The Science of Happiness with an expert Psychologist

Professor Bruce Hood is an experimental psychologist and philosopher , we chat about the science of happiness. I also speak about Autistic burnout Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:56Speaker 01

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• 1:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Prevent the hen from bending, you heaven-sent Kevins. Welcome to the Blind by Podcast. I'm currently on tour. I'm on tour. I'm in Scotland right now. I'm in a hotel room in Edinburgh, thankfully not underneath the duvet, because there's heavy carpets and heavy curtains in this room. So the sound isn't too bad, but it's slightly different to what you're used to. But since you joined me for last week's podcast, I've been gigging pretty much every single night and traveling in between. So these are very few and precious moments that I have to set up my equipment and have a little chat with you.

• 2:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm seven days, no, eight days into this tour, and I'm starting to experience the beginnings of autistic burnout. And I'm trying to explain what I mean by that. So every single, every single day of this tour,

• 2:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've been highly social. I've been speaking to, I've been having small talk with multiple people every day consistently. Cause that's, that's what's required to go on tour, to do a gig, to travel between gigs. There's no way to do that without consistent communication with people, with all different people, especially strangers. Now that's, that's a struggle for me, that's difficult for me because

• 3:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  I have to put on my, I, I have to deliberately engage in, in the performance of being a neurotypical person, of being a normal person, masking.

• 3:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  That might sound fucking nuts to you. For me, my entire life, just speaking to people, strangers, speaking to strangers is

• 3:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  difficult and uncomfortable. I've thought about ways of trying to explain this to neurotypical people.

• 3:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you ever want to do a massive fart? Do you ever have a huge fart, right? And you think you're on your own and you're ready to do this giant fart. And just as you prep yourself to do this giant fart, somebody walks in and tries to have a chat with you as you've just gotten ready to fart. Now the person's speaking to you and all you're focusing on is holding in this massive fart. It could be at work, a colleague comes in to tell you the photocopier is broken, alright, the photocopier is broken. So don't go near it because if you use it, you might break the photocopier. But all you're focusing on is this giant fart that's hurting your belly

• 4:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  and you're terrified of letting the fart out. And now this, what's supposed to be a regular conversation about a fucking broken photocopier.

• 4:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're not listening to your colleague talking about the photocopier. You have a cursory awareness. Someone's talking at me and it's about a photocopier, but I can't stop thinking about this fucking fart. And all you want is for the person. I can't wait for this conversation to be over so you can leave and I can do my massive fart. I really need to be on my own so I can do this fart because it's actually hurting me. And the longer you're talking to me, it's hurting me. And, and I can't wait for this conversation to be over because this fart needs to happen. The person leaves, you do the fart. Now you feel relaxed, you feel okay. And, and you can't remember, like you can't even remember what the conversation was about.

• 5:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because you weren't having a conversation, you were focusing on holding in that fart. That's what most conversation is like for me. Except I'm not holding in a fart. I'm thinking about my body language. I'm looking at the other person's body language. I'm thinking about my facial expressions. I'm thinking about whether I should smile, whether I should not smile. I'm thinking about when do I say hello, when do I say goodbye? I'm thinking about eye contact. Am I doing the right amount of looking into this person's eyes? And I'm very afraid of coming across as strange or weird or rude. And that's why like 90% of the time I just keep to myself.

• 6:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  90% of the time in my regular life, I try and spend as much time with myself as possible. So then I can be happy and be comfortable and feel okay with who I am. But when I'm on tour, especially seven days into it. I'm chatting to multiple people every single day. Chatting to lovely, kind, helpful, friendly, well-meaning people. And each time I do it for me, it's like I've got this giant fart, this huge painful fart in my belly. And When the conversation's happening, I'm really focusing on not giving away that this giant fart is inside in me, but really, it's like, I'm not really taking in most

• 6:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  of what you're saying to me. I'm not taking in most of this conversation because I'm focused, I'm really focused on my eye contact, my tone of voice, my body language, my posture. That's what I'm worried about right here. That's what I'm focusing on. I can't actually listen to your words because there's other shit going on here. And I'm really looking forward to when this conversation is over because this is, this is, this is a tough one. This is tough to do. This is difficult for me to do because I've just done 16 of these already today. And I sound like a bit of a prick. My internal voice there sounds like a bit of a prick, like I don't have time to speak to people, or I consider myself above people and don't want to chat to them. And, and that's not the case at all. It's,

• 7:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I have dyslexia. It's like having dyslexia, except instead of words on the page, it's hu- human conversation. It's one-to-one human conversation with strangers. The more, it's not really with people I know, the more I get to know a person, then the less I need to mask, the more comfortable I feel being myself. But when you first meet another human being, when, when you first meet a person, you have to slip into your first time meeting a person persona, which contains all the learned rules of propriety and manners and appropriateness. And all of this stuff that we, we simply pick up, we pick up from

