The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
30 years of the internet, Irish rebel songs, gangsta rap Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
16,416 words · 11 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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Present yourself to the hell-bent dentist you henpecked, Kennets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. If you're a brand-new listener, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. If you're a regular listener, a droopy Ona, or a fearless Saoirse, you know the crack. This is the first episode of 2026. A very futuristic-sounding year, if you're an elder millennial like me. It's the type of year you would have dreamed about as a child and imagined, "What am I gonna be doing in 2026? What's life gonna be like in 2026?"
I first used the internet in 1996, 20 years ago.
And in those days, I can't, oh, fuck it. Like, there's no, I'm just an old man. There's no way. I just have to lean into it. Actually, I'm such an old man. I just called nineteen ninety six, twenty years ago, when it's not, it's thirty fucking years ago. Nineteen ninety six was thirty years ago, lads. Like, put it this way. If something is twenty years old, that's considered vintage. If it's beyond twenty years old, that's called antique. Okay? So I'm speaking about something. I'm gonna need to explore some antiquarian themes from my childhood here. So in those days, in nineteen ninety six, when I first used the internet, to use the internet,
it wasn't a thing in your home. You didn't have it in your house. Well, no, so some people did if, if they were a rich kid or if their dad worked with computers, then these people had the internet in their house. I actually remember, probably nineteen ninety five, the summer of nineteen ninety five, I was carrying a, a reva-
I, I, I used to put a, like a cap gun. I, I was carrying a revolver and I used to put it down the front of my pants because I was listening to a lot of Ice-T and had seen the film Boys in the Hood, which I adored. But the summer of nineteen ninety five, I remember first hearing about the internet from my friend Lee, not his real name, who's, who had a computer in his house because his dad fixed computers. I remember standing outside his house with a gun down my pants and him telling me, "We have this thing called the internet." And I said, "What's that?" And he said, "You can look at photographs of people having sex with sheep." I was a child. That took me back a bit. I didn't interrogate it further. Things didn't work out too well for Lee.
He, he, God, I met him in Australia. He got addicted to crystal meth in Australia. He told me that about the internet in nineteen ninety five and kind of walked away going, "Well, why the fuck would I want to go on the internet?" And I didn't think about it again until a year later, in nineteen ninety six. Because in nineteen ninety six, to use the internet, you had to go to a place where the internet was. In Limerick, it was a, a comic book shop called Forbidden Planet. Fucking incredible place. If you shot me into the head and I went to heaven, I'd want to- I've got the giggles this week. If you shot me into the fucking head and I went to heaven, why do I have to have such a violent death? Why can't I just die by natural causes?
And actually, yeah, if I was gonna get a violent death, I might as well get a good one. I'd be blood eagled. Do you know what a blood eagling is?
It's an old Viking method of execution.
I don't know if you wanna hear about a blood eagle, do you? I have to tell you now. Okay, content warning for about the next thirty seconds. I'm gonna describe what a, what a blood eagle is. This is a profoundly violent method of execution. You may not be interested or want to hear this. So fast forward by about thirty seconds. So the Vikings, they had a ritualistic form of killing. This method of execution, I think it was only reserved for, for like royal people. Like if you took over a, a kingdom or a royal clan. So what they'd do is they'd get like a hatchet
and they'd, they'd hack someone down their spine, then rip their spine apart, pull their lungs out so it looked like a set of wings. And then the person would be kinda crucified. And this was a blood eagle. The silhouette of the person dying looked like an eagle because their lungs were used as wings. So if you fast forwarded there, I'm, I'm not speaking about blood eagling anymore. So if I was to die by blood eagling and went to heaven, I don't believe in heaven either. I'm just trying to talk about a comic book shop in Limerick in nineteen ninety six.
There was a comic book shop in Limerick in nineteen ninety six called Forbidden Planet. And I used to go there as a child and some of my happiest fucking memories are going to this place as a child. And to return to that place at that age with that sense of wonder is a vision of heaven for me. Because it's where I would, I could read comic books. I could see Japanese manga. They'd be playing Akira. I could go there and Akira or Ghost in the Shell would be playing in the corner on a TV screen. And I'd just stand there looking at it. And I was a child and the people working in the shop. I'd be there for hours, like, I would be there for hours looking through comic books
or staring at whatever manga or anime was playing on the television and the people working in the shop, I know they'd be like, should we ask him to leave because that, that cartoon that's playing is actually eighteens, there's violence and sex in it. And sometimes the girls working there in particular, they were so lovely. They would fast forward certain bits, especially bits with sex, but they were so, they were just like, this kid is here all the time and he clearly loves all this stuff, just leave him be. We can tell how happy this makes him, but there was still a little duty of care. He was very compassionate and they, they were probably in their early twenties or late teens. They would have been
the cool kids, I suppose. Cause in those days, in those days, if someone was cool, there was no social media. You couldn't perform a personality online. You couldn't go onto Instagram and curate an entire personality for yourself. I mean, that, that's what coolness is now. You can share like your tastes, your interests, how you look, your fashion, where you go and, and you curate this personality and present it as a digital avatar. In those days, a huge signifier of coolness was where you worked. If you got a job in Forbidden
Planet, like the comic book shop, or you got a job in the music shop, that was a difficult job to get. You had to be a cool person. You had to have passion and knowledge about the things that are being sold in the shop, but when customers walked in, they had to get a feeling of, oh, this is kind of intimidating. Everyone who works here is way cooler than me. See, I was a literal child in that shop. So those rules of coolness didn't apply to me. No one in their twenties is going to be competing with, with a child for coolness or, or trying to intimidate a child. So I got quite a lot of generosity, although I do remember one day, one of the most embarrassing moments of my life.
I went into the comic book shop. I, I probably fancied the girls as best as you can fancy. A woman in her twenties when you're a child. I, I felt cool that I was allowed in there and I liked that they, they knew me and that they were nice to me and I would have looked up to them. I had a, a prodigy t-shirt. Right? But they didn't make prodigy t-shirts for children. They only made adult prodigy, prodigy t-shirts. So I was wearing an adult prodigy t-shirt, which probably went down to just above my knees. But my shorts. My shorts were shorter than where my t-shirt ended. And one of the girls in Forbidden Planet.
Thought that I wasn't wearing any underpants. She thought I'd come in with just a t-shirt and my balls out.
And, and she asked me and I was mortified. Cause I suppose in hindsight, it's like, there's a child in here. And there's, there's adult cartoons playing. That's bad enough, but we can't have a nude child.
We can't have a nude child. Cause she just, fair enough. It, it. On reflection afterwards, it's like, it does actually look like I have no trousers on whatsoever. It looks like just t-shirt and legs. And then balls underneath, no pubes. So in those days, cool people, the cool people. You were cool if, if you had a cool job in a cool shop. And this was gate kept. By a really, really, really cool manager. And if you were really, really, really cool. You got the fuck out of Limerick and you had to go to a place in the world where cool things were happening. You had to go to New York or you had to go to London.
You had to physically visit a place where a scene was happening and then absorb the music that you heard, the, the fashion. And you had to bring it home to your hometown. Like even before my time. A, a level of cultural scarcity that I don't even understand. I used to have a, a theatre producer. In the early 2010s, remember the name of David Johnson, I've mentioned him before, he sadly passed. Not the same theatre producer who I mentioned last week, who got a rash on his back from letting a fox sleep on his couch, different person. But he used to tell me about the emergence of the new romantic movement in London in
the late 70s and early 80s. So I'm talking, by George, dead or alive, that's early 80s, very flamboyant, androgynous, lots of makeup, that was the new romantic movement. It was a style of dress and music, half based on 70s Bowie, but anyway, that was, that just started on one street. And my old pal David Johnson, who was around then in the 80s, he'd been in his 20s, he used to tell me, in this one street, I think it was in Covent Garden in London, people just started dressing like this. The cool kids just started wearing makeup and dressing this way and hanging around
a corner. And then if you, you were a teenager too, and you fancied yourself as, fuck it, I wanna be one of them, you had to just show up on Saturday with makeup on and you might be allowed to hang out, or you'd be rejected. And he was one of the ones who, he was allowed to be there. He, full makeup and mad ridiculous clothes. And he, he was in that new romantic scene. And then other people would show up and go, what the fuck is this? Why is, why is there 20 people on this one corner dressed this certain way? And then the media would show up with cameras, taking photographs of these young people wearing makeup. And then tourists would show up and take photographs with the new romantics.
