No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As Alien Dust

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Rhys Darby joins Dan, James and Anna to discuss Santorini, sheep and suspending sacks of spuds. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes. Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreonEdited by James HarkinProduced by Leying LeeTeam includes Tara Dorrell, Joe Mayo and Ethan Ruparelia

Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast coming to you this week from four undisclosed locations. My name is Dan Schreiber. I'm sitting here with Anna Tishinsky, James Harkin, and Reese Darby. And once again, we have gathered around the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, and that is Reese. A charismatic adventurer. discovers a cable car in Atlantis. And that's the quickest time to breaking our format and show we've ever experienced. That felt like a riddle rather than a fact.

I've got a suspicion I know who the charismatic adventurer is. If I could hazard a guess. Oh, gosh. And he's been to Atlantis, has he? Allegedly. Allegedly, yeah. This year, actually, this has just come in, this news. How's it?

Yeah. Okay, well, for those of you that may know anything about Atlantis and where it is, one of the main spots of contention is Santorini, the Greek island. And said person, adventurer, he discovered a cable car in Santorini. Now, he'd been twice, this was his second visit to Santorini. And was it a mysteriously lost fable Atlantean cable car or? Well, he never saw it the first time he went. He went to his 20s with his then wife, Rosie.

Actually, oh, they're still married. Hang on. Yep. And actually, I don't know if they were married back then. I have to check on. When you're married a long time, you do forget how long and when the actual, you know. So. I imagine Rosie thinks it's been quite a long time.

You're right. You're in Santorini, Atlantis. They're the same place. Yes, yes, yes. For me, it's probably the most Atlantean place. If you go back to the Plato readings, you know, Athens is just around the corner. Mm-hmm. Yes.

The whole place volcanic erupted about 3,600 years ago. And so all the islands are created from the whole thing falling through into the sea. Big hint there. That's what happened to Atlantis. So it used to be just a normal round blob of an island, like an island. Huge volcano comes and collapses in on itself. And now it's got a big hole in. And that was like 1,600 BC.

It used to be called Stroghili. And then it got renamed Santorini off the back of the fact that it's more than one island now, isn't it? It's a sort of round shape. And did you go there, Reese, because of the connection? Or was it just on the cruise? Was it a stop happening anyway? I heard a rumor that there was rumors of a cable car. So I wanted to just get it down as a definite, you know, get it in the book.

Have you ever been on a cable car before, Reese? Because they're quite common. Yes. No, it turns out, yes, they are. They are. But this one I hadn't been on before. So I try to go on every cable car I see. You know what I think might be even better than the cable car is there is an Atlantis Museum in Santorini.

I think it might be the only Atlantis museum in the world. I spent the whole time on the cable car. Got to go on to the museum. And the idea is that the Minoans were there and there was a really good civilization of Minowans that was very advanced. And then they probably disappeared when this eruption happened. And in fact, right now, they're kind of going to the bottom of the ocean and they're finding lots of evidence that this civilization was very advanced. So I think whether this is what Plato was talking about, I don't know.

But definitely there is a big old underwater civilization. Right. That's so interesting. Do you know there's an Atlantean language? And it was only spoken very briefly, I think, in the 1990s. and it was when Disney were making their movie, Atlantis, the Lost Empire. They hired a language expert who constructed a whole grammatical system, everything put in place. Yeah, an entire language.

How do they make it like Atlantean as opposed to any other like languages? Is it like all bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl bl. Yes. Yes, it was, yes, that was, unfortunately they were sinking and they were half underwater at the time we heard the language, so it does sound very bubbly and liquidy. But no, I actually haven't seen Atlantis the Lost Empire, despite both mine and Rees's interests in it. Areas, have you seen it?

I can't recall, no, which is another confusing thing. Well, it's probably a bastardization of the true factual historical truth that you guys adhere to, I suppose, the disnification of it. True. That's right. But that's amazing that they went to the trouble of creating. a language. It's not Lord of the Frickin rings, guys. It's a film for five-year-olds. Who's he is? They don't care. Yeah. I mean, Lord of the Rings is a film for kids, isn't it?

James. Well, the Hobbit is. Okay. Exactly. You graduate to Lord of the Rings. Rees, do believe in Atlantis? I kind of, I do. I tell you why I do, because we always forget how old the earth is, and some of us don't even know, and some of us... you know, speculate the wrong age. But the world has been turned over and turned over so many times. And they're finding every day, not every day, let's say once a week, they're finding new bits that they haven't seen before, layer upon layer. And now with this new LIDAR and this E-RADAR technology that they're using,

you know, they're finding lost civilizations under the forests. in the Amazon and all sorts of things. So I think the technology is catching up. And that's the one good thing I'll say about artificial intelligence is that's going to help. I was speaking to a chap the other day, and he works in the AI interpreting animals language system. Oh, cool. And we're getting really advanced on that. We're figuring out using AI what animals are saying.

And that's going to be a crazy thing to happen. It's going to happen in the next couple of years. where we're going to work out what our cats and dogs are saying or thinking, which is going to be very confronting. Very weird. It is, isn't it? Especially from the cats. Yeah.

Can I just say, those cats are liars? And whatever they say, it's not true. I know my dog's just going to be like, I love you. I love you. I love you. Mike, I will be, I still haven't been bad for the last three months. Yeah. Do you know that on Sanzarini, they have Martians as well as,

Atlantis. Oh, God. He's drunk the Kool-Aid. Here it is. So this are some caves. I've been to the museum. These are some caves called the Ballos Cove basalts. And scientists have checked the rocks there and compared them with Martian meteorites.

