No Such Thing As A Fish - No Such Thing As The Treaty Of Velociraptors

Episode Date: August 7, 2025

Dan, James, Anna, Andy, Elf Lyons, Ray O'Leary, Andrew O'Neill and Ahir Shah discuss punks, clowns, dinosaurs and post-Kantian transcendental idealism. Visit nosuchthingasafish.com for news about live shows, merchandise and more episodes.  Join Club Fish for ad-free episodes and exclusive bonus content at apple.co/nosuchthingasafish or nosuchthingasafish.com/patreon

Hi everyone, welcome to another very, very special episode of No Sussex Things of Fish, where we showcase four more comedians who are currently at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. So who do we have for you this week? Fact number one will come from Elf Lyons. Elf is a brilliant comedian. You will hear from her fact that she is very much into the clowning style of comedy. Her shows have been so well received over the years. At last year, Edinburgh Fringe, she won the best show, that's by the ISH or the IH Comedy Awards.

She also won the Comedian's Choice Award, and she'll be up there this year with three different shows, so plenty for you to choose from if you'd like to hear more of Elf. Fact number two will be from Ray O'Leary. Ray is a really good friend of ours. He is a New Zealand comedian. He's often seen on Australian television as well, a TV show over there called Have You Been Paying Attention? He's a regular on there, but he's also been. on Taskmaster New Zealand.

He's a fantastic comedian. He's got such an amazing deadpan humor, but really smart as well. I know you're going to love him. Fact number three, it comes from Andrew O'Neill. Andrew is an extremely prolific stand-up comedian, done so many shows over the years, also a musician, also best-selling writer.

They wrote a book called The History of Heavy Metal, again, someone who we've known for many, many years. I really wanted to get on this on a podcast for a long time, so I was delighted when they said yes. And finally, fact number four, will come from Ahir Shah. Now Ahir, he's been nominated a few times Redderbara and he finally won it in 2023.

He's a brilliant, brilliant comedian. We're all massive fans at QI, and of course he has done QI and all of the panel shows, so I'm sure you will be well familiar with him. But anyway, that's four incredible comedians, all of whom are currently slogging away at the Edinburgh Festival. So if you are going up there, then please do check them out. And if you're not going to Edinburgh,

then like I said last week, go and find these people on social media, check out all the work that they're doing because they come highly, highly recommended from us. Anyway, that's enough of me talking about, I guess, why don't you hear what they have to say when I say on with the podcast. Hello and welcome to another episode of No Such Thing as a Fish, a weekly podcast this week coming to you from eight undisclosed locations around the world. My name is Dan Schreiber. I am sitting here with Andrew Hunter Murray, James Harkin, Anna Tishinsky, and four very, very special guests.

And once again, we have gathered round the microphones with our four favorite facts from the last seven days. And in no particular order, here we go. Starting with fact number one, that is elf lions. The great clown teacher Philip Goliere is so known for his negative feedback that his former students created a Facebook page purely to log all the men. many ways he's insulted them. The page is called Philip Goliere hit me with a stick. I mean, this is a very, very famous clown teacher, isn't it? Philip Golier. And you've met him, haven't you, Elf? Yeah, I trained with him and I still remember I came on stage. I think I was performing the Cyclops and Greek tragedy. And he went, who would you like to make love to?

And then I picked a boy called Oliver. And he was like, Oliver, take her to the shower. And then I got covered in ice water and then brought back. And he's like, Oliver, hit her with a stick. And then kiss her on the cheek and then sing and then say the text. And I would start saying text like, so speaking, he drew the sharp sword hung long and heavy at his side. And hit her with a stick. Oh, put more water on her. Not bad. Goodbye.

And then I'd have to go and sit in the class still covered in water. and that wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened. So as Philip Gullier asked someone else to hit me with the stick, in your case? Yeah, it was just so silly. Like, I think people's concept, if you haven't trained with him, is that you're just being emotionally abused. But like it's emotional abuse in like a really fun clown way. Is it?

