Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast The history of smoking banana peels and the Anarchists Cookbook About this episode Ancient persian air conditioning, smoking banana peels and the Anarchist cookbook. Emotionally intelligent learning within a social contect Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
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1:57 Blindboy Boatclub? Dance a laugh the gammy chandelier, you jangly anthony's. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. We are all currently nestled in the testicles of a greasy heatwave. A fucking record breaking heatwave. Not just Ireland, not just Limerick, all of Europe. The consequences of global warming is what we're dealing with. Temperature in Limerick this week was 32 degrees. Big swinging Mickey. You're thinking if you live in Australia or if you live in Spain. 32 degrees. That's just a Wednesday here in Spain or in Perth. But here's the thing, this heat here in Ireland and over in England.
2:41 Blindboy Boatclub? It's unprecedented. So we're dealing with this for the first time. In Spain, for instance, where 32 degrees is normal. You've got.
2:53 Blindboy Boatclub? You have infrastructure, architecture and culture all built around heat. Here in Ireland, we have infrastructure, culture and architecture built around the cold and the rain. So when it's hot here in Ireland, it's inescapable. If you stay indoors, it's actually worse because we live in buildings that are designed to keep the heat in. We don't have air conditioning. Nobody has air conditioning. That's not, it's not part of our culture. So what's fascinating for me is to, to watch all the little changes emerge. Because we're being, we're being pushed over a tipping point. There's traffic jams.
3:35 Blindboy Boatclub? There's traffic jams and there's long, and as a result then there's long queues for buses. Some people are just getting into their fucking cars because our cars do have air conditioning. Now also you have people traveling. They want to go to a beach, they want to go to a lake, to a river, whatever. Because too, the heat is something you cannot escape. People try to move for the sake of it. There's an underlying anxiety there. There's no rest from the heat here, especially at nighttime. See in Spain, if there's not air conditioning, you've got buildings which are designed to stay cool. You know, shutters on the outside. You have a culture built around staying cool.
4:15 Blindboy Boatclub? Society tends to shut down in the middle of the day and people, people operate in the mornings and the evenings. Here in Ireland, we just carry on. We carry on and continue with an ambient hum of, I cannot escape this. Nothing I do will cool me down. And that tension and that anxiety just causes people to move, to get out of the house, to get into the car. Something I started to notice two, three years ago. As the summers began to get hotter with climate change. Food, ready meals in particular. You gotta be on the lookout for food poisoning. I got food poisoning this time last summer from a reheated meal.
4:59 Blindboy Boatclub? Because the amount of time that you can leave food out for, normally in Ireland, that safe period, that now changes completely and we're not used to that. So I don't risk ready meals during the summer. I'm very careful. Another thing I've been noticing, it's been taking me longer to buy my lunch. I get the same lunch at the same time in the same place every single day. That's an artistic thing. We tend to automate tasks that require executive functioning skills, like planning. I mean, for me, how I experienced that is if I wear the same clothes all the time, if I eat the same food all the time, if I have the exact same route to get in and out of work every single time,
5:40 Blindboy Boatclub? then I can focus on whatever I'm mad curious about. This week, I'm thinking about the ancient architecture of Persia. I feel happy when I'm thinking about that. I want to think about that all of the time. And I don't want to distract myself by needing to plan my lunch. So the procurement of my lunch is an incredibly automated and predictable experience. So if anything disrupts that, I notice it very quickly. And in the heatwave, I've been noticing it. Like fucking hell, it's taken me like an extra six minutes to buy my sandwich. What the fuck is going on here? I stopped in the supermarket and looked around. And there weren't necessarily more people than usual in the supermarket.
6:23 Blindboy Boatclub? But what I noticed was a change in people's behaviour. Our supermarkets are not air conditioned, they're fucking hot. But the freezer section and the fridge section, everything's behind glass doors now to save energy. So every person who's going to buy their pint of milk or their packet of ham, when they open that glass door and get hit with that wave of cold from the fridge, everyone's kind of basking in it.
6:53 Blindboy Boatclub? Whether they're aware they're doing it or not, everyone is spending that little bit longer choosing their milk. I went out for a walk the other evening to escape the fucking heat of my house. And when I was walking around a housing estate, I got a glint in my eye, a painful glint in my eye, as if someone had shined a laser into my eye, and it wasn't a fucking laser. Some of the houses, people had put tin foil up on their windows to reflect the sunlight back. Our doom scroll algorithms are full of people coming up with new novel ideas to try and escape the heat, filling plastic bottles full of water and freezing them until they're blocks of ice, and then putting a fan in front of it.
7:37 Blindboy Boatclub? These are all the, the changes in human behaviour that occur when it just gets two, three degrees hotter than what we're used to. Our mental health worsens. As I mentioned, there's the, the unnameable hum of not being able to escape something uncomfortable, so that grinds away at you in the background. We're all getting terrible sleep. I was speaking to someone yesterday, and they live in an apartment in the city centre, and they're up at the fourth fucking floor, so heat rises to the top, so they're fucking roasting in bed. But if they try to open their window at night time, they can't sleep because of the noise of the city.
8:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Domestic violence goes up during heatwaves, violence against women. I'm basing that on a, on a study that I read called Hot Weather and Violence Against Women, a Global Scoping Review, which identified that as global temperatures rise, things like socio-economic status. So the poorer you are, the less able you are to cool yourself down. I give an example, I visit a city in Spain called Cordoba, hottest city in Europe. It would hit about forty this time of year. I went there for nearly a month in 2017, in August, to write my second book. I'd managed to get really nice accommodation there for fifteen quid a day. I couldn't understand how it was so cheap.
9:06 Blindboy Boatclub? It was so cheap because nobody wanted to be there in the middle of August. It was borderline dangerous to be there in the middle of August. It was too hot, forty, forty-one degrees. It was so hot that if I sat down, even in the shade at a cafe in the middle of the day, my laptop would just shut off, wouldn't work in the heat. What I also noticed, all the middle-class people and wealthy, upper-class people are gone. They're not there, they're gone. The luxury shops are empty, the jewellery shops, the expensive restaurants are empty. The people with the money have got a second home near the sea so they get the fuck out of the hot city because they can afford to. And the people who are left to deal with the urban heat, the working-class people,
9:51 Blindboy Boatclub? the people working in shops, the people working for the council. So a- access to being able to cool yourself down is a, it's a class issue. Even to the point, and I can't find the name of the exact scheme, but I, I knew someone in Spain who would have been, they were low-income and they were able to avail of a government scheme that pays or subsidizes lower-income people to be able to travel to a cooler part of Spain during the summer. Alcohol consumption increases during heatwaves, the urban heat-island effect, patriarchal norms, and the irritability of having shit, shit sleep and just being too hot and not being able to escape it.
10:35 Blindboy Boatclub? That is resulting in a rise in violence against women and domestic violence. And those are the findings of that study from twenty twenty-five. And of course, the obvious one, and this is a headline from today's BBC News, "European heatwaves are linked to thirteen hundred deaths." And the World Health Organization said that. So thirteen hundred people have died unnecessarily over the past couple of weeks because of the rising temperatures. So global warming is global, but Europe, Europe is actually heating at twice the speed of everywhere else. And this is how, this is how unpredictable ecosystems are, as in something you could not have planned for.
11:20 Blindboy Boatclub? One of the reasons that Europe is heating twice as fast as the rest of the world. I frequently speak about Europe, the EU, being a place of regulation. Regulations are generally good things because what they do is they place the safety and well-being of human beings ahead of a corporation's right to profit. So, air pollution was a huge thing in the 20th century. So, if you're a millennial or older, you'll remember from your childhood, you know, hearing on the news, things like acid rain. Like, you don't hear about acid rain anymore. The hole in the ozone layer, that was massive when I was a kid. The hole in the ozone layer. And CFCs.
12:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Remember, you'd buy hairspray or deodorant and it would proudly label that it was CFC-free. Or there'd be awareness campaigns about how to dispose of fridges safely because of CFCs. It even changed hairstyles. Remember the big giant 1980s perms? They went out of fashion as soon as hairspray became demonized as a source of CFCs when people became aware that excessive use of hairspray was causing a big giant hole in the ozone layer. And the hole in the ozone layer, it was very real. There was a massive one above Australia and the ozone layer, which protects us from UV light, but there was...
12:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Loads of people were getting skin cancer because of the hole in the ozone layer, particularly down in Australia. Smog, too, was a huge thing. You think of movies, 70s and 80s, in particular, Los Angeles. Los Angeles is always represented with this deep orange haze. The most exaggerated example of that would be a film called 187 with Samuel L. Jackson. That was smog. The air quality in Los Angeles in the 70s and 80s was so poor that the films had a bit of an orange hue and then they would exaggerate it. Not to one like London, London at the peak of the Industrial Revolution. You had painters like Turner. Look at Turner's paintings from the 1840s. And everything has this yellow glow.
13:30 Blindboy Boatclub? He was painting smog, coal pollution. London up until the nineteen seventies was famous for, I think they called it pea soup. It was a type of smog that was full of sulphur and it was green. You don't really hear about smog anymore. Acid rain. I was really scared of acid rain as a child. It'd be represented in the media as literal rain that would melt your skin and you turn into a skeleton. What it really, what it was, was it was pollution from sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, which come from fossil fuels, from coal and from the engines of cars, was causing rain to become acidic.
14:13 Blindboy Boatclub? And this was poisoning lakes and destroying ecosystems. So acid rain was a real thing, but you don't hear about it anymore. To the point that if you see the arguments of people who deny climate change, they will use CFCs, acid rain, smog as examples of hysteria. They'll say, do you remember when we used to always talk about acid rain? Now you don't hear it anymore. What happened to the fucking ozone layer? I thought that was gonna kill us all. Now you never hear it anymore. This is all hysteria. The same way that global warming is hysteria now, it's bullshit. You don't hear about smog and acid rain and CFCs and the ozone layer anymore because we did something about it. Europe in particular.
14:58 Blindboy Boatclub? The EU brought in regulations on industry to reduce air pollution to get cleaner air. So nineteen eighty-eight, there was the fucking large combustion plant directive. Unleaded petrol, you know, the lead was taken out of petrol. Smokeless coal, you have to burn, if you are burning coal now, it has to be smokeless coal because of regulation. Catalytic converters, catalytic converters in cars. It removes from an exhaust carbon monoxide and hydrocarbons. Those are regulations because of all of that. That's why you don't hear about acid rain. That's why you don't hear about the ozone layer. It's why you don't hear about smog in Europe.
15:43 Blindboy Boatclub? That's really good news there. The ozone layer is actively repairing itself. Like wonderful. That gives me a real sense of hope because you can look at legislation and regulations that were brought in that changed the behaviour of industry. Because industry is the big fucking polluter. That's the big one. Positive things happened as a result of positive actions regarding the environment. Isn't that wonderful? Our air is not as polluted as it was in the middle of the 20th century. It's a lot cleaner. But here's the fucking sticker. We are now learning about something called the clean air paradox.
16:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Turns out all that smog and pollution and smoke and CFCs was reflecting sunlight back towards the sun. So as the earth was heating from global warming, the greenhouse effect, the pollution was keeping us cool because it was reflecting sunlight back, like those fucking people earlier I mentioned with the tinfoil on their windows. So because Europe in particular was so progressive with clean air policy, now we've got cleaner air and we're heating at twice the speed of everywhere else because of our fucking clean air, the sunlight is getting through. Ecosystems are not predictable.
17:10 Blindboy Boatclub? What that reminds me of is there's an invasive species of mussel in the River Shannon in Ireland at the moment. So you know mussels, they're like little oysters, shellfish. So there's these freshwater mussels that are invasive. They came in on boats in the 1990s. They're called the zebra mussel. And the zebra mussels are from... Eastern Europe, so huge rivers in near Ukraine or the Danube in Germany, right? So their indigenous ecosystem are the floodplains of these giant European rivers. Very cloudy water, water that's disturbed by rainfall upstream.
17:53 Blindboy Boatclub? So real cloudy sediment-rich water. As a result, these fucking mussels, they filter the water. They stay in one place and they can filter a huge amount of water and they clean it, which is excellent when they're in Ukraine. Now they're in Ireland and they're in the Shannon and they're replacing our native mussel. And they're making the Shannon River less polluted because they're so hungry, they're so excellent at filtering the water, that they're making the Shannon River really, really clean. In Ireland, our rivers are polluted from fertilizer runoff. Huge amounts of nitrogen and phosphorus that come from fertilizer and, and the piss of
18:38 Blindboy Boatclub? cows, the piss of cattle is, is very bad for Irish rivers. So now we've got these zebra mussels who are invasive, but they're actually doing a, they're inadvertently cleaning the Shannon River and fighting against this fertilizer runoff. Fucking brilliant. No, that they're making the water too clean. Just like the skies over Europe, there's so many zebra mussels and they're doing such a good job at filtering the river, that sunlight is reaching parts of the river that it's not supposed to reach. It's also happening in lakes. And now as the sunlight penetrates deeper into the river, it's causing algal bloom,
19:23 Blindboy Boatclub? in particular cyanobacteria, which completely poison the rivers. And then the mussels don't want to eat the fucking cyanobacteria, so they're killing Irish rivers by making them too clean. And it's not something anyone predicted until it fucking happened. So I've been battered with the heat this week. Nighttime is the worst because...
19:44 Blindboy Boatclub? You're lying down, you're trying to sleep, you can't escape it, you're tossing and turning. In an Irish house made of bricks that's designed to trap heat, to keep the heat inside, and the walls act as thermal mass. Like the walls act as a crude radiator, they hold on to that heat. So I've been lying awake, obsessing about ancient Persian architecture. So ancient Persia, let's call it Iran, the area that is now Iran, was Persia incredibly hot, you know, forty degree desert. And during the Achaemenid Empire, so that's 2,500 years ago,
20:30 Blindboy Boatclub? 500 years before fucking the birth of Christ, the Persians had developed air conditioning, very, very effective air conditioning. No electricity, just using the physics of a building and an understanding of the science of heat. So in ancient Persian buildings, they had these things sticking out of the top, going up real tall, that looked like chimneys. But what they actually were is they were called wind catchers. So the ancient Persians understood the physics of hot and cold air. So hot air is less dense.
21:14 Blindboy Boatclub? Think of hot air a bit like a helium balloon. The heat excites the molecules of air, so those molecules move around. Like remember when you were a kid, remember when you were a little kid and it's really fucking hot outside? So you put your head down to the footpath, to the tarmac. And then when you look at the surface of the footpath. You see the air shimmering, you see a little mirage. Like water in the distance. What you're seeing there are, it's air being excited by heat. It's that air getting all fucking jittery and becoming less dense and moving upwards. So hot air rises.
21:58 Blindboy Boatclub? Cold air is more dense, that sticks to the ground. I mean, what's an example of that? The freezing cold winter and mist and fog just hovers above the grass. Or if you're, if you're near a lake in the morning and it's freezing cold and you just see that layer of fog hover above the meniscus of the lake. That's dense cold air falling. So the ancient Persians understood this. So the big huge chimneys that they had sticking out of their buildings, they weren't lighting fires, it wasn't a chimney. Their big chimney towers were catching cold air up in the sky. And they would catch that air and they would then know because that air is cold, that's gonna fall.
