No Such Thing As A Fish - 600: No Such Thing As The Doughnut Ambassador

Episode Date: September 11, 2025

Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss tractor tyres, doughnut dimples and protecting porpoises. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hello and welcome to you from the QI office in Hoibern. My name is Dan Shriver. I'm sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, and Anna Tyshinsky. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that in the 1940s, a mystery man traveled America measuring the holes in donuts and passing a ruling on what size they should be.

Pervert. It's got pervert written all over there. That didn't even cross my mind. Now I'm looking down all my research from this guy and questioning his motives. Yeah, I didn't as well. Why is he a purpose? over it? What's going on? It's weird having an obsession with measuring holes and putting

a mucky little fingers in there and like, what are you doing? Why's he got mucky fingers? Because they got sugar on them because of all the donuts. We don't know he wasn't a good hand washer. In fact, we know almost nothing about him. What was he measuring the holes with? That's what I want to know. Come on, people. Okay, now I get it. Edward Falasker was a perfectly innocent donut aficionado. And this, I started looking into this because there's a picture that occasionally pops up online of a man who's whole, holding up a big sign with three pictures on it and the sign says size of donut hole down through the years. And then there's three pictures of donuts in 1927, 37 and 48.

And there are just these, all these reports in the late 1940s of this guy, Edward Fulaska, going around America and announcing that donut holes will be shrinking. And that, he says, is because people are getting dunked dimples from handling the existing size, which I think meant if the hole's too big, you leave a dent in your donut when you dip it. Pervert. Pervert, pervert, pervert. I'm sorry. This is just screens per cent. Also, this was the 1940s. The world had big things on its plate. No longer. Nah, they've forgotten all that. It's 47.

First half of the 40s was a very stressful time. It was all that thing. But second half was Donut City. No, you're right. Maybe he was in the war and spent, you know, when peace comes, I'm going to get back to doing what I love. I'm thinking PTSD. Actually, that was the most plausible explanation.

Bullet holes, isn't it? Oh, yes, of course. It's the D in PTSD for donut. I didn't know that. I did not know that. So there's a great photo, isn't there, of him holding up a board, and he's pointing to three different donuts over the years. That's the one in that, exactly.

And that photo, we have that, thanks to a Smithsonian collection of donut ephemera, which is collected by Sally L. Steinberg. She is the donut princess of America, and she wrote a book. Self-appointed. Solvointed. She wrote a book called The Donut Book, The Origins, History, Literature, Law, Taste, Etiquette, Traditions, Techniques, Varieties, Mathematics, Mythology, Commerce, Philosophy, Cuisin, and Glory of The Donut, which I found a copy of, and it is insane. It's an insane book, but it's so brilliantly researched, and she's the person who has this photo that we now know of, as a result of her collection. The Smithsonian had very serious things in its connection. It doesn't.

It has doughnut ephemera from this girl who was the granddaughter of that. I think the reason she calls herself a princess is because she was the granddaughter of Adolf Levitt, a refugee from Russia in the 1920s who made America's first donut machine. So got called the donut king and she's his offspring. Because obviously Russia did away with their monarchy, didn't they, in the start of the 20th century? But they didn't figure for the donut monarchy, did they?

Indeed. They were chasing him down for decades, actually. A lot of Stalin's resources. He was supposedly inspired, so it goes back to the war actually, where people were cooking biscuits and dough and they were putting them on bayonets and giving them out to soldiers, so you would have the hole so that, like, you could cabb it. That's, there's lots of stories about how he had the inspiration. That's one that's mentioned. I think it's definitely true that they did have donuts in the war, though, isn't it? Yeah. In the first World War, they had the

Salvation Army volunteers who went there on the front line, and they just went there to make various sweet meats and cakes and stuff, but they realize that donuts actually, you don't really need many ingredients for them. You don't need to bake them. You can just cook them in oil, so they're really easy to do right on the front line. And I think the popularity of donuts, people put it down to that because the servicemen came home and they got a taste for the donut. Quite brave. They were called the dough lasses, the Salvation Army. And there's some men in the tents as well, the Salvation Army tents and plenty of women too. And they were sort of looking after the American soldiers

and sometimes they got shrapnel in the tents they were that close to the front lines and yeah that's how sprinkles were born and didn't they they they used soldiers helmets as frying pan as cooking panes. They use bayonets to store the donuts on it this is amazing the whole of war

was just a donut production unit it was that was what it was for is it a bayonet charge they're doing or are they just bringing us some lovely new donut is that jam? Open your mouth, cross your fingers. No, they did, they said they used soldiers' helmets. They'd ask for a soldier's helmet to double up as a frying pan

because they didn't have any of the equipment at first. Well, this is what they claimed, but I don't believe these women because they also claimed. Your cashphrase. There were two women who started it, really. It was their idea. And Helen Pervience, who was one of those, another Perth. She wrote that in one day her and her one colleague, Margaret,

who were making these in their frying pans using their shell casings as rolling pins she wrote they'd make it one day 2,500 donuts 100 cupcakes 50 pies 800 pancakes and 255 gallons of cocoa which James you've worked in catering

That's a lot That's not possible War catering isn't it Can we talk about the mad donut myth I think this is not true of donuts in general Okay go on because I'm going to I'm going to counter it I think it might be true Oh okay

Well we're in new England England, they had been brought over as oily cooks, which is the Dutch word meaning oily cakes, just cakes cooked in oil. And then in New England, there was a woman called Elizabeth Gregory, and her son was a ship's captain, and she wanted to feed him, you know, keep him well fed at sea and all of that. And she put nuts in the centre of the little cakes she made. There was dough in the middle, dough nuts, doughnuts. And supposedly her son, Hansen Gregory, put the hole in doughnuts.

because he was a ship's captain, he was at the wheel, having one of his snacks. A terrible storm blew up. He was trying to control this big, big ship's wheel. He jams his donut on the wheel. Are you deliberately making up extra stuff now? This is the story. He skewing it on the ship's wheel to control the donut while he's, you know, helming the ship. He's trying to control the ship and keep his lovely donut.

