564: No Such Thing As Water Floating On Water

Hi everyone, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us at no such thing as a fish. Hope you had a nice Christmas. If not, I hope it was manageable at least and I hope we're all looking forward to what is in store for 2025.

We've taken a little bit of a break this week after a very very busy year where we've written all sorts of books and been on tour around the world and what we have for you instead of a novel episode is a compilation of the best bits that didn't quite make it into the show from our UK, Ireland and Sweden leg of our tour. So what you'll get here is lots of silly things that didn't quite fit in the show. You get loads and loads of extra facts. I really hope you enjoy it.

but I don't really want to keep up any more of your time so all I'll say is Happy New Year and on with the podcast!

We run out of QI as well. And the QI offices in Covard Garden. And then the end it turns out to get through and over by a trade. Then it just didn't do one more thing about Mars. Oh my god, I'm surrounding it by idiot.

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Good evening and welcome to No Such Thing as a Fish. Are you ready for the show? Then please welcome to the stage No Such Thing as a Fish! Thank you, Lynn!

Holy moly. Hey guys. Thanks so much for coming. Hello. Whoo. How you guys doing?

Let's do this. Welcome to our 10-year anniversary show. Tonight is going to be a party. It's going to be an awesome night. We're going to be celebrating your facts as well. You've sent a bunch in. Thank you very much. James, you've been collecting them, right? Yes, I've got a few here. For instance, Napoleon fell in love with Josephine because she could do a naughty act called the zigzags. And nobody knows what the zigzags were. Wow.

Really? Well, according to random person who texted me. Wow. And there's no better sauce than that. Can we get the lights up on the audience, please? Oh, hello. Oh, wow. Oh, you guys are much more attractive than I thought you were going to be.

Okay, here is a fact sent by someone in this room. This is brilliant, actually. Between Heathrow and Rome from Take Off to Touchdown, the flight time is the exact run length time of the 2000 film Gladiator.

If you've got a window seat on the right side of the plane, you'll be flying over the Colosseum as Maximus and Komodus enter the arena for the final battle. Fuck off, that's great. Isn't that great? Very good fact. The Blue Whale produces the largest fart bubble. It's so large, a Zebra who makes the loudest fart, can fit in it.

Oh, gold. In Tudor, England, there was a type of criminal called a bear-top trickster. A woman would flash her breasts to lure men into a house. Once he'd come inside, brackets, the house, he would be robbed. He would be robbed. Oh, he would be robbed. That's very cool. Yeah, the funny bit was the brackets bit, really. Yeah, yeah. That's a good thing. When dragonflies get tired, they suck water up their bum and jetties out to propel themselves forward.

That's so cool. It's funny because I would have thought that's quite tiring in itself. It does feel tiring, doesn't it? Yeah. I'm just clenching now, and yeah. Yeah.

Have you guys read about a story I love last year is about the probably the two most influential writers, academics, who write about honesty, who have released a bunch of papers. We definitely have come across them in our work. They released a very famous paper sort of showing that basically, if you nudge people a certain way, they'll be more honest. So for instance, in a dinner. Which part of their body do you have for that?

No one did that. It's against sort of like study principles. But if you like have to sign a bit at the top of your tax return that says, I promise I've told the truth rather than at the bottom, the study showed that people are more honest because they've just signed this.

The thing is, these two famous people, one of whom Dan Ariele wrote a book called The Honest Truth about Dishonesty, were cheating in the paper, allegedly I have to say, but were cheated in the paper and the data was falsified. And not only falsified, but falsified in a way that even I could tell because it's in two different fonts.

The data that was true was in Calibri font, and then there was a bunch of Cambria thrown in. Hey, I found the equivalent to the American movie 127 Hours. You know where Anne Ralston gets stuck while he's out on his own, and his arm gets trapped underneath the boulder. He eventually has to chop off his arm in order to survive, and he does have 127 Hours into it.

So I found the British edition of it. It should be called 60 Hours. This is a man called Joe Galliot from Yoval in Somerset, who spent two days underneath his sofa after it fell on him. And he couldn't get out of it because he had a few back problems. And he only survived because when the sofa fell over, a bottle of whiskey rolled towards him.

And he survived sipping whiskey for two days. What kind of sausage? I fell in labor and noticed that his curtains hadn't moved in two days and thought something's wrong with Joe, and they went and they found him, and then he survived. He spent five days in hospital, but he was there for two old days. And at first he said, I took a sip of the whiskey, and I thought, oh, well, this isn't too bad.