Because it sounds to me like being a clown teacher is one of the last remaining ways you can get away with a lot of shit and not get back for it. It sounds like an HR nightmare. the phrase that keeps on cropping up with me. Yeah, I think safeguarding is something that's still being learned in the clowning community, I would argue. But you know what? We had good times.

We had good times. He was cheeky. I mean, he just called me asparagus or wobbly giraffe. Look at this wobbly giraffe with how wobbly body. Again, that's, I'm afraid to say, Elf, that is a tribunal waiting to happen. Wobbly giraffe woman wins three million pounds from elderly French clown. I think it's why I've coped so well in the comedy industry, to be honest, because if I ever got heckled at the comedy store, I'm like, you're not a short old man in France telling me, would we wish she was on a plane to Malaysian Airlines? Which was one that I got frequently.

Right. Have you contributed to the Facebook page, the insults? I think I must have done about 10 years ago. Yeah, because this was set up in 2007. The About section says, we are all variously insulted by Philippe Goliere in various cities at various times. He called you a toilet, a cretan. When joining this group, please share an insult you received from him. Adios.

And yeah, people would put things like you sound like overcooked spaghetti in a pressure cooker. They all sound like they're not hugely harmful. But I have spoken to a few other people who studied under him. My friend Sam did. And she said she was so badly insulted by him. He talked about how dead her eyes were, that it was more dead than a family pet that had not only died but been buried into the back garden that took ages to shovel and left for years and years

and then a fountain's been built on it and then you go back and you dig it all up and you take the pet back out and you look at his eyes. Her eyes are more dead than that animal's. Like he did it for like five minutes on stage but she now runs clowns without borders UK so she went into it.

And I bet her eyes are great. Can I ask what the idea is as someone who hasn't done clowning what's the idea behind being like incessantly and absurdly insulted? Does it make you more funny and clowny? I think, do you know what it is? It's about realizing that you can never disguise anything about yourself. You have to come on stage so full of pleasure in your body and who you are. Because if you try and conceal or hide what you look like, the audience are going to notice it. And also getting rid of the pride and the ego. But it's so funny. That's the thing. Everybody's laughing. And I remember once, there was someone dressed as a gnome. And she was so bad. She was so not funny. And he was like, you hate me, don't you? And she was like, yeah, I do. And he's like, help. much do you hate me? And she was as a little gnome. She was like, I hate you fucking hate you,

Philippi. He's like, yeah, you tell me how much you hate me, how much you hate my face. And she started getting really angry at him and it was the funniest thing, watching this like 50 year old woman dressed as a gnome in Swedish shouting at this French man. He's like, yes, you tell me how much you hate my guts. So it's just, I think it's one of those things, it's all context related. And I do genuinely, you could say there's a lot of HR issues, but it is about. the environment. And Philippe was pretty, if there were any issues in the village, there was a village flasher who had just flash his penis whilst we were all running. And Philippe, like, this has got to stop you. Can I all keep getting flashed to you? Not to be funny on stage.

I will call the mayor and rang the mayor to sort out the flasher in the park. Was he sorted out? I think he was, actually. Is that what it takes to sort out a flasher? You need to tell the mayor that it's a running clown school. I mean, clown cop is an impressive premise for a TV show. Oh, God. From the makers of Tiberius Cop comes.

Clown Cop. So they sort of torturing people among clowns does seem to be part of their modus operandi. There's also a thing in America where you can hire clowns to terrify your children. And I actually don't, this suddenly was happening about eight or nine years ago. I can't say it happening now, but there's Rinkles the Clown in Florida. Do you guys know him who? Don't like a sound of wrinkle. He hires himself out to parents who want to petrify their children who are misbehaving.

