No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As A Toilet Break For A Tuna

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

Live from the Royal Institution, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss big fish, big pencils and a big coincidence. Missed out on this live show? Get in-person or streaming tickets for the London Podcast Festival here: nosuchthingasafish.com/liveJoin Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan RupareliaGet NordVPN two-year plan + four months extra ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fish It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee.Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hi everyone, welcome to this week's episode of No Such Things a Fish. Before you fast forward, we have news of some live shows coming up, which you can go to live in London, or you can stream. But first of all, let me tell you about today's show, which we recorded live at the Royal Institution in London. It is one of the most venerable places in the entire United Kingdom. It's where multiple elements were discovered. It's where some of the great scientists in history have spoken. And then they let us four dorks to. turn up. I really hope you enjoy this show. It was the first of four that we did. They will go out over the next four weeks. There were brilliant audiences every night. I'm sure you will enjoy listening to them as much as we enjoyed recording them. And if you would like to come to a live recording, then guess what? We are doing a couple more in September. On Saturday, the 12th of September, we are returning to the London Podcast Festival at King's Place, which is near to Kingscross station in North London and at 7pm we'll be doing a live recording of the main episode. There are not many tickets left for that. So if you want to come to that, then get in there

quick. But even more excitingly, I think, is that at 4.30pm we'll be doing our first ever live, drop us a line. It is our audience feedback show. It is normally only available for people who are members on Patreon, but you could be there. If you want to ask your question or send as an extremely pedantic email. You can be there in person. If you bought tickets to the show already or if you buy tickets, then email podcast.cuhi.com

and let us know that you're going to be there. Let us know what your question is, or your piece of pedantry. Let us know your bonus bream. Let us know your thanks but no thanks, and we might well read them out. Both of these Kings Play shows will be live streamed and available on catch-up,

and you can get a discount if you buy tickets to both shows, either in-house or on live-stream. So go to New York. no such things of fish.com slash live to get tickets for that. And in the meantime, please enjoy this week's episode of No Such Things of Fish recorded live at the Royal Institution. Okay, on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to live

from the Royal Institution in London. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunta-Murie, and Jane Tarkin. And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in a particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Anna.

My fact this week is that the building we are in contains the former world's largest pencil. There's a photo of it behind us, and that's a big pencil. Yeah, but we're burying the lead here, because that is an even bigger ruler than the world's largest pencil. No, Andy, we're burying the lead. There we go. There you are.

Oh, come on. There's been other 59 minutes of this, guys. Yes, that is, in fact, in this photo, carrying that pencil is the man who made it famous. Famous being a stretch. But this was in 1968, it had its debut. And as you probably know, this room is famous for very excellent, interesting lectures before we got here. And someone who gave a lecture was a physicist called Philip Morrison in 1968.

And he opened his lecture with a huge penny on the floor. And he said, OK, who's going to come up and measure this penny? And he pulled out this huge ruler, which people in the room can see. a 12 foot long ruler to measure it with. And then he said, okay, and let's write down how big this penny is. And for no particular reason, he produced an enormous pencil.

Right. To write that down. I think there was some reason behind it, right? Because he was like doing a lecture about things that are very, very big or very, very small. So he's imagining what it would be like if he was a Lilliputian.

The Gulliver's travels. Yeah. That's true. They were called the Gulliver's lectures. Yeah, it did feel like you've made a point with the ruler, and now you could just do it with a normal pencil. But he went to,

to the trouble and that's what we love. It was about how crucial sizes in science. So things act really differently. If they're really, really, really big, like, you know, universe scale compared to really, really, really tiny. And he got some little children to come up from the audience to operate it. And it was a great lecture. I watched it.

It was excellent. I really like how things were different back in the day, as I say, audience of 10, 11-year-olds. One quote from it is, of course, you know very well that the theories of Euclid simply do not supply in the non-Euclidean geometry of a sphere. Right. The 10-year-olds nodding along. I think they cover that in K-pop demon hunters. So how big?

Oh, okay. How big is this pencil? It's hard to picture, isn't it? So it's like, so the ruler was 12 foot. So I guess the pencil's about nine or ten feet. It's hard to imagine. How big of these desks? Yeah, this must be four or five.

Do we have anything in the building that's roughly the size? Do we think of the pencil? Oh. Oh! For listeners at home, Dan has just come in holding, do you say nine foot long? I think it's shorter because how's... Can you pop it on the ground? You're about six foot, right? Pop it on the ground.

I am six foot one. It's been sharpened. It's been sharpened. I've literally just been told that it was taller, but they have used it and it's been sharpened. So it's... Wonderful. It keeps getting shorter. Is it lead? Does it work?

It is. This is a real pencil. You can see that it actually says HB on it. Yep. This guy was really interesting. Philip Morrison, he had been at Los Alamos for the nuclear testing. And he transported the core of the test device, so the nuclear core, to the test site on the backseat of a Dodge Sedan. So good.

Then he was one of the team, and he was the head of the team that loaded the atomic bombs onto the aircraft before it went to Japan. Really? And then he became like a real anti-war person and a real pacifist after that. Careers are so long and varied, aren't they? As then if you, like, if while he was... You can do this podcast for 15 years. I know, I know, I know. But if while he was supervising the team

that were loading the nuclear bombs onto the planes, you could have said to him, look, in just over 20 years' time, you're going to be messing around with a giant pencil that would have reassured him a bit, maybe? Would it? Or would he think, has the bomb changed us so much that we are a tiny race of humans, no taller than a coin.