And then they'd all start listening to the same tunes. And then they'd open a nightclub or have a night where they listen to these tunes and they go to this nightclub. The nightclub was called The Blitz, they became known as Blitz Kids. And then, music managers show up and talent managers show up and go, can any of ye sing? And then people get signed to labels. There was a job, the job was called A and R. And A and R people used to work for, for music labels and their job was to go to the cool cities around the world and see, what are the, who were the cool kids? What are they all doing? Can you go in there and find the next massive act? And, and that's what used to happen. And that was a scene and, and you had to be there. And then that scene would go mainstream. And I suppose the moment that went mainstream is...
David Bowie's video 1984, Ashes to Ashes. Bowie by 1984 had stopped being cool and he was older, he'd have been party, we'll say. So he wasn't cool anymore. So he went down to all the new romantics and said, come into my video, come into my music video for Ashes to Ashes and make me cool again. And the reason I can make that assumption is Bowie himself kind of gives that anxiety away on a song on the same album, actually 1980, not not 84, on the album Scary Monsters, one of the greatest albums of all time. Bowie has a song called Teenage Wildlife and one of the lyrics is, "A broken-nosed mogul, are you one of the new wave boys? Same old thing in brand-new drag comes sweeping into view."
And that lyric there, that's Bowie worrying about getting older, worrying about not being cool anymore, not being relevant, being a little bit passive aggressive, going, "Oh, these are the cool kids now? This is what's cool? Doing shit that I was doing 10 years ago? Okay, well, if you can't beat them, join them, bring them on board and get some of that coolness." And Bowie did that his whole career. He was amazing at that. And Madonna, Madonna was great for that. And just as an aside, what I mentioned there about, you know, the early eighties where a scene emerges in a place with people and you have to physically show up, the last vestiges of this that you'll see, and I don't even know if it's still there because the last time I saw this was maybe 10 years ago.
Camden, go to Camden in London, which used to be cool and isn't cool anymore. Go to Camden in London and you will see elderly punks, punks in their sixties. And with all due respect, to me, they appeared to be people in active addiction, alcoholics. And they're sitting down on the side of the road, dressed as punks in their sixties, all the hair, the jackets, everything, and they're holding up signs and the signs say, Take a photograph with a punk and give me money for beer. And those old punks are harking back to a time in the seventies and the eighties,
when tourists would go to Camden and get a photograph with a punk. Get a photograph with some lad, because his hair is mad. Now you can go onto Google Images and learn how to dress like a punk and get all the punk clothes sent to your house, probably comes from China. The authenticity is gone, the cultural scarcity is gone. But to be cool in the nineties, you had to leave where you lived, go to the place where the cool people were and then return home with trinkets of coolness in the way that you talk, the way that you dress, the music that you listen to. You had cultural capital that you could hoard. And these were the people who got jobs in record shops or comic book shops. And look at a film like High Fidelity from nineteen ninety seven, I think it is.
That's, that's a film about exactly what I'm speaking about. It's about a bunch of hipsters in a record shop, gatekeeping music and deciding who's cool enough and who's not cool enough. And choosing not to share certain records with certain people because they don't think they're cool enough to, to understand this music. And that film is a satire, but that's how things were. So the cool people, they worked in nightclubs, they had proximity to music. They worked in music shops, the comic book shop. And then the beautiful people, like the people who would now be an Instagram influencer. What were they doing in nineteen ninety six? They worked in clothes shops.
Physically attractive people worked in River Island or in Brown Thomas. And it was an unwritten role, but it was clearly a fucking role because you walk into Brown Thomas and it's like, why is everyone here a ride? But I used to, I was going to Forbidden Planet, I'd say from nineteen ninety four to nineteen ninety six, every Saturday for hours as a little child, just being there and feeling spiritually nourished, not feeling like a freak, not feeling left out, discovering art and ideas and different cultures. But nineteen ninety six was the year when, in Forbidden Planet in Limerick.
They got a computer in there. One computer over in the corner with a chair. And for one pound, for one, one Irish pound, you could use the internet for one hour. And in those days, you went on websites and websites were things people told you about in real life. And the people who were going on the internet in nineteen ninety six in Limerick, they were cool kids in their early twenties who'd just come back from America and they were emailing their friends back in America. And that's what the internet was. It was a thing you paid for in a shop for one hour or a half an hour. And it was a very safe space and it was enjoyable.
And it's where I first saw, I didn't, I didn't want to see photographs of people having sex with sheep. I wanted to see what The Prodigy looked like. Photographs of The Prodigy. My favorite band were The Prodigy. And I'd been listening to The Prodigy, wearing big baggy T-shirts that made me look like my dick was hanging out for about three years. I had their music on tape, obsessed with The Prodigy and I didn't know what they looked like. This would have been pre-firestarter. So before that, The Prodigy were relative, not underground, but you wouldn't be seeing their videos on TV. Put it this way, my, my, my neighbors, their grandkids lived in New York and used to come to Limerick for the summertime.
Um, I've spoken about this before. These, these were the kids who showed me Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles before it was in Ireland. When they got a little bit older, one of the kids, Brian, again, who's sadly passed, one of my best friends, he's not with, with me anymore. He gave me Wu-Tang Clan on tape and I'd never heard of Wu-Tang Clan in Ireland. Impossible, why would you? And I gave him The Prodigy on tape because he'd never heard of The Prodigy in America. So the first thing I ever looked up on the internet was photographs of The Prodigy. And it felt a bit shit because I'd elevated The Prodigy to the level of gods. And now I'm just looking at photographs of a fella called Liam, Liam Howlett, who sounds like he could have grown up around the corner from me.
And just as an aside, because there's a million people listening to this podcast now. If anybody knows Liam Howlett, like, I have a lot of listeners in Essex. If anyone from Essex is personally friends with Liam Howlett, give him a shout, please, and tell him I'd love to have him on this podcast. He's a dream guest. My two dream guests for this podcast, Liam Howlett from The Prodigy and Ice T. I have a lot of listeners over in Los Angeles. If anyone knows Ice T, tell him that he's a god to me and I'd love to chat to him. Ice T radicalised me. I used to listen to Ice T.
I'd say I was five or six years of age. I shouldn't have been listening to Ice T. How did I end up listening to Ice T when I was five or six? My older brother was a huge fan of Bob Dylan and he read an article that said Ice T is the Bob Dylan of today. So my brother bought an Ice T tape, didn't like it and just gave it to me because I was listening to The Prodigy. And it was the first ever rap album that I heard. It was Home Invasion, which was fucking political gangster rap. And I used to have it blaring in my front room, motherfucking this and motherfucking that. And my dad came in and heard all the motherfuckings and was a bit concerned because of all the
motherfuckings in the songs. But my dad sat down, listening to it with me and listened to the lyrics. And the lyrics were about, "I'm a black man in America and the police are oppressive and the police murder black people and there's a system here called racism and you have to fight against it." And my dad listened to that and said, "I don't give a fuck about the motherfuckings. This is good stuff for him to be listening to." And that's when my dad first started explaining to me about my granddad in the IRA. And he'd say, he did tell me about The Black and Tans. And he'd go, that, that's, that, that, those police there, they sound like what the black and tans were doing. Cause the black and tans, they, they were a police force by the British, but they'd shoot you. They weren't actual police, they were there to
kill people. Cause my dad used to be listening to the wolf tones. He'd be listening to rebel songs. And then he, my dad would say to me, oh, this iced tea stuff, this, this sounds the same as the wolf tones. It's the same stuff, isn't it? There's no Carson in the wolf tones, but it's the same, it's the same message. So I was allowed to listen to iced tea when I was tiny. And then he'd get his tip and he'd play, come out you black and tans, come out and fight me like a man. And that song, that song is pure gangster rap, political gangster rap. And it's, it tells the, it, it's, it's so fucking Irish. It tells the history of British colonialism. It's intersectional. What I love about come out you black and tans, the song, and this is why my dad used to contrast it to, to
iced tea. It's a song about the Irish struggle, but it doesn't, it's not just about the Irish struggle. It's about systems of oppression all over the world. I was born in a Dublin street where the royal drums do beat and the loving English feet they walked all over us. And every single night when my dad would come home tight, he'd invite the neighbours out with this chorus, come out you black and tans, come out and fight me like a man. Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders. Tell her how the IRA made you run like hell away from the green and lovely lanes of Kilishandra. That song was written by Dominic Behan, Brendan Behan's brother. And just that opening verse,
the storytelling that's going on, you'd, when people sing that song, come out you black and tans, come out and fight me like a man, you'd think that it's addressed at the British. It's not. I was born on a Dublin street where the loyal drums do beat, loyal. And every single night when my dad would come home tight, tight as drunk, he'd invite the neighbours out with this chorus. Who the protagonist is addressing, come out you black and tans to? It's not to the tans. It's to the working class community. It's to his neighbours who went and joined the British Army.
