No Such Thing As Alien Dust

17:36James Harkin:Great puns from India. Rhys, talking about AI and sheep, you've been in the headspace of a sheep recently because... What? Well, Rhys 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 it's one of those ones that surprises you.

18:15Dan Schreiber: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 Detectives Who Are Sheep. Yes.

18:21James Harkin:They should have worked harder on the title, shouldn't they? it's not quite clear enough it's Hugh Jackman's um most highly rated film of his career yeah on the on the tomato meter absolutely like it was a huge kids book it was massive I think it was German initially called three bags full the author of who was Leonie Swan and then she's got a sequel which is called Big Bad Wool so it sounds like there's a there's a potential next movie I think there'll be more I think there'll be more because it's done very well yeah sounds

18:52Dan Schreiber:Sounds like George Monbiot 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, how much grass, what their environment is and how spread out they are and that type of thing.

19:18James Harkin:You know who gave you guys sheep? New Zealand? It's a big old name. Who? Big old character. Cook. Captain James Cook. I was just going to say. He's credited with it. Between 1773 and 1777, he brought over the first sheep. Just quite an iconic name to have dropped them off. Do 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 there are without counting them? So if there's two there, 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 uh i think a kiwi farmer would be 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 okay yeah 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.

20:43But 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?

20:59Dan Schreiber:Could it be anything? Or it was 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. Is, and this is what farmers do, is for every 25 white sheep, they have one black sheep.

21:33Dan Schreiber: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 you know so 75

21:59James Harkin:white 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.

22:12Dan Schreiber:No white sheep. I shouldn't have said this, should I? Maybe I've just exposed their trick.

22:17James Harkin: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. No. Yeah. So this is 1882 and the first shipment of frozen mutton and lamb along with some pork 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.

23:00James Harkin:Wow.

23:01Dan Schreiber: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 cleave it in front of me. You know. Oh, they love that kind of stuff. The royals. I suppose they're into it, aren't they? 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 3000 BC, so a 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.

23:37But 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.

23:47Dan Schreiber:Wow. Also, they're quite easy to draw, probably. That's why. It's just a cloud with a head, isn't it? Is that a cloud or a sheep on your tattoo? Eh, well, what would entice you more? A sheep, obviously. Yeah, that's a sheep, mate. That's a sheep.

24:04James Harkin:Let's head to the pyramid, eh? Maurice, you were in the Territorial Army, weren't you, back home in New Zealand? No, I was not, Dan. The Territorial Army is part-time soldiers. Okay. I was regular force. You were regular force. How dare you? I'm so sorry. How many times do I have to? I was in the Cadets, the Regular Force Cadets, and then the Royal New Zealand Signals Corps. Okay. Core. 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.

24:38Dan Schreiber: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 territorials, of course, they're still working at the supermarket or whatever they're doing. And 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. Yeah, that's the way you grab them with the big Velcros. 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?

25:16A 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 and they'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 sheeps on the loose heading towards the cliff. Yes, sir. And off I'd go, get choppered in. That was beautiful. Then I'd abseil down. And then I'd just release from the carabiner and then sometimes I'd just leap from the helicopter onto the sheep.

25:51Dan Schreiber:It's real James Bond stuff, isn't it? Yeah, it's all coming out in the book.

25:58I'm doing a follow-up to my autobiography. 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 don't like spaying as 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 has he and what's he doing this for he's done more in his life why has 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 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.

27:22When 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.

27:39James Harkin:Yes. I mean, this is a big genuine worry that i have about all our satellites in 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 yeah essentially like an asteroid belt yes yes uh 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

28:07Dan Schreiber:worried on behalf of humanity because you're a very um selfless guy no no no billions of future

28:13James Harkin:people it's a good point it's a good point and actually that really frees me up for more ebay so that's that's cool if i don't have to think about that you can cancel the space trip have you got have you guys heard of the zoo hypothesis and this is another reason for why possibly um 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 the principles of david attenborough filming a documentary if you see an animal in distress let nature take its course it's 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 uh so observe it in the way that you would animals at a zoo is the idea and that and that's what we think

28:57Dan Schreiber:and this was put forward by a an actual astronomer i guess this is the thing that makes these fun hypothesis sees 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 keeping their distance yeah well i mean we're so

29:19James Harkin:fascinating 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 these hypotheses are so exciting uh when you read about them all um 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 10s and start sort of stomping on people like we would probably sit back and

29:47Dan Schreiber:decide what to do at least before we went in and yeah showed ourselves in fact i think that's i I read an interview with someone, was it Nassau? 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 saucers.

