Pod Insights No Such Thing As A Fish No Such Thing As A Whale In Your Car About this episode Manu Henriot joins Dan, James and Andy to discuss seaweed, spermaceti, stick houses and Spain.
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Transcript 10,889 words · 7 speakers
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0:32 Speaker 01 Hi there, Dan and Andy here. Just a little announcement before we start this week's show. We have reached the point where next week Anna Turzinski will return. This is very exciting.
0:44 Speaker 02 She's back!
0:45 Speaker 01 Yeah, she's back, baby. And we've had an amazing run of guests. It's been so fun, but there's no one we love more than Anna. So it's very exciting that she's going to be back. So put it in your calendars. However, we've got a very exciting final guest episode to go out with before the return of Anna, and that is with a fellow QI elf.
1:04 Speaker 02 Yes, you may remember Manu Onrio. She has been on Ask the Elf, our little bonus show. And Manu, as well as being one of the writers of QI, is on the podcast Lunchbox Envy, which of course is also made by QI Productions. Lunchbox Envy is a show all about food, food from around the world, food-related paraphernalia. It is the food show. It's Manu, it's Jack Chambers, another elf who you will have heard on Fish and Fish Products in the past, and Rosie McKean, the Pasta Queen.
1:34 Speaker 01 Oh, yes, yeah. And so, as Andy says, Lunchbox Envy, they each come to the table, each episode with their lunchbox, and each episode takes on a theme. And they kind of blow your mind with all sorts of interesting takes on the history of that food and so on. So there's about 65 episodes out there now. Everything from the episode called Asparagus, through to mangoes, through to food art.
1:55 Speaker 02 What are these all about?
1:56 Speaker 01 You have to listen to find out.
1:59 Speaker 02 That's right. So if you enjoyed Manu's appearance on Fish Today, we're sure you will enjoy Lunchbox Envy. Check it out.
2:05 Speaker 01 Check it out now. And one last thing before we leap into this week's episode is to say, hey, do you like listening to us four dorks talk every week and you want more?
2:14 Speaker 02 Yeah.
2:14 Speaker 01 Why not become a member of the secret private members' club? The one where we put up bonus episodes, where we have video, where we have online quizzes. It's a magical place and it's called Club Fish.
2:25 Speaker 02 That's right. Just go to patreon.com/clubfish today and check it out.
2:29 Speaker 03 And join us.
2:31 Speaker 01 Join us. Okay. But for now, enjoy fish, enjoy Manu and enjoy some seaweed. Okay, on with the show. That was a little teaser there.
2:40 Speaker 02 Really good. I feel teased.
2:58 Speaker 01 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 Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin and Manu Onrio. 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, it's Manu.
3:23 Speaker 04 Okay. Today, my fact is seaweed bubbles could stop you getting pregnant.
3:30 Speaker 02 That is a relief.
3:31 Speaker 04 Oh, I know.
3:32 Speaker 02 I have been trying to avoid it, but you can't.
3:35 Speaker 03 Is that where Andy talks to a woman about seaweed bubbles and they don't want to have sex with them anymore?
3:40 Speaker 04 I mean, that would also work.
3:42 Speaker 02 Yeah.
3:43 Speaker 04 No, so actually, this is a semi-edible seaweed bubble. And I brought an example for you to sample if you would like to.
3:52 Speaker 01 Yes.
3:53 Speaker 02 Yes, please.
3:54 Speaker 04 I brought with me something called Egaregar jelly, which is what my Indonesian aunties used to make. So it's a sweet, coconutty dessert thing. This one has been put in the fridge and it's made using... A seaweed gelatin. So it's vegan, it's very squishy, no pressure to eat it, but I, I mean, I think it's delicious.
4:16 Speaker 03 Okay, Dan, can you explain what it looks like before? I know Andy is desperate to.
4:20 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. It looks like a giant bit of tofu on top of a jelly-like substance underneath.
4:28 Speaker 03 Yeah.
4:28 Speaker 01 Um, like a whiteboard marker, you know, it's got that kind of vibe about it.
4:33 Speaker 03 Like a whiteboard rubber?
4:35 Speaker 01 Uh, yeah, a rubber rather.
4:37 Speaker 02 It looks like food. We were told food would be in the future in the sixties. Like in the future, they'll only eat stuff like just this wobbling jet colorless weird gelatin. But it tastes like a roast dinner incredibly. It tastes like a full roast dinner.
4:51 Speaker 04 I mean.
4:51 Speaker 03 Well, have some and tell us what it tastes like.
4:53 Speaker 01 I should have brought my tongs. It's enormously gelatinous. It kind of just disappears in your mouth as soon as you bite. It's sort of just, yeah, slides down.
5:02 Speaker 03 Is it like eating a jellyfish?
5:04 Speaker 01 Sorry?
5:05 Speaker 03 Is it like eating a jellyfish?
5:06 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's like a jellyfish that's been in a mold, which jelly I suppose has because it's a jellyfish.
5:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
5:12 Speaker 04 Yeah. James, you're not, you're not tempted?
5:14 Speaker 03 I'm not a big fan of seaweed, I have to say.
5:15 Speaker 04 Oh, okay.
5:16 Speaker 03 I will eat stuff if, if that was disgusting and it was like a dare, I would eat it because it's quite nice.
5:22 Speaker 01 Because you've done the museum of disgusting foods.
5:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, I would do that just for the show, but to enjoy it, I just, I'm very bad with texture.
5:30 Speaker 04 It is very wobbly, wobbly.
5:32 Speaker 01 I think it tastes fantastic. Are you saying if I go home now, me and my wife won't get pregnant because I've eaten that?
5:38 Speaker 04 No. Basically, um, agaros, the sugar derived from agar agar, which is what we've just eaten, is used to make these special beads that can trick sperm into binding with them to kind of protect the eggs. And this was all done in mice. And what they did is they covered these beads in a protein called zonopilicida glycoprotein two, or ZP two for short. And what this does is it tricks sperm into thinking that whatever it is, is the egg. Cause it's basically sending out signals being like, I'm an egg, I'm an egg. And the sperm are attracted to it.
6:14 Speaker 03 It's like having a weather spoons and then next door to the weather spoons, you've got. Another Wetherspoons that's made entirely out of jelly.
6:21 Speaker 04 Yeah.
6:22 Speaker 03 But they kind of cover it in the smell of stale beer and desperation. So the people are tricked into thinking it's that. And then all the men sort of walk towards his Wetherspoons, but they get stuck to the outside.
6:33 Speaker 04 That is exactly right.
6:34 Speaker 01 Dan, the in-house Wetherspoons ambassador is looking absolutely furious at this. Actually attracts a very good clientele.
6:42 Speaker 04 I had no idea you're a Spoons fan.
6:44 Speaker 01 One forty-nine for a pint of Ruddles. He's not a fool. He's not a fool. He's a drunk, but he's no, but he's fool.
6:51 Speaker 04 I love it.
6:53 Speaker 01 He's a drunk and a loser, but he's no fool.
6:59 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's very cool.
7:00 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:00 Speaker 01 That's extraordinary. It's a decoy. It's a decoy item that's been sent in.
7:05 Speaker 03 And they use this agar jelly because basically it has the same consistency as an egg, so it tricks them into it. Is it that?
7:11 Speaker 04 I think they use this kind of agarose jelly a lot in microbiology to kind of sift through substances and build structures. Cause it's basically like a nice squishy building block.
7:23 Speaker 03 Yeah, things love living on it.
7:24 Speaker 04 Yeah.
7:25 Speaker 03 In the same way that agar, which agarose is derived from, is really good for petri dishes.
7:30 Speaker 04 Exactly.
7:31 Speaker 01 So are we using this or is this in test mode at the moment?
7:33 Speaker 04 So this was a group of cellular biologists from Maryland in 2016. I tried to find out whether it's actually in development, because I think it's, well, it's a fantastic non-hormonal contraceptive if it works. But like any kind of medicine, these drugs take a long time to develop. And I couldn't find out if they're actually in production, which I think means they're probably not.