To the Irish people who were loyal, to the Irish people whose minds were colonised by a foreign power. The actual, the, the, the mirror analogue in rap music is, it's actually a song called Black Cop by KRS-One. Which is, it's a song about a policeman who's black who brutalises his own community. In a, in a type of self-loathing, a way to gain approval within the system of whiteness that works against him. It's, it's a tenement street in Dublin. And it's like, ye took the Queen's shilling. Ye're Irish people and ye went and fought for the fucking British and they walked all over ye. So who he's enticing there are other Irish men, his neighbours.
The song is set, I think, probably the 1930s, post War of Independence. And the worst thing that you can call an Irishman back then is a black and tan. Cause he's going, ye went and fought for them, look what they did. Look what they did here. I'm not letting you forget that. But it's also trauma, cause the protagonist, you can tell he was in the rap. He fought against the British in the War of Independence. And now he's coming home drunk every night. He's traumatised from all that. And he's got this bitterness. Come out you black and tans and come and fight me like a man. Show your wife how you won medals down in Flanders. That's World War One.
Because this happened in a, in a lot of, of working class Irish communities. The system was against Irish Catholics. This happened in Limerick too. One of the only good jobs you could get was to become cannon fodder for the fucking British Army. And an Irish person joined the British Army and they sent him off to the front lines. And, and the Irish were hoodwinked. Around the time of the First World War, there was a politician called Redmond. And Redmond was like, Do you know what? If loads of Irish people go and fight for the British in World War One, they might just give us our country back. Which would would never have happened, but that was answering Redmond's call. That was the the excuse that a lot of Irishmen gave when they came home.
They just said, I was answering Redmond's call. I thought if I went to World War One, that it would get us independence. And then their wives were accused of taking the Queen's shilling. Again, another thing, even when I went off, if I work with BBC, someone would go on the internet and go, you're taking the Queen's shilling, which is to take English money to be a traitor. And then the third verse is, come tell us how you slew them old Arabs two by two. That's referring to the Ottoman Empire. That's the roots of fucking Palestine right there. And then it's like the Zulus, they had spears and bows and arrows. How bravely you faced one with your sixteen pounder gun and you frightened them damn natives to their marrow.
So now it's gone from Palestine right down to Africa, where the British were were colonising and committing mass murder, where the Zulus are trying to fight back. But they don't have guns, they've got spears and bows and arrows. And the British are just killing them by the hundreds with Maxim machine guns. Now, that bit there is based on a popular myth, but it's a myth that the Maxim machine gun was the first ever machine gun. It was a British invention. And in the late eighteen hundreds, the British would only use machine guns on non-white people. Now, I don't think that's a hundred percent historically accurate,
but the the lyrics use it to illustrate the point of racism and colonialism. And that song, you hear it being shouted in pubs when people are drunk. But it's like iced tea. You think you're just hearing the motherfuckings, but when you go underneath the surface, it's storytelling and it's it's a deep interrogation of systems of power. And it's in that Irish storytelling tradition of. Hold the fucking British accountable. Hold all of British colonial history in a song, in something that you can keep in your mouth. You don't write it down, you keep this in your mouth and no one can take it away.
And my dad used to, he would contrast and compare that music with what Ice-T was saying, with greater complexity as I got older. And I'm so glad he didn't take my Ice-T tape away just because it had curses in it. And it was the greatest decision my dad ever made. Jesus Christ, I'd have been robbed of so much if he'd have just heard all those motherfuckings and decided to take the tape away. That changed my life. That defined who I am as a person. I still listen to that. I still listen to Home Invasion every fucking week. Like, I can't play songs on this podcast unfortunately because it'll get, it'll get taken down, but there's one song I used to listen to, it's called "The House".
It's actually on a different Ice-T album. I think maybe the tape that my brother had was a taped tape with more than one Ice-T album on it, because I had no cover art. I had no cover art, it just had this tape. I didn't know what Ice-T looked like, I worshipped him. But he has this song, "The House", and the song itself is less than a minute long.
But I'll read out the lyrics, Fee. And I won't read this out as a rap, I'll read it as Irish prose. "You know that house down the street where the kids are? And every day they seem to have a new scar. Something strange is going on and everybody knows.
The doors are always shut and the windows are always closed. The little girl, she had a barn and the boy was black and blue. They said it came from play, but you know that's not true. The boy's arms broke, the girl is scared to speak. And their parents drink all day, a couple of dead beats. And some days they go to school and other days they might, because it's hard to stay awake after you cry all night. You see them every day with the tear tracks on their cheeks, but they'll never tell. It goes on weeks and weeks.
But what can they do? They're only children, man. You're not a fucking kid, act like you give a damn. Won't somebody save these kids? Do something? Call a cop?" The other night I heard gunshots.
I think, I think that was the song that made my dad go, no, this is good stuff.
Like, just that is a short story. It's,
it's, it's about, it's about a house where, where kids are undergoing physical abuse from parents that are suffering addiction and, and severe domestic violence. And then by the end of it, it's like, call the police, call the police, something must be done. And the police show up and they don't help anyone. They shoot the parents in front of the kids because in, in America, under the system of racism, if, if someone is black and they're poor, the system doesn't work for them. The police, the police are a danger. Now, post George Floyd, we all saw this. We see this with social media. The world is aware of this
systemic injustice that happens in American society now. But before social media or the internet, you had to hear about it from Ice T or Ice Cube. And Ice, Ice T had a song called Cop Killer, just something about killing cops. And the US government tried to, they tried to arrest him for treason. And actually, I'll play you a clip rather than me explain it. I'll play you Ice T in nineteen ninety-one on an Australian TV show explaining what the song Cop Killer is about.
Savage, hateful message, isn't it? It's now not relating just to the cop. It's, it's his family as well.
Yes, it's, it's saying that, I know your family's grieving, but what about the families of the youth that have been killed out there? This record is so far-fetched from Australia or New Zealand. It's like, um, you guys are very fortunate. You don't undergo the police brutality the same way we do in America. But where American people are really up, up in arms about this song, which doesn't kill, it's just a song. But the cops are, in, in, America actually kill kids. And the parents cry and scream, and these cops don't go to jail. They're just laid off. You know, there's no cops on death row. And this particular character in this song has said, hey, I know your family's grieving, but so what? You know? It's a, it's a, this is the point where I determine it's time to get even.
Um, and he doesn't say he wants to get up, he just says he wants to get even. This is a very angry song, a song about rage.
Okay, but I understand that, um, you said this in, in one of your US interviews. I've got no trouble with killing brutal cops. True?
They have no trouble with killing what they consider brutal kids. See, my attitude is that just by, because you have a badge, doesn't give you the right to murder me. Once a cop pulls me out of the car and handles me under the law, that's cool. But once he starts beating on me and taking advantage of me, no longer is he in the, in the lines of law. He is now becoming some inhuman person and he's determined, now it's just two men out in the street. And one of us gotta die and it's not gonna be me. You know? It's either you or me, that's what the record says. It's better you than me. If it was me down there and I was Rodney King, I would've tried to kill those police. Because they were trying to kill that man.
Okay, uh, you present it as a black view, and yet, for instance, the new black chief of the LA police asked for this song to be banned. What does that tell you?
