He mentions a concept in Zen gardens known as the "wild corner." The idea is that in every garden, no matter how well-kept, there should be a piece of untouched land where vegetation grows wild and chaotic, to remind the gardener of the way the universe intended it to be. "I believe we should all cultivate a healthy 'wild corner' in our minds," argues Dan Schreiber (Hong Kong, 1984) in his new book, The Theory of Everything Else (Capitán Swing). "A small nook at the back of our brain that ensures we never stop getting goosebumps of excitement when we hear about a crazy idea, no matter how absurd it may seem."
Schreiber knows a thing or two about crazy ideas. As the co-founder of the successful British podcast No Such Thing as a Fish and one of the researchers behind QI, the BBC program, his work involves finding the weirdest, most entertaining facts capable of "turning the world upside down." In his book, he delves into that "wild corner" of humanity, exploring marginal theories, implausible beliefs, and obsessions that have surprisingly often changed the world, from the PCR inventor who talked to raccoons to the Nobel laureate who found a miraculous cure in a 1,600-year-old Chinese medicine text.
The book is indeed "a treasure trove of bizarre wonders" that takes us by the hand through a world where life on Earth could have originated from "cosmic garbage" (microbes from a sandwich crumb left by aliens after a picnic) or where the Titanic did not collide with an iceberg, but sank due to the weight of the thousands of time-traveling passengers crowding its deck to witness the disaster. We learn that Ringo Starr's unique rhythm could be attributed to the exorcisms his grandmother, the "voodoo queen of Liverpool," performed on him as a child to "cure" his left-handedness (considered the work of the devil); that magician David Copperfield believes he has found the fountain of youth on his private island in the Bahamas; that tennis player Novak Djokovic recharges his cosmic energy in alleged Bosnian pyramids; that Edmond Halley himself, the man who calculated the comet's orbit, was convinced that the Earth was hollow and habitable inside; or that pubic lice could be on the brink of extinction thanks to the popular Brazilian waxing.
But when asked to confess his own "grain of eccentricity" - that "impossible" personal belief he defends even though it embarrasses him a bit - Schreiber hesitates before sharing a story that, he admits, he didn't even include in his work. "There is an experience I had and that I didn't put in the book because I felt like I was still researching it," he confesses. It is what he calls his "soft rock": the impossible that, nevertheless, you know happened.
The story dates back to his childhood. "When I was a child, nine or ten years old, I grew up in Hong Kong, and my uncle worked at the Holiday Inn in Tibet." At that time, it was one of the only hotels of its kind there, and he managed to get access for the family. One night, he was in the hotel room with his little sister, China. "She was acting very strange. We were with our friends, but she was sitting alone at a table, having dinner, and just staring at a tall glass on the table."
His sister said she felt a "growing tension," and uttered a phrase that changed everything: "I feel like I can lift that glass without touching it." Schreiber and his friends kept playing, but he couldn't stop looking at the glass. "There was a moment when everything felt very intense. And this is what I saw, and I had to verify it with everyone else in the room," he recounts. "I saw how the glass, which was on the table, rose in the air. It just floated for a second and then shattered. And we screamed and ran out."
The incident was already strange enough, but the context made it even more terrifying. His uncle rushed to the room and picked up the pieces. The glass was not just broken; it was "twisted" in a way that a simple fall on the carpet could not explain. Then his uncle confessed what he had hidden: "He believed the hotel was haunted." The night before, Schreiber's mother had complained that a tree was hitting her window. "And he turned white because there were no trees outside that window." The staff had reported girls crying in the hallways.
For years, Schreiber doubted his memory. Had he and his sister made it up? The answer came decades later. "For my 40th birthday, my parents gave me a USB with all our old cassette tapes digitized... and we were watching the video of our trip to Tibet." The video showed the morning after the glass incident. "It's my friend Brad's birthday... and my sister China is next to him, and you can hear my friend Brad saying, 'China, do the thing again! Do the thing!' And we are all looking at the cake trying to lift it with our eyes. So, clearly, it happened. But what happened, I have no idea."
This is his personal "wild corner." But he also has another more philosophical belief: "My super weird belief is that I think when you die, wherever you think you're going, that's where you go." It's not that one religion is right, he explains, but that "the brain will slow down time and put you in infinity, in the place you want, even if you die in the real world."