30:14James Harkin: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 hiding really well.

30:47There'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 Spielberg movie? Come on, get off your seats and go and do it. That'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 uh but trump is sort of um has got a load of files about ufos hasn't he that he's is he slowly releasing them maybe um he's quite he's well known for doing a bit of a slow release but then jd vance um was in the news last week saying that he thought all aliens were demons oh oh yes that's the other problem is the the very christian side yes because that's what they believe yeah some of them the very the very you know front

31:45Dan Schreiber:enders um 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 think they believe there's a probably a hell that's inside the earth or whatever the whole thing is you know it gets so muddy so like yeah unlike the clean ufo aliens are real they come and probe we just agree what they are they're from here they don't mean any harm if they if they did it'll 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

32:15James Harkin:hey can i 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 um the likelihood of life in the milky way um and i 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 its planet and all that kind of stuff, I think.

32:54James Harkin: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 it was 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.

33:32James Harkin: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.

33:58Dan Schreiber:That's what's going to happen when we translate what Rhys' dogs are saying. It turns out. 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 could do it with whales and we could do we could 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 you know maybe not funny but weird and and profound is that the vector diagram of where we're going with artificial intelligence and the UFO disclosure situation is going like this.

35:05And 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. So mark my words. Have you blown this wide open? 2030. 30.

35:23Dan Schreiber: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 there 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.

36:00Dan Schreiber: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 like 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.

36:32Dan Schreiber: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. Huh. 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 us, it's us. Like, what do you do?

37:09What's the first thing you do?

37:11Dan Schreiber:I think it's just you go, oh, my God, oh, my God, oh, my God. And then you leave voice notes for 15 of your friends trying to play it to them. No, 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 found is real.

37:47so the scientists have been told that as soon as you find it do not tell anyone you test it as much

37:53James Harkin:as possible shit but then that feeds into the idea that the government 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

38:04Dan Schreiber:the protocol yeah yeah i could just i've left those voice notes before i've left the follow-up voice notes so many times before of 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.

38:27Dan Schreiber: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 something else that exists, Fermi questions. and I like family 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 and then 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

39:39James Harkin:And that is my fact. My fact this week is that Franz Kafka's grandfather could lift a sack of potatoes with his teeth.

39:46Dan Schreiber:I love it. Wow. What a ridiculous.

39:51James Harkin:I found this fact while reading a play by Alan Bennett called Kafka's Dick. And it's a brilliant 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 hell facts. 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. To 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.

40:30James Harkin:He kept the novels and he published them and he wrote biographies on him. and he turned Kafka 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 Brod actually says that his grandfather could lift a sack of flour with his teeth. So potatoes has come somewhere along the line. 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.

41:09James Harkin: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 Butcher's 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.

41:40Abraham 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 bunghole. So, like, that's, again, it's a strength thing. It's like being able to lift up the 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 the argument by saying, OK, OK, 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're a young lad and you were getting in all these scrapes, weren't you?

42:25and they tried to use it against him in the future.

42:27Dan Schreiber: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. He was the anti-punem of his day. He was the anti-punem of his day. Yeah. No one's buying that that's irresponsible when they're a world leader.

42:44James Harkin:Bob Hawke, the very famous Bob Hawke, of course, former Prime Minister of Australia. Surprised that you've said it's like Justin Bieber. I feel like... Someone that most people are not going to know.