He's not black. He's just, uh, he might have black skin, but he's not at the, at the bottom of, uh, the system. When I, when I say black and white, it has nothing to do with skin color. It has to do whether the system works for you or the system works against you. I don't have any love for that particular police chief. He's, uh, what we could say in America, a tom.
Your detractors would say that, that the music is second-rate stuff that wouldn't rate a mention if it didn't have these references to violence. What do you say to them?
My detractors couldn't make a record that would sell ten records. That's like me saying that Rembrandt would have never sold a painting if he didn't paint nudes. You know, that's ridiculous.
So that was Ice-T explaining his, his song on Australian TV in 1991. And one thing I noticed from that interview, he wrongly assumes that police brutality is not a thing in Australia. And my listeners, especially my Aboriginal listeners in Australia, would know this is not the case. There's huge, a huge issue in Australia with Aboriginal people dying in custody. And this has been going on for years. But I reckon someone pointed that out to him because in his 1993 album, he does address Aboriginal Australians in a song called Race War. I've meandered heavily from the initial point that I was trying to make at the start of this podcast.
2026, it represents 30 years of me using the internet. In 1996, I probably would have thought to myself, wow. Wonder what it's going to be like in 2026. I imagine robots and flying cars and all that type of futuristic crack. But what I didn't imagine, and which didn't seem possible, is that this internet thing that I was using there in Forbidden Planet, that it would become this huge source of pain. That 30 years in the future, we'd be imprisoned by this thing. That it would impact our mental health.
That we'd have exported our identities and, and sense of self and self-esteem to a digital online avatar. I think we'll take a little Ocarina pause. I don't have an Ocarina. What I'm gonna do is, I'm gonna hit my coffee cup with a vape. I'm not back on the vape, so I just have one in my possession. So I'm gonna hit a coffee cup with a vape. You're gonna hear some fucking adverts, all right? Oh, very monastic. Quite like that.
No complaints about that now.
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Facing there wasn't that monastic, that was more of a
calling a cat for its dinner. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you distraction, mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly because this is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is how I rent out my office, pay for all my equipment. This is how I have the, the Patreon is how I have the time and space to prepare and write and record a podcast for you each week and to give it my all. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.
And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living and we're not beholden to advertisers. Advertisers cannot tell me what to talk about. They're just, they're not part of the discussion. They can fuck off. They advertise on my terms. This is a listener-funded podcast where my only goal is to pursue whatever I'm curious about. This has worked for eight years solid. I have no intentions of changing this model. I love it. Okay. So let's keep it going. If you're interested in doing that, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast.
And if you're a new patron, don't sign up on the iPhone app because Apple take 30%. They're greedy. Do it on a browser or the browser on your phone. Right, let's, let's plug some, some contractually obligated gig plugging. I'm gonna start with my UK tour.
So this UK tour, England, Scotland and Wales, right? It's, it's not until next October, which is nearly a fucking year away. Loads of ye bought tickets as Christmas presents. All right. So this UK tour, even though it's ages away, is very quickly selling out. Thank you so much for the Queen's shilling. Some of these dates, they're more than 90% sold out. All right. So if you want to come to my live podcast in England, Scotland and Wales in October 2026.
Get your tickets now because they're selling out really quickly. And I won't be able to add extra dates because just the type of venues that I'm booking. They're, they're big venues. So when you book a, a big venue, you have to give it like minimum eight or nine months in advance because these places are booked up. So I won't be able to add any second shows if any of these sell out and they look like they're going to sell out pretty quickly. So starting on the 18th of October, 2026, Brighton, Cardiff, um Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham.
Guildford there is flying out the door. I did not know I had so many listeners in Guildford. Thank you very much because I was unsure where Guildford was. But if you want those tickets, faen.co.uk forward slash the blind by podcast. Irish gigs starting in January, the 23rd of January. I'm in Waterford on the 23rd of January. That's nearly sold out. Nice Kildare on the 31st, up at the Spirit of Kildare Festival. There's actually, that's a small enough gig. So yeah, there's only a few tickets left for that. February, Vicker Street on the, is that the 4th? Very nearly sold out. You're talking 20 tickets left for that.
Belfast on the 12th of February, Galway on the 15th. Killarney, the Aineck on the 28th of February. Then in March, what have I, the 3rd, is it, no, the 14th of March, I'm in Carlo. I, oh, there's only about five tickets left for that. Cork Podcast Festival, March 26. I don't have updated sales for that gig. I've only got ticket sales from like November. So I don't know what the crack is with Cork. But Cork always sells out. And then Castle Blaney there in April. And Limerick in April on the, what is that, the 9th?
Come to Limerick. That one is selling quick because people, when I do a gig in Limerick, people tend to travel and make a little, a little trip of it. You'll get those tickets and links on the blind by podcast.ie, assuming my website is working. Right back to the podcast, which I think, I think this is about. Me using the internet for thirty years and
just imagining in nineteen ninety six, what, what, what the world would be like thirty years from, what the world would be like right now. The early internet that I experienced, it wasn't really anything new. It was the information superhighway, as they called it. You were surfing the web.
It was just, it was books on a screen. It was access to loads and loads of information. It was the reduction of scarcity. It was safe. It was a single player game. It was somewhere you could retreat. And when eventually we started to get the internet in our fucking houses, on the computer in your house, it wasn't that different to opening a book. It was a new way of opening a book. It was somewhere you went to escape, to find out very specific information. The only time I experienced something like radically new was social media, the emergence of social media.
My first experience of social media would have been Bebo. Before social media, you were truly anonymous. You were nothing. You didn't have an identity to defend. When social media came about, now you had a situation where you could feel threatened.
Like Bebo was one, one of the first social media platforms and there you are with a community of people you know in real life with actual photographs of yourself up.
And there was top friends.
And people would get anxiety over, am I not in that person's top 10 friends? And you're being ranked and you're going, oh, I thought I was closer to that person, but I guess not. I'm not in their top 10 friends. And your, your Bebo page had views on it. So if you had a lot of page views, well, that was a numerical representation of how popular you were, how people in your peer group viewed you. So if you had loads of page views, you're a liked person, you're popular. But if you had no page views, it meant you were unpopular. You weren't cool. You didn't have worth. Now, I first joined Bebo 20 years ago, in 2006, 20 years ago.
I was very young. I was trying to make it as a comedian. I was doing prank phone calls and uploading them on Bebo. And you have to realise in 2006, the idea of the internet is a place to have a career. This didn't exist. This did not exist. No one had done it. No one had done it yet. What we knew was, here's this new thing called social media. It's like a year or two old. You can put your content there for free. People can listen to it for free, but there's no way to earn money in any way. And it wasn't, it wasn't taken seriously.
But still, if you were doing anything creative, you could show people and people could respond. And it was the first time that I started to notice all this internet thing here. I have an emotional response to this machine. My identity, my sense of worth feels somehow tied to this new social media thing. Sometimes it feels great, but then other times it feels terrible. It feels awful. 2006 is when I first started to read about psychology, the psychology of Carl Rogers. In particular, Rogers's idea of the, the real self and the ideal self. You have your real self. It's the person who, who you actually are.
Your feelings, your needs, your lived experience. Your real self is the person who experiences joy. My real self when I was a kid was being inside a forbidden planet, enjoying art.
My real self could exist on the early internet where it's just an autistic kid in the world's biggest fucking encyclopedia. But then this new thing called social media comes around and all of a sudden, you're comparing yourself to other people, ranking yourself with other people. Am I popular enough? Do people like other people more than they like me? And that there is Rogers's ideal self. It's the person who you think you should be, continually trying to find happiness in the approval of other people. And that is not... If you do that, you'll find misery, shame, and a consistent feel...
anxiety and a consistent feeling of not being enough. Because self-esteem has to come from within, it can't come from without. And as I was using Bebo in 2006, I started to notice, what's this feeling? This feeling of comparing myself continually to all these other people and wondering if I'm popular enough? And getting... putting work up and getting all these positive comments from strangers and feeling empty and then one negative comment completely fucking destroying me. And this machine, this internet now, it's a source of pain, it's something I have to avoid.