7:56 Speaker 01 I'm going to stick with the good old fashioned methods.
7:58 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
8:00 Speaker 01 Conversation.
8:03 Speaker 01 Talk about wallpaper long enough. Headaches.
8:07 Speaker 04 But what is really cool is it works both ways. So not only would it create decoy eggs, because the strongest sperm stick to it the fastest. It can also be used to select really strong sperm for IVF. So it's like a great way to prevent and a great way to encourage pregnancy when it's wanted.
8:23 Speaker 01 That would be outside of intercourse, right? That would be a petri dish situation. And then you bring the chlorine in.
8:28 Speaker 03 So the use of agar to, and agarose to be used in science, it comes from the meeting of a cock and a fanny.
8:37 Speaker 01 Oh, really? I can't believe you found that, if that's what I'm thinking about to say.
8:41 Speaker 03 So in 1881, Fanny Hess.
8:45 Speaker 02 Studying.
8:45 Speaker 03 Was a German technician and she was working with Robert Koch and she had seen people using agar-agar to make jam and they'd been using it for a long time, basically making this stuff that you've made, Manny. They'd been using it for a long time and they needed something to grow bacteria on. And she said, well, why don't we try this? And Robert Koch did try that. And then he managed to isolate the tuberculosis bacterium, which caused tuberculosis. And he won the Nobel Prize for that. But he didn't mention Fanny in his speech or anything like that.
9:18 Speaker 02 Boo. Boo. How many times a day do you guys eat seaweed? On an average day? I had some this morning. Did you? Yeah, I had sushi this morning.
9:26 Speaker 04 Did you actually? Nice.
9:28 Speaker 02 Yeah. The WeatherSpoons breakfast has been changing a lot. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
9:32 Speaker 03 Uh, I don't knowingly eat it at all. My daughter loves it, but I, I don't like it at all.
9:38 Speaker 02 But probably, James, you eat seaweed several times a day.
9:41 Speaker 03 No, never.
9:43 Speaker 02 This is the crazy thing. Most commercially produced foods rely on ficolloids, ficolloids. These are commercial extracts that are derived from seaweed. And basically what they're terrific at is thickening and stabilizing and gelling and all the things that you need food to do commercially. And you get liquids and various liquids and pastes. And what is modern commercial food except a mix of liquids and pastes solidified?
10:05 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah.
10:06 Speaker 02 Um, so jelly beans, frozen cheesecake, ready-made lasagna. James, I'm talking about your breakfast every day.
10:12 Speaker 03 Ice, what about cold burnt toast with low cholesterol spread?
10:15 Speaker 02 Cold burnt toast is on here. Surely spread. Lots of spreads, I'm sure. Canned luncheon meat. James, I know you love a canned luncheon meat. Chocolate milk.
10:23 Speaker 03 I'm actually on, when I go to a restaurant, I ask them if they have a non-ficololoid menu.
10:28 Speaker 02 They love you. They absolutely love you.
10:31 Speaker 03 They say, any allergies, sir? Yes, I don't really eat ficolloids.
10:36 Speaker 02 It's stunning what it said. Eggnog.
10:39 Speaker 04 Yes.
10:40 Speaker 02 I missed a few niche ones in there, but a lot of food. This is great contraceptive chat. Right now, Andy. Fruit yogurt. I've cornered some poor girl in the corner of a party. Fish fingers. All sloth, for heaven's sake.
10:54 Speaker 02 Have you guys heard of the kelp highway hypothesis?
10:58 Speaker 04 Excellent. No, I haven't.
10:59 Speaker 03 Okay, so kelp is a type of seaweed.
11:01 Speaker 02 Type of seaweed?
11:02 Speaker 03 A highway is, so the kelp is moving somewhere?
11:06 Speaker 02 It's actually not kelp moving, it's people moving, thanks to kelp. And it's a hypothesis, okay. It's the theory. We all know the boring old theory about how people got into the new world. Over, over the Arctic or.
11:19 Speaker 03 Yeah, the Bering Bridge, maybe?
11:21 Speaker 02 Maybe the Bering Bridge, whatever. Actually, what this theory posits is that there were these, there are these massive kelp forests stretching all the way from Alaska down to Southern California, I mean, down the coast of Canada and the USA, basically, and across from Japan. The theory is, early humans settled the Americas basically by following the kelp.
11:40 Speaker 03 Cool.
11:40 Speaker 02 And that's how they allowed, they had the nutrients to get along that route.
11:44 Speaker 04 So they're not like walking on the kelp?
11:47 Speaker 02 They're not walking on the kelp.
11:48 Speaker 04 Is what I imagined.
11:48 Speaker 02 They're going, they're, they're eating the kelp. And Northern California used to have these huge pyramids of mollusk shells from where the early settlers had eaten them, feasted, and they were all flattened sadly, but they, they used to be there, these massive great pyramids of what, what they'd left behind.
12:03 Speaker 03 Very cool.
12:03 Speaker 01 That's very cool.
12:04 Speaker 03 And this agar-agar that we have on the table, there are a few interesting things about that. So you know the bubbles in bubble tea? They're usually made of tapioca, but you can make them out of this as well. And so you can get special ones that have this in. And also, the way that you make it is you get this seaweed and then you put it on the beach and then you dry it off and then you freeze it and then you thaw it again and then you freeze it, then you thaw it again. But this was discovered accidentally by a Japanese innkeeper in 1658 when he accidentally left it outside on a frosty morning, came back, it was frozen, thought, oh no, I'm gonna have to bring that in. And then made the same mistake for day after day after day.
12:48 Speaker 02 Brilliant.
12:48 Speaker 03 And kept freezing it and then found that it had got rid of a lot of the impurities and that they could make proper agar jelly out of it.
12:55 Speaker 02 This family, this family are saying, can you please bring in that seaweed? He's like, I'm busy, I'm busy, I'll do it, I'll do it. That's a wonderful accidental discovery story.
13:02 Speaker 01 How do our discoveries happen? By cock-ups.
13:05 Speaker 02 Yep.
13:05 Speaker 01 And fanny ups.
13:06 Speaker 03 And fanny ups.
13:07 Speaker 01 Apologies. Not right here out of history. I was looking into futuristic seaweed. There's a group called the Safe Seaweed Coalition. Okay.
13:16 Speaker 04 Nice.
13:16 Speaker 01 This is my kind of people.
13:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
13:18 Speaker 01 I don't know if there's a dangerous seaweed coalition. Possibly there is, but basically they advocate farming more of it. And what they think is that if we just add a bit more seaweed, this will help secure a good chunk of the world's food supply. If we farmed on 0.03% of the ocean surface, you could add 10% to the world's food supply and free up a load of land that's currently used for farming, you know, crops. You can actually provide a lot of this stuff with seaweed.
13:46 Speaker 01 And there are various ideas, like there are seaweed slash wind farms, which is lovely, where you've basically strung out lines, grown seaweed on them next to a wind farm. It just grows, it doesn't need land, it doesn't need fresh water, it doesn't need fertilizers. It just grows.
14:00 Speaker 02 Yeah.
14:01 Speaker 03 And can you harvest it by attaching it to the wind turbine? And like pulling it up like a spaghetti fork?
14:06 Speaker 01 Like that, it's exactly like that. But basically, I think it's the food of tomorrow. I think, I think.
14:11 Speaker 03 I think you're just gonna, sometimes you just have to add some whimsy to these ideas. Otherwise, people are not gonna go for them.
14:16 Speaker 01 I hear you, I hear you.
14:22 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that in Disney's Three Little Pigs, the pig who built his house out of bricks was voiced by a man who grew up in a house made of sticks.
14:36 Speaker 03 Such a good fact.
14:37 Speaker 04 How, how did you find this?
14:39 Speaker 01 I, I was, I got lost down the rabbit hole highway and I randomly discovered it. So this was a very famous actor in his day, voice actor as well as a screen actor. He was called Pinto Kolvig. We'll, we'll get into him in a bit, but he was the voice not only behind one of the little pigs, but he was the original voice of Goofy. He was two of the seven dwarves in Snow White. He did a lot of big voices for Disney. And yeah, I read that he was the pig who made his house of bricks. And I thought, I wonder if he lived in a house made of sticks? And I spent three hours Googling. And I eventually found.