Yeah, this is, this was part of a lecture, which is one of the great things that this institution has been doing for many, many years. I was being told beforehand, no matter who was coming in, no matter how famous they were, there was no introduction, they would just walk onto stage, they would not say anything to the crowd, they would not say thank you for coming. They wouldn't do any of the stuff we did basically at the beginning of this show because the information was the star. So when we were waiting prior to this show coming in, we were sat in a room at the back,

and that was the room that for many, many years, over 100 years, scientists would be locked in for 10 minutes before their lecture started so that they couldn't run away from doing the lecture. And this was based off a story of a scientist called Wigstone who supposedly got cold feet and he ran away and Michael Faraday had to come at the last second and do his speech on behalf. Now, the records are so amazing here. We know that didn't happen. It never happened. It was all the myth. They can see that he was ill.

He wasn't coming in. Faraday was ready to do it. but they love the idea of it so much that they did then just start locking scientists in the room for 10 minutes prior to the lecture and they've been doing that ever since. A lot of them are still there, by the way. Michael Faraday?

He was incredibly popular because it was the early days when he was doing it. Yeah, 19 series of lectures and his most famous one, I think he delivered it several years maybe was called The Chemical History of a Candle. And it's one of those wonderful things because it sounds wonderful. It's one of the most successful science books ever.

His basic point was so much of what we know about science can be encapsulated in a candle, whether that's what the wick is made of, what the sort of what the air around it does, the sort of flow of air when it's burning, the science of combustion, all of these things come together in the form of a candle. It was written as a book which I think might be still in print today, nearly 200 years later on. And he was dead against writing it as a book because he said the point about science to communicate it to people is it has to be in a live environment. Lectures are an important way of properly communicating science to people.

And then in the 1850s, there was a massive wave of seances which swept across London. And he thought, okay, maybe not enough people know any science. And so he thought, right, okay, I will do it as a book now because it can get the word out a bit more. Yeah, yeah. And I got the book out of the library today. Did you? Did you? Yeah, yeah.

They still have his notes here, don't they, I think? And the papers are singed. and no one knows really how they got singed, I think, but he used a lot of fire in his experiments. He would get sauces and fill them with brandy and then set fire to them, so we think that's probably what happened. But he was allowed alcohol on stage.

We're not allowed alcohol on stage. So once again, it's one rule for Michael Faraday and one rule for the rest of us. Yeah. Would we have been allowed alcohol if we could also bring a live flame on stage, I wonder. Yeah, exactly. It was in 1825 that the first Christmas lecture happened.

And actually that one was quite boring, and it was a series of 22 lectures. And Faraday quickly stepped in and said, you know what, let's go six lectures. And let's make it all about demonstrating science. So they all had to have big set pieces in them. So John Tyndall, who took over from Faraday, and by the way, if you're Googling him, he is not the chairman of the National Front in the 1970s. Never lectured here, as far as I know. John Tyndall, the physicist, 19th century.

In 1867, he put solid carbonic acid. in his mouth, and then he breathed out over a candle while this was in his mouth, and the candle turned blue, and then it went out because the carbonic acid made his breath so chilled. Wow. And he said at the time that if I'd inhaled with that in my mouth, I would have died. That's the kind of tension people were bringing to the lectures. If he coughed or sneaked because it's such a dangerous substance.

Well, how about this one? 1938, so a bit more recent, the Christmas lectures, had a boy, maybe about 10 or a 11 years old, same as the boys who had the massive pencil. A boy coated his hands in water, and then the scientist delivering the lecturers put his hand in a, put the boy's hand in a stream of molten lead. And that, and he was fine, but that's an example of the lighten frost effect where, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, uh, what I'm saying? It's like if you get a, if you get a really hot pan and you pour water on it, it kind of

bounces around. Yeah, the water evaporates on contact and it makes this tiny, tiny protective layer between you in the Molden hot lead. But he was fine. And maybe, you know... I think that's amazing because that was in 1938, right? And that kid's parents

has let him come to this lecture when the year before, Julian Huxley, who was their secretary of the London Zoological Society, had brought a live lion into the... Wonderful.

He'd brought a lion cub, some snakes, crocodiles, a red kite. And then before even the animals came out, he'd shown a short film of a load of baby seals being clubbed,

in the Arctic. And we have the video now. And there are photos of this as well of the kids stroking the lion as they were doing it. And it turns out, I didn't know this, they used to do that in London Zoo. If you went to London Zoo in the 1930s, you could go

to what they call Pets Corner and just stroke a lion. Really? That's amazing. They used to be an assistant called Bill Coates who would always join and he would always do the demonstrations. I mean, it might be possible. Charlotte, is it possible that he actually, oh, Charlotte's still here,

did he design the pencil? He might have designed the pencil. He's that kind of guy. Possibly. And one thing that happened was there was a scientist called William Bragg who had him swallow a pressure-sensitive capsule with a radio transmitter on it, and he invited kids to come up on stage to show that if you punched him in the stomach,

a local speaker would go, and so kids, incredible. Kids came up mid-lature, just pounding him in the stomach while the same was, wah-bler. And, yeah. And Dan has swallowed a radio transmitter. And it's now going to step into the middle. Can I say one thing on the subject of good demonstrations in lectures and how important they are? This isn't a lecture that took place at the R.I., but it was by someone called Giles Brindley.

He was a British urologist, and he found that injecting certain agents into your, and I can't believe I'm about to use these words in this room, but into your penis, made you have an erection. And this was early on in the 1960s when people didn't really know about how to do that. So it was sort of pre-Viagro. They knew how to have erection, sorry. They didn't know how to conjure them out of thin air, as it were.

