Frankie Boyle

I chat with the legendary author and comedian Frankie Boyle in his hometown of Glasgow Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:38Speaker 01

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• 1:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Remove the boatwax, you goofy Cusacks. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. It's wonderful and greasy here in Limerick. Sideways drizzles of bastard rain, socking me to the bone, and a gentle heat in the air, awakening the, the eggshell stench of starling gogs on the pavements of the Bardshit District. A few weeks ago, I mentioned on a podcast a few weeks ago about how the news cycle just appears to be rapidly irrational. How you can't, you can't possibly predict what's gonna happen next.

• 1:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, literally, ju- just today, just today, Donald Trump announced that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. I think Israel and Iran went to war since the last time we spoke. So Donald Trump announced that there was a ceasefire between Israel and Iran. The Israelis broke the ceasefire and then Trump cursed, Trump cursed on the news. And it's receiving more coverage than when someone tried to shoot him into the head. If you're, if you're a seasoned Quiva or a 10 foot Declan, if you've been listening to this podcast a long time, you'll remember during the first Trump presidency, back in fucking 2018, 2019.

• 2:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  I used to read out Donald Trump's tweets as your drunk limerick aunt. I used to do it every single week. I'd read out Trump's tweets. He's not on Twitter anymore and I don't want to follow him on fucking Truth Social. I don't even know how to look at Truth Social, but I would, I'm gonna bring back, I'm gonna bring back your drunk limerick aunt. And I'm gonna repeat what Trump said on the news as your drunk limerick aunt. So it's 10pm, your drunk limerick aunt. She's tried to sit down and watch an episode of And Just Like That. Cause she used to watch Sex and the City, but now she's watching And Just Like That. And she's highly disappointed because it's shit.

• 3:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  I tried, I used to love fucking Sex and the City. Sex and the City was brilliant. Any, any millennial man who pretends he's never seen Sex and the City is lying, lying. Because when I was a teenager, it was one of the few good things on television. And people used to curse and have sex and you felt like an adult when you watched it. I fucking loved Sex and the City. But anyway, I've tried to wa-watch And Just Like That. It's not as good, it's not as good, it's not the same. We'll leave it alone. But anyway, your drunk limerick aunt. I'm just projecting me, I'm projecting me onto your drunk limerick aunt now.

• 4:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  So your drunk limerick aunt used to watch Sex and the City and now she's disappointed with it and just like that and she's so disappointed she's after cracking open a bottle of Baileys that she got at Christmas and now she's she's ringing people up drunk and she says, "We basically have two countries that are fighting so long and so hard that they don't know what the fuck they're doing. Do you understand that?" And you can you can hear her Baileys tinkling, tinkling in the background because it's summertime. It's summertime and she's enjoying Baileys as a summertime drink with some ice in it. So that's one there for the seasoned quavers.

• 4:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Lots of ye. As soon as fucking Trump got back into power, so many of ye were asking me, "Please start doing, start reading out Trump's tweets as your drunk limerick aunt again." And I haven't been doing it because he hasn't been tweeting. He fights with Elon Musk. He doesn't use Twitter, or X as it's known now. And so yeah, as of now, as I record this, now there appears to actually be an agreed ceasefire between Iran and Israel, which I think was brought on by Donald Trump saying the word fuck. Not wearing a tie. He

• 5:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  wasn't wearing a tie. So he looks like he's been up all night and he says the word fuck on live TV on the lawn of the White House. And it was so un-presidential and unprecedented that I think it freaked out. It freaked out both Iran and Israel and they went, "We can't predict this fucker. We actually can't predict this fella now." It was so shocking. And all the news organizations didn't know what to do or how to report it properly. It's just, he just said the word fuck. It's so strange and unprecedented that I think it may have actually, as of 10pm when I record this now, it may have, may have caused a ceasefire. Like,

• 6:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Trump is so narcissistic and so volatile and takes things so personally.

• 6:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  That it's possible that Israel in particular were like, this fellow might turn around and not give us, not give us any bombs anymore. And I don't think that's a strategy on Trump's part. Like, Richard Nixon used to do that, but Nixon would do it deliberately. Richard Nixon used to, used to have a strategy called the madman theory, where Richard Nixon would consciously behave in such a volatile, unpredictable way, especially in the context of the Vietnam War, that the Soviets were like, we don't know what chess move to make here because this fellow might actually be crazy.

• 6:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  But Nixon used to do that deliberately. I don't think, I don't think Trump is doing that deliberately. I think people are aware that this is someone who can, this is someone who can take things very personally. And he, he went to his throat social last night and announced, there's a ceasefire, there's a ceasefire, everybody. And for that to be broken, then it bruises his ego, his ego. And I think, I think that may have caused a temporary ceasefire, which, I don't know, it could be broken again tomorrow. I don't know what could happen tomorrow. Like I said, the nose cycle is bizarre. You're always asking me to, to bring back the drunk limerick aunt.

• 7:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the other thing I get asked to do a lot is, so I, I do live podcasts and sometimes I have comedians on. And when I do a live podcast with, with a comedian, I rarely put it out. Usually because, like, when I, when I do a live podcast, I want it to be, it's for the audience, it's for the people who are there, who are present in the room. That's who I do the live podcast for, the people who've shown up. So often when a comedian is my guest, we both just kind of go nuts and we try to make the crowd laugh. We try to make the crowd in the room laugh.

• 8:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sometimes that doesn't translate into a listenable podcast. It's more, you had to have been there. Like, I've had Tommy Tiernan on this podcast three times. Three times I've had Tommy Tiernan as a guest on this podcast, and I haven't put out any of them. Because it's just me and Tommy screaming at the audience and having crack. And when I listen back to it, I'm like, no, don't think people are gonna wanna hear this. But I am gonna, I'm gonna share with you a wonderful, wonderful conversation I had with a comedian two weeks ago in Glasgow. I sat down with Frankie Boyle. Frankie Boyle is a world renowned comedian from Glasgow.

• 9:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've done bits and pieces with Frankie. Jesus, for about, since about 12 years ago. He's always been so kind and supportive of my career. And he's just, he's a deeply intelligent, thoughtful person, as well as being hilarious. He's great for a chat. And we had the most marvelous chat in, it was, it was a privilege to do it in Glasgow, to his home crowd in his city in Glasgow. We had a wonderful night and I just wanna share it with you because it's so much crack. Almost as a bit of distraction, as a bit of distraction, because we're all glued to the news

• 9:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  this week and it's stressful. And I think it's okay for us. It's all, it's all right to take an hour, to take two hours out of your day to not focus on the news cycle. You have to put your head in the sand about events in the news. That's not helpful, but at the same time as well, you do have to mind your cognitive fatigue, cognitive fatigue and stress levels. So it's okay to switch off a couple of hours a day. That's what I wanna do for you this week. Before I get into the chat, first off, I wanna flag. I put out a live podcast three weeks ago.

• 10:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  And in this live podcast, I spoke about the Greek myth, the Greek myth of Zeus and Prometheus. I also speak about it in this chat with Frankie. So apologies for the repetition. It was from the same tour. And when you're gigging every single night, sometimes similar stories pop up with different guests just because that's what's in my head day to day. So apologies for the repetition there. And also apologies if I go on a little history rant or something and I get a couple of facts wrong. I can't go back and edit that in a live podcast setting or correct my, correct my facts or fact check myself in the moment like I can do with a hot take.

• 11:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Frankie Boyle, he's a legendary comedian. He's also an author. Wrote his first book of fiction two years ago called Mean Time. And he also has a podcast. He has a podcast called Here Comes the Guillotine. If you want to check that out. I don't need to be introducing who Frankie Boyle is. I think you all know who Frankie Boyle is. So here's the chat we had.

• 11:38Speaker 03

  What's the crack? Happy eat. How you doing? And I love all that stuff you do about like toxic masculinity and that. I was listening to the other day. You know, you did a recent podcast on toxic masculinity and how to talk like an adult. And I was listening to that. I've always wear like noise cancelling headphones. So I was listening to that in the park and I was eating a gelato. And 99. And some guys came up and started to have a go at me about something. Some young guys and they seemed a bit annoyed. But with the noise cancelling headphones on, I couldn't hear anything. And it's just you talking about the drawbacks of toxic masculinity.

• 12:19Speaker 03

  And as I, I was kind of smiling and they seemed to get angrier and angrier. And I thought this would be an amazing way to get my fucking head kicked in. Just your gentle voice and the piano. Just a little Ocarina pauses my fucking ribs collapse.

• 12:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  I read that you, uh, did you train in Jeet Kune Do?

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, I trained here with a brilliant guy who's actually probably the world's foremost teacher of Jeet Kune Do, a guy called Tommy Crothers.

• 12:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  How did you like that? Jeet Kune Do is Bruce Lee's specific style.

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  What was that doing in Glasgow?

• 13:06Speaker 03

  Well, I think Tommy was just fascinated by Bruce Lee when he was younger and he trained with Bruce Lee's first student, this guy called Jesse Glover. And Tommy used to have this flyer that he'd hand out and it had a quote on it from Jesse Glover, which obviously in Jeet Kune Do is a great thing. But the quote was, Jesse Glover, "I think if Tommy punched a man full force in the chest, it would stop his heart."

