No Such Thing As A Fish - 373: No Such Thing As The Handshake Police

Episode Date: May 14, 2021

Anna, James, Dan and special guest Ella Al-Shamahi discuss unhealthy handshakes, pioneering pilots and Seattle's favourite shrink.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hey everyone, welcome to this week's episode of Fish. Before we begin, just to let you know that we have a special guest on this week. Andy is away looking at thatched roofs around the UK, and so in his place, we have got the brilliant Ella Al-Shamahi. Ella is a National Geographic explorer. She's a paleoanthropologist, an evolutionary biologist, a stand-up comedian. She's extraordinary, and she's written this new book, which is called The Handshake, A Gripping History. It's all about, as it says on the tin, the handshake. You know, where did it come from? How long have we had it? Is it dead after this pandemic? It really is an awesome book. It's got amazing chapters. I mean, take this as a chapter headline. Chapter number three, finger snaps and penis shakes. Who doesn't want this book?

So do go out and get it. It's available online. You can go back into physical bookshops as well to pick one up, and do follow her adventures online as well. She can be found on Twitter on at Ella underscore Al-Shamahi. Do that because she is packed with facts. That's right, and you'll be getting a bit of a taster of those in the upcoming episode. But sadly, of course, Andy is going to be back next week, and he's also going to be joining us for our upcoming tour. We couldn't convince Ella to come on that instead. But yeah, we've got a tour coming up. Please join us. We are going to lots of fun places, Belfast, Birmingham, Nottingham, Peterborough, Richmond, Dublin, and then loads more. Go to knowsuchthingasafish.com to get tickets right now. Okay? On with the show. I'm going to take a bath.

I'm going to take a bath. I'm going to take a bath. Al-Shamahi, and once again, we have gathered round our microphones with our four favourite facts from the last seven days, and in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Ella. My fact is that an anti-handshake society was formed in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1894 because of a cholera outbreak. You paid six roubles as membership, you wore a pin to identify yourself, and just in case you did slip up and shake hands, you had to pay three roubles as a fine. You're volunteering to be fined. If you didn't join the society, you didn't have to be fined. Yeah, I mean, there's a question about the money there, isn't it? Six as membership, and then three every single time you shake hands.

Yeah, but if you're signing up, you're fairly confident that you're not going to be doing the handshaking, right? Yes, sir. It's like instituting the swear box or something. Exactly. But I love the pin that, you know, it's basically declaring that you're really not involved at all. You're not having any part of it. Do you think that pin is so that people can see you and think that guy is not to be handshuck? I think so. I think it's to identify yourself, but I do have questions about how many people were actually wearing these pins. Is it just you and Mike down the street, or was it actually a lot of people wearing it?

You're talking about it like it was a police badge. I don't think anyone was staring at the badge anyway. It was probably a badge that was like, I love ninja turtles that I would wear. Like, yeah, it's on me, but no one's paying attention, right? I mean, who knows? This is way back. This is over 100 years ago. But the thing that I love about this bit is that the lancet of all things, which is obviously a really respectable medical journal, absolutely blasted them for this and just blasted them for not refusing to shake hands during an epidemic, which is hilarious, obviously, today. And they're basically like, oh, these Russians, they've taken everything too seriously. They've completely lost it. Obviously, that has not aged well, has it?

So they knew that shaking hands was going to be bad for the spread of cholera. This is why they did it. So, yes, this society knew it. Obviously, generally, the people in that area didn't. And more importantly, the whole of the Western medical establishment thought they were lunatics. So this is a story that just kept getting repeated everywhere, kind of in that period, which is people going, what is going on with these Russians? I mean, they're Azerbaijanis, but at the time it was, you know, they were clad as Russians. Yeah, that was a really bad cholera outbreak in Baku. It started in 1892. And when it first got into the town, they didn't have a single microscope in the entire city. And everyone realized that there was this problem with cholera and everyone just fled.

The city had 120,000 people at the start of June, and by the end of June, there were only 20,000 people left in Baku. And so basically, people had fled out of Baku, but it meant that they'd taken cholera with them on the trains and the boats to the whole rest of Russia. And then there was a cholera outbreak for two more years in the whole of Russia. And in Baku, they had four doctors who were in charge of all the different sanitary sections of the town. And they were called Arkhangelsky, Akhundov, Lockerman, and Dr. Corona. He believed that. It's Russian for crown, but he was called Dr. Corona. Yeah. That's amazing. How come they spread it? Because cholera is pretty hard to spread person to person. You've got to be drinking their poo. This was like a misconception, right, in the olden days.

And actually, avoiding hand shaking probably wasn't fully necessary, unless someone had just wiped their bum. It can go on clothing and on bedding and stuff like that. So I think that was one way it went. So I actually think that's why the lancet were having a go at them, because the lancet rather racistically were like, oh, the Russians have terrible sanitation and their solution is just not to shake hands. They're being absolutely ludicrous as opposed to, you know, like, but it's an interesting one. Yeah. Because they do say that it's not really touch that gives you cholera, although actually refugee camps or workers, they are told not to shake hands and to have distance if there's a cholera outbreak. So presumably it's a little bit. It's feces getting in your mouth.

And if you have feces on your hands, then, you know, if you've got two hands, you could have traces. I mean, it's easy to get traces, isn't it? Yeah. Well, I think it's just it's only just the point that people often thought that it was really bad to be around people who had cholera in the olden days. And people would try and keep them in a different room. But actually, largely, it's just from drinking infected water. And it's so horrible when you read these tales of people being so terrified and fleeing. It's so easy to treat. It must be the easiest disease on earth to treat, right? You die of dehydration. You can die within two hours of getting it.

But if you just drink and if you drink rehydration salts, if you're super dehydrated, or if you just neck water constantly, you're basically fine. OK, so we're saying that it is water and there might be traces. But do you guys know that only 19 percent of people globally actually wash their hands after a number two? Really? Only 19 percent. I suppose you can take out all the men. So it's, you know, 19 percent of the 50 percent of the women, you know, everyone knows that no men wash their hands after they got to the toilet.