What are they called? The door sausages. Yeah, a door sausages. What are they called? Trapped Excluders. Yes. Door sausages, isn't it? Another inside into the Murray home life. Another veil ripped away from my carefully crafted persona. Oh well. I have to go as a translator whenever you go to DFS, don't I?

He wants one of those brown marshmallow-sitting things. Sofa, yeah, he wants a sofa. Wow, what's James Harkin? Oh, there are no autograms of that. Hey, speaking of storytellers from overseas. Surely Shane Durkin. No, does that work? Wow, you just did that? Well, I don't know if it's right. Come back in a few minutes. Yeah, yeah.

So there's another thing which happens around the world, which... OK, no, let's just pause and watch Andy write. No. Oh. Use the E twice. No, it's Shane Jock Jocken. I don't know, I'll work on some more.

You know who was one of the most rich people in America off the back of Beavers was John Jacob Astor. And he became a billionaire. And he's a name that a few of you might be going, John, how do I know that name? He was at the time of the sinking of the Titanic, possibly the richest man in America, maybe even the world. And he's one of the men who died on the Titanic. And so his fortune was largely about Beavers. And when I read that, I just thought, I do wonder if in the final seconds of his life, if he thought,

If only we had a bunch of beavers here, we could have plugged this hole up in instinct. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think? Maybe, maybe that was his final thought. Or maybe, oh, I wish I'd worn my entire full-body beaver onesie tonight, and then I could just swim away. Yes. I think that's weighing you down. I do. I think even lying on that door is not going to keep you up if you're wearing the full beaver onesie.

This is how I'd use my time travel moment. If I got one time in a machine, that's where I'd go. Not to save him, just to go. Andy and I have a bit of a better way. Actually, did you know that, sorry, speaking of ambassadors and names, that the US ambassador to Denmark used to be called Dick Sweat.

And there was... 1998, 2001. This goes out. It's someone who knows it. Dick, you made... You were on... No such thing as a fish, you could ever listen. No, I don't know why they're laughing at your name. They must have cut out the interesting bit they said about you afterwards.

Yes, he was. His opponent actually campaigned to have his name removed from the ballot paper because he said in the phone book he's listed as Lantos Sweat. So it's not legally correct. But obviously his opponent's just worried that everyone's going to vote for Dick Sweat if they see it, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I like there was a guy called Soren Sorenson Adams, who invented a type of itching powder, which basically transformed the world of jokes, right? Yeah, yeah. Like this guy, I can't believe he's not a name that I have known before this. He did itching powder. Yeah. He did the... The joy buzzer. The joy buzzer in your hand. He did... What did he do? He did sneezing powder. Squirting flour. Squirting flour. The guy was a genius. He refused to do the whoopee cushion. Did he? He said that was vulgar.

Wow. Yeah. And this was the man behind the dirty Fido plastic toy thing. What's that? That's the sort of fake dog poop. Oh yeah, and then fake vomit he did as well. Did fake vomit? And he said no, whoopi, whoopi cushion is too far. So they went elsewhere. One of your earliest facts down was that whoopi cushion was invented by a great ancient Roman. So for him to say, that was lowbrow. Oh, come on. You know, it's credited to an emperor called Eligabalus, but his birth name was Basianus.

Yeah. The Whoopi Cushing was invented by Basienus. Like, it's the greatest fact that I've ever, I feel like I was the first person to notice it. Like... Unbelievable that classical scholars haven't pointed that out before. Fools. How many people do you think you can fit in a phone box? Oh, that's good. Because this was a thing, wasn't it, in the 1950s and 60s? Oh, yeah, yeah. Sort of classic.

You would get one of these classic phone boxes. You would stuff as many students in as you can. Well, they would stuff themselves in. You wouldn't do that. It was because it was before the age of Zoom calls, wasn't it? What ages are we talking here? They tended to be students, so they would have been skinnest teenagers. But you look down on if there's a tiny corner left and you shove a one-year-old in there.

Well, this is the interesting thing, like, there were loads of different rules. But the official rules, basically, you had to be more or less adult-sized. You had to get at least part of the greater portion of your body into a standard upright foam booth.

I'm going to say, I'm going to say, low ball and say three. Oh, yeah. Two. It's nine. I'm going to say 15. OK, well, the answer, the official record from March 20 of 1959 was 25. Wow.

But there was a Canadian school that claimed to have got 40 students in a phone box. But it was later found that they turned it on its side and they used a much larger phone box than normal. So then they put the official rules in. And the really amazing thing is that only in England they had an additional rule that, as well as all getting in there, the group had to be able to either place or answer a phone call while they were in. Amazing. So good.