And they say that they're basically the best rocks on Earth for checking what they're like. And if they're like this, then the Martian meteorites will be like that as well. Okay, cool. Yeah, right. Yeah, the clay, the soil there, it's all just volcanic. Ash, isn't it? Which means, excitingly, for me, it's the only place in Europe where you can get really, really, really old wine. Because we've discussed before that all other wine was wiped out at the end of the 19th century by phyloxera, which was an insect that feeds on vine roots. It wiped it all out. But Santorini immune to philoxera because it's all volcanic ash. So they couldn't live in it. These insects can't survive in that environment. And so if you want a wine that's more than 150 years old. And who doesn't, you can go there. And it's quite famous the wine.

It's Vincanto, a white wine that thinks it's a red. Oh, I like that. If that's appealing. Have you had a white Peno No, but I did read. That's one of the few ones you can get in white and red. Yeah. Is it nice? That blew me away.

Oh, well, I mean, you know, in the dark, of course, you can't tell. But during the day, I'm like, this shouldn't be tasting like this. Do you do a lot of drinking in the dark, Rhys? I went through a phase, you know, when I've been out of work for a bit. As well as having Atlantis and Martians, did you know that Santorini has vampires? Really? Yeah, these are Greek vampires called Vricolacus, and it's basically, Santorini was thought to be the place where they came from,

and to send vampires to Santorini is like to send Coles to Newcastle, or to send Al's to Athens or Samovaz to Tula or, you know, like sending something to somewhere where they already have a lot of it. We're not really sure why, but it could be due to this soil that we were talking about. And maybe the soil doesn't rot the corpses very well. And so, like, they would bury people in the soil and they would still be bodies after quite a long amount of time. So they thought they were vampires. Yeah. I read a story as well, James, which is that it was an island where they plopped plague victims, people who were still alive with the plague

so that they were isolating the problem and they were sort of just left to their own means and there's accounts of people saying that they could hear across the water from the island screams of pain and so on and so they were treated as vampires but actually they were just very, very ill. Oh wow. Reese, I'm just imagining Rosie sort of thinking

great, I'm taking Reese away from all this weird Bigfoot stuff. We're going to go on a Greek cruise. We're just going to have a nice time. Oh my God, Atlantis is there. The island of vampires is around the corner. Oh, shit. She's like, no, no, Reese, there's a cable car up here. Let's go there. She did sidetrack me with the cable car.

She knows I've got a cable car obsession. Did you... Rees, on your cruise, did you happen to stop nearby the land of Sauter Immortals? I've given it that nickname. It's called Icaria. It's an island where the longevity rates are just far greater than anywhere else than the rest of Europe and America. They live 10 years longer, on average. They have lower rates of cancer and heart disease. And people have studied them because so many of them

live into their hundreds. And they've studied their food. They've studied their sex life. So they found that 80% of eccarian males between the ages of 65 and 100 were still having sex. And of those, a quarter did so with good duration and achievement. Isn't that amazing? Don't market it as an achievement. I think that's going to give a lot of people a complex. No one's judging either way. I have achieved.

Duration needs work. George. Yeah, it's this island where they're just living long and they're studying their food. They're studying everything about them. But we think they're shagging their way to longevity. Basically. Because I think there's another thing. I think we have mentioned that actually they've all just been fiddling the books and their dates of birth are in wrong.

And I think it's just places like islands which have dodgy record keeping. So they're a claiming they're lasting for ages and they're amazing in the sack and they're B saying they're 100. They're all 50 and actually they're prematurely ejaculating all over the shop. I can give you one tip, Rhys, for next time you're in the islands. If a lesbian offers you their placenta, then you must accept. it. And that's because on the island of Lesbos, a placenta is what they call backlaver. And it's really rude because of this Greek idea of Xenia where if you go to someone's house, they have to look after you and they have to offer you food and stuff. You should always accept it if they give it to you.

Yeah. That's good. Okay. Well, look, I'm, that's good advice, but I'm definitely, I'm a yes man anyway. So I never say no to things. Regardless of if it's actual placenta or backlava, you're just You're going to have it. Yeah. I'm just a kind receiver. And then, you know, later on in the day, maybe even in the dark, when I'm having a wine, I might just sort of put it away somewhere, never to be seen again. Well, it is another tip, Rhys.

Next time, you don't need to go all the way to the Greek islands to get to Santorini. You just need to go around the corner to the Hollywood Hills to Castle Argyle. Yeah, because Castle Argyles, it's a senior living community. And they've started doing virtual headset excursions together. and the first place they went as a pilot test was to Santorini. So they all sit down. All the old ladies and old men sit down and they put on their headsets. And there's a tour guide who says,

okay, look to your right, see your cable car? There you go. And then a lot of people who are in these care homes don't have shared experience together. And if they did used to go traveling, it's quite isolating because they say, well, I used to go to this place. I used to do that. Now they all go together and they experience it together. and so they can talk about the time we went to Santorini together.

