Beef And Dairy Network - Episode 107 - Nicholas Summers

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

It's MaxFunDrive! To support the show, go to maximumfun.org/joinCody Dahler and Tom Neenan join is this month as we hear from professional diver, Nicholas Summers.Stock media provided by Setuniman/Pond5.com and Soundrangers/Pond5.comMusic credit courtesy of epidemicsound.com:Small Strokes / Martin GauffinCircling Sky / Moon Craters

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For example, if you get a bottle heavy in adrenal glands, it'll give you more zip. Drink a bottle heavy in bovine thyroid, and you'll experience weight loss, heart palpitations, nausea, loss of libido, increased perspiration, hand tremors, anxiety, poor sleep, thinning of the skin, fine brittle hair, muscular weakness, or even death. For 10% off your first taste of Glando, use the code THINNINGOFTHESKIN. You go, King! hello and welcome to the beef and dairy network podcast the number one podcast for those involved or just interested in the production of beef animals and dairy herds the beef and dairy

network podcast is the podcast companion to the beef and dairy herds. The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is the podcast companion to the Beef and Dairy Network website and a printed magazine brought to you by Glando. Now, this month I spoke to famous scuba diver and author Nicholas Summers, who has been in the spotlight recently due to his views about the Titanic. In our interview, we covered his life as a scuba diver, the surprising link between diving and the dairy industry, and of course, his controversial work with Titanic director James Cameron. Hello, I'm Nicholas Summers, and I'm a professional scuba diver. Nicholas, thank you so much for joining us today. A very famous scuba diver. You're not just a scuba

diver. Of course, you're an author. You've got a series of books, Diving for Beginners, How Not to Die and Enjoy Yourself. That was a big hit earlier this decade. Then you followed that up, of course, with So You Didn't Die, Intermediate Diving for Dummies. And then finally, recently brought out, Remember, You Might Still Die, Diving for the Professional. Yes, that's right. It is, of course a quite a dangerous hobby a lot of people sort of think it's something you pick up on holiday you know you're there with your

family you've got on your Ryanair flight you've gotten off you've still got your case and before you know it before they've even unpacked a lot of people are donning the gear right and they're heading down to the harbour and they're jumping in. And by all means, please, please do that because it's really rewarding to see so many people getting into the hobby. But you can very much die. You know, a lot of people, they don't think about propellers, the local fishermen. Those big giant clams that you can kind of open up and you can go inside and then... Yeah, exactly. And they will close. So yeah, you you know i've heard a lot of stories uh people sort of write into me and they say you know thanks so much for your books um i would never

have tried scuba diving otherwise a member of my family was unfortunately caught inside a clam um managed to get them out in time uh had to rush them to hospital ruined the holiday but that initial magic experience by diving into the sea was just fantastic and and it's that sort of story that really makes me pick up my pen makes me sort of don on my bcd stick the regulator in my mouth and really start writing you know okay so you do you do write in full scuba gear yeah absolutely yeah it's uh that's important for my process um i can't really think unless i've got a full covering over my eyes and my nose snorkel in my mouth so yeah very much full gear flippers and and actually depending on how creative i'm feeling i'll sort

of inflate my bcd so sorry what is a bcd so a b a BCD is sort of the crucial part of your diving equipment. And that's the item that will allow you to float to the surface or sink to the bottom. Okay. Because I thought that was, sorry if I'm wrong, maybe this is the old fashioned way, I thought that was to do with how much piss is inside the wetsuit. Yes. Well, the piss, so we're looking at from around the early 80s was a sort of turning point in in scuba gear before about 1985 1986 it very much was piss um they've now replaced that with air because they found that while scuba diving a lot of a lot of divers obviously your your main breathing equipment is your tank before 1985 that was also filled with piss so partly because we lost so many

souls to that sort of old-fashioned equipment and also i guess the rise of the environmental movement sort of put an end to that because um you know people like al gore started saying you know we're seeing a lot of turtles with piss poisoning and that's largely due to the sort of uptake in in the sort of passion for scuba diving around the early 1980s and really the professional scuba divers myself included did think you know maybe al's got a point perhaps if we replace the piss with air it might make it a more enjoyable experience and and also allow us to breathe underwater which um well be quite good yeah and i i think the death rate did uh did plummet after that but it's important to say

the death rate is still very high and and would you say that you know those people you mentioned going on holiday taking the family jumping in is part of the fun the fact that there's a high chance you're going to die oh absolutely yeah mean, you know, if you think about all of the different types of recreation, bungee jumping, cliff diving, that thing that people do when they have a can of lager and they shake it up and then they stab the bottom of it and they try and suck all the liquid out and it's firing into the back of your throat. And often, you know, I've been on dives when there's maybe 20 people in the party and we all sort of salute each other, jump off the boat, knowing full well about three of us are going to come back. But it's part of that sort of gamble. And you obviously take parties out diving. You're a teacher. You take first time dives out. How rare is it that you all come back? And if you do all come back, is there an element of disappointment there? Yeah. Well, I would say in my entire career, there's maybe been two or three times all of us have come back. And, you know, they'll look at me and they'll say, Nicholas, we're all still here. You know, what's going on? They'll start throwing their fins at me, their master's snorkel. And then often I'll say you know listen guys look at philip

over there his eyes are rolling in the back of his head he's got the bends he's got two or three hours to live and that's that's when you sort of feel a kind of you know like an audible he is gonna die he's gonna die just not straight away just not straight away i'd say you know of those two or three times it's happened on two occasions they've been happy with that the third occasion we've left philip on the boat and we've all dived back in looking for that more immediate death maybe a clam based clam based thing someone getting caught in the propeller the captain of the boat that i use occasionally just gets his shotgun and starts firing into the water just he's a bit of a he's a bit of a kooky guy you know i have said on occasion you

know jose please don't do that and and the other people i've been taking out diving have said nicholas what are you doing no no no no no absolutely jose keep doing that we love it barbara's lost her arm that's exactly what we're paying for do you ever take jose down on a dive he doesn't scuba dive because i tried to teach him but really as much as the joy in scuba diving comes from that risk of death you do also want to take in some of the um sort of aquatic environment some of the um you know the magnificent fish turtles sharks when i took jose down there we just jumped in we start descending i looked over and he was holding two grenades in his hand. And I thought, ah. As we descend, I look over again.

