No Such Thing As Dance Floor Book Club

8:07Dan Schreiber:Hang on, when they give us the safety briefing at the start, they never say, quickly shave your beard off and then apply the oxygen mask. Is that just like beards into the goners? I think so. Shit. It really struck me that the battle between beards and moustaches, they're on opposite sides of the fight, aren't they? Because as soon as a beard becomes popular, a moustache is just part of a beard. Or in fact, and I really like this quote, there was a novelist called Frank Richardson in the 19th century who said, moustaches get lost in the general face fungus. that is the popular beard so I think it was quite good for mustaches when people like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 19th century started to discover that bacteria caused infections because suddenly people were losing their beards left right and centre because the idea was that lots of bacteria was going to get caught in them and in fact there was a 1907 experiment where they made a woman kiss a very hirsute on the face man and found that he was polluted with tuberculosis and diphtheria bacteria, as well as food particles and a hair from a spider's leg.

9:11Andy McH:Where did they get this man from?

9:16Dan Schreiber:He's just an everyman. You probably got all of that in your beard right now, James.

9:20Andy McH:I don't deny it. So this is a lot about men in the army and stuff like that, because we're talking about mustaches. But there is Manuela Seons, who's an Ecuadorian revolutionary female who used to wear a mustache.

9:34Anna Ptaszynski:A false or...

9:35Andy McH:No, real. No, no, she didn't grow one. She was at the Battle of Ayakuchko and as proof she was there, she carried around the mustache that she'd taken off a dead enemy and she would wear it at masquerade balls. So she would go around and wear this mustache as just proof she was there. This woman was one of Bolivar's people and actually was in a relationship with Bolivar for a lot of the time. which is like one of the most important Ecuadorian revolutionaries

10:02Anna Ptaszynski:It's just it feels very hard to take a moustache off someone you've, that's quite an operation to shave off a

10:07Andy McH:I don't think you shave it off, I think it's more of a scalping issue.

10:10Dan Schreiber:Yeah, it's got to come with the skin otherwise how do you piece it back together and I think it's a good move at a dance because no one's going to refuse to get on your dance card once you tell them the moustache you're wearing belongs to the last bloke who refused to dance with you Actually there is some evidence that in the 19th century it was a trend for women to have a whiskery face when whiskers became so popular. There were fashion journals that said women would start wearing their locks of hair down the side of their face where a man's sideburns would be in imitation of men's sideburns because they were so popular.

10:42Dan Schreiber:And there were adverts for pencils for women to draw little whiskers on their cheeks. And there was a dye advertised for women's whiskers.

10:49Anna Ptaszynski:Right. Yeah. So this is the thing. Why don't women typically have as much facial hair as men? What is going on? Because there are all these reasons of why we've got hair on our head, which is sun protection. To keep you warm and stuff? To keep you warm. Again, hair on your head, when men grow chest hair, that's a warmth thing. Armpit hair and pubic hair is to reduce friction. Yeah, also where I keep my tuberculosis. Right. So if these were reasons, like friction and heat retention and keeping the sun off and all of that, you would expect women to have full beards and mustaches as well. Yeah. Which means it's either something in female relationships or male-male relationships in that it's either to attract and impress and excite women or it's something to cow and repel rival men.

11:34Anna Ptaszynski:Do you know what I mean?

11:35Dan Schreiber:It's got to be the latter. Because as I say, the number of people I've come across, no offence, I'm trying to count the beard of people in the audience now quickly.

11:44James Harkin:I'm literally sitting next to you.

11:47Dan Schreiber:I've come across so many people who are, so there's Rod Littlewood, who's vice president of the World Beard Association. There's Steve Parsons of the British-based Handlebar Club, Handlebar Mustaches. the world record holder who's an Indian man for the longest moustache all of their wives say I didn't like it I'd rather they didn't devote their entire lives I mean the poor wife of the Indian guy Ram Singh Chauhan said you know for the first decade or so I thought this is a really bad idea I'm sort of repulsed and then eventually as I realised he was building a career out of it How long is his?

12:20Dan Schreiber:So his is 14 foot long I think it's 7 foot from each side

12:25Anna Ptaszynski:That's long you can be in every room of the house at once but today you can send it to the fridge to get a beer for you that's nice

12:36Dan Schreiber:apparently dipping them in beer is good this is according to the handlebar club guy who says dip it in beer to keep it

12:43Andy McH:yeah but what does his wife think

12:44Dan Schreiber:well indeed there was a thing that said he's got a great comeback to his wife who complains about his facial hair he always says I say kissing a man without a mustache is like drinking champagne without the bubbles. And I don't think that is a good comeback. I don't think...

13:00Andy McH:Well, you also like white wine.

13:02Anna Ptaszynski:That's a good point.

13:03Dan Schreiber:Yeah, you're right.

