No Such Thing As A Toilet Break For A Tuna

13:59Anna Ptaszynski:So it was sort of pre-Viagra.

14:01Dan Schreiber:They knew how to have erections, sorry. They didn't know how to conjure them out of thin air, as it were.

14:07Andy Dawson:And sorry, this is not one of the children's Christmas lectures.

14:13Dan Schreiber: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 are 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 for these pictures so I'd better show you i took some of this before i came on stage today wow and he stepped out in front of the podium and he pulled his trousers tightly around himself and you know he said 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 what the hell was happening in their lives and um he dropped his pants and um he revealed his um member and then as his final piece de resistance, he said, ah, but we need someone to test the tumescence.

15:13At which point the academics' wives in the audience

15:17Dan Schreiber:started screaming and he had to quickly wrap up the lecture prematurely and leave the room.

15:22James Harkin:The lecture was called What Happens in Vegas Stays of Vegas, wasn't it?

15:26Andy Dawson:Can I take us away from this, please, and talk about enormous pencils? Please. Oh, yeah. 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 meters and weighs 98.43 tons. And it was made by a friend of the podcast, Ashreeta Furman, who basically 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. And this pencil is the equivalent of 1 ,900 ,000 standard-sized pencils. right and it's the same length as the world's longest outdoor shot putt the largest wave in the world in 2025 and the world's largest barbecue pit if you need some perspective yeah thank you it's really helpful because i've actually got it back can i check something with you is it a pen

16:23Anna Ptaszynski:is it a pencil or is it a model of a pencil what's the difference the difference is pretty clear if if it's got a lead in the middle of it works it has to work it has to work then it's a functioning pencil. Yeah, absolutely. Because sometimes people do make models of pencils and they say this is the world's largest pencil. Do they? 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.

16:55Anna Ptaszynski:But it's basically a tree that they painted. It's 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. So that's very impressive.

17:12James Harkin:It's just for any pencil fans that might be here tonight or listening at home. 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 Reese. He wrote a book called How to Sharpen Pencils. 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 carpet...

17:46Anna Ptaszynski: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.

17:51James Harkin:Well, it's 100 American dollars to...

17:54Anna Ptaszynski:I beg your pardon.

17:56Dan Schreiber:I think that's worth it Pencil sharpeners don't work Why haven't we nailed the pencil sharpener in this day and age? They always break off a pencil lead

18:03Anna Ptaszynski:I think there is a clear territory Between pencil sharpeners don't work very well Which I think we can all agree on And$100 is good value

18:16James Harkin:Stop the podcast

18:17Dan Schreiber:Stop the podcast

18:18James Harkin:Hey everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by NordVPN

18:22Dan Schreiber:Yes, if you've been listening to Phish for any number of weeks, you'll know we think that getting a VPN is really important if you care at all about your own online privacy or security. And NordVPN is one of the fastest out there.

18:36James Harkin:Yes, I must say with the kind of stuff we Google for this show, internet security is the most important thing in my life right now. And it is something that is a pretty amazing feature that you can get. It's got servers across 149 different countries. It means as well, by the way, that if you go overseas and you want to access all the stuff that might be geo-blocked in the country you're now in, but you had back home, you can set your VPN to your home country, which means you have access to everything you were getting there to begin with.

19:02Dan Schreiber:That's right. You can just pretend you're not even on holiday. Go on holiday, sit in your bedroom and watch all those Netflix shows that you'd be missing otherwise.

19:09James Harkin:Yeah. And so if you want to get this and you need to, I think it's very important. You should just go to nordvpn.com slash fish and use the offer code fish.

19:21Dan Schreiber:That's right. And if you do that and get a NordVPN two-year plan, you will get four months extra, completely risk-free, 30-day money-back guarantee. Do it now. Okay.

19:31James Harkin:On with the podcast.

19:32Dan Schreiber:On with the show.

19:37James Harkin:It is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay.