And sorry, this is not one of the children's Christmas lectures. Anyway, he was giving a lecture about how he'd found this substance that could create an erection, which is very useful in urology, and he decided to demonstrate. So he showed a bunch of slides of his own member after he'd taken it. And then he said to this lecture, this audience of academics who were all in their suits, very dry. It happened in Las Vegas at the Eurodynamic society. And he said, look, that's not enough. I could have stimulated myself for these pictures.

So I'd better show you. I took some of this before I came on stage today. Wow. And he stepped out in front of the podium and he pulled his trousers tightly around himself. And, you know, he said, anyway. And then he said, look, but that's not enough. That's not enough. And then he pulled down his trousers in front of the entire audience of.

very dry academics who were wondering what the hell was happening in their lives. And he dropped his pants and he revealed his member. And then as his final piesta resistance, he said, ah, but we need someone to test the tumessence at which point the academics' wives in the audience started screaming and he had to quickly wrap up the lecture prematurely and leave the room. The lecture was called what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, isn't there? Can I take us away from this, please, and talk about enormous pencils. Me. Oh, yeah.

So we said that this was a former world's largest pencil, right? Because the record has since been beaten a few times. And the current largest pencil measures 23.23 meters and weighs 98.43 tons. And it was made by a friend of the podcast, Ashreta Furman. Oh. Who is basically, he spends his whole life trying to break as many world records as possible. like hopping backwards with a traffic cone on his head, things like that. And this pencil is the equivalent of 1,900,000 standard-sized pencils.

Right. And it's the same length as the world's longest outdoor shop putt, the largest wave in the world in 2025, and the world's largest barbecue pit. If you need some perspective. Yeah, thank you. It's really helpful. Because I've actually got it back to me.

Can I check something with you? Is it a pencil or is it a model of a pencil? What's the difference? The difference is pretty clear. If it's got a lead in the middle of it... It works. It has to work. It has to work. Then it's a pencil.

Functioning pencil, exactly. Absolutely. Because sometimes people do make models of pencils and they say this is the world's largest pencil. Did they? Clearly not. I don't like it. It feels like I'm shaming them now.

But there is a giant pencil. It's in Minneapolis. And actually, it's just a toppled oak tree. I believe it's lead free. It has got a giant ferule and a rubber on the end. And every year there is a ritual sharpening, which is good. But it's basically a tree that they painted. It's basically a painted and a shaped tree.

I feel, no, but I feel bad about it now because it's in Minneapolis and it sounds wonderful. And thousands of people turn up every year to the ritual sharpening, which does sound like my kind of people. So that's very impressive. It's just for any pencil fans that might be here tonight or listening at home, that, oh, yeah, a lot in tonight. Okay. A friend of ours, John Hodgman, is a friend of the leading pencil sharpener in the world. His name is David Reese. He wrote a book called How to Sharpen Pencils.

And he, and it's a whole book. And he provides a service which started out as you could send him your pencil and you pay him and he sharpens it for you and sends it back. But his new service now is he will provide the pencil himself. So if anyone here wants a pencil scarf. Yeah, it feels like the pencil is not the main cost base of his operations, is it? Just getting a new pencil. He'll just send you a sharp pencil. Well, it's a hundred American dollars to.

I beg your pardon. I think that's worth it. Do you think so? The pencil sharpeners don't work. Why haven't we nailed the pencil sharpener in this day and age? They always break off a pencil left. I think there's a clear territory between pencil sharpeners don't work very well, which I think we can all agree on.

And $100 is good value. Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hey, everyone. This week's episode of Fish is sponsored by NordVPN. Yes, if you've been listening to Fish for any number of weeks, you'll know we think that getting a VPN is really important. if you care at all about your own online privacy or security,

and NordVPN is one of the fastest out there. Yes, I must say, with the kind of stuff we Google for this show, Internet security is the most important thing of my life right now. And it is something that is a pretty amazing feature that you can get. It's got servers across 149 different countries. It means as well, by the way, that if you go overseas and you want to access all the stuff that might be geo-blocked in the country you're now in, but you had back home,

you can set your VPN to your home country, which means you have access to everything you were getting there to begin with. That's right. You can just pretend you're not even on holiday. Go on holiday, sit in your bedroom and watch all those Netflix shows that you'd be missing otherwise. Yeah. And so if you want to get this and you need to, I think it's very important, you should just go to nordvPN.com slash fish and use the offer code, fish. That's right. And if you do that and get a NordVPN two-year plan, you will get four months extra, completely. completely risk-free, 30-day money-back guarantee. Do it now. Okay, on with the podcast. On with the show. It is time for fact number two, and that is James. Okay, my fact this week is that one of the world's oldest cycling road races is getting much harder because people keep stealing the road.

This is the Paris-Roubla cycle race, and it goes over cobblestone roads. And it's very famous because it's very, very difficult to cycle on these cobbles, especially if you're a couple of if it's been raining or if they get muddy. And the race's nickname is the hell of the north. For various reasons we might go into. But this year, the events director, Thierry Guvano, has made a plea to the public to leave the rocks in place because people have been taking the cobblestones as souvenirs

and it's hard enough to go over those guys normally. But if there's a big hole where there should be one, then you're going to get big pile-ups of cyclists. Dangerous. They say the speed that you go at over those cobbles, you feel literally like you're a jackhammer, like you're just going the whole way through. It sounds horrendous.

It's a 160 mile long route, right? Like, it's a massive race. That's one day? And it's one day, and they do get hurt. And Theo de Ruiz, a Dutchman, he was asked about it afterwards, and they said, what do you think of the race? He said, it's a bollocks, this race.

