No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Dance Floor Book Club

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Live from the Crossed Wires Festival, Dan, James, Anna and Andy discuss podcast studios, parking spaces, robust moustaches and Robert Miles.  Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon Get an exclusive 15% discount on Saily data plans! Use code [fish] at checkout. Download Saily app or go to https://saily.com/fish

Hello and welcome to you know of a while hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you live from the CrossWires Festival in

Sheffield. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Anna Tyshinsky, Andrew Hunton Murray, and James Harkin. And once again, we have gathered around 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 Andy.

My fact is, in the 19th century, some Hungarian cavalry officers got extra pay specifically because they had to spend so much money on wax for their enormous moustaches. So we have on screen here an enormous military mustache. This was the age of the moustache, the 19th century. Basically, there was an officer called the Hussar. Very impressive.

The Hungarian hussars were the pride of Europe, you know, amazing, amazing. And there was a writer called John Padgett, who was touring Europe in the 1830s, and he was in Hungary. He reported they were up to a foot long, these moustaches. They were just incredibly stiff and waxed, and there was supposedly a little extra stipend for buying your moustache wax. Do you think it's an advantage of someone shooting at you? Because you're a bigger target, they might hit the moustache,

and it doesn't hurt so much? Yes. Yes, I do. Interesting theory. You say yes, you do, but I'm not getting that vibe from you. I think it's an interesting thing because John Padgett was going around and he was interviewing people over there and they were saying the idea of not having a mustache at all,

let alone a ginormous one that required wax, was an alien notion to some of them. They were like, that is what men literally have. You are not a man unless you have a mustache. How do you distinguish between men and women in the UK, is what they were asking. There are other ways. They never found them.

And that's why the Hungarian population has died out since. In the 19th century, around the time this is happening, a lot of people are trying to sort of prove various ethnic boundaries and saying these people are from one race, these people were from another race,

it was a big time for that. But a lot of them, I was reading articles, they really struggled with Hungarians because they couldn't compare their mouths because they couldn't see their mouths because they had such massive mustaches. There was a quote, the Majas, which is the Hungarians.

Garyans and not only a mustachioed people, but also one that is proud of a mustache that recognises there as a basic element of honour and respectability. Right. That's amazing as well, because you'd never have to worry about someone lip-reading you, right? There's just a wall of hair stopping. But it doesn't grow out of your mouth? No, but Anna. Can it grow down over it, really?

Yeah, you can get one of the waterfall ones. Those are lovely. They're like curtains. Yeah. They don't sound lovely, but I think there often is a disparity between what we're women think of moustaches in terms of how attractive they are and what men think of them. But it definitely caught on, didn't it? In military trends, in fact, it was uniform regulation in the British Army from 1860 that every soldier should have short hair on their head, no hair

on their chin, but hair on their upper lip. And I think it started with the East India Company and British soldiers went to India where, as is the case today, they are the world leaders in mustaches, I would say, probably. And it was a real mark of manliness for an Indian person to have a moustache. So they weren't going to respect, you know, British army officers unless they did. And so then I think it spread from there. And everyone had to have one. Everyone had to have one. And also, in some countries, it was illegal to have one if you were not in the military because you were basically impersonating a soldier. Are we talking 19th century? Or is it? I don't think this is still in force. No. Actually, a lot of the rules about wearing mustaches of the

army are not enforced anymore and it was World War I and it was because she had to put gas masks on. You can't get a proper seal on if you have a mustache. Yes, but this is exciting. There's new news from the British military on mustaches as of last year and beards. So my friend is in the army and I rang him up and asked him about this. Yeah. And it turns out April last year I think, finally the British army you're allowed to have a beard. Oh, thank God. I know. In the old, like before last April, you could have a moustache, that was fine, but a beard was absolutely not. There were Queen's regs on sideburns, not like they could only come down a certain proportion of your ear.

I just imagine in that episode of The Simpsons when Mr Burns doesn't know what sideburns are. I know I'm just referencing another TV show there, but... Yeah, but this has been changed and finally, and it was like the king himself intervened in this matter. Did he? Yeah, and you... Well, he's always always going to bring on the hot button issues, hasn't he? I'm not... I am not sure.

whether you're allowed currently in the army to have a beard but no moustache. You're allowed a full set. I don't know what the rules were. It used to be that the rules were you basically couldn't do it, but you could get an exemption for religious reasons, right? If you were Sikh, for instance, you were allowed it. A few people in the army that were allowed it, so like drum majors, pipe majors, bugle majors, goat majors,

which is people who looked after goats. And pioneer sergeants. And pioneer sergeants are amazing. They're people who would be at the fronts of a regiment. and they would have a special apron that they wore. And their job was to, like, clear the path for anyone who was walking behind them. And if someone's horse was wounded, it was their job, I'm sorry about this, to kill the horse. Right.