19:40Andy Dawson: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. this is the Paris Roubaix 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 Gouverneau 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.

20:26Andy Dawson:Dangerous, very dangerous.

20:27James Harkin: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. Sounds horrendous. It's a 160-mile-long route, right? It's a massive race. That's one day? And it's one day, and they do get hurt, and Theo de Roig, a 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?

21:03James Harkin:Sure. It's the most beautiful race in the world. That's what the race is to people.

21:09Andy Dawson: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

21:19James Harkin:I'm so excited

21:21Andy Dawson:Andy, first time you've heard an audience get that that is your world it's basically the cyclists drove through northern France after World War I 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 oh interesting

21:39Dan Schreiber:because all races were cobbled back in the day right? no tarmac, 19th century

21:43Andy Dawson:Actually, the race is the Paris-Roubaix, but actually it doesn't start in Paris anymore. It starts in Compiègne. Compiègne. Compiègne. I'm sure one of those is right.

21:55Anna Ptaszynski:It's good that you've protected the place's identity like that.

21:59Andy Dawson: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 started a bit further out where the cobbles began. Nice.

22:08Dan Schreiber:And in fact, this was a problem, right? That the cobbles were disappearing because tarmac was invented and roads kept being tarmacked. And then in the, I think it was the 1960s or 1950s, they said, well, this race is just going to become really boring because 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.

22:34Anna Ptaszynski:Okay, okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

22:37Dan Schreiber:As you do. As you do.

22:38Anna Ptaszynski:Is this being held down the mine? Because that is the most impractical thing you can give someone down a mile.

22:43Dan Schreiber:The acoustics are very good there, though.

22:44Anna Ptaszynski:No, a bicycle, not an accordion.

22:46James Harkin:Oh! I thought you meant, is that how they lowered him down? They just held one end of the accordion each? Okay.

22:53Dan Schreiber:Cycle your way up. I don't think it was down the mile, 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. 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 roots that were very, very cobbly.

23:13Anna Ptaszynski:So the prize in the race is a cobblestone, which is interesting, but it's not one of them. Obviously, they don't take it from a bit of the root. These are cobbles which have been blown up during the First and Second World Wars, right? 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. Wow.

23:40Andy Dawson:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

23:41Anna Ptaszynski:It's very cool.

23:42Andy Dawson:They're really big old things, aren't they?

23:44Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, because you get little round cobblestones, lots of places here, but these are big flat. They're like bricks, but they are much less even.

23:50Andy Dawson:So you get a cobblestone, and you also get a brass plaque of your name, which goes onto 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 there. Oh, really? 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, 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 race.

24:22Andy Dawson:And then you get a third group who use these showers. Can you guess who they are?

24:26Anna Ptaszynski:People who've been injured and need to wash mud.

24:30Andy Dawson:Well, they could still use normal showers.

24:32Anna Ptaszynski:Okay.

24:34Andy Dawson:Okay.

24:35James Harkin:The bicycles.

24:36Andy Dawson:The bicycles themselves? Yeah. On their own? Yeah. No. Some of the race crew, the staff? No, it's not. It's the ones who are sponsored by shampoo companies. Ah. 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 the nice warm showers afterwards.

24:57Anna Ptaszynski: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.

25:03Dan Schreiber:How many guesses do you think we would have had to have gone to before we'd got to that?

25:07Anna Ptaszynski: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 there and kind of serviceable. But there is a team of extra employees who are hired. Can anybody guess what their job is?

25:27Andy Dawson:Well, in the Tour de France, they have people who are employed because people draw penises on the ground, and they employ people to turn them into beautiful butterflies. Yes. Is it that? It's not that.

25:38Anna Ptaszynski:These people have to, these crew have to eat something as part of their job. And I corrected people to crew there. Mmm. Good riddle. Okay, so they might be animals. They might be animals. Good riddle, Andy.