15:16 Speaker 03 It was a remote control fish.
15:18 Speaker 01 Yes. Yeah, that's the term we use when you hope a fact is true and you desperately search to try and prove it.
15:24 Speaker 02 So a house made of sticks, we're not just talking a wooden house here.
15:26 Speaker 01 We are talking a wooden house.
15:27 Speaker 02 A wooden house.
15:28 Speaker 04 Oh no, but it's a technical term, isn't it?
15:31 Speaker 01 Yeah, stick build is a term that you would use for wooden houses.
15:34 Speaker 03 When you say he grew up there, he didn't live there his whole life, did he?
15:38 Speaker 01 No.
15:38 Speaker 03 Like, he had to leave when the big bad wolf flew in.
15:41 Speaker 01 Yeah, they fled town. So the house is a very specific house. You can still see it on Google Maps. I did that this morning. The address is 410 South Oregon Street, Jacksonville in Oregon. And I found an original description of it, which was it's a one and one half story wood frame house with gable roof that stands on the hillside overlooking much of Jacksonville.
16:04 Speaker 02 Question, you said it's a one and a half story building?
16:07 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:08 Speaker 02 What's going on there?
16:08 Speaker 03 Mezzanine.
16:09 Speaker 01 Mezzanine.
16:10 Speaker 02 Mezzanine?
16:11 Speaker 01 Yeah, it must be.
16:12 Speaker 02 Comboned attic, exactly.
16:13 Speaker 01 Okay.
16:14 Speaker 03 When you said this fact round, my first thought was, well, first thought was great fact. Second thought was, I don't really know this Disney Three Little Pigs. Like, I know all the movies of Disney. I thought I did.
16:24 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:25 Speaker 03 But then I watched it on YouTube and it's a short, but I definitely knew it. Like, I had it growing up. I think we must have had it on cassette or something growing up.
16:34 Speaker 01 Yeah.
16:34 Speaker 03 Because it's the one, it's the one which has the song, "Who's Afraid of a Big Bad Wolf?"
16:38 Speaker 04 Yeah, I was gonna say that song.
16:39 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's 1933 that it was made. It is a short, but it won the Oscar for Best Short Animation that year. But yeah, he was an amazing character and other notable things that he did in his career. He voiced one of the munchkins in The Wizard of Oz. He's one of those guys where his footprint is just kind of on all these major classics. But most importantly, for a decade, he played Bozo the Clown.
17:00 Speaker 02 He was the first Bozo the Clown.
17:02 Speaker 01 He was the original, was he?
17:03 Speaker 02 Because Bozo the Clown was a big franchise.
17:05 Speaker 01 Right.
17:05 Speaker 02 There were, there were bozos all over the place. And that's why we, we did, we did a thing about clowns and I researched bozos and I never mentioned it. Basically, there's a spell. In fact, recently, there are, it's a rash of obituaries of bozos.
17:17 Speaker 01 Yeah.
17:17 Speaker 02 And you'll see a headline like, "Bozo the Clown Has Died."
17:19 Speaker 03 Some other bozo's died.
17:21 Speaker 02 Basically, it's very much, "Who's this clown?", you know, it's just loads and loads of bozos.
17:26 Speaker 01 Including his son, who was a bozo as well.
17:28 Speaker 04 Oh my god.
17:29 Speaker 02 Yeah, nepo clown, though.
17:30 Speaker 03 But I think in 2026, I reckon we'd be more familiar with Goofy than Bozo the Clown in the UK at least.
17:36 Speaker 01 Absolutely, very true.
17:38 Speaker 02 I will just say that his son also played Bozo the Clown and therefore will have had big shoes to fill.
17:42 Speaker 04 Oh.
17:44 Speaker 01 He will say that.
17:44 Speaker 04 Very nice.
17:45 Speaker 02 James, can you just edit that in back when we were, when it was?
17:48 Speaker 03 It's not really gonna work. I'm gonna have to keep the big gaps.
17:51 Speaker 02 That's okay.
17:55 Speaker 01 He voiced Sleepy and Grumpy, yeah, as well. And he was the original voice of Pluto and Bluto.
18:01 Speaker 04 Who's Bluto?
18:02 Speaker 02 Bluto is Bluto.
18:03 Speaker 01 The meanie in Popeye. Yeah.
18:05 Speaker 04 Ah, I see.
18:06 Speaker 01 He took over that role, so he wasn't the original Bluto, but he was the original Goofy and he fell out with Walt Disney. And after he fell out with Disney and left, there was a couple of years where there was no Goofy because they just didn't replace him.
18:18 Speaker 03 Well, he owned Goofy, basically. He owned the voice and he owned the mannerisms.
18:21 Speaker 01 Interesting.
18:22 Speaker 03 Because he invented a character called the Appleknocker. And the Appleknocker was based on someone he knew growing up. He called him a griny, half-baked village nitwit.
18:32 Speaker 04 Oh.
18:33 Speaker 03 And this Appleknocker, but he based his voice and his mannerisms and the way that he walked on this person. And then Goofy came along and he used his existing character. So it meant that like, there were lots of things that you couldn't copy from Disney, but you could copy Goofy because it wasn't really owned by Disney.
18:51 Speaker 04 I had a really nice story from Pinter's autobiography about making Snow White.
18:56 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
18:57 Speaker 04 He was also a fantastic musician. I think he played the clarinet. And they have a deleted scene about soup. And it's just a really long stint of them singing about soup. But the way they created the noises were actually having soup every day, making all of these slurping, gurgling sounds, but in harmony with each other, like a seven-part harmony for each of the dwarves. And they had a really big argument about what liquid it should be because no one wanted to eat soup first thing in the morning for like days on end, like creating the song. So they were going to use water, but that wasn't like slurpy, gurgly enough. And then they all decided beer, we'll just do beer. We all love beer.
19:37 Speaker 04 But it was too frothy and it wasn't going to make the slurping noises that they wanted. So they landed on buttermilk. So they spent nearly a week just slurping buttermilk and created this incredible song.
19:51 Speaker 03 Just one more thing on this Three Little Pigs movie. It came out in 1933, which was the worst year of the depression. And basically, Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf became a song that everyone would sing as if to say, you know, we'll get through this. You know, like Things Can Only Get Better by Dee Ream. It was like.
20:12 Speaker 03 It's like the bat song of its day.
20:13 Speaker 02 Nice. I do like that there are a few behind the scenes things about it. There's the song in it where they have to rhyme the word wolf at the end of one of the lines. And they don't manage it. They spent three hours with everyone, every creative member of the team.
20:28 Speaker 03 Who's afraid of the Persian Gulf? That's what I've been saying now.
20:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, they couldn't, they couldn't find it in the end. And so they decided, let's just fix it by making the two pigs play a flute and a violin in place of a word.
20:41 Speaker 03 There was also a bit later, a children's book, which was based on the three little pigs that encouraged children to invest their pocket money in war bonds.
20:49 Speaker 02 Wait, I, I know about this. There was a second one, War, Three Little Pigs, made in Canada, a special version, which, where Practical Pig is one of the.
20:58 Speaker 04 Yeah.
20:59 Speaker 02 He builds his house from Canadian war bonds.
21:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. So that was the Canadian one. And then the Americans did their own version a little bit later.
21:06 Speaker 02 People would be so cross today if you suggested children put their pocket money into war bonds. I think that's quite a good idea.
21:11 Speaker 04 What is, what is a bond? Like, it's not a physical thing, is it?
21:14 Speaker 03 It's where you give a load of money to the government and they promise to give you some back with interest, but they use the money for war.
21:22 Speaker 02 Yeah. You need to raise a lot of money now for tanks, planes, whatever.
21:26 Speaker 03 For the investors, it's kind of a good idea because it's the government who's giving you the money. So in theory, they shouldn't default on them.
21:31 Speaker 04 You're not given anything physical back. You could build a house.