Oh, boy. And also, they would cut off one of the legs and give it to the soldier to carry with them because the animals had numbers branded on their hoof, and you had to take it back to prove that... I haven't just lost my horse. Look, I've got this bit of it. This all sounds made up, doesn't it? That's amazing. Because I was about to ask, why does he have an apron

if his job is just going ahead of everyone else? But now you've said that, like, cutting horses up is part of the job. It's a good weapon if you need it as well. A horse's a leg. If you want to have other stuff. I think if you're in a cavalry charge and you're the one guy on foot with the horse's leg. I feel like I would have two of the horse's leg

and bang them together like coconuts. So the enemy thought I was on my horse. They'll think you're a coconut. That's a very good idea. Interestingly, the thing you were mentioning about gas masks is it was recently, in the last few years, it was learned that's the reason that Hitler ended up with his Hitler mustache. So he used to have a big, big mustache and it didn't fit the regulations for the gas masks. There's a debate about this. Yeah, absolutely. But this is from a biographer who knew him at the time who writes.

So it's a kind of, it's a firsthand account of someone's opinion, but absolutely, it's one of those contentious things. I thought he was harking back to old school Prussian stuff. I should say this fact comes from an article about why don't politicians have mustaches anymore in which Hitler plays a key role I would say Yeah So the other thing is apparently Pilots on airplanes have that similar thing

About not having beards because they have to be able To get the mask on if they lose oxygen and the oxygen mask come down So they could catch on fire When they give us the safety briefing at the start They never say, quickly shave your beard off And then apply the oxygen mask Is that just like beard is a god? honors. It really struck me that the battle between beards and moustache, they're on opposite

sides of the fight, aren't they? Because as soon as a beard becomes popular, a moustache is just part of a beard. Or in fact, and I really like this quote, there was a novelist called Frank Richardson in the 19th century who said moustaches get lost in the general face fungus. That is the popular beard. So I think it was quite good for moustaches when people like Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch in the 19th century started to discover that bacteria caused infections because suddenly people were losing their beards

left right and centre because the idea was that lots of bacteria was going to get caught in them and in fact there was a 1907 experiment where they made a woman kiss a very hursuit on the face man and found that he was polluted with tuberculosis

and diphtheria bacteria as well as food particles and a hair from a spider's leg Where did they get this man from? It's just an every man. You probably got all of that in your beard right now, James. I don't deny it. So this is a lot about men in the army and stuff like that

because we're talking about mustaches. But there is Manuela Seons, who's an Ecuadorian revolutionary female who used to wear a mustache. A false or... No real. No, no, she didn't grow one. She was at the Battle of Ayakuchko, and as proof she was there, she carried around the mustache that she'd taken off a dead enemy, and she would wear it at masquerade balls.

So she would come around and wear this mustache as just proof. This woman was one of Bolivar's people, and actually was in a relationship with Bolivar a lot of the time. Just like one of the most important Ecuadorian revolutionaries. It's just it feels very hard to take a mustache off someone you've, that's quite an operation to shave off a... I don't think you shave it off. I think it's more of a scalping issue. Yeah, it's got to come with the skin. Otherwise, how do you piece it back together?

And I think it's a good move at a dance, because no one's going to refuse to get on your dance card once you tell them the moustache you're wearing belongs to the last bloke you refuse to dance with you. Actually, there is some evidence that in the 19th century was a trend for women to have a whiskery face. When whiskers became so popular, there were fashion journals that said women would start wearing their locks of hair

down the side of their face, where a man's sideburns would be in imitation of men's sideburns because they were so popular. And there were adverts for pencils for women to draw little whiskers on their cheeks. And there was a dye advertised for women's whiskers. Right. Yeah. So this is the thing, why don't women typically have as much facial hair as men? What is going on?

Because there are all these reasons of why we've got hair on our head, which is some protection. To keep you warm and stuff? To keep you warm, like, again, hair on your head, hair and like when men grow chest hair, that's a warm thing. Armipid hair and pubic hair is to reduce friction You know, also where I keep my tuberculosis Right So if these were reasons like friction and heat retention And keeping the sun off and all that

You would expect women to have full beards and moustaches as well Yeah Which means it's either something in male-female relationships Or male-male relationships In that it's either to attract and impress And excite women Or it's something to like cow and repel rival men Do you know what I mean?

It's got to be the latter. Because as I say, the number of people I've come across, no offence, I'm trying to count the beard of people in the audience now quickly. I'm literally sitting next to you. I've come across so many people who are, so there's Rod Littlewood, who's vice president of the World Beard Association. There's Steve Parsons of the British-based Handlebar Club, handled by mustaches,

the world record holder who's an Indian man for the longest moustache. All of their wives say, I didn't like it. I'd rather they didn't devote their entire lives. I mean, the poor wife of the Indian guy, Ram Singh Chowhan, said, you know, for the first decade or so, I thought this is a really bad idea. I'm sort of repulsed. And then eventually, as I realized, he was building a career out of it. But, yeah, Steve Parsley.

How long is his, sorry. So his is 14 foot long. I think it's seven foot from each side. That's long. Yeah, that is long. You can be in every room of the house at once. But do they? You can send it to the fridge to get a beer for you.