22:43 Blindboy Boatclub? So that falls down to the bottom of the building into the rooms, which then naturally pushes all the hot air out. Cause that rises to the top. No electricity, just an understanding of the physics of heat and air and how it behaves when it's hot and cold. And they managed to create buildings in the middle of the forty degree desert that were livable and cold. And then they took it a step farther. They had these things called canals, which were manmade underground canals. So you'd have this canal, like a small little stream of water, moving underneath the house. Then the air that's coming in the chimney, coming in the wind catcher.
23:28 Blindboy Boatclub? When that goes down and passes over the canal that's passing under the house, because that air is hotter and drier than the water, it causes a little bit of evaporation to occur on the surface of the water. But evaporation, that uses energy, that uses heat energy from the air. So hot, eh, hot, dry air that has to evaporate water loses energy and then naturally cools. So then that colder air is pumped back into the house, not only pushing the hot air out, but now really chilling the fucking house. So they'd created an air conditioner, a fucking air conditioner with no electricity, using only physics 2,500 years ago.
24:13 Blindboy Boatclub? Like the Persians, I think I've done a podcast on this before about six years ago. The ancient Persians invented the world's first frozen dessert. Now, if I told, if I said, where did the world's first frozen fucking dessert come from? You're not gonna think, oh, the hottest country in the world, because where the fuck are they gonna get ice? They were able to make ice in the desert. They had these buildings called yakchays. They were these round clay buildings. They looked a bit like a pointy hat. They'd have one of these canals of water running underneath. Hot air would come in through the roof, evaporate the water, lose energy, cool down, and the cycle would go on and on until eventually ice would form.
24:55 Blindboy Boatclub? And they were able to manufacture ice in the desert 2,500 years ago, using only an understanding of the physics of heat and no electricity. And from that, the Persians made the world's first frozen dessert called falouda, like a type of frozen custard flavoured with rosewater. But all of that got me thinking that if Europe is to respond to the rising temperatures, we need to start thinking in that way. If the fucking ancient Persians could do it 2,500 years ago with no electricity, just understanding how heat moves, then why can't, why can't we do that in Europe? I don't think everybody getting air conditioners.
25:41 Blindboy Boatclub? Is gonna help anything because of the amount of air conditioners use a huge amount of fucking energy. If you've got an air conditioner in your fucking car, you know this, it eats up the petrol. So all week what I've been doing is trying to think, how can I exploit this physics in my fucking Irish house? So what you're talking about is what's called the stack effect.
26:03 Blindboy Boatclub? Think of it this way, it's about density. If you've got a glass of water and you pour oil into that water, the oil is always gonna move to the top. It's searching for buoyancy because the oil is less dense than the water. Hot and cold air is the same crack. So during this heat wave, another big reason that sleeping is so difficult is that we we sleep upstairs. So all the heat from the day that rises to the top of your house because it's less dense. So your bedroom is a fucking nightmare. So what I started doing was,
26:41 Blindboy Boatclub? I'd wait for it to get dark so that it's it is colder outside. I'd open one window downstairs on the side of the house that wasn't getting the most sun. Then I'd open another window upstairs on the side of the house that was getting sun because that'd be the hottest side of the house. And after about five minutes, like, here's the thing, it was really fucking dead heat. No wind outside, no movement. That's what made it worse, that there was no wind to cool you down at all. When I strategically opened the the windows at opposite sides of my house up and down, after about five minutes, a localized wind started to develop in my own
27:24 Blindboy Boatclub? house. And that's when I knew, fuck it, this is working. There was different zones of pressure, you see, as the less dense hot air upstairs exit through exits through the window, that sucks in the cold air from downstairs. And then you get a little wind. I got a thermometer. My upstairs bedroom was 27 degrees, like, fucking unbearable. After an hour of that strategic wind opening, it had gone from 27 degrees down to 19 degrees. I'd used the stack effect, I'd managed to fucking do it, that ancient Persian technique. Now, some of you might be thinking, He's acting like he invented opening windows. He's acting like he invented opening windows.
28:10 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm aware I'm just opening fucking windows. I know I'm doing that. But that's that. It's not that deep shit that autistic people hate. It is that fucking deep. If I'm opening windows in my gaff, then there needs to be a conversation about the Archimedian Empire and the world's first frozen desert. But I was just really happy that it worked. I was so happy that it worked. And also generating that little wind, generating the, the current of wind that I could feel and hear when there's no wind outside. And then seeing the mercury drop in that thermometer. I felt great. Give it a go yourself the next time it's thirty something degrees. If you feel secure enough, you could just leave it all night.
28:54 Blindboy Boatclub? What I'd love to try is, can you incorporate evaporation into it? The ancient Egyptians used to have devices called a kola. All this was, was a clay pot. And around the clay pot, they would wrap wet rags. And they'd place these clay pots surrounded by wet rags, anywhere where there was a draft. You maximize the surface area that's wet. Now, this might not work in Ireland where we have humidity, you see. We're in the middle of the Atlantic and our prevailing wind is incredibly wet, full of moisture. So I don't think the humid air will cause evaporation. But technically,
29:36 Blindboy Boatclub? if you were to hang a wet towel, a wet tea towel
29:42 Blindboy Boatclub? in the downstairs window that's open, if the air coming in isn't too humid, that will lose energy as it evaporates and dries that towel. And then you're bringing in even colder air into the house. And I'm gonna give that a go, but I don't think it'll work because of Irish humidity. Do you know who understood these physics actually in their architecture? And I would argue that this is technology that we still have in everyday use, but we have forgotten what its purpose is. We've forgotten how to use it, even though it's there all around us. The fucking Victorians and the Georgians. So like Limerick, like we have loads of Georgian architecture.
30:27 Blindboy Boatclub? I think we might have the largest unmolested collection of Georgian architecture in Ireland.
30:36 Blindboy Boatclub? So in Limerick, you're talking O'Connell Street. Loads of Georgian architecture in Dublin, where it'd be the best fucking Georgia. Around Parnell Street, Mountjoy Square, loads of it in Manchester, loads of it in London. Georgian buildings have got sash windows.
30:56 Blindboy Boatclub? These windows are a nightmare in, in, they're a nightmare in, in wintertime.
31:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Your classic single glazed fucking window with all its individual panels, right? But they don't open out. They have a drawstring and they open up and down, right? So that's, that's a Georgian and a Victorian sash window. Those are actually designed to take advantage of the stack effect, right? So to use one of those windows effectively as an architectural air conditioner. You open it in such a way that there's a little space at the top and a little space at the bottom. And right now, if you're living in one of the cities in Ireland, those are the toughest buildings for people right now.
31:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Like in Limerick, that's the, the cheapest accommodation in the city centre are the old red brick Georgian buildings. And they're really fucking hot. Those windows are intended to be opened with a bit at the top and a bit at the bottom, specifically to exploit the stack effect. The cold air flows in through the bottom part and the hot air flows out through the top part. And that's natural Georgian architectural air conditioning. Some of them even have wood panels so you could just close the wood over the window completely. And that was another way that they kept their houses cool. We've forgotten that. I guarantee you, there's a load of people listening to this
32:25 Blindboy Boatclub? fucking podcast and you have those exact old sash windows. They're natural air conditioners. They're trying to exploit the equilibrium of hot and cool air. So I have a story I want to tell you and I don't want to interrupt it. So let's have the Ocarina pause now. I do have an Ocarina this week. So I'm going to play this. Hopefully it won't disturb your dog and you're going to hear an advert for some bullshit.
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36:29 Blindboy Boatclub? That was the Ocarina Pause. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast.