This fascination with the inexplicable is the driving force of the book, the "porous frontier" between eccentricity and genuine discovery. Like the aforementioned Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR, who had his epiphany while talking to a bright raccoon, or Tu Youyou, who won the Nobel Prize for finding a cure in a 1,600-year-old Chinese text. How do we distinguish, a priori, the crazy hunch that deserves funding from the one that will only cause harm? Schreiber admits it is "strange." "I think science should be science... but science is full of rebellious people."
His paradigmatic example is Barry Marshall, the Nobel laureate who discovered the cure for peptic ulcers. "He had the idea that antibiotics could cure them, but he couldn't get permission to test it on patients." Marshall's solution was radical. "So he went home, drank a Petri dish full of bacteria, made himself sick on purpose, and then applied the cure to himself. And it worked, it changed the world, and he won the Nobel Prize for it." For Schreiber, this is the key point. "He could have died from that. So, can you institutionally allow people to do that? Probably not. He had to go rogue to do it... History has been changed by so many people who had controversial and rare ideas."
He insists that even failure has immeasurable value in this ecosystem of ideas. He mentions the first expedition that sought the Titanic, led by "a Bigfoot believer who tried to bring a psychic monkey on board." Although it failed, it was useful. "Robert Ballard, who eventually found the Titanic, said that it was very useful to know where not to look. It saved us a lot of time. So failure itself is positive in the long run for the world of science."
But where does the ethical line lie? Why dedicate an entire book to theories that the compiler himself describes as hallucinatory (such as police plants or botanists co-writing books with plants) without losing credibility or exploiting charlatans? "What excites me the most is the variety of human experience." He uses the metaphor of a British pub: "If aliens came down and abducted everyone in a pub, they would leave very confused saying, 'How can all of you sit in the same room believing in a completely different reality... and still watch football together?'"
Kary Mullis, inventor of the PCR, who had his epiphany while talking to a raccoon, or Tu Youyou, who won the Nobel Prize for finding a cure in a 1,600-year-old Chinese text.
For him, the danger does not lie in listening to these ideas but in silencing them. "My biggest concern is that we are killing all these ideas, which also kills the creativity of thought." He mentions the "ethnosphere," the cultural diversity lost when tribes are absorbed. "If we lose those who believe in Bigfoot, I think we lose something magical," he asserts.
However, draw a clear line when those beliefs cause harm. The case of Mullis is the best example. "I will never say he was a great guy. I will say he did something extraordinary [the PCR], and he also did something very unextraordinary and dangerous, which was convincing many people that something very dangerous [AIDS] was not [denying the link to HIV]... That is inexcusable, but it's the yin and yang of life.... You have to say they are bad as well as say they are good, or that the things they do are both good and bad."
We now address one of the great phenomena of the book: Nostradamus. Why are these prophecies so addictive, to the point that Eddie Murphy rearranged an entire shoot out of fear of a supposedly predicted earthquake? "Nostradamus is the most fascinating," says Schreiber, "because his book sales skyrocket every time there is a disaster in the world." He reveals surprising anecdotes: the song 1999 by Prince was inspired by a Nostradamus documentary about the end of the world; and during World War II, both Goebbels and the British released pamphlets with false prophecies of Nostradamus about the enemy to demoralize them.
The attraction, according to him, is simple: "We all look up and wonder, 'What the hell is going on?'". These theories act as "global gossip." But the biggest twist about Nostradamus, Schreiber's favorite discovery, connects the prophet with his modern detractors. "The material used to make the crystal balls that fortune tellers use at fairs uses an element that was discovered by Nostradamus, because he was a chemist, a scientist."
The conversation concludes on a somber note. Why is this "wild corner" expanding dangerously today? Conspiracy theories, anti-vaccines, QAnon... Is it just the algorithms' fault, or is there a deeper fatigue of the rationalist narrative? Schreiber gets serious. "The question I struggle with is: 'What is the truth?'. It doesn't seem to exist. Every story has six different versions." He cites the Serial podcast as an example of how memory changes reality. But the real change, he argues, is who uses the conspiracy. "Conspiracies used to be fun, now they are pure danger. Before, authorities dismissed conspiracies. Now, I feel that if a politician gets in trouble, they rely on a conspiracy. They introduce into the language: 'The left is doing this'... Conspiracies have been repurposed as weapons by people in power."
What was once the domain of Bigfoot believers and psychic monkeys, the "wild corner" that Schreiber defends so fondly has mutated into a cynical tool. The real danger is not that people believe in strange things, but that those who believe in nothing use them to destroy the truth.