Do you know what? The first professional team he was in when he started racing?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  What?

• 27:19Dan Schreiber?

  Cause they're in teams, Andy. Like you're in like a, you get like.

• 27:22Speaker 02

  You have a hostel?

• 27:23Dan Schreiber?

  Okay. It was the, the Linda McCartney racing team.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:29Dan Schreiber?

  Which focused largely on racers who were vegetarians as well as the crew. Yeah.

• 27:34Speaker 02

  Wow. Well, I mean, talking about women's cycling, it's, and the reason I asked if it was a mixed race is that actually, um, cycling is one of the things that women and men could be on a par at, um, in future. And in fact, there's this thing called the RAM, which is the Race Across America. And.

• 27:52Dan Schreiber?

  It is R A A M, isn't it?

• 27:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. Yeah.

• 27:55Dan Schreiber?

  Race Across America.

• 27:59Speaker 02

  It's meant to be the most extreme cycling race in the world. It's absolutely insane. People who do it have these crazy hallucinations. They go mad. They start dribbling and shrieking and, you know, thinking they're being murdered and stuff. But the, um, it's 3,000 miles, um, so it's across America. You're not allowed to take longer than 12 days. And the winners of the RAM in 2021 and 2023 were both women. And that's mixed gender RAM. Um, so 2021, it was actually, and I'm always doing this, having just turned 40, um, looking up things I could still achieve. And the winner in 2021 was a woman called Leah Goldstein, who was 52.

• 28:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, she doesn't listen. It's fine, but.

• 28:46Speaker 00

  Was she American?

• 28:47Speaker 02

  I think so, yeah. Um, she, or maybe she was, I know, I think she was Israeli because she used to be a bantamweight kickboxing champion in Israel, which to be fair, I haven't achieved before the age of 40. And she had, and she was also the 1998 duathlon champion. But aside from that, I could do it.

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:05Dan Schreiber?

  There was, the very first RAM had, uh, only four racers in it. And one of them was a guy called Michael Shermer. And I don't think he's won the RAM, but he did invent a new medical problem off the back of something he experienced. You know how, you know how you sort of hope that one day something horrible is going to be named after you in a medical sense?

• 29:24Speaker 03

  Is it a cycling injury?

• 29:26Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, it's called Shermer's neck.

• 29:28Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 29:28Speaker 00

  Okay, that's not the part of the body I thought you were going to go.

• 29:31Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah. So Shermer's neck is a thing when you've been riding so long and your body has really, really gone to its edge, that suddenly your neck just gives up and you just, your head just drops.

• 29:44Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 29:45Dan Schreiber?

  And you can't do anything and it's just gone. The muscles are entirely gone. And so Shermer had to hold his head up for the rest of the race. Yeah. With one hand on the handlebars. And he's not the only person to have this. So multiple people have had Shermer's neck. And you can even buy devices, because they don't give up. Once their neck gives up.

• 30:04Speaker 00

  Cyclists.

• 30:04Dan Schreiber?

  They pull over and they put on a device that just pulls their head up.

• 30:09Dan Schreiber?

  And they just ride the rest of this insane thing that they're doing.

• 30:13Speaker 00

  At least at the end of the race, it's quite easy to put the medal over him.

• 30:25Dan Schreiber?

  Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that 150 years before there was a social network called X, run by a man called Musk, there was a social network called X, run by a man called Busk.

• 30:46Dan Schreiber?

  Insane.

• 30:47Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 30:48Dan Schreiber?

  So Elon Musk named X, and Ellen Busk named the other X from 150 years ago. And basically, I was doing research about Albemarle Street, the street that we're on, which this is an amazing road, by the way. There's so many incredible things that have happened here. There was a publishers just next door where Byron was published by them. And when he died, all of his memoirs and papers were burnt. That happened just next door over there. There was the Albemarle Club where Oscar Wilde was accused of being a sodomite. And that happened literally on the road that we're on. That ruined his life, sent him to jail. But so while I was reading that, I discovered that on the 3rd of November 1864,

• 31:31Dan Schreiber?

  at St. George's Hotel on this road, a social network was set up called the X Club. And it was run by nine great scientists, one of whom was George Busk. This was one of the very first scientific groups, and they called it a social network at the time. And the idea was they could see that science was being excluded from so many places where it was needed in terms of political power, in schools and so on. They thought, let's get together and start discussing how we can inject science into these places. So literally around the corner, they changed the landscape of how this country operated, because they were all very influential people. George Busk and his wife Ellen were very much a part of this.