That's nice. Apparently, dipping them in beer is good. This is according to the handlebar club guy, who says dip it in beer to keep it. Yeah, but what does his wife think? Well, indeed. There was a thing that said he's got a great comeback to his wife who complains about his facial hair.

He always says, I say kissing a man without a mustache is like drinking champagne without the bubbles. And I don't think that is a good comeback. I don't think. Well, you also like white wine. That's a good point. Yeah, you're right.

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

I'll ask on behalf of everyone. The royal beaver. With the flowing beaver of Queen Elizabeth's Royal Age. Yeah. Beaver is just another word for beard. Oh, that's all it is, guys. And it's overdue a comeback. We probably shouldn't talk about mustaches without mentioning our colleague who's been on the podcast a few times. Anne Miller's one of her favorite facts.

She's got a huge mustache, hasn't she? She always likes this fact. Well, and I'm going to ask, do you guys think that if you're in the CIA, should you keep a fake mustache on hand? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Of course. You should have a drop. No, not on your hand. Wait, then you just put it up like that.

That's going to work great on a podcast, Andy. We're not going to explain what Andy's doing even. You can imagine. But your imagination's run wild. I'm putting a finger in front to be a flowing beaver. That's what I'm doing. Carry on. It's working like a charm.

Well, so the fact that Anne loves is that in 2008, there was an MI6 officer on the one show whose fake mustache fell off halfway through an interview, which is absolutely cracking. You can't see the footage. It was because they didn't. actually broadcast it. Only the people in the studio know. But John A. Mendes, who was the CIA's mask dress of disguise during the George Bush era, the George Bush Sr.

era, sorry. She says that you shouldn't go for fake mustaches because they are very uncomfortable, so it's always obvious when someone's got one. And the glue does tend to melt and it falls off, which gives the game away. She said instead, horn-rimmed glasses, very effective, because you notice the glasses and not the person and just accessorize. So just carry a nice leather bag and a big cigar and people will remember those two things. Is it possible that Elton John

has been deep cover CIA all these years? Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that one of the most successful club songs of all time is mostly used to stop people from wanting to dance.

I've got to say, I think Dan, pretty much all club songs make me not want to dance. Agreed. I just want audiobooks. That would be great. 2am audiobooks. So this is, we'll all know the song, Robert Miles' children. You know that? So that was a song that was written by Robert Miles. He wrote it in Italy. He was writing under another name.

He became Robert Miles because he wanted to go miles in his career. So he had a real destiny thing to his name because he wanted to go far. They do kilometers, don't they? Yeah. But a mile is even longer, I guess we're right? Yeah, and so he wrote this song, and he wanted the song to be played at the end of every single club night, every rave that was happening,

because a lot of car crashes were happening after raves, and it was because everyone was leaving the club of a really pumping song, really adrenalineized, they'd get in the car, and they would crash. The idea was, play this song at the end of the set, and it would put a trance-like music, it would calm the person down, and allow them to get into their car a bit safer.

And DJs globally have been doing it It's obviously not going to be every rave that does that But largely, that's what that song became It was road safety basically for the end of a night I didn't think I knew that song And then as soon as I listened to it I thought, oh, of course, I've heard this dozens of times It was absolutely massive, wasn't it?

It was apparently cost just 150 pounds to produce it And it got to number one in Europe The Whole of Europe for 13 weeks And he was the only Italian solo artist To ever win a Brit award. Really? Wow. Wow. Absolutely huge, and he died very young, didn't he? He did 47, very sadly.

It's a shame. This thing was called the Saturday Night Slaughter, or in Italian Strachie del Sabato Serra. It was a recognized thing. It was hundreds of young Italian people were dying every year. I think they might have assessed how much effect it's had.

Because I've heard this song at the end of things like, you know, roller disco, but I don't think that was... Is that the closest you've been to a nightclub? I think it might... Yeah, I think it might... Well, it's pretty exciting in there, Anna. Oh, you're still on wheels, so it makes sense, right?

Like, that's a good use. Right, yeah. But I didn't think I like dance music, and it turns out I do. Do you? Have you ever been to a rave? No, okay. I mean, some of that roll of us go got pretty heavy, but, you know. I think you would have been cheering on the Public Order Act of 1994

that kind of stopped all the raves from happening in the 90s. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've got that printed out on my wall. I love that one. That law changed the number of people you needed a ray from 100 to 20. So if you had 20 people in an area and they were all dancing to music, then you could nick them all. And you could ban anyone who's playing music,

which was predominantly characterized by the omission of a succession of repetitive beats. Right. Okay, so then a band called Otrechtre, they issued a track called Flutter, and in that track, no two bars had the same. beat. So it was all the way. It got to... Well, I know it sounds awful. Was it? It was awful. It was really awful. But it did the job of

that you were allowed to play it in a rave because it didn't have repetitive beats in it. But no one's not. It seemed to it, presumably. Everyone leaves the rave. So it sounds like it would do the job of the profits for it went to a liberty. It is crazy that they tried to ban repetitive music. Yeah. But the police were really worried. It was in the early 90s, wasn't it? So this law was 1994. That's right. And that followed a couple of years of national panic,

moral panic about raves and rave music. There was a thing called the rave at Castle Mawton Common in 1992 where people danced for five days and it was a free illegal festival basically for about 20,000 people and the police was just so worried about it. The same year they broke up a party by using a JCB Digger to smash through one of the walls of the party. Wow.