And I remember when Bebo first came about, there was no smartphones. Smartphones didn't exist, so you had to still sit down at your computer, turn it on and check your Bebo page. If someone left a comment on your page, if someone liked your fucking photograph, I can't even remember how it worked. But if someone interacted with you on Bebo, it took a good five minutes to open up your fucking account and check. And if you did check, if you were online beside your photograph, it said that you were online. And back in those days, there was a sense of shame about being online too much. So you had to open it up, check, get the fuck out. Because if you were online all the
time, it meant you had no life. And the reason it meant you had no life was, if you're online all the time, it means you're in your room all the time and you're not out in the real world socialising. Because anyone who's online, they have to be sitting at their computer. So if you were added too much, it was weird and it was a source of shame. So you had to open it up, check, get the fuck out. And that's how Bebo worked. Because we didn't have smartphones. So if you were online all the time, you were an addict. You had no social life. You were seen as a weirdo, a loser. And do you know what people used to joke about in 2006? And I'm serious. People used to say, fucking hell, Bebo's good crack.
But Christ, imagine it was on our phones. Imagine that on your phone, you could check your Bebo account. Wouldn't that be utter and absolute hell? That was the joke we used to... That was, that was an unthinkable reality. We used to... The idea that you have social media in your pocket at all times, and you consistently can check in what comments you're getting, other people's photos. That was an unthinkable hell. And the technology to make it happen didn't exist yet. And I used to think about all this critically. And I used to contrast it with Carl Rogers's theory of the real and ideal self. Because
social media was like a year fucking old. So anyway, I had a lot of followers on the prank phone call page, about 8,000, which in 2006, 8,000 followers.
It'd be like half a million now. Your ma wasn't on social media in 2006. 2006, social media was a small cohort of young people. It hadn't gone mainstream. It started, social media went mainstream 2008, 2009 with Facebook. That's when your ma started to go on Facebook and everyone had social media. Before that, it was new, it was niche, we didn't know the rules, we didn't know what it was, we didn't know what to call it, what to feel about it. It wasn't spoken about or treated about as anything real or serious. It was like a toy, it was seen as a video game. So I had this page with 8,000 followers and one day I decided to post a blog.
Where I, I basically spoke about Rogers's theory of the reading ideal self. And I said, the fact that Bebo has page views on everyone's page and that you can rank, that that human beings can rank themselves against other human beings and see a figure that denotes their popularity. I said, this is gonna have massive mental health impacts and it will eventually lead to suicide. And when I posted that, 8,000 people saw it, which was massive in 2006 and my Bebo page got deleted and my life was over. The little career that I thought I'd built for myself with the prank phone calls, that was gone and I was in bits.
And I actually managed to dig up a radio interview that I did 20 years ago about my Bebo page getting deleted because it was one of the biggest Bebo pages in Ireland in 2006. And there was a DJ down in Cork by the name of KC who was a buddy of mine still. And he used to play Robert Bandit's prank phone calls on his radio station. He was the first person ever to give me any type of established media presence. So when my Bebo page got deleted, I had to go to KC and say, I need to start a new one and I don't know what to do, can you put me on the radio?
So I, I found my, this is my first ever, I think, proper radio interview where it's me. It's me complaining about my Bebo page getting deleted in 2006. This is so old that I wa- I wasn't even called Blind Boy. I was going by the name of Liam Flag, who was a character that I used to do in prank phone calls. Liam Flag.
Ironically, I thi- I think Liam Flag was me knowing that I was autistic when I was like nineteen. It was me as a kid, playing the character of a man in his thirties who was basically autistic. I think it was my unconscious mind knowing what I was gonna turn into. But anyway, I'd like- I'd like to play this interview from 2006, of me on the radio, talking to the DJ KC about my Bebo getting deleted. And- and also, what strikes me with this is, I don't know when to be serious and when to be in character. I don't know what the rules are.
On their Bebo page, Liam Flag from the Bandits on the line. Hello, sir.
How's it going there, uh, Casey?
How are ya?
I'm very good myself now, but uh, you know, I'm a bit, I'm shook with the- the incident with the- with the Bebo page now.
Let's just, uh, tell people, you had how many fans? You had how many, how many groupies on your Bebo page?
We had about, uh, just over eight thousand and that, the page was about, uh, seven months old. We had over eight thousand, uh, fans on the page and- and about a hundred thousand views.
Now, this would make it, uh, the most popular unsigned act, uh, fan site on Bebo, worldwide.
This is correct, this is correct.
Not bad for a couple of messages from Nimerick, isn't it?
Well, yes, I suppose, but uh, the- the- the success of it perpetuated itself, you see, the- the emphasis on the fact that it was unadvertised, you know?
Yeah.
But, um, unfortunately, the page itself was actually deleted, uh, ve- very, very quickly and abruptly. And, uh, the reason for this is because I had written in my blog... Uh, about the horrors of profile views.
Okay.
Now, I'm sure many people who uh use Bebo are aware that when you go onto anyone's page, it shows how many views are on that page.
And it's a bit of a, it's a bit of a, uh, an ego massager if you're up on fifty, sixty, seventy thousand hits. I mean, it's, you know, it looks good for you as a person.
Very much so. And as a result of this, it's turning Bebo into a popularity contest, which is all well and good for the people that have maybe ten thousand hits. But for the people that do not have as many profile views, then it is a, has a very bad effect on their self-esteem.
Now, I stated this in my bog, or my blog, I'm very sorry.
Your blog.
And it was deleted rather abruptly and rather unfairly, I believe.
Does that mean, Liam, that they were monitoring your Bebo page?
Well, yes, they, they, they, they were actually, they were, they were monitoring it. But considering it was the most, um, you see, the thing is because I had so many fans, the, the eight thousand fans.
Right.
As soon as I wrote anything in my blog, eight thousand people would then, uh, got what was in that blog, you see.
So after I wrote that in the blog, I created a separate page, which was an online petition to remove profile views from Bevo, Bebo, because it was having such a negative effect on people's self-esteem. That page was deleted and the rubber bandage page was deleted as a result because what I was saying was dangerous to Bebo.
They know this and that's why they deleted you.
Well, it, it's all I can assume. There was no other, uh, conduct that would have been considered against the rules. It just, it, it disappeared completely when I, uh, emailed Bebo about it and explained my situation, that we had so many page views and whatever. Uh, they just simply said to me that, uh, that they refused to discuss why the page was deleted and it cannot be brought back. And to be honest, the way I feel at the moment is it's as if, uh, fascism has gotten democracy pregnant. It's left me with the child and it's suckling on my breast and there's no milk there.
That's how I feel at the moment.
That's some analogy there Liam.
Fantastic analogy. Uh, since your letter of complaint into the powers that be of Bebo, now where are they, where are they based? It's an American.
They have offices in California and England, I believe.
Well, it was the Californian office I was in contact with.
This thing is huge. I mean, every kid and young adult between the ages, anyone between the ages of thirteen and thirty-five is on Bebo. They're not, not just on it, they're, they're on it three or four times a day. Do you think it's become a dangerous addiction Liam?
Very much so, and this can be evidenced, uh, by the fact, and, and profile views are a part of the addiction because it can be evidenced by the fact that you have people on it who, especially young teenage girls, who take photos of themselves in maybe their underwear or something. And they'll use this as, as a means of getting more profile views. So if you look at what addiction is, uh, considered. If, if, because they are doing something that they would otherwise consider appropriate, but no longer consider appropriate because they want to get these views.
They are therefore addicted and it is then dangerous because their value and self-esteem becomes, uh, is derived from how many profile views they have, which is absurd.
But isn't it essential for, uh, for Bebo as well Liam, to have that profile view thing because that means that there's people probably like myself with huge egos who go on there for ten hours a day and just click profile view, refresh, refresh, refresh. Cause I'm only at twelve at the moment and I need to start getting that back up.
And I'm sure your self-esteem is affected. I'm sure you're crying at sleep.
That's fair to you.
I wouldn't like to feel your pillow. I'd say your pillow is very wet and salty.
It is.
And I, I empathize with you.
I spend a lot of time crying in the shower. It's horrible.