Yeah, it seems like it's quite a useful thing if you're not able to leave the confines of your home. That's amazing. So there you go. And Rosie has already paid for your first two years in there. And then after that, you'll have to find the money. Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Anna. My fact this week is that the introduction of sheep to Argentina

doubled the amount of dust in Antarctica. Riddle me that. Is it wind? Blew it over? No, actually James. It's aliens that took it half. Ah, I know it. Your face.

Oh, yes, it's bloody wind, all right? It was blown over. But this is this amazing correlation that we found, scientists have found. I read this in an article on NASA's website about how human activity in one place has massively far-flung geographical impacts. And basically, there's been a doubling of dust in Antarctica since 1935, which, so it's getting very dirty. And that coincides exactly with when sheep came to Patagonia. 70% of the

forested lands were wiped out, and it was turned over to mostly sheep farming. And it caused massive land degradation, turned into desert, vegetation loss, and all of that kind of stuff, loosens the soil, it gets puffed up in the air, trotted up by all of these sheep trotting all over it, and it sails away to Antarctica? And then is it bad in Antarctica because it melts the ice? It's simply dreadful in Antarctica. I found it very amazing. Sunlight is terrible at melting snow.

Sunlight barely melts it. If you shine sunlight at fresh snow, it reflects about 90% of the sunlight off it. As soon as you get dust on snow, suddenly it absorbs 50 to 60% of, the heat from it and it suddenly melts much, much faster. So the more dust you get on your snow, the more it melts and the more it melts, the more screwed. So is there someone out there whose job it is just the dust

snow? Yep, yep. It's a cleaning gig that you can get. You get sent to Antarctica just with a dustpan and brush and sweep it up. There should be. What are you doing these days? Oh, you'll never guess I've got a new job. I used to work with a cable car, but now

I'm in Antarctica, brush and shovels. wife put me onto it absolutely loving it yeah and sheep basically wreck everything don't they as soon as you get sheep somewhere like according to some people like like that's probably not fair because i think there's it's an argument so half the people seem to think actually much less than half of people think that if you put sheep somewhere it wrecks the whole environment much less than half of people think actually sheep are quite good for the environment and almost everyone else doesn't really have an opinion on the subject. And do you have a side you fall on,

bearing in mind that we're about to be able to translate all of what sheep can say, apparently. So be careful. The next two years. Well, I was reading an article by George Momboyer, who's like the main guy who is anti-sheep. And he says that the Lake District, where I used to live, has been sheep-wrecked.

Oh, that's good. Good pun. So he's got like the good headlines. Yes. He does. It's funny because George Mombiot is known for so, many things. He's sort of famous in the UK for internationalists. He's a very famous journalist, but no one has ever said he's just known for being anti-sheep. You know what? That's what I mostly know him as? Like a rewilder kind of guy. Oh yes, you're right. Rewarding. Yes, I

hadn't thought of that as being spun as anti-sheet. I just known for his puns. Great puns from Mumbai. Rees, we're talking about AI and sheep. You've been in the headspace of a sheep recently because, well, Reese was a sheep in The Sheep Detectives, which is a new movie that's just come out. Is this why you met the AI language guy? Was he telling you how to be a sheep? No, no, there was a different party I was at. But look, for a start, you guys have got to see the sheep detectives if you haven't seen it. It's a fantastic movie.

No one knew that it was going to be any good with, you know, it's about detectives who are sheep. But one of those ones that surprises you. I've read an amazing review of it. I know this sounds mad, but I've just gone, oh, it's that one with the detective to a shea. Yes. They should have worked hard on the title, shouldn't they? It's not quite clear enough. It's Hugh Jekman's most highly rated film of his career.

Yeah, on the tomato meter. Absolutely. It was a huge kid's book. It was massive. I think it was German initially called Three Bags Full. The author of who was Leone Swan, and then she's got a sequel, which is, called Big Bad Wall. So it sounds like there's a potential next movie coming up.

I think there'll be more. I think there'll be more because it's done very well. Sounds like George Mombio has a rival for his pun contest. Yes. It's hard for me to see someone being anti-sheep because sheep are so docile and you talk about them ruining the environment, but you only have to look at New Zealand and it's definitely not ruined and we have a lot of sheep. So it's all down to how much paddock they get.

much grasp, what their environment is and how spread out they are and that type of thing. You know who gave you guys sheep, New Zealand? It's a big old name. Who? Big old character. Cook. Captain James Cook. He's credited it with it.

Between 1773 and 1777, he brought over the first sheep. Just quite an iconic name to have dropped them off. You know if you have a load of sheep in a field, this is a question for everyone. How many would there have to be that you could know how many they're out without counting them? So if there's two there, you would just, you wouldn't have to count one, two. You would just know there were two. But if there were 300, you would only know there was 300 by counting them. So how many do you think you would just naturally know?

Seven. I think a Kiwi farmer would differ with, you know, because they're used to seeing blocks of how many and they do hang out together and they'd be able to just instantly go, right, there's 40 there. Okay. I think that's what's key. I feel like maybe they do hang out in groups of, four or three, so you're just, you're going, okay, there's 10 groups, so now that's 40. That's still counting, though, that's still counting.

Oh, I see, just on site. Look at them and you just know the number. I can definitely agree that, like, Kiwi farmers would have, like, an inherent advantage of this, but most humans can seem to be able to do five, and then once there are six, you have to start counting them, or you have to say there's two lots of threes or whatever. but there was a 19th century German calculator, a man who calculated things called Zacharias Days, and he could do 30.