• 13:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's, uh, when we were growing up, uh, oh god, like, again, I was mentioning about the days when, like I said, Prince removed his rib to suck his own dick. But when that could just fly around and you couldn't challenge it, because what are you gonna do? Ring someone up who knows Prince? You just had to go with it. There was no internet. And the other one we had was in Limerick. "Did you know that Bruce Lee was so healthy his heart burst?" And we just had to go with it and go, "I don't know, maybe he did." There was no internet.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  Do you think God took Adam's rib out so he could blow himself?

• 14:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's your favourite creation, mate?

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Uh, my own, uh, which is Um Bumby, the Undying Egg. Uh, I believe the world was created by, uh, Um Bumby emerging from the Undying Egg. He lays an egg and then dies. That's my own one and I'm going with it.

• 14:40Speaker 03

  I think, I think the idea that the universe is a hologram. Leonard Susskind's mathematical theory that we are a projection from an infinitely far away source. I find that quite comforting, because what does any of this matter? Hologram blind boy.

• 15:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, it's, it's interesting, like, the, I was telling you backstage that the CIA ended up doing a study and trying to figure out what reality was in the seventies, and millions and millions, and they came to the conclusion that reality is a type of hologram. And then they developed a type of meditation, call it a hemisync meditation, which you can do on YouTube, it's a fucking CIA meditation, that apparently allows you to leave your body in an astral plane. And I tried it, and I didn't leave my body, but I got that rollercoaster feeling and went, fuck this, I'm gonna go back to mindfulness, not the CIA meditation shit. My favourite origin story is, do you know Zeus and Prometheus?

• 15:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 15:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I love about that one is just how fucking, how much it is about right now. Like, you've Zeus and, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a bollocks of this, right? But I'm gonna tell it in the Irish way, which means I'll tell a version of it. So Zeus and Prometheus are like gods, right? And they're up on Mount Olympus, which is like Greek heaven. Marty Pellos there wanking.

• 16:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  He, he's not Greek, is he?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  He should be. Have you seen, have you seen him on Instagram? He's got a strong Instagram game, Marty.

• 16:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  He doesn't, it's fuck. Doing what?

• 16:19Speaker 03

  He's got like, always his shirt unbuttoned to like the fourth button. He's got a really fantastic bedroom, and he just sings versions of songs that people ask him to sing.

• 16:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  We're playing him.

• 16:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Zeus and Prometheus are there going.

• 16:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  We're fucking, they're really bored. Zeus and Prometheus are bored. They're like, "I'm sick of looking at fucking Marty Pello's thirst traps. I need something better. I need something more." Up in Mount Olympus. So Prometheus says to Zeus, "Why don't we just like make a video game full of people like us? Why don't we make this like world full of creatures that are like us? And then we won't be bored anymore." And then Zeus is like, "Fuck that, Prometheus. What if they like get so, if they're like us, they'll be smart. What if they get so smart that they fucking kill us?" And then Prometheus goes, "Ah, go on. We're sick of looking at Marty Pello. Let's just do something." So Zeus

• 17:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  goes, "All right, fuck it." So they make humanity. They make us. They make the world. And they're living in a different time. So they get to watch humans progress really quickly. And it goes from, you know, fucking Cro-Magnon man, blah, blah, blah, blah, until you got Homo sapiens, but they're kind of stuck. They're stuck. They're freezing cold. And they're miserable. And the humans are eating raw meat and doing fuck all with themselves and chasing mammoths. And then Prometheus, he starts to, like Zeus is like, "I don't like these little cunts." But then Prometheus starts to fall in love with the humans. He's like, "I like them. I want to help them." So what Prometheus does is he steals fire from Mount Olympus and gives

• 18:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  fire to the humans. And once the humans get fire, then it starts to progress rapidly. And when the humans get to the point that they start making art, that was the one, when the humans start making art, then Zeus goes, "Fuck this. No, no, no, no. These cunts, if they're making art, they're getting real smart. They're gonna kill me." So what Zeus does is he finds one of these little humans, a woman called Pandora, and he knows these humans are smart. They're curious. So he goes to Pandora and says, "Here's a box. You can't open it." And then Pandora's like, fuck that Zeus. Staring at the box every single day going, you can't just show up as a god and give me a box and say, don't open it.

• 18:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  So she stares at it and then eventually goes, fuck that. She opens the box and what comes out is mental health issues. Yeah. This is a fucking 1500 year old story. What comes out is jealousy, anxiety, depression. And then that's it. Humans can't take over the gods. And what I love about it is in about two years' time, right, when AI goes nuts, someone's gonna be like, yeah, we're gonna have to teach it panic attacks. That's what they're gonna do. They're gonna teach AI panic attacks, body image, jealousy. And it's the, that's why we're gonna have to stop AI. Give it low self-esteem.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Zeus, he liked to shag people as an animal, didn't he? Sort of turn up as a bull.

• 19:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  He fucking did, didn't he?

• 19:30Speaker 03

  And maybe that's why he was worried about art. He was like, they're gonna finally be able to do sketches of me. It was this guy.

• 19:39Speaker 03

  If you were getting shagged by an animal back in the day, you'd better hope it was Zeus. Do you know what I mean? You're like, I really hope this is Zeus and I'm not just being hummed by a dog.

• 19:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  What? There's a fucking mad story about, uh. It's in Greek myth, right?

• 19:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's this woman, whatever, whatever happens in the myth, uh, one of the gods curses a man's wife so that she's sexually attracted to a bull.

• 20:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's where the Minotaur comes from.

• 20:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, it's the Minotaur's ma. So this, this, it's, it's, there's a husband and wife and the husband, the hus- ah, here it is. So the husband gets his hand on a, on a beautiful white bull. And this is the most perfect bull in Greece. But the thing is, in Greece, if you were to get something as magical as a beautiful white bull, you have to sacrifice it to the gods. But this fellow went, fuck this, this bull is amazing. I'm keeping it. Fuck the gods. So then the gods said, all right, I'm gonna make your, uh, wife wanna fuck that bull more than anything in the whole world. So then the wife is just like, ah, I really wanna fuck that bull. I, I just can't think about anything else. I need, I need that bull to fuck me.

• 20:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Goes to Deadless.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  I thought you were gonna say Marty Pell.

• 20:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  No. Fucking Deadless, the fella who invented the Icarus Wings thing. She goes to Deadless, who's an inventor, and goes to Deadless and goes, "I need to fuck this bull, right? But I don't know how, I can't figure out the mechanics of how a bull is gonna fuck me." So Deadless has a good old think and he goes, "I know what to do." So he invents a big wooden bull's arse that her arse fits inside. So she stands around with her arse, her bare arse, in the wooden bull's, and then the bull comes up and gets to fuck her. And then the child is just this fucking weird, this weird bull man. And, and then the dad's like, "What the fuck is this?" And then they go, "This child is so mad looking, because he's half bull, half human, we need to send him to an island that has a maze on it." And that's the Minotaur.

• 21:45Speaker 03

  I think Deadless said he invented that, but he already had it in his shed.

• 21:51Speaker 03

  I try.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  Surely if you're the husband, you just sacrifice the bull, hollow it out, fuck your wife wearing the fucking bull costume?

• 22:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Actually, that's a good... Yeah, why didn't, why didn't he try and dress up as the bull? That's a good one.

• 22:10Speaker 03

  We should do that mythological couples counselling.

• 22:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  I wanna talk about that. You're, you have a real name, right? That sounds like someone had a gun that, that shot Irish names instead of bullets. Patrick Martin Francis Boyle. The only person who beats you is, is Dusty Springfield, whose real name was Mary Isabel Catherine Bernadette O'Brien.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  Do you know, um, Jerry Adams just won that libel case?

• 22:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Against the BBC. It was for a guy who was murdered in Donegal, um, years and years ago. That's the origin of the case. Um, which obviously he had nothing to do with. But, no. I mean, genuinely, genuinely, it was like a stupid case for them to bring. Um, but I got questioned for that murder.

• 23:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, because I was in Donegal at the time, and there's an IRA hitman who's also called Francis Martin-Bodden.

• 23:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck. Oh, how long ago was this?

• 23:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was like, eh, 2005 or something like that. I was doing Mark of the Week, so the police turned up and they were like, "What the fuck?"

• 23:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are you serious?

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and they were laughing, but they still kind of...

• 23:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  The policeman knew it was you, but they're like, "We have to do our job."

• 23:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have to go through it, yeah.

• 23:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are you allowed to talk about that?

• 23:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so.

• 23:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  That is fucking gas.

• 23:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, I've got DMs from Gerry Adams on Twitter, I don't answer them. He wanted me to go up a mountain for a biodiversity project.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Who's turning that down?

• 23:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Me.

• 23:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  "I don't know, like Gerry, fucking figure something else out. How are you, blind boy? My friend's got a mountain. I'm very interested in taking you up the mountain." "Pause, it's for biodiversity." So I just left, I just left it on read, I just...

• 24:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I met, I met Gerry Adams once. I've only met the man in person once, and I happened to be dressed like a blackened tan. I'm serious. I was shooting a fucking documentary, um, back in 1916. It was a documentary about the 1916 Rising, and I was, I, I, I wanted to, I tell you what, from an artistic perspective, this is what I was doing. In front of the GPO in Dublin, there's the statue of Jim Larkin. Like, Jim Larkin is a wonderful socialist. He was a compatriot of Connolly, right? And I was trying to make the point of, of the vulgarity of having like, fucking McDonald's and Coca-Cola and all this American capitalism

• 24:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  around the statue of Jim Larkin. That, that's really offensive to me, so I figured, "Okay, if that's offensive, why don't I read out the 1916 proclamation, dressed as a blackened tan, at the GPO?" So I, so I did, right?

