No Such Thing As The Treaty Of Velociraptors

16:14James Harkin:Why not? So it turns out there's a town in the UK called Clown. C-L-O-W-N-E. And Clown Junior High is a school, right? And I searched so hard. I couldn't find any clowns who live in clown. They have a population of 7 ,000, except I found one guy whose name is Chris Carter, who started filming a bunch of horror movies where he dresses as a clown and walks the streets. But he got caught up as a clown in clown by the 2016 clown fear. And he had to tell police any time he was going out in his clown gear. Otherwise, he was going to be arrested.

16:51Dan Schreiber:No. Was that the policy in the police? Every time you put a red nose on?

16:55James Harkin:Well, it was just that month, as you say, that crazy month. Yeah. It made its way all the way to the UK town of Clown.

17:02Dan Schreiber:It was so ridiculous because I think it was confected by journalists mostly, surely, because people aren't that insane. But it did affect things then. There was a Clown Lives Matter march that had to be cancelled. So no wonder no one takes us seriously.

17:17James Harkin:I can't get over the headline, clowns complaining they're not being taken seriously. It's wonderful. Wind your neck in. When I was a teacher and we did Wild Book Day and all the teachers had to dress up, and I full-on dressed up as Pennywise the clown. It was the one day I had no issues with discipline. Those kids behaved themselves. I got latex. I got some fake blood. I reenacted The Shining as an immersive film experience in the classroom. We went to town that day. And I'm no longer a teacher because the children were worried because I was too scared. we do need to wrap up so elf you're going to be up at the fringe doing quite a sort of exciting three shows right yeah i'm redoing all i'm doing my bird trilogy so i'm doing swan which is a one woman production of swan lake in an hour in french ish and then chif chaff which is a one woman musical about the economy and then raven which is my one woman reenactment of all Stephen King's books.

18:20And they're all clown, mime, bouffon shows that make my agent's job of getting me on television so difficult. She's like, please just do a straight stand up show. And then I was like, I'm going to make a show where I pretend to be a horse. And she's just started crying, going, I want to earn enough money to buy a house. Please just do something relatable so I can pitch you to Taskmaster.

18:43James Harkin:Where are you going to be, Elf? Where are you playing? I'm playing in the Kingdome at the Pleasance for the final two weeks of the Fringe. So swan one day, chif after next, rave in the day after. So you can go and see all three in a row and just see just how mad I am.

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19:36James Harkin:Okay, it is time for fact number two, and that is Ray O 'Leary. And my fact is, in the 1820s, philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer hated his contemporary Hegel so much, he intentionally scheduled his lectures at the same time as Hegel's and had zero people attend. What a backfire. A terrible backfire. Yeah, so apparently this was at the University of Berlin in Schopenhauer. He taught a few semesters there, and apparently he never had more than five students sign up to attend. Meanwhile, I think Hegel was getting in the hundreds, because at the time he was the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

20:19So he was sort of like the Taylor Swift of German philosophical idealism. I actually call Taylor Swift the Hegel. of pop music so do you know a lot about philosophy ray because these are pretty new names to to me and probably a lot of people listening yes i i do know a bit about philosophy i i interestingly this is not the area of philosophy i know the most about but i was always drawn to arthur schopenhauer because he was sort of just such a miserable man he was just sort of quite a cantankerous horrible old man. And that was so interesting to me. The more you read about him, the more you're like, oh, there's almost nothing redeemable about him as a person.

21:03Sorry, can I just stop you there, Ray? Because before we came on mic, I was saying how much Andy reminds me of him. Okay, okay.

21:11Anna Ptaszynski:I like to think of myself as a cantankerous, miserable young man, all right? Also, I think he's quite a nice man. Actually, he's quite handsome now that I think about it. Yeah, yeah. Thank you very much, Ray. But this story, it's from a time when Hegel was the most famous philosopher in the German-speaking world, and Schopenhauer was just some punk kid. He was in his 20s, I think, or maybe early 30s, but he was young, and it was him who wanted the rivalry. Hegel made no reference ever in his life to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is constantly writing about how much he hates Hegel, and it was all about his main work, The World as Will and Representation.

21:48Anna Ptaszynski:It was about his magnum opus. It's so...

21:52James Harkin:When you read about him on page, to me, it's like reading a biography of Larry David. He tries all these little schemes. And I wonder if maybe in real life it was funnier. Because if you read Curb Your Enthusiasm on page, that's not funny. That's a cantankerous, horrible, repulsive man, right? But in real life, he's amazing. He largely drew his philosophy from Eastern religion, right? So Buddhism and so on. And so in his apartment in Frankfurt, he had a large black lacquered bronze statue of the Buddha sitting there. And he told a friend that he positioned it so that every morning when the morning sun came through the window, it would bounce off it and push an annoying beam of light into the apartment across from him, which belonged to a pastor who he didn't like, just so it would piss him off every day.