So if you put up to 30 sheep in a field, he could just say 26. Oh, really? Was it only sheep? Could it be anything? Or it's just sheep? If he got cows, he's got no idea. It worked with anything,

but he did it with sheep. That was his party trick kind of thing. And sheep tend to not move so much. So for example, if you're putting 30 goats in there, They're going to start moving around a lot more. But 30 sheep, if one of them is staying still, the others will just stand next to it. Oh, nice. Do you know the best way to count sheep if you're not that guy?

If you're a sheep farmer but not that guy. No. And this is what farmers do, is for every 25 white sheep, they have one black sheep. And this is to work out if your sheep have gone missing. So if you've just got white sheep, it's very hard to count if you've got a thousand sheep. but if you've got, I mean, let's say you've got 20 black sheep, you know you've got 20 black sheep, you can count them much faster and you can go, okay, three black sheep are missing. That means I'm missing roughly three out of 20, three-twentieth of my sheep.

So the equivalent number of white sheep will be missing. Yeah, but if you're a good poacher, you would just make sure you don't steal the black sheep. So your farmer's looking around going, all the sheep are here, but you're down to six black sheep. And nothing else. No white sheep. I shouldn't have said this, should I? Maybe I've just exposed their trick. You've given away the secrets.

Yeah. Did you guys know? There's a butcher's hall in London, and the butcher's hall has the cleaver that cut up the first New Zealand lamb brought to England and served to Queen Victoria. Wow. Yeah. So this is 1882, and the first shipment of frozen mutter. and lamb, along with some port, came along, and the carcass was brought to Buckingham Palace, I believe, and it was brought to Queen Victoria, and it was carved up for her,

and that cleaver has become such an iconic cleaver as a result that if you go to the butcher's hall, it's framed with an explanation about its importance. Wow. The perks of being a royal are weird. I don't know if I want a massive sheep carcass brought into my living room and cleavered in front of me, you know. Oh, they love that kind of stuff. staff the royals.

I suppose they're into it on there. As long as you protect the carpets. Because they couldn't do it with peasants anymore, so they kind of had to do it with sheep. Good point. Yeah. It's a real second best. In ancient Egypt, around 3,000 BC,

so long old time back, the most fashionable tattoo you could get was a sheep. Right. What it seems is that it was people who had caught a barbary sheep because they were really difficult to catch. But when you caught one, you got a tattoo.

and if any woman saw your sheep tattoo, she'd be immediately very attracted to you because it proved that you could kill a Barbary sheep. Right. Oh, gee. Wow. Also, they're quite easy to draw, probably, that's wise. It's just a cloud with a head, isn't it?

Is it a cloud or a sheep on your tattoo? Well, what would entice you more? A sheep, obviously. Yeah, that's a sheep, mate. Let's head to the pyramid, eh? Maurice, you were in the territorial army, won't you? Back home in New Zealand. No, I was not, Dan.

The territorial army is part-time soldiers. I was regular force. You were regular force. I'm so sorry. How many times? I was in the cadets, the regular force cadets, and then the Royal New Zealand signals. Okay. Is it right, as I've read, I should know this because I know you so well, that quite a lot of, not quite a lot, but a few times your job was to rescue sheep that were stuck in certain places?

Yes. You don't get that kind of big mission in the territorial army, do you? Territorials would not get that. They're the weekend warriors, you know. So, yeah, we were out there midweek. And the territorial, of course, they're still working at the supermarket or whatever they're doing. We are out there with our Velcro gloves

running after the sheep to bring them back. Velcro gloves to stick to the wool? Yeah. No. That's the way you grab them with the big Velcroes. You run behind them. and you grab them in the Velcro. Just as they're leaping off a cliff or anything like that,

Velcro's ass. Is that really true? A lot of our military training was grabbing hefty sheep with the Velcro gloves because it's a lot of upper body strength. So they would normally choose. They'd look at the line-up of the soldiers. You'd go, oh, Darby, because you can see my upper chest quite big and they'd go, you grab the gloves for this one, mate.

We've got two sheep on the loose heading towards the cliff. Yes, sir! And off I'd go, get chop it in. then I absale down and then and then just release from the carabina and then sometimes I just leap from the helicopter onto the sheep. It's real James Bond stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, it's all coming out in the book. I'm doing a follow-up to my autobiographically. The first one was this way to spaceship and I'm just trying to think of a title for the second one. Right. I don't suppose you're, you know, like spaying is cutting the genitals off an animal. You could be this way to spay sheep. Oh.

I can't see that falling off the shelf. What's he done here? He's done a play on words on the first book, is he? I know. And what's he doing this for? He's done more in his life. Why is he hired George Mombia to come up with his titles? Okay, it is time for fact number three, and that is James.

Okay, my fact this week is that one theory as to why we haven't seen aliens is they have all been trapped on their own planets by their own garbage. Hmm. So, this is the Fermi paradox, which is if there are so many aliens out there, which you would think because the universe is so big, the chances are they are out there somewhere, but if they are, then why have we not heard from them? And there is something called the Kessler effect, which is as soon as you start putting stuff in orbit, eventually more and more stuff gets up there.