13:04Anna Ptaszynski:I think it is a men-to-men thing. Right. There was a piece in 1926 in the New York Times which claimed Ivan the Terrible, as Russians are, he liked Beard so well that he used to play by the hour with the flowing beaver of Queen Elizabeth's royal agent, George Killingworth. That's something.

13:26James Harkin:I'll ask on behalf of everyone the royal beaver

13:31Anna Ptaszynski:with the flowing beaver of Queen Elizabeth's royal agent beaver is just another word for beard oh that's all it is guys and it's over do you a comeback

13:42Dan Schreiber:we probably shouldn't talk about moustaches without mentioning our colleague who's been on the podcast a few times Anne Miller is one of her favourite facts

13:48Andy McH:she's got a huge moustache hasn't she

13:51Dan Schreiber:she always likes this fact Well, I'm going to ask, do you guys think that if you're in the CIA, should you keep a fake moustache on hand?

13:58Andy McH:Yeah. Oh, yeah, of course. No, not on your hand. Wait, then you just put it up like that and it's fine. That's going to work great on a podcast, Andy.

14:09Dan Schreiber:We're not going to explain what Andy's doing, even. You can imagine. Let your imaginations run wild.

14:14Anna Ptaszynski:I'm putting a finger in front to be a flowing beaver. That's what I'm doing. Carry on.

14:19Dan Schreiber:It's working like a charm. Well, so the fact that Anne loves is that in 2008, there was an MI6 officer on the one show whose fake mustache fell off halfway through an interview, which is absolutely cracking. You can't see the footage. It was because they didn't actually broadcast it. Only the people in the studio know. but Johnna Mendez who was the CIA's mass dress of disguise during the George Bush era the George Bush senior era sorry she says that you shouldn't go for fake moustaches because they are very uncomfortable so it's always obvious when someone's got one and the glue does tend to melt and it falls off which gives the game away she said instead horn-rimmed glasses very effective because you notice the glasses and not the person and just accessorize.

15:07Dan Schreiber:So just carry a nice leather bag and a big cigar and people will remember those two things.

15:12Anna Ptaszynski:Is it possible that Elton John has been deep cover CIA all these years?

15:22James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of the most successful club songs of all time is mostly used to stop people from wanting to dance.

15:36Andy McH:I gotta say I think that pretty much all club songs make me not want to dance agreed I just want audiobooks that would be great 2am audiobooks so this is we'll all know the song Robert Miles's

15:50James Harkin:children you know that so that was a song that was written by Robert Miles he wrote it in Italy he was writing under another name became Robert Miles because he wanted to go miles in his career so he had a real destiny thing to his name because he wanted to go far. They do kilometres, don't they?

16:06Dan Schreiber:Yeah. But a mile is even longer, I guess.

16:12James Harkin:Yeah, and so he wrote this song and he wanted the song to be played at the end of every single club night, every rave that was happening because a lot of car crashes were happening after raves and it was because everyone was leaving the club off a really pumping song, really adrenalised. They'd get in the car and they would crash. The idea was play this song at the end of the set and it would put a trance-like music, it would calm the person down and allow them to get into their car a bit safer. And DJs globally have been doing it. It's obviously not going to be every rave that does that, but largely that's what that song became.

16:45James Harkin:It was road safety, basically, for the end of a night.

16:48Anna Ptaszynski:I didn't think I knew that song. And then as soon as I listened to it, I thought, oh, of course, I've heard this dozens of times.

16:52Andy McH:It was absolutely massive, wasn't it? It apparently cost just£150 to produce it and it got to number one in Europe, the whole of Europe for 13 weeks and he was the only Italian solo artist to ever win a Brit Award really? wow absolutely huge and he died very young he did, 47 very sadly, it's a shame

17:12Anna Ptaszynski:this thing was called the Saturday Night Slaughter or in Italian Stracci del Sabato Serra it was a recognised thing, it was hundreds of young Italian people were dying every year I think they've might have assessed how much effect it's had because I've heard this song at the end of things like you know, roller disco but I don't think that was

17:31Dan Schreiber:Is that the closest you've been to a nightclub?

17:34Anna Ptaszynski:I think it might Well, it's pretty exciting in there Anna Oh god yeah

17:40James Harkin:You're still on wheels so it makes sense right? Like that's a good use But I didn't think I liked dance music and it turns out I do Have you ever been to a rave? No

17:51Anna Ptaszynski:I mean some of that Roller disco got pretty heavy

17:55Andy McH:I feel like you would have been cheering on the Public Order Act of 1994 that kind of stopped all the raves from happening in the 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got that printed out on my wall. I love that one. That law changed the number of people you needed at a rave from 100 to 20. So if you had 20 people in an area and they were all dancing to music, then you could nick them all. And you could ban anyone who was playing music, which was predominantly characterized by the omission of a succession of repetitive beats. Right Okay so then A band called Ortrek They issued a track Called Flutter And in that track No two bars Had the same beat So it was Oh my god It got Well I know It sounds awful Was it?