25:50Andy Dawson:No, they have to, I know, because they're near farms, so there's often like horse poo and stuff on there. So they employ a load of dung beetles to push away the balls of dung just before the bikes get there. He's got it. Wow.

26:06Anna Ptaszynski:It's a team of goats.

26:08James Harkin:Eating grass.

26:08Anna Ptaszynski:Eating the veg in between the cobbles.

26:10James Harkin:Okay, right. Yeah, yeah.

26:12Anna Ptaszynski:And the human are called the Fossat du Pavé, convicts of the cobbles. How cool is that? Oh, that's like a society. There's a human team of maintenance people too.

26:23Andy Dawson:They're not eating the...

26:24Anna Ptaszynski:They're not eating the stuff. Well, I don't think they're banned from it, but...

26:28James Harkin:The method ones are. So, yeah, 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 love the cobble. So they're probably looking out for the cobble stealers that we're talking about. This is a very old race, 1896. Like 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.

27:07James Harkin:There was Perez and there was Vienne and they were like we're gonna end it in Belgium or France We don't know which way 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 gonna write immediately and say no human should do this this is this is mad this is insane but then these two guys perez and vien took him out to dinner got him drunk and then he was like yeah i'll be fine it'll be cool and that's why we have it that's

27:42Andy Dawson:so funny yeah and then like for 125 years women were not allowed to do it until 2021 it's quite recent isn't it oh it's so long ago now 2021 um and the winner was lizzie daynon who's british i think uh and the sad thing about that was and And this, in fairness, this happens in a lot of 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.

28:18Andy Dawson:And so the entire broadcast was just her being miles in front of everyone else and just winning.

28:24Dan Schreiber:Oh, sorry, I thought you meant the people who were filming couldn't catch her. Surely they've invented cars for this race. I know they haven't invented women yet.

28:35James Harkin:She's the only British cyclist to win this race.

28:40Dan Schreiber:Was she winning the mixed set? No, no, no.

28:43James Harkin:So 2021 was the first women's race. She won that. Bradley Wiggins has done it quite a few times. I think he came ninth. It was the closest that he ever got. Not very good.

28:55Anna Ptaszynski:Sorry?

28:55James Harkin:Not very good, is it? Not coming home. No. Do you know what? Do you know? He's in a team. He's in Sky Team. That's what he wrote for it. Yeah, he was in Sky Team. Do you know what the first professional team he was in when he started racing? What? Because they're in teams, Andy. Like, you're in, like, a group. You're in a postal? Okay. It was the Linda McCartney Racing Team. Yes. Which focused largely on racers who were vegetarians as well as the crew. Wow.

29:26Dan Schreiber:Well, I mean, talking about women's cycling, and the reason I asked if it was a mixed race is that actually cycling is one of the things that women and men could be on a par at in future. And in fact, there's this thing called the RAM, which is the race across America. And...

29:43James Harkin:It is R-A-A-M, isn't it? Yeah, it is.

29:47Dan Schreiber:Race across America. 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 as 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.

30:34Dan Schreiber:Yeah, well, she doesn't listen, it's fine.

30:38Andy Dawson:Was she American?

30:39Dan Schreiber:I think so, yeah. Or maybe she was, no, 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

30:56James Harkin:There was the very first Ram had 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 sort of hope that one day something horrible is going to be named after you in a medical sense?

31:16Anna Ptaszynski:Is it a cycling injury? Yeah, it's called Shermer's neck.

31:19James Harkin:Oh! Okay, that's not the part of the body I thought you were going to go. Yeah. So Schirmer'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 drop. Oh my god And you can't do anything and it's just gone The muscles are entirely gone and so Schirmer 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 Schirmer's neck and you can even by devices because they don't give up. Once their neck gives up, they pull over and they put on a device that just pulls their head up and they just ride the rest of this insane thing

32:03Andy Dawson:that they're doing. At least at the end of the race, it's quite easy to put the medal over him.