I actually think, Andy, that you were not going to go down any of this route. But as soon as I said that, I believe it, you thought, right, what is the most ridiculous thing I could possibly say? What's the back end of that story? They make it through the storm. He removes the doughnuts and everyone goes, what's that? I think that's it. Is that it? He did claim that he had made the hole himself, but he claimed he'd done it on purpose rather than jamming it on the wheel later.

Yeah. Yeah, with good reason, because it wasn't cooking properly on the inside. So I'm skeptical about Elizabeth Gregory put the nuts in the middle, but I think he just said it wasn't cooking right on the inside. So I thought, take the inside out, and then it cooks right. I'm with Anna. I think the nut thing doesn't make sense because the word nuts just means a cake, like ginger nuts or biscuits or whatever. But the fact that it was invented by him and he put the hole in,

the dates do work. Okay, okay. So it definitely was invented somewhere around New England, and it was definitely around that time when we first see donuts with holes in. And he was really proud of it. Like, if he didn't do it, he really embraced the idea that he did. He definitely thought he did. He did, or he wanted to convince the world.

And he would say when an interviewer asked him in 1916, when he was 85 years old, how he felt about it. Was he pleased when he got the results of this first donut ever that he made? He said, was Columbus pleased when he landed in America. What year was that? That was 1962. It was 1916, and I know what you're going to say, we had bigger fish to fry. Another period of total war, which for America. at the time. For America, a halcyon time of peace.

Do you know the idea of dunking donuts, very big in America? Not so if it's massive here, is it massive here? Do you mean the shop? I mean the act itself of doing it. No, it's not, I don't think it's a big thing here. But in America, it was, and there's a lot of theories about who was the first person to do it, where it came from.

It was a ship's captain who's donut fell overboard during the Boston Tea Party. It's like, this is delicious. Well, the donut princess has put forward a few theories in the donut book. One is that she said that it began in the Civil War. It was inspired by soldiers dunking Hardtack into coffee. Hardtack being a type of biscuits that they would put in or a cracker. But then there's this other theory that Hollywood actress, who was really big called May Murray, so namesake of you, Andy.

She was sitting in a cafe. She was holding her donut, and it slipped out of her fingers and fell into her coffee. and she picked it out and the person with her did the same thing to make it look like it was intentional and because so many people were watching they went wow, what's that

and it became a fad off the back of this famous actress Wouldn't you love to be a person who was famous or respected or feared enough that you could do something really stupid and it became copied and trendy? The other day I was playing golf

and someone said to me halfway around oh your flies are undone imagine if the next day you come into central London and everyone's got the flies Yeah, that's the dream, isn't it? That does happen. There'll be many examples of that.

You know, in our, a bit of behind the scenes inside baseball here, you know our Google document where we put what subjects we've researched each week so that we don't go in different directions. We all spelled the word donut differently, right? And I spelled it the American way, D-O-N-U-T, because I just think everyone knows what you mean and it just saves a few characters. But the interesting thing about that, I think, is the original spelling was D-O-N-O-T-E-S for donuts.

Donnottes. Donnotes. And that's from 1782. And then we have donuts with D-O-U-G-H nuts, which is the British way of spelling it. And that kind of takes over and becomes the main thing. And then the spelling D-O-N-U-T, which is how Americans spell it, there's a journalist called Kate Taylor for Business Insider who looked at this and found that basically if you look at where Dunkin' Donuts opens throughout America,

you can see where the spelling changes. And the spelling basically changes wherever Dunkin' Donuts goes, people start spelling it that way. They used to spell it with the UGH in the middle. And obviously now Dunkin' Donuts is ubiquitous in America, so everyone spells it NU2. That makes sense because you know, all the old newspaper archives,

the Americans are spelling it with a GH. But I must admit, I put it in our public doc, public to the four of us, with a GH. But in my private notes, it's too much effort to put those extra three letters Then I just got it. Get out.

Sorry. We keep saying Dunkin' Donuts. Do you know in America it's no longer called that? It's now just called Duncan. They've lost the donuts. And I think it's largely because as the donut ambassador not weighed in, the donut archduke, not made a statement. Well, it sounds like they don't sell as many donuts as they used to back in the day. They're largely a coffee at restaurant place.

Duncan is what they're called colloquially, you know, that people just say, let's go to Duncan. So it's gone. Except globally, we've still got it as Dunkin' Don't. Really? Donuts. I think we should not leave out the world's leading doughnut consuming country in this. San Marino. San Marino. And that's by sheer volume. It's not per person. It's just amazing.

No, I've seen the claim in various places that it's actually Canada. Yeah, I saw that. It's amazing that, isn't it? And Tim Hortons is the chain. He's a hockey player. Yes. Now, sadly, no longer with us. I don't know. Related to the... No, I don't believe so.

I don't believe so. But yeah, he used to skate over and he would put donuts on the end of his ice skates wouldn't you? Well, they can be dangerous.

In the donut princess's book, she cites a few times where donuts can lead to major issues under a title called What Can Donuts do? On the highway, I saw a man

stuff a chocolate donut in his mouth, then his car skidded into two cars for a three car crack up. So just a word of warning. That's the donuts fault that, isn't it?

What are the chances of the donut watching you in a car eating a donut leading to a crash, right? What's her outfit like? That's probably what put him off when he was driving. He was like, my God, that woman's dressed in just two donuts over her nipples.

That would be such a bad nipple cover, because it would be the only bit that it didn't you tell. Didn't cover, wouldn't it? That's what makes it sexy. Oh, I see. You get the donut and you get the nipple access. I was reading that, did you guys come across this thing that in France, anything that is a sweet fried cake has the nickname of Nun's Fart? Oh, really? No, I think Nunn Fart is a specific thing.