He's taken both pins out, shoved both of the grenades into the mouth of a turtle. I must say, I've never seen anything like it. Unfortunately, if it was any other animal, I think it would have been contained to that sort of small environment. But because of the turtle's shell, it completely shattered. There's underwater shrapnel everywhere. It took out between 90 to 95% of all of the aquatic life

in about a 30 mile radius. And I thought, we're going to have to get to the surface here. We're going to have to ascend. We throw a couple of okay signs. I'm gesturing to Jose to sort of go up. We get back on the boat and i say you know what what what the hell happened there what the hell happened there jose and he just started firing

a shotgun into the air you write in your book you know i've had a quick read of your of your book and um there's a very moving passage where you talk about how once you've been diving, any other form of recreation doesn't really measure up. You talk about going to the cinema in your book, you talk about going to see Jumanji, a film that, for someone who hasn't scuba dived, I mean, that's an absolute rollercoaster ride of thrills and spills, adventure, Robin Williams doing what he does best. And you talk about sort of feeling entirely numb throughout the entire film and leaving and feeling like that hadn't had an effect on you at all and feeling like, am I an alien? Has something gone wrong? Yeah. I mean, once you've been scuba diving, you pretty much know once you start that hobby

that there's going to be very few things that thrill you any more than that um i personally was pretty disappointed um with the jumanji film you know i got caught up in the kind of um the atmosphere the excitement when that film came out and i thought you know this might be it this might be the one thing if there is one thing that's going to thrill me more than scuba diving it will be jumanji so um just to be careful i did i did go to the cinema in full scuba gear sat right at the front but yeah i was uh the the conventional elements of that film that thrill people just didn't do it for me that's really sad and actually i i've sort of found myself in some legal troubles when people have brought cases against me for trying to accuse me of trying to bring Jumanji down. And that's not what I'm doing.

And that's now a federal crime in the US. That's correct. Yeah. I think at the time I was charged on multiple state grounds because I did fly over like a lot of people to the States for that initial release of the film Jumanji. So I was in the States, I was charged by the state of Florida, state of Texas, and the state of Arkansas for not enjoying the film Jumanji. And then, of course, about 15 years later, they brought that federal case against me. I was quite disturbed by what I'd heard about Nicholas feeling nothing during a screening of Jumanji. And so I spoke to a friend of the show, TV doctor Dr Sam Archer, probably best known for BBC One's Lunchtime Stethoscope and Channel 5's Laxative Roulette Live.

I was interested to know, is what Nicholas had described something that is diagnosable? It's something I've seen quite a lot. We call it adrenal diluvian syndrome, which is essentially your body is so flooded with adrenaline that the ability to enjoy mid-90s family movies almost evaporates completely. Okay, and how would you diagnose that? What we'll do is we'll sit them down and in a clinical situation make them watch this film and see if there's any spike in excitement in their brain chemistry. Okay. Not many people know this, but the machine MRI used to stand for maybe Robocop is interesting.

And you would lie someone down in the MRI and play Robocop to them and then just see if there was any spike of interest. That's sort of where it started. Robocop's quite old now. Most people know the twist. So obviously it needs to be updated, hence Jumanji. I mean, you would say, wouldn't you, that until Jumanji came along, Robocop's quite old now. Most people know the twist, so obviously it needs to be updated, hence Jumanji. I mean, you would say, wouldn't you, that until Jumanji came along,

Robocop was very much the most exciting film you could watch? I think you would have called it the Jumanji of its day if in that day people knew what Jumanji was going to be, which of course they didn't because it was in the future. I mean, Jumanji's been with us as a culture in the background, I think, you could argue for thousands of years. It's always kind of been there.

It wasn't until they actually made the movie that we sort of crystallised Jumanji into something we could watch with the family. Before that, it was just a kind of ludic sense of playfulness and adventure that sort of seemed to exist as a kind of aura or wisp in the air around us. Exactly. To borrow a motif from the film itself, it was sort of a bongo drums humming in the

background that sort of grew louder and louder until eventually we discovered Jumanji. So if we have anyone listening who is involved in one of those life or death pastimes that has brought them so much excitement. For example, you know, scuba diving, as we've talked about, or there are plenty of others, horse riding, dipping your genitals into a bucket full of scorpions. There are plenty of people out there doing that kind of thing, and they may well have had that experience of going to watch Jumanji or Robocop and feeling nothing. For those people, can you give them any hope from the medical community that something can be done to row them back from this in some way?

I just encourage these people to realise that they have peaked, adrenaline-wise. That they need to lead a life where adrenaline doesn't feature at all in their day-to-day existence. They need to seek out the kind of experiences that elicit no thrills whatsoever. A fully zero adrenaline life? Yes, exactly. One of the most effective treatments for this we found is going to see the book tour of any comedian. You will go thinking it'll be funny, but it's a book tour. So yeah, deeply tedious. Nicholas explained to me that he got his start in scuba diving through his father.

Nicholas explained to me that he got his start in scuba diving through his father. My father was a dairy farmer. He specialised in the production of condensed milk, which involves transporting hundreds if not thousands of cattle to very, very deep depths, keeping them there for about six to nine months, and then the milk that they would otherwise produce due to the pressure is condensed it's pumped to the surface you have condensed milk so just to be clear um they are living in a kind of what would the word be like a sort of aqua base aqua bases they exist yes but the most common form of condensed milk farming is actually that you know the old-fashioned scuba suits that people might know, the sort of big metallic.