36:41 Blindboy Boatclub? This podcast will be nine years old in October. Every week for nine years, I've delivered a podcast. I've never missed a week because I love and adore doing this. A huge part of my mindfulness practice revolves around cultivating the humility, the humility to remind myself how lucky I am to be able to write from a position of genuine curiosity and passion. And for you who's listening, to show up and want to hear that. And also for this to be the thing that I earn a living from.
37:24 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm unbelievably grateful for that. And this is my full-time job. This is what I do as a job. This is how I earn a living. This is how I pay all my bills. This is how I feed myself. This is my vocation, my career, my practice. And I'm so thankful to all ye that I've been able to do that for nine years. So if you listen to this podcast and it brings you entertainment, distraction, mirth, merriment, please consider supporting the podcast directly. It's that direct support that keeps the podcast going. All I want is to be able to earn a living. If I can earn a living, then I have the time in my week to be curious and to write
38:08 Blindboy Boatclub? and to record and produce this. If you listen to this and you met me in real life and you thought, fuck it, I'd like to buy him a pint, or I'd buy him a cup of coffee if I met him, then you can, because that's all I'm looking for. The price of a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month, that's it. For that, you get four podcasts a month. But if you can't afford that, for whatever reason, don't worry about it. Listen for free. You listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast, whether you pay or not. But if you are paying, you're paying for the person who can't afford to pay. Everyone gets the exact same podcast, the same experience. I get to earn a living.
38:51 Blindboy Boatclub? The wonderful model based on kindness and soundness. It's the closest thing we can get to public fucking broadcasting in these neoliberal times. And direct funding means too, I'm not beholden to advertisers.
39:05 Blindboy Boatclub? Advertisers can come here and they advertise on my terms. I've more than 20 years' experience working in entertainment and what destroys, what destroys creative work in broadcasting, whether that be television, fucking radio, books, advertising kills it. Because when a creative medium is beholden to advertisers or relying upon advertisers, those advertisers want figures, they want listenership, they want popularity, they want return on investment. You can't create anything meaningful from that position because you've started from a position of anxiety. If you create anything and you're trying to be popular, the best you can hope for
39:49 Blindboy Boatclub? is consistent mediocrity. If you're creating something and you have space to fail, to fuck up, to be weird, then you can have occasional brilliance. And that's what I've learned in all my years of being professionally creative. And I've never been happier and more fulfilled creatively than I have in these past nine years. So thank you to each and every one of my patrons, patreon.com forward slash the Blind By Podcast. Follow me on Instagram, Blind By Boat Club. I might be releasing a new, a new piece of music on Instagram this week. I've been falling back in love with making music, with producing music, playing with my analog synthesizers.
40:30 Blindboy Boatclub? More than a decade ago, I used to be a professional musician. I didn't like the professional side of things because it can, it can put you in a situation where you fall out of love with the creativity because your music has to be popular or else you don't earn a living. Now I'm back making music for the process, for the love of the making. I've no intention of doing gigs, releasing music. I'll put the odd bit out on Instagram as a video if, if I like the piece. I've been growing potatoes. And the recent humidity and the heat, I'm actually after getting blight. One of my potato plants has shown signs of potato blight, which is to be expected in
41:14 Blindboy Boatclub? this fucking weather. So what I've managed to do is...
41:19 Blindboy Boatclub? I've hooked electrodes, hooked electrodes up to the potatoes as they're the tubers, as they're stuck to this dying plant. I've hooked electrodes up to the potatoes. And while the potatoes are still, you know, joined to their plant, then they're alive, they're a living thing. If I pluck them from the roots, then they're dead. But these are a living thing. They're generating a current, a life force. And I can, that generates a crude electrical signal. I can then translate that electrical signal into MIDI data that
42:00 Blindboy Boatclub? I can control synthesizers with. So I've been making French house music out of blight-stricken potatoes. I appreciate that that sounds a bit mad. Maybe it is a bit mad, but it's not harming anyone. It's not hurting anyone. And the lateral thinking involved in that process brings me wonderful joy. I mean, if you can make Puccin out of potatoes, why can't you make house music? So that's what I've been doing. I've been making house music out of blighty potatoes. And I'm hoping to put one of those tracks up on Instagram this week. So upcoming gigs, upcoming live podcasts, this Sunday, the 5th of July,
42:44 Blindboy Boatclub? next week, I'm in Sheffield at the Crosswires Podcast Festival. Down to the last tickets for this gig. If you're on the fence and you can make it, I strongly advise you come to this gig because I'm going to be speaking to Professor Carl Chin, who's someone I've spoken to twice before. I've only put one of the interviews out. Carl is a fascinating person, a wonderful human being, and he's an expert on the history of the English working class. I want to radicalise the people of England. I want to... I want to help the people of England to learn about the radical history of the English working class. I'd like the people of England to start viewing themselves as
43:29 Blindboy Boatclub? effectively colonized by the Normans. Your royal family, this parasitic fucking class of pricks that own a lot of the land that have been there since 1066, that have put great effort into convincing the the working class people of England that the poor people from other countries are your fucking enemies, you need to go to war. I'd be chatting with Carole Chin about that type of stuff. And I can't wait, I can't wait to just to learn from him. So come along to that gig in Sheffield. Then October 26. These, a lot of these are selling out very quickly now. October 26, starting on the 18th, I'm in Brighton on
44:09 Blindboy Boatclub? the Brighton Dome. Then to Cardiff on the 20th, the New Theatre, Coventry, Bristol at Beacon Hall, that one's nearly gone. Can't wait to get back to Bristol. Then Guildford, bit of Guildford on the 24th of October. London, sold out, completely sold out in London. Glasgow, as good as sold out last tickets. Gateshead, and finally finishing it off in Nottingham. Then April 27, Australia and New Zealand. And these gigs are nearly fucking sold out, so thank you so much to my listeners down there. But gonna be starting
44:48 Blindboy Boatclub? on the, when am I fucking starting? Starting in Auckland on the 9th of April 27 at the Town Hall, Melbourne, the Palais Theatre, Brisbane, the powerhouse, Perth, the Astor Theatre, and Sydney Opera House. Sydney Opera House, which is nearly fuck, Sydney and Melbourne are both nearly sold out. So again, if you're on the fence, if you're thinking that's a year away, get your tickets now or you will be disappointed. England, Scotland, Wales tickets, fan.co.uk forward slash the blind by podcast. And then have a crack at my website, theblindbypodcast.ie. I hate telling you to go there just in case it crashes when you do. This week's podcast.
45:30 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm drifting in and out of themes. I like themes to emerge as I'm writing this podcast and something that's definitely emerging. My love of science, thinking about the physics of heat, connecting electrodes to potatoes. I adore and love science because science to me feels like art. It feels like art. There's such wonderful room for curiosity and playfulness. However, I'm fucking shit at maths. I can barely count. So that has always been...
46:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Like, Jesus, even when I'm describing to you there about the stack effect and hot air and cold air and densities, I can only access these ideas using images and words. But I can't express these things through maths. Same with the electrodes and the potatoes. I have to use images and words. I would love to be able to approach these subjects using maths, but fucking forget about it. I can't. I struggle to read clocks. And what this is taking me on to is just thinking about heat waves when I was a kid, when I was a teenager. I went through all the records of, you know, the highest temperatures in Limerick when I was a teenager.
46:51 Blindboy Boatclub? The year 2000, the hottest it got was 27 degrees in 2001, 24 degrees. 24 degrees was the hottest it got in Limerick in 2001. The first time it hit the 30s. 2006, it got to 31 degrees. Then it cooled back down again. And from 2017 onwards, that's where you start seeing your very evident pattern and trend of global warming. That's where it goes 28 and doesn't drop below it. I still have memories of very hot summers as a teenager. Summers where you couldn't move and it was just boring.