I know. It was a properly, it was a very, very intense time. That sounds more dangerous than the dancing itself, doesn't it? I think so. for people like Andy who's just standing next to the wall not wanting to dance. I just can't roller skate. That's the problem. But actually at that time, the rave culture was known as the second summer of love, but it was credited for reducing football hooliganism.

There's a lot of people who were going to football matches and who might have caused a fight otherwise. Instead of taking lots of cocaine, they were taking lots of ecstasy and just hugging each other. Oh, okay, much better. Yeah. Well, that's it. So that's an interesting thing. I read, been to a few, I went to a rave four nights ago. No, you did. Yes, I did. It was a birthday party in Margate. I got a lot of trouble from my friends there because I brought a book with me.

And I do think, like, 2am dance floor book club would be an amazing thing to set up. So I went the other night and I remembered what it was like to go to a rave. It was really fun. But one thing I didn't see there, which apparently happens a lot in raves, is a lot of people are sucking on pacifiers, on dummies.

And I'd never heard of that, but apparently this is a big thing. And the reason is It's because if you're at a rave, you're often on drugs, MDMA, a big one, leads to massive amount of grinding of teeth. People used to do that in my world of days. Here we go. All right. And I'm not going to go into any further detail.

Okay, so Pacifiers, dance music. Do you want to play a game of type of electronic music or show on CBBs? Yes. Okay. Okay, so Fidget House. is that a show on CBBs or is it the type of electronic music? I'll say that's CBBs. Yeah, CBBs, I think.

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

yeah how yeah clearly house music audience puffin rock see babies we have a very young audience in today we should say they're all sucking on pacifiers on the front round yeah it's an animated children's series

about a young puffin named una okay yeah are there any glitchy four four beats baby club baby club I'm gonna say music is it baby club

or is it baby club music I think it's baby club of music. Yeah, music. You are so bad at this. And also, don't you have very young kids? Yeah. Wow. I haven't actually locked in my answer yet. I feel like I might give it away. Go up, Dad.

Club. No, CBBs, obviously. Yeah, no, it's where all the kids sit around in a circle and sing songs. Oh, beautiful. Nice. And finally, squea S-W-E-E-E. Club. Baby. Club. is a type of music.

Yes. So it's a type of music where the aim is to squeeze out as much interesting sounds as possible. From where? From the synthesizers, Dan. Ah, okay. One of the things I find quite interesting is that the subgenres of dance are basically just defined by their tempo. Right? So trance was just it going slower.

And so the oldest trance band is a thousand years old. And they're so cool. the master musicians. Is this like collectively? Like how the Rolling Stones are about 400 now? No, no, no. It's been going for a thousand years.

They're all still in fit as fiddles. There's been some handover. So it started a thousand years ago. It's based in Sufi tradition. And it's in Morocco. They opened Glastonbury in 2023, which I think just means you play Glastonbury when no one's quite arrived yet.

But still, and they're incredible. You should look them up. And they're better than anything you see at a club. So performances, in their, like if they do a performance, it goes on all night or it can go on for days, they play constantly, it's supposed to induce a literal trance,

and it's on drums and Woodwind, mostly lots of circular breathing, and then it climaxes in this pan like God who comes and dances around flames and quivers and chases children around with olive branches, and he's dressed in the skins of four black goats, and he's been played by the same guy

for the last 50 years. Anyway, you can go. It's the festival in Morocco. You can go and see them perform. It's the smallest festival in the world. Only 50 people can attend. Have a 10. They'll want to attend.

Yeah, they've never actually set a limit. It sounds great. You stay in the musicians' houses. They have to cook for you. That sounds good. Yeah. They cook all your meals and then they go and perform. It's a big deal.

Timothy Leary was very into it. Was he? Yeah. William Burrows, all your guys. Okay, so we're talking counterculture 1950s kind of period. That kind of thing. Wow.

The guy who's chasing the children, is he trying to beat them? Because normally if you say, I want to offer you an olive branch is a nice thing. No, no, it's scary. It's scary. Yeah, he's going for a beating. But I'm sure it's mostly just acted out at this point unless they've been really naughty. It's interesting you mentioned beats because I was talking to, so my best friend is Ash Gardner. He wrote the theme tune to No Such Thing as a Fish.

So Emperor Yes, it's the song called Wasps. After he released that album, they were approached by Superdrug because Superdrug wanted to make the ultimate electronic song to make love to. Wait, Super Drug the chemist. Yeah. And yet, when I did that in Super Drug, ever kicked out. Yeah, they approached Ash and said, we want to commission you to write a song that couples can make love to.