What? Is that a thing? Yeah, I heard that they actually did a study of what's it called a thingy station, service stations, the men's toilets, and it was not. It was not a good site. Oh, OK. Well, that's that's a that's a whole different world, the men's toilet in a service. No, not in that way, Dan. I mean, just in terms of washing your hands afterwards. Well, no, you don't want to touch anything.

Even the even the washing of the hands, you know, pressing the tap down. I feel like I'm going to get a disease in a place like that. So that's that's a place where you touch nothing except yourself and then go out. I don't mean that. That does happen a lot. But you do wash your hands, though, Dan, right? Not in service stations. I'll happily admit that I don't touch anything.

I do think men's toilets are worse because they get clean less often. I think that's the thing. Or perhaps this is just a thing that. No, I think they're just not very clean. You are. You think they're just not clean. Like, do you think any woman would just admit to what Dan just admitted to? I think the problem is not admitting to it is really what we're saying here. We're just liars.

Just on the handshakes, one more thing in in Russia. This carried on for a while. And in 1918 in St. Petersburg, there was a quite a common slogan called with the handshake. And you could, again, buy little badges, which had down with the handshake on because people thought the handshaking was bad. And there was a union of simplifying greetings in the 1920s, which not only banned handshakes, it also banned hugs and kisses.

And Bulgarkov writes about it in one of his early stories called Devildom. My problem with all of this is whenever we kind of talk about the handshake, you know, just how gross it is, how many people weren't shaking hands, et cetera, et cetera, at various times because of things. I always just think once upon a time on our planet, there were penis handshakes and we're mortified. Dan still does that in the welcome break every week. What is a penis handshake?

Does that two penis is shaking or one hand? No, it's one hand shakes the penis. And this was this was by one one tribe in Australia. And, you know, it's only recently extinct. I think it became extinct in the 1950s. So what it is is one village, one group of people from one village comes to another group. The visitors, they offer their their penises to the to the people who are

home, you know, who are at home basically. It's like bringing a bottle of wine to a party. Exactly. If the men at home, if one of them refuses to shake it, that's akin to a declaration of war. So then the panicked visitor offers it to all the other guys in the hopes that one of them shakes it because if one of them shakes it, it's basically we vouch for you, mate.

He's probably all right. Fascinating. Absolutely amazing. Oh my God. How long did this last for? You said it ended in what the 50s? Yeah. So the last reference.

So the reference we have of it kind of a really detailed anthropological study was in the 1950s. And then we don't really know anything after that. And it's just really hard to know what really went down. If that makes sense. But also because I've got to be honest as an anthropologist. Sometimes I feel like anthropologists turn up somewhere. And tribes just do whatever they want.

There's always a bit of me that's like... So you think this tribe is like, yeah, we do this every day, mate. Yeah, of course we do. They're behind the corner. They're just giggling to themselves, guys. I believe you swallowed it. Not literally swallowed it. I found it really fascinating reading about handshakes,

both historical and modern ones. And some of my favorite ones that I've discovered, probably my favorite, whenever Prince Charles used to participate in a tree planting ceremony, he'd always give one of the branches a handshake and wish it well before leaving. Wow. Was that the penis handshake or your standard

just hand on twig, right? Just hand on twig. Oh, God, yeah. Charles mob out just waiting for the wind to brush a branch against it. If he doesn't accept, he goes to the other trees. Please, one of you. What I found really interesting about this fact

and what I liked about it, the initial fact is just the idea that we've been doing some of the same stuff for so long. You know, we say there's disease spreading, don't handshake today. The same back then. And I hadn't quite realized how widespread that advice was around pandemic time. So it went out of fashion basically always when there was an illness around, didn't it,

in the early 20th century. You're right. You keep seeing it time and time again. So Prescott Arizona actually banned the handshake during the Spanish flu. They just made it illegal. And you do see stuff like that during different pandemics and epidemics, people either shun it

or they actually completely ban it. So it's not the first time at all. Do you know how handshake police sort of going down the street throwing people apart? I suppose they must have. I'd love to have that. I'm not really sure how they would have policed it. I guess it's like everything.

How on earth do you police any of this stuff? I guess you would just grass on your neighbors doing the handshakes, wouldn't you? That's what usually happens. It's probably like today. You can't police any... It's like diversion. But I was in the...

I was in the... Yemeni is a very, very... I'm Yemeni originally. Yemeni is very famous for polygamy. Like it's a really big thing. Men tend to have loads of wives. I was in a cab. There's a Yemeni taxi driver.

And I was like, how's your dad handling lockdown? And he was like, oh, he's been a bit naughty. He went out and visited his second wife. I was like, first of all, that's so typically Yemeni. Secondly, how do you police that?

Like, I'm going to go see my second wife. How are the police going to get involved with any of this stuff? Yeah. That's just an extended bubble, isn't it? Ella, there's a thing that you say in the book, which I found quite surprising. I think when you read facts about handshakes,

a lot of a sort of very classic fact that's out there, which turns out to be wrong, is that the handshake was sort of... came about during medieval times to show you didn't have a weapon in your hand and that you were presenting an open palm to show you. But that turns out that's, well, according to your book, completely wrong, right?

Yes. Yes. My research very much is against this. But I love that I've now become the authority on the handshake in this country. Like, I just don't know how this happened, but I'm completely loving it with all the random things.