That's a specific egg, I think. It's so light, it's so light and airy that it's like a nun's fart. It's like a proffiteral. Oh, that's not the story that I read. Oh, God. Okay, according to the donut princess, the Okay, now, because we know what a nun's fart is, now I'm thinking that maybe not everything the donut princess is saying it might be true. So, no, she definitely saw someone crash a car after eating a chocolate donut. She says that a long time ago, there was a nun called a nun called, Agnes. And Agnes and her fellow nuns were in the kitchen making some stuff. And one of them had some sweet dough on a spoon. And Agnes farted really loud. And it made the other nun laugh so much that she dropped the dough into the water with the oil in it, frying it. And what? This is the Smithsonian's leading donut ephemera expert who is putting this in her brilliant book. And yeah. And so that became

the byword for you is like it's a nun's fart because it inspired the dish. In which religious track did the nuns record this for posterity? One of us has got to write this moment down. That's very funny. I thought it was just because it was a lovely light cake, but now I realize it's because of Agnes. A specific incident. Agnes the nun. Why do cops like donuts?

That's the myth, isn't it? Yeah. I don't think it's a myth. They do buy donuts. Yeah, they do. Why? Because they've got, they have like a deal, do they get like 20% off every purchase? No.

If you're on a like a stakeout, might be the last day on the force. Yeah. But you're having to sit out there for 24 hours while the hoodlums are doing whatever they do inside. That's it. Can you hang it round your gun? Is it so? Excuse me. I was in the middle of a bit of whimsy here.

Oh, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, I got too excited. They're tired. So they need to drink coffee and what goes with coffee donuts? Well, not far off actually. Yeah, sort of irritatingly, considering it was whimsy. Basically, it was the sort of, the idea of it comes from the 50s.

It was when cops were often on the late night beat. And they were the only snacks available. They were the only shops open a lot of the time because they have a morning rush and they would have to stay up late baking away for the morning. So it was one of the only options available to them. I want James' whimsical the wire version. I want that to continue rather than that. Quite mundane, to be honest explanation for, yeah.

Sorry, yeah. Can you make something better up, like the donut princess? My guys, my dad's retired now. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Everyone, I'd like to let you know that this week we are sponsored by Babel. Yes, Babel, the best place you could possibly go to if you are learning a new language. Babel has 14 different languages that you can learn right now.

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Stop the podcast. Hey, Dan, can you tell me what the following TV shows and movies all have in common? Oppenheimer, Top Gun Maverick, June Part 2, The Wild Robot and Parasite. Top Gun, June, Oppenheimer. Are these Andy Murray's playlist of best movies he's ever seen? I think Parasite is a bit too good for that. No, these are all amazing movies that are not available to stream on Netflix in the UK,

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Beautifully illiterated. Is that the most alliterative fact we've ever had, do you think? I think so, yeah. If it had been to protect slugs, would you still put it forward as a fact? I would have still said the word scientist at the start, but the rest of the rest of the time. of it might have been different. Sonnets from the 17th century to save slugs. Anyway, sorry, porpoises. Yeah, so this is a team

from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and they looked at 700 ancient Chinese poems dating back nearly 2,000 years and then they've managed to work out the habitat that has been lost in the time, which is extensive. So is it like someone in the 5th century writes a poem saying,

oh, I saw a great porpoise over here and it reminded me of... Yeah, so we know where on the Yanksy River, so this is all on the Yanksy River in China, that we know where they will have lived, where they will have written, where they will have visited, and they write about porpoises

because porpoises are really big, they're really obvious, they're quite active on the surface of the water, especially when there's thunderstorms, they kind of jump around and try and catch fish, and so that's obviously quite a moment for someone to write poetry about. So, yeah, there's lots of examples of it in history,

and they've kind of mapped it out, and then they looked at actual science, And they said, yeah, it's the same as what actual science says. That's really cool. So it kind of fills in the gaps a little. Yeah. Brilliant. One of the poets was an emperor.

It was one of the, yeah. Was it a stoner emperor? Tianlong, he was sailing across the Yangtze River. And, yeah, he wrote, porpoises chased moonlight on silvered tides as dragons summoned storm clouds, loom in sight. And that was used as part of the, yeah. And of course, dragons have died out now as well, haven't they? So that is one of the problems because a lot of the things that people wrote were metaphorical. So you're not always, you have to kind of read the poem, understand the poem, and then work out, are they talking about a porpoise that they've seen, or are they talking about a long-lost love?

Yeah, particularly in China, you're right. All of this stuff is like, Chan Long himself, he had a concubine who was called the fragrant concubine, and she doesn't say much for the rest of the concubine. So he may, I'll go for the fragrant one again, actually. He was overseas and he smelt her and he was like, oh my God, I've never smelt anything like you before. Sorry. He was, oh, he didn't smell her from overseas. He was overseas, yeah. Was she also overseas, though? Yes, obviously. He was next to her, guys. He was next to her. I imagine him. He saw her picks up her smell and like a cartoon character floats to water.

Well, he fell in love with her and he was like, I must make her one of my concubies. And the deal was struck and she came back and she was bathed in camel's milk all the way as she was coming back to make sure that her fragrance remain there. Preserve to the fragrance. Yeah. But then we don't know if she was. It was real or not? That suggests that she smelled like camel's milk, doesn't it? Hang on, wait, what's the porpoise? And she was called, known as the fragrant porpoise woman.

No, no, no. I was saying that all these metaphors, dragons and so on, we used. Like, even in his life, we have a concubine who's written about, and we don't know if she was real or not. It's sort of mythic stuff. Yeah, maybe I've been misunderstanding poetry all my life so far, but sometimes when I read poems, I don't assume that it's all based in scientific historical facts. Well, it depends on the poet, doesn't it?