You're working like an animal, you don't have time to piss, you wet your pants, you're riding in mud like this, you're slipping, it is a pile of shit. And they said, wow, okay. I mean, are you going to do it again? Sure, it's the most beautiful race in the world. That's what the race is to people.

So it's got quite a good history, and the nickname the Hell of the North doesn't come from how hard the race is. It's named after Terry Hell. No, it's not. Oh, I'm so excited. Oh, Andy, first time you've heard an audience get that that is your world.

It's basically the cyclists drove through Northern France, after World War I and there was so much rubble everywhere and stuff it was like they were driving through hell so it is a very very difficult race but the hell of the north was due to the...

Oh, interesting. Because all races were cobbled back in the day, right? No tarmac. Yeah, and actually the race is the Paris Roubae but actually doesn't start in Paris anymore.

It starts in Compin Compin. It's good that you've protected the place's identity like that. But yeah, They used to start in Paris, but then they got rid of all the cobbled roads in Paris, so there was no point starting there.

So they start a bit further out where the cobbles began. Nice. And in fact, this was a problem, right? That the cobbles were disappearing because tarmac was invented and roads kept being tarmac. And then in the, I think it was the 1960s or 1950s, they said, well, this race is just going become really boring because it's going to be flat and easy. And there's a guy called Jean Stablinski, who was a former cyclist. And he was also a former minor.

and he knew of these really cobbled paths. He won a bicycle in an accordion competition. Okay. Okay. Whoa, whoa, whoa. As you do. Is this being held down the mind? Because that is the most impractical thing

you can give someone down a mind. The acoustics are very good there, though. No, a bicycle, not an accordion. Oh! I saw him in his how they lowered him down. They just held one end of the accordion each. Okay. Cycle your way up.

I don't think it was down the mind. But no, he won this bicycle in an accordion competition, so he started cycling. His mum was so pissed off he started cycling that she destroyed his first bike. Anyway, he basically founded this race in its modern iteration because he became a cyclist and then added cobbles to all of these roads or found lots of routes that were very, very cobbly. So the prize in the race is a cobblestone, which is interesting. But it's not one of the, obviously, they don't take it from a bit of the route.

These are cobbles which have been blown up during the First and Second World Wars, right? Lots of, you know, lots of roads were bombarded and lots of them were blown up. and the cobbles were blown all over the place. And they then go into the soil and every year farmers plow up cobblestones that used to be on the roads. So it's one of these dug-up cobblestones that becomes the prize.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's very cool. They're really big old things, aren't they? Yeah, because you get little round cobblestones, lots of places here, but these are big flat. They're like bricks, but they are much less easy. So you get a cobblestone and you also get a brass plaque of your name which goes onto the shower block, which is at the very end.

There's a big old shower that all the cyclists are supposed to go to. In actual fact, it's a horrible old shower and no one really goes in. Oh, really? It's like a really famous part of the race. So you get three lots of people who use it. Basically, the youngest people who are there for the first ever year, and they're like, oh, wow, like, I really need to try the showers because they're so famous. And then you get the really old ones who just want to embrace the history of the race.

And then you get a third group who use these showers. Can you guess who they are? People who've been injured and need to wash sort of mud Well, they can still use normal showers. Okay. Okay.

The bicycles. The bicycles themselves? Yeah. On their own? Yeah. No. Some of the race crew? No, it's not.

It's the ones who are sponsored by shampoo companies. And so at the end of the race, those ones always come in, do a little bit of a rub down with the shampoo and then go straight off to their nice warm showers. You've just been through absolute hell for 116 miles and then you have to film a shampoo advert. That's like a bad dream.

How many guesses do you think we would have had to have gone to before we've got to that? Here's a very cool bit of the road crew who work on it. So there's a team of people who are employed to maintain the cobbles, not to make them nice and smooth, it's not possible,

but just to make sure they're there and kind of serviceable. But there is a team of extra employees who are hired. Can anybody guess? What their job is. Well, in the Tour de France, they have people who are employed because people draw penises on their ground. Yes.

And they employ people to turn them into beautiful butterflies. Yes. Is it that? It's not that. These people have to, these crew have to eat something as part of their job. And I corrected people to crew there. Hmm. Good riddle.

Good riddle. They might be animals. They might be animals. Good riddle, Andy. No, they have to. I know, because they're near farms. So there's often like horse poo and stuff on there. So they employ a load of dung beetles

to push away the poles of dung just before the bikes get there. He's got it. Wow. It's a team of goats. Eating grass. Eating the veg in between the cobbles. Okay, right.

Yeah. And the human are called the Fossat du Pave convicts of the cobbles. How cool is that? Oh, that's like a society. There's a human team of maintenance people too. They're not eating the... They're not eating the stuff.

Well, I don't think I banned from it, but yeah. The method ones are. Yeah. So, yeah, that's like a, that's like a crew that you join. It's a society. And that's not even when the race is happening. That's year-round. They just make sure they love the cobble.

So they're probably looking out for the cobble stealers that we're talking about. This is a very old race. 1896. Like the bicycle, the bicycle proper was only invented in the 1860s. So we're talking like 30, 40 years after the invention of the actual modern bicycle that they started doing this insane race. And even the person who did the first mapping of the route didn't want the race to happen. So basically there were two creators. There was Perez and there was Vienne.

