Dan Schreiber has made a career out of combining quirky facts with comedy.
In his debut book The Theory of Everything Else, the UK-based Australian podcaster investigates the world's most mind-boggling and thought-provoking theories.
He describes the book as a kind of wine-tasting tour.
“You should have a sip, swivel it around in your brain but spit it out again because none of the ideas in the book really are proved.”
Photo: Supplied / Matt Crockett
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Schreiber is a researcher for the popular TV quiz show QI, co-hosts the podcast No Such Thing as a Fish and co-created the BBC Radio 4 comedy talk show Museum of Curiosity.
He says of all the things we do know about the universe, it’s wild that we still don’t know why a shower curtain billows towards you while you’re in the shower.
There are, in fact, four competing theories “and none of them are right” Schreiber tells Kathryn Ryan.
“There’s one guy who spent the whole weekend crunching, genuinely, 2.5 billion calculations to try and do it. He modelled it off his mother-in-law's bathroom tub and he just couldn’t crack it.”
It’s no wonder some of the brightest minds are trying, Schreiber, says - small things like that often lead to big discoveries.
For the past twenty years, Schreiber has worked for Q.I, finding facts that are both funny and interesting.
When he began to research well-known people he realised they almost always held at least one odd belief.
“Everyone just has a little bit of bananas about them.
“There’s something weird that they believe in, and I started to wonder if that informed the world we believe in.
“Does the little weird bit they believe in become integral to the way that they discovered and thought about the things that changed the world?”
The Covid-19 pandemic has made us familiar with the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test, which was invented in 1985 by a man with a very interesting mind, Schreiber says.
“Kary Mullis, the same year that he cracked PCR, [he] also claimed that he was abducted into a spaceship by a phosphorescent English-speaking raccoon, and he spent a lot of the rest of his life looking for this racoon.
“This is the guy who saved millions during the pandemic and has changed the world.”
It’s an extraordinary pair of facts, Schreiber says.
“Was the mind that made him think that a raccoon spoke to him in the middle of the night... is that the mind needed to be able to be thinking the way it did in order to find this thing that changed our lives?”
Novak Djokovic gets introductory explanation from Bosnian archaeological explorer, Semir Osmanagic, the founder of the “Archaeological Park: Bosnian Pyramid of the Sun”. Photo: AFP / Elvis Barukcic
Schreiber dedicates an entire chapter of The Theory of Everything Else to the alternative beliefs of Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic.
He says that every two years, Djokovic travels to the Bosnian city of Visoko to meditate and “collect cosmic energy off the oldest man-made pyramid in the world – it's 12,000 years old”.
“It’s definitely not a pyramid, it’s just a hill that looks like a pyramid that’s all it is but this guy who he’s been following has claimed that a lost civilisation has built [it].”
Djokovic also believes that his food will lose nutrients if he speaks harshly in its presence, Schreiber says.
“So he bans TV, he bans text messaging, he basically bans conversation as well from the table because he just needs his food to be pure.”
The idea of time travel has inspired a lot of strange and nonsensical theories, Schreiber says.
“One of the things I love about time travel is that there is a theory that one the reasons the Titanic sank is not because it hit an iceberg but because so many time travellers travelled back in time to witness it hitting an iceberg that the weight of it all sunk the Titanic."
There’s an odd theory floating around for almost any mystery you can think of, Schreiber says, including why Australians speak the way they do.
“[One theory is] the reason Aussies speak in their accent is that it was so sunny in Australia attracting so many flies that when they spoke, they needed to grit their teeth so that flies couldn’t fly into their mouth.
“That’s the wonderful thing, right? Everyone’s got a theory.”