47:34 Blindboy Boatclub? 2001, for example, there 24 degrees. So that's, that's probably just tomorrow. It was one summer, probably 2001, and I'd have been in school, I was a teenager. And it was so hot. There's no mobile phones, but there would have been fucking knockies, no internet.
47:53 Blindboy Boatclub? I remember it being very, very hot and very, very boring. And me and my buddy, I'm gonna call him Christie, even though his name isn't Christie. Me and my buddy Christie were just going, what are we gonna do? What the fuck are we gonna do today? It's too hot, you can't play soccer, you can't walk around, it's roasting. What the fuck are we gonna do with our day? We couldn't get drink, we couldn't get alcohol, because we were under the age of 18 and it was difficult to get alcohol. Getting hash in those days, again, you needed to have the money to do it. And it wasn't like now where you've got WhatsApp. You needed to know someone who knew someone who could go somewhere to go to a dealer's house to get the hash. So even getting hash back then was very difficult.
48:38 Blindboy Boatclub? So I said, why don't we smoke banana pills? Let's smoke banana pills, Christie. Because I heard that they're like LSD. That was a bit of an urban rumor back then, that banana pills, when prepared in the right way, could be smoked and could provide psychedelic effects. And there was always someone you knew who said, yeah, I tried it and I tripped balls. The reason I became convinced that smoking banana pills was psychedelic was because
49:11 Blindboy Boatclub? one of my favorite albums, The Prodigy Experience. You know, these were the before times, no internet. So if you owned an album that you enjoyed, this was a religious artifact, a fucking religious artifact. And my copy of The Prodigy Experience on tape was a religious artifact. And I would listen to that album and just stare at the liner notes of that tape. And that's what you had to do and just imagine things. I knew every single word on those liner notes. On the back of that tape, there was a photograph of the four lads in The Prodigy. And Leroy, the Prodigy member, he was smoking something that looked, looked a bit like a joint.
49:54 Blindboy Boatclub? And then it had a quote from him, and the quote from Leroy was,
49:59 Blindboy Boatclub? And I can remember this exactly, "Respect to everyone I have met, you're welcome round to smoke some banana skins, anytime." So that was it for me. If the prodigy are smoking banana skins and they're making this astounding, incredible, psychedelic rave music, then of course you can smoke banana skins and get high. The prodigy are saying it. Now, I'd gotten that album in the early 90s, so I'd been reading it since I was a child and I'd been thinking, "Fucking banana skins, how am I gonna smoke banana skins?" But I didn't know how, but it was around 2000, so I didn't have access to the internet in 2000. So how it worked back then was, there was somebody in school and that person in school,
50:44 Blindboy Boatclub? they had the internet. And sometimes they'd download things from the internet, put them onto floppy disks. And you could buy them, you could buy them off your friend who had internet access. So there was one thing I really wanted to get my hands on. It was called The Anarchist Cookbook. It was a book about how to make bombs, how to make bombs from household objects. It was a legendary book. But also, it was the book that contained the recipe of how to make drugs out of banana skins. And The Anarchist Cookbook used to pass around schools on floppy disk. And I wanted, because I did have a PC at home, it just didn't have the internet, I
51:27 Blindboy Boatclub? wanted this fucking anarchist cookbook. So I went to my buddy in school and was like, "Look, can you give it to me? Give it to me on a floppy disk." I would have said to him on a Friday and he goes, "Yeah, no worries, I'll have that disk for you on Monday." And I probably gave him a fiver or something like that. So on Monday, he comes to me with the floppy disk and says, "There you go, The Anarchist Cookbook is on that." And I threw some other shit on it as well, just to fill up the space. So on Monday, I got the floppy disk, went home from school, shoved it into the computer. And there was two things on it. One of these things changed my life forever. It wasn't The Anarchist Cookbook. It was a copy of a piece of software called Fruity Loops. Fruity Loops 2, I think it was.
52:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Piece of software that allowed you to record music on your computer at home. I'm recording this podcast right now on Fruity Loops.
52:24 Blindboy Boatclub? Back then, it was version two. Now I'm up at version 26 and it's called FL Studio. But that's what I'm recording this podcast on. That's what I got a music career out of. That software showed me how to become a music producer. I don't know what the fuck I'd be doing with my life if I wasn't given that floppy disk, because I wasn't looking for fruity loops. I didn't even know what it was. I didn't know you could make music on a computer. This was just an accident. And I opened it and messed with it and fucking loved it and learned how to become a music producer from that. But the other thing I adored was the anarchist cookbook.
53:08 Blindboy Boatclub? This illegal manual of how to make explosives from bleach, or fill a tennis ball full of match heads and make a crude grenade, or dissolve styrofoam into petrol and make napalm. I didn't have a desire to destroy anything. It wasn't a violence thing. I just, I loved having this thing that was so bold, that was so wrong, that was so forbidden. This forbidden knowledge I used to just adore and read it voraciously. But this one summer, think 2001, fucking heatwave, that's when I said to my buddy Christie,
53:50 Blindboy Boatclub? "Let's do the banana peels, man. Let's do the fucking banana peels. I've got the recipe on a floppy disk on the anarchist cookbook. Let's fucking do it. I'll make it tonight and we'll smoke it tomorrow." So I went to the shop and bought two or three bunches of bananas. I made less than the recipe. The recipe called for 15 pounds of bananas, which is quite a lot. I went for three bunches. I had the problem of what the fuck am I gonna do with all these bananas? Because it was the skins I was after. There was a dog that I was friends with. I mentioned this dog on a podcast about four years ago. His name was Jeff. And Jeff was the dog.
54:33 Blindboy Boatclub? He was just consistently, he had an erection all the time and he had this weird, we'd call it Jeff is taking out the lipstick. He had this weird dog penis that used to drip all the time. And there was something up, there was something wrong with Jeff. But you know, when you're that age and a dog is just your friend, you know, he's just your friend. It wasn't even my dog, it was one of the neighbor's dogs. He used to follow me around everywhere dripping penis. But he was my friend. He was half dash und. What, no, what are the, what are the ones with the fucking, um, the dots? Dalmatian, half Dalmatian, half pointer. Weird fucking dog.
55:17 Blindboy Boatclub? Always on a horn, but would eat everything and anything you gave him. Just would just eat it.
55:25 Blindboy Boatclub? So I gave Jeff
55:28 Blindboy Boatclub? three bunches of bananas, which was about twenty, twenty-four bananas, about twenty-four, twenty-five bananas. I peeled them all and Jeff ate twenty-five bananas and then probably went and vomited it somewhere. Now I had twenty-five banana skins. And the recipe called for me getting a knife and then scraping, getting those banana peels and then scraping off all the white shit. So I scraped all that into a fucking bowl. I don't know what my ma thought of it. I think she'd given up at that point. Scraped all the banana, the white bits on the inside of the banana peel into a bowl.
56:07 Blindboy Boatclub? About slightly larger than my fist. I spread all that out onto grease proof paper into the oven for like two hours until you're left with
56:19 Blindboy Boatclub? like a crinkly black substance, like.
56:25 Blindboy Boatclub? Like a sheet of paper, if you burnt it, real fine, crinkly, black shit. And then I put that into a bowl and I ground it down into a powder using a fork and put it into a plastic baggie. This was the anarchist cookbook recipe and this substance now was called banana dean. And it was as strong as LSD. And what you do with the banana dean is like you're rolling a joint. Get your tobacco and you sprinkle this banana skin dust into the joint. You roll it, you smoke it and you have a very powerful psychedelic experience. So I meet Christie the next day, we sit down, fucking roast and heat.