21:36 Speaker 03 No, that's true. In premium bonds, you at least get a certificate.
21:41 Speaker 02 It's fun, the premium bond. I was gonna say, it's a little, like, sorry, okay, okay. I'm at the party again.
21:49 Speaker 02 I only really know it as the source of the play, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Ebert Albee?
21:54 Speaker 03 Yeah.
21:55 Speaker 02 Which I have read, so.
21:56 Speaker 03 Okay. Yeah. I mean, the, the title's based on it, but I think largely speaking, the plot is quite different.
22:01 Speaker 02 I think it's about sort of unhappy married couples. I don't think it's anything really. I don't think it's any Big Bad Wolf at all. Yeah. It doesn't even feature Virginia Woolf as a character, as far as I remember.
22:10 Speaker 03 Does it not? Do they sing the song?
22:11 Speaker 02 They don't sing anything. It's, I mean, they take all the fun out of it, basically. That's so funny because I don't know that one. I just know Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Alan Bennett, which is a play about that play. But I don't know your play. Interesting. Wow.
22:26 Speaker 03 Oh, you piece it together.
22:27 Speaker 02 Yeah.
22:28 Speaker 04 Um, I've got a bit on pigs actually building.
22:30 Speaker 03 Yes, please.
22:32 Speaker 04 So pigs build nests. I had no idea.
22:35 Speaker 02 Interesting.
22:36 Speaker 04 Yeah, there's a study published in two thousand and two that followed a group of wild pigs on the coastal plains of South Carolina. And they found that ones who were farrowing, so that some females that are about to give birth, started building nests out of all of this like natural material. Um, but yeah, loads of animals build nests, like loads of mammals build nests, cats, dogs, humans.
22:58 Speaker 03 Gorillas.
22:58 Speaker 02 Gorillas.
22:59 Speaker 04 Gorillas, exactly. Um, but in two thousand and thirteen, a group of researchers were studying human nesting and they found women were more likely to get really into cleaning and organising in their third trimester of pregnancy.
23:12 Speaker 03 Yeah, you do hear that, don't you?
23:13 Speaker 04 Yeah.
23:14 Speaker 03 Like people primping the nest.
23:16 Speaker 04 Mm hmm.
23:17 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:17 Speaker 02 Yeah.
23:18 Speaker 03 What about houses made of sticks, Andy?
23:20 Speaker 02 Okay, I have a wooden house link to the first ever friend of the podcast.
23:24 Speaker 01 James Garfield.
23:25 Speaker 02 James Garfield.
23:26 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah. Oh, did he? A lot of those earlier presidents came from log cabins, didn't they?
23:32 Speaker 02 Everyone was obsessed with saying they had been born in a log cabin.
23:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
23:35 Speaker 02 If he was standing for president, it was almost a requirement of the job that he had to say, well, I was born in a log cabin, of course.
23:41 Speaker 03 It was the equivalent of a British prime minister saying that they supported a football team.
23:45 Speaker 02 Yes.
23:45 Speaker 03 Like David Cameron saying, oh, I support Aston Villa. Yeah, of course you do, mate.
23:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So Lincoln, there, there is a Lincoln Memorial Log Cabin replica inside a national park, which is inside a massive stone temple that was built to Lincoln. They just said, let's have a replica of the log cabin. It's incredibly weird. Um, but basically it just, you had to do it. Like Rutherford B. Hayes grew up in a great big house, but it had a log extension. So he was able to claim log cabins.
24:10 Speaker 04 Oh, really?
24:11 Speaker 02 James Garfield, I think, was the final president born in a log cabin in eighteen thirty one.
24:16 Speaker 04 That's cool.
24:17 Speaker 02 And I just found a little side fact about him. You know, so he was shot.
24:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
24:21 Speaker 02 Ate everything.
24:22 Speaker 03 Through his anus.
24:23 Speaker 02 Through his anus. After he was shot, he was taken to the White House and it was decided that he would do much better if he had a seaside holiday, but he needed to be taken to a seaside location.
24:34 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:34 Speaker 02 Three hundred men worked insanely hard laying a railway track.
24:40 Speaker 02 To a little cottage on the coast for him.
24:43 Speaker 01 Wow.
24:43 Speaker 02 Isn't that nuts, really?
24:44 Speaker 03 Is this research you did in episode one of No Such Things as Fish that you're finally getting to use?
24:50 Speaker 02 My new little secret. I've been trying to get this in every episode since episode one.
24:53 Speaker 04 Well, I think it's fantastic.
24:55 Speaker 03 Um, we still get houses made out of wood, buildings made out of wood. Um, wooden skyscrapers are known as ply scrapers. Uh, and you get those all around the world. Uh, there's a 20 story one in Sweden. There's a 25 story one in Milwaukee. And in London, they're talking about building one called the Oakwood Tower, uh, which will be 300 metres high.
25:20 Speaker 04 Ooh.
25:20 Speaker 03 Um, will be in Barbican oak wood, which is quite confusing, but they're going to build this big wooden tower, apparently.
25:27 Speaker 02 That's insane.
25:28 Speaker 01 How wooden are we talking? Are the lifts made of wood?
25:31 Speaker 03 So the, it's the structure. So where you would have steel beams that are holding everything together, you would have, um, wooden beams. And then like the panels, you would have like plywood panels, I guess. And the reason is that actually wood is very good for the environment, weirdly enough, better than concrete. Would you believe that?
25:50 Speaker 02 Is it?
25:50 Speaker 03 It's amazing. Um, the energy required to produce a laminated wooden beam is one sixth of what would be used for a steel beam.
25:59 Speaker 02 Right.
26:00 Speaker 01 It's basically you're building a big tree, aren't you?
26:02 Speaker 02 You are.
26:03 Speaker 01 It's a big tree house.
26:05 Speaker 03 It is in a way. Yeah.
26:06 Speaker 01 Do you know about Horace Burgess's big tree house?
26:09 Speaker 02 Oh, do I?
26:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, I was, it was said to be, said to be the biggest tree house of all time.
26:14 Speaker 02 Who's that?
26:15 Speaker 01 Uh, Horace Burgess. He was a minister. Um, he lived in Crossville, Tennessee.
26:20 Speaker 03 A minister as in a church minister.
26:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, church minister.
26:22 Speaker 02 You're really making us drag this out of the media.
26:27 Speaker 02 So it's an American church minister, Horace Burgess. Sorry, just the way you said Horace Burgess made it sound like, you know, Horace Burgess.
26:32 Speaker 01 Horace Burgess, we all know.
26:33 Speaker 02 Horace.
26:34 Speaker 01 Um, he, he got a message from God saying you should build a tree house and.
26:39 Speaker 02 Oh, I'll make sure you've got all the materials.
26:41 Speaker 01 We did it. We had a great time with Noah. So just, and he was doing a boat, but now I want a tree house to go with it.
26:47 Speaker 02 Yeah. He said, I'll see that you never run out of material.
26:49 Speaker 01 And so he decided to build it and he did. He built a 30 metre tall treehouse. He built it largely on his own. He had 500 pounds of penny nails. He had a nail gun that he did it by himself. You've seen pictures of it. It's remarkable. People got married in it. And when they weren't getting married in it, he used the space for the marriage as a basketball court. But it burnt down. And it took 15 minutes to burn down.
27:16 Speaker 02 That's not, that's not, I can't tell if he's saying that's a long time or not long.
27:19 Speaker 01 That's very quick to burn down.
27:21 Speaker 04 This would be the best episode of Grand Designs I have ever seen.
27:25 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, it took him decades, so there'd be a lot of revisits to see how he was getting on. But, um. Yeah, it was a new owner. The new owner had just bought it and it burnt down, but he didn't have insurance. So he kind of just said no more about it and.
27:39 Speaker 03 Said no more about it.
27:40 Speaker 01 Yeah, he just, I think he was so depressed about the fact that he'd bought this thing and then he let it burn down.
27:45 Speaker 03 God was upset that he'd sold it and that's why God burns it down.
27:48 Speaker 02 Seems likely, doesn't it?