In 2011, Chinese magician called Fu Yandong, his pièce de resistance was six goldfish doing synchronized swimming. Really? 53 different animal rights groups complained, saying, it is quite clearly magnets in their stomachs and they are big and they're huge. Oh, my God, Andy. Do they check Olympians for that? For magnets?

Do you know that Simon Cowell and Ricky Gervais look like Stonehenge? This is according to the clothing company Jackamo, who made the thing called the architecture of man. And this doesn't really make any sense, but apparently to train their staff, they would choose famous people and say what monuments they look like, and that supposedly would help their staff work out people's sizes.

I know it doesn't make any sense at all. Why don't you just say you look a bit like Ricky Gervais? Why go through the needlessness of the step of you look like Stone 7 from Stonehenge? I reckon probably less people would be insulted by saying they look like Stonehenge than they look like Ricky Gervais. Very true. Perhaps. But yeah, so Ricky Gervais and Simon Cowell look like Stonehenge. Russell Crow and Jay-Z look like the Time Bridge, and James Codden looks like the Gherkin.

That was amazing. Sorry, his personal ad exo. But my friend, we were at a party once. You guys know him. And he was a packed party, and he really needed the toilet. And the window that was at the room led to an alleyway. So he thought, there's no one going to be walking there. So he opened up the window, and he peed out the window, right? And about five minutes later,

The door gets kicked into the room, and this soaked man comes walking in, and you go, who fucking pissed on me? And we all had to go, well, that didn't happen here. I don't know, but it's really hard to keep a straight face when a man soaked in urine is angry at you.

Sorry, that man must have stood still. I know, right? What sounds like quite a thick shower of urine. Do you know? I never questioned why he was so soaked, yeah. I love your reaction. Who did that? That's not in my life. You! Give me a number. Oh, God.

Wow, wow. If you're itching, you don't know why scratching works. It's kind of interesting this. I'm not sure it's funny, but it is interesting. Basically, you scratch it and your body thinks that something bad is happening to you and that is more important than the itch itself. And so the scratch sort of blocks off the pathways to your brain.

So you've got a little itch, you scratch and your body thinks, oh my God, someone's scratching me. And then it concentrates way more on that than it does on the itch itself. And what that means is if you have an itch, it also works if you tickle yourself. And it also works if you press down on it, or if you put something cold on it, it all does the same thing. So we could have been tickling ourselves all these years rather than scratching. Exactly.

Well, there's even been studies that if you have an itch on one side, like you're on your left side of your body, if you look in a mirror and you scratch the other side of your body because it has the idea that you will get rid of the itch, yeah. Does that work for everyone or just idiots?

Well, it works for idiots and me, because I tested it and it does work. We sort of have Beethoven to thank for CDs. Not the entire technology, but one very important bit, which is the reason that CDs are the diameter that they are and the length of time that they can take on as a recording is because the man who invented them wanted to be able to play all of Beethoven's ninth symphony in one go without having to change the CD.

So you needed 75 minutes worth of music on there in order to do and that's what defined it. That was his condition. Yeah, that's really cool. Yeah, and if you don't know what CD is When Osama bin Laden was killed it was by seal team six right yeah two days after seal team six Took him out guess who tried to trademark seal team six seal

That would be incredible. The Singer Seal. Yeah, the Singer Seal. No. Walt Disney. The Walt Disney company tried... How would we have guessed that?

It just would have been a long game. Is it because they were going to make a cartoon with loads of seals who went around killing terrorists? They were going to, because Disney's gone obviously into more dramas. Wow, this would be an amazing series. We'll do Seal Team 6. That was their first thought, though, immediately after they started being lost.

So they have someone in their company who does that and goes, let's trademark that. And so, yeah. But Disney are famously a benevolent and charming corporation, I don't understand. What do you want them to do? Have a month of mourning for a summer bin Laden? I think fair enough, Disney. Bit of respect for the great man who'd been good. And let's end all that time. We actually do need to move on. So that's annoying that we are ending on that. But I'm not great for my career.

Stop the podcast. Stop the podcast. Hello, everybody. We are sponsored this week by Babble. That's right. Babble is the brilliant language learning app that we've all been using on fish to brush up on all the languages that either we've been wanting to learn for years or if we're planning a holiday in the area, we can get the basics to make sure we don't look like an idiot when we're trying to yell things in good lab English.

That's right. I mean, did you know Fish actually has four spin-off versions in French, Spanish, German and Polish, which we are all individually fluent in because of Babel. But we really do love it. I have been using it to try and get better at Polish for years now. What's really good about it is you obviously often don't have time.

to commit to an hour-long lesson every couple of days. It's very expensive getting language learning lessons, building it into your life. This is just so flexible. You can have real lifestyle conversations. They've got an amazing feature where you can talk back and forth to the AI and it really works.

