No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As An Unsexy Astronaut

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

Dan, Anna, Andrew and Major Tim Peake discuss an out of this world diet, the last species on Earth, and what Tom Collins has been saying behind all of your backs.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.

Hi guys, Andy here. Just before we start this week's show, we wanted to say that we have a special guest on. It is none other than Major Tim Peek, soldier, pilot, astronaut, absolutely everything. He is the first British astronaut to go into space with the European Space Agency. He has done so many amazing things in his life. And part of the reason he's on is that he's got a new book out. It's his autobiography. It's called Limitless. I've just finished it. It is so amazing the stuff he's done.

He spent years flying helicopters being a helicopter test pilot. He was in the army. He talks about going to Sandhurst. He's done all these incredible things. The number of adventures in the book, basically every single page has a new, exciting, weird thing he's done on it. He lived underwater for a while. That didn't even make it into the podcast. We didn't even mention the fact that he lived underwater.

That's how many interesting things he has to say about his life so far. So we hope you like the episode. and if you do, you should give his book a look. It is called Limitless and it is out now from all bookshops, even if the bookshops aren't actually open. It can be ordered. Okay, on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish,

a weekly podcast coming to you from four undisclosed locations in the UK. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew. Andrew Hunter Murray, Anna Tashinsky, and special guest, it's Britain's first ever and currently only ever spacewalking astronaut, Major Tim Peek. 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 you, Major Tim. Well, my fact of the week is that when you do a spacewalk, you have to wear 16 layers of clothing and a nappy.

Was that definitely not a prank from the other astronauts? I thought it might be, you know, when you get told the fancy dress party and you turn up and everyone's to wearing normal clothes. So the nappy is very, very important. We don't call it a nappy. We call it a mag, a maximum absorbency garment so that we don't have to go around calling it a diaper or a nappy. But it's a nappy. It's an adult nappy. And that gives us an ease of mind to know that at any point during a spacewalk, if you need to go for a week, you can just let it go.

And is it like a standard nappy, just sort of a big, woolly mess on your bum? I don't have children, I think, but I think that's what a nappy basically is, isn't it? Or is it more advanced? No, it's a standard adult incontinence pad nappy. So you put it on and you've got two Velcro-type straps on the left and on the right, and you just, you know, tighten yourself up. And then we wear some long johns over the top of that. So that's layer number two, long johns and a kind of long-sleeved top.

Layer number three is what's called an LCBG, a liquid cooling ventilation garment. And that's pretty cool, actually. It's a onesie that has got about almost a kilometre's worth of piping, thin rubber piping going through it. And that's where the water flows through. And that's what regulates our temperature out on a spacewalk. And then it's into the space suit. And that's where the other 14 layers of clothing.

Oh, damn, I thought you were going to be able to list every single layer individually. Well, I could, it might go on a bit. We might need more time for the podcast. I was reading about the procurement procedure behind these garments, maximum absorption garments. So apparently they were made by a firm called absorbencies, and they've gone bust, but Natsa bought so many. They bought 3,200 of these in the late 90s, and they've still got some of them knocking around. But it seemed like they must be running short by now, you would think. We don't need many, do you? You don't need. I mean, I read that astronauts are only really given three, one for takeoff, one for reentry, and if you're going on a spacewalk, there's your third nappy. Is that right?

Training? Maybe training you need to practice them? We do. Absolutely. Right down at Houston, we had this big old swimming pool, the neutral buoyancy laboratory, and we wear them there as well, because we train exactly as we would do a spacewalk. And so although we're only in the water for six hours, we still wear them so that we know what it feels like. And in fact, the advice. was because going through training, you never need to go. But the advice from some flown astronauts was Tim at least once, just have a wee in your space. Because he said, you don't want to do anything for the first time on a spacewalk. You know, you want to have tried everything so you know what it feels like, you know, that it works. So he said at least, at least do it once during training. And did you have to do it on the spacewalk? I didn't. No, actually, I was very fortunate. I perhaps I should have probably tells you that I was very dehydrated. Because we put that thing on.

We start getting dressed at 7 o'clock in the morning on Spacewalk Day. You're up at 6.30. And then you do your medical. You put a chest harness on, which has got monitors your heart rate and breathing rate. And then you're into your spacesuit quite soon. So you end up spending somewhere about 10 to 12 hours in that spacesuit. But no, thankfully, I didn't need to use it. Yeah, you've got to start drinking more.

Yeah. That is a long time. Okay, I read something that I really wanted to check because I don't think you mentioned this in the book, but it might be sort of a previous astronaut procedure, which is that sometimes you would have to spend the night before you do your spacewalk in a cupboard wearing your space suit. What?

And that's so that you can get all the nitrogen out of your blood so you don't suffer, you know, you don't get bubbles forming at this kind of thing, very dangerous. Yeah, actually, Andy, you're partly right there, because what we used to do, they used to camp out in the airlock. And so it wasn't this a cupboard. They would actually kind of take their sleeping bags in there. And they would be breathing oxygen at a lower pressure in the airlock all night long.

And that was flushing the nitrogen out of their system. But it was not comfortable. And people were getting up very tired on Spacewalk morning. And we've gradually, we've become more and more comfortable with actually reducing that period of time. it's just the same as a diver trying to prevent themselves from getting the bends, because inside the spacesuit, we take the pressure down to about 4.3 PSI, so less than a third of the atmosphere. It's slightly higher than Mount Everest, the equivalent pressure,

which is pretty low, actually. And so you don't want to go into that low pressure environment with a whole stack of nitrogen in your bloodstream. Wow. And then when you're out there, I was reading, to be fair, quite an old article from 1984, when the first woman did a spacewalk. I think it was Fetlana Savitskaya, and she was a cosmonaut,

and she went out to do some welding. And the article about that said that, and I don't think I can believe this, that they're so kind of uncomfortable and inelastic back then that you could lose up to three kilograms, as in almost half a stone, in the course of a spacewalk. Wow. I think that's impossible.