22:41James Harkin:That's Larry David. Really? You wouldn't want to live next door to Schopenhauer, would you? One of the things he hated was noise. You can imagine if you had a little party, even if you finished it by 9pm, he'd be round banging on the door. Yeah. Do you know what? People need their sleep. Some people go to bed nice and early. You know what, Andy? I know that you don't like loud noise very much and loud music and stuff. Schopenhauer once said, the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity.

23:11Anna Ptaszynski:That makes me the cleverest man alive. I think, if I've understood it. I've never been round to Andy's place, but I'm imagining it's sort of a series of statues carefully positioned so the sun ricochets around until it hits all his enemies' eyes. But he's clearly unbelievably... Reading about, actually, both of these guys, Hegel and Schopenhauer, you just think these people are so unbelievably clever. And the beef was kind of because Hegel's view of the world was that humanity had arrived at the age of self-consciousness. He had this big lecture about the world history, which he claimed that Europe is the absolute end of history, the spirit of the world with the zeitgeist in it.

23:53Anna Ptaszynski:It was reaching its perfect final form. Everything was getting better. And Schopenhauer rejected that. Hegel was basically things can only get better. And Schopenhauer said, we're not becoming anything. We remain the same. We go in these big historical cycles. It was, I mean, really, basically, it's like optimism versus pessimism, wasn't it? Hegel was very much sunlight and rainbows and unicorns. And Schopenhauer was, I fucking hate unicorns. Which team are you on, Ray?

24:20James Harkin:If you had the option of those two lectures, you know, your time traveled back to there. I think my inkling is to go towards Schopenhauer, but I really would not want him to have somebody at his lecture. I think that's the thing I don't want to preserve his loser status. I think it would corrupt his whole legacy of people were actually paying attention to him at the time. I think Hegel's lectures were not the most fun. I think he was very difficult to understand. His students said that every third sentence he said began with therefore. So you can imagine this sort of German lecture going, oh, therefore, therefore, therefore.

25:01Yes, I was going to say, I think one of the reasons Schopenhauer hated Hegel was for his dense way of writing and he was obscure and hard to understand. I don't want to take sides in the dispute, but I did find there's a famous explainer of one of Hegel's most prominent works, and it's over three times longer than Hegel's actual work. Hey, Ray, you said at the start that this isn't what you know most about in philosophy. What's your era? Who's your philosopher? Well, my favourite was actually Manuel Kant, who was the one that inspired both Hegel and Schopenhauer, but they took him in different directions.

25:39And then what my thesis ended up being about was free will. That was the main thing I ended up writing about. The movie about the whale?

25:49James Harkin:What a pivot. Sadly, I wrote the sequel. That was why it was free will to the much less popular straight to DVD philosophical thesis.

26:02Anna Ptaszynski:The whale can escape, but will he ever truly be free? Do I have free will or was I forced to make that terrible joke? I think knowing you is entirely within your genes and environment that you were compelled. There was no choice for you.

26:20James Harkin:We've not mentioned one big part of Schopenhauer's studies, which is the time he became a paranormal investigator. Oh, here we go. Well, it's a surprisingly big bit of his life, and he wrote about it quite a lot, which is that he had a very weird moment where he woke up one morning and he saw his mum and dad standing in front of him as an apparition. So his dad was dead, a bit weirder because his mum was still alive, so not sure what she was doing there. His mum was just over for a visit. That's the most paranormal thing I've ever heard before in my life. Yeah, and so he sort of thought, I wonder what that is.

26:56James Harkin:And he was working as a large part of his work that metaphysics would explain why people were seeing weird things. He didn't properly believe in ghosts himself, but he did think all of these experiences, telepathy, all that stuff, premonition, something might be tied in. So it made it part of his philosophical investigations. It's going to be a nightmare if you hate other human beings and then you start getting visited by ghosts as well. This is exactly what I didn't want.

27:24Anna Ptaszynski:He was really interested in sacred Hindu texts as well. That was a big part of his life and his philosophy. So all of his poodles, he was a big poodle fancier, all of his poodles were called Atman, which is the Sanskrit word meaning your true self. Why would you call all your dogs the same name? That doesn't make any sense. It means you only have one thing to shout in the park, and then all the dogs will come back. Okay, I see that. It's ingenious. See, he was the cleverest man in life. And his bedtime reading every night was a few pages of, this is when I thought, okay, this guy's a cut above intellectually.

27:59Anna Ptaszynski:It was the Latin translation of the Upanishads, the sacred Hindu text, the Upanishads. It was the Latin translation of that. Every night before going to bed, he would just read a few pages to help himself drift off to sleep. And he said, it has been the consolation of my life and will be that of my death. You know, he was just an extremely polymathic guy, effectively.

