No Such Thing As A Whale In Your Car

27:47Right. Sounds good. It's basically you're building a big tree, aren't you? You are. It's a big tree house. It is, in a way, yeah.

27:54James Harkin:Do you know about Horace Burgess's big tree house? Oh, do I? Yeah. Well, it was said to be the biggest tree house of all time. Who is that? Horace Burgess. He was a minister. he lived in Crossville, Tennessee a minister as in a church minister yeah, a church minister you're really making us drag this out as an American church minister Horace Burgess sorry, just the way you said Horace Burgess made it sound like, you know, Horace Burgess Horace? he got a message from God saying you should build a tree house and I'll make sure you've got all the material we did it, we had a great time with Noah so just he was doing a boat, but now I want a tree house to go with it yeah he said i'll see that you never run out of material and so he decided to build it and he did he built a 30 meter tall tree house uh 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'd seen pictures of it it's remarkable um 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 um but it burnt down oh well and it took 15 minutes to burn down that's not that's not i can't tell if he's saying that's a long time or not long that's very quick to burn down yeah the best episode of grand designs i have ever seen 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 oh so he kind of just said no more about it and um no more about it yeah he just i think he so depressed about the fact that he'd bought this thing and then he let it burn down god was upset that he'd sold it and that's why god burns it down seems likely it could be it 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 what is this story

29:55James Harkin:okay there's time for fact number three and that is james okay my fact this week is spain is spinning how how indeed um well it is all down to plate tectonics continental drift and a lot of other boring stuff you learned at school but this is something that's been found out by a researcher at the university of the basque country called asia manderieta 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 is there going to be a time where Spain is upside down?

30:47Is what we all want to know. 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. Oh, that's what I mean. Sorry, like the bottom will be spinning like a vinyl. Like a roundabout. Like a roundabout. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what I'm saying is it will go round. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's spinning around the Western Pyrenees, isn't it? So like from the northern part, that's the pivot. and then Malaga's slowly going clockwise. Sorry, I thought you meant that the underground...

31:22There's not much sun today, is there? How fast is it spinning?

31:26James Harkin:Very slowly, Dan. So my holidays, I'll still end up in the same place. We're talking geological timescales here and even with your planning of holidays, I think it's not going to affect it too much. 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 yeah basically right like it just slowly slowly slowly moved and then it crunched and then it crunches the land upwards yeah if i was in south tibet yeah would i look at india approaching and like even at the two ends of my life where i think it's a bit closer not really i better haul my feet out of the sea you know that kind of thing the difference is so small that you would never really notice it unless there's an earthquake and that's why this work 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 like that here's wild i remember um 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 um the idea of tectonic plates and that's how the planet works so rich we should say is as old as methuselah no he isn't that old in actual facts it's true like i would say until the 60s it wasn't completely agreed 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 yeah this bit looks like that fits in there and he 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 It wasn't accepted really until the 60s, as James says.

33:32There are a couple of seminal papers in the 60s 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. I had a little look because I found a comparison point. Widespread acceptance of the theory of plate tectonics is younger than Barack Obama. Okay. So I thought I'd look for other people who are older than widespread existence of the theory of plate tectonics. So are you saying that it started in 1966? Give or take. Like it was properly formalized and finalized. I think Alan Davis was born in 1966.

34:09What a great point. He's not on my list. Robert Downey Jr., older than plate tectonics being widely accepted. Oh, yeah. Chris Rock. Very good. Thank you. He's the only appropriate one. Right. Slash. Kind of like the breaking up of the ground after an earthquake. You're doing really well. Brad Pitt. Yeah. Nicholas Cage. Sandra Bullock. Some of these are less good. Keanu Reeves. Now we're going completely off topic. Liz Hurley. And again, I was not looking for appropriate people. I was just surprised that Liz Hurley is older than plate tectonics. Yes. So what we're doing here is we're listing people who are about 60, but don't look it.