I think dieters would be doing this left, right and center, if that level of weight was possible. Let's do the spacewalk. diet. Exactly. Very expensive, but it does work. Is it uncomfortable and heavy? It is uncomfortable and it's hard work.

You are really working hard because although it's a very, very low pressure, compared to the vacuum outside, you feel like, you know, Mitchell and Man in this blown-up tire and bending your fingers, moving your arms is exhausting. And just moving around in space is exhausting. So you do come back physically, absolutely exhaust. But three kilograms. Three kilograms sounds like an awful lot. And I tended to not believe the article the moment you said welding. Because we take risks on a spacewalk, but I don't think we'd go out there welding just in case. The suit sound pretty amazing. I was reading that the gloves have a inbuilt heater system.

You know, like when you sit in a car and someone presses that button, you know, the driver presses the button in the back of your seats, something gets hot. You're like, whoa, they have that on the face suits just above the fingernails on the gloves with an on off button on the wrist. I believe so, is that right, Tim? That's so cool. That's absolutely right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's a little tab that you pull on the top of your wrist. And when we're going into night, actually, we get Mission Control call up and they just say, guys, you know, you're 25 seconds away from nighttime, helmets, gloves and visors.

And so what they want there is helmet lights, switch them on. visors, because we'll often have the gold visor down in the daytime for sun protection. So gold visors up and then gloves switch them on. So your fingers stay nice and warm. And that is actually, that's the only source of heat other than body heat to keep us warm on a spacewalk. And I guess that just goes to show how effective the suit is at protecting us against the cold from space because it's only our own body generated heat that keeps us warm other than the electrical fingertips. Wow. How cold? I mean, what's the temperature out there?

If we're in the shade or at night time, it's just a few degrees. I mean, space is a few degrees above absolute zero. And the things we're touching will be down at minus 100 Celsius. But in the sunshine, metal panels can be as hot as plus 260 Celsius. So even when you're working in the sun, you know, you might have one hand, you know, on one side of a solar panel in the sun and the other in the shade. and your space suit is having to cope with this massive, massive thermal differentiation between the two. So it's doing a remarkable job. That's like Canada, I believe. I'm led to inform. They send astronauts to Canada to live for a year, don't they? To prepare.

That would be good training, I'm sure. Does it feel, I mean, how odd does it feel when you step out of the airlock? It's brilliant. I mean, it does feel odd because you just suddenly feel the experience. exposure and you know, you're aware that the danger is kind of palpable in that respect, like, okay, this is it. I mean, the vacuum of space, just a suit and a thin visor. But you soon get comfortable and you get comfortable with the view as well. And, you know, you let go. You know you're not going anywhere. So as long as you're tethered onto the space station. But sometimes the vertigo just catches you out unexpectedly. And it happened to me once. I was coming back

towards the airlock along this thin pole. It's like a shortcut. and so I was not surrounded by a structure at all. And I was kind of like hanging on to this pole and I looked down and suddenly got this massive wave of vertigo seeing Western Australia down below my themes. What a stupid time to look down. Oh, my God. You know, one thing as you're looking down,

if you are taken in by the absolute beauty of what you're seeing, one thing you can't do in your space suit is go, whew-w-w-w-w-yes, yeah, whistling. Can't whistle in space? Well, it's, no, I mean, it's really weird in that low pressure environment. Whistling is really, really hard. And your voice tends to kind of drop an octave, which for me is quite good because I've got a high voice anyway. But it'd be great for David Beckham.

So, yeah, it's one of those environments where, you know, you're saying that low pressure, just weird things happen. So no, whistling is really hard. Wow, I didn't know that about the voice. That's, I want to try that. I'm put off by the lack of whistling, because, My mum always said, you can't be unhappy when you're whistling. But I quite like the idea of the voice going down an octave, kind of sexy and sultry.

Yes, sexy astronauts. That's the only version that we have. Yeah. It's funny when you say it's about sexy astronauts. One of the things that came up, why I came up with the fact is from gravity and Sandra Bullock, you know, coming in from her spacewalk and taking it off. And there she is. All she's wearing is hot pants underneath her space. So that's why I thought, I've got a, it's been.

a myth-busting here. I can't believe that was your chief problem with the science of film Gravity. Oh, everything else. Everything else is perfectly accurate, of course. We fly around on fire extinguishes all the time. You do see George Clooney's ghost when you're up there. Everyone sees George Clooney's ghost. When you're inside the ISS, the clothes that you're wearing, obviously quite different, more comfortable, hopefully. But when you have to take them off, is it the case that I think I was listening to the NASA podcast and they were saying that dead skin is a real problem. So when you're taking off your socks, particularly, dead skin comes off a lot. And you have to take your socks off next to a sort of suction vent or something, right? It's gross, yes. Yeah. I mean, there's some things

about the human body you just don't want to really see. And we don't get to see on earth how much we shed each day, really. It's kind of hidden from us. But up there, yeah, you take your socks off and in weightlessness, anything that's inside your socks will just come flying out. And your feet, because you're not walking on them. All of the hard and dead skin that's accumulated all of our lives, it's just after about a month or two, it's shedding off. So big, big, horrible flakes of skin coming off your feet. I mean, you have to do it next to the air return grid because it's the cleanest way of doing it. Just take your socks up. Are they reusable for anything in the way that I know that like urine urine is being turned back into water to drink? That's a good point. No, we haven't, we haven't

become that quite ingenious as to how to reuse dead skin. One thing I really found interesting was what you described. So you captured a cargo vehicle when you're up there. Not what captured. You know, it was scheduled to come in. It's not like you were just doing space piracy or whatever. But the method by which you gauge how close it is, because you're using a robotic arm, aren't you, to insert exactly the right moment.

And obviously it's rolling, you're rolling. there's lots of pitch and yore. But the method is so... It's antiquated. It is. It's unbelievable. And, you know, when I was first told, this is how you do it, I couldn't quite believe it. I thought, oh, hang in a second, where's the laser rangefinder? Where's the image tracker?