Philip Larkin, if he says, I found a hedgehog, you sort of trust that. These ones are finless porpoises, aren't they? Yes. Which are very cool. I believe the only freshwater porpoise in the world. Every other kind lives out at sea. And porpoises are just a family of toothed whales, small whales, basically. But finless really gave me pause, and I was really surprised to read that.

And it turns out they do, I was thinking they were just, how do they move? They're just like a sausage. They're just like a sort of gray sausage in the water. It turns out they just don't have a dorsal fin on their back. Yes. They do have flippers on the front. Interesting. Yes.

Oh, yes. I find it really interesting and very surprising, having read this, that dolphins and porpoises are not the two most closely related animals to each other. Oh, what? Isn't that weird? Well, you would think that who is most closely related to a porpoise, a dolphin. Absolutely. But actually, it's not that at all, is it?

No. A hedgehog. It's the other toothed whales, basically. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Looks wise, I feel quite bad for them because they're basically conflated with dolphins And essentially they're, whenever they're described, they're like fat, snub-nosed, spayed-toothed dolphins. That's why when you're like, what's the difference between the porpo's and a dolphin, it's like a dolphin has a beautiful, elegant long nose.

Porpoise has this squashed thing. I think they're charming. And they're stocky. They're stocky, though. Come on. They're broad, aren't they? They're all stocky. When do you see a thin dolphin?

Yuck. Have you guys seen there's a Wikipedia page, which is sort of known for its joke. So it's the list of cetations and it's got all the way. whales, dolphins, and porpoises listed down. Like a cetacean needed kind of thing. Exactly. So what they have is that they have the name of the animal, and then they'll say how many are in the wild,

and then they have a photo. And if they're missing a photo, they say cetacean needed. Oh, that's very good. It's very good. And the list, I think, used to have more, but it's down to one now. It's just got one cetacean needed, which is the Durrani Yagala's beaked whale.

And there are photos out there, but just no one's put one on Wikipedia. So if anyone out there wants to fill the final cetacean needed. And spoil the joke. Is that the reason they haven't put it up Because they want to keep the job That's what I was thinking But it's pretty depressing reading as well by the way

You know despite the really great gag Because it does show how many are left in the wild Of certain porpoises and dolphins and whales And it's really scary It's these ones are down to about 1,200 They've had a very very slight bounce back But the numbers are still so much lower than they were Even 30 years ago

It's because the Yanksi has a lot of sand mining Much of it illegal And obviously just completely Messes up their habitat you know Yeah Yeah. The Vakita is probably the worst, right? Yeah.

In a good way. Yeah. There was how many do we reckon about a dozen? In 2021, the estimate was 10 porpoises remaining in the wild. The problem is that there's a fish called the Totoaba, and their swim bladders are very popular in Chinese medicine. They're known as aquatic cocaine. They go for like $50,000 per bladder. It's mental.

It's insane. Is that the Vakita? No, that's a Totoabat. So people fish for that fish, and then they end up damaging the Vakita. The fishing nets just happened. They're the same size, basically. But the Vakitas live off Mexico. Yeah.

But that's crazy. The demand for something in China is messing up species. The Chinese ones, they used to have similar fish in China, but they died out, and so they go to the Mexican ones instead. Chinese beds and does have quite a lot to answer for, doesn't it? When you read about extinctions of a lot of animals. I've got to say, though, the prices, they are eye-watering. It's mad.

I kind of see where the poachers are coming from, kind of curious. Oh, I'd do it. I'd kill the last eight in a heart beat. That's going to get me a million dollars. It's mental how expensive they are for a swim bladder. That's crazy. And also, maybe they're all experts,

but I wouldn't be able to tell Totoaba swim bladder from a cod swim bladder. No, you're right. There's in fact, do you know what, guys? There's money to be made here in faking swimbladders and we'll protect the Vakita in the same time. Oh, great. All right.

Well, head to shop at no such thing as fish.com. Oh my god Can we talk about the harbour porpoise Please Because that one's not doing so badly In endangerment terms Relatively And they are amazing

So this is a thing Specifically about their mating And if you want to see a harbour porpoise mate There's one place in the world to go And it's the Golden Gate Bridge Because they hang out In the sort of narrow channels of water Under that very romantic

When you say one place Is this like the Sargasso Sea for eels All harbour porpoises from all around the world, congregate under the Golden Gate Bridge. No, no, no. It's just a good place because you have a great vantage point through the slats like a pervert basically. And it's called The Funnel of Love is where these channels are that they mate.

Cool. Did you guys read about the mating process? No. It's crazy. It takes one second, okay? So basically, the female will surface for air. That's her big mistake. She very briefly swims along the surface,

at which point a nearby male will just prang himself at her like a torpedo approaching 100% of the time from the left-hand side. That's important. The female has about half a second to assess whether she wants to raise this male's offspring and either twist towards him or away from him, basically. So if it goes wrong, he just goes, b'oying, bounces off, like corkscrews out of the water, it goes off. And if it goes right, then there's a very, very, very quick coupling and then, you know, for one second, and then, you know, she might well be pregnant.

but it's really interesting is this evolutionary race going on. The male's penis is very asymmetrical and it might be because males have worked out the optimal angle to approach from to give themselves a chance and the female's reproductive tract is very complicated potentially because the female's trying to

in evolutionary terms have a bit more control over this procedure and scientists have worked all this out. Males have approached from that side to get around the vaginal folding. So you could tell if you were female and you turned around you'd know that this person's interested in you because of the angle they're coming out. Well, he's swimming towards you

with a penis of a third the length of his body very, very fast. Like, the signals are not mixed. This is not a rub in thicky moment. And their testes go massive. They've got big testicles in breeding season. The total body mass can go in the testes can be represented

as 4 to 6% of their body weight. It would be 3 kilos for you, Deb. Yes. Nice. Because 4 to 6% doesn't sound much, but then 3 kilos would be a, that how much as that, like at least twice as much. Well, I'd have to contact my tailor. And say, yeah, bad news, though, for harbour purposes in Britain, we have some pollutants

called PCBs, polychlorinated by phenols, and they were used in, like, old light bulbs and hydraulic fluids and stuff like that, but they're used for many, many years. They're banned now, but they're still in the environment, and if a porpoise has too much of that, then their testes will shrink. Oh, no. Another thing about harbour porpoises, that I think this might explain why they can only make for one second, is because they have to be eating all the time.