• 32:13Dan Schreiber?

  Thomas Huxley was the original, John Lubbock, a lot of people who would have lectured in this very room. And Ellen called it the X Club because she said, "You need a name where you can just change and adapt to what the club is. You don't want to get stuck into one thing."

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Means you can talk about anything, because X can be anything.

• 32:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Two quick thoughts on the name?

• 32:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yep.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Firstly, should have called themselves the X-Men, because they were all men. The second point, there were nine of them.

• 32:38Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 32:39Speaker 03

  And their symbol is X, which is of course Latin for nine.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Nine, yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  I'm just seeing two big missed opportunities here.

• 32:48Speaker 02

  You want them to call the One X Club, the I X Club.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  The I X Men, I don't think.

• 32:55Speaker 00

  Or you invite one more person in, and then you could, there's 10 of you.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  Well, they kept on trying to invite people in, didn't they? They kept on, well, they kept on...

• 33:03Speaker 03

  We need just one more!

• 33:06Speaker 02

  We don't like anyone else. There was this constant chat, as you can imagine, they were saying, "Look, shall we get Barry in? Or, you know, shall we get, you know, Dorothy?" And eventually, they, apparently, various attempts to add more members became so wearisome, this is according to Huxley, that Huxley made this new rule. He said that "No idea of someone joining the club shall be entertained unless the name of the new member contains all the consonants absent from the old ones."

• 33:33Speaker 00

  Okay.

• 33:35Speaker 02

  So I had a look, the only consonants that are remaining once you go through the names are Q, V, and Z. And the only famous person I could find, who was alive at the time, was a guy called Vazquez, V-A-Z-Q-U-E-Z, who was a Galician musician, who invented a thing called the techniphon, which looks a bit like a piano, but when it plays, when you play notes, it replicates the human voice.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Can you imagine if he turned up and gone, "I'm here, guys"? Then I'd have to go, "What's your first name?"

• 34:07Speaker 00

  That is amazing. One thing they did do, speaking of names, is they gave each other nicknames. And all the nicknames had to begin with X. So there was the exquisite Lubbock, the excellent Spottiswood, the experienced Tucker,

• 34:24Speaker 00

  the eccentric Tindall, the exemplary Busk. And so they gave themselves these X nicknames.

• 34:30Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, they did have alternative names as well. So Huxley's original idea was calling it the blastodermic club. And blastodermic is a layer of cells inside the ovum of birds. X is the centre of development for the entire bird, so that's what they thought they were. They were on the inside.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  I think we'll just go with X, actually. Thank you, thank you, yeah, we are writing down that suggestion.

• 34:52Speaker 00

  Hands up for blastodermic! No?

• 34:57Dan Schreiber?

  The Thorough Club.

• 34:58Speaker 03

  Okay. I quite like that.

• 35:00Speaker 02

  Thorough Club? No, it sounds quite dull, doesn't it? There seemed to be contradictory views on what it was for. So what Huxley said was, "It had nothing to do with science, this club. It was basically because we were all great mates, but we were all getting quite busy and successful, and we weren't hanging out very much. And so we literally said, 'Let's make a date every month to hang out.'" And he really denied that there was any other purpose. And in fact, he said, "If others had been present at the meetings, they would have been incredibly disappointed at the sadly frivolous tone of our ordinary conversations."

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Interesting. Well, they were accused of only working to each other's mutual advantage. You know, they were accused of being a bit of a self-promotion society. They would lobby for each other, you know, for their own members to get a particular eminent position in the world of science, that kind of thing. So they were advancing the cause of science, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't totally without self-interest, I guess.

• 35:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is normally very even-handed, says, "The motives were never entirely pure, the reasons not entirely consistent, and the means not entirely admirable. Advancing the cause of science and advancing themselves were often conflated."

• 36:03Speaker 02

  Wow, that is...

• 36:04Speaker 03

  But you could say the same about us.

• 36:07Speaker 00

  Well, you know what? The reason I don't like them is because they had some sworn enemies.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  Ooh.

• 36:12Speaker 00

  And the sworn enemies were the North British scientists.

• 36:15Dan Schreiber?