Oh, sure, with the kind of diving bell. Exactly, the diving bell helmet. A lot of people think that those were designed for humans. No, no, no, no, they're not. They are very much cattle suits. Right, that's why they're so bulky. Why they're so bulky. And the four arms and legs, as people like to say are actually

just for the four legs of the cow and the big bell uh is for the others oh so hang on so where's the cow's head the ass if of the suit if if you were conceiving it to be worn by it by a human being the ass of the suit is sort of a bit baggy so the the cow is sort of hunched slightly um but i think when people would have seen those suits you know and as you say we assume that they're for the human body that kind of the large ass section we thought was just for the kind of dump truck ass no no no no um that is very much for uh for the cow's head it's not stopped people with dump truck asses wearing those suits um anyone with a dump truck ass it fits them perfectly like

a glove but the initial design very much for for a cow's head and the conventional sort of bell section like i say is for the udders you'd attach some pipes stick the cow down there and it's those pipes that um would sort of milk the udder while it's at deep depth but you took a different path you decided you were going to become a commercial scuba diver instructor and everything you've become. Why did you leave behind condensed milk? Well, that's a good question. And I think it's a question that anyone who has been brought up with very successful parents in a particular industry has to grapple with. I think sorry so i mean i'm just an elephant in the room your father is paul boff i mean anyone listening will know who that is yeah that's huge

in the dairy industry i i wondered when his name was going to come up yeah um it's it's and actually this has been a bit of a record for me the the time we've been talking his name usually comes up and more quickly and and a great man and i you know i don't want to take it you know thank you i know that you probably don't you know you you're you are your own man you are successful but you know you are the son of paul boff you obviously changed your name from boff to summers yes was that a to try and get away out of his shadow is that what we're talking about it's a big shadow that my dad casts yes so as if i'd say then you decided to go into scuba to try and forge your own path in life and as you say get out from under that big boff shadow yes um and you know it's not a huge departure you mentioned the sort of uh

word scuba there um that's an acronym for the breed of cattle used in the condensed milk industry that's it that's right So the S is Shetland. The C is the Chillingham cow. The U is the Ukrainian Grey. Right. The B is the Belgian Red. Okay. And the A is, of course, the big boy, Aberdeen Angus.

And is that because those are the breeds that are best suited to being sent down and doing the whole condensed milk system? That's absolutely right. They're some of the largest cows, they're built for pressure, and boy, do they get some of that. You know, there's a lot of pressure down at 3,000 feet below the surface. And we've just found over the years that they are the most resilient cows. Your smaller cows would just implode. Yeah, I was thinking if you took down a pygmy limousine, for example. Gone. Really, just, I mean, you've barely broken the surface and that's imploded.

Really? As beautiful as they are, they are not built for the water. And sometimes you just show one of those cows a glass of water and they will implode. I don't know what it is. I think mentally they feel the pressure and they implode. The human cost of the condensed milk trade is awful. That's interesting because obviously people think a lot about the ethical side of whether it's okay to do that to cows and to put them underwater for all that time.

And obviously, I don't want to talk about the rights and wrongs of this. People can make up their own mind, but people say it's unethical. It's like the veal trade it's something where we maybe shouldn't can can consume condensed milk and and but you know this is going on and people think about the welfare of the cows but it's very rare that people actually mention the welfare of the human beings who are having to go down with the cows and and um you know plug them into the milking machines and all the rest of it yeah i mean these people risk their lives every day. For instance, they could be gobbled up by one of those giant clams that we see. They're popularised in cartoons. What happens then?

Awful. They get eaten by the clams. A lot of these people will then turn into pearls. And that pearl will often have the face of the deceased etched into the pearl, won't it? And that pearl will often have the face of the deceased etched into the pearl, won't it? Yes, I believe the term. I'm not a jeweller, but it's a milky scream is what you see there. And if you look deep into the pearl, you'll see someone in anguish, their final moments. And as we all know, as is the tradition, if you break that pearl open, which obviously not many people do, you hear the last words of the person as they died. And that's that's usually something like oh for fuck's sake something like that exactly yeah yeah oh my god that big clam ah my legs that kind of thing it's not really worth it because you can sort of guess what their last words are going to be is there any way in which this

industry could be safer luckily there are people who are better adapted to milking the cows. The people that we refer to in the medical community as having a dump truck ass. A big behind, the jello on springs. And that's great for two reasons. Firstly, often the dump truck ass is too big for the clam to get its mouth around. So you can escape. And the second is obviously that you can absorb a lot of the pressure that you experience down in those depths. And I guess the third reason is you do look very good in jeans. Yeah. So are you telling me that then, you know, if you're someone with that real Pixar mum arse,

that actually the atmospheric pressure of thousands of tons of water at those depths somehow doesn't affect you yeah exactly if you're rocking a miss is incredible if you are stowing two great panthams then you should be perfectly fine to to exist down there last question uh dr sam on this how many people every year are killed by those giant sort of man-sized clams at the bottom of the sea? Every year? Every year, yeah. 100 million. I could have spoken to Nicholas all day about condensed milk. Of course I could. But I felt I had to broach the topic of the controversy that he has created in recent times with his views

about the Titanic. Nicholas questions the official narrative around the Titanic sinking, although he does agree that the boat was hit by an iceberg. I do believe it hit the iceberg, but I ascribe to the theory that the ship sank as a consequence of carrying illegal tins of beef. Okay, so illegal tins of beef. What, so many? And we're talking about the weight of that, of those tins, dragging it to the bottom of the seas? No, no. The weight was fine.

Everyone knows that the Titanic is comprised of 16 compartments and 15 bulkheads. Right. Now, if there were no tins of beef in the Titanic, it would have hit the iceberg, those bulkheads would have closed, the water would have been contained at the front of the ship. And that was the idea of why it was unsinkable and all this kind of thing. Exactly. Hence, it's unsinkable.