You know, coming from a background flying, all these sophisticated aircraft with these tracking systems and lock-on systems and guidance systems, you've got two old hand controllers. And what your crewmate's going to do is print off some sheets of paper. with pictures of how big the cargo vehicle looks at different ranges. So when he sees it this big, he's loads, it's five meters, then four meters, then three meters. I thought they're having a joke, but that is how we do it. And you just have to drive in this robotic arm from the cupola window, looking at some old screens and just hoping it all goes to plan.

It's by far and above. It's the highest pressure moment for any astronaut is capturing a cargo vehicle, more so than a spacewalk without a doubt. And if you miss it, is there a sort of second chance? Or is that it? They're stuck in space now forever. It depends how badly you screw up really. If you just miss it, you can have a second chance if you haven't knocked it.

But if you knock it and you know, you can cause some damage or even cause it to go off tumbling into space, then that could be really bad. So, yeah, the pressure is definitely on there. So in the way that you train underwater for the spacewalk, Do you also go to sort of amusement parks and play that claw game where you have to capture a soft toy? I've never won at that claw game. It's the most depressing thing in the world. Years of training, years of academy training, wasted.

Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that visitors to the Sarawak Cave in Borneo don't report feeling claustrophobic they report feeling agoraphobic. Riddle me that. What is going on? Is it huge? It's big. It's the biggest cave chamber in the world.

So this is inside a cave system called the Good Luck Cave. And it would fit, and it took me a long time to do this calculation because it's a while since I worked out volumes. But it would fit roughly 10 Wembley Stadiums inside it. I think, based on Google Maps measuring of the Wembley Stadium, stadium, which is large, very tall, very wide, very long. It was discovered in 1981 and when the first people went in, they didn't know they were in a big cave at all. They thought they were in a little tunnel. And so they were just feeling their way along the sides. And they followed the wall for

ages. And it was sort of bending round. And when they'd almost come back done full circle, they were like, hang on, is this just empty in the middle? Are we in a giant stadium? And they walk through the middle of it and realize that they were. Wow. Wow. That must have been incredible. I can imagine that that feeling of agoraphobia actually you get to the middle of that stadium and switch the lights off I mean you'd think you're just floating in space it just I mean it'd be incredible yeah the other thing having done some gaming as well the the fear of getting lost because of course gaming is all about following known features and and finding your way back in the middle of that thing you know how do you work out which way which way you're going to go I wondered that yeah just wandering around it forever

Because you kind of forget when you see pictures of caves that obviously very well photographed and you do forget that you are in pitch darkness basically all the time, aren't you, except for a tiny light in front of your face. Yeah, yeah. But why is no one set up some sort of breadcrumbs system whereby you can, you know, luminous breadcrumbs or glow sticks? Hansel and Gretel.

Yeah, what's going on? I'm sure there are directions, aren't there? Maybe. Directions? You've got a compass? Do you take a compass there? Yeah, if the rock's... If there's not too much metal content, iron content in the rocks, I guess you could try a compass.

Or just have a little bit of a string. Use the cave diver method. Yes. We mentioned the Sandun Cave in Vietnam ages ago as an example of another extremely big cave. But I didn't, I think we said that it has clouds that form in it. That's how tall it is. But I didn't know this. It's got a jungle in it.

It's got proper sort of, you know, virgin jungle. 600 feet below the surface of the earth. And it's also, this jungle, I read, is home to the only underground monkeys on the planet. They're the only monkeys in the world that live their lives underground, which I really hope is true. Well, where have you read?

I read it in a reliable source. We're supposed to be professional researchers and sources, Andy. I hope it's true as well. You've just said it. That is unbelievably cool. I guess they've evolved to, suit their habitat. So I wonder how different they are to, you know, other monkeys in the region that are outside the cave. It feels like they're a really good backup for all life forms

on Earth, as in if we all go, do there's some accident nuclear or something? At least those monkeys will probably be fine. Yes. Yes. But that came blinds got a big gaping hole at the top, right? As in it's not, they're not underground. They're not underground monkeys. They're just subterranean. There has to be sunlight. Yeah, for the trees. for the jungle to survive, yeah. Nice. You do often get actually in these massive caves, birds, you get little swiftlets.

So this is in the biggest cave by volume, which is actually in China. So the other one is the biggest cave by area. And the swiftlets are the birds out of which you make bird nest soup in China. And so that's why a lot of people go caving in there to collect that. Although I think they've commercialized bird nest soup and they've just started farming them these days. but it sounds really sweet.

I was reading about someone who went to sort of stay in that cave for a couple of months and said that you lie down on the ground and the swiftlets will just land on your chest and let themselves be petted. Wow. That's really sweet. It is.

That's great. And they make their nest out of saliva, don't they? It's all saliva bird's nest suit, basically, I think. It's strands of the whole bird nest is this white, these white threats. Oh, I thought it was twigs held together with saliva. I think it's pretty much all saliva glands with a little bit of paraphernalia to cushion it.

You've never been tempted to try some, no. It's not the best. It's quite a high price to pay for something that's apparently tasteless. If you're trapped down there and hungry, I think I'd give it a go, definitely. You definitely would actually, you're right. Just let the birds land on you, build their nest on you, and then... Keep eating it? Yeah. So frustrating for the bird.

What's happened to it? I looked away for one second. Caves are quite important for training for things like space, actually, aren't they? And training for how humans are going to survive in isolation, I think. So quite a lot of people do this weird thing where they experiment on themselves by going deep into caves and staying there for ages. And I think the king of that is this amazing guy called Michel Sif, who's this sort of geologist, who's basically been bedding down deep in caves for over 50 years for various long amounts of time. and the first time he did it, it was 1972,

and he spent six months, 440 foot inside a Texas cave, in fact, so maybe just avoiding the heat. And they learned so many interesting things, but the weirdest thing is the sleep cycle and how our sleep cycle changes. So he would fall asleep for sort of 30 hours and think he'd just had a short nap. Whoa.

And so one day he had lasted 52 hours. On his 63rd day inside, as in the 60th third time, he'd woken up, 77 days had passed above ground. So it seems like our days really lengthen when we're underground. But it sounds awful. I don't know why he kept doing it. He said he was so lonely he contemplated suicide. And this is the first time.