  Oh!

• 36:18Speaker 00

  But actually, they were based in Scotland, so a bit further north in Britain than where I'm from. But Lord Kelvin was one of them, and James Clark Maxwell, so quite big, famous guys. And the difference really between them was the North British ones believed in miracles. You sexy thing, I know. I know that look in your eye, Andy.

• 36:40Speaker 00

  But yeah, they thought that you could like get science, and you could also get miracles. And there was sort of an in-between, that there was an invisible realm that was affecting our realm. And the X Club were more like, "No, science is science, and religion shouldn't get involved," and all that kind of stuff.

• 36:56Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, you're crazy Scots.

• 36:58Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  That is an, oh yeah.

• 37:01Dan Schreiber?

  They had a lot of little phrases and words that we use in science today, came from these nine people in a room. Huxley came up with the term agnostic, I guess the concept of agnostic to go with it as well. Survival of the fittest, that was Herbert Spencer. I think Herbert Spencer also invented what was like the original paperclip as well. So, you know, he had a lot of... He had a prototype thing that held papers together, and he argued that, "Come on, I was basically there."

• 37:28Speaker 02

  Bet no one's done this before.

• 37:29Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Was it Huxley who invented agnostic? It was, wasn't it?

• 37:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 02

  Because he needed it to overcome social awkwardness, because he was at gatherings of the metaphysical society. And it was all either atheists or religious people who had their denomination. And he said, "He felt like a historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions," which I think the tail is the label that everyone else had, and he's got no tail.

• 37:59Speaker 03

  What?

• 37:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, I know. Look, I'm not saying he had a way with words. I'm not saying I necessarily delivered it. He was a scientist. But, you know, he said, "He felt like he didn't have a label. He felt like he was a fox without a tail." And so he called himself agnostic, because the agnostics were people who claimed to know everything. And he was saying, "I don't know anything."

• 38:16Speaker 03

  Oh, really?

• 38:17Speaker 02

  And so, yeah, and then he said, "I prance back into the next meeting of the society like a fox," you know.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  I'll stop with the fox thing, though, it's not, it's not working.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  It's got an X in it, that's...

• 38:27Speaker 03

  It has got an X in it, yeah, yeah.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  So they would like, they would all meet together, and a lot of it was down to Lubbock's wife, Lady Lubbock. And she would organise all of the get-togethers. And then when she died in 1879, basically it went into decline. So Lady Lubbock, she was the daughter of the guy who founded the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. So she was already part of that world. But yeah, she married this Lubbock guy, she died. Then they kind of stopped going to the meetings, and they all got a bit old, and they started to get sick, and so they couldn't meet on cold nights anymore. And basically, they just all became very grumpy old men.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  It's classic men and friendships. If your wife is not making you go and be friends, you just stay at home and then die.

• 39:14Speaker 00

  I mean, yeah.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  It's not good, you know?

• 39:16Speaker 00

  I mean, that's life, isn't it?

• 39:17Speaker 03

  It's what we like, yeah, yeah. I did read, it declined until the very last meeting was in 1889. There's just two of them left, and they were just there for the evening. And they sort of said, "Well, this hasn't really worked, has it?"

• 39:30Dan Schreiber?

  Who was it, you know, Andy?

• 39:31Speaker 03

  Maybe that was 1893. 1889 was when they had their final row, when Huxley ridiculed in The Times Spencer's a priori reasoning against land socialism. Devastating.

• 39:41Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:42Dan Schreiber?

  There's a slightly interesting moment, which is connected to the main fact, which is, I think it was 1892, Tesla came. Nikola Tesla came to do a speech in the very room that we're in right now. And it's highly likely that one of the members of X were in the room listening to that speech as well. So at one point, Tesla and X were in the same room.

• 40:08Dan Schreiber?

  There was one guy as well called John Tindall, who used to do lectures in here as well. And he was one of the members of X. And there's a great lecture that happened here, it's a real seminal one. It happened on the 1st of February 1878. And it was the first time that the telephone was publicly shown to members of the public, right? So I think scientists had seen it, it had been displayed in academic circles. But so they showed it here for the very first time. And because they had basically 10 minutes of spare time at the end, they went, "Oh, let's show you another new invention, it's called the phonograph." They made a recording in the room live, and then they played it back to the room. So John Tindall did a recording of a Tennyson poem, and Tennyson was in the audience, listening to it being done.