But, in fact, the ship was carrying millions of tins of illegal black market beef, which were being held inside the Titanic so that when it hit the iceberg, the water poured in, the bulkheads tried to close, but it was being clogged by tins of beef. And where was this beef from and why was the Titanic full of beef? Yes, that's a good question. and why was the Titanic full of beef? Yes, that's a good question. Bruce Ismay was the chairman of the White Star Line and he was very much the sort of brainchild of this luxury transatlantic travel.

And he was chairman of the White Star Line and he came up with this idea of having a luxurious cruise that would travel between the UK and America. But that requires a lot of money. And around 1912, who had money? The black market beef traders of Southampton, Belfast, and Portsmouth. So Bruce, in all of his wisdom, thought, hang on, if I'm actually going to make this dream of mine a reality, I'm going to have to get some of these funds. So he wasn't able to get a normal bank loan or find financing a different way?

The draw of those gangs was quite strong at the time. If you wanted a ship to dock off one of those ports, which of course the Titanic wanted, you really had to get on the good side of the beef black marketeers. I see. They really had control over those ports, which of course the Titanic wanted, you really had to get on the good side of the beef black marketeers. They really had control over those ports. So while he could have had a bank loan, sure, he could have made the Titanic, sure. But where is that docking at? Where is that sailing from? Exactly. And I say Southampton and Portsmouth, around 1912, you could not find a port that wasn't controlled by beef black marketeers. Right. So there was this meeting in Southampton.

They met at a milkshake bar. Down on the docks, I imagine, you know, pretty sketchy place. You know, we imagine it now. We all know about those milkshake bars back then. You know, dockside fights. You know, all life was there. Covered in milk. Yeah.

Exactly. All of them covered in milk. Everyone had that milk moustache around that time. And actually, that was a surefire sign that someone was a member of one of these beef black marketeer gangs. So that's how you knew who to approach. Exactly. That's how you knew everyone in those gangs had a milk moustache. Because somebody like Bruce Ismay, you know, for him to go to one of those dockside milkshake bars, you know, he's from the high echelons of society, right?

Exactly. So that must have been a, you know, pretty big thing for someone like him to stoop, to go down to the dockside milkshake bar. Yeah, I mean, pretty scary stuff. You know, like you say, this man's used to champagne. He's not used to the sort of the dirty milkshakes of southampton so it would have been a big moment but you know that's how you know that bruce's dream really really was pretty serious you know someone doesn't go to a milkshake bar without knowing what they want so uh he met with the gangs he he explained his dream he know, listen, I want the most luxurious cruise liner to depart from here and take people across the Atlantic. And, you know, I'm sure he would have been a bit scared. But a couple of milkshakes later, you know, some shots of condensed milk, maybe. They were actually getting on like a house on fire. So initially, the discussion was around transporting a couple of thousand tins of beef,

but Bruce was so high on the sugar of the milkshakes that he ended up promising the transportation of about 4 to 5 million tins across the Atlantic. Right. So when the Titanic took off and there's those, you know, there's film, isn't there, of the people waving it off and that's right people up on the up on the balconies waving we just have to imagine that then below decks it's just tin after tin of of that beef well you've got to ask yourself why they're on the deck you know why are they waving why are they on the deck waving i've seen the footage like everyone else um they're on the deck there's thousands of them they're waving you know everyone know, everyone's like, oh, it's this so happy. It's what a wonderful moment filled with hope that they're waving for help. You know, they've gotten on that boat with the cases that they've tried to go into their cabins

and they've been turned away. You know, I'm sorry, it's full up. What do you mean it's full up? It's full of beef. Hang on a second. The ships, you know, it's blowing its horn. It's departing. Everyone's rushing up to the deck they're waving they've got their handkerchiefs they're saying help help help this this this thing's full of beef uh you know i can't get i can't get below deck um and everyone on on the harbor thinks they're just happy they're waving back you know good luck well done and they're going help you know seriously that it's full of it's full of beef oh enjoy your time it's for this thing it's gonna blow it's going down and lo and behold then they hit the iceberg and as you say, the system didn't work because it was all clogged up with beef. Some people have felt that you've gone too far with some of the things you've said. You'll claim that, for example, the high number of the deaths were caused because the lifeboats were full of beef. Yeah, that's right. Again, these beef black marketeers, after that milkshake meeting with Bruce Ismay, had him sign on the dotted line that if anything goes wrong, he's going down and everyone's thinking, OK, uh-oh, at least we've got the lifeboats.

Hang on, what's he saying? And you're hearing right across the whole boat, tins of beef first, tins of beef first, then women and children. More after this. More after this. Hello! Sorry to take you away from the thrilling and unravelling tale of professional diver Nicholas Summers, but it's Max Fundrive. I hope you can listen to me for a couple of minutes. I just want to talk about how this show is funded, but before I do that, I want to extend the biggest of thank yous to those of you who already support the podcast. Thank you! how's that max fun drive is the one time a year all the shows on the network come together and invite you to support the show as a member it might be that you listen to a number of shows on the max fun network it might be that you just listen to this one the good thing is that when

you sign up the system asks you to indicate to it which shows it is that you listen to and that you just listened to this one. The good thing is that when you sign up, the system asks you to indicate to it which shows it is that you listen to and that you want to support. And so your money then is funneled to the right one. It's a system I'm very happy with. I really think that Maximum Funnel are doing great stuff. You may or may not know that in recent times, especially this year,

a lot of podcast companies have gone under, normally because they get bought by some kind of sort of finance bastard or company made up of finance bastards and they kind of promise the world and then end up sacking everyone and then it all goes terribly wrong that's happened all over the place in the podcast world in the last couple of years and it hasn't happened with maximum fun because maximum fun is a worker-owned co-op and they're not dicks. So I want to ask you, please, will you consider joining us as a member?