28:19James Harkin:Well, that was someone said in writing about his understanding of the Upanishads and general Hindu philosophy is that he was reading these sort of put together Latin translations that lost a lot about it. A mistranslation almost, not quite a mistranslation, but one step away from the meanings that were properly captured in the original writings. That's really interesting. It suited what he was trying to build. That's quite similar to Zen Buddhism in the West, which was it came over when a guy went over to Japan and he spent a lot of time with this really famous Zen Buddhist and he didn't speak Japanese and the Buddhist didn't speak any English.

28:58And so they went through a translator and the translator just basically told him what he wanted to hear because the Zen Buddhist guy was quite old by that stage. He was repeating himself. He was talking quite a lot of nonsense. and then this guy would say oh yeah what he's saying is that you need to become one with the world and and whatever but actually never said any of that stuff give all your dogs one name give them all one name um schopenhauer he wrote about the feeling that people had after sex oh he wrote that directly after copulation the devil's laughter is heard oh and is that who's been laughing this whole time

29:43Anna Ptaszynski:it's always better that it's the devil laughing really isn't it so this all comes back to galen the famous guy who wrote about medicine and stuff um he wrote that every animal is sad after coitus except the human female and the rooster you know We don't pitch the show, but how a fact, this is not where I originally would end up, to be honest. We should say, A-Shops was a massive sexist. I was reading his work and I was thinking, yeah, I'm jamming with this guy. And then I read his views on women. They are big children all their life long, an undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged race.

30:25Anna Ptaszynski:They have no proper knowledge of anything and they have no genius. And I thought, back off, okay. Sorry, did you say that he said women are bigger children? Because, I mean, so are men. That's what being an adult is, isn't it? Yes. Being a bigger child. He was very dedicated to slagging off the other philosophers. He once wrote an essay that was awarded the first prize in a competition by the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters. And so then next year he submitted another essay, and this essay did not win the award even though it was the sole submission

31:07and the reason it was rejected is in part because he kept disrespecting other philosophers and i think to be fair if you are writing a essay on morality you probably shouldn't be

31:18James Harkin:slagging off other philosophers yeah that's yeah that's so funny that's like there was a um there was a study that was done amongst uk scientists and one of the findings at the end was that most scientists don't like richard dawkins but what they were being asked about had nothing to do with richard dawkins that just came up as everyone's slagging him off as part of their response and they were like well here's here's an unintended bit of data that we've discovered yeah yeah he did he's like even in his books right even in his main that main um one what What's it called, by the way? Will.

31:52Anna Ptaszynski:The world as will and representation.

31:54James Harkin:Yeah. Even in the main one, the will is world and represent.

31:57Anna Ptaszynski:Will is, say it again? The world as will and representation. It's not catchy. It did not take off. Part of the reason it didn't take off was he didn't call it big things. I just love the idea of Dan going to a year of lectures and still can't get the title of his work. Any questions? Yes, Dan, again. No, it's the world as will and representation.

32:21James Harkin:okay so so where there's a world there's a will of representation there's a way that would have been better that would have been better imagine if i was the time traveler that went back and sat

32:31Anna Ptaszynski:in his legs they think of me in the year 2025 we love your work we're willing for you willy

32:44James Harkin:we need to wrap up in a sec but ray you're going to be in edinburgh this is very exciting you're coming across the ocean, halfway across the world. Where are you going to be playing? What's the show? Yes, I'm going to be at the Pleasant Courtyard at 6.05pm every day except for one Monday. I forget which one, so hopefully that's not the only day I'm here in Edinburgh for the entire Fringe Festival. And the show's called Laughter, I Hardly Knower. So yeah, please come along.

33:13James Harkin:Brilliant title.

33:21James Harkin:Okay, it's time for fact number three, and that is Andrew O 'Neill. My fact is that the first band to call themselves punk didn't use guitars, which is counterintuitive because we think of, you know, biker jackets, spiky hair, guitars. But the first bands to actually call themselves punk were Suicide. So Suicide were a kind of art noise duo in New York, Martin Rev and Alan Vega. And they used synths and drum machines and created a wonderful sort of sleazy, uncomfortable, aggressive noise. So I'm constantly fascinated with the history and the kind of like taxonomy of music. So with punk, punk was used as an insult.

34:07You know, it was seen as putting them down and then suicide of the first band to kind of lean into it. But punk in its origins was so much wider as a genre and so much more experimental and kind of arty than the dudes with loud guitars. Yeah, right. I read an interview with these guys from Suicide and they said that they did have a guitar at the very start before they became Suicide when they were just sort of starting out. Right. But the guitar player decided to leave and they realized that actually he wasn't really contributing very much anyway. So that's why they did without him.