That's right. It absolutely makes learning language so much fun. And as Anna says, so many different ways that you can approach getting those words stuck into your head. And you should give it a go. And if you do want to give it a go, you can do it through fish. All you need to do is go to babble.com. So B-A-B-B-E-L.com slash N-S-T-A-F, as in no such thing as a fish, for up to 60% off your subscription. And that's valid for only a limited time.

Yes, so do it now, babble.com slash end staff. Get there now for 60% off your subscription. On with the show. On with the podcast. Oh! Yeah, how are we doing? Has anyone spotted what's missing from the stage?

Anna's wine! Yes, I'm going to have to do something so unprofessional. I thought I'd save it for this. Someone backstage I forgot to bring my wine on and I won't be able to make it through without. Could you possibly feel right to the brim? Thanks. As you were. So I'm working with Gilgood himself. Quickly, because you did say Gilgood, laughing they compared me to Gilgood.

Here's James, everybody. Here's our tour manager, James. James Hingway, everyone. Save the show. As if Gilgood was the epitome of professionalism, was it not him who was once in the audience of a play really personally, but at the pub all day, he was with his mate and he leaned over to his mate and whispered, oh, this is really good. This is where I come on.

I was kind of caricatures that you get on the street these days where they're just rude about you and you have to pay them on a tenor or whatever it is. I've never had that done because I'm too afraid to. But the thing is about you and you have no discernible features.

So... Wow. Like, do you remember when people would draw, like, fanart of us? Yeah. And they'd have, like, silly hair, glasses, woman's hair, and just a stick figure. Just a guy. Just a guy. Generic stickman, for Andy. That did happen. Yeah. But really, it looks exactly like you, whenever we saw them.

He actually, did you read just one other thing about George Quickshank? So he was famous for being Dickens illustrator as well. He illustrated a lot of Dickens books. And he claimed that he actually came up with the whole plot for Oliver Twist and said he wanted to call it Frank Foundling. And so I think him and Dickens ended on slightly bad terms. Yeah. Frank Foundling. Bad man. It could have been. It kind of works, yeah. It could have been. It could have been.

But he was an obsessive bore of a tea-totaler, and he was once burgled, and he caught the burglar, and while grasping him with one hand, he felt his pulse with the other hand, and noticed that it was the usual 75 beats a minute.

had not been increased by the exertion and the excitement at all. And so he started expounding on the benefits of temperance to the burglar that he'd caught, explaining, you see, it's because I don't drink, my pulse, feel it. So the police came along, he's still lecturing this poor burglar, a bit of more than he could chew about not drinking. What is a lunette?

Not the Lynette, you might say. A lawn yet was the spectacles, isn't it? A Lynette is a light, a whole full of light. Torture thing? Yes, it's a torture thing. French torture thing? Yes. Not the Lynette.

It is the hole where you put your head through in a guillotine. Oh, very good. So isn't it? Probably they're mostly just said, not the guillotine. Surely. No, no, no, no. I don't think the civic detail of the hole is what's worrying. It's more what's above the Lynette. I just like the idea of the guy who's going to do the, with the axe of the mask, I'm going, ooh, a connoisseur.

But am I right that actually if you're having a head chopped off you never have to see the lunette because You can't fit your head through that whole can you don't you put your neck on the on the dip? And then they put it down off And then they put the thing down over your neck. Oh, yeah, that's true Maybe in some designs so perhaps the one sweet relief is that you don't have to see the another cool protester I just like really wavy gravy

Oh, yeah, a wavy gravy. I thought you'd be a wavy gravy fan. He was the MC for Woodstock, hung out with all those beat generation people, and he nominated nobody to be president in 1976. I think it was. And he was just really cool. He had a son called Howdy Doo Good Gravy Tomahawk Truck Stock Romney. Is he any relation to Mitt Romney? And do they socialize? Yeah, brothers, yeah. He goes by the name Jordan.

Here's a weird thing about the Queen's car. She had multiple cars, but they all had the same license plate number. It was the same sheet. Yeah, we had the red. B1G L1Z. Is it on something like that? No, is it?

It took a little while for some of you to work that out. It was jiggy to A.C. Yeah. J.G.Y. to A.C. And any time that she got a new car, she had that as the personalized license plate. And I can't see if there's something that was a reason behind it. What could it stand for? Yeah. Just gallivanting.