But yeah. I think the sport was open. There wasn't an established handshake authority. All right, Ella. All right. Come on. Yeah. So I kind of looked into it,

and it just never made any sense. And my argument is that the handshake is biological. And I've got two arguments for this to support it rather. One is the chimps shake hands. So chimps and bonobos shake hands. Dr. Kat Hobaita showed that the chip pan shake actually has a very similar meaning to our own. So she's got, like, for example, videos of two chimps

kind of really going at each other in a fight and then kind of sheepishly walking up to each other and shaking hands to make up, which is adorable. So if you think about it, our closest living relatives are the chimps and bonobos. It kind of makes sense that, you know, that's by descent. So I'm arguing that the handshake is 7 million years old. But the coolest bit that kind of supports this

is that we actually transfer chemo signals, chemical signals via handshakes. And there's data to show that we actually sniff our hands afterwards. And I know that sounds absolutely mad, but chemo signals are something a lot of us don't really realize are actually going on. So I think we accept that, you know, the animals in the animal kingdom communicate

with each other chemically, but we like to think that our communications are via like sonnets and language and what have you. But it's absolutely bull because we do communicate with each other chemically. So they did these crazy experiments where they got gauze. They put it under people's armpits. They got them to watch, you know,

stressful films or happy films. And then they took that gauze to a different group of participants and they go point to the bottle that has gauze in it that smells like happiness. And they were getting it right more than you'd expect by chance. So when we shake hands, you're saying we're trying to tell someone I'm really happy or I'm freaking out and we're hoping that you smell your hands afterwards

and you go, oh, God, are you OK? Yeah. There's one institute, the Wiseman Institute, they actually put hidden cameras on people and they showed that people were more likely to put their hand to their nose and take a sniff after they shake hands than if they greet in a different way. So we're just animals, basically.

Whenever I close a Zoom call, I always sniff my computer afterwards. That's why I'm just in case I can gain some information. Anything is your computer sad? Stress. Well, but I've had cholera quite badly this whole time. Right. So we do know it's covered in your own faces. I think most people could have worked that out anyway.

Oh. OK, it is time for fact number two and that is my fact. My fact this week is the 2013 recipient of the Amelia Earhart pioneering achievement award who later successfully completed Amelia Earhart's fatal circumnavigation of the world is called Amelia Earhart. What?

Did she change her name? For it. She did not change her name. She was born Amelia Rose Earhart. She was named that by her parents because they wanted to inspire her by pairing her up as a namesake to one of the great aviators of all time. And I don't believe that there's any kind of aviation history

in her family. She tried to find out if she was actually descended from Amelia Earhart in any way if she was a relative because they lived fairly close to each other. And it turns out there's nothing that connects them. She hired a genealogist who looked into it and said that she was connected as far back as the 1700s. And then she found a sort of second advanced team

who said there's absolutely no traceable connection. So. So weird. Yeah. Yeah. My brother is having a kid and we're like, names aren't important. And now I'm like, no, names are definitely, definitely important.

Like, that is so random. I think if you want someone to win a prize and you actually give them the name of that prize, like if your brother decides to call his child, the Nobel Prize for chemistry or something, and he might have a chance. I mean, he won't have a chance in school. But you know, having friends, it just detracts from all that time.

You could spend doing chemistry, doesn't it? That's the thing. Yeah. Hold on. So she was the first, she couldn't have been the first person to then redo it. No, no, she wasn't the first person to redo it. She's the second youngest ever to do it though,

which is a pretty amazing feat in itself. No, it was done solo by another person a few years beforehand. The media reported that she had done it because I think it felt like a better story. Yeah. The namesake did it. And sorry, when you say, because I couldn't help noticing that in your wording, you said she successfully completed

Amelia Earhart's fatal circumnavigation. So she didn't complete the fatal bit, right? She decided to remain alive throughout. Is that correct? Yes. Cool. It was a cheat? I'll be really sticking to the cause, wouldn't it,

to think, well, I've really got to follow her into her footsteps and disappear as well. Yeah. Especially not knowing where she disappeared. That's quite a feat. Well, the thing is though, so we don't know the exact spot where Amelia Earhart disappeared, but we know roughly the area.

It's Howland Island is the general area. This is a place that is in the Pacific Ocean. It's halfway between Hawaii and Australia. There were ships in the immediate area that were on radio contact with Amelia Earhart trying to help guide her there. So it was her. It was her co-pilot.

It really doesn't feature much in this story. You know, don't die next to someone famous. You know, don't die next to someone famous. This really is the great example of that because most people didn't even know there was another dude there. They just think it was her. I always thought she tried it alone. I couldn't believe I found myself researching this

and thinking, we've really got to rejuvenate the reputation of the man in this story. It's getting way too much cute us for it. Fred, Nuna, and he was a navigator. He was brought on to be able to navigate using the stars and help them find where she was going. She was going to do a lot of it solo, but I think he was so good at what he did

that he sort of hitched the ride for much more of it than he was meant to. And he's a guy who was known for surviving stuff. He used to work on ammunition ships during wars, and he was on three separate vessels that were all sunk by U-boats, and he survived. So, you know, this is a guy with a good survival rate. I wouldn't think of that as a bad omen,

because that certainly implies that my plane's going to go down and crash, and I'm going to die, but he'll walk away scot-free. Possibly. This is like, I went through a five-year period every time I turned up on an expedition somewhere that was coming out of war, suddenly would go straight back into war the minute I would turn up.

And it was like, my brother was like, do you think you're cursed? And I was like, maybe. Is it true that Amelia Earhart got ripped apart by crabs? That's why I always read at the end. Wow. This is one of the latest theories. So, howland island is the island that she was meant to be landing on?

There's another island next to it, which is Gardner Island, and it's thought that that is where she turned and landed on a reef survived, and then was eventually killed by giant crabs, which ate her, carried her bones to the holes that they dig, and left her down there. So, that is a theory,

and one of the last expeditions, which I believe happened in about 2017, 2018, they had bone-sniffing dogs to try and find her, and bone-sniffing dogs can smell quite far down, and so the hope was that they were going to find her, and I think they found some bones, but I don't think it was hers.