34:38James Harkin:I listened to the album this morning their their debut album in 1977 and uh it's it's noise and it's interesting and it's wild lyrically there's an amazing song which is called Frankie Teardrop and it's a song that's been cited by quite a lot of people as an influential song so Nick Hornby wrote a book called 31 Songs where he picked 31 songs that have altered his life in some ways and He says it's a song that you should only hear once because it's just too intense. And it is really intense. It's a story of a guy who goes home, he kills his family, and then you follow his own death and then his journey into hell.

35:14James Harkin:And it's just this soundscape of noise. And it's horrific, but hugely influential. Springsteen was influenced by this. Yeah, like a lot of people were influenced by suicide that you would not expect. Actually, aren't Bruce Springsteen's songs like a lot more depressing than people make out? Like Born in the USA is about someone being really disheartened about America after the war.

35:37Dan Schreiber:Oh, yeah. Yeah. A lot of his songs are about rough living and suffering and a very downbeat in their meaning. But if the music doesn't sound. Isn't it true that a lot of politicians use Born in the USA as like their big sort of American kind of thing? Nationalistic flag waving kind of thing. It's exactly the opposite of that, which is true, isn't it? pretty much any artist that gets co-opted by a politician will go, you've not really paid attention to the lyrics.

36:04James Harkin:Andrew, you're doing a whole show about the history of punk. So is this your opinion that they're sort of the first punk band or is that agreed? Not that they're the first punk band, but they're the first band to call themselves punk. Right. Because there's a thing that happens, isn't there, with sort of genres where before a genre gets named, it can be quite amorphous. The meaning isn't kind of ossified yet. So I would argue the first punk band was the Stooges, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Do you find, Andrew, that when people get put into those categories, then they start sort of living up towards it?

36:38Absolutely right. People call you a death metal band, then your next three albums are just going to be heavier and heavier. That's absolutely it. And also there's a thing where people start to form bands based on the tax. So basically the map becomes the territory. So you put a thing out saying, I want to form a thrash band. You kind of already know what that's going to sound like.

36:57James Harkin:That Suicide album, the 1977 one, was described as Taxi Driver the Musical. Forgive it is. Which I think did quite nicely. And they toured with The Clash. Right. And Clash fans universally hated them because they wanted a band that sounded like The Clash. And they got a band that sounded like stoned speed freak Elvis playing over horrible keyboards and drum machine.

37:24Dan Schreiber:Do you know on The Clash, so Mick Jones is founder of The Clash, I think, and was a lead guitarist and his first cousin. Do you know who his first cousin is?

37:35James Harkin:Oh, not Davy Jones from Tom Jones?

37:39Dan Schreiber:It's not a Jones, sorry. I've led you up the garden path there. It's a tough one to guess. It's a really tough one to guess. Basically, what I'm telling you is The Clash are, you know, punk, very, very cool. This guy, not cool. Look, should I tell you? Is it Jacob Rees-Mogg? You're so close. Oh, my God, Dan, you're in the right political party. You're in the right era. Oh, is it David Davis? You're close. It's Grant Chapps. Grant Chapps. Grant Chapps is first cousins with The Clash. Grant Chapps was used by Alan Partridge to denote someone that's absolutely, totally middle of the road page. Exactly.

38:13Dan Schreiber:I'm afraid. And in fact, his brother is called Andre and he's in a band called Big Audio Dynamite with Mick Jones, who's, you know, Clash guy. So there you go. Cooler than you thought, Grant Chapps. Cooler, yeah. That's amazing. As if that could be possible. I know. It's strange, isn't it? Because, you know, there's that thing of like so many people in there. So Joe Strummer went to a private school. The idea that someone who went to actually a public school could be in a punk band in the 80s would have been incredible. But it was absolutely what happened, that kind of flourishing of bringing people together.

38:49I mean, the Bromley contingent, So Susie Sue and they were very definitely suburban middle class. It wasn't sort of street based as it kind of came to be seen. There are so many contradictions in it. I mean, the young ones, the most punk TV show, nearly everybody involved in that is privately educated.

39:07Dan Schreiber:Yeah, they absolutely are, aren't they? Yeah, that's so true.

39:10James Harkin:When you sent over this fact, I started looking into guitars. I realized I didn't know much about the history of guitars. and one thing that I got really excited by was in the early days, let's say around the time of the Beatles, guitar chords were a bit more secretive, it seems. I didn't know that. So there's this amazing story. Amazing Paul McCartney story. Yeah, so there's a great McCartney and Lennon story where they heard in Liverpool that there was someone who was across town who knew the chord B7 and they got on the bus and they travelled all the way and they met him and they said, show us B7, and he showed them.