• 25:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it was like a year before, like the 1916 commemorations, and I was unaware that on the exact same day Sinn Féin were having their official commemoration of O'Donovan Ross's funeral, and all of Sinn Féin were there dressed up like fucking volunteers. And I just wander into the hotel as a blackened tan. Sheer coincidence, Sinn Féin weren't fucking having it at all. And I'm there, I'm there going, "My granddad was in Tom Barry's flying column, it's fine. Up the rah, up the rah, it's grand."

• 25:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they were like, "No."

• 25:44Speaker 03

  Fantastic.

• 25:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you remember you appeared in one of my documentaries and we couldn't tell RTE it was you?

• 25:49Speaker 03

  Really? What was my name again?

• 25:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hen Party.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  Hen Party. It was either gonna be Hen Party or Netflix, remember?

• 25:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  We were peeling condoms out your back garden. We were putting condoms and bananas out your back garden.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  That's right, in a Wendy's house.

• 26:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know, in a Wendy's. Actually, we did two, so...

• 26:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was recording a documentary with RTE, right? And I gave Frankie a shout and I said, "Frankie, will you be in this documentary?" But the thing is, I couldn't let RTE know that you were in it, because they'd just go nuts with it. And like, because you were doing it for a favor, you were doing it for the crack. But they would then tell everyone, "Frankie Boyle's on RTE." So we had to hide it and...

• 26:31Speaker 03

  You made me wear a wig.

• 26:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  You wore a wig. We credited you as Hen Party, and fucking RTE had no idea he was in it. It went out on TV. They didn't know Frankie's like, if they found out that Frankie was on Irish TV, they'd come on their fans. They didn't know. And then we managed to get... So that there was a referendum coming up for abortion in Ireland, the repeal the eighth referendum. And you couldn't have a political opinion in support of this referendum on Irish TV, but we wanted to do it anyway. So what we did was, we counted a lot of bananas, we were peeling them, and then we said to you, "What do you do with the eighth banana?" And you said to camera, "We peel the eight."

• 27:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hold on, we went slightly over curve, you know, we're supposed to get a pint and a piss out here and then we're gonna come back out. I wonder is there any, one, one... God, the one question that my fucking... What do you think of Billy Connolly?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  I love Billy Connolly. I have a, I have a recurring dream where me and my dad go and see Billy Connolly. It's the most bland recurring dream anyone's ever had. We go and see Billy Connolly, it's great, and we go home.

• 27:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Was it hard starting out as a comedian in Scotland with someone like Billy Connolly being there?

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Oh no, that was great, because then you had someone who'd done everything. Because the hard thing is, people are like, "Oh, fucking Scottish people." Do you know what I mean? People are still like this a bit. But, do you know what I mean? The fact that you could go, "Oh no, there isn't actually a precedent, you know, for Scottish comedy was good." Because Scottish club comedy at the time was like, really, really hard, you know, and audiences were hard.

• 28:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  What do you mean hard? Like it was...

• 28:12Speaker 03

  Like, people, their ideas about comedy came from an album they'd heard in the 1970s. And there'd been a big dead period. Second gig I ever did, I walked in, there was a guy on the stage and he was kinda dying. It was a really rough club. And he lost his temper a bit and he went, "What the fuck do you expect for a fiver?"

• 28:33Speaker 03

  And someone goes, "Change."

• 28:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Listen. You have to have a pint and a piss, we'll come back out and speak about this after a pint and a piss, alright?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 28:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sad place.

• 28:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yes, so we're gonna take, let's take a little Ocarina pause now. I've got a, it's a lovely, nice, long podcast to have for you this week, but let's have an Ocarina pause. I don't have an Ocarina, I've got a kazoo and a sleigh bell.

• 29:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  So let's, I'm gonna play a kazoo and a sleigh bell at the same time, see if we can do it, and, and you're gonna hear an advert for something. If you're new to the podcast, if you're someone who listens to Frankie or knows who Frankie is and has an affi- Fucking clue who I am and you're a new listener. I, I, I like to have a little pause if adverts are coming in so that you don't suddenly get surprised by, by an algorithmically generated advert. So here's the, the kazoo and sleigh bell pause.

• 29:44Speaker 04

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• 29:47Speaker 04

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• 30:14Speaker 05

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• 31:13Speaker 01

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• 31:46Speaker 06

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• 32:22Speaker 01

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• 34:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Sounds like a depressed seal who swatted a chandelier, begging for euthanasia.

• 34:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. This is a listener-funded podcast. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. Listener-funded donations are what pay for my office rent. They're what pay for the equipment. It's what pays for me to have the time and space to show up each week with a new podcast and to actually

• 35:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  do this as my job. Thank you so much to everyone who's a patron of this podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. But if you can't afford that, for whatever reason, don't worry about it. You can listen for free. You listen to the podcast for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast. I get to earn a living. Patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And if you're a new Patreon subscriber, first off, don't sign up as a free subscriber. There's no point doing that. You're just giving Patreon your data. So if you are becoming

• 35:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  a patron, please only do so if you're actually donating some money. Otherwise, there's no point. The free subscriber option exists, but the only way that I can get rid of that free subscriber option is if I have paid tiers. And I'm trying to avoid doing that.

• 36:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  I want it to be suggested donation and I want, I want everybody to get the exact same experience, whether they're a patron or not. And if you do, if you are signing up to the Patreon, do it on a browser or a browser on your mobile phone. Don't use the Patreon app on iPhone because Apple will take 30% of your money, which is a very shitty thing that Apple have done to independent creators. Also, being listener funded means that I'm not beholden to advertisers. No advertiser comes along, tells me what to speak about or influences the content

• 36:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  in any way. Upcoming gigs, only two really. I'm trying to chill out. I'm trying to chill out a bit. Only two gigs coming up in September. The 19th of September, I'm in the Millennium Theatre in Derry. All right. Come along to that on the 19th of September. And then the 23rd of September, wonderful, fantastic, Vicar Street. I'm in Vicar Street. If you like this, if you like the crack that's going on here with Frankie, come along to a live podcast. It's like going to the theatre or the cinema. You don't have to get shitfaced. It's not, it's not a night out. You can come along to my live podcast and you'll be home in bed, ready for work the next day. Okay, back to my chat

• 37:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  with the wonderful Frankie Boyle. Like I said, this is, this is a long podcast this week. You can listen to it in one go, or you can listen to it in parts throughout the week. It's up to you. That's the joy of podcasts. Well, we were talking about Cocktoe Twins backstage. And any Cocktoe Twins fans? Okay, good. Is Grangemouth as depressing as they say it is? I need to go there.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. There's not a lot there. And now there's going to be less there because the whole oil thing has fucked off. Because the guy who owned the oil thing has bought Man U.

• 38:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  The oil is going from Grangemouth.

• 38:09Speaker 03

  Well, the refinery, yeah. Because the guy, Jim Ratcliffe, has bought Manchester United.

• 38:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  I didn't know that. Because we were chatting backstage, right? I was bringing up the point that, like, I fucking adore Limmy, right? And we had Limmy here as a guest. And what breaks my fucking heart and something I never, ever understood is that I can't believe that Limmy's shows were BBC Scotland. And like, what the fuck? Are you telling me this isn't funny in Sunderland? I didn't know that it was exclusively BBC Scotland. And like, what the fuck is going on there? Like, what do people from London think a Scottish person is?

• 38:52Speaker 03

  I think it partly comes from Scotland as well, doesn't it? Because Scotland doesn't really have enough of a culture. Limmy wrote a sitcom after he did those shows, didn't he? He wrote a Falkenhove sitcom and took it to BBC Scotland and they went, no thanks.

• 39:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck off, did they?

• 39:04Speaker 03

  And we're the fucking audience and we would like to see it, you know? Because we pay the fucking licence fee. But you don't, you don't get that here because like, our middle classes are incredibly Philistine. It's not like English middle classes where, you know, people are very kind of literate, francophile. Like, in Scotland, it's almost an asset in the middle classes to be a Philistine because it's really about social reproduction. You go to St Alshes, you go to fucking whatever, and you learn to be an accountant and you go and work in an accountancy firm and you then open your own accountancy firm. And that's kind of what it's about. It's about replacing the professional classes. And they have no fucking interest in culture.

• 39:49Speaker 03

  And the problem is, a lot of them end up working in culture.

• 39:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was trying to, I was on stage in Edinburgh last night with Michael Peterson, who's the Macar of Edinburgh, which is like the poet Laris. And I'm gonna sound something, I'm gonna say something now that sounds like the biggest lie you've ever heard in your fucking life, but this, this really, really happened to me. So.

• 40:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  I accidentally found myself at Harry Styles' 21st birthday party. Oh, you think that's... Oh, no, no, no. And then, at Harry Styles' 21st birthday party, I ended up drinking pints with the Glasgow mafia. And they told me that Burns' night was only for Protestants.