18:40Andy McH:It was awful It was really awful But it did the job Of that you were Allowed to play it In a rave Because it didn't Have repetitive beats In it

18:48Dan Schreiber:But no one Starts into it Presumably Everyone leaves the rave So it sounds like It would do the job Of

18:52Andy McH:The profits for it Went to a liberty

18:55Anna Ptaszynski:It is crazy that they tried to ban repetitive music. But the police were really worried. It was in the early 90s, wasn't it? So this law was 1994. That's right. And that followed a couple of years of national panic, sort of moral panic about raves and rave music. There was a thing called the rave at Castle Maltin Common in 1992 where people danced for five days and it was a free illegal festival basically for about 20 ,000 people and the police was just so worried about it. The same year they broke up a party by using a JCB digger to smash through one of the walls of the party. Wow. I know. It was a very, very intense time.

19:30Dan Schreiber:That sounds more dangerous than the dancing itself, doesn't it? I think so, yeah.

19:34Andy McH:Especially for people like Andy, who's just standing next to the wall not wanting to dance.

19:38Anna Ptaszynski:I just can't roller skate. That's the problem, you know.

19:42Andy McH:But actually, at that time, the rave culture was known as the second summer of love, but it was credited for reducing football hooliganism. There was a lot of people who were going to football matches and who might have caused a fight otherwise, instead of taking lots of cocaine, they were taking lots of ecstasy and just hugging each other.

19:59James Harkin:Oh, okay, much better. Yeah. Well, that's it. So that's an interesting thing. I read, I've been to a few, I went to a rave four nights ago. No, you didn't. Yes, I did. It was a birthday party in Margate. I got a lot of trouble from my friends there because I brought a book with me. And I do think like 2 a.m. dance floor book club would be an amazing thing to set up. So I went the other night and I remembered what it was like to go to a rave. It was really fun. But one thing I didn't see there, which apparently happens a lot in raves, is a lot of people are sucking on pacifiers, on dummies. And I'd never heard of that, but apparently this is a big thing.

20:33James Harkin:And the reason is it's because if you're at a rave, you're often on drugs. MDMA, a big one, leads to a massive amount of grinding of teeth.

20:40Dan Schreiber:People used to do that in my world of days.

20:45Andy McH:Here we go. All right.

20:47Dan Schreiber:And I'm not going to go into any further detail.

20:49Andy McH:Okay, so pacifiers, dance music. Do you want to play a game of type of electronic music or show on CBeebies?

20:59James Harkin:Yes.

21:00Andy McH:Okay. Okay, so Fidget House. Is that a show on CBeebies or is it type of electronic music? I'll say that's CBeebies.

21:09Dan Schreiber:Yeah, CBeebies, I think.

21:11Andy McH:Okay, I'll go just for the sake of variety house. You are correct, Dan. And it is defined by snatched vocal snippets, pitch-bent dirty bass lines, and rave-style synth stabs over glitchy 4-4 beats. Wow. And I might as well have said anything at that stage. What about Puffin Rock? Oh, God.

21:33Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, clearly house music, dance music.

21:36Andy McH:Audience, Puffin Rock? C-B-B!

21:40Dan Schreiber:We have a very young audience in today, we should say.

21:42Andy McH:They're all sucking on pacifiers on the front row. Yeah, it's an animated children's series about a young puffin named Una. Okay. Are there any glitchy 4-4 beats? Baby Club. Baby Club. I was going to say music. Is it Baby Club or is it Baby Club music? I think it's Baby Club music.

22:03Dan Schreiber:Yeah, music.

22:04Andy McH:You are so bad at this. And also, don't you have very young kids? Yeah.

22:10James Harkin:I haven't actually locked in my answer yet.

22:14Andy McH:I feel like I might give it away. Go on, Dan. Club. No, CBBs, obviously. Yeah, no, it's where all the kids sit around in a circle and sing songs. Oh, beautiful. And finally, squee. S-K-W-E-E-E. Club.

22:30Dan Schreiber:Baby. Club.

22:32Andy McH:It is a type of music. Yes. So it's a type of music where the aim is to squeeze out as much interesting sounds as possible. From where?

22:44Andy McH:from the synthesizers, Dan. Ah, okay.

22:47Dan Schreiber:One of the things I find quite interesting is that the subgenres of dance are basically just defined by their tempo, right? So trance was just it going slower. And so the oldest trance band is 1 ,000 years old. And they're so cool. They're called the master musicians.

23:04Anna Ptaszynski:Is this like collectively? Like how the Rolling Stones are about 400 now?