Was it to sell condoms? It was about to lose weight. It was about being healthy while you were, while you're in bed. So this is how they described it. What's you talking about? This is Ash. How has this never come up?

He wrote our theme tune and then he wrote Sexercise, which is the song. No. This is the description. As written by Super Drug for the release, Sexercise is something of a sonic epic at 22 minutes long. But this is a melting pot of ideas and experimentation, a synth-laden exploration of pure passion. And there's a few comments underneath it.

One guy's like, doesn't do it for me, dog. And it's pretty weird. But they got paid. really well for it. Wow. So what they were told was there's the BPM that is best for being in bed doing the act.

And losing, and that's why the obesity epidemic ended, wasn't it? Whenever I started shagging. We said years ago that sex only burns off the number of calories in, what was it? It was one small meringue without sugar. It was one small sugar-free meringue.

I think there are ways of having sex where you can gain calories. I really depends how you do it, isn't it? It is time for fact number three. And that is James. My fact this week is that children could learn to read faster if all lessons were held in a podcast studio. This is a study that was done in Japan,

and the idea was they got a couple of classrooms, and one of them they really soundproofed, and the other one was just a normal classroom, and they found that the children did much, much better in the soundproofed room. The idea is that when you're trying to learn how to read or learn how to speak, you're listening to your teacher and you're trying to work out what they're saying. But when there's loads of echoing around, you can't really hear it all properly.

And also with very, very young kids, you might get one of the kids gets a bit upset, and they start making noise, and then the teacher has to go louder, and then the kids go louder, and you get all this feedback of just things getting louder and louder and much more difficult to understand what's going on. And so they tried this, and they found that actually children did much better, and even the teachers found it much easier as well. the teachers found their job just way easier because they weren't having to fight against the echo.

So interesting. Yeah, really good. So when you say soundproof, you mean putting soft furnishings and mattresses everywhere? Yeah, so, I mean, how many people are in the audience here today? 1,500 people or whatever. Probably most of you have a podcast, I think.

But when you're doing a podcast, you have to try and make it the room as unequo-y as possible. So you've closed your curtains. Valued cushions. All that kind of stuff. I thought you guys were doing that to try and seduce me all these years. Yeah. No, it's very cool, the sound quality thing.

Because when you, there was a study done this year, I think, about, I mean, obviously everyone uses Zoom now. And if you use Zoom with a bad or a cheap microphone, it turns out people literally think you are stupider. You could be the cleverest person in the Zoom, but if you don't have a good microphone, others genuinely downgrade you. How interesting. And it, you know, and it can be, it replies to sort of everything.

So it's, you're less clever if you've got a bad microphone or your thought to be, or less hireable, if it's a job interview, less datable, if you do some cool Zoom dating. And it's just microphone quality. Really? Again, we should emphasise just on Zoom. Don't go to live interviews with your own microphone or anything. We're not recommending that, are we? But we wouldn't want the kids to learn in these studios because it would put podcasts out of business,

and podcasting is a great industry, cross-to-wise festival. I think we agree. Named, kind of named accidentally. I mostly say because Andy likes an accident thing. invention. Oh yeah. So named in 2004 and named after iPods. It was a software engineer Dave Weiner who started the first podcast for a journalist called Christopher Lidden and he created a program called I-Podder, which was called that because it was made to deliver online broadcast straight to iPods. And then a guy called Ben Hammersley wrote a piece in The Guardian about this new audio medium,

which was to be called podcast. And he went to his editors and they said, it's great, just need a bit of padding and you're shoving in a relevant sentence somewhere. So he said, said at the top, he wrote kind of a facile sentence saying, oh, what to call this? Audio blogging, podcasting, guerrilla media. And it caught on from there. Just a stupid bit of filler. What's interesting is September 28th, 2004, there was a blogger called Doc Searle, and he went to track the number of hits that Google would return if he wrote podcast into there. The first time, he says 24 times, reportedly, and then it starts to get bigger. By the end of September, there are 2,750 hits on Google coming back for podcast. An exact year later, the 28th of September 2005, over

100 million. And you know who was really pissed off about it? Microsoft. Because obviously, you've got the pod from iPod. So every time someone said podcasting was basically an advert for Apple. And so Microsoft tried to use their own name. They all called them blog casts until everyone in the world went, no, we're not calling them that. Right. It's not a good name. You know, a quarter of podcasts have one episode. Oh, okay. Yeah. And I think it's 65%

have fewer than 10. A lot of people say it should be higher, those proportions. I read an article by a company called Buzz Sprout, who's a free podcast host, and they said if your new episode gets within seven days

28 downloads, you're in the top 50% of podcasts. Wow. So we can get that one day. Yes. We can dream. George Bush was a forerunner in the world podcasting.