And he does things like one mother hired him to stand at a bus stop and stare at her 12 year old until he freaked out so much and started crying in front of his friends and ran home. I'm sorry, any child whose parents have hired wrinkles, the clown needs to be taken into care, effective immediately. It's quite weird, isn't it? Yeah. There's another one called Dominic Devil who stalks, I mean it does sound bad, who stalked victims for weeks, sending them chilling text messages and making prank phone calls

and sort of posting them notes, warning them they're being watched. And then eventually after weeks he'll smash a cake in their face. That's noncy. Sorry, that's noncy. Well, whatever makes you could do their homework, I think, is the thinking. These guys have strayed quite far from the joy ethos that the clowning apparently has. I always wonder with the link with scary clowns is there's the Bufon clown. So if you imagine the clown that we think of, the playful circus clown, has puppy eyes, very innocent, the inner child.

Then you've got the Bufon which has animal eyes, fox eyes. And there's this myth that the Bufon were the untouchables in the medieval period. And they lived outside of the town and they lived in the swamps. And it was everyone who was not respected in that time. And then there was one day of the year, the day of the Bufon where they could go and blaspheme against God and say F you to the king. and they could exaggerate their bodies to look like those were in charge and basically stick, you know, a finger up to the power. And Sasha Baron Cohen's Borat sort of originates from Bufon.

But it's like the dark clown. It's really smart. It's not foolish. There's like an acidic twist to it. Is that where clown terror comes from, you think, maybe? Because do you remember how insane it was in 2016 when that's a new story for about a month of clown terror? Which is weird because at the end of that year, Donald Trump was elected, wasn't he?

So you never know. Maybe it was a weird press. No. Dan, earlier you mentioned clowns without borders. And there are this amazing group. They go to the worst places in the world, like famine zones and war zones. And they entertain children. And there was a piece run in the Washington Post this July headlined,

Donald Trump is not a clown. I should know. And it was by Tim Cunningham, who was the president of Clowns Without Borders. And he was saying, Our joyful work has been diminished into an insult. Every election season, the word clown resurfaces to compare Washington politics to a circus. And he was incredibly angry about this. Clown is used by almost everyone to belittle those seen as foolish or incompetent.

The more we mistreat the word, the more we lose understanding of a sacred art form. And like, yes, but. But who's this clown? It's just a standard. It's just such a good line, isn't it? And if anyone, by the way, just a quick shout out for clowns without borders. if anyone has any spare money, please donate it to them because they do incredible things. They go into war-torn areas and they look after refugee children who just need a smile on their face.

They're really awesome. You mentioned Sasha Baron Cohen before Elf, and he was a Golié student, wasn't he? He was indeed. So many people in the world of entertainment, like Emma Thompson, Helena Bonn-Carter, Rachel Weiss, Jeffrey Rush, all studied underneath him. So he's had like a huge impact in our general culture. But in movies as well, Anna, we were just talking about how parents hire freaky clowns to stalk their kids. This is something that also gets used in movies, most famously in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Spielberg had a little boy who was his first acting role and he needed to get this emotion out of him when he was scared by seeing aliens outside a window.

And behind the window, as he approached it, a sort of blind went down and there was a terrifying clown standing there. Absolutely freaked him out. Yeah. And then another blind went down and there was someone dressed as a gorilla. So this kid just absolutely flipped out. What is going on? It was two of the crew. What was he trying to achieve with this kid? He wanted a motion of being scared.

You need a shot of someone wetting themselves in terror, apparently. Elf, are you familiar with the name Guy La Liberte? I possibly am, but I probably never pronounced it as beautifully as you did because my dyslexia means I pronounce everything like it's going through chat, GBT. But tell me. He's one of very few clowns to have become a billionaire. Wow. So he is one of the co-founders of Cirque du Soleil.

