No Such Thing As A Fish

Four researchers from the British TV quiz show QI get together every week and share the most bizarre, surprising, and flat-out weird facts they have stumbled across. Dan Schreiber, James Harkin, Andrew Hunter Murray, and Anna Ptaszynski have been doing this since 2014, and they have amassed over 769 episodes and 600 million downloads, which makes No Such Thing As A Fish one of the most popular podcasts in the UK by a wide margin. The format works like this: each person brings one fact, and then the group spends about fifteen minutes pulling at the threads of that fact until it unravels into something much stranger than anyone expected. A fact about a medieval cheese-rolling competition might detour into the physics of dairy products, then into a story about a Victorian con artist who sold fake cheese to the Royal Navy. The connections between topics are genuinely surprising, and the four hosts have a knack for finding the funniest possible angle on obscure information. What keeps this from being a dry trivia show is the banter. These are people who have spent years working together, and their comedic instincts are sharp. The deadpan delivery plays perfectly against genuine enthusiasm. Anna asks the questions that sound obvious but lead somewhere nobody expected. James brings the deep cuts and obscure connections that tie everything together. The show has a 4.8 rating from over 4,500 reviews, sells out live shows at massive venues, and has even toured internationally. If you like learning things that make you stop and say wait, really? while also laughing out loud, this is your show.