39:50James Harkin:And they said it was a turning point for their composition and kind of was part of how the Beatles became the Beatles. It was the lost chord, he called it. And they went back home, they showed everyone B7, then they spread it around. And I thought that sounds ridiculous. But when you read into the early days of guitar, if you were an amazing guitarist, you'd kind of clasp onto what you were able to do. So there was a guy who was known as the king in jazz guitaring called Freddie Kepard. and Freddie Capard had a picking style that was so unique that when he went on stage, he used to put a handkerchief over his picking hand so that no one could see the magic going on underneath.

40:26Dan Schreiber:Is it? Because I can't play guitar. So the analogy I can make is a piano and the idea of having a new piano chord, like I could just bash some keys together that don't sound very good and say I've made a new one. But was B7 something that sounded amazing and no one had discovered this combination of notes?

40:41James Harkin:It sort of just doesn't make sense, Anna, because it's quite simplistic. Yeah, but it does fit really well with the other easy to play cards. Yes, it's in the same area of the guitar. There's not much change.

40:53Dan Schreiber:We just hadn't discovered it sounded good. No, we knew it. It exists in music. Yeah. Oh, so just Paul and John didn't know it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they will have heard it, but not known where to put their fingers to get that sound. Yeah. I think also, Anna, like you say, I could just bash the keys and get something. I used to think that if because I'm terrible at drawing, I thought if I just draw enough times, eventually my lines will turn into something beautiful but it doesn't quite work like that for some reason exactly the same approach to the guitar someone told me early on that hendrix didn't know what notes he was playing and that's a lie because hendrix was a session musician hendrix on the chitlin circuit hendrix played for absolutely everyone he played for little richard played for you know he backed so many bands and you can't do that without knowing what key you're in and what literally what notes you're playing so i absolutely had james i had exactly the same thing if I just keep playing eventually I'll put and no and then I'm now like 30 years odd later starting to learn some theory and going oh this makes it so much better I've got my I can actually I can actually demonstrate it you know it just sounds so D D7 it adds so much texture and kind of emotion to it but the um the other thing about the Beatles was that they were they were one of the first, well, basically the first band to make writing their own music the thing within pop music.

42:16That's that mind-blowing thing if Elvis didn't write his songs.

42:19Dan Schreiber:Paul McCartney, who famously did write his songs, his guitar flies first class. He books it its own scene. I want to know how the booking works, because when you're on EasyJet you have to put in passport details, and I don't believe it has a passport. But B.B. King actually used to fly his guitar as well in its own playing. Yeah, Lucille, was that what the guitar was called? Yeah. Guitar's called Lucille. That's insane because he didn't book it under the name Lucille. He booked it under the name Mr. Guitar.

42:48James Harkin:Ah. Well, that's when Elton John books into a hotel. You don't give your real name. You don't want people knowing Lucille's on the plane. They might steal it. It's a pseudonym. He named it Lucille apparently because he had to rescue one of his guitars from a fire in a building that was started by two men having a fight over a woman called Lucille.

43:07Dan Schreiber:Really?

43:08James Harkin:Yeah, so that's where that name comes from. Angus Young called his the workhorse, or does call it. Willie Nelson's is Trigger. They've all got their nicknames for them. It's very sweet. Willie Nelson's Trigger guitar. He replaced the neck eight times and the body three times.

43:24Dan Schreiber:Hey, do you know the Eminem song, My Name Is? I mean, who doesn't? What a stupid question. There's a guitar and bass part in that, like one of the really familiar bits you'd recognise. Yeah. Do you know who plays the guitar and bass on that?

43:36James Harkin:Oh, Andrew.

43:37Dan Schreiber:Yeah, Andrew knows it.

43:38James Harkin:Chaz and Dave, isn't it?

43:38Dan Schreiber:It's Chaz and Dave. It's so cool

43:41James Harkin:Who were Chaz and Dave? I know their names But I don't fully know who, what they were They were like Cockney They made like Cockney songs Rockney Chaz and Dave were session musicians And they played with absolutely everyone And they were incredible musicians And what they decided they wanted to do was The big thing was they wanted to do rock and roll in their own accent Because every British band that did rock and roll Adopted an American accent And Chaz Hodges' big thing was he wanted to write A love song in his own accent so they came up with this thing, Rockneed and I adore Chaz and Dave I unironically love them, I was on tour in New Zealand and when you do New Zealand you're already homesick and New Zealand feels like the end of the world because of the way it sticks out into the Pacific and one of the other comics I was getting it was Terry Alderton, we were both being homesick and he went listen to this and it's a Chaz and Dave song called That's What I Like and it's just a list it's like the Amelie of pop music cheese and onion sandwiches and darby china where hoodles and jigs are woogamy dogamy aren't if i haven't a swear it's absolutely gorgeous like i completely unironically love them yeah amazing they are cracking so um they weren't in the studio with eminem though right this was a sample presumably it was a sample okay yeah okay okay punks and samples that takes me to daft punk uh-huh um the band daft punk so there is a species that has been discovered known as Baikalelia dafpunca.