In the shower? Well, it's good because the salt will wipe off. Cause what, what, an unfortunate thing that can happen with tears is that, uh, if you're crying in a hot room, uh, the salt will actually solidify on your face. The tear will evaporate and you're left with salty tracks on your face. Can't be going on like that, you look like a panda or something, you know?
Wrecks the mascara as well.
Scara and salt, just, they're not designed, they're not compatible. Bebo's fault.
Liam, the funny thing about this is after your letter of complaint now, since yesterday, they've made profile views optional. So they've, what they deleted you for, they've now changed.
This is correct. Um, because of the online petition, uh, it, it only survived for about, uh, a day or two before it was, uh, deleted. But it was massively popular and it was very clear from looking at it that a lot of people on Bebo were very annoyed, uh, with what profile views has, has made, uh, has turned Bebo into, which is, uh, profile views have made Bebo quite annoying. Because it, Bebo is a fine service that's there to help people communicate for free and I applaud it for that. But unfortunately, what it's, how it's, it's turned into is a popularity contest where people are more concerned with advertising their own page. And it's very, very annoying. Most people see this and, uh, Bebo has now listened. But, uh, at the expense of, of, of me, cause I now have a new Bebo page that I have to rebuild.
So I only found that recently. I think that might be my first ever radio interview. That's two thousand and six. And I didn't know, I was doing prank phone calls. That was all comedy characters. And I didn't know, how do I balance sincerity? You know, speaking about something that's actually very fucking important to me and then balance that with humour. Copper with the fa- I'm not even blind by yet. I'm, I'm Liam Flag. Didn't even have a name. And Liam Flag was very serious. Liam would talk like this. I used to do prank phone calls for, I, what used to do with Liam Flag?
I used to ring up bin companies arguing for the rights of dogs. Well, I just, I noticed that, wheelie bins became a thing around two thousand and five. And I just noticed that stray dogs, stray dogs were starving. They couldn't, stray dogs couldn't eat out of bins anymore, cause now there was these new fucking wheelie bins. This was about two thousand and five. And I used to get worried about starving dogs. So I used to ring up the bin companies like and record it and say, this is Liam Flag and I'm very serious about this. And I, I think that the bin company should pay for dogs to have special metal mouth mechanisms attached to their mouths so that they can have steel jaws that'd bite into the side of wheelie bins so that they can access the nutritious rubbish inside.
So that's the shit I was doing in two thousand and six. But also, I'm personally, I'm personally responsible. That's my, that was my party piece. I'm personally responsible for uh profile views getting removed from Bebo. That's a fact. And there's your proof there. And something as well I want to raise, just listening back.
Now, this is twenty years ago. I'm a fucking yumfella there. But I did make the point, when I was making the case for what social media addiction was, the example I gave was, I was seeing teenage girls posting photographs of themselves in their bras just to get more likes. And that's, that's a bit misogynistic. That's a bit body shamy. If I had a time machine to go back in time and speak to me twenty years ago, I'd say to myself, that's not a very good example there. That sounds to me like some type of sexual morality. If women want to show their bodies online, that's absolutely none of my fucking business and I have no say in that whatsoever.
So if I had a time machine, I would say that to me twenty years ago. I think I was trying to make a point about uh body image, social comparison.
But what I would have said, if I had a time machine, see here, anytime I start thinking of this, if I had a time machine and went back to me in two thousand and six and go, here, it's me twenty years in the future. I've got some things to say to you about that radio interview tomorrow. I'd just have a panic attack. I'd be like, who the fuck are you? I'm you from the future. What? So I hate using that, that analogy. Yeah, I'd be terr- I'd be terrified. And then I'd try and fuck myself. Or
or at least say, what does your dick look like? Are your pubes gone grey? I, and then future me. Yeah, I'd probably try and freak out younger me. I'd just have to show younger me an iPhone and then I'd just get a heart attack. Or I'd probably, I'd dress up in tinfoil. I, me now, I'd cover my, I'd cover myself in tinfoil and go back 20 years and go, it's me from the future. This is how we dress. But no, seriously, what I would say, I'd just say, ma- make the argument about something you can relate to and shut the fuck up about women uh, wearing bikinis. What the fuck do you know about that? Keep it about your own experiences, you little cunt.
But I think body image and vanity was where I was gearing towards. I was nervous as well. That's the other thing. I'm fucking nervous. It's my first ever give a fuck about radio interviews now, but I was nervous back then. Cause vanity was heavily shamed. In 2006, selfies didn't exist. Selfies did not exist. People, when people uploaded photographs of themselves to Bebo, you couldn't upload a good photograph of yourself. You had to upload like six shit photos that your friends took. If somebody in 2006 got a camera, took a photograph of themself in a mirror and posted that to Bebo,
that was seen as like mentally ill. And I say mirror there because that's what you had to do. There was no front-facing cameras. This did not exist. You had to take a photograph of yourself in your fucking bathroom mirror. That's what people had to do. Most people didn't have digital cameras. They were uploading scans. They were, they were getting photographs, physical photos developed in the fucking chemist and scanning them into Bebo. Sometimes with that sticker on them that the chemist used to put on it saying, this is blurry. This is blurry. You need to use your camera properly. In 2006, taking a photograph of yourself and putting it on the internet, like narcissistic, that, that's what culture was. Look, look at.
Look at people being, look at people on camcorders before social media. If you find old footage of people from the early 2000s or the 90s, people did not want to be on camera. If someone shoved a camera in your face, you shoved your hand up to the lens. People didn't want to hear their own voices. They didn't want to look at themselves. A completely different culture. Like occasionally now on TikTok, like 20 year olds will get their hands on a camera from like 2004 and they'll shoot fake 2004 footage. And they're, they will, they're basically faking, oh, this is all footage of me and my friends in 2004. And it's, it's the camera from 2004 and it's really convincing. And they put effort into dressing like it's 2004.
I can tell you in two seconds if it's fake by how comfortable people are with the lens. Real footage from 2004, nobody wants to be on camera. Everyone is a little bit strange, a little bit weird. And when the camera is pointed at them, they don't know what to say. And what you started to see in 2007 was the emergence of duck face. Duck face was where vanity started to become normalized on social media. Okay. Because people's self-esteem became associated with their online avatar. So people wanted to start looking hot on social media. But you couldn't look like you wanted to look hot. So people would pull duck face.
People would perform a silly face that accentuated their cheekbones where they're looking hot, but it's all a bit of a joke. And even the word vain, vanity, this isn't used anymore. Oh, that person's always posting photographs of themselves online. Like this, this is, this does not exist. Now, that's probably a good thing because it's one less thing to be shamed about. But it is completely and utterly social. It's not only socially acceptable, it is expected to post photographs of yourself looking nice in nice locations, wearing your best clothes, bragging about your life.
This is socially acceptable, normalized behaviour. There's a job now called influencer. In 2006, that person was called a lunatic. I'm, I'm, these are not my opinions. What I'm trying to do is, is. I'm speaking about zeitgeists. I'm, it's trying to capture the cultural feeling of 2006 and contrast it with now. And it's really difficult to do. I was there at the coalface of it. I'm, I'm the man who got profile views deleted from people. All of this was highly stigmatized in 2006 because we did not know what the rules were. You're vain, you're bragging, you're showing off.
That's gone. And another part of that interview, KC says, Bebo is huge. People are checking their profiles three, four times a day. How many times do, how many times do you check your Instagram a day? 60, 70, over 100? What about every single moment throughout your day where you have to experience the, the inconvenience of boredom or nothingness, or even an uncomfortable emotion? Straight on, check those likes. That's normal. That's where we are. Is that a good thing? Just because it's completely normal? Selfies only became a thing with the Kardashians. No, it was Paris Hilton. I think Paris Hilton was the, was the one circa 2007, 2008,
who normalized making it okay to take a photograph of yourself and post that online. And for this to be socially acceptable behavior. The Overton window has shifted here. If you showed someone in 2006 TikTok where people are filming themselves, just regular, normal people are vlogging their everyday life. If you showed that to someone in 2006, they'd die of shock. And the reason I wanted to play that clip there.