57:10 Blindboy Boatclub? We're not gonna move for the day and then we decide, okay, let's do it. Let's fucking do it. We're both kind of anxious, we're scared. We're like, shit, what if we trip balls and we don't come back? What if we have a bad trip? But we do it anyway, we roll the joint and we smoke it. And then both of us kind of start to convince each other that we're feeling something. I remember us putting our hands in front of our eyes as if we could see trails. But really, we're getting nothing. Then Jeff, the dog, comes over and sits beside us with his weeping dog penis.
57:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And Christie starts entering a trance-like state and closes his eyes like he's unconscious. And he's obviously tripping like mad now off these fucking banana skins. And I'm looking at him going, fuck, I'm not getting anything off this, but maybe, maybe he's getting something and this is what's about to happen to me. I start shaking him and I'm getting nothing out of him and I'm kind of freaking out a bit. Fuck it, has Christie gone unconscious? What if he has a fit? Then Jeff, the dog, comes over and then he starts licking Christie's, Christie's hand. Christie's not budging.
58:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Jeff does that jumpy, barky thing that dogs do when you play dead around them. And then whatever fucking maneuver he did, Jeff now starts trying to have sex with Christie's head. Lipstick out, immediately Christie jolts up, jolts up, because now he knows Jeff is trying to have sex with his fucking head. The only thing is...
58:55 Blindboy Boatclub? Said it smells like fish.
58:59 Blindboy Boatclub? Christie's awake now, he's not stoned anymore. Jeff, the dog trying to have sex with his head had woken him up rapidly and that just killed the buzz. And then both of us got on with our day and realised, this banana shit, this is bullshit. I, I must have made it wrong. I made it wrong, but this didn't work. This gave us fucking nothing. And Christie too had been exposed. He'd been exposed by, he pretending. You see, in those days, something that could bring great teenage shame upon you. It was the lads who would pretend that they were stoned or worse. Now I look back on it now with a lot more compassion. But we used to go bush drinking, where you'd drink in a hedge or on a roundabout or whatever.
59:41 Blindboy Boatclub? And there was always somebody who was scared, scared of getting drunk. So what they would do, or they'd be scared of going home drunk and getting in trouble, because we're like fourteen, fifteen. One lad would always disappear off and pour his can out and then come back pretending to be drunk. And if you got caught doing that, that was great shame. And Christie had clearly pretended to be tripping balls from the banana skins and then got exposed by Jeff when he tried to have sex with his head. Now if any of ye are, are supreme ten foot Declans and are familiar with my prank phone call work from the early fucking two thousands. If any of this is ringing a bell, yes, I had a prank phone call from about two thousand and four,
1:00:26 Blindboy Boatclub? where I rang up a psychotherapist and claimed that a dog had sex with my head. And that, and the dog got my mind pregnant with the notion of horses. So that prank phone call was directly inspired by that real incident with me and Christie smoking banana peels and Jeff the dog trying to have sex with his head. So it turns out the banana peel stuff was bullshit. What got me thinking about it this week was the hot weather.
1:00:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Something about the angle of the sun, or a smell in the air, or whatever, or this, I think it was the smell of really, really dry cut grass. It brought back that memory of, fuck it, remember, remember 2001, that summer? You tried to smoke the banana pills. Oh, fuck, yeah. And then, of course, I started thinking, fuck it, I must look into that.
1:01:14 Blindboy Boatclub? You know, that was a big thing. Smoking banana pills was an urban legend. It was there in the anarchist cookbook, and it was on the back of that Prodigy album. And everyone in school knew about it too, and everyone's older brother knew about it. Smoking banana pills was a thing before the internet. It was one of these urban legends that survived. Like Prince removing a rib to suck his own dick. It was one of those things that just survived in oral culture, because the internet wasn't around to say that this is false. So where, where the, the, the origin of bananas, banana pills are psychedelic drugs? It comes from 1968, I found out.
1:02:00 Blindboy Boatclub? It was a deliberate hoax, without getting into too much detail. Late 60s in America, you've got your counterculture movement, your hippies, your summer of love. But it wasn't all taking acid and smoking hash and having sex and listening to Jimi Hendrix. There was also hardcore politics behind it, in particular the anti-Vietnam war movement.
1:02:26 Blindboy Boatclub? Young kids in America were being drafted to fight in Vietnam, and there were huge protests to go, no, I don't want to do this. And these kids were radicals, and before the internet, they would get their, their information out there. You had the Black Panthers as well, the Black Panther Party, huge protests. A generation of young people born after World War II, who were going, no, we want something different. Before the internet, they would get their information out there amongst each other via the underground press. They would print independent papers and magazines and pass these things around via word of mouth.
1:03:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Around 1968, 69, the police and the FBI started to crack down on this behaviour because it was, it was leaning towards socialism, communism, unions. It was leading towards black American people and white American people gaining clash, class consciousness and realising, hold on a second, there's a system here in place and we should fight this system. So it became difficult for, for the police and the FBI, you can't arrest people for protesting. They, they would try and there was, oh, I think it was Chicago, 1968, where some students were shot, shot dead. Apologies if I'm wrong on that.
1:03:47 Blindboy Boatclub? But when the police would crack down on students and there was violence, this was bad PR. So the police are thinking, how do we crack down on these, these middle-class white students? How do we, how do we get them? Then the police start to notice, oh, fuck it, they're all smoking weed. Now cannabis was illegal. Cannabis had been illegal in America, I think it was from, from the, the 40s onwards. But it was around the hippie movement, the anti, anti-Vietnam War movement, when the police then started to enforce and arrest people for cannabis. They started to realise, can't arrest these fuckers for protesting, but they're all smoking
1:04:29 Blindboy Boatclub? weed, we can arrest them for that and that'll put the shits up them. So when the police started to arrest more and more students for smoking giants, arresting hippies for smoking weed and possession and giving them jail sentences, that's also where you get your roots of the legalized cannabis movement in the late 60s. There was one underground, underground paper called the Barkley Barb. This was 1970, I think it was. Actually, in 1970 was when the US, it made cannabis a Schedule One drug, which made it very, very illegal, up there with heroin. So if you're a middle-class white student and your parents have a few quid and now
1:05:09 Blindboy Boatclub? you get caught with a giant, now your life from here on in is quite difficult because you've been caught with a Schedule One drug. So that, the- The cannabis legalization movement starts and people are thinking, this is ridiculous. Cannabis is just a plant. It's a plant that grows in the fucking ground. I can grow it up in my back garden. So if you're telling me if I dry this and smoke this plant that just grows everywhere, I'm a criminal? That this will impact my, my employment prospects in the future? That I might go to jail? So the Berkeley Barb decided, let's put out a fake story. Also, there was a song in the charts. I think it was sixty-seven. You'd know the song. Mellow Yellow by Donovan. They call me Mellow Yellow.
1:05:54 Blindboy Boatclub? You'd know it. That song came out and the editor of the Berkeley Barb, this underground newspaper, decided, let's put out a recipe and tell everybody that you can dry banana pills and smoke them and it's like LSD. Let's put out this fake story and say that everyone is doing this. And the whole point of the hoax is they were trying to bait the police into making bananas illegal. If they could convince enough people to start trying to smoke bananas, then the police would start arresting people for trying to do it and then they'd start confiscating bananas. And if the police start confiscating bananas, then that exposes the absurdity of cannabis being illegal.