When there's enough, then they start colliding with each other and making even smaller bits of garbage. And eventually those collisions get worse and worse and worse. And you just get covered in bits of metal. And you can't send rockets out of there. So you can't go and look throughout the rest of space and find us. Yes. I mean, this is a big, genuine worry that I have about all our satellites. space that multiple collisions will just lead to us being trapped by these bullets that will

just forevermore be circulating our planet and we can't get out. Essentially like an asteroid belt. Yes. Mm. Yes. Well, I don't think you personally have to worry about it too much, Dan. No? I think it's probably not going to affect your life massively.

But you're worried on behalf of humanity because you're a very selfless guy. No. No. Billions of future people. It's a good point. It's a good point. And actually, that really frees me up for more eBaying. So that's cool if I don't have to think about that.

Like, you can cancel the space trip. Have you guys heard of the zoo hypothesis? And this is another reason for why possibly, if there is life out there and they know of us, they haven't touched us, which is it's kind of, it's kind of similar to the principles of David Attenborough filming a documentary. If you see an animal in distress, let nature take its course. It's simply watching the earth and how it evolves and how life evolves and not making contact with it so that you don't spoil it. So observe it in the way that you would animals at a zoo is the idea.

And that's what we think. And this was put forward by an actual astronomer. I guess this is the thing that makes these fun hypothesis Cs be quite legit, is that this was John Ball, who was an MIT astronomer in 1973. and he's saying that the aliens are thinking of us as like a nature reserve, right, or a patch of wilderness and they're protecting us and staying and keeping their distance. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is a big thing to a lot of astronomers to sort of say, well, look how many stars, look how many potential planets are out there.

Why haven't we been visited? And coming up with these hypotheses are so exciting when you read about them all. I guess if we go into the outer space and we find some aliens, then it would be a little bit irresponsible to just go straight in with our size tens and start sort of stomping on people. Like we would probably sit back and decide what to do at least before we went in

and showed ourselves. In fact, I think that's, I read an interview with someone, was it at NASA? It was some astronomer who said kind of exactly that, that we're not even trying to collect data on things that we might potentially see. We're literally just trying to see

if there are any signals out there. And that's it right now. So we are very cautious, yeah. We're not going down and abducting people and doing experiments on them in flying sources. So the other theory is the dark forest hypothesis. And this idea is that there are civilizations out there, and they spend a lot of their time hiding as if they were in a dark forest or Reese drinking some wine at night, you know,

so that no one can spot them because they realize, and it's a thing that Stephen Hawking was saying at the end of his life, stop sending signals out. They will come for our resources. We've got water, we've got metals, we've got Abba, we've got all these amazing things on our planet. Stop it. And so that's another theory. Where are they?

They're out there. They're just hiding really well. There's a little thing in the military called reconnaissance. And that's what you do when you are staking someplace out, ready to invade. And that can take a long time. But that's, I believe, what they've been doing. Have you guys seen Disclosure Day? Not yet.

It's the Spillbird movie. Come on. Get off your seats and go and do it. It's so good. Is it? And that kind of dives into the element where, you know, the governments have been keeping it from us. These things are real. But Trump has sort of has got a load of files about UFOs, hasn't he?

That he's, is he slowly releasing them maybe? He's well known for doing a bit of a slow release. But then J.D. Vance was in the news last week saying that he thought all aliens were demons. Oh, yes. That's the other problem is the very Christian side of us. Because that's what they believe. Yeah, some of them, the very, you know, front end is. Wait, so he believes that aliens are from hell?

They just don't know what they're talking about. You know, they think, yeah, they believe there's probably a hell that's inside the earth or whatever the whole thing is, you know, it gets so muddy and so like. Yeah, unlike the clean UFO, aliens are real. They come and throw up. Can we just agree what they are? They're from here. They don't mean any harm. If they did, it would all be wiped out years ago, which is I think,

you know, who knows? We could be an experiment that they've put together and they're watching. Hey, can I recommend a book? It's one of my favorite books I've ever read, and it's called Is Anyone Out There? And it's written by Frank Drake. And Frank Drake is known to many for his equation, Drake's equation, where he works out the likelihood of life in the Milky Way. And I think you can expand it further. Sorry, the equation for what? It's like he takes the number of different galaxies and the number of planets that are in the galaxy and the likelihood of one of those planets having life and then the likelihood of that life being able to get off his planet and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And Drake's equation was something that he debuted

to his friends when he was setting up the first sort of international effort to set up what became SETI, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And it was quite secretive. So as Frank Drake, it was Carl Sagan. And Sagan has kind of emerged as more famous of the two, sort of popularly, because of shows like Cosmos. But Frank Drake was part of the team that put together the plaques that went on Pioneer, so the drawings of a human that went out. And he also was part of the golden record, the furthest thing we've ever sent out into space to show that we exist. And a remarkable guy. And there's this great fact. in one of Robin Ince's books called The Importance of Being Interested,

which he says that once SETI, after all these years of convincing the government to fund it, getting private funding from people, getting people convinced that it was not a crazy thing, Carl Sagan finally sat down and listened for the first time to the dishes receiving these signals. Within half an hour, he got so bored he fell asleep. That's what's going to happen when we translate what Reese's dogs are saying. It turns out.

What's saying interesting stuff. Here's an interesting thing. So SETI, so it's the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. And one of the things that they're doing is trying to learn the language of animals. So especially humpback whales, but actually quite a lot of animals, other animals. And the reason that they're doing it is because, let's say the aliens try and talk to us. We might not speak their language, right? So how can we practice?