He'd been a still walker and a fire eater before, you know, before founding this incredibly successful global corporation of brilliant shows. And in 2009, he became the first ever clown in space. He went to the International Space Station. Tressed as a clown. We don't do anything together. taken seriously. I'm sorry. I bet everyone how Adam and everyone

is in the clowning profession to be taken seriously. We do such stupid things. He did a little like clowning. There's a picture of him in his space suit with a nose on and made the astronauts laugh a bit. He was up there partly to make a speech about the importance of clean water accessibility. That was the thing. Anyway,

the real punchline is that he paid $41 million to go. And he was a billionaire by this point, so he had a huge amount of money to spend. But the funniest joke of all he made was that he claimed the trip was a expense and that therefore he should not have to pay any tax on the $41 million he'd spent going to space. This was litigated for 10 years in the Canadian courts and eventually, in I think about

2020, the Canadian Federal Court of Appeals ruled that it was a personal trip he was making and he would have to pay tax on that. I think that's a very funny joke. I can't believe you're allowed to just go. He went to the ISS to do that. Yeah. I thought only asked for us. He cleared it with them first.

He didn't turn up outside the ISS, just knocking on the hatch. How do you stow away? a rocket. There's massive shoes are poking out from beneath the curtains on the... Oh, we had a very

cool clown connection with no such thing as a fish, by the way, that happened on our Australia, New Zealand tour. So we did a fact about clowns ages ago that in New Zealand

a man was made redundant and there's this idea that if you're made redundant you can bring someone along with you to the meeting so that you have a bit of support and I can see you clapping elf.

I have a feeling you might know this person as well. I do know this. A comedian called Joshua Jack, whose real name is Josh Thompson. Josh Thompson hired a clown to come with him for this redundancy meeting. And while the person was saying, we think, you know, unfortunately we're going to have to let you go. The clowns there go, and, you know, doing all the clowny stuff. Anyway, we're in Australia and we have a drink post-Melbourne show with Ray O'Leary, who is part of these Edinburgh showcase shows that we're doing with Fish. And he says, this is my friend. His name's Josh Thompson. He was the guy. guy who hired the clown. We got pissed with the man who was a fact on no such thing as a fish.

Our greatest strings. Yeah. Hey, by the way, I found a clown school where no one who has left that school as far as I can tell has gone on to become a clown. 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 popular. 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? No. Was that the policy and the police

every time you put a red nose on? Well, it was just that month, as you say, that crazy month. It made it, it made its way all the way to the UK town of Clown. 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. No wonder no one takes us seriously. I can't get over the headline. Clowns complaining they're not being taken seriously. It's just, it's wonderful. Wind your neck in. I, 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 going on because I was too scared. We do need to wrap up.

So, Alf, 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 Chiff 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. And they're all clown, mine, bufon shows that make my agent's job of books. getting me on television, it's 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 task master. Where are you going to be, Elf? Where are you playing? I'm playing in the Kingdom at the Pleasance for the final two weeks of the fringe. So swam one day, chift 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. 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 Hager was getting in the hundreds, because at the time he was the chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

So he was sort of like the Taylor Swift of German philosophical idealism. So it was actually... I actually call Taylor Swift the Hagle of pop music. So do you know a lot about philosophy, Ray, because these are pretty new names to me and probably a lot of people listening. Yes, I do know a bit about philosophy. 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. 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. Sorry, can I just stop you there, Ray, because before we came on Mike, I was saying how much Andy reminds me of him. Okay, okay. I like to think of myself as a cantankerous, miserable young man, all right? So I think he's quite a nice knight.

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 and speaking world. And Schopenhauer was just some punk kid. You know, he was in his 20s, I think, or maybe, no, maybe early 30s, but he was young. And it was him who wanted the rivalry. Like, 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. It was about his magnum opus. Yeah. It's, and no one. When you read about him on page, to me, it's like reading a biography of Larry David.