He's done it like seven times since. There's an awful story in his diary where he's just staying alone. He writes a diary every night. And when he first went down, he killed a bunch of mice who were infesting his little chamber. And then after a few weeks, he realized he really wanted a friend. And he saw a mouse. And he thought, oh my God, that's my friend. He's going to keep me company through these awful months.

And he spread some jam on the floor and then put a little pee next to it to lure this mouse in. And he slammed a bowl down over it to catch it. And he crushed the mouse. No. It just sounds like surely the worst moment of his life. What a shame. Oh, because I imagine in his head this was the Hollywood moment where a man on the ground with a mouse for a best friend, you know, like. But then he ruined it.

Totally ruined it. Yeah. There's actually a woman called Josie Law, who's the woman who spent the most time alone in a cave, and she did successfully befriend a white mouse. Oh, that's something. That's something, yeah. I read that account of Sifra and his mouse.

I think he said later on that he didn't remember it, because obviously you forget time when it's all similar and monotonous. Yeah, but he did keep a diary, so he wrote in the diary, I killed the mouse in his. I'd love to know what he felt when he came out with that kind of sensory overload of having been deprived of all those senses for so long. Yeah, because, I mean, when I came out after just seven days, it was as if somebody had turned the contrast up on the telly to full. The sky was this brilliant blue and you could smell the moss under the trees

and everything was just an overdraft. It only lasted for about 30 minutes, but it kind of made me realise that we get so used to our limited senses and other animals, you know, have these incredible senses that it would be wonderful. I'd love to be able to smell like a dog or a polar bear and just to explore their world and, you know, or have the, you know, the eyesight of owls and be able to see what they see at night time. So I think... Where have you been underground? That was in a sardinia in a cave complex in Sardinia. There's about 15 kilometres of unexplored cave. And that was fascinating, Anna, about the time because we were actually deprived of sleep down there. That was part the exercise, they took our watches away. So we had no idea, no concept of time. And we'd be woken up

after about two hours and told that we'd had eight hours sleep. So now crack on with your next day's work, which we duly did, feeling a little tired come the third or fourth day, thinking, why am I so exhausted? And of course, of course, you're only getting two hours sleep a night without thinking you're getting a good eight hours. And then you get told after you, you wake up on the seventh morning thinking, okay, I'm leaving the cave today. No, no, no, no, no. You've got another three days to go. And so that was not allowing us to get into our natural cycles. It's fascinating to think the body actually goes the other way in a cave

and you actually lengthen your days and lengthen the amount of time you sleep. Were you angry when you sort of woke up and they were like, ha, punked you, you've only getting to our sleep in night. Yeah, but that was the whole point. They were trying to make us angry through the whole exercise. It was all about trying to push you to, you know, so that there'd be conflict between, as a team. They wanted you to learn how to deal with the pressure of being cold, wet, tired,

and hungry, and if they could instigate a little bit of conflict amongst you as a team, of course, then you're able to explore those psychological aspects as well. It's all, I mean, it was all really beneficial training for the space station. But I'm not sure I would voluntarily spend six months down the cave. I mean, that's an awful long time. And was there conflict? Is there a dead rival somewhere deep within the space? someone who never made it. Is it like the experience of coming out where you described this incredible sensory overload and you know you can smell the moss and the sunlight has never been brighter?

Is it like having been to the cinema in the daytime? Because for me, that's I think as close as I'll ever get in my life for that. I fell to my knees, I kissed the earth, all of it. You know, Brian, blessed. says that when he came down from Mount Everest, there was so much sensory overload for him that he could see the molecular makeup of flowers when he looked at them.

He could see the cells of his hand. Yeah, he said his eyes were so heightened in their clarity. Don't degrade the quality of truth you're getting from Tim here with your Brian Blessed bullshit. I'll go back to Andy's side. Is it like when you come out of IKEA after shopping for six hours? Keep it observational. There's a great word that I love, which is associated with caves,

which is Berenschliff. And this is a word that means the smooth polished surfaces of a cave wall caused by the fur of a passing cave bear. This is the story that's believed that cave bears, they wallow in mud, and they do that so they can loosen parasites that are on their fur. And the solids that are contained in the mud in connection with the hair that they have as they pass wall, acts like a sandpaper. So after time and time and time again,

it smooths the rock wall into this polished surface, and it's a surface that you can only get polished if done by this specific method of a bear doing it. So, yeah, Bergen-Schlipp. And when did Brian Blessed tell you that, though? Oh, that's so cool. That sounds like a German thing. It sounds like, yeah, it sounds like an obscure German gentleman, Barron Schlieff.

Rubbing up against a cave. There's a cave in Slovenia which has a train insider, which is so much fun. The Postonia cave. And it was designed to replace the sedan chairs, which were the original means of getting around the cave. They were for royals, obviously, only. But when these caves were discovered, it was the mid-19th century. And, you know, millions and millions of years have passed in the cave when they were unknown. And so, yeah, they then got sedan chairs.

Then they got a train which was hand pulled. So Victorian tourists would visit and just be pulled along by... laborers. And then eventually, because it's so horizontal in the cave, they've built a little mini Disneyland inside it. Caving was a different experience, wasn't it? Having read some of the quite hardcore experiences of cavers today, getting carried down

in a sedan chair did not feature anywhere. I'd be up for it if it did. It does sound quite dangerous. Andy Evis, I think, is sort of this absolute legendary. He's the great Spalunka of our age. And he was the first person to explore, all this good luck cave actually.

And he just such mad stuff happened. Like at one point there was a huge flood and they got trapped deep inside a cave and one of the people on their team had to do this extremely long free dive which they call a self-rescue where you know you just have to swim down under the flood and swim and swim and hope that you get out.

And I think a photographer split his thigh open and they had to trek overnight through the rainforest. When the doctor arrived to fix his leg, a tree fell through the roof of their camp just and landed just next to him. They all got fever from rat poison, I think. Was that a thing Tim they warn you about? Apparently everyone's feet get eaten away by gross bacteria.