How can we practice learning what another species has to say? Well, we get Reese's dogs. and we try and work out what they're saying. And then if we could do that with dogs and we can do it with whales and we could do it with lots and we can do with everything, then we'll be able to do it with aliens

when they try to talk to us. So that's quite cool. What I find funny is, or maybe not funny, but weird and profound, is that the vector diagram of where we're going with artificial intelligence and the UFO disclosure situation, is going like this.

And so the exact moment when we're going to have contact with these extraterrestrials is the exact moment when I think AI is going to be at the point where we're going to be able to understand what they're talking about,

almost like they've designed it. Oh, interesting. Mark my words. Have you blown this wide open? 2030. Well, I would say one of the reasons that maybe that won't happen, maybe,

is because of another Fermi paradox explanation, which is that, basically there aren't any other interstellar life forms, aren't any other aliens, because of the great filter. And this seemed to be the main explanation initially for why we haven't come across aliens is actually that there's just one moment in evolution. And I think the most likely moments are either the moment that life happens or the moment that you go from single cell to multi-cell organisms. That is so unlikely to happen that it's almost impossible to clear. and in fact we're the only ones that have cleared it. So the idea is that actually there aren't any aliens out there

because life is so impossible. But the thing we don't know is, is that hurdle behind us or ahead of us? So have we passed the hurdle? In which case, that's really good news because that means there probably aren't any other life forms out there who are going to attack us and try to kill us because we're the only ones who've got past the hurdle or is the hurdle coming up,

which basically means there have been shed loads of other life forms, millions, but they all hit this absolute catastrophe. Maybe it's the invention of AI. Maybe it's coming in 20 years. They all hit this huge hurdle which always wipes them out. Maybe the garbage around the planet. Maybe they all crash into the garbage

and extinguish themselves. Yeah. Yeah. Do you know what we're going to do when we find aliens, if we find aliens? Like there is a protocol that's been invented by the International Academy of Astronautics. So do you know what we do? Anna, you're a scientist, right?

You're listening to loads of stuff coming from the aliens on your transistor radio. And you hear a, hey, it's ours, it's ours. Like, what do you do? What's the first thing you do? I think it's just you go, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, my God. And then you leave voice notes for 15 of your friends trying to play it to them. No, no, no, no. Actually, it's the exact opposite of that.

Oh, shit. The protocol is very clear that you do not tell anyone. you keep it to yourself as much as possible, just tell important scientists and then do loads and loads and loads of tests to make sure it's real and that it's not a fake thing. Because in recent years, especially with the rise of fake news and stuff like that, people need to be really, really certain that what you've found is real. So the scientists have been told that as soon as you find it, do not tell anyone you test it as much as possible. Shit. But then that feeds into the idea that the government is.

is hiding it from us, and they literally are telling us now that that is what they would do. So maybe that's always been the protocol. Yeah. Yeah. I've left those voice notes before. I've left the follow-up voice notes so many times before. Oh my God, sorry, please don't tell anyone that. I've just found out I wasn't meant to mention it.

I was just thinking all the voice notes I've had from you over the years, Anna, that are like two and a half minutes long, and I'm like, I'm not fucking listening to that. They're all alien reveals, James, and you're the only one I told. Can I say something quickly about Fermi, Fermi, who this paradox is named after. So physicist Enrico Fermi, and he was the one who first said in 1950, where is everybody to his fellow astronomers who are saying aliens must exist. But as something else that exists, Fermi questions. And I like Fermi questions because we all kind of know what they are,

but he basically invented them. And they're questions you ask people, where you ask them to work out the rough answer to a question where they have almost no information and they just have to use their knowledge of the world and their human intelligence and their everyday experience. So if I was like, guys, how many ants do you think there are

in the country of Cameroon? And then you'd have to just, you'd have to give me an answer. Then you go like, okay, well, Cameroon is a medium-sized African country. So it must be about this big and there must be this many ants in my garden and you kind of come up with a number. There you go. And for every 25,000 ants,

I like to put a white ant to see. Okay, it is time for our final fact of the show, and that is my fact. My fact this week is that Franz Kafka's grandfather could lift a sack of potatoes with his teeth. I love it. Wow. What ridiculous. I found this fact while reading a play by Alan Bennett called Kafka's Dick. And it's a brilliant point.

play, and it's largely about a biographer whose poor wife has to put up with this man who's constantly telling her boring as hellfax like Franz Kafka's grandfather could lift a sack of potatoes with his teeth. And I couldn't relate to it, but I made my way through the play anyway. So me, the most fascinating thing about this fact is that Franz Kafka didn't want us to be talking about him right now. He asked his friend, Max Broad, to burn all of his unpublished papers when he died. And Max didn't do that. He kept the novels and he published them and he wrote biographies on him and he turned Kathgut into one of the most written about figures in literary history. And the very fact that we know that his grandfather could lift a sack of potatoes with his teeth is a testament to how badly

that wish went for him. And I think Broad actually says that his grandfather could lift a sack of flour with his teeth. So potatoes has come somewhere along the line as a, it's in all, it's in lots of biographies, but maybe he was, it's a party trick, isn't it? To be honest, I think it's mostly the weight of the thing that you lift. I think whether it's flour or potatoes probably doesn't affect the trick that much. Exactly. Whatever's in the pantry. Just potatoes is a funnier word, isn't it? Yeah. But I recommend reading, I'm on a huge Alan Bennett binge at the moment. Highly recommend reading him. You learn amazing little facts in random plays. For example, did you know that Butchers Hall in London has a cleaver that cut up the first New Zealand lamb? I heard that. It was brought to England. And so,