1:06:39 Blindboy Boatclub? So that's the roots of where that story came from. Nineteen sixty-eight, the Berkeley Barb. This is what takes me on to the anarchist cookbook, which was written in nineteen seventy. So the recipe for banana pills from that underground newspaper, which should have disappeared, that ended up in the anarchist cookbook and that's what solidified it in history. That's why it didn't go away, because now it was in the anarchist cookbook. The anarchist cookbook was a, a manual for radicals in the United States on how to wage war on the government. It was a recipe book of how to make weapons and bombs from everyday household items
1:07:23 Blindboy Boatclub? so that you could farm. Domestic terrorism, basically, against the US government was written in 1970 by a 19-year-old called William Powell, a very angry student, a very angry anti-Vietnam War protester, who had a look around and said, "This is what needs to happen. We need revolution, and it has, it's gonna need to be violent. So I'm gonna write the manual." And this manual became the anarchist cookbook. Now, where did a 19-year-old student, where did he get the information on how to make bombs, how to make sabotage equipment, booby traps, weapons? Where did he get this information?
1:08:06 Blindboy Boatclub? He just went to the library and read all the freely available US military training manuals. You can get all these online now. US military training manuals had information about how to make fucking bombs. William Powell recontextualized this freely available information and put it in his manual called the anarchist cookbook. He changed the context of information that's already out there. Even though to this day, the anarchist cookbook is not illegal, it's out there, it's published, you can own a copy of it. But if you look at its history, in America, if you commit a crime and the police find you to have a
1:08:48 Blindboy Boatclub? copy of this anarchist cookbook, the crime could be selling drugs, but if you have a copy of the anarchist cookbook, that crime can suddenly change to domestic terrorism. So, again, depending on the context, it's a very serious book to own. I have a copy of it. I, like, I don't gig America. I don't gig fucking America because I'm not risking that. The main reason is, I've mentioned it before, in 2019, I had a BBC series and...
1:09:19 Blindboy Boatclub? A team of me and a team of journalists, we, we, we made a replica of Trump's piss tape and uploaded it to the dark web. This was all done through BBC, cleared with lawyers, all that shit. We uploaded it to the dark web and it was taken down by definitely the CIA. So I'm on a list, so that's why I won't go to America. But throughout the years, the anarchist cookbook became this, this legendary manual, this hidden knowledge, this forbidden book. Now, on the one hand, a lot of American school shooters had copies of this book. Most people who had it just had it like me, just had it for curiosity. Someone tells you you can't own a book, you wanna fucking own it, you wanna find out what's inside.
1:10:02 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, it's highly relevant this week. Um, in Texas this week, there were protesters who were protesting against ICE. They were given massive sentences and they were sentenced as domestic terrorists as part of Donald Trump's crackdown on calling Antifa. He has decided that Antifa, which doesn't exist, like it's not an organisation that you join up, Trump has decided that Antifa is a domestic terrorist organisation and there was eight people in Texas sentenced between 30 and 100 years, 100 years in prison this week for ICE protesters. Did they kill anyone? Were they violent?
1:10:47 Blindboy Boatclub? No, they were made an example of and tried as domestic terrorists. A huge part of the evidence quote unquote that was brought against them to prove that they were a terrorist organisation is that they'd been printing zines, they'd been printing leftist zines. Some of these were just, were manuals about sexual consent. Another one was a zine about the history of, of witches. But anyway, eight young people. In Texas, we're sentenced from between thirty and one hundred years this week in a huge miscarriage, in fucking fascism. Alright, this is American fascism. This is what it looks like. That's what that is. It's the shit that people in the sixties were warning about. But none of them had any manuals that were as explicit as something like the anarchist cookbook.
1:11:32 Blindboy Boatclub? But when I went looking into William Powell, who wrote the book, some fascinating things started to emerge. And it started to explain my love and fascination with the book when I was a teenager. William Powell went on to become a teacher. He deeply regretted writing the book when he was nineteen because of, because it was being found amongst school shooters and things like that. He died in twenty seventeen. In twenty thirteen, he wrote to The Guardian and basically said, "Look, I regret writing this book. I'm not the publisher. I don't have a choice in saying that it should be unpublished. It's out of my hands."
1:12:13 Blindboy Boatclub? He said, "Over the years, I've come to understand that the basic premise behind the book is profoundly flawed. The anger that motivated the writing of the cookbook blinded me to the illogical notion that violence can be used to prevent violence. I had fallen for the same irrational pattern of thought that led the US military involvement in Vietnam and Iraq. The irony is not lost on me." Then it emerges that William Powell ended up,
1:12:39 Blindboy Boatclub? he ended up founding international schools that specialized in delivering education to children with dyslexia, ADHD and autism. The other book he published was published in twenty ten. It was about emotional intelligence for teachers. So this lad ending up, ended up becoming an expert in education for the neurodivergent kids. That hit me like a ton of bricks.
1:13:11 Blindboy Boatclub? Why when I was 12, 13, 14? Why was I obsessed with this manual of how to make bombs out of household items? Why did I love reading this? And I guarantee it too, because I have a lot of neurodivergent listeners. If you're around the same age as me, you probably had a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook too. Now, did I make any of this stuff in this cookbook? I had a crack at one or two things. Tried to make explosives out of bleach. I had a go at the napalm from the styrofoam, but 99% of the time, I just loved reading it. I loved getting home from school and reading this book that was forbidden.
1:13:56 Blindboy Boatclub? The important distinction is I had no badness in my soul. I didn't want to harm anybody. I didn't want to destroy property. I didn't want to bring sadness upon anybody. I didn't want to interrupt anyone's day. I wasn't angry like that at all. I was curious. But why is my curio— why bomb making? Why is that my curiosity? What the fuck is that about? I'm clearly a person who has a capacity to learn. I'm fascinated by information. I'm good at retaining information. I'm good at understanding information and explaining it. I was always that way.
1:14:40 Blindboy Boatclub? I was that way. In school, and I was the worst student in school. Failing fucking everything. By the time I was about 10, I was just written off. The worst and cast to the side in the system. Where does curiosity and ambition and drive?
1:15:04 Blindboy Boatclub? An intense focus, go. When you're that kid. Well, I decided at about the age of 11 or 12. Well, I can't do this fucking school shit. I know I'm supposed to be learning science, I'm supposed to be learning geography, but I can't pay attention. I can't do this. I now know it's impossible for me to learn in a classroom environment. It's my nervous system just will not allow it. Like, I can't learn from a, from a teacher, a human being, telling me information with their face. Because I'm autistic, so so much of the effort goes into, I'm talking to a human being. And thi- this bit is really fucking difficult.
1:15:46 Blindboy Boatclub? And I'm worrying about my body language and sitting still and reading their body language. So that information, that's not fucking going in. And I'm completely and utterly overstimulated by the fact that I'm in a classroom with so many human beings. So there's no learning happening here. My curiosity and passion had to be something I compartmentalized and did by myself at home on my own, where I could learn autodidactically. But because I was a child, my identity, I identified with being bad. I can't be good. I can't behave myself. I can't get good marks in school, no matter how much I try. The teachers keep calling me stupid, keep calling me bad.
1:16:29 Blindboy Boatclub? So at the level of maturity I had at that time, I had to identify with being bad. My self-esteem and worth came from being the baddest, being the most disruptive, the craziest, the one who's capable of anything. That, I got status from that amongst my peers, the whispers. Oh, he's a mad fucking cunt. He knows how to make bombs. He knows how to grow hash. He's a lunatic, he's like a mad scientist. That gave me status and self-esteem and identity and a feeling of worth, being the baddest. The anarchist cookbook is a, it's a, it's a science manual, a very fucking crude.