George Bush. George Bush. George Bush, senior, weirdly, yeah. Very rare to have a double bush podcast. Nice. Double Bush and a beaver. This was George Bush the younger, and he released his presidential weekly address

as a podcast in the kind of late-ish 2000, I think 2008-ish, which was pretty impressive, and he used to sometimes deliver it in Spanish, which is like good on him. But then I watched a little interview with one of his Hispanic colleagues who remembered that journalists would come up to him all the time and say,

And isn't it great that your colleague, the President George Bush, speak Spanish as well? And he said he never wanted to say to them, he doesn't speak Spanish. But he does try... He wasn't just making it up. He does try to speak Spanish, he said, and that's good enough.

There's quite a few podcasts out there when you look into the history of it that arguably are the first podcast. I tried to look into it, accidentally found out the oldest podcaster in theory, as in current age. And there's a guy that was an article that went out this year, He's 100 years old, and he has started making a podcast. He's called George Hall, and he was Lawrence Olivier's voice coach.

That's so cool. Yeah, so he's basically dishing, interesting anecdotes about Lord Olivier, his wife, people that he knew. He said, apparently in one of the interviews, he says that Olivia was going through a phase of being absolutely obsessed about colonic irrigation. This is the kind of juice we're getting from, George. horn at this point. That's amazing. We should mention the elephant in the room in the podcasting world. Joe Rogan.

A heard of it? Big deal. Yeah? Big deal. If you listen to Joe Rogan, which someone in the audience just said, nope. Lots of people do. But if you do listen to it, American women will be less interested in you as a partner.

And this was a survey that was done. It's another beard and mustache situation. Everyone thinks it makes them more attractive. Is it for men? American women between 18 and 34 were surveyed about what was a turnoff for them so 55% definite

said definite turnoff in a partner if they listen to Joe Rogan I just thought some of the other turnoffs were quite interesting about where we are like societally they send green texts that's a red flag for 7% of women Is that about recycling? It's not having an iPhone I think it's not having an iPhone I think it's the old sort of that

instead of the blue ones if you're on an iPhone Oh right yeah yeah Then there was some very weird red flags researching for best deals and rates before buying. 2% of American women said, no, that's not for me. They read, 1% said red flag. They look better in person. 1% said red flag.

Interesting. Whereas when men, American men at the same age were asked about women, for them the biggest red flag, they identify as a communist. 64% red flag. You've got to keep those red flags fighting, haven't you? I think it's hard the earliest podcast Because basically before podcast You had distributing cassette tapes around the place

I feel like that was the original podcast Was bootleg cassette tapes Because the thing about podcasting is that you're free Of all the constraints of having to produce the show Which has all this oversight, right? That's why there's so much shit out there It's because there's kind of no standards imposed And again, we want to say that podcasting is a great industry

And that this festival does really good jobs Of course, yes, all of that stuff but Russia did a strong line in that I hadn't realized during the Cold War it was so there was Samizdat in Russia which was the quite famous distribution of written the written word like band stuff exactly like Solzhenitsyn or band authors you know you'd type things out endlessly and then you'd send them to your friends and they'd retype them and send them to their friends and then there was this thing called Magnitisdat which was publishing by tape recorder And I think this is the original podcasting

where basically you record yourself into a tape saying, I'm not a huge crushing a fan or something, don't like Stalin, and then you'd send it to your mates and you'd say, can you listen to this and then make a copy of it and send it to your friends. And for some of these broadcasts, millions of people would end up hearing, apparently, which seems incredible.

That's really amazing. Patron saints are podcasting? We have one? We do. Well, it's unofficial. It was organized by some trainee priests in Burmendale. but they named St. George Preker as the unofficial patron saint of podcasting

because he worked sort of spreading the values of the gospel and he would send out lots of books and prayer booklets and he did lots of talking to people and that kind of thing. So he's a real saint? He's a real person. His miracle that made him a saint was that he saw a 12-year-old boy pushing a cart full of manure

and then when he went to help him, he put his hand on the cart and felt an extraordinary spiritual sweetness from the manure. Wow. Also, I don't know why pushing shit around makes you a patron saint of podcasting, but...

Well, also, he did a miraculous thing where he was able to get you 20% off your express VPN whenever you put in an offer code. Do you know there is a thing now? This is a practice that's going on where people are setting up entire podcast so that they can secure business meets.

meetings. So if you want to get in touch with someone in your industry who you admire, and you might write to them on LinkedIn, you might send them a cold email and just, and you might never hear from them. But if you write to them and say, would you like to appear on my podcast, there's a much bigger chance to say, oh yeah, I'd love to. People are just setting up entire podcasts, which have like four listeners, simply because it's a prestigious thing to be asked to do. Yeah. I thought that was why we were doing it. I can't even remember who we're trying to meet. Hey guys, I need to move us on to our next fan.

Can I tell you one last good podcast name? There's a podcast all about the horses in Lord of the Rings. Each episode is up to three hours long. I just love the name. Horses in Lord of the Rings. The title of the podcast is Shadow Facts. That is good. Lovely.