• 40:53Dan Schreiber?

  And he was so blown away by it that he then spent a large part of the rest of his career recording onto the vinyl, because he just thought, "This is the most magical thing that we have." I say vinyl, the early days of... Can you imagine, the phone and the vinyl player?

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Why didn't they play the vinyl down the phone?

• 41:08Dan Schreiber?

  Oh yeah, like a voicemail. "Sorry, Tennyson's not in right now."

• 41:16Dan Schreiber?

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

• 41:23Speaker 03

  My fact is, in Cambodia, there is a special hotline for fishermen to ring if they accidentally catch a fish that is too big.

• 41:32Speaker 00

  How do you accidentally catch a fish?

• 41:36Speaker 03

  Well, you get a bite, you tug away for a bit, and then you haul it in, and then...

• 41:43Speaker 00

  And then it's much bigger than you thought it was.

• 41:45Speaker 03

  It's much bigger than you thought it was, yeah, basically.

• 41:46Speaker 00

  And is this a very special type of fish, or is it just any big fish?

• 41:50Speaker 03

  It is the Mekong Giant Catfish. So cool. This is one of the most amazing fish in the world. It's just about the largest freshwater fish in the world. Before you shout out, I know, one or two stingrays have been bigger, I know, but...

• 42:05Speaker 03

  That's why I said among the largest freshwater fish in the world. They get up to three metres long, they weigh up to 300 kilos.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Wow, so bigger than the pencil.

• 42:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 00

  The world record is pretty much in the ballpark that you said, so 2.7 metres and weighing 293 kilograms, and that means you could make about 10,000 fish fingers out of it.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  And that would be, no, that would be a good and noble way for that fish to die.

• 42:34Speaker 00

  I mean, once it's dead...

• 42:35Speaker 03

  Captain Birdseye's rubbing his hands up on deck.

• 42:39Speaker 03

  So basically, the problem is, the Mekong Giant Catfish, they're a wonderful fish, and as they get older and bigger, they can produce more offspring. So the really big old ones can produce, I think, 20 times as many offspring as even a 50-kilo fish. 50 kilos is not tiny, but they get so much bigger. But they, you know, millions of people rely on the Mekong River, there's lots and lots of fishing, there's lots of pollution, there are dams in the way, there's overfishing, all sorts of things. So the fish are getting a lot smaller, you know, because the bigger, older ones have been caught, and they're not getting a chance to grow to their full size. So, there is this wonderful new team, they have launched the Mekong Fish App, and the fishermen have downloaded the app, basically, and there's a rapid response team, and if

• 43:21Speaker 03

  you accidentally find yourself pulling a 200-kilo catfish into your boat, you just get on the blower, they come down, they tag it, they re-release it, and I think in nine months, 92 megafish which have been accidentally caught have been returned to the water. And they do a little ritual, they'll sprinkle it with flowers, which must absolutely blow its mind, like, what the hell is this?

• 43:43Speaker 03

  And then, and then they chuck it back in.

• 43:46Dan Schreiber?

  Maybe that's why they're getting caught so much these days, like, you had to check out this flower thing, man, this is, it's insane. No, they put you back in, it's nuts, they don't even, this lady comes, she tags you, you're back in.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's a very clever thing to do, yeah, yeah.

• 44:01Speaker 00

  And it's important, because these fish, they're getting smaller as well, aren't they?

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:04Speaker 00

  You'd be hard-pressed to find one that's even half the size of that one that we mentioned earlier. And the reason is, because in the past, people were catching the biggest ones, because they're the biggest, they're the easiest to find, and then over generations, they just get smaller and smaller, because the smaller ones survive.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:20Speaker 00

  So, yeah, and it's quite a good thing, you know, that, I think, generally speaking, because the Mekong is in quite a lot of countries, but most of these countries now are all trying to do something to help these catfish.

• 44:29Speaker 03

  Yes, I think it's half a dozen countries the Mekong goes through, and it floods massively, and it's full of smaller fish to eat, which is all the reason it can get so big. There was one caught in the 1980s, I love this, it took 100 men two hours to land.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Nice.

• 44:43Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  That's crazy.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  100 men? What are the 99 men doing who aren't holding the rod?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  They're just doing, like, encouraging...