Oh, really? So they live in cold water, which requires lots and lots of energy, and they're quite small. And so they can only eat really small fish. And so they need just hundreds of them. And there's a study that found that they can hunt up to 550 fish per hour. Oh, gosh.

And they have a 90% hunting success rate as well, which I think is up there with Dragon Falls. flies, which I think we've said are the most successful hunters. But yeah, if you're eating 500 fish an hour, you just don't really have time to do anything else at all. And you're saying they have to be eating just to maintain their body weight? Yes, I think they would lose 10% of their body weight a day if they didn't eat. So they die very quickly.

They disappear. Gosh. I know. What an easy diet, though. Imagine if you were told you were going to lose 10% of your body weight a day if you didn't eat. A piece of peace. The Zmpic of the sea that they've got in them. I can still imagine it getting to about 5pm and me seeing that keyline pie at the bridge and thinking, ah, I'll start tomorrow.

Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is my fact. My fact this week is, in Canada, tractor tires are filled up with vegetable juice. This is so interesting, it's a ballast thing. So you've got tractors with the center of gravity's way off and you could tip over. That's very, very dangerous. So you need to counter that weight. Now, so instead of putting air into these giant back tires, beet juice is something that is used a lot. And for various reasons, one is that in Canada gets very cold. If you put water in there, that could freeze. That's really bad for the whole tractor in its own right.

So they use this because it can get really cold and not freeze. And you've got a yet you put a straw in. Nice little drink. There you go. On a cold day. I just want to say as well, like ballast is not just used to stop you tip it. is to give you grip. So let's say it's a really muddy day

or even an icy day and you want to get your tractor to go down a muddy field, then you need the weight in your tires to help you get grip. Yeah. Ethylene glycol is used as well, but the problem is that is toxic.

So if it leaks out of the tire, animals around who are eating it can die so they don't like to use that. And then windshield washer fluid is used. That's very good as well. Yeah, that's very good as well. I didn't think you got windshield water fluid in that quantity.

Well, you don't really get juice in that quantity either, so you've got to go to specialist places to get it. That's a very good point. I think windscreen fluid is also flammable. Oh, cool. I mean, not cool, but, you know. So that's another reason why you might want to go for the beet juice. Oh, dangerous. There we go.

I've retaken that. We should say, just a little shout out to the commercial name for this beet juice, which is Rimgard. Yes. The heaviest, the heaviest non-corrosive tire ballast on the market. And I went to their website, and the two options are, find a dealer of rimguard or become a dealer. I was incredibly tempted to click option two. Anyway, would anyone like to buy,

if any listeners would like to buy 300,000 gallons of rim guard, please contact me. I wonder why you came in such a big overcoat today. You want a bit of rim guard, mate. Guard your rims, guv' math. Anyway, yeah, tractors. Tractors. Invented, I think, in Britain.

Oh, couldn't agree more Britain, Britain, Britain, Britain All right Probably the first version of them Was you would get two traction engines Two big steam engines on either side of your field And you put a big rope between the two of them And then you would attach something to the rope

Like a ploughing machine And you would pull it from one side of the field to the other And that was before we had any kind of like tractors Like we know them today I think that's a good shout Yeah, traction engines Yeah Yeah. There's a real mystery about the tractor, which is why it took so long to catch on.

And it comes up a lot in conversations about, like, what we can expect from... With Andy. So it's often using chats about how long we should expect driverless cars to catch on, why is an AI moving as fast as we think it is. You know, a new technology comes along. Everyone says, as they did in the 1910s, when tractors came along basically like to mechanise farming, Everyone said, well, this is going to revolutionise farming immediately and completely replace horses. And incredibly, by 1942 in Britain, horses still outnumbered tractors by 30 to 1 on British farms.

It took until the late 1950s for tractors to overtake horses. So that's like half a century. And, yeah, it's an example of slow diffusion where everyone said this is it, end of horses. And actually, horses are just really good because they're flexible and they don't use up fuel. They don't use fuel There was a depression So people didn't really have the money To make the big tractor investments at the time

But they did have the money to employ some bloke To look after the horses Because labour was cheap They weren't that good at first Like they didn't have pneumatic tyres So they just sank in the mud quite a lot Right Yes the tyres were solid rubber

Or solid metal in some cases They were not very useful This is a really interesting thing About the change it made So in 1910 the USA had 25 million horses and mules On its farms By 1960 there were 3 million

left, so that is a huge decline and they'd been replaced by 5 million tractors because one tractor can do the work of lots of horses, basically. Well, in 1963 million, I find it still really surprising. That's that many. That's America's big, isn't it? But in 1910, this is the other thing that tractors changed.

One in three Americans worked on a farm. Wow. One in three. By 2010, a century later, it was 2% of the workforce works on the farm. 1910. That's wild. It is. It's a massive shift over the last hundred years. And the same will be true in lots of other countries, obviously, you know. I'm surprised it's one in 50 now. Yeah. When you think how big

cities are and how much population lives in cities. Yeah, get more tractors, lads. Why still hand-pulling these plows? Well, that might be including people who work on farm shops and things, I don't know. Yeah, people who work in the whole foods probably can't say. No doubt. That's technically agriculture, yeah. You've got the Amish, of course, who don't love using tractors, so they're doing a lot of it, you know, that probably takes quite a lot of labour. Yeah. But I I was looking into the Amish's use of tractors because, you know, you picture an Amish horse and cart, right? And you picture a horse drawn plow.