• 40:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, I know that sounds fucking nuts. I'm gonna... I'll contextualize it for you. I'm not lying. I was working in Soho Theatre. I was in... You know the Groucho Club? Groucho Club...

• 40:48Speaker 03

  I'm not a regular.

• 40:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a fucking showbiz club, right? So I had access to... This was like 2014. So because I was working in Soho Theatre doing a show, I got access to the Groucho Club, which is fucking famous people. So I go into the Groucho Club, right? And then it's in the middle of Harry Styles' fucking birthday party. I'm like, what the fuck? I'd never seen someone so famous in my life. It was terrifying. He was at the height of his One Direction fame. And he was even his own birthday party with his own friends. He looked like an atom. He was walking... I swear to fuck, there was a nucleus of people just facing him. It was terrifying. So I was looking at this going, what the fuck am I doing here? And then I'm at the bar, and I had my hood up.

• 41:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And this person said, "Stop wearing your hood", and then pointed at an old man in the corner. And then they heard my Irish accent and invited me for a drink. And they were Glasgow, but like hard Glasgow people. An old man, kind of an oldish woman, and a younger son. And I was having chats with them. They were fine. They liked me because I was Irish. And then one of the bartenders, this could have been a lie, and the bartender says, "Excuse me, sir, are you aware you're drinking with the Glasgow mafia?" Now, that's all I know. And then...

• 42:03Speaker 03

  Did we find out why they were at Harry Styles' birthday party?

• 42:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  No!

• 42:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, no. And then they said, they said to me, they were going, Robert Burns is only for proddies. And that's what they said, Robert, and it stuck in my head from the night, that's it. And then I brought it up on stage with Michael Peterson last night, and he disagreed with that. And then I was asking you backstage, is Robert, is it just for proddies, or is it for everyone?

• 42:27Speaker 03

  Very, very slightly more for proddies.

• 42:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 42:30Speaker 03

  You know what I mean? Like, if you're a Catholic, you'd be much more likely to celebrate St Patrick's Day than you would Burns Night.

• 42:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 03

  But it's not an exclusively Protestant thing.

• 42:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is it because of the Ulster Scots thing? Is that it? Is it the Scots language and how they like that over there in an Ulster?

• 42:44Speaker 03

  Well, you get that in Northern Ireland, where they have, they have like pictures of burns.

• 42:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Speaker 03

  In Belfast, because they, I don't think he even visited.

• 42:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's the legitimization of the dialect.

• 42:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, to say, we were also a kind of like indigenous people.

• 43:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, so like, you don't consider the fetishization of Robert Burns to be evidence of Scottish culture?

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Well, it's not, it's not enough of a culture. Like, if you look at like, you know how we always go, oh, there's nowhere left to explore in the world anymore? Must have been great in the fucking 18th century or 17th century, when there were new kind of, like, there are in Scotland. Like, what's it like to be a teenager in fucking Gruuk? We have no idea. What is it like to be a mother in Fife? Nobody knows. There is, there's no kind of cultural examination of 99% of the country.

• 43:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can you, can you contextualize the Scottish mind in a colonial sense?

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Scotland was a henchman.

• 43:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 03

  For the British Empire.

• 43:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  And when the Czechs dried up, we went, oh, we were sort of a bit like Ireland. You know, because, because the fucking money wasn't coming in anymore. But at the same time, lots of people here did suffer the type of oppression because they lived under capitalism. So they didn't get any of the money. So like, you know, I grew up in Glasgow and I got nice streets to walk down, but, you know, we were fucking poor, you know? So it's difficult for people in Scotland sometimes to see their role within colonialism. You know, we were taught about in school, the tobacco lords, you know, oh, they just traded tobacco. What was on the other part of that journey? Slaves.

• 44:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like Walter Raleigh, like, he was a fucking prick. Like no real one, like he was nasty bit of work Walter Riley. So I'll speak to with the English people who come from Irish people and they'll speak about this, this struggle of figuring out what am I? What was it like, cause you're fucking Irish, Irish. Like what was that like here in Glasgow, was that grand?

• 44:59Speaker 03

  No, you would just always think of yourself as Scottish, even though your parents like largely spoke Irish.

• 45:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like your parents were Gaelic, weren't they?

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, and like we would go there for about seven weeks of the year. And there's just kind of Donegal, so there's just sort of nothing. So all the, all the counties in Ireland, I don't know if you know this, but the counties all have a wee kind of catchphrase. So it's like tip the premier county and all that stuff. And Donegal's one is Donegal, the forgotten county.

• 45:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck me.

• 45:36Speaker 03

  And they had transport links, they had like a train system in the 1920s and stuff, but all just gradually died off. And then it's just become this kind of, almost like you, you described Chernobyl, you know? Where it's just kind of overgrown.

• 45:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's the thing with the trains is like, when, when the South got independence from Britain, like we got rid of loads of British shit, we got rid of the statues, changed the names of the streets. But then we went too far and they turned against trains. Yeah, so the one good thing the fucking Brits did, well, no, they, they gave us the three pin plug. And the other thing was a fantastic railway system because the reason Ireland had amazing railways was so that they could distribute troops anywhere in Ireland, whatever they wanted. And then fucking Eamon De Valera goes, fuck that, we don't need these fancy railways anymore. And then poor old Donegal.

• 46:30Speaker 03

  And also the south of Ireland just didn't really care, like the post civil war.

• 46:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, no, no, no.

• 46:36Speaker 03

  Post civil war, they just couldn't care less.

• 46:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just went.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  It was a bit like, you know the old Billy Connolly joke about them, there's two guys getting stalked by a lion and one starts putting on his trainers and the guy goes, "You'll never outrun that lion" and he says, "Only have to outrun you." That, that's kind of what the south of Ireland did to the north of Ireland.

• 46:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Not fully, like full fucking partitionism, it was, um, fuck off with your bullshit up there in Belfast, that was, that was, don't be, don't be bringing the Brits down here. That was, that was the attitude, even though some people like to say that it was different, but we have a problem with partitionism in Ireland, we have, and I grew up with myself just, free state privilege, I call it, like even years and years and years ago, there's a song called Up the Ra, you know, and what it was based on was, when I was growing up in Limerick, lads would just write IRA on walls, but it wasn't anyone in the IRA, it was someone's brother.

• 47:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what, they'd just write IRA on the wa- IRA and then Tupac beside it and maybe Bob Marley. Seriously! But like up in fucking Belfast, you can't write IRA on the wall unless you're in the fucking IRA. Do you know what I mean? And all these different things that I had no awareness of because I grew around the safety of that. Donegal's different though because it's right beside the border.

• 48:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, people like to hide stuff there.

• 48:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a very hidey country. I'm gonna consult my questions. Doesn't look very professional, does it? I'm supposed to have a fucking clipboard. These are shit questions, man. Roll me the ball. Let's see, um...

• 48:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you feel about satire? I don't even know why I wrote that down.

• 48:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why did I write like? It probably meant something different. What I mean, okay, this is what I want to get at, is...

• 48:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  The fucking problem of doing satire now, when... Like, I think, I think that the biggest cultural influence, especially in American politics, has been wrestling. The idea of K-Fabe. Seriously. If you look at... Like, it's very... Trump is a fascist, right? Like, he's a fascist and what you're seeing is a fascist regime. But the thing is, we think of fascism as, "Oh, Mussolini and Hitler and Franco, I know what a fascist looks like." These fascists don't like to laugh, they're very serious. But America does the fascism, such as getting people and putting them in chains and putting them to El Salvador, which is fascist.

• 49:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then the official White House account would post a video of it and be like, "ASMR." But they're joking! And now, it's like, how do I call this fascism? Because the people who are fascists are joking about themselves and I don't know what this is. And... Like, how do you do satire anymore?

• 49:41Speaker 03

  He never laughs, though, Trump. You ever heard Trump laugh?

• 49:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Never.

• 49:45Speaker 03

  I think he's at heart a very humiliated person, but also a bit of a troll. Yes, unfortunately incredibly funny.

• 49:54Speaker 03

  How did that assassin miss his giant head?

• 49:59Speaker 03

  It's like the one guy in America who couldn't fucking make that shot. The guy's fucking head glows, he wears a red hat on top of it, and stands in front of a flag so you can gauge wind direction.

• 50:23Speaker 03

  I think satire is a bit like, the problem with satire is, it's kind of moralistic at heart. Do you know what I mean? And maybe we're just at too late a point in history for that. So satire tends to go, these people are behaving badly in those roles. Whereas actually, it's that those roles, those institutions and that structure doesn't work. Do you know what I mean? So it's very hard from a satirical point of view to go, we should end capitalism, which is probably what needs to happen, you know? It's much easier to go, well Boris Johnson's a bit of a fucking asshole.

• 50:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a tough one. I mean, what we're seeing right now, we'll say, let's just take Los Angeles right now. And like this morning, there was an Australian journalist shot into the leg with a rubber bullet on camera. And that's, I did a podcast on it years ago, it's, that's deliberate. It's called the Miami method of policing. It was invented by a cunt from Dublin in the 2000s who became, he was a policeman in Miami. Went to the chief of police, he's from Dublin. And they invented this way of policing. And one facet of it is the media become a target.

• 51:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  So she was shot deliberately as a way to intimidate the public. And you can't have satire when that exists. What do you satireise? You know what I mean? It's very tough.