34:55So that's why you went through a lot of Hollywood names, I suppose. Yeah, like Keanu Reeves and Liz Hurley both look terrific, you know, but they're older than plate tectonics. They're not older than plate tectonics, of course. Which has been going since the Earth began, pretty much. You're right. So Britain's moving as well. Oh. Yeah, and spinning a little bit. we are like over hundreds of million years we are going to move northeast but we are going to ride along with europe we're kind of forever tethered to europe which feels like there's some metaphor there i'm not really sure what it is um but yeah we'll basically and then the mediterranean sea is going to close and there'll be a huge mountain belt like the himalayas which is where the Mediterranean now is.

35:40So Ibiza is just going to become a huge mountain. But we're going to move further northeast so it's going to get colder. And then eventually it all comes back and we're all one big Gondwana land again. Really? Have they named the next big superculture again? 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? Is it a friend of the podcast? No, it's someone you've never heard of. Oh, let me guess. Is it a Tennessee minister Called Someone who shares a name With someone you absolutely have heard of These are great clues

36:18James Harkin:By the way if you haven't joined Our online quiz at Club Fish James is around as a thriller Is it someone I just mentioned? Is it someone like Chris Rock? No it's someone very unlike Chris Rock It's Dr. Seuss Dr. Edward Seuss Who was an Austrian geologist 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 that's so cool 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 right so he got it a little bit wrong but well there were so many theories that were going around.

37:05James Harkin: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. Oh, yeah. 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 it was a shift of magnetism spreads out the actual continents 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 and he thought okay it would have needed a big moment like a like the poles shifted well i will say in defense of this nutter that you found out and albert einstein um it is important for things like the earth's magnetic field and in fact earth is the only planet which has plate tectonics and that's bizarre and it might be that it helped life survive because what happens is 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.

38:35I see. And it helps make the Earth's temperature stable enough for life. So there's a theory that plate tectonics are actually one of the things that makes Earth this fantastic environment. I think on Venus, it's so hot. When the crust sort of moves, the inside just comes up and then just fills in the gaps. Yeah. So there's no drift. It just kind of just fills in the gaps immediately. That's interesting. I think it's a constant solid mass. Yeah. 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.

39:10But I think in that, is it not that Disney cartoon where they go to try and mine that moon and they sing Io, Io?

39:21I didn't see it coming. Oh, you must have seen that one coming. No, no, I walked right into it. I saw something coming. I didn't know where you were going. I'll be honest I didn't know where I was going for a lot of that I read the name of every continental plate And every minor plate And only one of them is amusing How many are there? A few dozen Put a lot of time into reading that list Is it the China plate? That would be quite funny Oh that is good Damn I didn't check for the China plate There was only half a dozen of them This one is a micro plate of South America And it's called the South Sandwich Plate Oh, that's good.

39:59And the Wikipedia says, not to be confused with a culinary sandwich plate. Someone having a little joke there. Who's got a dedicated sandwich plate is my question. Oh, hello. Let's move on.

40:15James Harkin:Plate tectonics have been proposed as one way of getting rid of nuclear waste. I read about this. Yeah, really weird. They just like shove it under the carpet, basically. Basically, but sort of iconic trenches like the Mariana. They want to put it down there, right to the bottom. That's one of my top ten trenches. 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. I don't know about that. With a gun to your head, James, could you name another three trenches? Because I'm thinking it's the only one I've got.

40:47Yeah. I know there's a really deep one up in the Arctic by Cameron, it's called. Mariana isn't the deepest is it? No it is the deepest but it's not the closest to the centre of the earth because the earth is like an ablate 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 closer to the centre of the earth I'm very impressed that you've made it even one more but Dan you're saying this

41:16James Harkin:supposedly doesn't work or? I don't think they've tried it I think they didn't like it either in the end yeah it feels messy it was um proposed by a scientist called uh 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 um and he wrote a really angry letter to the nuclear waste management organization in canada after they'd rejected his proposal um and in it he lists why it's a bad idea. So the fact that it might return to the surface via volcanic eruption. I feel like that's my main worry about it.