So these are the people who don't like to use any technology. Yes. In Pennsylvania? Yeah. Okay. So I... Big shout out to our Amish listeners, we should say. Yeah.

I'm pro this. So they don't use tractors. Did they use podcasts? I think there's quite a lot of variety within the Amish community. And I think if you're at the quite technological end, you might be listened to a podcast right now. Oh, well, write in if you're Amish and you listen and tell us how. please do

write in with your quill just get us on TikTok guys but they don't use tractors just because they think it's a slippery slope to cars basically well the ballast means

it's not a slippery slope maybe they haven't discovered the vegetable oil in which case so there's lots of Amish websites that say you'll have a tractor on your farm and it'll run a little errand

it'll carry hay bales around it will fill up silo but don't use it in the fields because then you'll get a taste for how good they are at driving and the next thing is you'll be on the roads and actually a lot of Amish people use the old tractors with just the metal tyres because they really damage roads so that's to remove the temptation so if you've just got metal what are they called those

spikes that you have for proper traction on old metal tires winter tires lugs lugs then you you know you can't get onto a road because you're ruin it so you're stuck in your field right anyway I thought you know that's certainly how I got into driving I started in a tractor And now I'm knee-deep in Mazarathis. It's a nightmare. Well, that's the original Lamborghini was a tractor. Right. Yeah.

So Ferruchio Lamborghini founded his tractor company way before he founded it as a car company. See, slippery slope. They still make them, though, because on Clarkson's farm, he has a Lamborghini tractor. Yeah. And he got really rich after selling a lot of them. And so he started buying nice, expensive cars. And he bought a Ferrari. And he was really annoyed with how the clutch worked in one of the ones.

of his Ferraris. And he was also really annoyed that when he pointed it out, the sales team were just really bad with him. So you got into an argument with Enzo Ferrari and said, you need to make this better. And he said, go away. And so he went, I will. And I will invent my own car, which is a better version of your car. So the Lamborghini was built to spite the Ferrari. That's a proper rivalry. But it started with tractors. I read a guy, there's a book called Lamborghini Supercar Supreme, which was written by like a big historian of this time. And they think, even though Lamborghini said that this is what happened and even Ferrari said this is what happened

they reckon it probably didn't happen and it was all marketing stuff that that's why kill the joy of the story I know sorry we can accept that these two people might have elaborated on this story but they've said it gone and then they attached donuts to the exhaust pipe Lamborghini a lot of these people actually started

because they were into car racing and Lamborghini was into car racing for a very short amount of time he entered one of his early cars into the 1947 Milamiglia road event and two thirds of the way through the race he crashed into a cafe and never raced again and apparently he crashed his car into the cafe

and the cafe owner was like discombobulated and he said I'll have a glass of wine please brilliant to toast the end of my racing career and they didn't give him a glass of wine did they well it's a cafe it depends what time of day it was and what their licence is Oh, if it's in Italy.

You think even if someone's crashed their sort of tractor race car through the wall of your cafe, you're serving them wine? I think I would do that because then I'd be to the police. Look, he's been drinking. But I think all of these are kind of slightly exaggerated stories. They're all worthy of the donut princess herself. Can I talk about my tractor hero? We've all got one.

Robert William Thompson. He was a Scottish engineer. He made the first mechanical road haulage vehicle. It was a steam traction engine. So he invented the pneumatic tire in the 1840s, really before there were decent roads for a pneumatic tire, also before there were cars, and in fact, really before there were bikes. So he had invented something that the world wasn't yet ready for. Running around with the steering wheel.

Anything I can do with this? He's going to change the world. And he invented it, but there was a lack of demand, as I've said, and the rubber was really expensive. So he couldn't make it commercial. And so he went off and invented the self-filling fountain pen instead. It was such a great inventor and engineer and he had invented these tires and he tried them in Regents Park

there was a big trial of two carriages next to each other one with pneumatic tires, one without and the pneumatic tire one was much nicer to ride in and much more smooth and comfortable but yeah there just wasn't the demand if you like let's say you know how to make cars

which I certainly don't know how to do that but a lot of people do and you think okay well I've also made a time travel machine so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to the time before cars and I'm going to make the first car and I'm going to be, you know, my kids will be billionaires. You can't go back too far, can you? You have to go back to the time just before the first one was made

because if you do go back too far, they don't have roads. You're right. The conditions need to be in place. Otherwise you don't have to invent the road and you don't know how to invent the road. As luck would have it, you brought a fountain pen with you. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast.

Everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Calm. You know what, Dan, we've been doing a few live shows in the last couple of weeks. And what that means to me is we get home kind of late. And honestly, my sleep schedule has been absolutely all over the place. But that is why Calm has been really good for me. Totally agree. Calm is the perfect app that allows for you to get yourself either through guided meditations, through sleep stories, through sleep meditations, through expert-led talk.