All memberships from the lowest, which is $5 a month, up to other higher memberships, get access to bonus episodes. Every year we put out some bonus stuff. You get all of that going back to when we started, which was, I think, 2016. started which was I think 2016. This year's bonus we've got a long episode that I made using bits that hit the cutting room floor over the past year or so and that was actually really good fun to make remembering bits that I had to get rid of normally for time it's not because they're not good enough it's because every episode if I just left everything in that we recorded would just be hours and hours long so it was fun going through that stuff there's some really fun off cuts there from the likes of paul f tompkins and of course pod favorites like mike korsniak and co lots of good stuff there there's also the audio of a live

stream event i did last year which was with dr sam archer and the arsvet bob truscothic we did a kind of live ask a vet versus ask a Doc. That's up there. I've also done a collaboration with another MaxFun pod called SoundHeap, in which my character from Beef and Dairy is interviewed by a CEO

who's like two inches tall called the Tiny CEO, which doesn't make much sense if you haven't listened to their show, but it's good fun. Also, you can find in this year's bonus stuff a video of last year's live

show which was at the london podcast festival which i think is the best live show that we've ever done and i think it's better than the opening ceremony of the 2012 london olympics there there i've gone there i've said it it's got projections and costumes and all that kind of stuff. And I think it's really worth watching. All that bonus stuff is there for you. Also, for those newly signing up at the $10 a month or people upgrading their membership to $10 a month, you get the Beef and Dairy Network pin badge.

We've done a number of pin badges over the years. This year's one is a very special one. It's the crest of the wyoming cattle college of the internet so you can wear that proudly and show people that you have learned about esteemed academy also at the higher tiers there are various gifts available there's a max fun bag there's a max fun bucket hat go and check that out at maximumfund.org forward slash join. But the main thing really, I think, is that by signing up to support, you guarantee the future of the show. And I guess I just want to say, like, I do not take for granted how amazing it is that enough people chip in some money so that I can

spend proper time on this show, pay all the contributors, and try and make a show as good as I can make it. And if over the years you've enjoyed listening, think of it as giving us a tip. It's good to support the things that you like, because if you don't, then who will? And if you like the show, and you think it's worth something, then why not kick us some dosh? Anyway, I'll stop going on about this now. This is my final ask. why not go to maximum fun.org forward slash join back to the show back to my big interview with nicholas summers why do you think this isn't well known was this covered up you know why obviously we've we've seen the film titanic

that's where many people will get their knowledge about this particular event. In the film, of course, the main characters go below deck. You'll remember them having sex in a very sweaty Model T Ford. He sketches her breasts. She dances with some carefree Irishman. You're saying that none of that could have happened because all those areas were just packed full of tins of beef. That's right.

There is no way that that would have happened on the actual Titanic. And I'm glad you brought this up, actually. I'm glad you brought this up because you say there's been a cover-up. I would agree with that. But there's one person who's tried to blow the whistle on this, and that's James Cameron. But that's his movie. It's his movie and that's james cameron but that's his movie it's his movie that's right but

i met james in southampton at one of those sort of preserved milkshake bars that i i frequent the national trust i think own a number of them and keep them as they were yes that's right and this one um in southampton is thought of to be the original milkshake bar and it really is a fantastic um example of a milkshake bar they've kept all of the the original features the filthy glasses the filthy glasses exactly there's a lot of excrement on the floor uh you know they've really really kept it the way it used to be dog fights dog fights a lot a lot of dog fights a lot of cock fights as well uh a lot of cock on dog as well actually and dog on cock right so yeah they've got a lot of that and uh

i was there on a saturday morning as i always do straight down to the milkshake bar and i sat down and there was this guy just on the bar head in his hands and he and he had this big folder and on the front of this folder it was just the word titanic so we're sorry when when was this this was a couple of years before he made the film. So that folder may have been him working on the script, maybe. Exactly. So it very well might have contained the original script. And so I went up to him and I said,

Hi, James, I'm Nicholas Summers. I know who you are. You're a big Hollywood heavyweight. It's great to meet you. What the fuck is this? You know, what is this that you've got here? And he said, you know, it's my, uh, it's, I'm making this film with Kate Winslet and, um, Leonard DiCaprio. And, uh, he said, I'm working on the Titanic. And I started asking him about it. And, and I, and I said, you know, there's, there's been no mention of beef James.

And he said, what do you mean? And I told him the whole story and he was completely taken with it i'd never never you know a lot of people take a little bit of convincing he straight off the bat he was oh my god i think i think you know for me certainly things start making sense once you hear the theory because you think what of course yeah of course all the questions are answered it feels like that final jigsaw piece is coming into place it feels like james cameron had that same experience absolutely absolutely and he said to me he said nicholas i'm gonna get you on this feature and so i was his main advisor throughout the filming of the titanic with kate and leonard you know he'd say he'd do these shots he'd do these scenes and he'd look at me and he'd say nich Nicholas, what do you think? And I always had the same note.

More beef. More tins of beef. More tins of beef, James. Right. Anything below deck was full of beef. So all of those scenes were very much filmed with the tins present. Not many people know this, actually. It might be a podcast exclusive.

I was the on-set doctor for the blockbuster film Titanic. No way. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was a fun few months, that shoot. Well, it didn't come without its fair bit of drama, though. Mainly, people were coming to see me because they'd either had an injury because a can of beef had fallen on their head, or they'd tripped over a can of beef,

or they'd scratched themselves on the jagged edge of a can of beef that had maybe been partially opened. So as a doctor then, were you attending to the likes of, you know, the big hitters? Your Billy Zanes, your Kate Winslet, your Leonard DiCaprios? Yeah, lots of fun days on set.