That is a dog's dream job, isn't it? I'm going to literally employ you to find bones. Yeah, that is amazing. The only better job is chasing post-med, isn't it? Yes. Yeah, I think they did an experiment where they tested how well she could have been consumed by these crabs,

and it was coconut hermit crabs, which we must have mentioned before, and they are giant crabs. They're the largest land crab. They have a lot of birds and climb trees and stuff, and their claws produce double the force of a tiger's bite,

so they can just crunch through bones, and I think the scientists took a pig carcass to the beach where they found these sort of remnants that could be Amelia Earhart. I think they found lipstick remnants and stuff, so they thought she'd been there. So they brought a pig carcass to the beach,

and they left it there, and there's a time lapse that I believe you can watch because it's really cool. But she wasn't killed by them, which should be clear, although that would have been an awesome way to go. Well, we don't know. We don't know anything. We don't know anything. She might have been murdered by a coconut crab.

There's so many theories, aren't there, that have come out about this over the last 70-odd years, about her disappearance, and everything from alien abduction through to she was captured by Japanese soldiers and was broadcasting as Tokyo Rose to, you know, all stuff like that.

It's pretty exciting when you go through the big list. Yeah. I know you guys deal with facts, but in terms of feelings, do you think that, you know, if she was in any way kind of aware of what was going on, there's a bit of her that's like, damn, I didn't succeed,

but they're still obsessed with me? Do you know what I mean? The world is still like, what happened to Amelia Earhart? Yeah, I hope she's up there going, thank God they've forgotten all about that noonen guy. She was really pro kind of getting as many women to fly airplanes as possible,

wasn't she? She was the first president of the 99s, which was a group of women who basically... They were dedicated to ice creams, weren't they? That was it. That was all they used to do, just eat ice creams all day. They had 99 problems,

but a flake wasn't one. But they really, basically the first licenses you could get in America were in 1927, and within two years there were 9,000 men with licenses and only 117 women. And so they started this club to try and encourage

more women to fly. And there were some amazing people who were part of it. There was one woman called Opal Kuntz, who was part of the 99s, and she was one of the first women to... Sorry, what? No, no, there's not much over that. Could you say the name once more?

Opal Kuntz? Opal Kuntz was one of the first people to fly against men in races. And she used to win them as well. She was a really, really good racing pilot. And there was a thing in 1929 where it was the first

women's air derby, where they went all the way across America from Santa Monica to Cleveland, Ohio. And the newspapers called it the powder puff derby, because it was all women taking part. There were 40 people who took part and she would have won it,

but they said that her aircraft must have a horsepower appropriate for a woman. In other words, her plane was too fast. They wouldn't let her fly it, so she had to fly in a slower aeroplane and she came seven. I want to use her surname to describe them. Is that bad?

No, you're quite right. And then the other thing about the 99s is Amelia Earhart had a thing called the Hat of the Month program. And she would give it to whichever member of the club flew to the most airports wearing a Stetson hat that she designed herself.

Cool. That is so weird because she initially preferred hats to planes. What? This is her origin story. Amelia Earhart, it's really great she wrote a diary that's quite detailed, so we know lots about what she thought. And she saw her very first aeroplane when she was 10 at the Iowa State Fair

and there were planes there. And so she was 10 years old and she saw this plane and was like, I wasn't interested at all. It was just a bunch of kind of wood and wire. And someone said, look dear, it flies. And she said, I was much more interested in an absurd hat made from an inverted

peach basket that I just bought. So that was her first love. So maybe she was all about the hats. The whole plane thing was so that she could get this Stetson hat competition going. I think you're right. She had her own fashion label, didn't she? I think. Back then it was really hard to fund all of

these projects and she wrote some books and she used to go on lecture tours. But one of the other things she did was become one of the first for the modern era celebrity fashion designers. And she had her own line, this Amelia Earhart fashion line, where she would incorporate bits of aeroplane onto the clothing

as well. So she would have wing bolts and she would have, you know, sort of little... Did she invent that hat that people wear with a like a rotor on the top of it? Did she invent that? Oh God, I wish she did. I'm going to speak to my expedition buddies,

because right now we're trying to approach like Dell to give us like funding. And I'm like, no, no guys, let's just go design a fashion line to fund our expeditions. It kind of pioneered fashion a bit as well, didn't it? Because up until then

women were wearing one piece suits or dress or it was always one thing and she with this fashion line created the idea or at least popularized it quite nicely, separates the idea of matching this with this, this skirt

with this jacket with this shirt. You know, you buy in different pieces and that really wasn't a thing back then and she kind of pushed it to be as part of her line. Wow. Ella, what was the name of that company that you want to give you some money for your next exhibition? Was it Dell, the makers

of amazing computers that everyone should go and buy computers from? Yes, Dell, but I'll take IBM. I will. I will take anyone and then I will I can't stop actually. She didn't need to fund it. I will take anyone.

Yeah, Dell already to sign off on that, you know, until you pinch yourself out to all of their competitors. Oops, oh well. Do you know, she did have one successful fundraising thing which is what did fund her trips and that was

carrying letters. No, she wasn't a carrier pigeon. She was a postman. Okay, this is actually her career. No, she was she had this idea of basically crowdfunding by saying that she would take

letters that people had written with commemorative stamps that said like, I went all the way around the world with Amelia Earhart or I went over the Atlantic with Amelia Earhart. So I think across the Atlantic she had a hundred or so commemorative stamps and she'd sign them and on her round the world trip that plane when we find it will have

five thousand stamped letters in and she said that she's, it must have been such a hassle on every stop along the way she had to postmark every single one of those letters. The sack, five thousand letters down to the local post office in wherever

Hawaii. I wonder if they told the Bone Snipping Dogs, you know, she used to be a postwoman just to give them that extra bit of incentive. You know what, this makes me feel better that even Amelia Earhart struggled with financing her expeditions.

This is just, this is information I needed, Anna, bless you, thank you. That's offered to deliver mail as part of them. Where are you next going? I'm sure there are people who have left. Somaliland? Perfect. If anyone's got a friend in Somaliland

you need to write a letter. LSU Women. She charges a grand letter. Thank you. So Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. But she was actually the first woman

to cross the Atlantic in a plane where she wasn't a solo flyer. And that was when she was a guest in the plane of Wilma Stultz and a guy called Slim Gordon. And she spent the flight crouched in between the fuel tanks

of the plane. So she went as a passenger over, but she said that she was no more useful than a sack of potatoes when they asked her. Yes, they are useful, actually. Less useful. You can make them into loads of different things, potatoes. They're probably one of the most useful of all the vegetables, aren't they?