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That's amazing value. Amazing value. So get yourself the Calm app. And as James says, you can do that by going to calm.com. That's C-A-L-M dot com slash fish for 40% off unlimited access to the entire library. Do it now. Okay. on with the podcast on with the show

okay it is time for our final fact of the show that is andy my fact is that if civilization comes to an end one of the best places to be is a cafe in fort mason san francisco is that so you've got a good view of the pauper shagging you've got to have to occupy yourself in the after times that's going to be one of the few things that is entertaining um no this is uh this is

quite a cool thing. It's a library that's called the Manual for Civilization and it's a collection of three and a half thousand books basically which contain the operating instructions for Earth, how you would start civilization again from scratch if you had to and it's run by this organisation called the Long Now

who are they're quite sort of eccentric but they say we need to be focusing on the next 10,000 years. You know we've got problems which are immediate but actually we've got to preserve civilization. Yeah yeah I'm not going to do my recycling because what's going to happen in 10,000 years.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it was a phrase that was coined, I think, unknowingly by Brian Eno, the musician. He was talking with Stuart Brand and a few other guys who were the founders of Belong Now. And they were saying all the stuff about, remember how back in the day,

people used to talk about the year 2000 and all the like, in the year two. And we don't do that. We don't talk about the year 3000 in the way that they would talk about. I think not much has changed, but we live underwater. I think philosophers have talked about this for years. That's a huge. change as well.

The infrastructural changes. How do you mean not much has changed? How did trains work? Underwater. What are you saying? Okay, Buster's been talking about it, but not many other people. But yeah, so like in the Long Now Foundation, for example, we're not living in the year 2025. We're living in the year O. 2025.

Which I really like, it's quite teenage to do. They were founded in O'1996. I mean, everything that I read about these guys, it does sound like teenagers who have just read a book for the first time going, oh, but dude, what about this? Well, Stuart Brand, the founder, he's part of that old counterculture America. He was part of like, you know, LSD and all that. He had these big hippie ideas of changing the world. And so he's, yeah, those little things, I think they were a bit sort of hippie-ish in their own ears.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a very good thing to be focusing on. Obviously, and it's largely what responsible people who look at the future do focus on. But what I quite like is that this cafe, which has the big library in it, doesn't it? So the cafe is called The Interval. And it was founded with such great ideals. And it reminded me a little bit, and I say this with complete fondness, of QI actually set up its own bar, many years ago. And I'm sure many other people have done this thought, I'm going to set up a cafe.

But the idea is that everyone's going to have amazing conversations. So the idea of this cafe is everyone will be discussing topics relating to long-term thinking, how to save the world in 10,000 years. and you go to the trip advice reviews and the only thing they say is God, the cocktails are good and that was true of the QI Club as well yeah

cocktails are amazing I want to just say on the record that I disagree I think we should be looking at the problems that are immediate and deal with those and I don't think we should be saying yeah we don't need to save the purposes because we need to worry about what we're doing in 10,000 years it's just a lot easier to kick it down the road

I think to be fair that is what they're about I don't think that, I don't think they're saying, let's forget about it. They're looking to extend ourselves to 10,000 years. You don't think so? Well, it's hard to allocate your resources. Like, the stuff that the world is losing now, like biodiversity and things like that, I think is a really, really immediate and pressing concern. And then, you know, you have to preserve it for a long time.

But sometimes, like, you have to put out the fire that's burning now rather than say, hey, maybe there's fire will spread, man. No, sorry, that's sometimes. No, I'm just saying that Stuart Brand, he created the whole earth catalogue. What is the whole earth catalogue? It was an idea of going, where are we now? What do we need to look at? How do we save things?

It was a big collaboration project. Well, explain this, Dan. Why are they building a clock in a Texas mountain which will function for the next 10,000 years and which you won't be able to visit? Well, you mean the one that was conceived by a millionaire funded by the world's richest man and built in his private space pot inside his mountain?

That's right. That does sound like it'll help us in the long term. Okay, guys, when you put it like that, Now I sound like a horror. No, no, no. Jeff Bezos has funded it. It's simply called The Clock. That's no why I call him. Yeah, and Brian Eno's involved in that too.

Yeah, he's a founding member. I think it like ticks once a year or something, does it? I remember reading about it. Like, as in, instead of ticking once a second, it ticks once a year. And the cuckoo comes out once every millennium or something. I think that was the original thing. But for some reason, they changed it. and it plays a tone every thousand years instead of the cookie.

But originally they were going to go for the cooking. Probably because they thought, well, the cuckoo will have died out by then and we don't give a fuck about that. They're not about saving stuff now. They are about whatever's in charge in 10,000 years. Save that. It's more about the idea it is to change your manner of thinking, not think about the modern day just about what's happening today and tomorrow,

but to think in the long term, that's their idea. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like, you know, go on a diet today and next week, you'll feel better rather than eat chocolate today? Well, they would be more like, well, maybe I should buy some really, really big clothes because I'm not going to have a diet for a while, but I know that in 20 years' time I'm going

to be morbidly obese. That's actually really good. You should start marketing big clothes. This library has 3,500 books, as mentioned. I found a list of some of the books that are in there, because they are interesting. What are other books that are rebuilding? Please tell me the donut princess's book. There's dirt. the erosion of civilizations. There's six Ian M. Bank novels.

They have quite a lot of sci-fi, as you might expect, from some sci-fi thinkers. But I was talking to a scientist the other day who said that a lot of scientific ideas are inspired by reading nothing but science fiction. So they are valuable things, I think. Completely. But I think they haven't chosen all the books yet. As of the year, oh, 2014, they only had about 1,400 nominations for their library. And of those 200 were sci-fi. And I just think if you need a book on how to build a water wheel,

and you've accidentally got all five Dune novels in your... Well, June is in there. I know, of course it's in there. They will be useful for kindling. That's true. I wonder if they have The Buck. Have you guys heard of The Buck? What's that?

This was the third most successful Kickstarter campaign of all time. It's a book that I own as well. I have one. It's 2.3 kilograms, so almost as heavy as Dan's testicles, if he was a porpoise and it was written by a group of escape room designers and the idea is this one book will help you restart civilization if you have it so on the first page it tells you how to make string and how to start fire and how to make wheels and then it goes all the way to the last pages which tells you how to play football and how to make sex toys right and stuff like that

well ironically my testicles are the other thing you need to restart civilization so that's true that book and my balls are the uh they're sex toy they're that they came up with was a five foot tall fountain and you pour water into it. And as the water goes down, it creates a vacuum that makes a sucking action on a handy attachment that you can attach to yourself. Do you need the fountain? I mean, is that the best way of creating that suction? Well, the technology you've got after reading the book.