45:07Dan Schreiber:Okay. It's a type of flatworm. And do you know why it got that name? Does it wear hood masks over its face all the time? I like a big helmet. Yeah. You're close enough. I'll let you have it. It has a helmet-shaped structure on the end of its penis. Okay. Okay. That's not where they wear theirs, I don't think. I like to think that dafpunc, if they tuck their trousers down, they would have the same helmets. So you can't identify them by their penis? They're sort of fractal, and then on a cellular level, there are helmets. It's helmets all the way down.

45:43James Harkin:Do you know who Daft Punk were very influenced by? Suicide. Suicide. Were they? Yeah, they cite, I mean, because if you listen to it, it's electro music, really, when you listen to that opening album. So yeah, they cite them as influencers. Hey, listen, we need to wrap up in a second. Andrew, before we do, you're in Edinburgh. I am. I'm doing two shows because I'm an idiot. I'm doing two shows and I broke my leg in February, so I am behind. I'm doing Andrew Neil's History of Punk at Bannerman's at 11.30pm and that starts on the 1st of August, right through not doing Mondays or Tuesdays because I'm actually a little bit more sensible than I used to be.

46:23and I'm doing a stand-up show that discusses my three-point model of political difference, which I think might be the only genuinely original idea I've ever had, three ways in which people disagree or are wrong politically. And it's got tons of very, very stupid jokes and a thing about rhombus. And that's called Escape, and it's on at 7.10pm at Monkey Barrel. So, yeah, two shows. Beautiful. Awesome.

46:53Dan Schreiber:it's time for our final fact of the show and that is ahir shah so my fact is that andrew carnegie tried to achieve world peace by sending countries dinosaurs yes the common enemy like i don't think you get to be like that successful and wealthy and industrialist without being a bit of an ideas guy. Are all of them going to come off necessarily? No. But you can say that you did your level best. I think it's a great idea. Like, you know, the idea of everyone having nuclear weapons so that no one attacks each other. Yeah, mutually assured dinosaurs. Yeah, it's perfect. And you could make it so, like, the bigger countries have smaller dinosaurs and the smaller countries have bigger dinosaurs.

47:41Anna Ptaszynski:We're being progressive, are we? So the Vatican would have to have the largest Titan. It would be as big as the Vatican.

47:49Dan Schreiber:So aside from all this absurd reasoning, what was the idea behind world peace being created by dinosaur diplomacy? Well, it wasn't necessarily... It was another MAD mutually assured Diplodocus, or Diplodocus, or however we want to pronounce it, basically. I'm sure that many, if not most, of the listeners will have seen Dippy, the famous skeleton in the Natural History Museum, right? And basically, the idea was that in 1899, the original sort of Dippy, Dippy's a composite skeleton, but the sort of main part of it was found in Wyoming on an expedition that had been sponsored by Carnegie. Now, this is like something no one's ever seen before, right?

48:33This is going to change the game in a huge way uh and a couple of years later uh king edward goes up to uh carnegie's castle in scotland and sees just like a picture of the dippy skeleton i was like oh it'd be great to great to have something like that for the natural history museum and carnegie really rolls with this and i believe like at his own expense like commissions a guy to do a plaster cast of it The guy is initially just like, no, I don't want to do that. It's massive. No one's ever attempted to do anything on this scale before. But sure enough, it ends up in the Natural History Museum.

49:12It's a great fanfare. Millions of people have seen this for the first time. And I guess Carnegie gets it into his head that this is something about scientific discovery and everyone working together and cross-national cooperation. And so pretty much every year of the first decade of the 1900s, he's giving one of these things out to different countries on the understanding that how could we possibly fight one another if everyone has a dinosaur? That makes perfect sense. Yeah. And so over the course of the first decade of the 1900s, we're talking there's one in France, in Germany, in Italy, in Russia.

49:54This didn't work. And Mr. Carnegie took the beginning of the Great War very badly because he was basically just like, I give you all a fucking dinosaur.

50:10Dan Schreiber:like lads what are we what are we doing and he was so upset wasn't he i mean i know quite a lot of people were upset about the first world war maybe some people suffered even more than him but a lot of biographies say he sort of died of a broken heart in 1919 because he was so devastated that his plan hasn't worked and world war one happened anyway but he saw the end of the war

50:30Anna Ptaszynski:he might have lived to friend of the podcast the treaty of versailles if it was 1919 because that That was signed. So that should have given him a new lease of life. It's like, oh, great. Now we can resume the dinosaur dispatch. But then he read the treaty and was like, this doesn't even mention the dinosaurs. Come on. How do you expect this piece to hold? It should be the treaty of Velociraptor. And then everyone's going to happen. It's so good. So the things I didn't know about this, I mean, I didn't know anything about this story. I'd only vaguely heard of Andrew Carnegie, to be honest, as the man who sold steel to the world, like made steel, made big American industrialists.