• 51:56Speaker 03

  Well, I think you can have it if it's done very well. But it's, the problem is that you can kind of get drawn into simply churning out their message. Do you know what I mean? They want people to see that. They want people to hear about that. And if it ends up in your monologue, you then become part of that process, you know?

• 52:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  You need the, maybe the people in power to be deliberately trying to hide something. Like if you go to, what do they always use as a classic example of fucking satire? Jonathan Swift's Modest Proposal, which is, the famine is happening in Ireland. The liberal elite of England are pretending it's not happening.

• 52:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then Jonathan Swift goes, why don't we just eat the children? Why don't we just get the children of the poor and then feed them to poor people? And then the problem is solved. And you, you need to have that kind of ignorance from the upper class to be hiding something in order for it to work. But you don't have it anymore now. You have, Trump's people are just going, how are you getting on? I'm, I'm a prick, I am. I'm a fucking prick. Pete Hegseth, he's got Nazi tattoos, you know?

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Well, you, that's the, at the heart of satire is you're pointing out hypocrisy quite often. And if you point out hypocrisy about these people, they're like, that's one of my better qualities.

• 53:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're a nerd about rap music. Like you, I've seen you share rap tunes and I'm like, how the fuck does he know this? You're really, really into your fucking rap. That, that has to be something you developed as a kid.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Eh, no, I kind of got into it maybe like 20 or something like that.

• 53:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Really?

• 53:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. Um, but also as well, you know, you never know as much as people who really know about stuff. So I'm kind of like that about comic books. Like I was a com- I thought I was a comic book nerd and then you meet someone who really knows about comics. And it's the same at rap. So I went on like Ramesh Ranganathan's show and I was like, fucking hell, I have no idea what you're talking about, Ramesh. Like he's so knowledgeable.

• 54:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And was there anything about rap that informed your process as a, like, when you started off, you used to be very confrontational, very controversial. And then I won't say you softened, you changed a bit over the years. What was the thinking behind that? Like what, what I always, when I was looking at you and you were being mad offensive, what I, what, what, what, what I used to say was,

• 54:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're holding a mirror up all the time to how offensive we say tabloids are. Any joke that you said that was really shocking, there was nothing, the papers were doing the same shit just in a completely different context, like really disgusting, but we never called that. And I always felt, no, no, no, there's a mirror being held up here. This is a tabloid thing. That's the vibe that I got, but like.

• 54:58Speaker 03

  It was always interesting to me, the idea that like newspapers, which is where most kind of offence journalism type stuff comes from, like they were sort of moral arbiters of what should go on in culture. And you're like, have you ever met a fucking journalist? And the idea that they should be the moral judges of anything, you're literally going through a stranger's fucking bins on cocaine, you know? And also even the idea that they're genuinely offended by anything. Do you think a journalist genuinely saw two teenagers who went to a student Halloween party dressed as the Twin Towers and went, oh my God, I'm so offended.

• 55:39Speaker 03

  I must put this, and they just didn't, they, you know, but they realised it was a type of currency, you know? I did a joke one time and it was about, do you remember the speaking clock? It's this old thing you'd phone up the clock for the time and the guy would go, on the third stroke, it will be 10:30, right? So I did some joke, he died and I mean, the guy who did the speaking clock died, hopefully it was after a couple of small strokes, right?

• 56:05Speaker 03

  I got, I got then an email from a journalist at the Telegraph who went, well, Mr. So-and-so actually did die after three small strokes. And I'm gonna tell, I'm gonna phone up his family and tell them about your joke.

• 56:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh my God.

• 56:22Speaker 03

  Is there anything you would like to add? I'm like, no, don't phone them.

• 56:29Speaker 03

  They weren't at the show.

• 56:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  That is unbelievable. So you would have said this, was this pre people recording shit?

• 56:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  This joke was just gonna disappear into the ether?

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then a journalist decided, I'm gonna start some shit because I'm so moral.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  They like to tell the joke because then they get to second hand tell the joke without the artistic risk. Do you know what I mean? They go, oh, and isn't it terrible that he said that's quite a funny thing, you know?

• 57:03Speaker 03

  It's like, you know, a judge at a flasher trial going, "And apparently he showed you one of these."

• 57:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you think the red tops have gotten any better? Like, I mean, the, the, like, there was a particular low point. I, like, I always remember the countdown to Charlotte Church turning 18, just being, "Oh, my fucking god." And how that was culture, that was. That was normal culture. That was like, people went, "Okay, is that what we're doing now?" Like, that was horrendous. Uh, Piers Morgan, listening to people's phones. Like, some fucking bad shit went down. And what makes it worse is like, "Oh, it's actually funded by billionaires." Right, okay. Like, all of these fucking red tops, it's, it's money at the top, you know what I mean? Do you think they've gotten any better?

• 57:56Speaker 03

  No, but, I mean, they get less readers now.

• 57:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  They do, yeah.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  You know, but their websites are still hu- they're still really hugely influential, you know? So, I don't think, I don't think it's gonna, you know... I, I just think, I just think ultimately they're, they're owned by the wrong people. And what you needed in Levison was something about media plurality. You needed them to go, "People can only own 10% of a newspaper," or whatever. And they had a chance to do that, and they, they fumbled it.

• 58:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, that's a good point.

• 58:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, because now you've got, over in America, Jeff Bezos is after buying the Washington Post. And just came straight in and said, "From now on, we only speak about free market capitalism in a positive way." And any- he did. "And anything that contradicts this, just find a new job."

• 58:47Speaker 03

  Do you think they all go up to space because they know we want to see them die?

• 58:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've thought about that a lot, actually, with the... Do you remember your man, Salt Bay?

• 58:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, something that I always thought about. So, if you look at Salt Bay, he's after closing his restaurant in Hollywood now, so it's on the way out. But at peak Salt Bay, which would have been about 2022, it's very, very, very wealthy people because it's expensive food. But if you look at the full Salt Bay ritual, it's not just the salt. He puts the salt on the steak, then gets an incredibly 12-inch-long, sharp steak knife, gets the steak, and the first bit of steak is put into the rich person's mouth on the end of this fucking knife. I think it's rich people. They're playing with the idea of the guillotine. Their neck... I'm serious. It's some billionaire.

• 59:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can look at his Adam's apple, and then Salt Bay just has a fucking knife to his neck. And I think that that is the... Because...

• 59:56Speaker 03

  We just need to radicalize Salt Bay.

• 1:00:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't think that's gonna happen. He seems like a silly man.

• 1:00:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  Bizarrely, he speaks English with a Limerick accent.

• 1:00:09Speaker 03

  That's very strange. He says avocado.

• 1:00:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Avocado.

• 1:00:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, it's...

• 1:00:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  I can't get... Apparently, fucking, I think it was Lennon spoke with a Limerick accent as well, like Vladimir Lennon. He had a teacher from Limerick.

• 1:00:29Speaker 03

  I wonder if Bezos is going up, and it's like the rocket is a penis with which he's trying to fuck the universe, and he is the ejaculate?

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  And he went up with his brother, who also looks like ejaculate. Do you remember that?

• 1:00:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you see the clip of him coming down, and William Shatner is trying to have a profound moment of having just been in space, and then Bezos is like, "Fuck this, where's the champagne?"

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Elon Musk doesn't even go up in the fucking thing. Did he get that guy up there?

• 1:01:00Speaker 03

  He's a fucking terrible person, even by South African standards.

• 1:01:11Speaker 03

  I hope they keep going up, because it seems real dangerous.

• 1:01:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  You've never found yourself in the presence of any of these people, have you?

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  It'll be fucking funny if I do, I'll tell you that. Not got that long left, I think I'll, yeah, just strap a huge fucking nail bomb to myself. Hopefully it'll hopefully be a Halloween party, so I can go as like a snail or something. So I can just have like a shell that's almost entirely plastic explosives. Just drag myself into the fun. Even if it's not a Halloween party, just say, this is his thing. He likes to dress as a snail. Don't mention it.

• 1:01:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  An entire new comedy act, where Frankie Frankie is now a giant snail, like a Teletubby, and no one questions it, and this is the master plan.

• 1:01:59Speaker 03

  Well, I might have to do maybe six months as the snail, just doing gigs. Then I get booked for the fucking Bezosmas corporate. Save the world.

• 1:02:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Maybe that's what Russell Brand is doing. You, you performed in a Beckett play.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  I did. I was in Endgame. I was Ham, which was a much bigger role than I'd been expecting. And it was really, really incredibly difficult, but it was great.

• 1:02:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Forty nights?

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, we did like forty-four shows.

• 1:02:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yourself and Robbie Sheehan.

• 1:02:33Speaker 03

  Myself and crazy Robbie Sheehan.

• 1:02:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  He's a lovely man.

• 1:02:37Speaker 03

  He's a, but how is he Irish? He's so fucking handsome. I was in a pub with him in Cork, and it was just like Irish person, so it was just like gargoyle, potato. And then this like fucking caravaggio.

• 1:02:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know. There's a bang of a talk about him. What was that like? I mean, what I'd love to know, right, is that's, that's a difficult fucking play. It's not a play that's...

• 1:03:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I wouldn't call it enjoyable for the average audience. Did you get any fucking Frankie Boyle fans showing up and going, I'm gonna sit here and watch Frankie doing a Beckett play for a couple of hours?