All right, we need to get to our final fact of the show, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that Second World War bombings were useful for freeing up parking spaces. So every cloud, I think you'll find. This, yeah, it's hard to get the quantity, but basically in Second World War you may or may not know, there was quite a lot of aerial bombing campaigns. The Blitz, being a famous example,

and what that did was flatten a lot of buildings and leave an enormous amount of space in the middle of cities where, well, for example, the big car parking franchise NCP car parks in the UK, they founded their first car park on a bomb. site in Red Lion Square in Hoban, that was in 1948, and lots more followed. And if you watch kind of bulletins at the time, there was kind of a panic in the 1950s, because car ownership was going up and up, that there wouldn't be any parking spaces left. But I was watching a bulletin

saying, fortunately, at the moment, we've got so many massive bomb sites with no buildings on them that we have managed to find space to park all the cars until now. But if we don't have another bombing campaign soon, we'll have nowhere to put the cars. They didn't say that, but it was implied. It's incredible the story of that first car park. Okay. This is really fun, I promise. And if you doubt it halfway through, just remember, it is really, really fun.

Okay, that one, in Red Lion Square in Hoban, so 1948, founded by two guys called Donald Gosling and Ronald Hobson, and they were told, this will never work. That's a stupid idea. You can park on the side of the road any time, and no one's going to pay one shilling and sixpence for an entire day. parking in central London. They were just told, don't do it. I'm just,

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

You could park on Oxford Street. They were going up very fast. Post-war car ownership was going up. Anyway, this is going to get fun, is it? Well, I'm now slightly doubting that. Anyway, they bought it for 200 quid. 100 quid each they put in. They bought this space for a car park.

They sold the business 50 years later in 1998, each of them got 300 million pounds from the sale. Wow. And that was more than one car park by that point. That's less good effect, yeah. Well, the whole business was sold for 800 million pounds. They nearly didn't sell the business. It nearly fell over at the very last moment

because Ronald Hobson, one of the two co-founders, he wanted one particular car park to be excluded from the sale because it was on Oxford Street and he wanted it to be excluded from the sale because he would go there at the weekend and park up with a flasker. of tea and study which parking bays were occupied first. Wow.

So he wanted that to be like... That is fascinating. I know. Do we know the results? Okay, okay. Okay, sorry. I'm sorry for finding it so interesting, but I did... I do you think who parks where first?

Is it under the tree? Is it closest to the parking meter? I couldn't agree more, Anna, that this is an interesting fact, but I feel like I've lost the room at this point. Oh my God. I think we're locked in. That is an interesting thing, right? So if you go into a car parking place,

Do you just park as soon as you go in where there's loads of spaces, or do you drive as close to the door as possible and then drive around looking for the perfect spot? I do that. Yeah, so does almost everyone. It turns out that actually, on average, it kind of works out about even. But people have found that actually a lot of traffic in towns consists of people looking for spaces.

And they did a study in the German city of Freiburg in the 2010s and found that 74% of cars at one moment were looking, for a parking spot? No. Oh my God. It's mental, isn't it? Yeah. It's bad, you know?

A lot of pollution there. People cruising, it's called, which is a much less sexy version of cruising than other version of cruising. No, I'm cruising officer. There are some countries in the world with some really mad parking systems. I don't think we've mentioned before. Quite a lot of countries, the cold ones mostly, have systems where you have to park on one side of the road or the other

so that they can sweep the snow off the non-parked-on side. And they have different ways of signifying this. But Sweden's is so good. It's called their datum park-hering system. And it's exemplified by a post on Reddit I read from an American tourist saying, sorry for the dumb question, but we really can't make sense of this sign. We're on holiday in Sweden. Can we park here?

The sign is a vertical white line on one side of the sign and two vertical lines on the other side of the sign. And the answer that a helpful Swedish is, Swedish resident gave was, it means you're not allowed to park on the side of the street with even or odd house numbers on correspondingly even or odd days. Mahler? Ah, yeah. So there you go. Yeah. So you have to, if it's like the 11th of July, you have to make sure you're not parking on the side of the street that has houses numbers 1, 3, 5, 7 and 9. Simple, and you should know that with the side of the three random lines on it. That's crazy. In America, they have a lot.

things like this. Quite a lot of towns, especially Pittsburgh, apparently. They do this thing where if you go out for the day and you take your car, then you'll put a chair where your car was so that no one can park there. Oh, yeah. And they're not really supposed to do it, but really the local cops, they just turn a blind eye. Like outside your house? Yeah, so you've gone out to the shops, but you don't want anyone to park right outside

your house, so you put a chair there and then no one else will park it. And everyone kind of knows that that's the way that we do things. And then according to the economist, in Shanghai, they do the same thing, but people get their elderly relatives to sit in parking spaces. No chair? I assume there is a chair. This is a granny on the ground. I was reading about UK car parks, and I found that in 2004, Focus, the Science magazine, they were given a brief to come up with the 10 most secure places on Earth. and those places included

Saddam's Baghdad bunker, the Mormon Church Records, Fort Knox, Air Force One, and a car park in Derby called Bald Lane. Right? And you know how I was an hour late for the podcast today?