Man, your feet have taken a beating, Tim. Between space and caves. Yeah, that's why the skin falls off. There's nothing to do with the, yeah, the pedicure you get from space. It's the rat. Yeah, we thankfully didn't come across any bears or rats on our caving expedition. In the wrong caves. Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. You did have that, didn't you, where you went through somewhere on an early caving adventure. You went through a narrow tunnel. And then you read the directions later on. This was back in the highly irresponsible days of my 20s when we were just, we were actually rock climbing and abseiling a lot and kayaking at the weekends in Wales. And we saw a couple of people just pop out the side of the rock face and got speaking to them. They said, oh, this area is riddled with caves. And so we thought, that's it. Next weekend, we'll do some caving then. And literally kind of had a couple of maglites each and a Kit Kat. And on off we went into this cave complex with a rough sketch of what it was and literally a photocopied couple of pages out the guidebook. And it wasn't until we were about two hours into the cave, having gone through these very, very narrow presses that Dave, my friend, read the second page of the guide and said if there was a lot of,

a noticeable flow of water through this thing called the pebble flow. You should abandon the cave immediately because it's prone to flooding. And it had been pouring with rain outside. And the pebble crawl was about 45 minutes back from where it'd come. And the water had been up to our elbows as we went through this thing. So we suddenly realized we needed to get out of this thing in a hurry. By the time we got back to the pebble crawl, we had about three inches of where we could. breathe along this 20-foot kind of tunnel. So we were going through there with our chins tilted upwards and we were so close to being trapped down there. Were you still sort of holding the paper of the photocopy bits of the guideposted by the water level? We'd given up on it. I don't think

we ever got that bit of paper back again. But no, we realised quite how irresponsible we've been after that and we treated that environment with a bit more care and respect and came back the following weekend a bit better prepared. But that was a good lesson. It's reading page two of the instructions. That seems to be a big thing. It is kind of like when you get to the end of cooking something and it says serve with the pre-prepared grilled vegetables from page 72. Yeah. Yeah. Or leave to set in the fridge for 48 hours. You'll guess we're arriving in 10 minutes. Basically, there's nothing that exciting that you can tell us to him that we can't compare it to something much more boring.

Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is Andy. My fact is that Chicago has an alcoholic spirit which tastes so bad that its own founder used to boast that only one in 49 men liked it. Who was the one? Yeah. It was, so this is a thing called Jepson's Mallort. Founded by a man called Carl Jepson, and it's a kind of spicy. liqueur, which is flavoured with wormwood. And yeah, mostly known in Chicago, but it's drunk in a few other places.

But I've tried it, and it is really, really an acquired taste. And the back of the bottle had this label, which said, most first-time drinkers of Jepson Malort reject our liquor. During almost 60 years of American distribution, we found only one out of 49 men will drink it. It is rugged and unrelenting, even brutal to the palate. The whole label is just trying to say, you're not going to like this. Wow.

I'm amazed that you've tried it, Andy. You're a man who has an extra squeeze of lime and his soda water on a wild night out. Yeah. I've actually tried it as well. Have you? Yep. I tried it on the last night of our US tour for Fish

when we were in Washington. Well, that's the night I tried it. Washington, D.C. I couldn't remember if... Yeah, yeah. I couldn't remember if we both had it on the same night. Yes. It was the worst thing.

You tried it together with each other. Well, this is how pungent and painful it was I don't remember Andy being there when I tried it, and he clearly doesn't remember me being there. It's horrific. I mean, it's utterly disgusting. I am one of the 48, and I agree with Tim. I want to know who this one guy is.

In fact, actually, I know who this one guy is. One guy that we know who drinks it is a comedian who's been on our show, John Hodgman, who has it as his preferred drink. Really? Because I read a quote from John saying, it tastes like pencil shavings and heartbreak. So that is a bizarre preference for him to have. But he just loves that.

I think it's such a wonderful description, pencil shamington heartbreak. How would you describe it? I would just say it's overwhelmingly better, but they've asked more eloquent people than me. So they don't have many employees. It's quite a small firm, Jepson's Malort. But in the past, they've asked the public for slogans.

And the slogans that have come back have been things like, Malort, what soap, what is its mouth out with? Melort, kick your mouth in the balls and my favourite, Malort, these pants aren't going to shit themselves. Stunning. We've got to employ that person for our PR. Yeah.

So it's got Wormwood in it, right? Yeah. Similar to Absinth. And which has a bad reputation, Wormwood. And maybe unjustifiably. Do you remember when we were all younger and everyone claimed that absinth was illegal was the first claim and the second claim was that the wormwood in it that's now illegal

makes you hallucinate and sends you mad. Did everyone have that like this kid? Dimly, yeah. But none of it's true. Not true. No, although it was banned for years because people thought it was true. So it was, absinth was what, you know, all your fan goffs and all your crazy artists and writers of the 19th century were drinking,

especially in France. And it was thought to be responsible for the degeneration of French society. I think. And it was banned in France. And the justification was that Wormwood sends you mad and gives you hallucinations. And it was only in the 1970s that we showed that it's in such tiny amounts, it can't do you any harm in it. And it's just the fact the absinthe is faking strong and full of alcohol. But the US didn't lift the ban until 2007. Wow. Do you know what the Russian for Wormwood is? It's Chernobyl.

What? Really? So Chernobyl was named after the Wormwood fields, the town and the nuclear plant were named after the Wormwood fields around it. That is the Russian word for Wormwood. Yeah. Oh, so if you were to do this podcast in Russia and say Wormwood doesn't do you any harm, then that would not be true. And you'd have to be very careful with the translation. Tim, you were a cocktail mixer once, right? A long time ago, I wish I'd come across Moulod then, because I think it would be a lot. hilarious to have set that to the customers. Were you a mix-sol, what's the word? Were you a,

what's Tom Cruise? A mixologist. Well, they, do you know, they, they call that flare tending. Flair tending. Flair tending. Flair tending. Yeah, it was an ordinary pub. It was called the Nags Head in Chichistice. It was an ordinary pub, but come Thursday through Saturday, it was just heaving. It was a great sort of young person's place to go and drink. And we turned it into a cocktail bar for those. those nights. And Olivier Barbadette was at the French head barman and it was all, yeah, we're proper there, black tie waist, black waistcoats kind of thing. So quite a sort of French influence to it. And it was all flare tending. And we would be spinning bottles, we'd be throwing glasses, catching ice cubes down there. It was just brilliant, so much fun. We'd practice for hours

outside with empty bottles, smashing them all over the place and having to sweep up all the, all the debris before opening hours and then been off would go. So it was a huge amount of fun. Did it ever come in handy? Just did that training ever sort of later on the ISS? Was there a moment where? I'm trying to think where I'd love to say yes, but I honestly can't think. But no, in terms of coming in useful, it's got absolutely no use whatsoever.