• 1:03:20Speaker 03

  No, but what we did get was I did an Irish accent because my parents are Irish. I was able to pick a very specific kind of Dublin, like colonial West Brit kind of accent. I managed to get it, you know, just down pat. So people turned up and thought that I was an Irish actor and then later found out it was me.

• 1:03:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's amazing.

• 1:03:43Speaker 03

  What the fuck were you doing?

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  Cause they just thought, oh, that weirdly looks like him, you know?

• 1:03:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a great compliment though. That's wonderful.

• 1:03:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was a great compliment. But then causing the play, I don't know if you know the play, but Ham is in a chair. So he doesn't have to move and he wears goggles. We had blackout goggles. And so it really, you don't have to be that great an actor. It's almost like a radio play and we got great reviews for this thing. And I kind of feel like now go, oh, I did a play and people liked it and I'll never do it again. Cause I kind of feel I got away with something there.

• 1:04:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking hell.

• 1:04:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is there, what? Cause you're big into your fucking art as well. Like you're into philosophy, science fiction. Do you, did you bring any of that to your stand up? I'm trying to make the stand up a bit wanky.

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  I, um, I do sometimes like in smaller shows, do more stuff like that. Um, but then there's something about it, isn't there? Getting a show together to go and do, it's got to work in Hull on a Friday night. That kind of brings it down a bit, but also tightens it up a bit as well. Do you know what I mean? Um, but yeah, maybe moving forward, if I did live stuff again, I would just do wee small rooms and, um, try and do some more interesting stuff.

• 1:05:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  And with all the, the shit you're interested in, have you ever gone to TV stations and been like, I want to make a documentary about this. I want to make a show about this and they've just went fuck off?

• 1:05:25Speaker 03

  Oh, constantly.

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  Constant rhythm.

• 1:05:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like what, what are you like?

• 1:05:30Speaker 03

  I mean, there's no kind of like, um, there's no sort of logic to it. So we did that one about, um, the monarchy.

• 1:05:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:38Speaker 03

  Um, farewell to the monarchy and that went really well. And it, you know, it did, it did well ratings wise and stuff. And then afterwards we went, the election's coming up, why don't we do, um, the worst prime ministers? The 10 most prime ministers or whatever. Be really, you know, really easy. We'll get some good talking heads, blah, blah, blah. And they just went, yeah, we're not interested. And it just, there seems to be no logic to what people are and aren't interested in. But at the same time, you know, I've got plenty of other stuff in my life.

• 1:06:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you wouldn't want to make, like, I don't know, a fucking comic book docu- you, you released your own comic book, didn't you?

• 1:06:13Speaker 03

  We did, we did, um, we pitched a comic book documentary just before, um, the third Batman film came out. Like, it's a massive film, the Christopher Nolan film. And then the BBC said it's too niche. And you're like, it's fucking Batman.

• 1:06:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Silly fucking.

• 1:06:30Speaker 03

  Like, you know, but you can't really get past the fact that, you know, the people commissioning it don't read Batman comics.

• 1:06:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm. But they got that wrong anyway. Jesus Christ. Imagine saying to someone now, there's not enough Marvel around.

• 1:06:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  What do you think of that, by the way? What do you think of what's happened to film in general, just because of the size of these franchises?

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  I think it's bad. I mean, I just, I just think like the first Avengers movie was good, but then it was too successful. So then they started looking at all the other ones. You know what I mean?

• 1:07:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, are you able to enjoy them? Can you, can you turn on some, some Marvel stuff and go, I'll have a bit of this?

• 1:07:08Speaker 03

  No, absolutely not anymore. Like, I watched them all with the kids and stuff, but, um, I really loved comics. Now, I loved, like, a lot of that Marvel stuff comes from the ultimate iteration of the Marvel Universe. Um, and I loved all that stuff. But then by the time it hits the screen, it's been through so many hands.

• 1:07:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  And it's, you're just like, well, there's only two ways this story can go, you know? And, and now it's just like, you know, you see like the, the trailers for the new Fantastic Four and it looks like kind of, um, AI Wes Anderson.

• 1:07:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:37Speaker 03

  You know, and you sort of think, well, there's sort of no way that anyone's ever going to be allowed enough freedom to make this good, you know, because ultimately at the heart of things being good, someone got to take creative risks. And if it's money people involved, they're going to minimize risk.

• 1:07:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what really pisses me off is like films like The Joker. And the reason it pisses me off is here's someone trying to make a non superhero film, a story about male loneliness, but they have to fucking do it inside the Marvel Universe. And it's just insane. Like it's, it's Taxi Driver, basically. Even the new Penguin thing with Colin Farrell.

• 1:08:20Speaker 03

  Why is he the Penguin?

• 1:08:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Huh?

• 1:08:22Speaker 03

  Like it's, it's like an Italian mob story and he's called Cobblepot.

• 1:08:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know.

• 1:08:29Speaker 03

  They tried to do The Sopranos. Don't make him the fucking Penguin then. Why is he the Penguin?

• 1:08:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because they need to have everything.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  He doesn't look like the Penguin.

• 1:08:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  He doesn't look anything Penguin-y. It just doesn't make sense.

• 1:08:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Even I was watching it.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  They should have called it Not the Penguin.

• 1:08:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're having to make normal films within the Marvel Universe. They're going to be making these films that are gritty realism and then in the background, you just see Batman for two seconds. But that's what they're going to start doing because the only way to get the fucking thing commissioned.

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  He might have to start appearing in old films so that they stay on streaming. Do you know what I mean? So like fucking Terms of Endearment or something, or Kramer versus Kramer. He cocks Dustin Hoffman.

• 1:09:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you know that the Marvel films as well, they're, they're being edited specifically to go in line with, with the Chinese government propaganda because they're making so much money over there. And there was, oh, I had to big that do that huge big up. Apology to the Chinese and the Chinese language. It wasn't John Cena, the wrestler, was it?

• 1:09:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, that's mad. Did you see that?

• 1:09:45Speaker 03

  Was he apologising for?

• 1:09:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  So John Cena, he was in, he obviously was in a movie. So John Cena is a wrestler. And he'd been in some movie that did big in China. I think, I think he like got something wrong about Taiwan.

• 1:10:02Speaker 03

  He's, they're quite touchy about that.

• 1:10:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. And he had to give the full apology in the Chinese language. Of because he would just lose so much money. And it was like, oh my fuck, is this real?

• 1:10:16Speaker 03

  At the same time, I'd like to crack China.

• 1:10:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Would you? Des Bishop tried to go, Des Bishop tried it, man.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  That's true, yeah.

• 1:10:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Des Bishop went and, you know Des Bishop, do you?

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  He's like an Irish comedian, he's an American comedian based in Dublin, basically.

• 1:10:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, Des, I always try to explain myself in terms of Des's fame, but I guess not now because no one knows who Des is over here. Because I always, when people ask me at home, why do you wear the fucking bag? Because I'd be about as famous as Des is back home, right? And they say, why do you wear the bag? And I, before I knew I was autistic, I used to say, if Des Bishop got drunk and had a hangover and vomited in the middle of Dublin, it'd be all over the papers. And I'm like, I did that last night and no one knew who the fuck I was. Do you know what I mean? But yeah, Des, he went and learned Chinese and went to fucking China and did the hard graft of Chinese comedy clubs. And he didn't break China, but fair fucking play to him.

• 1:11:16Speaker 03

  It was really strange for him and really strange for China.

• 1:11:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  They've got cities in fucking China, like really, really, like Shenzhen and Chongqing. You'd see him on TikTok. It's like fucking Blade Runner. And we don't know about them over here. It's like they're hiding these giant megalopolises. And it's like, do you think they're as bad as people say they are? Or is that just Western propaganda?

• 1:11:40Speaker 03

  And hail China, you know, there was a.

• 1:11:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  You went hail China?

• 1:11:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, hail China, hail our new Chinese masters. I reckon they're in the market for some documentaries.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  I think there was an interesting thing in a Noam Chomsky book, it was maybe like 20 years ago, and there was a, the introduction says, you know, they commissioned a study of these American five-star generals, and they went, you know, what should we do? It's like a future study, what's the best hope for the future? And they said, the best hope of the future is that China destroys us before we can destroy the world. I kind of agree with them.

• 1:12:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  I agree with them too, because another study that I heard, right? I heard that the only hope that humanity has against climate change is that if China is the world leader.

• 1:12:36Speaker 03

  Well, let's start it here, do you know what I mean?

• 1:12:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the thing is, just around China, imagine if, imagine if you find out me and him are getting money from China, and that's what this is. Imagine finding that out.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  How was the podcast? Yeah, it was good, it was quite a lot in Cantonese.

• 1:12:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Imagine that, that coming out. No, like, so if you look at the news in, like I could say, Israel's fucking horrendous, that's awful, that's happening, they're absolutely fucking disgusting, it's just normal news. America's fucking nuts, horrible, horrible things coming out all the time. And then China, first after, and this is just the past month, because I keep up on Chinese news, and they're after inventing a type of nuclear reactor that doesn't use plutonium. It basically, they have gotten to a point with this nuclear reactor where if they can do this, which is looking like they will, you can have a nuclear power plant where there's no waste.