23:08Dan Schreiber:No, no, no. It's been going for 1 ,000 years. they're all still in fit as fiddles there's been some handover so it started a thousand years ago it's based in sufi tradition uh and it's in morocco they opened glastonbury in 2023 which i think just means you play glastonbury when no one's quite arrived yet but still they're and they're incredible you should look them up and they're better than anything you see at a club so performances in their like if they do a performance it goes on all night or it can go on for days they play constantly. It's supposed to induce a literal trance and it's on drums and woodwind mostly, lots of circular breathing.

23:45Dan Schreiber:And then it climaxes in this pan-like god who comes and dances around flames and quivers and chases children around with olive branches. And he's dressed in the skins of four black goats and he's been played by the same guy for the last 50 years. Anyway, you can go. It's the festival in Morocco. You can go and see them perform. it's the smallest festival in the world only 50 people can attend

24:09Andy McH:have a tent don't want to attend

24:12Dan Schreiber:yeah they've never actually set a limit it sounds great you stay in the musicians houses they have to cook for you

24:19Andy McH:that sounds good they cook all your meals

24:21Dan Schreiber:and then they go and perform it's a big deal Timothy Leary was very into it was he? William Burrows all your guys

24:28James Harkin:okay so we're talking counterculture 1950s kind of period

24:31Dan Schreiber:that kind of thing the guy who's chasing the children

24:34Anna Ptaszynski:is he trying to beat them? Because normally if you say, I want to offer you an olive branch, it's a nice thing.

24:39Dan Schreiber:No, no, it's scary. It's scary, yeah. He's going for a beating. But I'm sure it's mostly just acted out at this point, unless they've been really naughty.

24:46James Harkin:It's interesting you mentioned beats, because I was talking to... So my best friend is Ash Gardner. He wrote the theme tune to No Such Thing As A Fish. So Emperor, yes, it's the song called Wasps. After he released that album, they were approached by Superdrug, because Superdrug wanted to make the ultimate electronic song to make love to.

25:06Anna Ptaszynski:Wait, Superdrug the chemist?

25:08James Harkin:Yeah.

25:09Andy McH:And yet when I did that in Superdrug, I got kicked out.

25:13James Harkin:Yeah, they approached Ash and said, we want to commission you to write a song that couples can make love to. Was it to sell condoms? It was about to lose weight. It was about being healthy while you're in bed. So this is how they described it.

25:31Anna Ptaszynski:What are you talking about?

25:33James Harkin:This is Ash. How has this never come up? He wrote our theme tune and then he wrote Sexercise, which is the song. No. This is the description. As written by Superdrug for the release, Sexercise is something of a sonic epic at 22 minutes long, but this is a melting pot of ideas and experimentation, a synth-laden exploration of pure passion. And there's a few comments underneath it. One guy's like, doesn't do it for me, dog. and it's pretty weird but they got paid really well for it so what they were told was there's the BPM that is best for being in bed and that's why the obesity

26:11Dan Schreiber:epidemic ended wasn't it we said years ago

26:14Anna Ptaszynski:that sex only burns off the number of calories it was one small meringue without sugar it was one small sugar free meringue

26:22Dan Schreiber:I think there are ways of having sex where you can gain calories It really depends how you do it, doesn't it?

26:36James Harkin:It is time for fact number three.

26:41Andy McH:And that is James. My fact this week is that children could learn to read faster if all lessons were held in a podcast studio. this is a study that was done in japan and the idea was they got a couple of classrooms and one of them they really soundproofed and the other one was just a normal classroom and they found that the children did much much better in the soundproofed room the idea is that when you're trying to learn how to read or learn how to speak you're listening to your teacher and you're trying to work out what they're saying but when there's loads of echoing around you can't really hear it all properly and also with very very young kids you might get one of the kids gets a bit upset and they start making noise and then the teacher has to go louder and then the kids go louder and you get all this feedback of just things getting louder and louder and much more difficult to understand what's going on and so they tried this and they found that actually children did much better and even the teachers found it much easier as well the teachers found their job just way easier because they weren't having to fight against the echo so interesting

27:42Dan Schreiber:yeah really good so when you say soundproof you mean putting soft furnishings and mattresses

27:46Andy McH:everywhere and yeah so i mean how many people in the audience here today 1500 people or whatever probably most of you have a podcast i think um but when you're doing a podcast you have to try and make up the room as unechoey as possible so you close your curtains velour cushions all that

28:02Dan Schreiber:kind of stuff i thought you guys were doing that to try and seduce me all these years

28:06Anna Ptaszynski:um yeah it's very cool the sound quality thing because i just like when you there was a study done this year, I think, about I mean, obviously, everyone uses Zoom now and if you use Zoom with a bad or a cheap microphone, it turns out people literally think you are stupider. You could be the cleverest person in the Zoom, but if you don't have a good microphone, others genuinely downgrade you. How interesting. And it applies to sort of everything. So you're less clever if you've got a bad microphone or you're thought to be, or less hireable if it's a job interview, less dateable if you're doing some cool Zoom dating.