You help me out here. I thought it was very interesting research in this that in China they hate new car smell. It's so weird. So we famously love new car smell and they're always trying to replicate that. So this is when you buy a new car.

Yeah, and it's got all the all the surfaces in it still have the new chemicals on them that are gradually being released and It's just delicious carcinogens, isn't it? It's bad for you. I believe it's bad for you. It's slightly bad for you. They've done studies and it's like it's a little bit above what we'd recommend you're inhaling

So don't just sniff the seat leather seats in your car day after day. But new car smell, the Brits really like it. But in China, they've actually fought, have had to come up with an odor remover for car smells because in China they hate it so much. And in 2018 it was affecting car sales. So they hired, in 2017, Ford hired 18 golden noses.

which were human beings whose job it was to go inside a car and rate the smell from not perceptible to extremely disturbing. And then they'd work out ways to get rid of it. And they patented a device in the end which basically drives your car to a clean area, winds down the windows and airs it out. And then senses when the car smells gone. Then drives it back. That's cool. To get the Chinese people to buy it.

Isn't that weird? Yeah, do you know, also, you said that the new car smell being leather. But actually, so Rolls-Royce had a lot of complaints that their cars had lost the leathery smell. So they sent in this team, they were called SG Gordon Limited, to try and distill.

new car smell so that they could put it into their new cars that don't have new car smell so that it smells like a new car. And what ended up happening is that they discovered that it wasn't the leather predominantly that gave the smell. It was the wood that you would get in certain cars. So a lot of cars now have replaced wood with plastic. And so the mixture is... Who doesn't want a car these days? Well, Rolls-Royce particularly, yeah, would still have the idea. I mean, it doesn't even matter who has that anymore. That's where the smell of the old car came from.

But there are still some wooden cars, and I think it is a combination of wooden surfaces. I don't know. Yeah, yeah. Not a wooden car. Like a hogging me on the inside and stuff. Ooh! Yeah, yeah. It's when I was dating the Queen.

Bruce Lee again, Superman. That doesn't even work because he, in the movie, plays Kato from the Green Hornet, which was the big TV show that Bruce Lee starred in in America. So he had a big Kung Fu career in Hong Kong and Chinese movies, but he also had an amazing American career. And Kato, as the Green Hornet, was one. So he's again Superman, but Kato is part of the Batman universe. So, oh wait, that's the same universe. Scratch out everyone.

I've had my nerd credentials back here. There you go. I'll be honest, you lost me about two minutes ago. Yeah, take those credentials back. Do you know that water flows?

Do you know the water flows? Yeah, water flows. I would have to otherwise it would all sink to the bottom of the sea, wouldn't it? Hang on, something that floats on the top, though. If you drop a metre of water in the middle of some other water, it'll just stay there. So, like, different kind of water to... Oh, no, they're different. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like salt and salt water and fresh water with different densities, I believe. So...

But if you've got a whole body of normal tap water and then you drop some more tap water in, then it'll stay there, bobbing in the same place. It doesn't sort of like integrate, it just sits on top. It doesn't sit on top like a Lego brick on top of more Lego. It goes... Isn't that what floating is? Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the other water's got to move out of the way. If you move your... I guess what I'm trying to say... Honey, why is it that if I'm in a bath and I want to make it a whole set, I tell them the whole tap, I don't just get a small cube of really hot water up to the top. I don't have to put different... Well, that's because you're swishing around with your rubber duck and all that. That's you being the wave sister. But milk doesn't float.

Despite the name, milk flow. Right. Jesus Christ. So don't leave your cube of milk on top of the ocean. You'll never see it again. There is a thing called, what is it, dendrophilia, which is basically the sexualization of trees. I mean, that is a real thing that happens. I found a Wikipedia page on it. It's the most interesting writer I've ever read on a Wikipedia page says,

Many people use vegetables and fruits, such as cucumbers or carrots, to insert into their anus. Whoa, whoa! As an object to receive sexual pleasure or orgasms when they masturbate, in men, holes can be used inside trees or trunks, assimilating the shape of a vagina through which the penis is inserted. Why are you reading this, Dad?

This is the relevant bit. Why did you have to read all that film? Many people experience feelings towards plants after having sex in a garden, forest, greenhouse or bedroom with many plants. The use of flowers to caress the body is also included in dendrophilia. So it's a big thing. Can I tell you a cool thing about smell that is amazing and insane? Okay, get this. Right, what do you smell with?

Your nose. You don't smell with your, so this is amazing. The nose is merely the pipe that takes the smells to where you really smell. Oh. The place you smell, I'm going to do a big boop with my finger pointing to where you actually smell. Oh, this will be great on audio.