It's now like widely accepted, widely accepted that social media has not been a good thing for people's mental health. All over the, the news the past two months. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, they conducted internal studies about the mental health of people using Facebook and Instagram. And the findings internally were so detrimental that they cut the study short. They found hard evidence that people who quit Facebook reported lower depression, anxiety, loneliness, and social comparison, right? They found this and then they cut the study short. And government bodies are asking for
transparency around this because they're going, hold on a second, is this cigarettes all over again? Is this like when they told us the cigarettes weren't bad for our health and the corporations hid all that evidence? Because it would appear here that social media is actually a public danger. I've no idea what this week's podcast is about. I think it's about, it's 2026 and I'm trying to reflect on 30 years of the fucking internet because on 1996 I went onto the internet for the first time. And when I would imagine the future in 30 years,
I, no part of me, no part of me would have thought this internet thing is gonna cause me misery. This internet thing is gonna cause all of us some very difficult emotions. What I intended this podcast to be about was.
So I go on mindful walks. A hu- a huge portion of my life at the moment is escaping my fucking phone, okay? It's, it's one of the reasons I'm so passionate about this podcast remaining as an audio podcast, because a lot of podcasts now are pivoting towards video. No, stick me in your fucking ears and go for a walk. Because the thing is, the podcast hug that I've been speaking about for eight years.
If you're listening to my podcast or any other podcast that you're listening to, you're getting a break from your screen. You can go for a walk and listen to it. You're not going to be checking TikTok in the middle of a podcast. A podcast is one of those things. You listen to it and that's that one thing that you do. And the the unique feeling of invigoration and relaxation that you can get from listening to a podcast, I reckon a huge part of that is because you've just gotten a break. You've gotten a break from the horrors of your phone. I now have to go on reality walks.
I like, I, I'll pick an hour in my day where I just walk. And all I deal with is, is the physical environment that I'm existing in. I ground myself in my feet and my breath and my smells and my senses, in what I see. The only thing I'll allow myself is, is a podcast, if that's what I feel like, a podcast or an audiobook, bit of music. But I need to get the fuck away from that screen. Social media is my job. As you can tell from, like, I'm, I'm an OG, to use that, the iced tea terminology, I'm an original gangster. I've
been there from the fucking start, the very, very start, I would imagine. I'm, I'm in a very small, it's, it's a small circle of people who started off on social media in Bebo and who are still doing it. And I'm, I'm still doing it. I'm very fortunate to still be working professionally. I started off before fucking Bebo. I started off on GeoCities, but let's not even talk about that. But I've seen it all and I can't escape it. And if this was not my job, if, if, if I didn't have to have an Instagram or a TikTok
or a fucking Twitter or X as part of my job, I simply would not have them. I'm too old. I don't give a fuck anymore. But I have to have these things because it's my job. And it hasn't been great for the old mental health.
Because I said it before, when I decided to go back to therapy about four years ago, I've been called a prick by strangers every day of my life for I'd say the past 25 years, just by simply existing on the internet. I mean, this is part of the game. If you create content and put it online, strangers are gonna be really mean to you. As a given, as a guaranteed, there's no way to avoid it, no way to avoid it. And at this stage, I don't really take it on board. But I did have to go to a therapist at one point and say to him, actually, I've got
a job and I've been harassed by strangers online every day of my life there for about 20 years. And that's just my life and death threats and all of these horrible cruel things that just are a given, an absolute given. If you post content on the internet, a given, there's no avoiding it. So 30 years ago, thinking about the future, 30 years into the future,
to think this internet business is gonna consume you so much that you're gonna have to go on daily walks where you just experience reality and nothing else. Because the virtual world has consumed you to the point where I truly, you struggle to understand what is the real you and what is the online you. Because I feel like a big giant part of my brain has grown that contains an online avatar of myself. And same with you. You know, if you've got social media, which you probably do, there's Facebook you, you don't use that much. That's a
curated version of yourself, a performance of yourself, where you perform that version for maybe your ma and your aunts and uncles who are still on Facebook. And then there's Instagram you, which is the version of yourself that you perform for friends and a couple of strangers. But then there's your private stories Instagram, who that's a performance of yourself that is closer to the real you, but you perform that for close friends. Then... If you're a lunatic, you're on Twitter still, and I don't know what the fuck that performance is. And then there's, if you have a TikTok account, there's, that's the strangest
one, because who the fuck is that for? That's not for your friends. So if you're posting on TikTok, that's, I hope a stranger sees this and approves of me. And then there's the really strange one, the LinkedIn. Now, I don't have a LinkedIn, but if a lot of ye listening to this have got a LinkedIn. So who's your LinkedIn persona? Because apparently that's the most performative of all. That's the most absurd and fake performance and avatar that we have online is the LinkedIn. On fucking dating apps, your Tinder or your Hinge or your Grindr. Now, who the fuck is that person? And how much, how much of your actual sense of self and self-esteem is invested in that performance?
The Tinder performance? Or if like me, you're, you're a professional, are you on OnlyFans? Do you do online sex work? Who is that person? Do people pay you money and you perform a fantasy for them? And can you separate that person from who you really are? And see, we don't have words for all of this shit. Even there, like I'm consciously using the word performance there, because that's not everyday parlance. You're just gonna go onto your Instagram. You're not gonna go, oh, just gonna go onto Instagram there and do, I'm gonna play that character. I have a, I have a character that's highly curated for Instagram, and I perform this for my friends, for their
performances that are also on Instagram. We don't use this language, and it might be helpful to use this language. Because when you can say to yourself, when I use social media,
And all these different platforms. Actually, I'm an actor. And I haven't formally figured out the rules. It's something I kind of feel. But when you use any of these, you're acting, you have a little character that you've written for yourself. You haven't said in your mind that this is what you're fucking doing, but that's what you are doing. It might be helpful to start thinking about it that way. Your Facebook character, your Instagram character, and you're just an actor performing all these roles. And possibly that is the healthy way to process all this shit. And of course you're impacted by it, otherwise you wouldn't be posting.
If it feels good to get a like, then this is impacting our sense of identity worth and self-esteem. If you've ever posted a selfie and you're not happy with how many likes it got, so you deleted the selfie, then you took a little hit. You took a hit to the identity there and that impacted your fucking mental health. So we all need to have our little, our mindfulness walks now to get away from the screen. I wanted to speak about a specific walk I did in this podcast, but now I'm 70 minutes in and I can't. I can do it another day.
I've spoken about 1996, 2006. What about 2016? 2016 is an important year. We tend to think of 2016 as the year when everything went to shit. It's kind of accepted that as soon as 2016 happened, things went a bit mental. Now, I proposed a theory years ago. I'm not saying that this is serious. This is a bizarre hot take that I just put out there for entertainment. I suggested that when they turned on the Large Hadron Collider in 2014, it actually did rip a big hole in reality. And since 2016, we've been living that reality. A lot of people say, as soon as David Bowie died, everything fell to shit.
2016 was Brexit, 2016 was Trump. There has been the sense that since 2016, like what a fucking horrible decade we've had. If you go back to 2016, it's just been crisis after crisis after the Palmer crisis, they call it. Fucking Covid, no one's talking about Covid, that was rotten. So 2016 was an important year.
And it is, I think we can all agree that since 2016, it has felt pretty shit all the time. Now, there has been lots of bad news, but looking back 10 years, what's my assessment of 2016? I think what happened was algorithmic. I think in 2016, everybody had a smartphone. Like one of my core memories of 2016 was, so when Brexit happened, that was shit. Brexit was fucking shit, right? I'm not even in Britain, but Brexit was shit for everybody. It just was depressing. It was just, are you serious? You did this because of racism?
Brexit was also a wake up call to all of us. No one thought Brexit was gonna happen. I did not think Brexit was gonna happen.
And then we saw, oh, the algorithm was was very heavily manipulated by these Cambridge Analytica fuckers. 2016 was when you started to see serious radicalisation online. Your aunts, your uncles, before 2016, conspiracy theories used to be fun. 2016 was also the first time.