They're more edible than Amelia Earhart unless you're a coconut crab. They're less good at flying a plane, are they, in emergency situations? That's true. You might call on Mr. Potato Head if you're really desperate, but he's probably the only potato you want.

Yeah, that was actually what launched her flying career guesting. No, it wasn't what launched it, sorry, but that really propelled her to stratospheric heights, as it were career-wise, because she was put up to it by another woman called Amy Phipps Guest

who was actually this millionaire and this woman, Amy Phipps, wanted to make the crossing. She was like, women can do just as much as men can do. I want to cross the Atlantic with these two chaps and her family just begged her not to go. You're too rich. Come on, stay. So she said, okay, well, find me a suitable

woman. And she hired a guy called George Putnam to find a woman who she wanted to be adventurous, but actually in Amelia's Diary by the time they tracked her down, they were looking for someone with social graces, education, charm and pulchritude. So the men had obviously

slightly changed the advert on the way. G-S-O-H. Yeah. But George Putnam found her and ended up marrying her as well as getting her on the flight. And when do we ever hear about George Putnam? Exactly.

More airtime for George. So she had a wealthy benefactor to start off with. She did. This podcast is quickly becoming a how-to from my next expedition. Find a rich woman. I hear Mrs. Melinda Gates.

Thank you. I don't know what the people at Della are going to think about that. I'll take any of them. Okay, it is time for fact number three and that is Anna. My fact this week is that scientists have started putting

fossilised poos in particle accelerators. Why? What is that? Well, A, it's fun. And B, you can learn loads about the poo. And so these are... Anna, so a particle accelerator

you get like an electron and you fire it round a great big tunnel and they smash into each other. Are they firing poos around this tunnel and smashing into each other? The poos are not taking the place of the electrons, no. Although that would be such an awesome way

to find the God Particle. No, it would be gross. You don't want to be the cleaner in the lab that day. Oh, guys. It's not messy. Don't panic. It's in like a little test tube. So this is this really amazing new way

that they found of studying coprolites. So coprolites are fossilised feces and you can learn a lot about the thing that pooed out millions and millions of years ago because, you know, it's preserved the stuff that they were eating inside it. And we said years ago on this podcast that the only way to study a coprolite

was to cut it into slices. Now, not true anymore, because you can put it in these very specific particle accelerators called synchrotrons. And so there's one called the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility. And basically, you put the poo in there and the electrons

are being fired round and round, super super fast. And if you just slightly change the electron's direction along the way, they let out X-rays, but incredibly powerful X-rays. So the X-rays are 100 billion times brighter than the ones that you'd use in a hospital. So they see straight into

the coprolite. They have lots of other purposes as well, but coprolite is one thing they do. It does feel cheaper, though, just to cut it in half with a knife, doesn't it? Yeah, if you don't have the budget. But also, then you've destroyed your coprolite. Then you've got two half-coprolites, don't you?

This way you can keep the integrity of it. That's true, yeah. Although, as you just sort of trod on your own point, James, because then you do have two coprolites, which does seem like it's twice as good as having one, doesn't it? In some ways. That's true. I've got a pizza to sell you,

which is eight slices, opposed to six slices. Damn it. But one person we haven't mentioned is Mary Anning, who was one of the first people to work out what a coprolite was. Right? So she is, these days, a famous fossil collector

from the south of England. Some people think that it's where we get she sells seashells on the seashore. It was supposedly named after her, whether it was, we don't know. When you say these days, you mean she's famous these days, not that she's a fossil collector these days.

She is herself quite close to being a fossil by now. She is quite dead. She is quite a dead person. It's what she would have wanted. It's fine. I know, I know. She was perhaps not really appreciated in her time, although a little bit more than you would expect,

because she worked with a guy called William Buckland, who was a very famous paleontologist. And when he wrote his paper, when he gave his paper to the Geological Society in London in 1829, he did recognise her by name. So, you know,

she was kind of known in her time, but she wasn't allowed to be part of the Geological Society because they didn't allow women in those days. There was the director of the Lime Regis Museum called David Tucker. She was born in 1970. She'd be heading up the Paleontology Department

at Imperial or Cambridge by now. But as it was, she was just someone who collected fossils and learned about them and kind of wrote to this guy, William Buckland. But it was in the correspondence between these two people that the word coprolite first came into use and the idea that

these rocks with little bits of bone and stuff might be fossilised poos. It does feel like Buckland could have done a bit more to give her a bit more cred because he did clearly get on with her really well and took her seriously,

took her ideas seriously as well. But when these ideas were being presented to other scientists, they even used her drawings of the dinosaurs that she sketched out that she found with no mention of her name. That was what was shown and she got nothing.

It's pretty extraordinary. What was going through their heads? I think maybe I did draw that. Maybe I did find that fossil actually. You know, I don't remember everything I've done. Because she sort of invented I think this is why she invented the idea of drawing or imaginings of what

these things that we found the fossils of would look like. So the reason that we now can picture like a T-Rex or a Diplodocus or whatever is because she came up with, look, we've got to draw these things so people don't understand how they appeared. There's a really cool thing about the drawings that she did, which is that

she drew fossils with fossils. She had a friend called Elizabeth Philpot who was another great fossil collector at the time and they found this Belemnite fossil, which I think is an extinct kind of squid, and they found that it contained

fossilized ink sacs. So you have squid ink, squid ink sacs. And her friend, Elizabeth Philpot, realised that you could grind up and still make ink. So Mary Ann ink then used that process to grind it up and with this 100 million year old squid ink, she drew

some of her pictures. I have questions about this. How rare are those fossils? Because I just feel like today I wouldn't get away with that. Right. Just filling up your lamy pen with some 100 million year old fossils. You're right.