Wow. Your eyebrows? In the level of your eyebrows. In between your eyebrows. Right in between your eyebrows. Okay, the air goes up into your nose. Sure, we all know that. And then it curls around these little structures which carry the scent molecules and what you're trying to smell, right? That's the most important thing. They stop on the mucous membrane and this is where it is. It's level with your eyebrows.

And that's where the smell molecules actually get detected and received by this mucousy membrane. So could you cut out the middle man and just drill a hole in between, in like the free decalos? Yeah, yep, yep. We should do that. And we recommend it. Wow. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. That's where you smell. Very cool. You think you smell with your nose? Sure. But you don't.

It's just a vehicle. Why isn't anyone more shocked about this? They're stunned into silence. It's not your nose, it's a place pretty close to your nose. Inside what probably you could probably say is your nose. Let me do the eyes now. Let me do the eyes.

I got one thing as well, which is, this is just for anyone who's listened to this fact and gone, ah, if only I could read something about someone having sex with a tree, I just realized I read an entire novel in my 20s about this exact thing. It's called a melon for ecstasy, and it's all about a guy who goes round shagging trees, right? So... Dan, it's... I am not remotely surprised that you read this novel. I feel like... I'd be stagging if you hadn't read it. Also, when does Dan's butt club podcast come out?

Yeah, so basically the increased holes bored into the trunks of local trees, all of them 33 inches from the ground at an angle at between 15 and 20 degrees to the horizontal, attracts the suspicion of the police. It infuriates the council who see it as vandalism and excites ornithological society members who believe it indicates the return of the fabulously requested woodpecker. And the whole story is under start. It's some kind of pecker that is chasing.

That's an amazing book, a bellied for ecstasy, everyone needs to guess it. His main worry is not being caught, it's all the splinters he gets as he's doing it. Anyway, we should move on, right? That was your choice to do that for me. I know. So I did it. You ready for more facts?

Thank you everyone who sent in a fact to us already. So James, what do you got mate? Oh yes, and this is a bit where I read one out isn't it? That's fine. Slick. We spend a lot of time rehearsing this show. Here's a fact. At Prince Now King Charles and Diana's wedding, the head waiter got a black eye from the Queen.

I know this because said head waiter of Clarishes is my grandfather. Wow. Is this from Dan? Extra details. She, the queen, danced into a giant apple decoration which swung into his face.

She then followed him into the kitchen to make sure he was OK. That's nice, isn't it? OK, here's another hi-brow one. The most common adjectives used before breasts in books are in order, left, full, big, right and ample. I thought in order was one of them, what you said.

And that was sent by someone who had a large machine learning data set at work and worked it out for themselves. That was another death, by the way, like a torture thing that they used to do according to legend, which is they would take two trees and they would tie them together. So they would bend them right in and they would hold a rope that was holding them tight. And then they would take the offending criminal and they would attach a rope to either side of the tree. Some say with just one leg,

to each tree and they would cut the rope and the trees would fling away and you would be ripped in half. But is it like a wishbone where whichever tree you got the bigger heart?

You're right, it should be like a cracker, there should be a joke on one side. That was a thing that did happen, not just in the personal play, I think, because Saint Corona died in that way. Really? Yeah, patron saint of viruses. Really? No, but like, Saint Corona, I don't know what... Saint Corona, your giant mime shoved in his throat, I'm pretty sure.

Do you know how Atossa died, actually? No. This is according to Aspazias, who was writing in the first century, so quite a long time after. But Aspazias said, she was killed and eaten by her son Xerxes in a fit of distraction.

This is a distraction. No further information. And I don't even know who was distracted. He was eating a steak and accidentally got his mum on the way. Oh my God. Hey, you know, just super quickly back to Dennis Pop and Asa Bass. There was a thing that he used to do, which eventually a lot of other pop musicians would do as well.

which was called the LA car test. And the idea was you were going to be able to make it in America if your song was good enough to be played in a car in LA. So what he would do is he would take finished songs and he would send them over to LA and he would people over there drive on the highways listening to the songs in cars going, yeah, man.

Groovy. Yeah. And that's the LA car test. So songs were deliberately fixed or given a boost simply by what the response was. That's so interesting. Because we always, like with podcasts as well, you're supposed to play it in a car as well because the audio is slightly different. So if your audio is not quite right, it's different if you're hearing headphones and if you're hearing a car. So I wonder if it's something like that. Do you do that when you're editing our show? Do you go out for a drive? No, because it's so funny. I would just veer off the road.