It's a Queen Victoria. Yeah, you find out stuff like that in his books. But party tricks, I'm excited because I've never really looked into people's party tricks from history. And there's so many great ones. Abraham Lincoln, when he was young, he could lift a barrel of whiskey from the floor and hold it while he took a drink out of the bunkhole. So, like, that's, again, it's a strength thing. It's like being able to lift a whole barrel and drink it. And he once did that, there was a gambler.

who had been arguing with an employee of a bar or something and he settled that argument by saying, okay, okay, well, don't give him the money, but I will take on the bet. I will bet you the same amount that I can do this. And then he did it and he won the bet and the barman managed to get off it. But when he was running for Senate,

people found out about this and said, oh, well, you're an old drunkard when you were a young lad and you were getting in all these scrapes, weren't you? And they tried to use it against him in the future. It's never going to work. He was the Bob Hawke of his day, right? I mean, that literally is what he was. Incredibly famous world leader who can also down some beer or...

He was the anti-pernum of his day. He was the anti-perman of his day. Yeah. No one's buying that that's irresponsible when they're a world leader. Bob Hawke, the very famous Bob Hawke, of course, former Prime Minister of Australia. Surprised it. You've said it's like Justin Bieber. Someone that most people are not going to know. He's so famous in Britain because he was Prime Minister of Australia, but he'd drunk a yard of veil in Britain. So he's just known as being a absolute legend.

Yes. It speaks to the people though, doesn't it? When you do that kind of stuff because, oh yeah, you know, you're a politician and you might be, you know, a bad person or, you know, immoral.

But then, oh my God, look, he can drink. Yeah, he's one of us. Yeah. All is forgiven. Yeah. Exactly. But yeah, Reese, have you got any, if someone says,

what's your party trick, impress us? My biggest party trick, I guess would be not being invited. But actually getting into parties was a bit of a trick for me. I'd blag my way in, over the back fence, you know, dress up as a waiter. I've done many different things. Created my own party once, doing an Edinburgh show. I'd send to the whole audience.

Let's go to Brett's place and party. And I knew there was a party. And Brett did say you could bring a friend if you want. He wanted to get more people in there. I brought the entire audience. And there was 300 of us. And I knocked on the door. And he said, oh, welcome to the party.

And I said, oh, I've got a couple of friends with me. And he said, ah, a couple's fine. And he looked around the corner and there was 300 people. So your party trick is bringing everyone from one party to another party. Yeah. But a bit like the pipe piper of cool. I went on to the Oxford Dixury of National Biography, which is quite a dry. list of famous people from British history and it tells us all about them. And I searched for

the words party trick and I found three. So Gilbert Murray, who was a classical scholar and public intellectual, who was the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford and President of the Humanists, could take his socks off without removing his shoes. Oh, impossible. I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't say how. That's a good one. You'd have to do it. We'd have to do it. with your feet alone. So by squirming your feet out of them. Yes. They'd have to be loose.

Yes. I think they would have to be a bit too big. A few sizes too big. Yeah. Yeah. George Porter, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967, he could balance a half-pite mug of beer on his forehead and then wiggle his forehead around and drink the half-pipe without touching the glass.

What? No, he couldn't. He could? Is he standing on his head? I don't know, according to the ODMB. and Mary Hermione Hobhouse, who is a British architectural historian and secretary of the Victorian Society, she could skin, carve and bone out a large chicken,

then put the flesh together inside its skin. What? Hold on. Hang on, say that again. So basically you get a chicken, and then you take all of the bones out and all of the flesh out, and then you put all the flesh back in and all the skin back in, so you have a chicken with no bones in it.

It's filleted. It's like when you order a whole chicken at the restaurant but you say, can you feel like it for me? But it's like, can you imagine her at a party? She's like, has anyone got a chicken? This party's going to arrive, but I'll tell you what, if someone gives me a chicken, mate, we're going to have a great hour here.

Okay, here's Daisy. You won't hurt her, really? Well. Wow. Do you know the actress Glenn Close? Very famous actress. She can fit 42 carrots in her mouth at the same time. 42?

Wait, I want to give, I want to do it. correction to that. It's Glenn Close's daughter who can do that. What? It runs in the family. Well, Glenn Close did do it on a show and she didn't fit as many. But she said, oh, that's the image I saw. Yeah. 42 carrots in the mouth, Glenn Close. And it was her daughter. It was in an interview where she was talking up her daughter's amazing skill with the 42 carrots. I think she got about 12 in, which is pretty impressive. But that daughter's got a big mouth wherever she is. Wow. Wow. Yeah. And ironic, as everyone pointed out because she is a bunny boiler and bunnies what do they love? Carrots.