27:49 Speaker 01 Could be, could be. Horace said it was always a pain, uh, the treehouse. You know, he was only doing it because God said to do it and every marriage that happened in there ended in divorce. So he was sort of happy to be rid of it.
28:01 Speaker 03 What is this story?
28:07 Speaker 01 Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is James.
28:11 Speaker 03 Okay, my fact this week is Spain is spinning.
28:17 Speaker 01 How?
28:17 Speaker 03 How indeed. Um, well, it is all down to plate tectonics, continental drift. And a lot of other boring stuff you learn at school. But this is something that's been found out by a researcher at the University of the Basque Country called Asia Mandarieta. And basically they just put a load of GPS stations all over the country and looked at all the data that came out of it. And when Asia looked at all the data, he found that the European and Asian plates. So the continents are on these plates. They're moving closer to each other all the time. But while they're doing it, the Spanish part of it is very slightly rotating.
28:55 Speaker 02 Is there going to be a time where Spain is upside down? Is what we all want to know.
29:00 Speaker 03 Good question. No, it's not spinning in that way. It's not spinning so that the bottom of Spain will be on the top soon. It's more spinning so that Malaga will be in the north.
29:10 Speaker 01 Oh, that's what I mean. So like the bottom will be spinning like a, like a, like a vinyl.
29:15 Speaker 03 Like a roundabout.
29:16 Speaker 01 Like a roundabout. Yeah. So what I'm saying is that it'll go, it will go round.
29:20 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah, yeah.
29:21 Speaker 04 So it's spinning around the western Pyrenees, isn't it? So like from the northern part, that's the pivot. And then yeah, Malaga is like slowly going clockwise.
29:28 Speaker 03 Yeah. Sorry. I thought you meant that the underground pivot.
29:35 Speaker 03 There's not much sun today, is there?
29:37 Speaker 01 How fast is it spinning?
29:38 Speaker 03 Very slowly, Dan.
29:40 Speaker 01 So my holidays, I'll still end up in the same place.
29:43 Speaker 03 We're talking geological time scales here. And even with your planning of holidays, I think it's not going to affect it too much.
29:53 Speaker 02 This is the thing I don't understand about continental drift, plate tectonics. Yeah. Because I know, I know that India, the reason we have Himalayas, the Himalayas, is that India walloped into Tibet.
30:04 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:05 Speaker 02 Basically, right? Like it just slowly, slowly, slowly moved and then it crunched and then it crunched as the land upwards.
30:11 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:11 Speaker 02 If I was in South Tibet.
30:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
30:14 Speaker 02 Would I look at India approaching and like even at the two ends of my life, would I think it's a bit closer?
30:19 Speaker 03 Not really.
30:20 Speaker 02 I better haul my feet out of the sea, you know, that kind of thing.
30:22 Speaker 03 The difference is so small that you would never really know, unless there's an earthquake. And that's why this work that this guy's doing and why other geologists is so important. Because when you're working out how all these plates are moving, it means you can better predict things like earthquakes and volcanoes and other events.
30:38 Speaker 04 That's so cool.
30:39 Speaker 01 It was wild. I remember Richard Turner, who has been a guest on No Such Thing As A Fish years ago. I remember him telling me that he's, he half remembers when he was a very young kid at schools, it not being an accepted idea, the idea of continental drifts, the idea of tectonic plates. And that's how the planet works.
30:57 Speaker 03 So rich, we should say, is as old as Methuselah.
31:02 Speaker 03 No, he isn't that old. In actual fact, it's true. Like, I would say until the 60s, it wasn't completely agreed.
31:09 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah. It was, it was this guy who initially came up with the idea in the early 1900s called Alfred Wegener. And he basically was just looking initially at a map and going, oh, it's like a jigsaw. This bit looks like that fits in there. This bit looks like that fits in there. And he was very lucky. He was able to go to both the coasts of two bits, where he believed this might be the case. And he found similar geology there, similar rocks. And he thought, hang on a second, this is making more sense. So he and others pushed forward this idea. But he died in 1930, and it wasn't accepted really until the 60s, as James says.
31:44 Speaker 02 There are a couple of seminal papers in the 60s that, that led to it being properly accepted. So one was Dan McKenzie's co-authorship of The North Pacific: An Example of Tectonics on a Sphere. Okay. So that was in, I think, 66 or 67.
31:58 Speaker 03 Uh huh.
31:58 Speaker 02 I had a little look, because I found a comparison point. Widespread acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics is younger than Barack Obama.
32:06 Speaker 03 Okay.
32:06 Speaker 02 So I thought I'd look for other people who are older than widespread existence of the theory of plate tectonics.
32:12 Speaker 03 So does that, are you saying that it started in 1966?
32:16 Speaker 02 Give or take. Like, it was properly formalized and finalized.
32:19 Speaker 03 I think Callan Davis was born in 1966.
32:21 Speaker 02 What a great point. He's not on my list. Robert Downey Jr., older than plate tectonics, being widely accepted.
32:27 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
32:28 Speaker 02 Chris Rock.
32:30 Speaker 03 Very good.
32:31 Speaker 02 Thank you. He's, he's the only, he's the only appropriate one.
32:34 Speaker 01 Right.
32:36 Speaker 02 Slash.
32:38 Speaker 03 Kind of like the breaking up of the ground after an earthquake.
32:41 Speaker 02 You're doing really well. Brad Pitt.
32:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
32:46 Speaker 02 Nicolas Cage. Sandra Bullock.
32:50 Speaker 03 Some of these are less good.
32:51 Speaker 02 Keanu Reeves.
32:52 Speaker 03 Now we're going completely off.
32:54 Speaker 02 Liz Hurley. And again, I was not looking for appropriate people. I was just surprised that Liz Hurley is older than plate tectonics.
33:01 Speaker 01 Yes.
33:01 Speaker 03 Yeah. So what, what we're doing here is we're listing people who are about 60, but don't look it. That's why you went through a lot of Hollywood names, I suppose.
33:10 Speaker 02 Yeah, like Keanu, Keanu Reeves and Liz Hurley both look terrific, you know, but they're older than plate tectonics.
33:14 Speaker 03 They're not older than plate tectonics, of course.
33:18 Speaker 03 Which has been going since the earth began, pretty much.
33:21 Speaker 01 You're right.
33:21 Speaker 03 So Britain's moving as well. Yeah, and spinning a little bit. We are like over hundreds of million years, we are gonna move north east. But we're gonna ride along with Europe. We're kind of forever tethered to Europe, which feels like there's some metaphor there. I'm really sure it is. But yeah, we're basically, and then the Mediterranean Sea is gonna close and there'll be a huge mountain belt like the Himalayas, which is where the Mediterranean now is. So like Ibiza is just gonna become like a huge mountain.
33:57 Speaker 03 But we're gonna move further northeast, so it's gonna get colder.
34:02 Speaker 03 And then eventually it all comes back and we're all one big Gondwana land again.
34:05 Speaker 01 Really?
34:05 Speaker 03 That's so exciting.
34:06 Speaker 01 Have they named the next big supercontinent?
34:08 Speaker 03 They have, but I can't remember what it is. You know Gondwana land, which is one of these. Do you know who named that?
34:15 Speaker 01 Is it a friend of the podcast?
34:16 Speaker 03 No, it's someone you've never heard of.
34:18 Speaker 01 Oh, let me guess. Is it a Tennessee minister called?
34:24 Speaker 03 But it's someone who shares a name with someone you absolutely have heard of.
34:28 Speaker 01 These are great clues.
34:31 Speaker 01 By the way, if you haven't joined our online quiz, like, James's round is a thriller.
34:36 Speaker 02 Is it someone I just mentioned? Is it someone like Chris Rock?
34:38 Speaker 03 No, it's someone very unlike Chris Rock. It's Dr Seuss.
34:41 Speaker 01 Oh, okay.
34:42 Speaker 03 Dr Edward Seuss, who was an Austrian geologist. And he kind of is known as the father of continental drift. And he was the one who kind of noticed that the fossils in Africa and South America were kind of the same. Especially if you look at ferns or really, really old plants. And so he came up with the idea that we were once a big continent and he called it Gondwana land.