1:17:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Deeply wrong science manual, but it's full of information about chemistry. I remember reading about how to make the explosive from bleach and potassium hypochloride and potassium hypochlorate. It felt safe to explore my passion and curiosity and desire to learn about science. It felt safe to do this in a, in a space which aligned with my sense of identity. Why couldn't I just picked up your biology book? Why couldn't I just, your biology book was full of fucking science experiments, loads of them. If I can't do that, then I'd be a fucking nerd. I'm, I'm suppo-, I'm a, I'm bad. I don't give a fuck about that, what the teachers are telling me to read. Fuck them.
1:17:57 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm not reading the science book like I'm supposed to read. Fuck that. I wanna read this book, this forbidden book about making bombs, even though it's all just chemistry. My other book was the, the marijuana growers guide, which was, again, a book from the 1960s. It was from California. Ed Rosenthal, I think, was the writer. He was one of these 60s hippies and he had written the manual on how to grow cannabis. But this manual, it's a, it's a serious botany manual and I fucking devoured it. I felt safe when I read it. I felt happy, I felt regulated. I mean, what am I doing? I'm reading a manual about fucking botany, about how plants worked, about geotropism, photropism, sunlight photosynthesis.
1:18:42 Blindboy Boatclub? That's what the fuck I'm reading. But it, when the book is about growing cannabis and I'm 14, it feels safe because it aligns with my identity of being a misfit and being the baddest and being a little criminal. I, I think I told you the story before, but...
1:19:02 Blindboy Boatclub? I ended up, I sat, it was Jordan Junior, so I sat the agricultural science paper, which was not taught in my school. And I sat that paper and I got a hundred percent. And when I did that, I got called to the principal's office. Cause they're like, what the fuck? How did you get a hundred percent in a subject we don't even teach? My parents got called in, I was accused of cheating. Cause they're just like, we don't know how he did it, but he cheated here. And I couldn't tell him. Actually, it's this book here, The Marijuana Grower's Guide. I know fuckloads about botany and plants and plant science because of this book, but I can't tell ye, cause now I'm admitting to doing something illegal.
1:19:45 Blindboy Boatclub? And, and reading about William Powell, reading about the fellow who wrote The Anarchist Cookbook, and then seeing where his career went. It just opened up a lot for me this week. Like another quote from, from his article in The Guardian that he, he sent them in 2013, trying to distance himself from The Anarchist Cookbook. He says, "Two years ago, I co-authored a book entitled Becoming an Emotionally Intelligent Teacher. Although it's written for educators, the book serves as an implicit refutation of the emotional immaturity of The Anarchist Cookbook. But the premise is that all learning takes place in a social context, and that the teachers with a high degree of emotional intelligence
1:20:27 Blindboy Boatclub? construct relationships with students that enhance learning." That's what I was doing. I was learning, I was being curious. I was learning about fucking science, but that the social context for me as an autistic kid was very different. I had identified with being bad. So my learning and curiosity and ambition had to express itself within that context, cause that's what felt safe to my identity. Reading a school, I would have been embarrassed. Honest to fuck, to, to, to pick up my, my, I still have my Leaving Cert English book.
1:21:06 Blindboy Boatclub? At the age that I am now, a, as a published writer and as someone who's, my, my, my story's been turned into plays for the Abbey Theatre, I look at my Leaving Cert English book and the wonderful poems that are in there and the amazing short stories that are in there. And I go, oh my God, I can't believe I was in school and had the opportunity to learn this shit. You mean, I could have been 16 and I, I had the opportunity here to be reading Oscar Wilde at 16? I couldn't do it. I'd have been embarrassed, mortified. My identity, it was too far gone. I had identified with being bad. So to read the school textbook,
1:21:48 Blindboy Boatclub? I would have felt shame. I would have felt like a nerd. So my passion for learning went into the chemistry of how to make bombs, botany, growing cannabis. And even for music, it was, you know, my, my creativity and writing went into prank phone calls when I was in fifth year, which was illegal. It was illegal to record phone calls and producing songs about sniffing glue. I'm, I'm doing this, I suppose for, like, I, I had personal insight. I didn't know that about the fellow who wrote the fucking anarchist cookbook. I didn't know that he ended up being an educator specifically for neurodivergent kids, using
1:22:32 Blindboy Boatclub? emotional intelligence to try and understand what, what is the social context for learning for this particular individual. Like another time I'd really apply myself in school, I used to get detention an awful lot. I'd be in detention every week. Used to have to come into school on a fucking Saturday in your school uniform, which I used to wear like a badge of honour. I used to walk around Limerick City in my school uniform on a Saturday because that meant he's got detention. What a rebel. But when you had detention, one of the cruel things about it was you weren't allowed to do schoolwork. So you couldn't use detention as an opportunity, which is really fucking shit. Couldn't use detention
1:23:16 Blindboy Boatclub? as an opportunity to do the homework you were supposed to do. Instead, in detention, you had to write punishment essays. And the big punishment essay.
1:23:25 Blindboy Boatclub? And this shows you how, the lack of emotional intelligence within the school system that I grew up in, the punishment essay that we were given was,
1:23:35 Blindboy Boatclub? "Write a thousand words about the inside of a tennis ball." This was considered a pointless task. Like a Sisyphus type of fucking thing.
1:23:47 Blindboy Boatclub? Punish a student by saying to them, "You have to write about the inside of a tennis ball." That's not punishment if you're creative. It's the greatest thing you could possibly be asked. It's limitless. So every week I would write a new essay about the inside of a fucking tennis ball. I used to love it. And I got to be a little nerd. I got to explore my, my capacity and talent to be a creative writer. Because the context was, "This isn't schoolwork. This is punishment. So write your thousand words and enjoy it. You're still being bad. You're still disruptive." It's a punishment essay. And I used to adore it. And there was one teacher, and I used to love it when this teacher was supervising
1:24:33 Blindboy Boatclub? a detention. His name was Mr. Crowe, I've mentioned him before. He was an English teacher. And he used to love my essays about the insides of tennis balls. He used to read them out loud. He used to read them out loud to students in other classes. And I remember one time it got back to me.
1:24:56 Blindboy Boatclub? He was teaching one of the A classes. So the A classes were, they were the best students. Because in those days, the 2000s, the late 90s, very stratified, I don't do this shit anymore. But the best students were up in the A class. I wasn't, I was down in the lowest of the B classes. Class of about 13 kids. All neurodivergent dyslexic. Kids from troubled backgrounds, kids experiencing abuse or poverty. The unteachable. But anyway, he was teaching one of these A classes. And I think the students in there were talking shit about me.
1:25:34 Blindboy Boatclub? Whatever they were saying about me was quite negative. And he heard this and he turned to those students and he said, do you realise that that young fella has got the best command of English in this school? And everyone went quiet and that that got back to me, that story got back to me by a buddy of mine who was in the class. And when I heard it, I remember crying. I didn't know what I was, I cried because it was the first time I had ever felt safe be being fucking praised for schoolwork, even though it was punishment essays. I felt, I felt safe being praised for being seen as smart. I don't think there's any 13 year olds or 14 year olds listening to this podcast, but there's definitely teachers listening.
1:26:16 Blindboy Boatclub? I know there's teachers listening to this podcast, or parents who have teenagers that were like me. And I suppose you, to use what William Powell said there, the premise is that all learning takes place in a social context. So find out what that context is. Curiosity is curiosity. Passion is passion. Like I've now grown up to be a middle aged man who I open a window in my house and it becomes about ancient Persia, or I'm growing potatoes and now I'm trying to make house music out of them. I'm still doing the anarchist cookbook, except now I've made a career out of it. That's all I have time for this week. This podcast was half hot take, half phone call, drifting in between the two positions.
1:27:02 Blindboy Boatclub? Robert Doug, wink at a swan, genia flektor rain. I'll catch you next week. Dog bless.
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