It's the first time I remember waking up in the morning. The first thing that I do is check my iPhone and then getting that horrible feeling. And the horrible feeling was David Cameron's resigning because Britain just left the EU. Oh my God, this is awful. And that was the first time that happened. I think back to 2015, 2014, I used to have a pile of books beside my bed. Like a big, I remember it because I used to trip over them. I'd have so many physical books beside my bed that I'd trip over them. And that means I wasn't looking at my phone in bed. Whatever was going on, I still had an iPhone, but it just wasn't interesting enough. Or the screen wasn't big enough.
I wasn't looking at my iPhone in bed in 2014. It was boring enough for me to go, let's put that down and read some actual books here. Now I have to place my phone on the other side of the room. Because if I stare into that blue screen, I'm not fucking sleeping. And if it's TikTok in particular, forget about it, no sleep. So I have to put my phone on the other side of the room. That started in 2016. Feeds changed. 2016 is when we started to... Social media used to be a thing that was on my laptop. I used to use Twitter on my laptop. In 2016, Twitter started moving on to my phone. 2016 was the year of the doom scroll, the infinite fucking scroll,
where you're just scrolling and scrolling and scrolling through miserable content, hoping for that one thing that you like. Early to mid 2010, social media was kind of dumb. The algorithm wasn't learning, you know, what you like and feeding you things, not just what you like, but the algorithm started to feed you things that made you feel something. These high arousal emotions. A high arousal emotion in social media speak is anything that makes you perform an action. And that action is either writing a comment, liking or resharing. That kicked in hardcore in 2016. Corporate media now, the media that was like CNN, Sky News, whatever the fuck you have.
News is now being reported to survive in the algorithm rather than to inform us about what's going on. So since 2016, so the social media algorithms that they prioritize engagement. So there's your high arousal emotions, anger, fear and outrage. That means that there's a bias in the algorithm towards negative threatening content, which feeds into our negativity bias because that spreads more. In 2026, what we've said for the past two years. You're not seeing actual friends in your algorithm anymore. On Instagram, on TikTok, you're not seeing human beings that you connect with in real life. You're getting a continual feed of strangers.
And that feels uncertain and strange. And you can't ground yourself in at least going, oh, there's my buddy. I know them. All of our algorithms now are tailored to us individually. So you get a feedback loop. So you get this strange loop of things that are directed at you and you alone. And then evidence based, the American Journal of Preventive Medicine 2017. So this is for the 2017 algorithm. Heavy exposure to algorithmically created news feeds is associated with a higher level of anxiety, stress and rumination. Covid fucked all this up. We spent two years doom scrolling, the doom scroll. For two fucking years, we used to try and check what the figures were to see how many people died.
How many people died today of a disease? I can't leave my house. I can't leave my house because there's a fucking disease out there. So I've just got to check the numbers of how many people died. So I can look at that number and figure out when I'd be allowed to leave my house again. A lot of us never left that. I did not leave that. I'm still on fucking high alert. I'm still
scanning for threats all the time.
With little t, trauma from the pandemic. So all the research has shown that since 2016, the social media algorithms that we're swimming in, right? They systematically amplified emotionally charged, threatening information. And that then interacts with our own negativity bias. And it simply makes the world feel more dangerous than it is. I'm not trying to downplay any bad things that are actually occurring in the world today. There's a number of bad things occurring in the world today. But there's always been a lot of bad things occurring in the world 15 years ago. It wasn't shoved in your face on a screen.
You were able to, you could, you're entitled to have fucking space to exist. If you have the privilege of being safe. And most of us right now, I'm just gonna speak for myself. I have the privilege of being safe, okay? I live in Ireland and as of today, I have the privilege of actually being safe. And the pain and misery that I experience in my day, and I do experience pain and misery. The pain and misery that I experience is because I'm worrying about.
I did, I did an unnecessary whistle there on the about, apologies for that. I'm worrying about, did another one. Most of the pain in my life is completely avoidable.
Suffering, suffering is part of being alive. But the, the suffering that I experience is because I'm worrying about
things that might happen or things that have happened in the past. I spend a lot of time ruminating on worst case scenarios, catastrophizing, making mountains out of molehills. And when I find myself in a loop of these thoughts, I experience them as if they're real and this causes me great pain. And that pain is completely avoidable because I'm currently safe. I know that my social media algorithm doesn't help any of this fucking shit. So I have to go on little walks to get away from it. And I could not have predicted that 30 fucking years ago when I sat down with no underpants on in that internet cafe in Limerick when I was a child. I did have underpants on.
All right, that's all I have time for this week.
A lot of people asking me to speak about Venezuela and Trump. And I may do that. I'll see how things develop and whether it's worth a hot take. Because you can't fucking predict anything. You can't predict anything with the Trump administration. You just can't. And another thing with the algorithm and the here's, this is proof of that. Well, it's not really a theory or a thesis I gave there because all that stuff about the algorithm is it's evidence based, but something that is huge news today, massive news can be forgotten tomorrow and something equally as mental is being fed to us.
So it's very possible that by by next week, like the US violated fucking international law. Now, the US going into Central and South America and toppling governments and military codes. They've been doing that for a long time, but they used to do it covertly. Now they've done it overtly and it's the the framing of it is what's new. It's Trump going, yeah, we did that and we did it for oil. And then the world and the media and Western governments are going, you're supposed to lie. You're supposed to lie or you're supposed to get the CIA to do it.
And and you're supposed to lie and then we look the other way. That's how this always worked. You're not supposed to say it. You're not supposed to say, we control Venezuela. We violated a sovereign country. We kidnapped the president. You're not supposed to say that bit because we don't know what the rules are for that. Well, we do know what the rules are. It's called international law and we're supposed to stop you. So can you go back to doing it like secretly and covertly again because we don't know what to do? So that's where we are right now. America has done this in Nicaragua. They've done it in Honduras. They've done it in Chile. Like this isn't new. The framing of it is what's new.
They've just, they've done it overtly this time, not covertly. And then the international order is going.
We don't know what to do now because we're looking at the rulebook here and the rulebook says we have to stop you. And we were really hoping that if you were gonna violate international law, that you'd have done it covertly and lied. But you seem to be admitting it this time and we don't know what to do. I've done tons of podcasts on American imperialism. And so I have a million hot takes about this specific issue. I just wanna see how it develops because it might be news in two days. The president of Argentina has got eight cloned dogs. The president of Argentina had one dog who he loved. So he cloned eight of them. And now he has eight dogs that are actually the exact same dog
because they're clones. And he takes economic advice from two of them. This is the world that we live in. So I can't say to you, I know what next week's podcast is gonna be about. Or I can't say, this thing that's in the news today, I'm gonna do a podcast on that next week. So in the meantime, wink at a wasp. There's a seal. There's a seal up by Yarti's couch. A fucking seal. I saw him and people sent me photographs of him. So currently, the salmon, the salmon are coming in from the Atlantic and going upriver on the Shannon. And sometimes what happens is that seals will follow the salmon from
the fucking Atlantic. And they'll follow the salmon upriver. So there's seals now. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna go down and look for that seal. And I'll wink at that seal and wave at that seal. And listen to the song Kiss From A Rose by Seal. Incredible fucking song. There's a wonderful theory about the song Kiss From A Rose by Seal. So in the 1980s, and again, this would, this would tie into the fucking, the podcast about South America. But in the 1980s, the crack epidemic happened in America, and crack cocaine was everywhere. And in American petrol stations.
Usually in poorer neighbourhoods, in neighbourhoods that were impacted by the crack epidemic, they used to sell really shitty, tiny, plastic roses, like tiny, the size of a pencil, and they'd sell them inside a glass pipe for 10 cents. And these were known as love roses. But really, they weren't selling a rose, they were crack pipes. So, people, a bit like, in Limerick, there's a chocolate bar that's very cheap, called an animal bar, and it's only 10 or 15p, you don't see them as much anymore. But heroin addicts buy these chocolate bars because they get the tin foil that's in them, because
it's cheap. So, America had that in the 80s, with these petrol station, gas station, shitty plastic roses inside tiny glass tubes. And people who were addicted to crack would buy these roses to smoke the crack out of the glass pipe. And there's a theory that Seal's song Kiss From A Rose is actually about the hit of a crack pipe and those roses. So wink at a wasp, wave at a seal, genuflect to a... there's not a lot of wildlife out at the moment. We're at that time of year, you know, genuflect to a swan. God bless.
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