Like he tries all these little schemes. And I wonder if maybe in real life it was funnier. Because if you read Curbier enthusiasm on page, that's not funny. That's a cantankerous, horrible, repulsive man, right? But in real life, he's amazing. Like, he largely drew his philosophy from Eastern religion, right? Like, 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. That's Larry David. Really? You wouldn't want to live next door to shop and hire, 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 day. door. 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. Chopin-Howe once said the amount of noise which anyone can bear undisturbed stands in inverse proportion to his mental capacity. 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 that sort of a series of statues carefully positioned so the sun ricochets around until it hits all his enemies eye. But he's clearly unbelievably reading about actually both of these guys, Hegel and Schupper now, 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 and it. 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. You know, we go in these big historical cycles and... It was, I mean, really basically, it's like optimism versus pessimism, wasn't it? Hager was very much sunlight and rainbows and unicorns. And Scherpenhower was, I fucking hate unicorns. Which team are you on, Ray? if you had the option of those two lectures, your time travelled 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 basically I want to preserve his loser status. I think it would corrupt his whole legacy if 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 lecturer going, therefore, therefore do. Yes, I was going to say, I think one of the reasons Chopin how I 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 Hagell's actual work. Hey, Ray, what 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 Hagle and Schopenhauer, but they took her in different directions. And 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. What a pivot Sadly I wrote the sequel There was my was free will to The much less popular Straight to DVD Philosophical thesis

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 It's entirely within your genes and environments That you were compelled There was no choice for you.

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 big, 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 mom and dad standing in front of him as an apparition. So his dad was dead, bit weirder because his mom was still. alive, so not sure what she was doing there. The home was just over

for a visitor. That's not the most paranormal thing I've ever heard before my life. Yeah, and so he sort of thought, I wonder what that is, 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 got 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. 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. He's ingenious, right? See, he was the cleverest man in life. And his bedtime reading every night was a few pages of, this is when I've thought,

okay, this guy's a cut above intellectually. 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 polymatic guy effectively. Well, that was someone said in writing about his understanding of the Apanishads 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.

And 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 whatever, but actually

never said any of that stuff. Give all your dogs one name. Give them all one name. Schopenhauer. He wrote about the feeling that people had after sex. He wrote that directly after copulation, the devil's laughter is heard. Oh.

Is that who's been laughing this whole time? I've been wondering. It's almost 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. He wrote that every animal is sad after Cletus, except the human female and the rooster. You know, when I'm pitched the Schopenhauer Fetched, this is not where I imagined we were using that, for me honest. We should say, A-shops was a massive sexist. I mean, 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. They have no proper knowledge of anything. And they have no genius. And I thought, oh, back off. Okay. Yeah.

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. He's a bigger child. He was very dedicated to, um, slagging off the other philosophers. He once wrote an essay

that was awarded 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. And the reason it was rejected is a 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 slagging off the philosophy.

That's so funny. That's like 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 slagging him off as part of their response. And they were like, well, here's an unintended bit of data. that we've discovered. Yeah, yeah, he did.

Even in his books, right? Even in his main, that main one, what was it called, by the way? The world as will and representation. Yeah. Even in the main one, the will is world and representation. 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 that going to a year of lectures and still can't get the title of this. any questions yes Dan again no it's the world as will and representation okay

so where there's a world there's a will of representation where there's a world there's a way that would have been better that would have been better I imagine if I was the time traveler that went back and sat

in his like to the early go so what they think of me in the year 2025 we love your work where willing free willie We need to wrap up in a sack.

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 Pleasance Courtyard at 605pm every day except for one Monday. I forget which one. So hopefully that's not the only day.

You're at Edinburgh for the entire Fringe Festival. And the show is called Laughter. I hardly know a. So yeah, please come along. Really a title. 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'd think of, you know,

biker jacket, spiky hair, guitars. But the first band 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, you 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.

I read an interview with these guys from suicide and it said that they did have a guitar at the very start before they became suicide when they were just sort of starting out. 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. I listened to the album this morning, their debut album in 1977, and 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. 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 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. Oh, yeah. Yeah, a lot of his songs are about rough living and suffering and are very downbeat in their meaning. But if the music doesn't sound. Isn't it true that a lot of politicians use Bonn in the USA as like their big sort of America. Yeah, a 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. Yeah. Andrew, you're doing a whole show about the history of punk. 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 Stoogies, Iggy Pop and the Stooges. Okay. Do you find, Andrew, that when people get put into those categories, then they start, sort of living up towards it. Absolutely 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 on. 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. That suicide album, the 1977 one, was described as taxi driver of the musical,

which I think is 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 Stone Speed Freak Elvis playing over horrible keyboards and drum machine. 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? Oh, not Davy Jones from Tom Jones?