28:41Anna Ptaszynski:And it's just microphone quality. Really?

28:43Dan Schreiber:Again, we should emphasize just on Zoom, don't go to live interviews with your own microphone or anything. We're not recommending that, are we? But we wouldn't want the kids to learn in these studios because it would put podcasters out of business. And podcasting is a great industry. CrossWires Festival, I think we agree. Named, kind of named accidentally. I mostly say because Andy likes an accidental invention. Oh, yeah. So named in 2004 and named after iPods. There was a software engineer, Dave Weiner, who started the first podcast for a journalist called Christopher Lyddon. And he created a program called iPodder, which was called that because it was made to deliver online broadcast straight to iPods.

29:23Dan Schreiber:And then a guy called Ben Hammersley wrote a piece in The Guardian about this new audio medium, which was to be called Podcasts. And he went to his editors. They said, it's great. Just need a bit of padding. Can you shove it in a relevant sentence somewhere? so he said at the top he wrote kind of a facile sentence saying oh what to call this audio blogging podcasting guerrilla media and it caught on from there just a stupid bit of filler there's what's

29:47James Harkin:interesting is september 28th 2004 there was a blogger called doc searles and he went to track the number of hits that google would return if you wrote podcast into there the first time he says 24 times, reportedly. And then it starts to get bigger. By the end of September, there are 2 ,750 hits on Google coming back for podcast. An exact year later, the 28th of September, 2005, over 100 million.

30:13Andy McH:And you know who was really pissed off about it? Microsoft. Because obviously you've got the pod from iPod. So every time someone said podcasting, it was basically an advert for Apple. And so Microsoft tried to use their own name. They all called them blog casts. until everyone in the world went, no, we're not calling them that.

30:31Anna Ptaszynski:That's not a good name. You know, a quarter of podcasts have one episode. Oh, okay. And I think it's 65 % have fewer than 10.

30:40Dan Schreiber:A lot of people say it should be higher, those proportions.

30:43Andy McH:I read an article by a company called Buzzsprout, who's a free podcast host, and they said if your new episode gets within seven days 28 downloads, you're in the top 50 % of podcasts. Wow. So we can get that one day Yes We can dream

30:59Dan Schreiber:George Bush was a forerunner in the world of podcasting George which Bush? George Bush Senior weirdly yeah

31:07Anna Ptaszynski:Very rare to have a double Bush podcast Nice Double Bush and a beaver

31:13Dan Schreiber:This was George Bush the younger And he released his presidential weekly address As a podcast in the kind of late-ish 2000 I think 2008-ish Which was pretty impressive And he used to sometimes deliver it in Spanish which is like good on him but then I watched a little interview with one of his hispanic colleagues who remembered that journalists would come up to him all the time and say and isn't it great that your colleague the president george bush speaks spanish as well and he said he never wanted to say to them he doesn't speak spanish um but he wasn't just making it up he does try to speak spanish he said and that's good enough there's there's quite a few podcasts out there

31:49James Harkin:when you look into the history of it that arguably are the first podcast I tried to look into it accidentally found out the oldest podcaster in theory, as in current age. And there's a guy, there was an article that went out this year. He's 100 years old and he has started making a podcast. He's called George Hall and he was Laurence Olivier's voice coach. That's so cool. Yeah, so he's basically dishing interesting anecdotes about Lord Olivier, his wife, people that he knew. he said apparently in one of the interviews he says that Olivia was going through a phase of being absolutely obsessed about colonic irrigation this is the kind of juice we're getting from George Horn at this point we should mention the elephant in the room

32:36Anna Ptaszynski:in the podcasting world Joe Rogan, heard of him? big deal if you listen to Joe Rogan which someone in the audience just said nope lots of people do but if you do listen to it American women will be less interested in you as a partner. And this was a survey that was done. That's, well...

32:58Dan Schreiber:It's another beard and moustache situation. Everyone thinks it makes them more attractive.

33:03Anna Ptaszynski:Is it for men or is it for... Yeah, yeah, yeah. American women between 18 and 34 were surveyed about what was a turn-off for them. So 55 % said definite turn-off in a partner if they listened to Joe Rogan. I just thought some of the other turn-offs were quite interesting about where we are, like, societally. They send green texts. That's a red flag for 7 % of women.