But aside from that, she was very cool. She was very attached to her dog, and she sadly died when she was out on a fossil collecting trip. And she wrote a sweet letter saying that... Is she writing the dog's blood? Yeah, she was out fossil collecting and this cliff collapsed and nearly killed her. Basically this huge cliff fell down

inches away from her and crushed her little dog. Oh no. Just one last thing on Mary Ann ink I said about David Tucker at the Lyme Regis Museum. The Lyme Regis Museum you can go and learn some stuff about Mary Ann ink and it is

in the place where she was born that's where the museum is. But it's a complete coincidence that it's in that same building. No. Yeah, they bought this place and they didn't realize that that was where she was born. And it turned out that the actual area

where the family lived has since fallen into the sea but it was a bit of the building that was attached to where they lived which is now where the museum is. Wow. Is that the bit that squashed the dog? Wouldn't that be a thing if that was true? Yeah. Oh my goodness. It sort of swings around about, you know,

we lost the dog, we've now got a sea front view. Oh my God. It's so dark. The oldest human coprolite we have in existence is a Neanderthal one from 50,000 years ago in a Spanish site and what I love most about it

is it was on top of a hearth so you've got to imagine there was a fire they put the fire out and the guy was like, just give me a second, give me a second lads. He's just going to do a number two. Probably didn't wash his hands, you might know him, Dan. And then went about his business.

I misdescended. But yeah, it's just, it's kind of wonderful. Wow. Pooing in the fireplace, no manners than Neanderthals. That's why they died out. Well, did we learn about that? Do we learn anything about that Neanderthal poo, like what they ate and stuff like that?

Well, they obviously, they ate meat, that's not surprising, but they did eat veggies, which some people still find surprising. I don't know why, why would that be weird? But they also found a whole pile of parasites, so Pidworms and a whole pile of other stuff

that I think if they'd have found them in a modern human, they would say that person would be very, very sick. So either they were really hardy basically, or the poor guy was really, or woman was really sick. But also, I just, I kind of, I love human poo, like coprolites, because, sorry, probably shouldn't say it like that,

but it's just that, you know, when people talk about the Paleo diet, for me, kind of people that really into the Paleo diet, there's always a bit of bouginess about it. Don't get me wrong, I'm quite bougie as well, but there's an element of like, there's this like, blah, blah, blah, and it's actually like, well, the real Paleo diet,

these guys all had worms, and they were all dead by 30. You're shitting on the fire. Exactly, exactly. There was this one Paleo diet restaurant, and I was trying to explain to the lady in the Paleo diet restaurant, as you do as an academic, you know, just completely obnoxious.

Actually, the real Paleo diet wouldn't have been the chicken breasts. It would have been all parts of the chicken. So are you serving chicken eyes, and the dozens of the animal? Are you serving the poor girl? Oh, no. Speaking of technology being used

for studying Neanderthals, I was reading this in BBC Future, and they said that in 2013, they discovered that the genetic code for penis spines is lacking from Neanderthals, which means that we know in theory that they didn't have spines on their penises.

And what that apparently shows us is that they were more monogamous than we might have thought they were in the past, because usually the animals with penis spines are more like people from Yemen. They tend to have... Oh, my God. That's so dad you're talking about.

At one point, somebody turned around and was like, why don't you marry a second wife, Dr. Ashimahi? And my dad was like, oh, one's enough for me. My mom's reaction was, ah, no, hold on, that's an insult. I love that they can look at the genomes

of these, like, like, like, like, genomes of these, like, ancient, like, long, long dead species of humans and can tell you something as

kind of weird as that, how many sexual partners they might have had. That's extraordinary. So do you mean kind of like a penis bone is what you're talking about when you say spines? No, so, like, animals would have spikes on their penises, a lot of them do. Spike? Sorry, I heard spine. Oh, yeah, I did say spine.

Spines, like, spines. And the spikes were basically clearing out previous gentlemen's stuff that was in there using these exactly. And so it's more necessary for a polyamorous species because you're more likely to have stuff to clean out

from there, so to speak. Interesting. So Neanderthals were all romantics, monogamous romantics. That's what we can do. Yeah, let's go with that. And I read another study. This is from the University of California, San Diego Laboratory. And they

made some tiny brains. They're not conscious brains, but they're kind of brain cells and using CRISPR, which is like the gene editing thing, they made some that were human and some that had Neanderthal genes in them. And

the Neanderthal ones matured much quicker than the human ones did. And what they inferred from that is that perhaps younger Neanderthals would be more capable than younger humans, but then perhaps the Homo sapiens, as they got older, would have gotten better or

smarter. I don't know if any of this is true, Ella or Emma? No, it's completely, completely true, as I would expect from you, James. But no, yeah, they're called organoids. That's what they made, these kind of little brain things. And it's really interesting because it plays into

this theory. Anna, what you're saying, you know, why they die out? Well, there's this one theory that suggests that because we, as in modern humans, Homo sapiens have an extended juvenile period, basically we don't become adults very quickly at all, that that's given us a competitive

advantage because it means we play and play is really good for creativity, imagination, invention, blah, blah, blah. And obviously there's absolutely, it's not impossible to prove it, but it's, I mean, it is kind of, I guess. But it's just really interesting to think that the Neanderthals kind of growing up so quickly

might be one of the reasons why they became extinct. But you are right as well when you say that, you know, we kind of know a certain amount about Neanderthals from their DNA. We know a lot about them from their DNA, including obviously that all of us have about 2% Neanderthal

DNA in us. So all a wee bit Neanderthal, which is, you know, I think is really cute because it means they're not completely gone, they're still with us a little bit. Yeah, if you have more, you know how Dan is like a particularly hairy man, does that mean that he's more likely to have more Neanderthal in him

or is, does it not kind of, can you not see from the outside how Neanderthal someone is, you have to go into the genes and Yeah, you have to go into the genes because as hairy as Neanderthal might be, as hairy as Dan might be, sorry, Dan. We actually, we don't actually know

that Neanderthals were hairy. That's kind of just something that got into public imagination. There's no real, how do you know what I mean? How do you even prove that? We don't know. How about the fact that I keep ruining parties by having a shit on the fireplace?