It's used, well, to be honest, they do tell you how to make electricity and stuff in the bud. So I'm not sure why, because this is right at the end, they do this. But yeah, they probably had a few pages left and they thought, well, we've got to fill up the book somehow so we may as well it's a great book though it does sound really interesting I know that it's not dealing

with the immediate problems facing the world I do find it quite interesting it is interesting it's fun to think about in you know 10,000 years I mean I don't know if you guys listen to the 80,000 hours podcast but listen to the first hour

they're always talking about the deep future and what we do about it and there was one I listened to recently where they interviewed Paul Christiano who's a AI researcher who thinks about you know, how should we leave a message to, let's say, lizard people, if they're the only ones who have survived in 20,000 years? Sweetly, the first thing that happened in the interview was he said,

let's say lizards are what have survived. How can we leave a message for them once they've evolved to say, don't do this, do that? And Rob Wiblin, who's the host, said, I must interrupt now, because apparently there's some insane conspiracy theory that I've never really heard about, about lizard people running the world.

And I just want to pick it. And I was like, oh. They're already here, mate, Once you're talking about. Get it with it. Is it like King Charles? I did feel like you guys are so well informed, but you don't know the right stuff. You don't know about the crazy lizard conspiracy theories.

Many of the donut royal family are actually lizards themselves. But anyway, his solution, which I quite liked, was you need to draw attention to a spot in Earth where we can leave a message saying don't create nuclear weapons or whatever it is we want to say. And Paul Craciano's suggestion was there's this massive magnetic anomaly in Russia. So if we're talking tens of thousands of years, is in the future. Anything that you carve on a rock or a big structure you make will have descended into the earth or tectonic plates will have moved. But magnetism doesn't really change. And there's this amazing thing called the Kursk anomaly, I think it's called. And it's

in Russia. And it's, if you go there, your compass goes totally mad. The magnetism is insane. And it's riddled with iron deposits. And he was like, it's really easy to find quite early on in civilization once you've worked out magnetism. Go there. And then we can encode loads of just draw loads of maps there of leaving that message. Have we checked that magnetic anomaly for messages from previous civilizations? What a good point. We actually have. I've got a book called Ancient Aliens.

I think it's kind of interesting. Like, let's say humans die out, as is probably likely over a long period, right? But then some other animals don't die out. Then what will the next big species be? Like, the lizards, obviously, they've had their go with dinosaurs, really, arguably, right? Is it a turns-based system? You've had a lizard? So we've had a mammal?

Yeah, yeah. So one idea is octopuses. Okay, I would happily give it to them. Yeah, so like, let's say there's a big problem on earth, on land-based earth that we've probably caused. Then maybe at the bottom of the sea, they'll be okay. And the idea is that they would probably go straight to renewable energy because they can't really burn coffee. down there because they're underwater, but what they do have is tidal power and hydrothermal, so heat coming from the bottom of the ocean.

Great. So they will be able to go straight in at the, you know, the Tesla stage. That's really, that's quite a comforting thought, actually. Woke octopuses. Oh, you'll be one of the right-wing octopus journalists. Like, oh, what's the wrong is going off out of cow? That's the missing lyric from the busted song, isn't it? Not much has changed, except we are now ruled by our...

Octopus overlords. You've got to cut a verse, lads. This is really an important verse. No, cut it. It doesn't play well with the 18 to 24 market. Cut the octopus verse. Okay, let's say we're going to the stars then. Okay.

You need a crew omission which takes dozens of generations, right? How many people do you need on your spaceship? Feel like I kind of want to go on my own. Okay. I'm not sure I could last the journey. That's the octopus mindset. You're going to love the antisocial octopus. age. Talking to other people?

Well, yeah, for like tens of thousands of years. Well, you'll die at some point, which is that's the consolation. Probably quite early. Given what my crewmates will think. James, can you just pop in the airlock and again, I've dropped a contact lens. I've just funny how we find it.

No, so basically the mission lasts many generations. Sorry, that's the thing I missed out. I see. It's going to take centuries and centuries and centuries to get to the planet that we've picked as our new home. So is the question, Andy, sorry to interrupt. Is the question, how many people do we need so that we don't die out from imbreeding? Bingo. Right. Bingo. Yeah. Okay.

Like four? I mean, if you have a child with your cousin, it's basically fine. Yes, they will have children at some point, though, won't they, Anna? You've not thought this through. Exactly. That's like, that's okay for one generation. Yeah. And then it gets progressively worse. Yes. The ancient Egyptians will tell you.

You've got to go for 6,000 years. See, I'm a short-term thinker. I've got to get along now. You're not welcome. I'm going to go around a hundred. Two. Just me and my sister. There's going to be incest at some point. You might as well get it over with that.

Let's nip it in the bud. One of you is right and it's obviously James. This is the easiest game show ever when you're up against two idiots. Send me and dance. somewhere else they're going to sleep. Make sure we're not on the ship. I don't think we're sending you to one of the good planets.

Ander and Dan's weird incest mission, you're not going to get a plum posting. Okay, that's it. That's 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 all be found online. I'm on at Shreiberland. on Instagram, James. I'm on TikTok, No such thing as James Harkin. Andy, I'm on Instagram at Andrew Hunter M. And if you want to get to us

as a group, Anna. You can go to Instagram at No Such Thing as a Fish, Twitter at No Such Thing or email podcast at QI.com. Yeah, or you can go to our website. No Such Thing as a Fish.com. All of our previous episodes

are up there. There's a link to some live shows that we're doing later this year. Otherwise, just come back next week because we will be back here with another episode. We'll see you all then. Goodbye.

You know what I'm going to be.