32:17James Harkin: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. Insane. So Elon Musk named X and Ellen Busk named the other X from 150 years ago. And basically I 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 publisher's just next door where Byron was published by them. And when he died, all of his memoirs and papers were burnt.

33:05James Harkin: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, 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.

33:49James Harkin: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. 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

34:19Andy Dawson:means you can talk about anything because X can be anything

34:21Anna Ptaszynski:two quick thoughts on the name firstly, should have called themselves the X Men because they were all men second point, there were nine of them and their symbol is X which is of course Latin for nine Nine, yeah. I'm just seeing two big missed opportunities here.

34:40Dan Schreiber:You want them to be called the 1X Club, the IX Club.

34:42Andy Dawson:The IX Men, I don't think. Well, you invite one more person in, and then there's ten of you.

34:50Dan Schreiber:They kept on trying to invite people in, didn't they? They kept on... We need just one more. We don't like anyone else. There was this constant chat, as you can imagine. and they were saying, look, should we get Barry in or, you know, should 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.

35:25Andy Dawson:Okay.

35:26Dan Schreiber:So I had a look. The only consonants that are remaining once you go through all 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 Vasquez, V-A-Z-Q-U-E-Z, who was a Galician musician who invented a thing called the technophon, which looks a bit like a piano, but when you play notes, it replicates the human voice.

35:50Andy Dawson:Can you imagine if he turned up and gone, I'm here, nice. Then I'd have to go, what's your first name? 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 Hucker

36:16Andy Dawson:The eccentric Tyndall the exemplary busk and so they gave themselves these X nicknames

36:22James Harkin:Yeah, they did 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. It acts as the centre of development for the entire bird, so that's what they thought they were. They were on the inside.

36:38Anna Ptaszynski:I think we'll just go with X, actually. Thank you. We are writing down that suggestion.

36:44Andy Dawson:Hands up for blastodermic.

36:46Anna Ptaszynski:No?

36:48James Harkin:The thorough club. I quite like that.

36:52Dan Schreiber: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.

37:20Anna Ptaszynski:Interesting. Well, they were accused of only working to each other's mutual advantage. They were accused of being a bit of a self-promotion society. They would lobby for each other, 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 totally without self-interest, I guess.

37:39Andy Dawson: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.

37:54Dan Schreiber:Wow.

37:55Andy Dawson:But you could say the same about us. Well, you know what? The reason I don't like them is because they had some sworn enemies. And their sworn enemies were the North British scientists. 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 Clerk 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 that look in your eye, Andy. 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.

38:40Andy Dawson:And the X Club were more like, no, science is science and religion shouldn't get involved and all that kind of stuff. Right. Yeah, you're crazy, Scott. Wow.

38:50Anna Ptaszynski:That is an interesting, oh yeah.

38:52James Harkin:They had a lot of little phrases and words that we use inside 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 he had a lot of, he had a prototype thing that held papers together and he argued that, come on, I was basically there.

39:20Dan Schreiber:Bet no one's done this before.

39:21James Harkin:Yeah.

39:22Dan Schreiber:Was it Huxley who invented agnostic? It was, wasn't it? Yeah. Because it 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. What? 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.

39:57Dan Schreiber: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. Oh, really? And so, yeah, and then he said, I pranced back into the next meeting of the society like a fox, you know.

40:14Anna Ptaszynski:I'll stop with the fox thing. It's not working. It's got an X in it. It has got an X in it, yeah.

40:20Andy Dawson:So 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 a 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.

40:55Anna Ptaszynski: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.

41:05Anna Ptaszynski:I mean, yeah, it's not good, you know. I mean, that's life, isn't it? That's what we like, yeah. I did read it declined until the very last meeting was in 1889. 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? Who was it? Sorry, 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.

41:32James Harkin:Devastating. Wow. Yeah. 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. 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?