51:05Anna Ptaszynski:But he was looking for an exhibit for his museum. That's what started all this. He had the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and he needed a showstopper. And he read in the paper, oh, they found this gigantic thing. And actually what had been found was a thigh bone. So it was just a femur. And so he wrote to the director of the museum saying, you must buy this. And the museum director was in an awkward spot because you can't just buy a bone. Like one bone is not a showstopper for a museum. That's rubbish. So he said, well, we better find another one then. And he started funding all the expeditions.

51:38Anna Ptaszynski:And thank God they found, this is very American, they found it on the 4th of July. Did they? They did. It's very American. I bet they didn't.

51:47Dan Schreiber:I bet they found it in June and they were like, zip it. Wait a couple of weeks. I was looking at some of these other ones that are around the world. And for instance, one was donated to the Paleontological Museum in Munich, Germany in 1932 and wasn't mounted or anything. And then, of course, what happens in 1933 in Germany? And it's like, guys, if you just do the dinosaur thing, it might help. Like everyone goes very extreme when they're not doing the dinosaur thing. Wow, I wonder if anyone's ever made that connection before. I love it. Is that why? Is it perhaps that the dinosaur thing is leading up to this war?

52:28Oh, right. You know, if you've got like, if you've got a couple of kids and one of them has an ice cream, you think, I'm going to give them all ice creams and that'll make them all happy. But it really doesn't work like that.

52:38Dan Schreiber:Well, because they go, my ice cream's better than yours. You've got the fake ice cream. I'm the one with the real one. Precisely. Yeah. And in fact, the Natural History Museum and British commentators were really sniffy about Dippy. They were so rude about him. Yeah, they were. So the people absolutely loved it. But basically all the reviews said, this is a fuss about nothing. They wouldn't put Dippy in the paleontology section. So Dippy was in the gallery of small reptiles. What? Stop it.

53:06Anna Ptaszynski:That can't be true.

53:07Dan Schreiber:That's right. That's where he was housed, feeling pretty out of place, I imagine. And the reviews tended to focus on the fact that he wasn't particularly interesting because of the size of his brain or her brain, sorry. So reviews said things like the brain cavity is no bigger than a walnut. How can we get excited by this? Dippy's obviously a complete moron. In fact, the guy who accepted it on behalf of the Natural History Museum in his acceptance speech said, given that this animal was clearly very stupid, the size of it doesn't really add much to the interest. So I think it was British jealousy about the fact that we tended to export our science to America in this field and America suddenly waltzed in with their big showstopper.

53:49Dan Schreiber:But fortunately, the people didn't give a shit about the size of the brain and thousands of people rocked up. And then, of course, Dippy isn't there anymore. If you go to the NHM, it's Big Old Whale. They got rid of it in 2017. And when did the whole world start going to shit?

54:08Dan Schreiber:Exactly. Wasn't it 2016?

54:10Anna Ptaszynski:Anna, please. Sorry, I hate it. They're 65 million years old. What's a year here or there? Come on.

54:18There is something in this.

54:21Anna Ptaszynski:Can I say, I just love this so much about the thing you mentioned here about King Edward VII. and that's what prompted the first cast to be made and dished out. So King Edward VII, he'd only been king for a year. It was 1902 and he visited Carnegie in Scotland at his home, which is this amazing house called Scebo Castle. It had things that the world had never seen before, like indoor toilets and electricity. It was the equivalent of the most amazing space age house at the time. And Edward wanted to see the plumbing because he wanted to restore all the royal palaces. you know, Queen Victoria had been on the throne in an incredibly long time, they were very dilapidated He's like, get out of there!

54:59Anna Ptaszynski:I need to mum! And so, Edward wanted some of that basically, and that's why he was visiting and the visit happened, allegedly at such short notice, that the organ player for the household again, if you're very rich, you just have one of these the organ player was in the swimming pool and had to be hurriedly hauled out and towel himself off so he could play God Save the King as the king arrived. That is the story.

55:24Dan Schreiber:And to be fair, as far as billionaires go, he seems like one of the good ones. He gets, doesn't he? I mean, I'm going to say this and next week it'll come out that he made lots of inappropriate jokes to female colleagues. But at this point in time, I think we can say Andrew Carnegie, pretty good guy, one of the big 19th century philanthropists, gave away a huge amount of his money, about 90 % of his fortune, equivalent of$11 billion today to charities and foundations. So he really did want to make the world a better place, didn't he? Which of us allows their organ player in the swimming pool? I would imagine that.