33:20Andy McH:Is that about recycling? I think

33:24Anna Ptaszynski:it's not having an iPhone, I think. It's sort of that. Instead of the blue ones if you're on an iPhone. Then there were some very weird red flags. Researching for best deals and rates before buying. 2 % of American women said, no, that's not for me. They read. 1 % said red flag. They look better in person. 1 % said red flag. oh interesting whereas for when men american men of the same age were asked about women for them the biggest red flag they identify as a communist 64 red flag you've got to keep those red flags

33:59Dan Schreiber:i think it's hard the earliest podcast because basically before a podcast you had uh distributing cassette tapes around the place that i feel like that was the original podcast was bootleg cassette tapes because the thing about podcasting is that you're free of all the constraints of having to produce the show which has all this oversight right that's why there's so much shit out there is because there's kind of no standards imposed and again we want to say that podcasting is a great industry and that this festival does really good jobs of course yes all of that stuff but russia did a strong line in that i hadn't realized during the cold war it was so there was samizdat in Russia, which was the quite famous distribution of the written word.

34:44Dan Schreiber:Like band.

34:45Anna Ptaszynski:It was sort of under the table. It was band stuff.

34:46Dan Schreiber:Exactly, like Solzhenitsyn or band authors. You'd type things out endlessly and then you'd send them to your friends and they'd retype them and send them to their friends. And then there was this thing called Magnetizdat, which was publishing by tape recorder. And I think this is the original podcasting, where basically you record yourself into a tape saying, I'm not a huge Kroshne fan or something. Don't like Stalin. and then you'd send it to your mates and you'd say, can you listen to this and then make a copy of it and send it to your friends. And for some of these broadcasts, millions of people would end up hearing, apparently, which seems incredible.

35:20Andy McH:Patron Saints of Podcasting? We have one? We do. Well, it's unofficial. It was organised by some trainee priests in Birmingham. But they named St. George Praker as the unofficial Patron Saints of Podcasting because he worked sort of spreading the values of the gospel and he would send out lots of books and prayer booklets and he did lots of talking to people and that kind of thing.

35:47Anna Ptaszynski:So he's a real saint? He's a real person.

35:49Andy McH:His miracle that made him a saint was that he saw a 12-year-old boy pushing a cart full of manure and then when he went to help him, he put his hand on the cart and felt an extraordinary spiritual sweetness from the manure. Wow So I don't know why pushing shit around Makes you a bunch of saint of podcasting

36:11James Harkin:Well also he did a miraculous thing Where he was able to get you 20 % off your Express VPN Whenever you put in an offer code Do you know there is a thing now

36:20Anna Ptaszynski:This is a practice that's going on Where people are setting up entire podcasts So that they can secure business meetings So if you want to get in touch With someone in your industry who you admire And you might write to them on LinkedIn You might send them a cold email and you might never hear from them. But if you write to them and say, would you like to appear on my podcast? There's a much bigger chance of saying, oh yeah, I'd love to. People are just setting up entire podcasts which have like four listeners simply because it's a prestigious thing to be asked to do. Yeah.

36:48Dan Schreiber:I thought that was why we were doing it. I can't even remember who we're trying to meet.

36:54James Harkin:Hey guys, I need to move us on to our next fact.

36:56Anna Ptaszynski:Can I tell you one last good podcast name? Yeah. There's a podcast all about the horses in Lord of the Rings. each episode is up to three hours long I just love the name Horses in Lord of the Rings the title of the podcast is Shadow Facts that is good

37:14Dan Schreiber:lovely

37:20James Harkin:alright we need to get to our final fact of the show and that is Anna

37:25Dan Schreiber:my fact this week is that Second World War bombings were useful for freeing up parking spaces. So, every cloud, I think, you'll find. Yeah, it's hard to get the quantity, but basically, in the Second World War, you may or may not know, there was quite a lot of aerial bombing campaigns. The Blitz being a famous example. And what that did was flatten a lot of buildings and leave an enormous amount of space in the middle of cities where, well, for example, the big car parking franchise ncp car parks in the uk they founded their first car park on a bomb site in red lion square in holborn that was in 1948 and lots more followed and if you watch kind of bulletins at the time there was kind of a panic in the 1950s because car ownership was going up and up that there wouldn't be any parking spaces left but i was watching a bulletin saying fortunately at the moment we've got so many um massive bomb sites with no buildings on them that we have managed to find space to park all the cars until now but if if we don't have another bombing campaign soon we'll have nowhere to put the cars but they didn't they didn't say that but

38:34Anna Ptaszynski:it was implied it's incredible the story of um that first car park okay this is really fun i promise and if you doubt it halfway through just remember it is really really fun okay that one in red lion square in in hoban so 1948 founded by two guys called donald gosling and ronald Hobson and they were told this will never work. That's a stupid idea. You can park on the side of the road anytime and no one's going to pay one shilling and sixpence for an entire day's parking in central London. They were just told don't do it.

39:06James Harkin:Sorry to cut you off but how many cars did we have at the time? Was it a problem parking? It is now right? They're very useful. You could just park on the side of the street in most places. So we didn't really need it.

39:15Anna Ptaszynski:You could park on Oxford Street. But they were

39:17Dan Schreiber:going up very fast. Post-war car ownership was going up.