Me and Billy Zane. I saw Billy Zane a lot, actually. He's not a, well, man. He's a thing where he, sort of a form of eczema where your your skin is very oily particularly the bottom of your feet which means that you can if you wanted to sort of glide everywhere you know you'd often see him and he it was almost like he was on wheelies he would glide everywhere is there not a sort of patient confidentiality thing here where you shouldn't be telling me exactly about billy zane's eczema

um i used to think that and then i remember once at a premiere for another film of his a three i think it was called some people called it temptation island in other countries and he turned up at the red carpet and he was gliding around everywhere and it looked a bit like sort of the red carpet had been overrun by snails but i looked down at that clear trail and went that's not a snail trail that's that's a zane train as we used to call them that's interesting because i remember at the time when that movie came out people were like what's going on at this red carpet and they assumed he was standing on a roomba yes that he'd supercharged the roomba stories i remember um his publicist

getting very angry well i remember i remember all the rumours about it that were flying around. Or should I say, Roombas. The Roomba mill went into overdrive. I love to laugh. Yeah, but no, as I say, that's his slick, slick soles that he was able to glide around on. He sort of wears shoe tops, so it looks like he's wearing shoes. What you don't realise is there's no sole on that shoe and it's just his slick real soul yeah exactly it's just his skin underneath is it true that the part of billy zane's success as a hollywood actor and the reason why he made it and boy has he made it is that with him you don't necessarily have to do a dolly shot you can get him to glide towards

the camera rather than moving the camera towards him. Oh, the amount of money you save. Saves a lot of time on set. Exactly. Plus, you don't have to get him a car onto set. All you need to do is book him a hotel at the top of a hill and have the set at the bottom of the hill, and you can guarantee he'll be on time every single day. Nicholas had told me that the film Titanic was filmed with millions of tins of beef on set.

But as we all know, when you watch the movie, you don't see a single tin of beef. There's not a single tin of beef. And what happened was we'd wrapped on the film. Everyone's happy. Everyone's whooping. You know, we're getting the champagne out. Suddenly there's three execs that I see. Studio execs.

Studio execs. They've arrived. James starts looking a bit nervous. He sort of goes over, starts talking to them. They're looking very, very serious. James then beckons me over and I thought, hang about,

what's going on here? So I walk over and they go ape shit. These three studio execs go absolutely ape shit. I've never seen anything like it. And all they could say was, what's with the tins of beef? What's with the tins of beef?

And Leonard started crying. He went to pieces entirely. Kate was consoling him. And at this point, you know, it's deafening. These three execs, the room goes quiet. And, you know, they're saying they've spent millions of pounds on this production and they can't see F all, you know, in the footage because it's surrounded by tins of beef. You know, I said to them, I said, we sent you the script. They okayed the script. And then they come back at me. They say, well, yeah, sure. But you didn't say everything was going to be surrounded by millions of tins of beef so we've got the final movie titanic there's not a single tin of beef there does that mean that the whole thing was reshot like what what happened three letters cgi right the studio execs came in um with with a a windows computer and they open up this laptop

and they they put it in front of my face and they just say Windows. And this is what, probably Windows 95 at that stage? Windows 95, exactly. And that might be the first time you'd seen Windows 95.

I had no idea what they were talking about. Right, okay. They march off. Before I know it, I'm going to the cinema in my scuba gear. I'm getting down there. I'm sat on the front row.

I'm looking at the screen and I'm not seeing a single tin of beef. And I'm furious. So they CGI'd out every single tin of beef in that film using a Windows 95 computer. Remember James Cameron came to see me days after the premiere of Titanic and he was in a bad way.

What the execs had done to his vision, his film, he was devastated. He was drinking a lot of alcoholic milkshakes, about nine or ten a day. But you could tell that even when he sort of ran out of those, he was just combining any dairy products with any wine that he could get his hands on. The nadir of this was he had the thing where he got some mascarpone cheese and combined that with some very cheap Pinot Grigio he got from a garage and made what he called Pinot Cheesio, the odour of which still haunts me to this day. He'd gone so far that he was actually giving that out as christmas presents i ended up having to treat a number of celebrities who he'd sent this to i remember billy zane came into my surgery and um his feet had completely dried out as a result of the pinot cheese yeah yeah he tried to have some of it and uh and well it hadn't agreed with him i've got still got on my phone a screenshot

of a text message from um sigourney weaver where she just written it stinks it stinks so bad um my guest room is a write-off and when you think about you know how smelly something would have to be for you to go to the lengths of texting a doctor i mean that's smelly if she didn't even want medical advice i just told her you know you're never going to sell this place. Best option for you is to bulldoze it and sell the land to the military. James was a total mess. You know, he called me up hundreds of times. I could tell he'd been on the milkshakes.

And, you know, I'd go down to the milkshake bar on a Saturday and I looked at him. He looked at me. His eyes were completely bloodshot. He'd bet so much money on the dogfights that he'd lost it all, that he was actually going to compete in the next dogfight. Versus a dog.

Versus a Rottweiler, I think it was. Right. And I thought, this is serious. We're going to lose James. And I looked at him in the eye and I knew the next thing I was going to say was going to be incredibly important. It was going to save this man's life.

And I said the only three letters that I knew would shake him out of this. C-G-I. Right. Windows 95. And he looked slightly confused at me. And I said it again. C-G- again CGI Windows 95

and for the first time in a long time I saw that cheeky glint that he used to give me on the set when we were piling the tins of beef high to get ready for the next shot

and he stood up he picked up. He picked up the stool that he was sat on. He launched it across the room and he marched out of that milkshake bar and I never heard from James again until the release of a little film called Avatar. There I was at the premiere of Avatar.