• 44:50Speaker 00

  They're in the pub going, "Paul!"

• 44:55Speaker 00

  "No, my wife's at home, she said I had to come."

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Have you guys ever seen fighting chairs? I think anyone who's sort of like into fishing is familiar with fighting chairs, but they're so cool. So if you've got any respectable fishing boat, that you're going out in to catch vaguely big fish, a tuna or marlin, then fishermen strap themselves into a fighting chair, the fighting chair is bolted onto the boat, through the boat. You stick your feet into these footholders, so you've got something to push your heels against, and it's so that when you catch a big fish, you fight it, and the fights last, can last so long. So I found one fish fight, it was in 1990, it was a marlin, and it was caught by a guy called Schumacher, and he was in the chair for, how long do you think, altogether?

• 45:41Speaker 03

  This one was two hours, so I'll say two hours, 10 minutes.

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Nice, thank you, I appreciate that.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Dan, do you want to come in and absolutely trounce this?

• 45:49Dan Schreiber?

  16 years.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Thanks a lot, Dan. 23 hours.

• 45:57Dan Schreiber?

  Wow.

• 45:58Speaker 02

  23 hours in the chair. At 22 hours, he said, "I'm really sorry, I'm desperate for the loo," and he took a bathroom break, and then he came back.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  At 22 hours?

• 46:06Speaker 02

  22 hours he lasted.

• 46:07Speaker 03

  That's more impressive.

• 46:08Speaker 00

  And does the tuna just go, "Okay, well, while you're going to the toilet, fair's fair, I just won't pull for a bit."

• 46:14Speaker 03

  The tuna's been bursting for a piss for ages.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  They respect the rules. His mate took the line for a while.

• 46:23Dan Schreiber?

  Right.

• 46:24Speaker 00

  Could his mate not have helped in the first 22 hours?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  He got a lot of beers to get through in those cool boxes. Anyway, the fish won, got away in the end.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  Good.

• 46:33Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, nice. Wicked. There's a lot of species of catfish, there's like thousands, and they're all over the world. I've got a quiz question for you, though.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 46:44Dan Schreiber?

  Okay. So in Florida, there is fish farms where they don't farm catfish, but the farmers have had to erect fences around their ponds to protect them. Why?

• 46:57Speaker 03

  To stop fish from outside getting in and eating their fish.

• 47:01Speaker 02

  Jumping in?

• 47:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:03Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah.

• 47:04Speaker 03

  To stop flying fish getting in and eating their fish.

• 47:06Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, like, yes, but, but...

• 47:11Speaker 03

  QED.

• 47:12Dan Schreiber?

  But no, as well.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 47:13Speaker 00

  Is he right or not?

• 47:15Dan Schreiber?

  No, what do you mean flying fish? Fish that, like, what, have chartered an airline?

• 47:18Speaker 03

  No, fish will jump over the net.

• 47:22Dan Schreiber?

  From other, okay, so let's imagine there's a landmass in between another body of water.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Okay, but it must be close, right? Because otherwise, you wouldn't have sort of...

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:29Speaker 00

  Is it like, is it people throwing fish into it from...

• 47:33Speaker 03

  That's good.

• 47:34Speaker 00

  No.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Is it, right, there's a forest fire, and a helicopter picks up loads of water from the ocean, drops it prematurely, and all the fish from its load fall into the pond like it.

• 47:47Dan Schreiber?

  And how's the fence that is standing vertically?

• 47:51Speaker 02

  It's a really high fence.

• 47:52Dan Schreiber?

  Yeah, right, sorry.

• 47:54Speaker 00

  There are some fish that can walk.

• 47:56Dan Schreiber?

  Catfish can walk. It is insane. Catfish can walk like 1.2 miles. They can...

• 48:03Speaker 00

  It's crazy.

• 48:04Dan Schreiber?

  They can stay out of water for about 18 hours, just walking along, and they kept going in these ponds, and so they were like, "Stay out of my pond," and they had to build fences. Imagine building a fence to stop fish from walking into your pond.

• 48:19Dan Schreiber?

  You think you're nuts?

• 48:21Speaker 00

  That's incredible.

• 48:22Dan Schreiber?

  But they can do it, it's an extraordinary thing, and there's even a new word that's been invented called "refling," which describes the method by which catfish walk along. They use their mouth, they use their tail, they use their body.