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, shall I tell you? Is it Jacob Reeves mug? 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 Grand Chaps. Grant Chaps. Grand Chaps.

Come on. His first cousins with The Clash. Grant Shaps, it was used by Alan Partridge to denote someone that's absolutely totally middle of the road page. Exactly. I'm afraid. And in fact, his brother is called Andre. And he's in a band called Big Audio Dynamite with McJones, who's, you know, Clash guy. So there you go. Cooler than you thought, Grant Chaps.

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, so Joe Strummer went to private school. Like the idea that someone who went to a, like 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. I mean, the Bromley contingents, so Susie Sue and another, yeah, 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 Like I mean the young ones The most punk TV show Nearly everybody involved in that's privately educated Yeah they absolutely are aren't they

Yeah When you sent over this fact I started looking into guitars I realised 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 And I didn't know that So there's this 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 traveled all the way and they met him and they said, show us B7 and he showed them. 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 and 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 on to 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 Kepard 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. Isn't it? Because I can't play guitar. So the analogy I can make is with 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? It doesn't make sense, Anna, because it's quite a simplistic chord. 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. 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. I had 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 Hendricks was a session musician. Hendricks was on the Chitlin circuit. Hendricks played for absolutely everyone. He played for little Richard.

He 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 had exactly the same thing. If I just keep playing, eventually I'll put a note. 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 mean, I've got my, I can actually, I can actually. could demonstrate. You know, it just sounds, so D-7,

it adds so much texture and kind of emotion to it. But the other thing about the Beatles was that they were one of the first, well, basically the first band, to make writing their own music the thing within pop music. And that's that mind-blowing thing, if Elvis didn't write his songs. Yeah. Paul McCartney, who famously did write his songs, his guitar flies first class. He books at his 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. Gilles' 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. Ah. Well, that's when Elton John books into a hotel. You don't give you a real name. You don't want people knowing Lucille's on the plane. No, good point. 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. Really? 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. Hey, do you know the M&M 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. Do you know who plays the guitar and bass on that? Oh, Andrew. Yeah, Andrew knows it. It's Chars and Dave, it's Chas and Dave. It's so cool. So, who were Chas 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. Yeah, they made. Chas and Dave were session musicians and I played with absolutely everyone. And they were incredible

musicians and what they, what they decided they wanted to do was, the big thing was they wanted to do rock and roll in their own accent because everyone, every British man that did rock and roll adopted an American accent and they, Chad's hotges big thing was he wanted to write a love song in his own accent. So they came up with this thing, Rockney. And I, I mean, I adore Chaz and Dave. I unironically loved 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 stick that into the Pacific. And one of the other comics I was getting,

it was Terry Alderton, we were both bringing homesick, and we went, listen to this. And it's a Chaz and Dave's son called That's What I Like. And it's just a list. It's like the amalie of pop music. Cheese and onion sandwiches and darby china wear.

Whittles and jigs are wugged me, dog and me, aren't it my having a swear? It's absolutely gorgeous. Like, I completely unironically love them. Yeah, amazing. They are cracking. So they weren't in the studio with Eminem, though, right?

This was a sample, presumably. It was a sample. Okay. Okay. It was. Okay. Punks and samples. That takes me to daft punk. Uh-huh. The band Daft Punk. So there is a species that has been discovered known as Bicholalia dafunker. 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. and it has a helmet-shaped structure on the end of its penis. Okay. That's not where they wear. There's, I don't think. I like to think that Daph Punk, 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, they're a helmet. It's helmets all the way down. Yeah. Do you know who Daph Punk were very influenced by? Suicide. Suicide. Were they?