55:57Dan Schreiber:I certainly don't. That's a good point. The wars were a bad time for some dinosaurs. So Spinosaurus was a dinosaur which went extinct about 60 odd million years ago. And then it went extinct for a second time during World War II because the British bombed it in 1944 to smithereens. So it disappeared and we didn't have it anymore. Really? Yeah, but luckily it's come to light again in the last 20 years or so. We've managed to find some more fossils. So we got a chance to make it extinct a third time. Yes. This really reminds me of, did you ever see that headline that was something like, cocaine in the Thames is another thing eels don't need?

56:40Dan Schreiber:Dinosaurs have had to put up with so much. Oh, gory got extinct once, mate. Do you know, I think maybe this is common knowledge except to me, but dinosaurs were reptiles. One of the mad things about dinosaurs is we don't know if they're warm-blooded or cold-blooded. What? That's like so basic a thing to know. But dinosaurs count as reptiles. All birds are reptiles as well. Technically, they're part of this group called Diapsida, which also includes all other reptiles. But we're also reptiles. Come on. Well, no. The queen, obviously. That's why do you think the king wanted these dinosaurs so much?

57:18Dan Schreiber:He wanted his mates around. If you go high enough up the taxonomy, you're in the reptiliomorphic clade, and that's mammals, birds, reptiles, and the thing that it's not is frogs. So I shouldn't like amphibians, which are basically frogs, right? So it's basically everything that isn't a frog is the same. Sort of, with some insects and stuff. But basically, there's all of us together, and then frogs and nukes. I think that that would be a very funny prejudice to have. They're not like us, those frogs. Like humans, other species, objects, absolutely everything you treat entirely equally, but you're a ginormous froggist.

58:01Anna Ptaszynski:Yeah, like race is very old hat. Clade is a new hat. I think there's some background towards this. and I think maybe we should be against frogs because there was a frog called Bielzebufo Ampinga that lived 65 to 70 million years ago. It was absolutely massive and it had very, very strong jaws. So strong that they think it might have been able to eat dinosaurs. Not like a T-Rex. No, like little tiny chickeny ones, I guess.

58:31Dan Schreiber:Cool. But yeah, like if the frogs and the dinosaurs were fighting all the way back then, It's hardly surprising that everyone on this call is a frog racist right now. I mean, which one survived in the end? Here's a question. Why do some dinosaurs have such small arms? This is a joke.

58:49Anna Ptaszynski:This is a cracker joke. I just feel it. It's not. It's not. It's a true question. Like there was one called Guamisia okoi, which has basically got no arms at all. It's just got two tiny little, just a few inches in length arms. obviously the tyrannosaurus rex has very small arms as well what's going on there i guess they

59:09Dan Schreiber:didn't need to applaud anything you know no no plays or anything back then but only bad plays oh shit plays yeah yeah well you have something that happens even now right like as in the ancestor of the kiwi would have had wings and the wings are just gone so a kiwi like if you x-ray it or something a kiwi is basically just like a ball with legs absolutely so the kiwi lost theirs because they didn't really need it anymore and you don't need to use up the energy to to have body parts that you don't need yeah so that's one theory that they didn't need them anymore because maybe they would eat things with their mouth so they didn't need to use their hands to put things in their mouth anymore because they had such big jaws they would just grab things and bite them and then they didn't use up the energy to make the arms they could use the energy elsewhere and the other idea is that they act in like real feeding frenzies and that if they had long arms then they just get ripped off in those feeding frenzies.

1:00:04What do you mean?

1:00:04Dan Schreiber:Like they rip each other's arms off or they're going swinging so hard or something? Yeah, so you've got like 10 T-Rexes all going after the same bit of meat and they're all biting it. And if you've got one T-Rex that looks like Mr. Tickle, then his arm's just going to get bitten off. Oh my God. So surely they got to a stage where they were just biting each other's faces off instead. You're using your face to eat. That's the thing. Wow. Anyway, that's a theory.

1:00:29Anna Ptaszynski:How long would it take us to start this process? Like if I decided, you know, I'm just going to go feeding frenzy on all my meals. And then how many generations do I need to persuade my children that they just don't need their arms? Because I know it's got to make me more evolutionarily successful. Like it's got to make me better at breeding, right? If I am eating like this. Yes, this is the thing. And I don't know whether necessarily on dates that's the face directly into.

1:00:55Dan Schreiber:We should wrap up. But here you're going to be in Edinburgh. or maybe by the time people are listening, you are in Edinburgh probably. Where are you right now? So I will be at the Edinburgh Festival doing a show from the 12th to the 24th. That's not true. It's the 14th to the 24th. I'm just going up on the 12th. You might still see me, but on the street. It is a work in progress showed towards a new tour that'll be happening next year. And it is at noon at Monkey Barrel, three lovely monkey barrel three get there

1:01:37James Harkin:okay that's it that is all of our guests facts go see their shows they're in edinburgh it's going to be an amazing month get yourself up there and come back next week we'll have another episode waiting for you we'll see you then goodbye

1:01:59Thank you.