No, if there's a slight audio problem, I will do that, yeah. Do you? Yes. That's amazing. I think that's really cool. Do you? I think that's really cool, guys. Don't you agree? Yeah. There you go. I don't think they... That didn't sound like you really meant that. No.

Can I just, on older people lying about things, there was a big thing in the 1950s. There was suddenly this hunt for the last remaining US Civil War veterans. And there was a guy called Walter Williams, who was declared, in 1959, to have been the last surviving veteran who then died. And there was this massive week of official mourning in Houston. There was a funeral procession. More than 100,000 people came to line the streets to save farewell to this guy, the last person who'd been there.

In the 90s, a researcher looked into it, found out that he'd been eight when the war ended, and definitely had not fought in the Americans of the War. But not only that, looked into all the other veterans in the 1950s who were saying they were the oldest surviving, and they were all fake.

So, you know, the person who claimed the oldest living veteran, the oldest surviving veteran title from was another phony. The researcher found that every one of the 12 last remaining people to have survived the Civil War had not fought in the Civil War. Did they meet up and just occasionally look at each other and go, I know, I know, neither.

They did. There was a reunion. He said there'd been a veteran's reunion. And all the veterans who had God must have just been going, yeah, you remember Alamo? Was that a little bit? Yeah, and David, yeah. How weird is that? This is from 2011. This is a statement that was put on a paintballing website, OK? These are the words. Due to an incident at our Croydon Paintballing Center, you will be given special information on the dangers of paintballing with enhanced boobs.

And ask to sign a disclaimer. You will also be issued with extra padding to protect your implants while paintballing. This was put up there because during a paintball session someone was shot in the boob and it exploded. And apparently it was ruptured after it was hit. And this has been a huge problem apparently. It's very dangerous to have enhanced boobs while paintballing. A huge problem.

That's it. I was looking up some well-known clowns and a well-known one in Britain working today is Matty Faint, who's co-curator of the clown museum, or who was that a couple of years ago, at least. And he does kids' parties and sort of a lot of clowns now lament the decline of the clown and they blame Disney, like a lot of entertainers now come to kids' parties dressed as Disney characters instead of clowns, things like that. But he said recently he did a kids' party

So he went to the kid's house and he performed as a clown and it went down dreadfully well, 20 children laughing their asses off. And then the mum said, thanks very much, paid him by, and then he went upstairs to get changed into his normal clothes and he came downstairs, at which point the mother turned around, saw him, grabbed him by the throat, shouting, who are you? What are you doing in my house?

It's just a weird man in normal clothes coming down that staircase. That's a dangerous job. Here's a great, uh, Croydon flight anecdote from the Golden Age of travel, right? Uh-huh. And this is at a time when pilot nicknames included Dizzy, uh, Count Vodka, and Scruffy the Undertaker Robinson. So there's a, like...

You're in your safe hands, but this is in 1924. There was a flight from Croydon to Paris and Someone looks out of the window and saw on the wing of the plane as the plane was in the air a mechanic on the wing trying to fix the throttle midair Wow because He was trying to repair it. He realized he couldn't so he just stayed on the wing of the plane for the entire flight to Paris and

Hang on, he had got on after it took off, right? It wasn't like he was doing it on the ground and then they forgot to turn, they were taking it off. I am not sure.

I think he climbed out in mid-air. How do you do that? He just held it open. Well, they didn't used to fly very high, did they? They were really, really low. They were going at 30,000 feet. But they still fly fast. Again, at the time, not very fast. It's still scary. There's no height of game flight where I'm like, it's not actually that high, I don't really mind. Yeah, I'll go on the wing. It is scary. That's why this was a new story at the time and why I think it's irrelevant, I don't know. It was scary and hard for the guy. Yeah.

So there was a study in 2019 about learning from your failures. And basically, the conclusion was that failure is an essential ingredient to success. You have to fail to be successful. But that doesn't alone make you successful. You have to learn from your mistakes. But I just found it so interesting in terms of the cold,

hard-eye of academia. The way they worked this out was a huge study and it looked at three different things. So it looked at 777,000 grant applications submitted to the Institute of Health to see if they were successful or failures. It looked at 46 years' worth of the start-up investments to see if businesses were successful or whether they were failures. And what was the cause of that? And it looked at 170,000 terrorist attacks.

to see if they were failures. And I think that's a bold thing, and I don't know what you're involved, but a successful terrorist attack is obviously a failure for most of us, but a success for certain people. So reassuringly, the test found that if you're trying to get a grant from the Institute of Health, the average failure rate is 2.03 failures before you succeed. For a startup 1.5, and terrorists fail almost four times before they succeed.