And they were like, we're going to end it in Belgium or France. We don't know which way. But we can't be there at both ends. We need someone to start or end it. They decided Paris would start it. And they needed to get the local newspaper on their team. and so the Paris newspaper sent a man called Paul Rousseau to actually ride what might be a route

and he did it and he got to the end and he was going to write immediately and say no human should do this. This is mad this is insane but then these two guys Perez and Vienne took him out to dinner, got him drunk and then he was like yeah it'll be fine, it'll be cool and that's why we have it. That's so funny and then like for 125 years women were not allowed to do it

until 2021. It's quite recent is there Oh, it's so long ago now, 2021. And the winner was Lizzie Dane, who's British, I think. And the sad thing about that was, and this, in fairness, this happens in a lot of cycle races, which is you don't watch the first hour or so because it's quite boring. They're just going really slowly. And then someone attacks and it gets interesting. But she attacked at the very first sector.

And so by the time the camera started, she was already so far ahead that no one was ever going to catch her. And so the entire broadcast was just her being miles in front of everyone else and just winning. Oh, sorry, I thought you meant the people who were filming couldn't catch her. Surely they've invented cars for this race. I know they hadn't invented women yet. She's the only British cyclist to win this race. Was she, sorry, was she winning the mixed set? No, no, there was a women's, yeah, so 2021 was the first women's race.

She won that. Bradley Wiggins has done it quite a few times I think he came ninth is the closest that he ever got Yeah So we haven't had Sorry? Not very good, is it?

Not coming home, no Coming home Do you know what? Do you know he's in a team He's in Sky Team That's what he wrote for it Yeah, he was in Sky Team Do you know what the first professional team

He was in when he started racing Because they're in teams Andy Like you're in like a you get like Oh right Postal? Okay It was the Linda McCartney

racing team which focused largely on racers who were vegetarians as well as the crew Wow well I mean talking about women cycling and the reason I ask for it was the mixed race is that actually

cycling is one of the things that women and men could be on a par at in future and in fact there's this thing called the RAM which is the race across America and it is R AAM isn't it?

Yeah. Rates across America. It's meant to be the most extreme cycling race in the world. It's absolutely insane. People who do it have these crazy hallucinations. They go mad. They start dribbling and shrieking and, you know, thinking they're being murdered and stuff. But it's 3,000 miles across America. You're not allowed to take longer than 12 days.

And the winners of the ram in 2021 and 23 were both women. mixed gender ram so 2021 it was actually and I'm always doing this having just turned 40 looking up things I could still achieve and the winner in 2021 was a woman called Leah Goldstein who was 52

yeah well she doesn't listen it's fine was she American I think so yeah she or maybe she was I know I think she was Israeli because she used to be a bantam weight kickbox champion in Israel, which to be fair, I haven't achieved before the age of 40, and she had. And she was also the 1998 duathlon champion. But aside from that, I could do it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There was the very first RAM had only four racers in it, and one of them was a

guy called Michael Shermer. And I don't think he's won the RAM, but he did invent a new medical problem off the back of something he experienced. You know how, you sort of hope that one day something horrible is going to be named after you in a medical sense? Is it a cycling injury? Yeah, it's called Shermer's neck. Oh. Okay, that's not the part of the body I thought you were going to go. So Shermer's neck is a thing when you've been riding so long

and your body has really, really gone to its edge that suddenly your neck just gives up and your head just drops. Oh, my God. And you can't do anything and it's just gone. The muscles are entirely gone. And so Shermer had to hold his head up for the rest of the race. Yeah, with one hand on the handlebars. and he's not the only person to have this.

So multiple people have had Schumer's neck and you can even buy devices because they don't give up once their neck keeps up. Cyclists. They pull over and they put on a device that just pulls their head up and they just ride the rest of this insane thing

that they're doing. At least at the end of the race it's quite easy to put the medal over him. Okay, it is time for fact number three. three, and that is my fact, my fact this week is that 150 years before there was a social network called X run by a man called Musk, there was a social network called X run by a man called Busk. Insane. It's incredible. So Elon Musk named X and Ellen Busk named the other X from 150 years ago.

And basically, I was doing research about Albemarle Street, the street that are on, which this is an amazing road, by the way. There's so many incredible things that have happened here. There was a publishers just next door where Byron

was published by them, and when he died, all of his memoirs and papers were burnt. That happened just next door over there. There was the Albaal Club where Oscar Wilde was accused of being a sodomite, and that happened literally

on the road that we're on. That ruined his life. I sent him to jail. So while I was reading that, I discovered that on the 3rd of November, 1864, at St. George's Hotel, on this road, a social network was set up called the X Club, and it was run by nine great scientists, one of whom was George Busk. This was one of the very first scientific groups, and they called it a social network at the time, and the idea was they could see that science was being excluded from so many places where it was needed

in terms of political power in schools and so on. They thought, let's get together and start discussing how we can inject science into these places. So literally around the corner, they changed the landscape of how this country operated because they were all very influential people. George Busk and his wife Ellen were very much a part of this. Thomas Huxley was the original John Lubbock,

a lot of people who would have lectured in this very room. And Ellen called at the X-Club because she said, you need a name where you can just change and adapt to what the club is. You don't want to get stuck into one thing. Means you can talk about anything because X can be anything. Yeah.

Two quick thoughts on the name? Yep. Firstly, should have called themselves the X-Men, because they were all men. The second point, there were nine of them. Yeah. And their symbol is X, which is, of course, Latin for nine. Nine.

Yeah. Mm. I'm just seeing two big missed opportunities here. You want them to call the one X club, the I-X club. The I-X-Men. I don't think... Or you invite one more person in

and then you could, there's 10 of you. They kept on trying to invite people in, didn't they? They kept on, well, they kept on... We need just one more. We don't like anyone else. There was this constant chat, as you can imagine, they were saying, look, should we get Barry in or, you know, should we get, you know, Dorothy?