You can't blame that on your genes. So gross. Okay, it is time for fact number four and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that Frazier Crane was an early investor in Microsoft. How?

It's real. Which one? How did they cross this weird space of time? And why did he not go with Dell, which is a far superior company? So Frazier Crane, obviously fictional character from the incredibly popular American sitcom Frazier, Microsoft

obviously a real company. And this is a made up backstory which we found out about because our old friend Richard Osman tweeted that he didn't understand how Frazier could possibly afford to live in such a nice apartment in Seattle on his wages.

And then one of the writers Joe Keenan replied and said that they'd kind of talked about it in the writer's room on occasion and they said that they decided that he must have invested his money from his Boston practice very wisely perhaps in a friend's

Seattle software startup. And we can only infer from that that the Seattle software startup must be Microsoft because apart from anything else, Bill Gates was on Frazier as a character and in that episode he did say he was a fan of Frazier.

So he didn't mention that Frazier had invested in his company beforehand but you know that's where it goes, isn't it? You don't say that in public. Exactly, that's yeah. There is an episode where one of his I think it's his nephew or someone

is coming into town and he desperately wants four of the Microsoft offices and Frazier is desperately looking for any contact that he has. It's just curious that as an investor he didn't have an in. I think what happened is that he'd sold all his shares at that point and people had got a bit upset

because it had forced the price down and they I'm just making stuff up there. I totally believe that. I was like oh, okay, yeah, yeah. Yeah, because you're right. It was Freddie, so it was his son and he was trying to find somebody that knew someone at Microsoft and then he

convinced Ross to get in contact with an ex-boyfriend and even when, so this is like a mega fan talking here, even when Bill Gates comes in, he calls him it's very clear that they don't know each other very well at all and he calls

him sir and I'm just saying I'm just saying I think these writers it might be a cover up like how probably Boris Johnson would call James Dyson sir if he walked in you know sometimes you don't want to be open about quite how tight you are to power, but never know.

I mean also I'm not part of the investor class so I also just don't know if you even need to know Bill Gates to invest in Microsoft. I'm assuming maybe you don't. Yeah, that's true actually. If you were to buy some stocks in Tesla, you don't have to have an interview with Elon Musk beforehand to make sure

that he likes you, that he's a friendly. Good thing. You know they're rebooting. Are they? Yeah. I now feel like I'm going to have to go back and watch it all from the start because I've just seen it very sporadically. Well you should actually start from Cheers

and properly watch his character development. It's like delicious. So we should say this is the most interesting thing about Frasier is that it's a spin-off series of one of the other most popular American sitcoms of all time. Cheers. And he was a character who just came in and sat at the bar.

He was only meant to be in for a few episodes and he proved to be so popular with audiences that they wrote him into the series more and more and eventually when they ended they thought what are we going to do next as a team and Frasier was this spin-off. You know, that's happened a couple of times.

Does it not even used to annoy me when I was younger that it felt like there was a disconnect between his character there and then his character in Frasier or it was kind of confusing to my young head. I was like how is that the same person and he seems a bit different and there is a sense of inconsistency

as a super fan which must stress you out Ella surely. Like I think it's mentioned that he has a horrible relationship with his dad or something in Cheers. It still does though. I think in Cheers they said that his father was dead. And then when another character

from Cheers came to visit him in the second sitcom he said, I thought you said your father was dead and he said oh we were fighting. So that's how they taught that. They do a few things like that, yeah. So the Cheers was set in Boston

and they wanted to have this new sitcom but they didn't want it to be too close to Boston because then you would have to deal with all the previous characters and you would have to explain why they're not there etc. But if you move to the other side of the country you can get away with it. So they were going to move to Denver, Colorado

but then in 1992 there was a group called Colorado for Family Values that pushed an amendment which was described by the writers of Cheers as an egregious anti-gay amendment which was basically stopping any gay rights in Colorado.

And if you read the newspapers from the time it was a huge, huge, huge deal. A load of films stopped being filmed there. They were going to do a Stephen King movie there and they didn't do it in Colorado. And then David Lee who was one of the show's creators said that they were going to put

Frasier in Colorado in Denver but they had to move it away from there because they didn't want to be associated with this anti-gay amendment. And then in 1996, four years later the US Supreme Court declared it was unconstitutional so it got kicked out anyway but they lost all of this kind of investment

and all of these shows and stuff just refused to go to Colorado. In your face Colorado that's what you get. Because I feel like I know the space needle now because of Frasier. But they all did cameo in Frasier at times, didn't they?

Except one main Cheers character who was Rebecca who actually was probably the most annoying Cheers character anyway, I think. From what I vaguely remember. But she never guested in Frasier and it was an actress who is called Kirstie Alley.

And she said that she turned it down because as a Scientologist her beliefs forbid things like psychiatry. So Scientologists are very anti-psychiatry. How interesting. Yeah, although she did give an interview saying this and then the show creator David Lee said

I don't remember asking her. I don't remember asking you. I mean she was a big deal. She would have been asked at some point. She would have been asked, yeah. Kelsey Grammer in that show quite a fascinating story of how he went from being

this character that was just a normal actor and it happens in these sitcoms where the actor becomes the biggest part of the show generally. They become an exec producer. They start directing. They start... His power grew so great as he was going on that he could start pulling these power moves which felt really bizarre.

So one of the things was he employed an acting method that he called requisite disrespect. And the thing was, is that he said he would rehearse each scene only once and he would not learn his lines until the moments before the scene was shot.

And in some case he would go, okay, I'll do it better and not even use the lines. He said he'd played the role so long that he could now embody any kind of remark that would come out of Frasier better than a script writer and just became Frasier Crane himself. I'll just say whatever I want to say in this show now.