I guess if you throw a bottle of water over your head on the ISS, it just keeps going in the opposite direction. Exactly. Exactly. That you've just lost your water, yeah. Hey, do you know who the first ever flare tender was? As far as we know, a sort of documented case of it. Is it a famous person who we will have heard of?

Absolutely not. No. Right. Okay. Yeah, this would be a tougher guest. All right. So, start the alphabet A, Aaron. That's called Aaron. No.

Head down towards Jay and you'll be more there. Jerry, the Professor Thomas. And he was an American bartender and he wrote what was the first of the first. first ever book of fancy drinks, basically. It was called the bartender's guide, a complete cyclopedia of plain and fancy drinks. And he used to go around to different bars all over America. And he was the first to do tricks with spinning of the metal canisters that you would mix a drink in. And he would set them a light and he would transfer the flame into another glass. But yeah, so we know who kind of the first person was. And one of the things that he put into his cocktail book was

the Tom Collins, which I didn't realize was there's this hoax in America called the Tom Collins hoax. Have you guys heard of that? It used to be a game where you used to say in a bar, if the four of us were in the bar, I'd say, Andy, have you heard that guy, Tom Collins, who's been talking smack about you? And you'd say, like, what? And everyone would be like, oh, yeah, Tom Collins said this thing. And the idea was it was a hoax where you convinced someone that Tom Collins was talking about you and spreading rumors, making you furious. And that's what pranks used to be back in the day. So it's like stripy paint, isn't it? It's sending someone off a stripy paint.

It's kind of like that. Yeah, because it should be obvious. No, it's not a thing, Dan. There's no... Dan's getting up to get some. Hang on. You get stripy toothpaste. Why don't we get stripy paint?

Surely... Do you know, that is actually an unanswerable argument. That's a really, really good point. He's outwishing them. Damn it. What do you guys think is the most popular spirit, or the most commonly drunk spirit, on earth or in the universe.

I love that we have to specify on Earth windtips on the podcast. Yeah, we do. I know which one it is off earth. I don't know. Gin is fairly popular. Also whiskey. Lots of big whiskey fans out there. Nice.

I mean, you're not going to get it. Don't think. I don't get it. It's Baizu, which is Chinese liquor, which basically is not drunk outside of China, but is the most commonly drunk spirit in the world. By Joe, are you saying? Like, by, it's a Joe is an alcohol, and by being white, the word.

Yes, but it's a spirit. But it's a spirit, yeah. Yeah, it's distilled. Yeah, have you tried it. I think I have. Yeah, I can't, it sounds familiar enough that I feel like I must have. It sounds, I texted my friend yesterday who lives in China and says it resembles paint stripper, but it's very popular. But it sells more than whiskey vodka and rum combined worldwide.

Wow. And it sounds great. there's a museum in China. How do you pronounce it, Dan? China. Fuck you. Baidio. There's a Baidual museum in China

which shows a reenactment video of when it went global, which I think it's question mark over whether it's gone global. But apparently it went to the World Fair in San Francisco in 1915 and all the Americans were sneering at it and this weird sort of earthenware jar filled with this Chinese drink and it made the Chinese delegate so nervous it was smashed all over the floor and then

the scent of it was so seduced everyone that it won the prize that year and has gone down in history as everyone's favourite spirit. Of course. Yeah, we've all got our bottles right here, haven't we? Yeah. Have you heard of the six o'clock swill? This is a thing. Heard of it? No? No. So this was a thing that happened in Australia. Okay. And we, I think Australians are the sort of kind of big drinking country, you know, they like the drink. There was a rule in place, a law in Australia and New Zealand, that you had to finish your drinks. Last orders was 6pm, pretty much every day, as far as I could tell. And this lasted from 1916, when there were restrictions because of the war, until 1967. All licensed

establishments had to stop serving at 6pm, incredibly early. So the 6 o'clock swill was the final hour of legal drinking in Australia between 5 and 6pm. Everyone would leave their work and immediately go to the bar and start getting drinks in hand over fist, drinking as much as they could until 6pm. And then bang, the bell rang and that was the cutoff. Yeah. And it was mayhem. What year was that ended?

It ended in different regions of different years in Australia, but the final one to scrap it, scrapped it in 1967. Yeah. It's quite late. Your parents might remember it then. Well, actually, so my parents would have been, my dad would have been 10 roughly at that time. So he remembers it very well. But no, weirdly, the last time I was in Australia, I was talking to my grandfather who was there in that period.

He's Austrian, but he'd moved over at that point. And he was telling me exactly about this thing. And the problem was, is everyone after 6pm had to drive home, and they all did it drunk as hell. And because you'd had to drink so quick that you felt really ill. And he said, many, many days, would he stop at a traffic light? It was just people, including him, rolling down their window, vomiting out the window at a traffic light.

and then continuing on to drive home. So, yeah, it was definitely, definitely a thing. We are going to have to move on in a sec. I've just got one more drink. Yeah. Have you heard of whiskey? No. Okay, this is a drink that was invented by a British entrepreneur in 2010.

He's called James Gilpin. And whiskey is whiskey made using the sugar-rich urine of diabetes patients. So if you have diabetes, you have a lot of sugar in your urine sometimes. And Gilpin has diabetes himself, but he contacted various elderly volunteers, including his own grandmother, and extracted the sugar molecules from their urine, added them to the mash stock to accelerate the fermentation. He didn't sell it. He said this was illegal.