I was in my full scuba gear. That was the very first time that I had gone to the cinema and had done really anything other than scuba diving where I felt the same passion, the same level of excitement that scuba diving has given me. So in contrast to your reaction to jumanji precisely the cgi technology that these studio exec assholes used to completely bastardize and destroy mine and james's vision in titanic james had done the incredibly clever thing with my help to take that power back from them to create the greatest film ever made the greatest film ever made and actually now i think of it

i wonder whether and you can tell me if i'm right or wrong the subtext of the story of avatar that the blue space alien type people versus the kind of mechanoid human people is actually telling the story of you and james versus the studio execs i'm so glad you picked up on that because i i often tell people that i worry that i come across as a bit of an egomaniac but i'm so glad you got that same impression james told me that that is what the film is about you know there's all this talk of oh is it is it a kind of metaphor for the environment or fossil fuels and drilling it's not that it is entirely the retelling of mine and james's experience in creating titanic starring kate winslet and leonard dicaprio and eventually, as you know, the blue space alien weird people rise up and they

destroy the mechanoid human beings. And that's exactly what James and I did with the creation of Avatar. And it's that, I've never felt anything like that. And to this day, that's the one moment in my life where I have felt pure joy beyond that given to me by scuba diving. Despite Nicholas and James Cameron creating Avatar and feeling that they had proven the studio executives who had ruined Titanic wrong, their theory that the Titanic had sunk because it was full of illegal beef was still widely ridiculed and disbelieved. However, the success of Avatar gave them an opportunity to prove everyone wrong. It was when James and I brought out Avatar the Way of Water that we finally realised we've got enough money here. We've made a buck or two. And the only way we're going to stop people from calling us cranks is if we prove once and for all that the Titanic was filled from bottom to top with tins of beef.

And how do you do that? You've got to get yourself a submersible. You've got to go down to the wreck and you've got to recover as many tins of beef as you possibly can. And that is exactly what we did now this is obviously um huge and this is the thing that's you know some people have been saying all sorts that you fake the footage that you know ironically that it's all cgi um people sort of don't trust james cameron because they know that he can create these wonderful intricate worlds maybe even he's using the specific way of water technology which he you know to create those

underwater worlds maybe he's just done this with nicholas summers and they're they're faking this whole thing just like the moon landings was faked and you know and um you know everyone knows bill bill clinton's a hologram and so these things are possible how does it feel when people sort of say that to you well it's music to my ears in a way because you know what i'm gonna say uh whenever anyone comes at me with that with this diatribe if you faked it you faked it you faked it boom yes what is that what is that then now this is a real privilege can i touch it of course you can yeah be careful be careful with it just to explain to what this is. This is a tin of beef, which if you're to be believed, has been at the bottom of the ocean since 1912. That's right.

It's rusty. It's hard to read the writing on the front, but it's an incredible artifact. Thank you so much for bringing it along. My pleasure. You haven't yet opened any of these tins. No. But when you contacted the show and said you wanted to come on, you said that ultimately you do want to publicly open one of the tins no um but when you contacted the show and said you wanted to come on you said that ultimately you do want to publicly open one of the tins prove what's inside prove that it's beef

and also prove that if you tin beef in your words it could last 5 000 years like this this will be totally edible and you'd like to prove that and you've decided you want to do that on our show and i just want to say thank you so much it's my pleasure this exclusive it's my pleasure and and it's a recognition of all that you do for for the beef industry i know you you here have been um firm supporters of the beef tin theory for a long time now so this is just in recognition to when everyone else abandoned me and james i i knew you were there supporting us so um it's the least we can do okay let's open that tin okay uh here we go um and we are to expect that this this beef has been perfectly preserved absolutely perfectly

preserved um here we go i guess uh i'll do the honors um so just he's turning the little key side that's right and it's just oh we punctured it there oh god oh it's really um hmm jesus christ um it's really that's um it's a kind of swampy gas. Yes. I mean, I think that's normal. Yeah, that's, I mean, that's looking good to me. Are you sure? I mean, should we even open it anymore? Because that's noxious. I mean, that's really... It's meant to bubble.

It's definitely meant to bubble. I think if you... I'm just going to finish taking the lid off and... Oh, my God. Yeah uh that's looking that's looking good um i mean i that's sorry i know you said that this tin would be able to keep beef fresh for years and years and years but yeah that's uh that's a putrid meat no it no it's not um it's it's this is exactly as as the beef would have been eaten in 19... Would those worms have been in the tin originally?

Yeah, definitely. Because they look like kind of sea worms. There's definitely like a maritime worm vibe. Yeah. I just want to say, like, you don't feel like you have to eat this just because we're recording the podcast. This is 25 years in the making.

It's really ripening, isn't it? It's getting better. I just want to make it very clear that I don't, I won't think any less of you for not eating this. This is very obviously heavily rotten. There's nothing I want to do more than to eat this beef. Okay, there's quite a lot of eggs in it. Are those... All original.

That's all normal. What about the tiny crabs? It looks like there's thousands of tiny crabs in there. Nah, I think that's normal. We could sieve it for crabs first if you want. Okay. Here we go. First big mouthful.

Here we go. Okay. I can feel the crabs going back up my throat. Are you taking a second you don't need to take i think you've tasted it now so there's you don't need to take a second i just want to um because now you've got through the tops of the hardened carapace that there's a lot more of those miniature crabs that's the best bit the the best that's often the top bit of the tin beef was to preserve the rest yeah and. And the good stuff is down below.

It's great. I mean, there's no other word for it. It doesn't get better than this. It does not get better than this. Sorry. Okay. well i think i think you've done very well there and i i by no means think you need to finish this tin nope no the whole tin the whole tin i'm not even convinced that's still beef i'm so i'm sorry that's it's like kind of organic mulch created by hundreds of years of breeding crabs, I think.

You could eat around that. You can see that tiny, tiny, tiny bit there that resembles a bit of beef. The bit that's in the mouth of the live... Yeah. I don't know what that is. It's kind of a worm. It's kind of a sea worm. Yeah, that bit.