42:18James Harkin:So I think scientists had seen 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 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 But you imagine the phone and the vinyl player

42:57Dan Schreiber:Why didn't they play the vinyl down the phone?

42:59James Harkin:Oh yeah, like a voicemail Sorry Tennyson's not in right now

43:08James Harkin:stop the podcast stop the podcast hey everyone this week's episode of fish is sponsored by

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44:38James Harkin:Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is Andy.

44:44Anna Ptaszynski:My fact is, in Cambodia, there is a special hotline for fishermen to ring if they accidentally catch a fish that is too big. How do you accidentally catch a fish? Well, you get a bite, you tug away for a bit, and then you haul it in, and then... And then it's much bigger than you thought it was. It's much bigger than you thought it was, yeah, basically.

45:08Andy Dawson:Is this a very special type of fish, or is it just any big fish?

45:12Anna Ptaszynski: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 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.

45:34Dan Schreiber:Wow. So bigger than the pencil.

45:36Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, yeah, yeah.

45:37Andy Dawson: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.

45:50Anna Ptaszynski:And that would be a good and noble way for that fish to die.

45:55Andy Dawson:I mean, once it's dead.

45:56Anna Ptaszynski:Captain Birdseye's rubbing his hands up on deck. So basically, the problem is the Mekong giant catfish, they're 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.

46:32Anna Ptaszynski:So there is this wonderful new team. They have launched the Mekong Fish app, and the fishermen have downloaded the app, basically. And there is a rapid response team. and if 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? And then they chuck it back in.

47:07James Harkin:Maybe that's why they're getting caught so much these days. You should check out this flower thing, man. This is insane. No, they put you back in. It's nuts. They don't even... This lady comes, she tags you, you're back in.

47:19Anna Ptaszynski:So it's a very clever thing to do.

47:22Andy Dawson:It's important because these fish, they're getting smaller as well, aren't they? 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, that's the easiest to find. And then over generations, they just get smaller and smaller because the smaller ones survive. Yeah. 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.

47:50Anna Ptaszynski: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.

48:04Dan Schreiber:Nice.

48:04Anna Ptaszynski:Right. That's crazy.

48:05Dan Schreiber:100 men? What are the 99 men doing who aren't holding the rod?

48:09Anna Ptaszynski:They're just doing, like, encouraging... They're in the pub going, Paul!

48:16Andy Dawson:Now my wife's at home. She said I had to come.

48:20Dan Schreiber: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 a 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 foot holders, 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 can last so long. So I found one fish fight. It was in 1990.

48:54Dan Schreiber: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?

49:03Anna Ptaszynski:This one was two hours, so I'll say two hours, ten minutes.

49:06Dan Schreiber:Nice, thank you, I appreciate that.

49:08Anna Ptaszynski:Dan, do you want to come in and absolutely trounce this? 16 years.

49:15Dan Schreiber:Thanks a lot, Dan. 23 hours. Wow. 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. At 22 hours? At 22 hours he lasted.

49:29Andy Dawson:That's more impressive. Does the tuner just go, okay, well, while you go to the toilet, fair's fair, I just won't pull for a bit.

49:35Anna Ptaszynski:The tuna's been bursting for a piss for ages. They respect the rules.

49:42Dan Schreiber:His mate took the line for a while.

49:45Andy Dawson:Could his mate not have helped in the first 22 hours?

49:49Dan Schreiber:You've got a lot of beers to get through in those cool boxes. Anyway, the fish won. Got away in the end. Good.

49:55James Harkin:Yeah, nice. Wicked. There's a lot of species of catfish. There's like thousands. They're all over the world. I've got a quiz question for you, though.

50:05Andy Dawson:Oh, great.

50:05James Harkin: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?

50:18Anna Ptaszynski:To stop fish from outside getting in and eating their fish.

50:22Dan Schreiber:Jumping in. Yeah.

50:24Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah. To stop flying fish getting in and eating their fish. Yeah.