41:55It's like you shove it under the carpet and then one day it just comes up. Also, it's really illegal to dump nuclear waste in the sea in a lot of places. Well, let's change the law. You know, we're bright. Bright. We're corrupt. We can do what we want. And also it would take so long that the risk of leakage would be super high. Okay, okay, okay. Let's keep on Farragut into space like we normally do. Good idea.

42:27Okay, it's time for our final fact of the show, and that is Andy. 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. woke gone mad this is crazy I can imagine Clarkson having a go at that in one of his columns since 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 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 do you have a list of celebrities who are older than non-sperm whale cars everyone I've named before and more besides that's written down I was literally got my phone out to google those as you were speaking find some born in 1970 find some people born in 1971 okay let's have a look okay I'll just tell these guys while you have a look okay movie stars born in the 1961 first thing that came up as if I've searched this before Mark Wahlberg Ewan McGregor John Hamm Regina King Carla Gugino I don't know any of these people try 1970 Kehui Kwan Oh, okay Indiana Jones Jada Pinkett Smith Keep that whale oil out of your mouth Christina Applegate You see what I'm saying?

44:20Johnny Knoxville When Johnny Knoxville was a little baby They were still putting whale brain oil in cars I think that's insane And I think this is a very good news story Whales, 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 Wales anymore and it's really good 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 it was the best oil to use really well 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.

45:09As in, car transmissions became a little bit worse for a couple of years. I heard they were eight times more likely to break down. Yeah, they were. I must admit, I didn't know what a car transmission was until this week. It's the kind of thing that if I take my car to their garage, they go, oh, look, your transmission's gone. When did you last shove a whale in this? We're going to have a shortage of whales as well. We're trying to get paperwork. But it's the system that transfers mechanical power from the engine to the wheels. Yeah. It's an important bit of the car. It's pretty much all of the car, really, isn't it?

45:42That's arguably their car. I think potentially an electric car wouldn't need sperm whale brain oil. Yeah. Because it doesn't, I don't think it operates quite a bit. It needs lubrication, though. Everything needs lubrication, basically.

45:54James Harkin:Well, that's what I was going to ask you, Andy, because you've said there's two types of oil that we'd be getting from whales. So there'd be a general oil and then there's the specific spermaceti, which is in there. 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 spermaceti or was that just the... That's normally just the stuff. If you catch a lot of different whale species, 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.

46:25It helps fight rust, it operates at high temperatures. So there's a reason why they use that in machinery. I read it also for lamps. It was really good because it didn't smoke. What, sperm whales? Sperma safety. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. As a lubricant, it maintains its viscosity across a really big range of temperatures. Right. 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. Perfect. See? Cool. Good noises, guys. Good noises. But no, 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.

47:05A lot of your margarine would be whale. What year? That was in the 30s. And even in the 60s. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Oh, yeah. Okay. People, bud. I think Donald Trump is just younger. In 1934, am I looking for?

47:22James Harkin:Yeah. 1934. god that's I'm going to say Alan Bennett was 1934 the author of Me I'm Afraid of Virginia Woolf Bridget Bardo Shirley MacLaine Maggie Smith Albert II of Belgium could have had margarine with whale in it no they didn't stop using it that's how much was being used that proportion Carl Sagan Carl Sagan you see you see it was a huge thing I read it was used in planes as well like it got all the way up in the sky which bit of planes like the transmission the bits that needed to glide over each other really quickly you know what it got even further than the sky space the final frontier yes indeed NASA apparently lubed its moonlanders that feels like a euphemism it does lube my moonlander it's around in some kind of game show isn't it 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.

48:28Right.

48:29James Harkin: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, 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, a 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. 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.