35:04 Speaker 01 That's so good.
35:04 Speaker 03 But he thought that it wasn't that they came apart and came together. He thought that the water just filled in the gaps and then disappeared again and then filled in the gaps and disappeared again.
35:13 Speaker 01 Right.
35:14 Speaker 03 So he got it a little bit wrong, but.
35:16 Speaker 01 Well, there were so many theories that were going around. There was one that was created by a man called Charles Hapgood, who wrote a book in 1958, so just before continental drift was accepted, called The Earth's Shifting Crust. And that got a lot of exposure because Albert Einstein wrote the foreword to that book. And this was the idea that the cataclysmic shift, the polar ice caps that we get told about all the time, where the poles shift from north to south.
35:41 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
35:42 Speaker 01 That's the reason that the Earth is the way that it is now, because that spread all the countries out to where they are. And it was a suit-
35:48 Speaker 02 The shift of magnetism spreads out the actual continents themselves.
35:51 Speaker 01 Yeah, exactly. So, but it was, it was a pseudoscience idea. At the time, though, it was being accepted as a, as a real thing, to the point where Einstein thought it was a great idea. And this guy, by the way, the reason he came up with this idea is because he was trying to work out how Atlantis could have disappeared in a day and a night.
36:06 Speaker 02 Ah.
36:07 Speaker 01 There we go. And he thought, okay, it would have needed a big moment, like a, like the poles shifting.
36:12 Speaker 02 Well, I will say, in defence of this nutter that you found out.
36:17 Speaker 01 And Albert Einstein life.
36:18 Speaker 02 And Albert Einstein. It is important for things like the Earth's magnetic field. And in fact, Earth is the only planet which has plate tectonics.
36:25 Speaker 01 Isn't that weird?
36:26 Speaker 02 And that's bizarre. And it might be that it helped life survive. Because what happens is, the, the Earth was a snowball two and a half billion years ago. I mean, really, really, very long ago. It wasn't before life, but it was, you know, it was very inhospitable. But plate tectonics create a lot of volcanoes. That throws up a lot of carbon dioxide, which then rainfall scrubs out of the atmosphere.
36:48 Speaker 01 I see.
36:48 Speaker 02 And it helps make the Earth's temperature stable enough for life. So that, there's a theory that plate tectonics are actually one of the things that makes Earth this fantastic environment.
36:57 Speaker 03 I think on Venus, like, it's so hot. When the crust sort of moves, the inside just comes up and then just fills in the gaps.
37:05 Speaker 02 Yeah.
37:06 Speaker 03 So there's no drift. It just kind of just fills in the gaps immediately, I think.
37:09 Speaker 04 It's a constant solid mass.
37:12 Speaker 03 Yeah.
37:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. And it's one of the moons of Jupiter. It's Io, which is just volcanoes, volcanoes, volcanoes all the time. And the whole place is just covered in lava so constantly that it's very hard to get anything, you know, built.
37:22 Speaker 03 But I think in that, is it not that Disney cartoon where they go to try and mine that moon and they sing, Io, Io?
37:34 Speaker 02 I didn't see it coming.
37:35 Speaker 03 Oh, you must have seen that one coming.
37:36 Speaker 01 No, no, I walked right into it.
37:38 Speaker 02 I saw something coming. I didn't, I didn't know where you were going.
37:41 Speaker 03 I'll be honest, I didn't know where I was going for a lot of that.
37:45 Speaker 01 I read the name of every continental plate.
37:46 Speaker 04 Ooh.
37:47 Speaker 01 And every minor plate, and only one of them is amusing.
37:50 Speaker 02 How many are there?
37:51 Speaker 01 Ah, a few dozen.
37:52 Speaker 02 Okay. Put a lot of time into reading that list.
37:55 Speaker 03 The China plate, that would be quite funny.
37:57 Speaker 01 Oh, that is good.
37:58 Speaker 03 Oh, yes.
37:59 Speaker 02 God damn, I didn't check for the China plate.
38:01 Speaker 03 There was only half a dozen of them.
38:04 Speaker 01 This one is a micro plate of South America, and it's called the South Sandwich Plate.
38:09 Speaker 04 Oh, lovely.
38:11 Speaker 01 And the Wikipedia says not to be confused with a culinary sandwich plate. Someone having a little joke there.
38:17 Speaker 04 Who's got a dedicated sandwich plate, is my question.
38:20 Speaker 03 I'd be.
38:21 Speaker 01 Oh. Hello, let's move on.
38:28 Speaker 01 Plate tectonics have been proposed as one way of getting rid of nuclear waste.
38:32 Speaker 04 I read about this.
38:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, really weird.
38:34 Speaker 04 Oh.
38:34 Speaker 03 I just shove it under the carpet, basically.
38:36 Speaker 01 Basically, so, but sort of iconic trenches, like the Mariana. They want to put, they want to put it down there, right to the bottom.
38:44 Speaker 03 It's one of my top 10 trenches.
38:47 Speaker 01 And the idea is that over time, the plate tectonics would sort of push it down. They would cover it and push it down into the mantle of the earth.
38:54 Speaker 02 With a gun to your head, James, could you name another three trenches? Because it's, I'm, I'm thinking it's the only one I've got.
38:59 Speaker 03 Yeah. I know there's a really deep one up in the, in the Arctic, my camera, what's called.
39:04 Speaker 04 The Mariana isn't the deepest, is it?
39:07 Speaker 03 No, it is the deepest, but it's not the closest to the centre of the earth. Because the earth is like an oblate spheroid. So it's fatter in its middle, like a lot of us. If you go down to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, the trench is there. I close it to the centre of the earth.
39:23 Speaker 02 I'm very impressed that you've named even one. Yeah, yeah. But Dan, you're saying this presumably doesn't work? Or?
39:30 Speaker 01 I don't think they've tried it.
39:31 Speaker 03 I don't like it.
39:32 Speaker 01 Yeah, I think they didn't like it either in the end.
39:34 Speaker 02 Yeah, it feels messy.
39:35 Speaker 04 It was proposed by a scientist called James slash Jim Bard. And he patented the method of waste disposal. So it's like using subduction zones. Those are the kind of areas where it gets sucked and pushed down. And he wrote a really angry letter to the nuclear waste management organisation in Canada after they'd rejected his proposal. And in it, he lists why it's a bad idea. So the fact that it might return to the surface via volcanic eruption.
40:06 Speaker 03 I feel like that's my main worry about it. It's like you shove it under the carpet and then one day it just comes up.
40:12 Speaker 04 Also, it's really illegal to dump nuclear waste in the sea in a lot of places.
40:17 Speaker 01 Change the law, you know, we're bright.
40:21 Speaker 03 Bright? We're corrupt, we can do what we want.
40:25 Speaker 04 And also, it would take so long that the risk of leakage would be super high.
40:30 Speaker 01 Yeah, okay, okay, okay.
40:32 Speaker 02 Let's keep on farragging into space like we normally do. Good idea.
40:40 Speaker 01 Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy.
40:44 Speaker 02 My fact is, in the 1970s, the American car industry complained about new rules which said you could no longer include sperm whale brain oil.
40:55 Speaker 01 Woke, gone mad.
40:59 Speaker 03 This is crazy. I can imagine Clarkson having a go at that in one of his albums.
41:03 Speaker 02 You can no longer use. Yeah, whale oil was a massive business for a couple of centuries. There is a separate thing, I'm sure we'll talk about both kinds of oil. There's a separate thing in sperm whales' heads, the sperm whale brain oil, also known as spermaceti.
41:20 Speaker 02 And until 1972, which is really quite recent, lots of American car brands included in their transmission sperm whale brain oil. A bit of your car was once in the head of a sperm whale. It's insane.
41:36 Speaker 01 Do you have a list of celebrities who are older than non sperm whale cars?
41:41 Speaker 02 Everyone I've named before, everyone I've named before, and more besides. That's written that Dan, I should absolutely.
41:48 Speaker 03 I was literally got my phone out to Google those as you were speaking.