That's where you went? That's where I was. Oh my God! You went to the highest secure place in the UK basically? Yeah, well I was driving past it. What is it? What's there?

It's the most secure car park in the world. What does that mean? There's a big sign that says this is the most secure car park in the world. I should say it's in Derby. Not Derby. Did I say Derby? You said Derby. Wow.

But it's amazing. So you go in and they give you this card and then you park in the thing and they have sensors underneath your car. And when you leave, you tell, say which bay you're in and then the sensor switches on. And if anyone moves your car before you come back, then the whole

place locks down. No. Yeah. Absolutely. And there are 190 CCTV cameras in the building. They have a huge PA system. They have panic buttons all the way through. So anywhere you go, you can just bank the panic button. Again, everything shuts down. Did you do it?

Oh, boom. Why do you think I was an hour late? No, it's absolutely amazing. And what happened was, it was in 1997, there was a load of crime that was happening there. There was a lot of drug taking and muggings and stuff like that. And the council didn't really know what to do. And so they got this guy called Ken Wiglin.

who'd invented a load of security systems and said, do you want to take over it? And he said, well, I'll take over it as long as I could do whatever I want. And he just basically put all these amazing systems in. He's like Judge Dredd, but for parking. It's so amazing. So if you've parked your car there, you're busy shopping,

you've bumped your partner in town, you give them the car keys, you say, darling, I've parked the car, can you pick it up? That's it. They're arrested. As long as they've got the card, they're okay. Okay, fine. So you can walk around Darby and go to as many vape shops and bookmakers as you want.

And your car will be absolutely safe. Wow. I think I know one which is as secure. I don't think you'll have found this, Dan. There is a car park in Farnborough that is only accessible on foot. That's brilliant. This was reported...

Is it for the Flintstones? This was reported several years ago and I had a look on Google Images. Certainly the most recent image shows no cars there. It's above the gym. The business is called the gym. I'm not just being vague. When it was first reported, it had absolutely everything. It's got bays. It's got signs.

It's got all of that. But the only thing it lacked was access for a car. And that's because it's part of a big development way, which hasn't been finished yet. So you can go there to this day. But just not with a car. Wow. Yeah. That is secure in the other way. You can't get in. I thought it was going to be a clever system where you had to

lift your own car in or something. Like, I was actually in Spain a couple of weeks ago. We went into an underground car park and instead of parking your own car, someone stopped and said, I'll park your car for you. And the system is you get out of your car. I thought for that so many times.

I thought, oh, the number of cars I've been through. You're a 19 car that's it. You've given your keys and you watch. And they go up to a parking space. And the parking spaces are so narrow to save space presumably that they then get out of the car before parking it, take the handbrake off and push it in so that they don't have to get out of the doors afterwards.

So cool. And also remind you, me of another cool system they have in Thailand where you are and I discovered this because my friend lived in Thailand and she came back to pick up her car one day in a multi-story car park. There was another car parked in front and a Thai

person nearby explained that's fine they will have left the handbrake on and in Thailand you can park blocking people in as long as you leave the handbrake off so that when they arrive they can push your car out of the way and get their car out that's amazing. So good. That's very funny. A few things

on the Blitz. Oh yeah. So the Blitz, London gets a lot of the headlines, but the rest of the country was hit. And of course, Sheffield was hit quite badly because according to JBS Haldane, there was half a square mile of Sheffield that was more vital for production of munitions than anywhere else in Britain.

Basically, it was the only place in the UK where you made these armour-piercing shells in Sheffield, and so the Germans were really, really keen to bomb it. It was called Schmidt Stiegel, which means Crucible. Really? And basically, yeah, the whole city got hit quite badly. there was a woman who was fined three pounds because even though she blacked out her house curtains

before leaving she'd left a light on which you weren't allowed to do because the bombers would be able to see it. She said she'd left the light on for her cat and the cat had moved the curtains to kind of... It could have been a German cat and picking. Sounds like it.

Yeah. Yeah. And the hospital, the top brass, they all had tin hats, but the nurses had to make do with chamber pots on their heads that was held on with packages. There's amazing pictures of doing that. And they would go out to the moors, and they would collect sphagnum moss, which they would use...

If you know, you know. They would use to sterilize wounds and stuff like that. So, yeah. Wow. That was it. I read a couple of headlines about the Sheffield Blitz. There was a fact from the Sheffield Star, which wrote, Sheffield has braced themselves for air attack from the moment war was declared.

People couldn't understand why Sheffield was not hit sooner. very much like come on I love this line so much Yorkshire soldiers were reported to have pledged to avenge Hitler's raids on the city he made a bad mistake bombing Sheffield they said

like it's just quite that's very nice and proud I do think invading Russia was the bigger mistake of the war but like Sheffield was it's on his deathbed biggest regret Sheffield Okay that is it

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