So, and we've got a one-person cheering for the anti-terrorist brigade. Well, as we all know, Dan thinks so. Sam, I've been laden. It's a great guy. So... It's Maria Torres, the Queen of France. So she was Spanish, but she was the wife of Louis XIV. Oh, yeah. She was in labour in 1661. And in the old days, if you were royal, it was basically open season for your birth.

Everyone might come and watch. Everyone just came and watched. So when Mary Antoinette gave birth, there were nearly 200 people in her chambers, mostly in an outer room, but quite a few in the inner room as well. And when Mary had to raise, sort of a century earlier, was giving birth, lots of princesses and various dukes started coming in to witness her giving birth. And she hated it. She kept shouting, I don't want to give birth, I want to die. And she had to shout that because there were Spanish actors and musicians dancing a ballet beneath the windows.

And they had guitars and casinets to remind her that she was Spanish. There is another study, this is an amazing one, where they looked at surgeons who were doing coronary bypasses. And they looked at ones that were successful and the ones that were failures. And they saw, if you did a failure, where are you going to be more successful in the future? So have you learned from your mistakes?

And what they found was that actually that is true. So surgeons who made mistakes, they did tend to get much more successful as they went on, but only to a certain level. And after a certain amount of failing again and again and again, you just get really, really shit at it. Really? Because you're just like, oh, I can't do this. You just lose all confidence. Yeah, right. You're stuck in a rock. Exactly. I have that we're getting facts right.

I've just given up at this point. So I named my son Ted. His middle name is Harpo after the Mark's brother Harpo. But Harpo is Oprah Winfrey's company as well. I would assume that that would have been trademarked, but I had no problems. Oh my god, Oprah is Harpo backwards. Yes. And that's why she named the company there. She knows that. OK, fine.

Well, um... What a wild ride for you for five seconds. That was huge. I've got to... I've got to move this on. Oh, really? We need to get out of here. Can I tell you about Mandels? What? Mandels. Mandels. These are male candles. OK. There's a big problem for the candle industry, which is that they're only heading half the population. Women tend to buy more than 90% of candles. Men tend not to buy them. And there have been consistent attempts to get blokes to buy candles. So, since published, I've included Aftershave... Fine.

Fine. The browser. Yeah, the browser. Smoke to leather. OK. Rome. Not a Roman candle like a firework, just smells of Rome. And there's one exhaust, and I just wanted to read you the... Here's the blurb. Do you find yourself taking a minute in the morning to enjoy the unique scent of exhaust when you turn your car on?

We pray that you do not get down in your knees and enjoy the musky smell straight from the sauce, but we do pray you buy our candles so you can enjoy the smell with less danger. Avoid the headache. Good gut. Wow. They've really got men, haven't they? Yeah. So my parents opened up a salon in Hong Kong. First customer my mum ever did was Robert Quark and he immediately... He's too rich to keep that in the show, please.

OK, here's the thing. Do you think you learn from your failures? Yeah, I think so. I reckon. Because that's a whole point, isn't it? Well, there's this common idea that, you know, oh, well, actually, I just failed my way until I succeeded. You learn from your mistakes, right? But I think people don't tend to. Failing, repeatedly, is not a good way to succeed. You do actually have to think about why you failed, don't you? And then act on it.

And people, so it's quite hard to do experiments on whether you learn from your failures, but here is one experiment. Scientists got people to do a practice test, right? They gave them feedback, fake feedback on how they performed, and then they would do a real test.

And they were asked how happy it would make them if they did well. So the people who got negative feedback immediately said, oh, well, I wouldn't care at all if I did well on the real test. But they were lying. They were protecting themselves, you know. And then when they did the second test, they got given fake feedback again. And so you got full marks.

And they were thrilled. They were so happy that they'd done well. So people try and protect their self-image as competent people. And when they get proof that they're wrong, it does away with that image. I've just realised I read out the wrong fact in relation to the leading, which makes this bit of the show something I will not learn from.

But it was all part of the plan. It's a bit about failure. You're living it right now. That's insane. You failed literally in the moment, as you were telling us. Beautiful. The thing that seems relevant to me about what you were saying. Yeah. And I wonder if this is what you meant to say. Let me know. Right? And he's going through something right now. I feel like we should all pause and just watch it.

You know, like in an Edinburgh documentary where you don't interfere? I feel like... Is that what you do when someone really fucks up? You get everyone to pause and watch it. It's cool. And there's something in the background going... Yeah, we see the podcaster struggling with his words.