41:51 Speaker 02 Alan Carr. Find some born in nineteen seventy, find some people born in nineteen seventy one.
41:55 Speaker 03 Okay, let's have a look.
41:56 Speaker 02 Okay, I'll just tell these guys while you have a look.
41:58 Speaker 03 Okay, movie stars born in the nineteen seventy one first thing that came up, as if I've searched this before.
42:05 Speaker 04 Oh, spooky.
42:07 Speaker 03 Mark Wahlberg, Ewan McGregor.
42:09 Speaker 02 Ewan McGregor.
42:10 Speaker 03 Jon Hamm, Regina King, Carla Gugino. I don't know any of these people.
42:17 Speaker 02 Yeah. Try nineteen seventy.
42:18 Speaker 03 Ke Hui Kwan.
42:20 Speaker 02 Oh, okay. Okay, Indiana Jones. Right.
42:23 Speaker 03 Jada Pinkett Smith.
42:25 Speaker 02 Yeah.
42:25 Speaker 03 Keep that whale oil out of your mouth.
42:29 Speaker 03 Christina Applegate.
42:31 Speaker 02 You see what I'm saying?
42:32 Speaker 03 Johnny Knoxville.
42:33 Speaker 04 Oh.
42:34 Speaker 02 When Johnny Knoxville was a little baby, they were still putting whale brain oil in cars. I think that's insane. Yeah. I think it's insane. And I think this is a very good news story. Like whales, you know, the human, the human species, our species, we decimated whales. We have now changed the laws in all sorts of ways and all sorts of like brave campaigners and, you know, clever lawyers and all this, the laws have been changed and now with a very few minor dishonorable exceptions, Japan, Norway, anyway, whatever, no one kills whales anymore.
43:02 Speaker 03 And let's not forget Iceland.
43:03 Speaker 02 And Iceland. No, but basically this, and it is a good oil. As in, if you were looking at it purely from an effective transmission point of view. Yeah. It's the best, it was the best oil to use. Really? Well, the car, the car industry complained a lot. They whined massively saying, well, you know what? Your transmissions are going to break down more. And the terrible thing is, for the first couple of years, they did. As in, car transmissions became a little bit worse for a couple of years.
43:25 Speaker 03 I heard they were eight times more likely to break down.
43:27 Speaker 02 Yeah, they were.
43:28 Speaker 03 I must admit, I didn't know what a car transmission was until this week.
43:32 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah, yeah.
43:33 Speaker 03 It's the kind of thing that if I take my car to the garage, they go, oh, look, your transmission's gone.
43:38 Speaker 02 Yeah. When did you last shove a whale in this? We're gonna have to, there's a shortage of whales as well. We're trying to get, you know, paperwork.
43:45 Speaker 03 But it's the system that transfers mechanical power from the engine to the wheels.
43:49 Speaker 02 Yeah, it's an important bit of the car.
43:51 Speaker 03 It's pretty much all of the car, really, isn't it?
43:54 Speaker 02 That's arguably their car.
43:57 Speaker 02 I think potentially an electric car wouldn't need sperm whale brain oil.
44:00 Speaker 01 Yeah.
44:01 Speaker 02 Cause it doesn't, I don't think it operates.
44:03 Speaker 03 And who's lubrication though?
44:04 Speaker 02 Everything needs lubrication.
44:05 Speaker 01 Well, that's what I was gonna ask you, Andy, because you've said there's a, two types of oil that we'd be getting from whales. So there'd be a general oil and then there's the specific spermacete, which is in their, so the front of their head, top half of their head. So 18th and 19th century candles would often use whale oil. Was that the spermacete or was that just the?
44:24 Speaker 02 That's normally just the stuff. If you catch a lot of different whale species, you can, you can render down their blubber. I mean, you literally burn the blubber and turn it into the oil. The sperm whale stuff was very specifically good because of all these properties it has. It helps fight rust, it operates at high temperatures. So there's a reason why they use that in machinery.
44:42 Speaker 04 I read it also for lamps. It was really good because it didn't smoke.
44:46 Speaker 02 What sperm whales?
44:47 Speaker 04 Spermacete.
44:47 Speaker 02 Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
44:49 Speaker 04 As a lubricant, it is, it maintains its viscosity across a really big range of temperatures.
44:55 Speaker 01 Right.
44:56 Speaker 03 Much like agar agar. That's why it was so good as a jelly because you can heat it up and it won't melt.
45:02 Speaker 02 Perfect.
45:03 Speaker 03 See?
45:04 Speaker 04 Cool.
45:06 Speaker 03 Good noises, guys.
45:08 Speaker 02 But no, it was, it was a really big, I mean whale oil was just used for so much stuff. In 1935, 84% of all whale oil was used to make margarine. Like a lot of your margarine would be whale.
45:20 Speaker 01 What year?
45:21 Speaker 02 Uh, that was in the 30s and even in the 60s.
45:23 Speaker 03 Wait, wait, wait, wait.
45:24 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
45:27 Speaker 03 People, boy.
45:29 Speaker 02 I think Donald Trump is just younger.
45:32 Speaker 03 1934, am I looking for?
45:34 Speaker 01 Yeah. 1934. God, that's, that's, I'm gonna say Alan Bennett was 1934. The author of Me, I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf.
45:42 Speaker 03 Bridget Bardot, Shirley MacLaine, Maggie Smith. Albert II of Belgium could have had margarine with whale oil in it.
45:50 Speaker 02 No, they didn't stop using it. That's how much was being used, that proportion of it was being used.
45:54 Speaker 03 Carl Sagan.
45:55 Speaker 01 Carl Sagan.
45:56 Speaker 02 You see, you see, it was a huge thing.
45:58 Speaker 04 I read it was used in planes as well. Like it got all the way up in the sky.
46:02 Speaker 01 Which bit of planes? Like the?
46:05 Speaker 02 Transmission.
46:05 Speaker 01 Transmission.
46:06 Speaker 04 Yeah, the bits that needed to glide over each other really quickly.
46:09 Speaker 03 You know what? It got even further than the sky.
46:13 Speaker 02 Space?
46:14 Speaker 03 The final frontier.
46:15 Speaker 02 Oh, yeah.
46:16 Speaker 03 Yes, indeed. And NASA apparently lubed its moonlanders. Sperm whale oil. That feels like a euphemism, doesn't it? Lude my moonlander.
46:28 Speaker 02 It's around in some kind of game show, isn't it?
46:30 Speaker 03 Yeah, but this is according to a book called Unfamiliar Fishes by Sarah Vowell. And she says that they used it until the ban on whaling in 1986.
46:40 Speaker 02 Right. I read a lot of furious NASA geeks who basically said that it's been said that it's been used on the Hubble telescope.
46:51 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
46:51 Speaker 02 Which it hasn't. They said that it was part of the lubing process for the lens and so on. There's quite a few claims of it being used in space that have been just spread incorrectly. First World War, big user of whale oil. So British soldiers would rub their feet with whale oil. Because it helped, it probably helped with things like trench foot or something like that. Yeah, yeah. A single battalion, which is about a thousand men, would get through 10 gallons a day of whale oil. And it was used to make nitroglycerin, it was used for soap, you would smear your face with whale grease. Basically, if we didn't have whale oil, the First World War might not have happened. So it's the whales' fault, really.
47:28 Speaker 04 Why do they need to be so oily, whales? Do we know?
47:31 Speaker 03 Well, I think they use their oil for buoyancy, right? But the spermiceti ones have oils in the melon, which is in the front of their head. We don't know exactly what that's for, but I think this idea that it might be used to kind of get signals and...
47:45 Speaker 04 So like echolocation?
47:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, echolocation. I think that's the idea.
47:49 Speaker 02 They're incredible. They're incredible animals, sperm whales. They're really fantastic.
47:52 Speaker 04 A really nice thing about hunting avoidance in sperm whales. In 2001, there were some newly digitized logbooks from whale hunters in the North Pacific. And they found that over not that long a span of time, the whales had all learnt to swim upwind of the boats that were harpooning them, which were wind powered. So the boats would go one way and the whales would go the other way. And the strike rate for harpoonists fell by 58%, which is so cool.