And eventually, they, apparently, various attempts to add more members became so wearisome, this is according to Huxley, that Huxley made this new rule. He said that no idea of someone joining the club shall be entertained unless the name of the new member contains all the consonants absent from the old ones. Okay.

So I had a look. The only consonants that are remaining once you go with all the names are Q, V and Z. And the only famous person I could find, who was alive at the time, was a guy called Vasquez, V-A-Z-Q-U-E-Z, who was a Galician musician who invented a thing called the Technophore.

which looks a bit like a piano but when you play notes it replicates the human voice. Can you imagine if he turned up and gone, I'm here, guys. Then I'd have to go what's your first name? That is amazing. One thing they did do, speaking of names,

is they gave each other nicknames and all the nicknames had to begin with X. So there was the exquisite Lubbock, the excellent spotus wood, the experienced hooker. the eccentric Tyndall, the exemplary busk, and so they gave themselves these ex-knit names.

Yeah, they did have alternative names as well. So Huxley's original idea was calling it the Blastodermic Club. And Blastodermic is a layer of cells inside the ovum of birds. It acts as the centre of development for the entire birds, so that's what they thought they were. They were on the inside. I think we'll just go with X, actually. Thank you.

Thank you. Yeah, we are writing down that suggestion. up for blastedermic? No. The thorough club. I quite like that. No, it sounds quite dull, isn't it? There seemed to be contradictory views on what it was for.

So what Huxley said was, it had nothing to do with science, this club. It was basically because we were all great mates, but we were all getting quite busy and successful, and we weren't hanging out very much. And so we literally said, let's make a date every month to hang out. And he really denied that there was any other purpose. And in fact, he said that if others are, have been present at the meetings, they would have been incredibly disappointed at the sadly

frivolous tone of our ordinary conversations. Interesting. Well, they were accused of only working to each other's mutual advantage. You know, they were accused of being a bit of a self-promotion society. They would lobby for each other, you know, for their own members to get a particular eminent position in the world of science, that kind of thing. So they were advancing the cause of science, but it wasn't, you know, it wasn't totally without self-interest. Yeah, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which is normally very even-handed, says the motives were never entirely

pure, the reason's not entirely consistent, and their means not entirely admirable. Advancing the cause of science and advancing themselves were often conflated. Wow. But you could say the same about us. Well, you know what? The reason I don't like them is because they had some sworn enemies. And their sworn enemies were the North British scientists. Oh, dear.

But actually, they were based in Scotland, so a bit further north in Britain than where I'm from. But Lord Kelvin was one of them and James Clark Maxwell, so quite big, famous guys. And the difference really between them was the North British ones believed in miracles. Oh. You sexy thing. I know that luck in your eye on me. But yeah, they thought that you could like get science and you could also get miracles. And there was sort of an in-between that there was an invisible realm that was affecting our realm.

And the X club were more like no science. science is science and religion shouldn't get involved and all that kind of stuff. Right. Yeah, you're crazy Scots. Wow. That is an interesting. Oh, yeah. They had a lot of little phrases and words that we use in Science Day came from these

nine people in a room. Huxley came up with the term agnostic, I guess the concept of agnostic to go with it as well. Survival of the fittest. That was Herbert Spencer. I think Herbert Spencer also invented what was like the original paper clip as well. So, you know, he had a lot of, he had a prototype thing. that held papers together, and he argued that, come on, I was basically there. Bet no one's done this before.

Yeah. Was it Huxley who invented agnostic? It was, wasn't it? Yeah. Because it needed it to overcome social awkwardness because he was at gatherings of the metaphysical society, and it was all either atheists or religious people who had their denomination. And he said he felt like a historical fox when, after leaving the trap in which his tail remained, he presented himself to his normally elongated companions

to think the tail is the label that everyone else had and he's got no tail. What? Yeah, I know. Look, I'm not saying he had a way with words. I'm not saying I necessarily delivered it. He was a scientist. But, you know, he said he felt like he didn't have a label.

He felt like he was a fox without a tail. And so he called himself agnostic because the agnostics were people who claimed to know everything. And he was saying, I don't know anything. Oh, really? And so, yeah. And then he said, I prance back into the next meeting of the society. like a fox, you know.

I'll stop with a fox thing though. It's not working. It's got an X in it. It's got an X in it, yeah. So they would all meet together, and a lot of it was down to Lubbock's wife, Lady Lubbock, and she would organise all of the get-togethers. And then when she died in 1879,

basically went into decline. So Lady Lubbock, she was the daughter of the guy who founded the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. So she was already part of that world. But yeah, she married this. love a guy, she died. Then they kind of stopped going to the meetings and they all got a bit old and they started to get sick and so they couldn't meet on cold nights anymore. And basically they just all became very grumpy old men. It's classic men and friendships. If your wife is not

making you go and be friends, you just stay at home and then die. I mean, yeah, it's not good. I mean, that's life, isn't it? It's what we like. Yeah. Yeah. I did read it. It declined until the very last meeting was in 1889, just two of them left. And they were just there for the evening. And they sort of said, well, this hasn't really worked, has it? Who was, sorry, maybe that was 1893. 1889 was when they had their final row. When Huxley ridiculed in the Times, Spencer's a priori reasoning against land socialism, devastating.

Wow. Yeah. There's a slightly interesting moment, which is connected to the main fact, which is, I think it was 1892, Tesla came. Nikola Tesla came to do a speech in the very room that we're in right now. And it's highly likely that one of the members of X were in the room listening to that speech as well. So at one point, Tesla and X were in the same room. There was one guy as well called John Tyndall, who used to do lectures in here as well.