• 1:13:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  They invented a battery that lasts 80 years, and then they became, they're the closest country to becoming at net zero in the past 10 years, because they just sorted their fucking shit out with solder panels, and that's like the past month. And I checked all the sources on it, I wasn't reading a mad, mad newspaper. Like, I'm starting to kind of think, I'll have a dose of China, please.

• 1:13:59Speaker 03

  China's a bit like, you remember when you play all those old games like Command and Conquer or something where you built your little military base and stuff and your friend was doing one over here online and then you build your wee thing, you'd have a couple of wee guard towers and go, this is going pretty well. And then you'd send like a surveillance flight over his thing and it was like a massive fucking city. That's China.

• 1:14:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But that's, it's cause it's all fucking state controlled as well though. Like, I mean, do you remember during Covid, right? And they'd just like build a hospital in a week. And they'd show you like, there's a hospital. Oh, there's foundations. Seven days later, holy fuck, there's a full hospital. And I think what it is, is they just had state construction companies state this to build a fucking hospital. Not, oh, we want to build a hospital. I know what to do. Let's go to the 10 richest capitalists and get these capitalists to, to bid to take the most public money and turn it privately and build a private fucking hospital. You know what I mean?

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  It's cause it's, it's a command economy. So like, you know, people have said this for years, but if you, if you have a thing in China where they go, oh, we need to cure glaucoma. We've got too many people in the countryside getting cataracts or whatever. We invent a fucking laser, we send a doctor out and we go and fucking do that. Whereas in the West, that's like military research is the only place that gets real funding. So if they invent a laser to cure cataracts, it's something that's supposed to blow up a tank, right? And it happens that it has. That's why we have stuff from the space programme, you know, and fucking digital watches and stuff. They're just kind of offshoots of all this money that gets pumped into R and D for the military.

• 1:15:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like even, do you know autotune that you hear on, on, on songs like fucking Kanye West or T-Pain, that autotune sound? Do you know how autotune was invented? Trying to find oil. Yeah. So there was, in the eighties, they were going, right, we think there's oil underneath this desert. Uh, we don't want to spend money digging. What will we do? So they invented a thing that like would shoot sound waves down into the earth and then the sound waves would come back. And depending on the tune of those sound waves, they would know, oh, I bet you there's oil there. And then from that came fucking autotune. You know what I mean? It's mad.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  Do you ever meet people who smoke so heavily they sound autotune?

• 1:16:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  No one's smoking fags anymore.

• 1:16:24Speaker 03

  A shame, isn't it?

• 1:16:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  It is a bit of a shame. No, but you don't see anymore.

• 1:16:28Speaker 03

  Probably they are in China.

• 1:16:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, I'd say, yeah. Oh, I follow a lot of Chinese TikTokers and they love cigarettes. Do you follow any Chinese TikTok cigarette people? Fuck me, it'll make you want cigarettes. I haven't had a fag in ages. Um, like, do you remember growing up and children used to smoke fags?

• 1:16:45Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  It was just normal. I knew eight-year-olds that were that size because they were smoking their dad's John Player.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  And then you had to smoke- And collect coupons as well, do you know what I mean? You'd get fucking cancer in a toaster.

• 1:17:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, and when we were kids, we used to tell each other that you couldn't get addicted to nicotine, which was lies. But if you did get addicted to cigarettes, you had to smoke major. Did you have major?

• 1:17:10Speaker 03

  I didn't personally, no.

• 1:17:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, I'm gonna ask questions for the audience now. I'm gonna take the house lights up because I'm conscious of Carrefour.

• 1:17:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Can we have the house lights up slightly, please, if you wouldn't mind?

• 1:17:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then, one of you glorious people.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Imagine the lights, go up and they're all Chinese.

• 1:17:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm concerned, we did a very elongated China rant. Now, it is, I'm suspicious, like, is he getting funded? Am I getting funded?

• 1:17:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, does anyone have a question about anything in the whole world?

• 1:17:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  You get about anything, man. I'm, I'm ready to go. Okay, Usher, there's a hand up over there.

• 1:17:57Speaker 03

  Is Usher here?

• 1:17:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah. The 2000s R and B singer Usher has kindly come along.

• 1:18:03Speaker 03

  You know, the Chinese budget for this podcast is so high.

• 1:18:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Usher, strangest hairline in pop. Completely flat.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  Wild, isn't it?

• 1:18:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Pass it along there like a collection of ideas.

• 1:18:25Speaker 03

  That's mine.

• 1:18:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on, yeah, what's the crack, sir?

• 1:18:29Speaker 03

  Right, when's the genocide gonna end and when are we gonna do something about it?

• 1:18:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a fucking...

• 1:18:37Speaker 03

  Well, we're doing something about it, the whole world's against it. I think it's important to remember that people are doing things. I mean, things seem really hopeless, but that is a good thing that they did with the flotilla. You know, people are trying to get aid there.

• 1:18:56Speaker 03

  There are charities that you can give to. Medical Aid Palestine are running out of money, they need money. And I think as well, put pressure on media. Put pressure on media when they misrepresent this fucking genocide. That's what I think today, right? Remember there was like the Freedom Flotilla in 2010?

• 1:19:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  So there was a red... This flotilla is a kind of... A reiteration of something that happened in 2010, where some peace activists tried to land aid in Gaza. Israeli commandos boarded the boat and they killed 10 people.

• 1:19:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:31Speaker 03

  Right? The BBC, when they were reporting on this flotilla today, said this, you know, reminds us of the 2010 flotilla, when 10 people were killed by Israeli commandos and some Israeli soldiers were injured. And you're like, you don't need to mention that people got injured in the commission of a fucking massacre. I mean, how absolutely cucked are you?

• 1:20:03Speaker 03

  But it's important to have hope. I know it's disgusting.

• 1:20:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  They want us to feel hopeless.

• 1:20:07Speaker 03

  They want you to feel hopeless. And there are things you can give to, which is a good thing to do. There are, you know, organisations that are asking for you to put pressure on people. That was part of what the flotilla thing was doing. It was trying to engage interest and get people talking to their representatives. And it doesn't feel like much, but, you know, it's worth doing.

• 1:20:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  And another thing you can do, right? If your favourite fucking influencer or your favourite artist is saying fuck all, be relentless and call them out, like seriously, because what the fuck are they doing? Like, what the fuck, like, you look at, I tell you who I love, fucking Macklemore. Like Macklemore, Jesus Christ, Macklemore came out with that song, Heinz Song, and he was relentless with it, just went straight up here, and here are the facts, free fucking Palestine, a genocide is happening, that's what the song is. He lost so many gigs, Macklemore, because, because he was so mainstream, because we

• 1:21:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  thought he was so uncool, he really made it quite embarrassing for all these people who were comfortably sitting on the fence. There's a load of people comfortably sitting on the fence going, well, I can't talk about this, I don't understand. What don't you understand about dead toddlers? Do you know what I mean? What don't you understand about that? So, keep putting pressure on your, your favourite person who's conveniently saying fuck all? Fuck that.

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  And some of those people who are saying fuck all have reputations for being fearless truth tellers, do you know what I mean?

• 1:21:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know.

• 1:21:40Speaker 03

  Like, you know, this, this is a very clarifying moment in culture for who can sit by and watch a genocide and who can't.

• 1:21:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  A hundred percent, and I do not, lads, we've all seen things, we've all seen things on our phones that we never, ever thought that we were gonna see ever in our entire life, and that's, that's the difference this time, like, if you think, like Vietnam, and there were the photographs of the young girls who were burnt by napalm, and you just have that, and we're getting bombarded by something new every day that I didn't even think was possible, I'm seeing things that, oh man, I thought I knew what hell was. We're getting that on our phones, you go to Sky News or you go to The Guardian, and it's a completely different story, and that's a fucking toughie, isn't it?

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  I think Sky News's coverage has been disgusting, what I've seen.

• 1:22:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  I think the BBC's has been very depressing, and The Guardian's has been probably slightly worse than the BBC. You mentioned earlier that you'd asked Frankie to be in your documentary, and it seems like the two

• 1:22:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  You've known each other for a while, so I was just wondering how you got to know each other, if you have any questions. We were in, um. Remember we were in China?

• 1:22:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, my sub-question was, how are the Mandarin lessons coming along? You, you were just very supportive of us at the start and, and really sound. And then you followed me on Twitter and then I just started talking to you.

• 1:23:07Speaker 03

  And, and we did this thing in 2012, remember, a variety show?

• 1:23:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh shit, you got me on your fucking variety show.

• 1:23:13Speaker 03

  So we like did some, eh, variety show kind of thing. It was like you guys, Rob Delaney.

• 1:23:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, and Tom Stade as well, I believe.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  Tom Stade, um, Catherine Ryan.

• 1:23:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  And we did, it was a really fucking mental variety show. No, it was in London. They had like a kind of robot in the crowd that I did some crowd work on. And basically it was all slightly kind of fucking acid tinged, sort of variety show. Eh, and you, and you guys were on that.

• 1:23:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was great crack. Um, but Frankie's always been sound, eh, especially coming onto RTE Uncredited. They, they still don't know. They still don't know. They still don't know. Um, any other questions?

• 1:23:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Eh, at the back there, Usher.

• 1:23:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  The, the guy who's doing something which is Nazi salute adjacent, yeah. Might wanna, might wanna bend that elbow. Yeah, this gent at the back. Alright, fuck it, Usher, just go nuts, pick wherever you want.