48:23 Speaker 03 In your face, harpoonist.
48:25 Speaker 02 Eat it, Ishmael.
48:30 Speaker 03 Is that the first line of Moby Dick?
48:34 Speaker 02 It's Moby Dick from the Wales perspective, yeah, yeah.
48:37 Speaker 03 So, Andy.
48:39 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:39 Speaker 03 We have established that you like crockery.
48:42 Speaker 02 Sure.
48:43 Speaker 03 Sandwich plate, yeah. You also like cutlery.
48:47 Speaker 02 Yeah.
48:47 Speaker 03 So what do you think you would do with a mincing knife?
48:54 Speaker 02 Um, is it a knife which has a mincing tool on the end? So for mincing meat? So is it like got a, it's like got a grid of sharp metal on the end and I just shove it into the meat and that minces it?
49:03 Speaker 03 Not quite. And remember, we're talking about whales.
49:06 Speaker 02 Okay. I'm still thinking about a mince pie though, but my mince pies contain whale meat.
49:11 Speaker 03 Do they?
49:12 Speaker 02 Yeah. Oh, is it for mincing up a whale?
49:14 Speaker 03 Um, it pretty much is, but not mince as in like, mince just means chopping up smaller, right?
49:20 Speaker 02 Yeah.
49:21 Speaker 03 Um, so if you were to get the blubber and you were to put it into the pot, it, the smaller it is, the more surface area it has, the easier it is to melt down to turn into whale. Uh, so they would use a mincing knife for that. And they had all sorts of specialised cutlery on these whaling ships. So as well as a mincing knife, they had a cutting spade. They had a head spade.
49:43 Speaker 02 Oh.
49:44 Speaker 03 They had a chopper, they had a boarding knife, which you would grab on to your bit of whale. Because you're doing all this stuff in the water, right? You can't, you can't get the whale and put it onto your boat. It's way too big.
49:57 Speaker 02 Oh, I thought you.
49:57 Speaker 03 So your whale is on the side of the boat.
49:59 Speaker 04 Back in the day, you're cutting up your whale in the sea.
50:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, of course. Like whales are so enormous. Like you can't get a ship that's that big until very, very recently.
50:07 Speaker 02 Yeah.
50:08 Speaker 03 Um, so yeah, you would have your body knife where you would kind of, um, skewer a bit of meat and then throw it onto the deck so that they can put it into the pot. Uh, skimmer, which you would.
50:18 Speaker 02 Just this endless cutlery drawer on these ships.
50:22 Speaker 03 You know what? This is the first time, Andy, that I've listed a load of cutlery on this show and you've not been excited.
50:27 Speaker 02 I know, I know. Do you ever have a dinner party where you've provided too many guests that you've run out of your main cutlery? You have to improvise. Give them the mincing knife, give them the mincing knife, you won't notice.
50:37 Speaker 03 That's fine. Excuse me, is this grapefruit fork or is it a cutting spade?
50:42 Speaker 02 That's what I mean about it being a good news story. Like a century ago, this was just completely par for the course. And like loads and loads of people just worked in the business of killing whales and chopping them up. Have you heard of Waken?
50:52 Speaker 04 No, I haven't.
50:52 Speaker 02 Have a punt.
50:53 Speaker 04 Is it a wake bacon?
50:55 Speaker 03 Is it, is it woke bacon?
50:57 Speaker 02 That sounds woken.
51:00 Speaker 02 Waken was a corned beef substitute in the 1940s, which was made of whales.
51:05 Speaker 04 Oh.
51:05 Speaker 03 That's during the war, they tried to get the British to eat whales, didn't they? And everyone thinks it's utterly disgusting whales.
51:12 Speaker 02 Well, I think it was after the war, weirdly, because most of like, or not most, but a lot of the food shortage was the second half of the 40s, when the war was even over and they sent whalers off to the Antarctic, because there were genuine, like real food shortage in Britain. And so they said, do you want to try Waken? 1951 report, a new unrationed meat, unrationed is great. You can buy as much of this as you like. Waken reached British shops last week. It is corned whale meat with its fishy flavour removed. And apparently it had not been removed sufficiently to make it not taste like whale. And it was, it was not popular.
51:46 Speaker 03 Whale meat is just not tasty. If you live in the far north and you don't have any other option, then maybe you might eat it. But otherwise, like the whalers, they wouldn't eat it. They would catch a whale and they'd have shit tons of this meat. Like whales are big. You could feed your sailors for months and months and months, but they'd rather not eat it. And they'd just rather eat their biscuits and stuff.
52:04 Speaker 02 I'll just, I'll have the green salad. Is that all right?
52:08 Speaker 04 Would you guys try it?
52:09 Speaker 02 Oh, you brought some in?
52:10 Speaker 04 If I had.
52:13 Speaker 03 When I was in Iceland, I did consider having it, but I decided against it at the last minute and ordered the puffin instead.
52:21 Speaker 04 Oh, wow. Was it, was a puffin good?
52:24 Speaker 03 Puffin was not good, no.
52:26 Speaker 02 He was sounding so noble in there. I can't even tell if that's a joke.
52:29 Speaker 03 It's not a joke, no.
52:31 Speaker 04 Yeah.
52:32 Speaker 03 It was quite a long time ago, this, when I was in Iceland. But yeah, like puffin's not nice. It's still fishy and it's quite oily.
52:39 Speaker 04 Well, there's a brewery in Iceland that still brews with whale meat. I think it's like a fatty product, but in, yeah, 2025, they released a beer that was brewed with whale testicles.
52:51 Speaker 02 Okay.
52:52 Speaker 03 I would try that for sure.
52:53 Speaker 04 Yeah. Nice. Well, they smoked them beforehand with sheep dung. So that was used in the brewing cycle and it was, I mean, it was pasteurised out, but apparently it's got, yeah, this funky, smoky flavour released for a festive, festive season.
53:09 Speaker 01 I'm sorry, there's, I think there's a horseshoe theory of foods, which is where extreme deprivation would mean you had to eat whale knackers with sheep shit. And then extreme fancy foodiness means you're eating exactly the same thing.
53:23 Speaker 03 I think the people in Iceland are the only people who have seen the advert for Carlsberg, probably the best beer in the world, and gone, yeah, maybe it is.
53:39 Speaker 01 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've said over the course of this show, we can all be found online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James?
53:51 Speaker 03 My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin.
53:53 Speaker 01 Andy? At Andrew Hunter M. And Manu, you're online?
53:56 Speaker 04 Yeah, can I plug our Lunchbox MV podcast socials?
54:00 Speaker 01 Yeah, go for it.
54:00 Speaker 04 Because I am non-existent. So yeah, you can find Lunchbox MV Pod at Lunchbox MV Pod. We are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
54:09 Speaker 01 Very nice. And that is your pod that you co-host?
54:13 Speaker 04 Yes, it is.
54:14 Speaker 03 It's not a pod of whales.
54:15 Speaker 04 No, it's, it's not a pod of whales. It is a fully fledged podcast. So yeah, we look at weird, weird and wonderful foods. And we have a fantastic chef and food writer called Rosie McKean who's on as well. And then myself and Jack Chambers, who's another QI elf.
54:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, very cool. And it's wherever you get your podcasts. Also, if you would like to write to any of us about the things that have been said, and you want to have them come on our show, drop us a line, which is the sort of feedback show that we do, just send them to podcast at qi.com. Andy goes through all the emails. He cherry picks the best and we discuss them. And we love finding out about all the experiences that you've had as a result of listening to something we've spoken about. Anything you want to tell us, send us there. Or perhaps you have a great fact. If you've got a fact that you want us to read out on one of our shows, we do a audience fact-based show called Little Fish. Goes out every Monday. Send us your fact there. Again, podcast at QI.com and hopefully we'll read one of them out on the shows. Otherwise, just come back here next week. We're
55:17 Speaker 01 going to have another episode. Thank you as ever to our Fishbusters team. That's Liang Li, Ethan Ruparelia, as well as the other Fishbusters out there. And we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.
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