39:20Anna Ptaszynski:Anyway. This is going to get fun, is it? Well. I'm now slightly doubting that. Anyway, they bought it for 200 quid. 100 quid each they put in. They bought this space for a car park. They sold the business 50 years later in 1998. Each of them got 300 million pounds from the sale. Wow. And there was more than one car park by that point. But that's less good effect. Yeah, the whole business was sold for 800 million pounds. They nearly didn't sell the business. It nearly fell over at the very last moment because Ronald Hobson, one of the two co-founders, he wanted one particular car park to be excluded from the sale because it was on Oxford Street, and he wanted it to be excluded from the sale because he would go there at the weekend and park up with a flask of tea and study which parking bays were occupied first.

40:07Andy McH:Wow.

40:08Anna Ptaszynski:So he wanted that to be like... That is fascinating.

40:10Dan Schreiber:I know. Do we know the results? Okay, okay, okay.

40:14Anna Ptaszynski:Sorry. I'm sorry for finding this so interesting, but I do.

40:18Dan Schreiber:I don't think who parks where first. Is it under the tree? is it closest to the parking meter?

40:22Anna Ptaszynski:I couldn't agree more, Anna, that this is an interesting fact, but I feel like I've lost the room at this point.

40:27Andy McH:Oh, my God. I think we're locked in. That is an interesting thing, right? So if you go into a car parking place, do you just park as soon as you go in where there's loads of spaces, or do you drive as close to the door as possible and then drive around looking for the perfect spot? I do that. Yeah, so does almost everyone. It turns out that actually, on average, it kind of works out about even. Okay. But people have found that actually a lot of traffic in towns consists of people looking for spaces. And they did a study in the German city of Freiburg in the 2010s and found that 74 % of cars at one moment were looking for a parking spot.

41:04Andy McH:No. Yeah.

41:05Dan Schreiber:Oh, my God. Oh, my gosh.

41:06Andy McH:It's mental, isn't it?

41:07Dan Schreiber:Yeah. It's bad. You know, a lot of pollution there. Yeah. People cruising, it's called, which is a much less sexy version of cruising than other versions of cruising. No, I'm cruising, officer. There are some countries in the world with some really mad parking systems that I don't think we've mentioned before. Quite a lot of countries, the cold ones mostly, have systems where you have to park on one side of the road or the other so that they can sweep the snow off the non-parked on side. And they have different ways of signifying this. But Sweden's is so good. It's called their datum parkering system.

41:42Dan Schreiber:And it's exemplified by a post on Reddit I read from an American tourist saying, sorry for the dumb question, but we really can't make sense of this sign. We're on holiday in Sweden. Can we park here? The sign is a vertical white line on one side of the sign and two vertical lines on the other side of the sign. And the answer that a helpful Swedish resident gave was it means you're not allowed to park on the side of the street with even or odd house numbers on correspondingly even or odd days.

42:12James Harkin:Ah, yeah.

42:14Dan Schreiber:So there you go. so you have to if it's like the 11th of July you have to make sure you're not parking on the side of the street that has houses numbers one three five seven and nine simple and you should know that with three random lines on it that's crazy in America they have a lot of things like this

42:32Andy McH:quite a lot of towns especially Pittsburgh apparently they do this thing where if you go out for the day and you take your car then you'll put a chair where your car was so that no one can park there. Oh, yeah. And they're not really supposed to do it, but really the local cops, they just turn a blind eye. Like outside your house? Yeah, so you've gone out to the shops, but you don't want anyone to park right outside your house. So you put a chair there, and then no one else will park it. And everyone kind of knows that that's the way that we do things. And then according to The Economist, in Shanghai, they do the same thing, but people get their elderly relatives to sit in parking spaces.

43:08James Harkin:No chair? It seems there is a chair. This is a granny on the ground. I was reading about UK car parks, and I found that in 2004, Focus, the science magazine, they were given a brief to come up with the 10 most secure places on Earth. And those places included Saddam's Baghdad Bunker, the Mormon Church Records, Fort Knox, Air Force One, and a car park in Derby called Bald Lane. Right?

43:38Andy McH:And you know how I was an hour late for the podcast today?

43:42James Harkin:That's where you went?

43:42Andy McH:That's where I was. Oh my God. You went to the highest secure place in the UK, basically? Yeah, well, I was driving past it. What is it? It's the most secure car park in the world. What does that mean? There's a big sign that says this is the most secure car park in the world. What does it mean? I should say it's in Derby, not Derby. Did I say Derby? You said Derby. Wow. But it's amazing. So you go in and they give you this card. And then you park in the thing, and they have sensors underneath your car. And when you leave, you say which bay you're in, and then the sensor switches on. And if anyone moves your car before you come back, then the whole place locks down.

44:22Andy McH:No. Yeah, absolutely. And there are 190 CCTV cameras in the building. They have a huge PA system. They have panic buttons all the way through. So anywhere you go, you can just bang the panic button. Again, everything shuts down.