50:28James Harkin:Like, yes, but... But... QED. But no, as well. Okay. Is he right or not? No, what do you mean flying fish? Fish that, like, what, have chartered an airline? No! Fish will jump over the net. Okay, so let's imagine there's a land mass in between another body of water. Okay, but he must be close, right?

50:49Andy Dawson:Because otherwise you wouldn't have... Is it like... Is it people throwing fish into it from... That's good. No.

50:56Dan Schreiber: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.

51:08James Harkin:And how's the fence that is standing vertically? It's a really high fence. Yeah, right, sorry. There are some fish that can walk. Catfish can walk. It is insane. Catfish can walk like 1.2 miles. They can...

51:24Anna Ptaszynski:It's crazy.

51:25James Harkin: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. You were nuts. That's incredible. But they can do it. It's an extraordinary thing. And there's even a new word that's been invented called ruffling, which describes the method by which catfish walk along. They use their mouth. They use their tail. They use their body. Ruffling. They ruffle along. Yeah. And it's a word. It's now a word.

51:59Dan Schreiber:Sounds like crawling. I don't mean to denigrate the catfish. Well done, then. 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.

52:12Andy Dawson:But you wouldn't expect a walking catfish to just get up on two legs and saw to a lung.

52:18Dan Schreiber: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. Have they? Yeah, because if you do one thing well...

52:33Anna Ptaszynski:Sounds bad.

52:34Dan Schreiber: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.

52:48Anna Ptaszynski:Enemy of the podcast, the Panama Canal.

52:52Dan Schreiber:Who thought that was a good idea? All the lionfish came over, and they can reduce the population of the fish on a reef by 80%. very, very quickly. They can eat 20 fish an hour. So that's 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...

53:29Dan Schreiber:I know, I thought I'd skate over that bit quite quickly.

53:31Anna Ptaszynski:No, no, no. Honestly, that was a happier ending than I thought would happen for the fish.

53:36Dan Schreiber:Did you? The big dog at the restaurant. It's how he wanted to go.

53:40Anna Ptaszynski:I thought it was just a big mincing machine in the Hoover bag or something.

53:44Andy Dawson:I'll be honest, in the restaurant, there's probably some kind of big mixing machine going on as well. That's true. What a weird business pivot for Roomba.

53:53James Harkin:Can you imagine? We've become a household name. They're all sitting, all the shareholders, in the room.

53:58Dan Schreiber:What's next, boss? Can we do it anywhere but carpets? Have you tried?

54:02Anna Ptaszynski:How? So is it happening?

54:05Dan Schreiber:It is happening at quite a small scale. It was also the idea of a guy called Colin Angle.

54:10James Harkin:Oh.

54:12Dan Schreiber:Of angling.

54:13James Harkin:And fish have scales of a small scale. And so... You're welcome.

54:20Dan Schreiber:Thank you, Dan. For next time, don't need that. But thank you.

54:25Anna Ptaszynski:Okay, but it might be rolled out in a bigger way.

54:27Dan Schreiber:Yeah, it's one of these ideas that has not been rolled. It's not saving all the fish life.

54:31Anna Ptaszynski:If you have to have a person controlling it, every single one.

54:34Dan Schreiber:I think you have to send gamers out, take them out of their attics, put them on ships.

54:38Andy Dawson:Probably you can get AI to do it now and just go around and just chat GPT. We'll see a picture of it and go, that's a picture of Nick Clegg. No, I think it's a lionfish. Oh, yeah, sorry, it is a lionfish. Good point.

54:56Anna Ptaszynski:Meanwhile, Nick Legg's being attacked by what? A thousand? Roombas

55:01Andy Dawson:This is a movie that has to get made

55:04Anna Ptaszynski:Then you're in the restaurant I think I'll have

55:11Andy Dawson:It can't be It can't be It looks No Can I have that one that looks like Nick Legg?

55:22James Harkin: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.