Yeah, they cite. I mean, because if you listen to it, it is, 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 do two shows, and I broke my leg in February, so I am behind.

I'm doing Andrew Neal's History of Punk at Bannermans at 1130 p.m. 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. And 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 Rombus. And that's good escape, and it's on at 7.10 p.m. at Monkey Barrel. So, yeah, two shows. Awesome. 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. 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 sure 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. We're being progressive, are we? So the Vatican would have to have like the largest titan. be as big as the matter.

So aside from all this absurd reasoning, what was the idea behind world peace being created by dinosaur diplomacy? Well, it wasn't, so 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? This is going to change the game in a huge way. And a couple of years later, King Edward goes up to 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.

Like, no one's ever attempted to do anything on this scale before. But sure enough, it ends up in the Natural History Museum and to great fan, millions of people. I've 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. This didn't work. Right. 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. Like, lads, 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 happened anyway. But he saw the end of the war. He might have lived to Friend of the Podcast, the Treaty of Versailles, if it was 1919, because that was the sign. 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 because I, 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, you know, the man who sold steel to the world, like made steel, made, you know, big American industrialist. 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, well, 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 boat. Like one bone is not a showstopper for a museum. It's rubbish.

So he said, well, we better find another one then. And he started funding all the expeditions. 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.

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 everything. And then, of course, what happens in 1933 in Germany? And it's like, guys, if you're doing. 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? Oh, 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. 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. Imprecisely. 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? So I stop it. That can't be true. 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. One of the, 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.

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? Exactly. Wasn't it 2016?

Anna, please. They're 65 million years old. What's a year here or there? Come on. There is something in this. Can I say, I just love this so much about the thing you mentioned I hear about King Edward the 7th. And that's what prompted the first cast to be made and dished out.

So King Edward the 7th, 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 Skibo Castle. It had things that the world had never seen before, like indoor toilets and electricity. Like, 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. I need to. Mom! 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. And to be fair, as far as Belliners 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 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. I certainly don't. It'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 seven. 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? Dinosaurs have had to put up with so much. Oh, go already 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 were 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. The queen, obviously. That's why do you think the king wanted these dinosaurs so much? You wanted his mates around.

If you go high enough up the taxonomy, you're in the reptilomorphiclade, and that's mammals, birds, reptiles, and the thing that it's not is frogs. So I just didn't like amphibians, which are basically frogs, right? So it's basically everything that isn't the frog is the same. Sort of, with some, you know, insects, 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 those frogs.

Like humans, other species, objects, absolutely everything you treat entirely equally, but you're a ginormous frogist. Yeah, like race, race is very old hat. Claid is a new. I think there's some background towards this. And I think maybe we should be against frogs because there was a frog called B.L. Zabufo 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, no, like little tiny, chickeny ones, I guess.

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 does some dinosaurs have such small arms?

This is a crook. 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 Ocoi, which has basically got no arms at all. It's just got too tiny little,

just a few inches in length of arms. Obviously, the Tyrannosaurus Rex has very small arms as well. What's going on there? I guess they didn't need to applaud anything. You know, no plays or anything back then. But only bad plays. Oh, shit plays, yeah. Yeah.

Well, you're... I suppose that's 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 an eggs. 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 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 ate in like real feeding frenzies and that if they had long arms, then they just get ripped off in those feeding frenzies. What do you mean? Like they rip each other's arms off or they're going, swinging so hard or something.

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 Anyway, that's a theory How long would it take us to start this process Like if I decided, you know what, 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'm eating like this. Yes, this is the thing. And I don't know whether necessarily on dates, that's their face directly into. 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. So you might still see me, but on the street. It is work in progress,

show towards a new tour that'll be happening next year, and it is at noon at Monkey Barrel 3. Lovely, Monkey Barrel 3. Get there. Okay, that's it. That is all of our guest's 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.