And he was one of the members of X. And there's a great lecture that happened here. It's a real seminal one. It happened on the 1st of February, 1878. And it was the first time that the telephone was publicly shown to members of the public, right? So I think scientists had seen it, had been displayed in academic circles. But so they showed it here for the very first time. And because they had basically 10 minutes of spare time at the end, they went,

oh, let's show you another new invention. It's called the phonograph. They made a recording in the room live, and then they played it back to the room. So John Tyndall did a recording of a Tennyson poem, and Tennyson was in the audience. listening to it being done and he was so blown away by it that he then spent a large part of the rest of his career recording onto the vinyl

because he just thought this is the most magical thing that we have, I say vinyl the early days of, you imagine the phone and the vinyl player. Why didn't they play the vinyl down the phone? Oh yeah, like a voicemail. Sorry, Tennyson's. Not in right now. Stop the podcast.

Stop the podcast. Hey, everyone, this week's episode of Fish is sponsored by Sayley. Yes, Sayley is an e-Sim service app. It basically means if you've gone on holiday with your friends or family, you get to the airport, you've got so much other fafing to do. You do not have to go and buy a physical sim from some dodgy sim dealer because it's all on your phone and ready for you. And it is so worth it. I cannot tell you the importance of Sayley on your phone for when you're going overseas. The last thing you want to do is head back home and find yourself landed

with a bill that basically costs more than the trip itself because you were Googling stuff along the way, making a few phone calls. Saley stops all of that and it is available in over 200 destinations. Yes, it is. It also has various other perks. Like it's got a built-in ad blocker and it has 24-7 support. And all you need to do is download the app. It's compatible with iOS or Android. You buy a plan for whatever country you're in and you off you go.

Off you pop. Get online. Get online. Do it now. And because you're a fish listener, we've got an exclusive discount for you. So you will get 15% off on your Saley ESM data plan if you download the Saly app and use the code fish at checkout. That is right. Save on all of those data roaming international bills. Get Saly right now. On with the show. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show. And that is. Andy. My fact is, in Cambodia, there is a special hotline for fishermen to ring if they accidentally catch a fish that is too big. How do you, how do you accidentally catch a fish? Yeah, well, you get a bite, you tug away for a bit, and then you haul it in, and then

it's much bigger than you thought it was. It's much bigger than he thought it was, yeah, basically. Is this a very special type of fish, or is it just any of big fish? It is the Mekong giant catfish. so cool. This is one of the most amazing fish in the world. It's just about the largest freshwater fish in the world. Before you shout out, I know one or two stingrays have been bigger.

I know, but that's why I said among the largest freshwater fish in the world. They get up to three metres long. They weigh up to 300 kilos. Wow. So bigger than the pencil. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. The world record is pretty much

in the ballpark that you said. So 2.7 meters and weigh 293 kilograms, and that means you could make about 10,000 fish fingers out of it. And that would be, that would be a good and noble way for that fish to die. I mean, once it's dead. Captain Bird's eyes are rubbing his hands up on deck. So basically, the problem is the Mekong giant catfish, they're wonderful fish, and as they get older and bigger, they can produce more offspring.

So the really big old ones can produce, I think, 20 times as many offspring as even a 50-kil fish. 50 kilos is not tiny, but they get so much bigger. But they, you know, millions of people rely on the Mekong River. There's lots and lots of fishing. There's lots of pollution. There are dams in the way. There's overfishing. All sorts of things. So the fish are getting a lot smaller, you know, because the bigger, older ones have been caught and they're not getting a chance to grow to their full size. So there is this wonderful new team.

They have launched the Mekong Fish app and the fishermen have downloaded the app basically. And there's a rapid response team. and if you accidentally find yourself pulling a 200 kilo catfish into your boat, you just get on the blower, they come down, they tag it, they re-release it, and I think in nine months, 92 megafish, which have been accidentally caught, have been returned to the water, and they do a little ritual, they'll sprinkle it with flowers, which must absolutely blow its mind, like, what the hell is this? And then, and then they chuck it back in.

Maybe that's why they're getting caught so much these days. You'd check out this flower thing, man. This is insane. No, they put you back in. It's nuts. They don't even... This lady comes, she tags you, you're back in. So it's a very clever thing to do.

It's important because these fish, they're getting smaller as well, aren't they? Yeah. It would be hard-pressed to find one that's even half the size of that one that we mentioned earlier. And the reason is because in the past, people were catching the biggest ones because they're the biggest, that's the easiest to find. And then over generations, they just get smaller and smaller because the smaller ones survive. Yeah. So yeah.

And it's quite a good thing, you know, that I think, generally speaking, because the Mekong is in quite a lot of countries, but most of these countries now are all trying to do something to help these catfish. Yes, I think it's half a dozen countries the Mekong goes through. And it floods massively, and it's full of smaller fish to eat, which is all the reason it can get so big. There was one court in the 1980s. I love this.

It took 100 men two hours to land. Nice. Right. That's crazy. What are the 99 men doing who aren't holding the rod? They're just doing it. encouraging. They're in the pub going,

Paul! Now my wife's at home, she said I had to come. Have you guys ever seen fighting chairs? I think anyone who's sort of like into fishing is familiar with fighting chairs, but they're so cool.

So if you've got any respectable fishing boat that are going out and to catch vaguely big fish, a tuna or Marlin, then fishermen strap themselves into a fighting chair. The fighting chair has bolted onto the boat through the boat.