42:52Dan Schreiber:Maybe he's so famous in Britain because he was prime minister of Australia, but he drunk a yard of ale in Britain. So he's just known as being an absolute legend. Yes. It speaks to the people, though, doesn't it, when you do that kind of stuff? It does. Because, oh, yeah, you're a politician and you might be a bad person or immoral, but then, oh, my God, look, he can drink. Yeah, he's one of us. Yeah. All is forgiven. Yeah. Exactly. But, yeah, Rhys, 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.

43:30Dan Schreiber:That was impressive. 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'd done many different things. Created my own party once doing an Edinburgh show. I said 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 can bring a friend if you want. He wanted to get more people in there. So 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.

44:04And he said, ah, a couple's fine. And he looked around the corner and there was 300 people.

44:10Dan Schreiber:So your party trick is bringing everyone from one party to another party. Yeah, but like the Pied Piper of cool. I went on to the Oxford Dictionary 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.

44:50James Harkin:Oh, impossible. I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't say how. That's a good one.

44:55Dan Schreiber:You'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. Yes. George Porter, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. He could balance a half pint mug of beer on his forehead and then wiggle his forehead around and drink the half pint without touching the glass. What? No he couldn't 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 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.

45:54Dan Schreiber:It's filleted. It's like when you order a whole chicken at the restaurant but you say, can you fillet 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 gone awry but I 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, will you? Well,

46:14James Harkin:wow. You know the actress Glenn Close? very famous actress uh she can fit 42 carrots in her mouth at the same time

46:22Dan Schreiber:wait i want to give i want to do a correction to that it's glenn close's daughter who can do that what runs in the family well glenn close did do it on a show and she didn't fit as many

46:34James Harkin:but she said oh that's the image i saw yeah 42 carrots in the mouth going no she and it was her

46:40Dan Schreiber: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. Yeah. And ironic, as everyone pointed out, because she is a bunny boiler. And bunnies, what do they love? Carrots. 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.

47:12James Harkin:um there's a local hero from where you're from james from bolton amir khan 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 first uh 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 they can and then they can take it slow and it's going 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 uh for his cat harley uh needing some drinks 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 come on it looks It's like an anti-gravity bottle.

48:11James Harkin:I've seen video footage of it. Oh, James has just got sand peg everywhere.

48:15Dan Schreiber: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...

48:31James Harkin: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 what else? Rhys you've got all the voices that's your party trick sitting and doing helicopters and door open yeah I guess sound effects I could do some weird noises or throw my voice make it like I'm in a different room hey I'm over here guys and then they look around no I'm just behind you but that half a second of slight joy and then I'm often looking for the dark room to have a wine in yeah what what i like to do is whenever i get to hang out with reese um what i like to do is release one of the sheep from his local paddock and hand him the velcro gloves and just watch as he absolutely restrains it uh in no time i read a spectator article about party tricks and uh 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 corgi's 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 addy a candle in the dark which tried to separate between party trick and witch crap you don't have to burn the person who's just ripped a phone book in half uh pierce brosnan what do you think his party trick would be um showing off that he was bond yeah that's number

50:22Dan Schreiber: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 ends meet 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 called 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 um 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 dance and he said no not really if only he'd said that when they called him about mama mia but But anyway, then he said, I do do a fire eating act.

51:03Dan Schreiber:And so they said, OK, 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 Muppets 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. And that's Bond. That's James Bond. There it is. And he did the rest of the show.

51:37Dan Schreiber:Had to look really cheerful. Oh, my God. And then straight to the hospital. Class of cold water, if you don't mind. Shaken, not stirred.

51:52James Harkin: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 Schreiberland. James? My Instagram is no such thing as James Harkin. Anna?

52:08Dan Schreiber:You can email podcast.qy.com or Instagram at no such thing. Yeah, and Rhys, where are you? And I'm on the Insta with Rhys, at Rhysi, R-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 Guerrilla Comedy Plus and also on YouTube. So check it out. It's 25 Years, the best of my material from the year dot.

52:35James Harkin:Amazing. If you've never seen Reece live, you are missing out. 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. Just 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 yeah uh you got to watch that like logically that's the best bits of the best stand up filler there you go uh so that's out now do check it out um if you'd like to write to 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.

53:29James Harkin: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. We'll see you next time.