• 1:24:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  You speak about giving everyone a voice and using social media, but what are your thoughts on dead internet theory and the idea of comments you see just being bots put forward by the elites? So that is, that is happening. Um, the dead internet theory, you know that, that basically, like, I'm seeing more and more, like, AI comments, man, full on. Um, it's really a strange, bleak feeling.

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  I, I just don't think dead internet theory is true, though. So I think there are people out there. Just because, like, we're touring, right?

• 1:24:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's the full, I, I only know it in a cursory way. How do you understand?

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  The full theory is that mainly it's, eh, kind of bots, eh, talking to each other.

• 1:24:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 1:24:53Speaker 03

  Um, and promoting each other kind of thing, so that there kind of is no point in posting anything, right? Um, whereas actually we can see from touring, like, and you used to get better data from things like Twitter and you could see how many people. Click your link and then you could look at how many people bought your tickets. So there are, there is actually a point to posting still. Whether that will still be the case as AI develops. And as like the warfare, the cyber warfare side of social media develops. I don't know, but at the moment, I think it is still worth posting.

• 1:25:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, it's still worth posting, but something that I'm seeing and I'm wondering what the impact, the, the intended impact. I go to any news article, right? And I go to the comment section on Instagram and I just see you're a bot, you're a troll, you're paid. You're not a real person and it fills me with a feeling of there's no point. And it, it's, so it's so blatant that it's like, you're not actually trying to convince me. You're not trying to convince me that Putin is a good guy. You're trying to flood me with the sense of this comment section is pointless. So I'm just going to get the fuck away from it, you know? A lot of that stuff is.

• 1:26:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  Our, our attention is, is a resource. Our, our attention is a resource and sometimes they just want to exhaust it. Like something I found really fascinating was. It was Israel, it was about a year ago and Israel were raiding a hospital. And they were claiming that this hospital, it's not really a hospital. It's a secret Hamas control center. So then Israel released a video to prove, see, it's not a hospital. It's a secret Hamas control center. Look at these weapons we found. But the video was the fakest thing you've ever seen. There was edits in it, there was mistakes, the guns didn't look real. And I'm looking at it going, nah.

• 1:26:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mossad and Israel, some of the best funded intelligence in the world. They're not putting out a video with mistakes in it. And then I realized, ah, here's what they're doing. They're putting out a video with mistakes in it to annoy all the people on Twitter who like to point out mistakes. So what they're doing is exhausting the resources of critical thinking. So instead of talking about genocide, everyone's like. Fake fake, there's an edit there, that gun's not real. Look at the serial number of this gun, oh, it's an airsoft rifle, it's not even a real gun. And you have all these really intelligent, smart people, wasting their intellectual resources, arguing about this one deliberately fake video. That's the level of propaganda. It's not even about changing your mind, it's about...

• 1:27:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, what I always take it back to is, did you ever hear of Frank Kitson?

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Frank Kitson, up in the north of Ireland. Frank Kitson is a profoundly evil person who changed the world. He was a British Army officer, and he cut his teeth in Kenya. So, in Kenya, Kenya was trying to get away from the British Empire, it was a British colony. And Kenya wanted a bit of independence. And there was a group in Kenya called the Mau Mau. The Mau Mau were a bit like the Kenyan IRA. And Frank Kitson was in control of the British forces in Kenya. So he was going, right, how do I, how do I stop the Mau Mau? So what he did was, instead of fighting the Mau Mau, he created fake gangs that fought the Mau Mau, to create a sense of confusion.

• 1:28:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  He also sexually tortured Barack Obama's grandfather. Seriously, so Barack, you know about that?

• 1:28:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I've read it.

• 1:28:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Barack Obama's granddad was a Kenyan man. He was, he was in the British Army, he was in World War II, and he became a chef in the British Army. And when Kenya was like, we want some independence Britain, Kitson knew what had happened in Ireland, in particular, people like Tom Barry in Ireland. Tom Barry is a rebel leader in Cork, in Ireland. He had been in the British Army in the nineteen, in about 1919, he was in the British Army, he was in Mesopotamia. And then he's there as a British soldier, and his ma starts sending him parcels from home that are wrapped in local newspapers. And Tom Barry sees, oh my god, look at what the black and tans are doing at home in Cork.

• 1:29:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he comes back to Ireland with everything he learned in the British Army, and then trains an IRA column. So Kitson was terrified of that happening in fucking Kenya. So he starts to pick out who are the highly trained, experienced British soldiers that are also Kenyan. One of them is Barack Obama's fucking granddad. So he had him kidnapped and tortured for no fucking reason, other than you used to be in the British Army and you're also Kenyan. I think it's the reason that when Obama got into the presidency in America, he took Churchill's bust out of the White House. But anyway, Frank Kitson, he does that in Kenya. Then he finds himself in Belfast in the early 1970s.

• 1:30:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what Kitson does is he looks around and he goes, okay, the IRA are gaining traction. What are we gonna do here? He creates a military unit called the Military Reaction Force. And what these were, were plainclothes British soldiers. And their job was just go into any community, Protestant, Catholic, doesn't matter, and just shoot people. Just shoot a woman who's putting up her washing, shoot her into the head. Shoot a child, just shoot whoever the fuck you want. Because this isn't about winning or losing, it's about creating chaos. So Frank Kitson came up with the idea of, ah, that's how you win here.

• 1:30:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Create enough chaos and sectarian division that it justifies the British military presence. So all of a sudden now, it's like, we have to be here, we have to be here. Paddies are killing themselves, look at them, they're nuts. Do you get what I'm saying? So Kitson then went on to train the FBI and the fucking CIA, you know? And you see all that shit now. So if you're thinking of, what are they doing? Is this propaganda? Sometimes it's not propaganda, it's literally just to distract you, just to confuse you. Covid was a fucking brilliant example. Like all of a sudden, you clearly have these vested interests trying to get in, to get everyone to fight about whether or not it's a disease, to fight about a mask, to fight about an injection.

• 1:31:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's not about a narrative, it's about division at all costs, because that can be exploited. How many completely normal, nice people do you know, who were lovely people in 2019, went nuts because of Covid and now they're far right? Do you get me? I mean, that's what's going on.

• 1:31:47Speaker 03

  Kitson's other thing, just one of his...

• 1:31:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're into Kitson as well?

• 1:31:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, his other thing was like their infiltration programmes, the start of that. So the IRA ended up being like pretty thoroughly infiltrated by the end, right? With British agents, which were like people who would have been people from Northern Irish Catholics, who they turned, right? But the main plank of that was they didn't take walk-ins, which was different from every other intelligence agency in the world. Because like if you wanted to infiltrate people, usually you would go, well, we want people coming in here going, hey, I feel I have not got my due from the IRA, I want to become an agent for you, right? And they refused to do that and they just got people that they turned themselves. So the IRA couldn't infiltrate them, right?

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  So they would find someone who was unhappy with his boss and or whatever, or had been slighted in some way, and they would turn them, often turn them in jail, right? So what the IRA should have done was have role-playing classes, you know? If the IRA had taught acting and improv to their agents, they could have pretended to be annoyed at their boss. They could have pretended that so-and-so in the unit was having an affair with someone, got turned supposedly, and then been a triple agent. We were just a couple of really good acting coaches away from a United Ireland.

• 1:33:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you read a book called Chaos about Charles Manson, no?

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:33:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  You fucking love it. Oh, it's brilliant. It's a Rolling Stone journalist in 1997. It was the 20th anniversary of the Manson killings. And this Rolling Stone journalist was given the job of, you know, do a 20-year anniversary of the killings. So he ends up going deep and deep and then leaves the case altogether to write this book that took 20 years to do. And basically, the CIA and FBI, who had been trained by Kitson, it appears that Charles Manson was a CIA asset and the purpose was for it to frame the Black Panthers. That was the whole, and it went wrong.

• 1:34:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the reason that, what they based it on is Manson kept doing shit that he should have gone to jail for, and he didn't, and all of a sudden he got out. And Manson's psychiatrist was also Jack Ruby's psychiatrist.

• 1:34:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a brilliant book, Chaos by Tom O'Neill. Listen, we're after fucking going over Carthia now because of the conspiracy theories being funded by the Chinese government.

• 1:34:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Frankie, thank you so much for coming along.

• 1:34:28Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, man.

• 1:34:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  This was a wonderful night. Glasgow, thank you for coming along.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  Thanks for coming, folks.

• 1:34:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Amazing night. Go out and get your bosses. God bless. Oh, what a wonderful chat with the magnificent Frankie Boyle. Frankie, thank you for coming along. I faded the volume there at the end. I faded the volume. I don't want to cut the crowd cheer, it just feels weird. But also, I don't want to have it loud, so I just faded the volume there, which is something I need to start doing more at the end of live podcasts. I'll catch you next week with a hot take. I don't know what it's gonna be about. Hope you enjoyed that podcast. In the meantime, rub a dog genuflect to a swan and pick a snail up and take him off the road.

• 1:35:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  In Limerick anyway, this week, we've got that mice, that mice summer weather, so the snails are having a wonderful time. But if I do see a snail, I'll take him, I'll put him, just put him into the verge. Don't want to see snails getting hit by cars if they can avoid it. All right, dog bless.

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• 1:38:06Speaker 05

  You