It wouldn't be legal. But he said he was trying to make, you know, be thought-provoking about how we use the resources we have. And actually, as obviously on the ISS, everything is recycled to become clean drinking water. I thought it's not as silly an idea. But maybe it might be as well. Yeah. We certainly don't go making whiskey up there. But yeah, you are reminded every day, of course, that you're drinking your crewmate's urine that's been recycled in about 20.

four hours. It's a fast turnaround. It's a fast turnaround. If it was, yeah. Does your mind ever play with you, Tim, where you think you can, like, you can taste something that's not there? Like, is this definitely filtered? I just never drank pure water.

It was, I always mixed it with somebody. It was either a cup of tea or it was a fruit juice or something. Because to drink the pure water was, it was a little bit too close to the bone. This is why you didn't need to go to the lawn on your entire space. Because you're refusing to drink for your six months in place. You need more diabetics up there? Yeah, clearly. Get diabetics to sweeten the urine.

You don't even need to put sugar in the tea. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Land Rover once released a manual, which was edible, so if you got lost in the desert, you could eat it to survive. This was 2012, they published this. in Dubai, it's called the Land Rover's Edible Survival Guide. And the idea was, is if you got lost out in the desert, this manual could tell you things like how to build a shelter, how you could signal for help.

But then it became more practical as well. The metal wiring on the inside could be removed, and you could use it as a cooking skewer. It had reflective packaging around it as well, so that you could use that to make signals so that people could see you. But the greatest thing of all is that on the front, it says, in case of emergency, eat this book. and if you did eat it, according to the people who made it, the ink and paper, which was both edible, had the nutritional value of a cheeseburger.

So you were actually getting a good meal out of it, yeah. Right. So you need to have read it all first. Yeah, you've got to be so careful. You think which bits you're not going to need. You don't need to know about the air conditioning system. That can go. That's a snack. Brilliant. But such a clever idea.

I love survival guides. and unedible ones is the most practical of them all. It is. If you're desperate. It is. If only you'd had that inside your cave, Tim. You could have lasted hours more in there. Absolutely.

I know. It reminds me in the army, we used to get given these survival kits as well. And they had tallow candles. So it's edible candle wax. And it was a similar thing, but if push gave to shove and you were starving and you decided that warmth and light and heat wasn't essential,

you could just start munching. your way through this tallow candle instead. I tried some, and it was just disgusting. I mean, you just chew on this candle for ages, and it wouldn't, I mean, no matter how much saliva you could generate, it wouldn't go into a nice moist bar. It was just horrible, horrible. Wow. Is it just kind of fat tallow? It is, isn't it? Is it animal fat? Yeah, I think it is. Yes, yeah. But they did. What was the wick made of in the candle? Was that liquorice or something, so you could. No, I think that was the one bit that you weren't supposed to eat. It's got to be practical as well.

Yeah, you've got to light it. Also, apparently, sometimes it's a bad idea to eat if you're lost in the desert. Because the process of digesting food actually uses up a lot of water. So if you're really lost, the idea is that maybe you should limit yourself to drinking. And also, I didn't realise that. A page a day. Yeah, exactly. A line of text every few hours. But also you shouldn't drink in small sips,

which I think is quite useful because if I were stranded in the desert, I think I would be really conservative and I only have a few sips of water at a time. But apparently that means that your body doesn't, it doesn't launch the body's process that causes it to store the water. So it just loses it straight away. So the recommendation is that if you're lost in the desert, you drink water maybe three to four times a day in a big batch. And that's the way that it'll store it and then, you know, actually be useful.

Wow. Yeah. Didn't know that. That's very useful. They didn't teach us that you're at survival training. There you go. There you go, guys. We all could have died.

Saved a lot of lives today. Slightly less useful survival tip, possibly, is that you know how, so this fact is about something that's normally non-edible, but that turns out to be edible. Here's a fact about something edible that you can use for non-edible purposes, which is that you can use Doritos to build a fire. What? Because they're so covered in the sort of cheese.

flammable dust that they go up quite easily. It's short-term fire. It's fire lighters rather than you wouldn't have an entire fire about out of Doritos. Kindling, exactly. Could you clarify that? Because we're going to get very angry emails from Dubai. My Dorito fire went out in two seconds.

I mean, a lot of things can set on fire, can't they? Yeah, true. But I thought for a second maybe you could start a fire with Doritos by rubbing one against them. So that is genuinely good that you clarify. Sometimes if you open a packet of Doritos, have you noticed that there's nothing but ash in the bottom of it? Do you guys know the US military's universal edibility test? I don't know if the British military has an equivalent. No.

Well, this, did they ever teach you, Tim, like if you're stranded anywhere, how to identify stuff that's poisonous or not? Well, they told us, you know, put a bit on your lip for 10 minutes and then if your lip's not tingling and numb, then go under the tongue for 20 minutes. And you do this incremental process. and eventually there's small quantity. Do you get stomach ache? And eventually you can work out whether your body can tolerate it or not. You bang on.

They've nicked it off the Brits. Yeah. So you do get to all that. It's a very long process, isn't it? It's starving. It's very long, yeah. Especially the bit that's like swallow a tiny bit, wait for eight hours.

I mean, that's... Eat a page of your manual in between. Yeah. Yeah. I think the Italian army is the only modern one which gives out alcohol in its standard military rations to its troops.

The Guardian ran a huge piece about, you know, all sorts of different countries and the sometimes very stereotypical things they have. So the French army, they get deer patte, cassoulet with duck confit, small caramel pudding, mini baguette. They go super French. But the Italian army, I think, is the only one out of the ones they tried, which gives you a shot of alcohol, 40%, just to keep your speed. It's up, I guess.