When you say bunny boiler do you mean in a movie? Oh yes, Glenn Close is where for younger listeners and James who hasn't watched any films from pre-2000 is where the term bunny boiler comes from, isn't she? Because she in fatal attraction put a bunny in the oven or in a kettle or something. There's a local hero from where you're from James, from Bolton, Amir Carr, the boxer. I saw the most incredible party trick, and I almost think someone must be pranking me. Like, I must have misread April the 1st on it. But you know how boxers, when they have a boxing bag and they do that classic thing where they spin around their fists really fast,

and then they can take it slow and it's going back and forth, back and forth. I think Popeye can do that to people's heads. Yes, there we go. Better example. What Popeye does to people's heads, he can do that with an empty plastic bottle. So take like a bottle of water. he lifts it up and he hits it and the, yeah, James has got a San Pellegrino, no doubt for his cat Harley, who's needing some drink soon, but he can hit it and without holding it with another hand,

spin it so fast that he can do the boxing thing with an empty bottle and it continues spinning in the exact same spot in the air. It's phenomenal. It looks like an anti-gravity bottle. I've seen video footage of it. Oh, James has just got sand peg everywhere. So it's like you're running on a treadmill, but your hands are your feet. and the bottle is the treadmill. Just to help people out here.

That's made more sense to me. You're welcome. Do you guys have any party tricks? I don't really... James can rip a phone book in half with his bare hands. Oh, that's powerful. Well, again, it's just a trick. But I suppose they all are, aren't they?

But yeah, I could do that. Solve Rubik's cubes, I guess. Yeah. What else? Reese, you got all the voices. That's your party tricks. Sitting and doing helicopters and door open and creaky door open?

Yeah, I guess sound effects. You know, I mean, I could do some weird noises or throw my voice, you know, make out like I'm in a different room. Hey, I'm over here, guys. And then they look around and I'm, no, I'm just behind you. But that, you know, half a second of slight joy. And then I'm often looking for the dark room to have a wine. Yeah. What I like to do is whenever I get to hang out with Reese, what I like to do is release what are the sheep from his local paddock and hand him the

and just watch as he absolutely restrains it in no time. I read a spectator article about party tricks, and one of the examples given is that in 1999, one of Queen Elizabeth's Royal Footmen was demoted from Buckingham Palace, because he had a party trick of pouring booze into the corgis food and water, and watching them just stumble around drunkenly all the time. So he finally got caught doing that. But it also said in this article that, it was a case back in the 16th century and actually 17th century where if people had party tricks,

it often got mistaken as potentially witchcraft. And so that there were a few books that were written at the time, The Discovery of Witchcraft by Reginald Scott and Thomas Addie, a candle in the dark, which tried to separate between party trick and witchcraft. You don't have to burn the person who's just ripped a phone book and half. Pierce Brosnan, what do you think his party trick? would be. Showing off that he was Bond.

Yes. That's number one. And if people aren't impressed by that, he can eat fire. Oh. And yeah, he started out as a fire eater when he was trying to make it as an actor to make hens meat. Some of us work in a cafe. He did a little fire eating act.

This is back in the late 60s, early 70s. And then he was cooled up when he just done Golden Eye. He was called up by The Muppets Tonight, which I think was like a live show of the Muppets. It was like Saturday Night Live, but with the Muppets. and they called him up and said, we need you to come on, but do you do some kind of cool party trick? Do you sing or do you dance?

And he said, no, not really. If only he'd said that when they called him about Mamma Mia. But anyway, then he said, I do do a fire eating act. And so they said, okay, great, do fire eating on the show. But they somehow gave him the wrong kind of fuel. I went on a forum of fire eaters. And apparently this is quite a common thing.

Everyone's had it. And in the middle of this act with these two, puppets there cheering him on, the flame shoots off and then is sucked back into his mouth and burns the entire inside of his mouth so that his whole inner mouth is scorched and blistering. But the great thing is when you watch the clip, you wouldn't have a clue. Oh, wow. So that's Bond. Yeah.

That's James Bond. And he did the rest of the show. Had to look really cheerful. Oh, my God. And then straight to the hospital. Glass of cold water, if you don't mind. Shaken, not stirred. Okay, that is it. That is all of our facts. Thank you so much for listening.

If you'd like to get in contact with any of us about the things that we've said over the course of this podcast, we can all be found online. I'm on Instagram on at Shriverland. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Anna? You can email podcast.com or Instagram at no such thing. Yeah, and Reese. Where are you? And I'm on the Insta with Reese at Recy. H-Y-S-I-E-Darby. And also, hey, you've got a new special out, right?

Yes, my new comedy special, 25 years, is out now on Gorilla Comedy Plus and also on YouTube. So check it out. It's 25 years, the best of my material from the year. Amazing. If you've never seen Reese Live, you were missing out. I, hand on heart, this is not just saying it, because he's a good friend. Funniest stand-up I have ever seen in my life, bar none.

Oh, thank you, Dan. unbelievably funny. And so if it's going to be the best off, presumably that's just going to be the best comedy special ever made. So you've got to watch that. By logically, that's the best bits of the best end up. There you go. So that's out now. Do check it out. If you'd like to write us podcast at QI.com, as Anna said earlier, is the place to send it to. And we love to cherry pick from that email address, all of your best facts, which we bring to our Monday show, Little Fish. Or if you want to tell us about your experiences, if you want to send us, photos, interesting bits of audio. We have another show which is hidden inside our special club,

which is called Clubfish, which you'll find on patreon.com slash Clubfish. And that show is called Drop Us a Line. So Andy curates that he finds all the best emails. So send them there. We love discussing all of your stories and join Clubfish anyway. There's amazing, fun things that you can do there. Otherwise, just come back next week because we're going to be back with another episode. We'll see you all then. Goodbye.