You stick your feet into these foot holders, so you've got something to push your heels against. And it's so that when you catch a big fish, you fight it. And the fights can last so long. So I found one fish fight. It was in 1990. It was a Marlin, and it was caught by a guy called Schumacher. And he was in the chair for how long do you think altogether? This one was two hours.

So I'll say two hours, ten minutes. Nice. Thank you. I appreciate that. Dan, do you want to come in and absolutely trounce this? 16 years Thanks a lot, Dan 23 hours

Wow 23 hours in the chair At 22 hours He said I'm really sorry I'm desperate for the loo And he took a bathroom break And then he came back

At 22 hours 22 hours he lasted That's more impressive Does the tuna just go Okay well While you go to the toilet Fair's fair I just won't pull for a bit

The tuna's been bursting for a piss for ages They respect the rules His mate took the line for a while Could his mate not have helped in the first 22 hours? You've got a lot of beers to get through in those cool boxes Anyway, the fish won, got away in the end Good, yeah, nice

Oh, wicked There's a lot of species of catfish There's like thousands, and they're all over the world I've got a quiz question for you though Oh, great. Okay, so in Florida, there is fish farms where they don't farm catfish, but the farmers have had to erect fences around their ponds

to protect them. Why? Stop fish from outside getting in and eating their fish. Jumping in? Yeah. Yeah. To stop flying fish getting in and eating their fish. Yeah. Like, yes, but... QED. But no as well.

Okay. Is he right or not? No, what do you mean flying fish? fish. Fish that, like, what, have chartered an airline? We don't... No, fish will jump over the net. From other... Okay, so let's imagine there's a landmass in between another body of water.

Oh, then I don't know. It must be close, right? Because otherwise, you wouldn't have... Yeah. Is it like... Is it people throwing fish into it from... That's good. No. Is it, right? There's a forest fire and a helicopter picks up loads of water from the ocean,

drops it prematurely, and all the fish from its load falls. into the pot like it. And how's the fence that is standing vertically? It's a really high fence. Yeah, right. Sorry. There are some fish that can walk. Catfish can walk.

It is insane. Catfish can walk like 1.2 miles. They can... It's crazy. They can stay out of water for about 18 hours, just walking along, and they kept going in these ponds. And so they were like, stay out of my pond,

and they had to build fences. Imagine building a fence to stop fish from walking into your pond. You're nuts. That's incredible. But they can do it. It's an extraordinary thing. And there's even a new word

that's been invented called ruffling, which describes the method by which catfish walk along. They use their mouth, they use their tail, they use their body. Rethling? They raffle along, yeah.

And it's a word. It's now a word. Sounds like crawling. I don't mean to denigrate the catfish. Well done them. But that doesn't sound like walking. I've got a child

who's on the cusp of walking, but who mostly crawls. and I don't confuse the two. I don't keep saying, oh my God, he's walking. And people go, what? He's on his hands and knees.

But you wouldn't expect to walk a catfish to just get up on two legs to sort too long. We're wearing a tucks. Yeah. On fish conservation, their inventors of Rumba,

the hoover, have got involved in fish conservation. They've invented a hoover to hoover up fish. Have they? Yeah, because if you do one thing well... Sounds bad. It does,

but what they're doing is they're hoovering up a fish. that hoover's up other fish. So the lionfish is invasive in the Atlantic. It's from the Pacific. It got over there, probably that bloody Panama Canal. And it's got no native predators. Enemy of the podcast, the Panama Canal.

Who thought that was a good idea? All the lionfish came over, and they can reduce the population of a reef, of the fish on a reef, by 80%. Very, very quickly, they can eat 20 fish an hour. So within five weeks, they can reduce the population by 80%. So the Rumba guy, have got a remote-controlled hoover

that they pop into the water and it's controlled with like a game controller, PlayStation controller or whatever from a ship, from a boat. And it's got two arms, this little robot thing that stun the fish and then it sucks it into a tube and then it plops it into a tank

like your hoover bag. And then it gets sold to restaurants and it stops eating the... I know I thought I'd skate over that bit quite... No, no, no. Honestly, that was a happier ending than I thought would happen for the fish. Did you have been eating restaurants?

It's how he wanted to go. I thought it was just a big mincing machine in the Hoover bag or something. I'll be honest, in the restaurant there's probably some kind of big mixing machine going on as well. That's true. What a weird business pivot for Rumba.

Can you imagine? We've become a household name. They're all sitting. All the shareholders in the room. What's next, boss? Can we do it anywhere but carpets? Have you tried? So is it happening? It is happening in quite a small scale It was also the idea of a guy called Colin Angle

Oh Of angling And fish have scales of a small scale And so You're welcome Thank you Dan For next time don't need that But thank you

Okay but it might be rolled out in a bigger way Yeah it's one of these ideas It has not been rolled It's not saving all the fish life But it's saving If you have to have a person controlling it every single one. I think you have to send gamers out,

take them out of their attics, put them on ships. Probably you can get AI to do it now and just go around and like just chat GPT will see a picture of it and go, that's a picture of Nick Clegg. No, I think it's a lionfish. Oh yeah, sorry, it is a lionfish.

Good point. Meanwhile, Nick Clegg's being attacked by what, a thousand? Rumbas. This is a movie that has to get made. then you're in the restaurant. I think I'll have... It can't be.

It can't be. It looks... Can I have that one that looks like Nickleg? Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things we've said

on this podcast, we're all online. You can find us. And we're going to be back again next week with another live episode. from the Royal Institution. Thank you everyone for being here. We really appreciate it, and we will see you again. Goodbye!