49:06It 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 whale's fault really why do they need to be so oily whales do we know well i think they use their oil for buoyancy right but the spermaceti ones have oils in the melon which is in the front of their head and 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 echolocation yeah echolocation i think that's the idea they're incredible they're incredible animals sperm whales they're really fantastic um what a really nice thing about hunting avoidance in sperm whales in 2001 there were some newly digitized log books from whale hunters in the north pacific and they found that over not that long a span of time the whales have all learned 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 in your face harpoonists eat it Ishmael that's crazy is that the first line of Moby Dick eat it Ishmael it's Moby Dick from the Wales perspective yeah yeah so Andy we have established that you like crockery sandwich plate you also like cutlery yeah so what do you think you would do with a mincing knife 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 not quite and remember we're talking about whales okay i'm still thinking about a mince pie though but my mince pies contain whale meat yeah oh is it for mincing up a whale it pretty much is not mince as in like mince just means chopping up smaller right yeah um so if you were to get the blubber and you were to put it into the pot if the smaller it is the more surface area it has the easier it is to melt down to turn into oil so they would use a mincing knife for that and they had all sorts of specialized cutlery on these whaling ships so as well as a mincing knife they had a cutting spade they had a head spade they had a chopper they had a boarding knife which you would grab onto 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 oh i thought your whale is on the side of the boat back in the day you're cutting up your whale in the sea yeah of course like whales are so enormous like you can't get a ship that's that big until very very recently yeah 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 endless cutlery drawer on these sheets you know what this is the first time i've listed a load of cutlery on this show and you've not been excited i know i know do you ever have a dinner

52:18James Harkin:party where you've provided too many guests that you've run out of your main cutlery Give him the mincing knife. Give him the mincing knife. You won't notice. Excuse me. Is this grapefruit fork or is it a cutting spade? 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 loads and loads of people just worked in the business of killing wells and chopping them up. Have you heard of waken? No, I haven't. Have a punt. Is it a wake bacon? Is it woke bacon? That sounds woken. Waken was a corned beef substitute in the 1940s Which was made of whales During the war they tried to get the British to eat whales didn't they And everyone thinks it's utterly disgusting whales Well I think it was after the war weirdly Because most of, 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 was 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 not popular 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.

53:45Like 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 the biscuits and stuff. I'll just, I'll have the green salad. Is that all right? Would you guys try it? Have you brought some in? If I had, would you? When I was in Iceland, I did consider having it, but I decided against it at the last minute and ordered the puffin instead. Oh, wow. Was it, was a puffin good? puffin was not good no it was sounding so noble if that's a joke it's not a joke yeah it was quite a long time ago this yeah it was in iceland but yeah like puffin is not nice it's still fishy and it's quite oily right there's um a brewery in iceland that still brews with whale meat i think it's like a fatty product but in um yeah 2025 they released a beer that was brewed with whale testicles.

54:39Okay. I would try that for sure. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Nice. Well, they smoked them beforehand with sheep dung. Dung. So that was used in the brewing cycle, and it was, I mean, it was pasteurized out, but apparently it's got, yeah, all this funky, smoky flavor released for a festive season. I'm sorry. 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. 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.

55:27James 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 that we've said over the course of this show, we can all be found online. I'm on at Shriverland on Instagram. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Andy? At Andrew Hunter M. And Manu, you're online. Yeah, can I plug our Lunchbox MV podcast socials? Because I'm non-existent. So yeah, you can find Lunchbox MV pod at Lunchbox MV pod. We are on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. Very nice. And that is your pod that you co-host. Yes, it is.

56:01James Harkin:It's not a pod of whales. No, it's not a Potterworld. It is a fully fledged podcast. Also, yeah, we look at 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 is another QI elf. 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.

56:40James Harkin: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 going to have another episode. Thank you as ever to our Fishbusters team. That's Leeing Lee, Ethan Ruperalia, as well as the other Fishbusters out there.

57:13James Harkin:And we'll be back again next week with another episode. We'll see you then. Goodbye.