• 48:34Speaker 03

  Refling?

• 48:34Dan Schreiber?

  They ruffle along, yeah. And it's a word, it's now a word.

• 48:38Speaker 02

  Sounds like crawling. I don't mean to denigrate the catfish, well done them, but that doesn't sound like walking. I've got a child who's on the cusp of walking, but who mostly crawls, and I don't confuse the two. I don't keep saying, "Oh my god, he's walking," and people go, "What, he's on his hands and knees?"

• 48:51Speaker 00

  But you wouldn't expect a walking catfish to just get up on two legs, soar through a lung.

• 48:57Speaker 02

  Wearing a tux, yeah. On fish conservation, the inventors of Roomba, the Hoover, have got involved in fish conservation. They've invented a Hoover to Hoover up fish.

• 49:09Speaker 03

  Have they?

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, because if you do one thing well...

• 49:11Speaker 03

  Sounds bad.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  It does, but what they're doing is they're hoovering up a fish that hoovers up other fish. So the lionfish is invasive in the Atlantic, it's from the Pacific, it got over there, probably that bloody Panama Canal, and it's got no native predators.

• 49:27Speaker 03

  Enemy of the podcast, the Panama Canal.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Who thought that was a good idea? All the lionfish came over, and they can reduce the population of a reef, of the fish on a reef, by 80%, very, very quickly, they can eat 20 fish an hour, so that, within five weeks, they can reduce the population by 80%. So, the Roomba guys have got a remote-controlled Hoover, that they pop into the water, and it's controlled with like a game controller, PlayStation controller, or whatever, from a ship, from a boat, and it's got two arms, this little robot thing, that stun the fish, and then it sucks it into a tube, and then it plops it into a tank, like your Hoover bag, and then it gets sold to restaurants, and it stops eating the... I know, I thought I'd skate over that bit quite quickly.

• 50:10Speaker 03

  No, no, that, honestly, that was a happier ending than I thought would happen for the fish.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  Did you, the big, sold to restaurants?

• 50:18Speaker 02

  It's how he wanted to go.

• 50:19Speaker 03

  I thought it was just a big mincing machine in the Hoover bag or something.

• 50:22Speaker 00

  I'll be honest, in the restaurant, there's probably some kind of big mixing machine going on as well.

• 50:27Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 50:28Dan Schreiber?

  What a weird business pivot for Roomba.

• 50:32Dan Schreiber?

  Can you imagine, they're like, we've become a household name, they're all sitting, all the shareholders in the room, "What's next, boss?"

• 50:37Speaker 02

  Can we do it anywhere but carpets?

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Have you tried?

• 50:42Speaker 03

  So is it happening?

• 50:44Speaker 02

  It is happening, quite at small scale. It was also the idea of a guy called Colin Angle.

• 50:49Dan Schreiber?

  Oh.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Of angling.

• 50:51Dan Schreiber?

  And fish have scales of a small scale, and so... You're welcome.

• 50:59Speaker 02

  Thank you, Dan. For next time, don't need that, but thank you.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Okay, but it might be, it might be rolled out in a bigger way?

• 51:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's one of these ideas that has not been rolled, it's not saving all the fish life, but it's saving...

• 51:10Speaker 03

  If you have to have a person controlling it every, every single one, that'd be...

• 51:13Speaker 02

  I think you have to send gamers out, take them out of their attics, put them on ships.

• 51:16Speaker 00

  Probably you can get AI to do it now, and just go around, and like, just ChatGPT will see a picture of it and go, "That's a picture of Nick Clegg."

• 51:27Speaker 00

  "No, I think it's a lionfish." "Oh yeah, sorry, it is a lionfish."

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, Nick Clegg's being attacked by, what, a thousand?

• 51:38Speaker 00

  Roombas.

• 51:40Speaker 00

  This is a movie that has to get made.

• 51:43Speaker 03

  Then you're in the restaurant, "I think I'll have..."

• 51:50Speaker 00

  It can't be, it can't be. It looks, no.

• 51:53Speaker 03

  Can I have that one that looks like Nick Clegg?

• 52:01Dan Schreiber?

  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 we've said on this podcast, we're all online, you can find us, and we're going to be back again next week with another live episode from the Royal Institution. Thank you, everyone, for being here, we really appreciate it, and we will see you again. Goodbye!