Fantastic. I know the French rations, they used to give out a small, one of those kind of airline bottles of red wine. They probably stopped doing that now. But that just puts in comparison to the British, you know, where we get biscuits A-B. I have no idea what the A-B stands for. But the rations are just dreadful, designed to bung you up, to stop you having the need to go to the loo so frequently when you're on exercise or digging trenches.

or things like that. Did you get mini-tabasco with your ration packs? The US, yes, yeah, the US ration packs. Oh, the US? MREs, meals ready to eat. And they've got these brilliant chemical heaters. So, you know, the bridge rations, we're still on lighting your solid fuel tablets and you have a little stove to warm up the water.

But, no, America, you just rub the chemicals together, break the packages, and heats up chemically. And it gets really, really hot. it's a fantastic way of having a meal ready to go and they give you a little tobasco sachet in there or small bottle of tobasco. That's so sweet. Well, they're not telling you

they're all told to keep a Dorito in their back pocket. That's the key. My favourite survival meal that I learned about was one that Shackleton had, which I'd never read about, on his Antarctic expedition, the Endurance Expedition. His crew at one point,

and this was like well into it when they were like, we're going to die now, we are stranded and lost. They were attacked by a leopard seal, which very occasionally do attack humans, and in fact, I think, did kill someone a while back. So they were attacked by a leopard seal, and one of the crew managers shoots it. Not only that, when they split it open, its stomach was absolutely packed with completely undigested fish. Oh, wow.

So they just got a suitcase of fish. It's like a pinata. It's like a pinata. Stinking pinata. I found there's a classic survival guide book, which is the SAS Survival Guide, and it was written in 1987 by a guy called John Lofty Wiseman. And this has sold millions and millions of copies. And he's quite an amazing character, generally, to read into his story.

He's the guy who helped set up the SAS counter-terrorist team, and they were the ones that went into the Iranian embassy when that big incident happened. So he was part of the people that set that up. And he wrote this book, which is just packed with very good, useful advice, but also strays into territories where you think, when is this ever going to be a part of my life? For example, how to kill an octopus is a section. And he gives you three options of how to kill the octopus.

And a couple of them are quite normal, sort of using a knife, stab it between the eyes, or bang it against the rock. But one of the options is to thrust your hand inside of the octopus into its fleshhood and pull by its innards and flip it inside out like you would, like a washing glove, you know, like a marigold, I read in the article

being pulled the other way out. That's one of his sort of basic options for you to kill an octopus. And then it has, you know, lots of like basic stuff about how to lure animals and prey in and get water and so on. But yeah, pretty spectacular. He must have been absolutely terrifying at children's parties turning up with his octopus glove puppet.

It's amazing you said that I've actually got that book on my bookshelf because I think I was about 13 or 14 and it was given as a present. And I loved it. I absolutely loved it. The S-A-S-S-O-V-Han book, but you're absolutely right. And I remember as well, and I haven't read this for 30-plus years. But there was a bit in there that said about how to stop a car. If you're going down a hill, the brakes fail and the handbrake fails, you can use a wall and just scrape the car along the side of the wall to slay down. And I was thinking, when am I ever going to need her? But it's something I've remembered all of my life and I'm 48

and I haven't yet been going down a hill and all the brakes are now. But I'm waiting for that moment when I can scrape my car along the wall and think, thank you, Lofty. Thank you for saving the day. That's so good. You're going to trust a guy whose name is Lofty Wiseman, aren't you? Yeah, it's a great name. I'll do anything he tells me.

That's very good. We should probably wrap up in a set, guys. Sure. This is slightly off the topic of survival, but it's just one more thing about food and sort of food for survival and food preservation. So the first ever tin cans of food, they were invented in the early 19th century. And get this, every single one of them had spent a month at a temperature of at least 90 degrees Celsius before being sold. A solid month. Why?

That's going to be overcooked. I think they would have been quite overcooked. Yeah, I don't think there were delicacies inside. They were made by a man called Brian Duncan, who was a Northumbrian engineer, and that was the quality control, was for it to spend a month at about 190 to 100 degrees Celsius. Really? I just find that amazing. I can't imagine how he made.

Just to cook everything out of it that could do you any harm? Yeah, the canning process. I learned a bit about that when we were looking at the food for going up into space. And we ran it as a competition to kind of design a meal for the day with all the right nutrients and minerals and vitamins. and then the winners of the competition got to cook it with Heston Blumenthal. And he didn't want to tin the food because it's just from a chef's point of view, it just destroys it, this whole canning process. Like you say, you have to have it at these really, really high temperatures.

But we ended up having to put a lot of it into cans anyway. He went through 25 different types of bread before he found the ideal bread that could make a bacon sandwich and you could pot the tin after, you know, 18 months and it would still be fresh, buttery, nice and warm and taste like a good bacon sandwich. But the bacon looked disgusting because everything, everything in the whole canning process is just cooked to oblivion to enable it to last so long. But the other, of course, the other one is the irradiation from the foil pouches that we have. And that all gets, you know, put through this process for, again, for long-term preservation. So,

it doesn't really matter what you do. None of the food is going to come out of a packet or a tin tasting particularly good. Hence the Tabasco. Heston Blumenthal would not survive long on the ISS, I sense. If he's refusing to touch anything that has to be tinned. And is it true, Tim, that Doritos are not actually allowed on the ISS because it's effectively a small bomb? That's a fire hazard. Well, they were, but after listening to this podcast, they're probably going to get removed

from the list. So we'll have a lot of angry astronauts now who won't be out about their Doritos in space. Okay, that's it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening. If you would like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we have said over the course of this podcast, we can be found on our Twitter accounts. I'm on at Shreiberland, Andy. At Andrew Hunter M. Major Tim. At Astro underscore Timpeak. And Anna.

You can email podcast at QI.com. Yep. Or you can go to our group. account, which is at No Such Thing, or our website, no such thing as a fish.com. All of our previous episodes are up there. Or you could go to certain book buying websites and get the new autobiography Limitless by Tim Peek. It is the story of everything that he's done in his life, from being in the military through to flying test pilot helicopters and planes, getting into space, getting back down again. Andy's just finished it, and you loved it, Andy.

It's so good. It's so exciting. It's so interesting. It's great. But yeah, Limitless is out now. See you again next week with another episode. Goodbye.