Yeah. Do you want that bit? That invertebrate could be a new species as far as I'm concerned. I've not seen anything like that before. Do you want to eat it? No, I do not want to eat it. I think, and I don't think you should eat it anymore either.

I think it's... Okay, here we go. God, I just wish... I just wish Jose was here to finish me off. I mean, I don't mean that. That's just the... That's the beef talking, but... Round four.

I'm going to have to call Jose. I'm going to have to call Jose. Jose! Jose! Jose! Shoot my head off. Do it! He's not here. Jose!

Jose's not here. Jose, please. I can see Jose. I can see him there. I can see him there. So Nicholas is now in a stable condition. He fell into a coma moments after you stopped recording, but he is improving.

His vitals are now relatively normal and we're hoping he might wake up soon. Wow. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Dr. Sam, for taking care of him. Obviously, it was pretty scary for me. It was just the two of us in the studio and I saw things going south pretty quickly. It was when his eyes rolled back, his mouth started foaming, and then hundreds and hundreds of tiny crabs started firing back out of his mouth, nose and anus that I thought, right, I need to call the doctor. And thank God you picked the phone up. Is this something that we should have maybe expected

with him eating that tin of beef from 1912? I think we're looking at a situation where he's eaten very, very old beef. Beef from before a time of health and safety standards. We're talking about cows that were fed almost exclusively on lead. That was what they used to do back then. So the problem really with eating that old beef is that you are essentially putting yourself back into time before health and safety legislation, and essentially experiencing the levels of danger of an Edwardian person just in the modern day. Wow.

Exactly. It's like putting your stomach in a time machine and is as dangerous as that sounds as well. And the key problem is lead. Why was it then that so many cows in the early 1900s were eating so much lead? Cows used to be sold at auction and the heavier the cow, the more money you would get for it.

So the only logical thing for a lot of farmers to do was to feed their cow as much lead as possible. This sort of reached its nadir in, I think it was 1942, when a cow was sold at auction that weighed 37 tonnes, which is far too much for a cow. By that point, I believe the cow was almost pure lead and was completely useless to be butchered and the uh the butcher that bought it to turn it into um you know steaks and things actually uh just left it where it was and it became a statue it just became a cow statue because there was just so much lead in it so essentially the cow died the organic parts of

the cow naturally rotted away and what you were left with and what that cow had turned into was a kind of perfect cast within which to cast a lead statue of a cow. Exactly, exactly. Rumour has it a number of statues were created that way. I've heard a horrible rumour that the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square was made by pouring molten lead into the corpse of Winston Churchill, but I've not had that verified, so I don't want to spread that rumour. You don't want to spread that roomba?

That doesn't really make sense in this context. Thinking again about Nicholas then, he's absolutely chock full of lead. Yes. But you say he's going to make a full recovery. Is that true? We're hopeful. We're also hopeful that, as we all know, lead is very heavy, which means it sinks to the bottom.

Which means Nicholas might be looking at having the kind of dump truck ass that means that he himself will be able to traverse the inky depths of the oceans of the world deeper than he's ever dove before wow so you're saying that the lead will coalesce um in his ass yep creating that real dump truck situation and that that will allow him to um to be an even better diver so oh i mean this is i mean way to pull a positive out of something so negative this is amazing yeah. I just can't wait to see that new ass of his. Anyway, thank you, Dr. Sam. Oh, before I go, Dr. Sam, what do you make of his theory that the Titanic sank because it was full of tins of beef

and also that the lifeboats were full of tins of beef and that's why people died during that situation? I think that theory is complete bollocks. It's just not true. That's a good point. Okay, well, thank you, Dr. Sam. Thank you very much. A big thanks to Nicholas Summers

and Dr. Sam Archer for those interviews. Nicholas is still in a coma, but the good news is that the lead is beginning to sink and coalesce in one part of his body. That's right. That dump truck ass. Beep beep.

Also, I should mention that we did ask James Cameron if he would be interviewed for this programme, and he declined, but he did send the following message. Hello, and thank you for your interest in my work. I can't be interviewed at the moment, as I'm putting the final touches to the script of Avatar 11. In this film, a group of blue Na'vi people discover a portal which allows them to go to 1980s California, where they end up competing in the 1984 LA Olympics,

ultimately winning bronze. Thanks, James. That sounds like absolute horseshit. So, that's all we've got time for this month. But if you're after more beef and dairy news, get over to our website now, where you'll find all the usual stuff, as well as our off-topic section, where this month we surveyed the people of Birmingham

and asked them how they feel the city would be different if it had a coast. So, until next time, beef out. Thanks to Cody Dalla, Tom Neenan and Linnea Sage. And thanks to you for listening. I know that not everyone can afford to or simply doesn't want to support the show financially. And obviously that's totally fine.

I'm just pleased that you're listening, honestly because it's max fun drive we are going to be doing some special stuff over the next couple of weeks on the 27th of march that's a wednesday at 8 p.m uk time i'll be doing a live stream with professor james harkham historian and friend of the show we're going to be doing a live Ask a Historian session where you can put your questions to the historian James Harcombe. So to watch that, that'll be on Twitch. So 8pm on the 27th of March, twitch.tv forward slash Benjamin Partridge. Also, there'll be another episode of Beef and Dairy Network out next week. Because it's maximum drive uh another

extra bonus episode will be coming through to everyone's feed i'll also be doing reddit ask me anythings i might do some other twitch stream things i'm not really a big sort of twitch guy but maybe i'll do that for the next couple of weeks i've been playing a lot of the computer game civilization 6 and maybe i can um stream myself playing that but i have to say it has absolutely ruined my life anyway for details of special stuff that i might be doing for max fun drive follow us on social media we've got the beef and dairy twitter we've got the beef and dairy instagram and if you do sign up at maximumfund.org forward slash join do let me know on social media because i would love to say thank you to you personally. See you next week. Maximumfun.org forward slash join.