44:35Anna Ptaszynski:Did you do it? oh boom why do you think i was an outlet no it's absolutely amazing and what happened was

44:43Andy McH:it was in 1997 there was a load of crime that was happening there and there was a lot of drug taking and muggings and stuff like that and the council didn't really know what to do and so they got this guy called ken wiggly who'd invented a load of security systems and said do you want to take over it and he said well i'll take over it as long as i can do whatever i want and he just basically put all these amazing systems in.

45:05Anna Ptaszynski:He's like Judge Dredd, but for parking. This is amazing.

45:08Dan Schreiber:So if you've parked your car there, you're busy shopping, you bump into your partner in town, you give them the car keys, you say, darling, I've parked the car, can you pick it up? That's it, they're arrested. As long as they've

45:18Andy McH:got the car, they're okay. Okay, fine. So you can walk around Derby and go to as many vape shops and bookmakers as you want. And your car will be absolutely safe.

45:29Anna Ptaszynski:Wow. I think I know one which is as secure. and I don't think you'll have found this, Dan. Okay. There is a car park in Farnborough that is only accessible on foot. That's brilliant. This was reported... Is it for the Flintstones? This was reported several years ago and I had a look on Google Images. Certainly the most recent image shows no cars there. It's above the gym. The business is called the gym. I'm not just being vague. When it was first reported, it had absolutely everything. like it's got bays, it's got signs, it's got all of that but the only thing it lacked was access for a car and that's because it's part of a big development which hasn't been finished yet so you can go there to this day but just not with a car that is secure in the other way like you can't get in

46:17Dan Schreiber:I thought it was going to be a clever system where you had to lift your own car in or something like I was actually in Spain a couple of weeks ago and we went into an underground car park and instead of parking your own car someone stopped and said I'll park your car for you and the system is you get out of your car

46:30Anna Ptaszynski:I've fallen for that so many times I fall oh the number of cars I've been through

46:34Dan Schreiber:you're on the 19th car this year you give them your keys and you watch and they go and they go up to a parking space and the parking spaces are so narrow to save space presumably that they then get out of the car before parking it take the handbrake off and push it in so that they don't have to get out the doors afterwards so cool and it also reminded me of another cool system they have in Thailand where you are and I discovered this because my friend lived in Thailand and she came back to pick up her car one day in a multi-story car park, there was another car parked in front and a Thai person nearby explained, that's fine, they will have left the handbrake on.

47:08Dan Schreiber:And in Thailand, you can park blocking people in as long as you leave the handbrake off so that when they arrive, they can push your car out of the way and get their car out. That's amazing.

47:18Andy McH:That's great. So good. That's very funny. A few things on the Blitz. Oh, yeah. So the Blitz, London gets a lot of the headlines, but the rest of the country was hit. And of course, Sheffield was hit quite badly because according to JBS Haldane, there was half a square mile of Sheffield that was more vital for production of munitions than anywhere else in Britain. Basically, it was the only place in the UK where you made these armor-piercing shells in Sheffield, and so the Germans were really, really keen to bomb it. It was called Schmittstiegel, which means crucible. Really? And basically, yeah, the whole city got hit quite badly.

47:53Andy McH:There was a woman who was fined three pounds because even though she blacked out her house curtains, before leaving, she'd left a light on, which you weren't allowed to do because the bombers would be able to see it. Right. She said she'd left the light on for her cat, and the cat had moved the curtains to kind of... It could have been a German cat. Yeah. It's clearly a German spy, yeah. Yeah, and the hospital... The top brass, they all had tin hats, but the nurses had to make do with chamber pots on their heads that was held on with bandages. There's amazing pictures of them doing that. And they would go out to the moors and they would collect sphagnum moss, which they would use...

48:31LAUGHTER

48:33Andy McH:If you know, you know. They would use to sterilise wounds and stuff like that. Yeah. So, yeah. That was it.

48:42Anna Ptaszynski:I read a couple of headlines about the Sheffield Blitz. There was a fact from the Sheffield Star which wrote, Sheffield has braced themselves for air attack from the moment war was declared. People couldn't understand why Sheffield was not hit sooner. Very much like... Come on. I love this line so much. Yorkshire soldiers were reported to have pledged to avenge Hitler's raids on the city. He made a bad mistake bombing Sheffield, they said. That's just very nice and proud. I do think invading Russia was the bigger mistake of the war.

49:14Dan Schreiber:It's on his deathbed. Biggest regret. Sheffield.

49:24James Harkin:Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you to the Crosswires Festival. Thank you to our very good friend, Alice Levine, for having here, as well as the rest of the Crosswire team. Go to our website. You can find lots of fun stuff there. But come back next week for another live episode. We will see you then. Goodbye, everyone!