That's kind of, you know, it works. The best actor in Frasier of course was Moose who played the dog Eddie and he retired at the end of season seven and his son Enzo took over the role. But what I find interesting about that is

Moose had been deliberately bred to create a new child which would look enough like him that they would be able to bring him in when he retired. Which I think is just a really interesting idea. If you imagine that happen with humans that you're an actor in a show and they're like, okay, we're going to

find someone for you to mate with who looks the right kind of person that when you have kids they'll be able to come up and take your place. Well, and they cocked it up a bit, didn't they? They had to paint Enzo's fur to match his dad. Didn't quite nail the patterns. They did.

And also they hated each other. The father and son. The creator Peter Casey called their relationship a classic parent-child Hollywood rivalry and by all accounts Moose was horrible. So Eddie quite lovable on the show.

Moose was like bitey, everyone hated him like the trainer, didn't like anyone else on set and really hated his son Enzo. They had to be kept apart. You think they were basically mirroring the Frasier and his father's relationship. I hope there's a behind-the-scenes documentary

where it's from their perspective bickering at each other and you've just got Frasier and the dad in the background. Well, didn't the dad actually adopt? Didn't he adopt? I think Roz did. The actor who played Roz, Perry Gilpin. Yes.

Right. My favourite fact about Frasier is that the pilot was six minutes too long and they chopped and chopped and chopped and finally they had a pilot that ended up a 60 seconds longer than it should have been for the slot. So they handed it in and they said

we're sorry, we just can't do anything. It's 60 seconds too long. And amazingly the network went okay, so NBC agreed with it and they found extra time by taking 15 seconds of four other shows that were airing at night.

That's how you know you're the favourite. Are you saying like if you remember that one episode of like Party of Five where it ends really abruptly, that was probably the night that Frasier went out. You remember that game of basketball where it was all tied up with 15 seconds left and they just turned up.

Lisa Kudrow who plays Phoebe in Friends actually had the job of Roz initially and got fired before they even really started. And you're saying Roz not Roz, aren't you? Because for Lisa Kudrow to be cast as Roz, we're talking about her.

What a random factor to suddenly throw away that laugh. We're talking about Frasier here, come on. Sorry, Roz, that was supposed to be Lisa Kudrow. It was Lisa Kudrow and then she got fired and you can imagine she has stories about

how people were so shocked that she got fired from this massive show that they were looking at her like oh we are so sorry she wanted to just die basically. She fell her feet in the end. Right! She went to a fortune teller who was like it's okay, I see big things for you

and I was like it's absolutely bullshit Lisa, your career is over. Well she said that she was so depressed that I think that day or that kind of in those few days she went to a party and she was just like oh this is so I'm so past it

I've got nothing else and she sees this cute guy and she just goes why not, nothing else. Who cares, I'm just going to hit on him and she ended up marrying him. It's kind of a woman who's just managed to make it all work for her from being fired.

It's amazing what Scientology can do, isn't it? No, no, no. No, this is Lisa Kudrow. Lisa Kudrow is like a nice Jewish girl. Hey, question. Which actor in Frasier is it? Jay Leaves.

The British one. Incorrect. So devastated to learn this. She's not, I think she grew up in East Grinstead which is very much the south of England. And the home of Scientology, so Chrissy Alley. Stop picking everyone up Frasier

of Scientology. This is really upsetting me. It's a broad church. So she was asked to do that accent, and she's from there. But John Mahoney who plays Martin the Dad is from Manchester. So he was born in Blackpool,

but his family were from Manchester and he was schooled and raised in Manchester. Isn't that weird? Do you know how we all used to really kind of laugh at her accent being a Mancunian accent because it was just really weird accent. I caught a clip of her once kind of where

somebody very politely on one of the English morning shows was like, it was morning television, so they were trying to be polite. And you could tell that she was very aware of it and kind of a bit stressed about it. And she kind of said, well, you know, I was told that the actual accent that I had was too

it was too strong and the Americans wouldn't understand it. So the actual Mancunian accent was considered to be inappropriate or something. Oh, yes. I read that. She was trained to do a relatable to the Americans Mancunian version.

Oh, that's what she's claiming. I thought I'd read that she, her character was living in America for so long at that point that she had a kind of transatlantic drool that had seeped into the Mancunian accent and it had distorted it.

She's all sorts of excuses, isn't she? It's like worse than your accent. Like it's like there's like... I mean, I assume you're talking to me. Sorry. Well actually, any Americans listening, like I'm from just outside Manchester, so she should have

an accent that's a bit like mine. Instead, it's a bit Yorkshire and then just weird. It's a bit, God knows. It's just too many things. It's lovable, which is all that matters. A lovable accent. I read a quote from David Hyde Pierce,

who plays Niles, who said, to me, Jane is in Jane, Jane leaves. To me, Jane and Daphne were identical, exquisite and charming with fragrant smells like puppies, springtime and sex. Wow. He's gay. Yeah, exactly.

It's okay because he is gay, but otherwise it wouldn't be. I have to say that's a show that's aged really well. You know, a lot of... A lot of the shows from that period are a lot of kind of issues that... Jokes that you just wouldn't be able to get away with now. That's one of those shows that's aged

really well, because the joke is always on whoever is being, you know, the... The arse, basically. It's never on... So it's unlike a lot of the other shows of its time. Yeah, take that, Lisa Kudrow. I might have made the wrong choice there.

OK, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shriverland.

At James Harkin. Ella. At Ella Archimagi. And Anna. You can email podcast at qi.com. Yep, or you can go to our group account, which is at no such thing, or you can go to our website,

nosuchthingasafish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there, so do check them out. Also, do check out Ella's book. It's called The Handshake, A Gripping History. It is absolutely awesome. You've got a bit of a hint of the stuff that's in there in this episode.

There is so much more. It really is a brilliant book. We'll be back again next week with another episode, and we will see you then. Goodbye.