• 8:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  society and the culture that we're in. For neurotypical people, this is instinct, just, just instinct. There's a brand new person, time to put on my new person persona, boom, straight into it. What's the crack? How are you getting on? Gone, back to private persona. For what, from where I am on the autistic spectrum, that's my area of difficulty. That's my area of difficulty. But I can do it. I can pull it off. I can pretend. I'm able to actually do that and function in society. Smile, eye contact, how's your mother? How's your father? How's the weather? But I can only do so much of it. And I'm seven days into it now. And I've, I've been doing it multiple times a day. I'm even having difficulty speaking now, to be honest.

• 8:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  I've been doing it multiple times a day, non-stop. And now, a week into it, I'm starting to experience the beginnings of autistic burnout. And the first signs of it in me are, it becomes more and more difficult for me to speak to other human beings. The other night before a gig, I just noticed I couldn't do eye contact anymore. I had to speak to a sound technician, lighting, tour manager, people at the ticket desk, security, and then my guest, my guest on stage, who I speak to before we go out on stage.

• 9:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And these conversations range from something longer to just a simple hello. But I noticed, I could, I could only do it if I wasn't looking anyone in the eye. So now I'm trying to speak to people and be normal, but my eyes are darting all over the room. Because that's the only way I'm able to speak to another person. I have to have my eyes everywhere. But then what happens is, in society, if someone isn't looking you in the eye, it means that that person is either lying or they have incredibly low self-esteem and they consider themselves to be so beneath you that they can't look you in the eye.

• 10:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, lack of eye contact instantly makes the other person feel uncomfortable. So now I'm forcing myself to look someone into the eyes. But because it's forced, now I'm intensely gazing into a person's eyes and that's intimidating them too. And then I come away from small interactions then, feeling terrible, feeling really bad, feeling intense shame. And then that, then feeling... Feelings of low self-esteem as a result of that. And then what happens is my capacity to mask, my capacity to appear normal,

• 11:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  which means maintain eye contact, keep an eye on my posture, not fidget,

• 11:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  stay on topic, these things, they start to disappear. And it becomes, it becomes more difficult for me to pretend that I'm not autistic. That's, that's my life, that's the life of most people who are autistic at, at the level that I'm at, which is level one, what used to be called Asperger's. Your life in, in public is pretending to not be autistic. That's what it is, pretending that you're not autistic so that you can just get on with life. I mean, what do I want? I don't want to make eye contact with people. I want to, if an interesting fact comes into my head, I want to say that in the moment. And I want to fidget my hands because that's who I am.

• 11:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's, that's who I can be around people that I know. I have a small group of people, family, who I can be myself around. Everyone else, I have to pretend I'm not autistic. And that's not just me, that's, most neurodivergent people listening, they can relate to some aspect of what I'm saying, that's what life is like. If you're neurotypical listening and you're thinking, fuck it, Blind Boy, fuck that, go out there into the world and fiddle your fingers and don't look people into the eyes and talk about the Norman invasion as much as you want. No, that's how you get bullied. That doesn't work. That doesn't work. That works around a very small amount of people who know you well.

• 12:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Autistic people mask and learn how to mask as a defence mechanism from bullying, shaming, being picked on, being pointed at, being laughed at, being ridiculed, not being taken seriously, being called out as different, weird, strange, eccentric, whatever the fuck, our entire lives since earliest fucking childhood. And as soon as you find yourself in the playground and people go, "Why the fuck is he talking about volcanoes?" This is a seesaw. We're focusing on up and down and that's it. We don't need to hear about volcanoes. So that's where I'm at. That's where I'm at seven days into this tour. And I have to, like, I'm familiar with this. I've

• 13:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  been dealing with this my whole life. It's just the past three years I've had a fucking name for it. What did I used to call this before I knew I was autistic? I used to call it depression. I used to call it anxiety. Like, I'm in Edinburgh right now. Tonight, I'm gigging Usher Hall.

• 13:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  About 13 years ago, I used to come to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. I did it three years in a row, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. And at the Edinburgh Fringe, I would gig 30 nights in a row. And for all of those 30 nights, I would be intensely social and speak to lots and lots of new people. And I'd drink, every single night I would drink, because alcohol, after two pints, that little buzz after two pints, if you drink alcohol after two pints, your inhibitions start to go and you stop caring as much about eye contact and the propriety of your body language.

• 14:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, a lot of neurodivergent people, without knowing it, will use alcohol as a crutch. And also, the rules change, the social rules change when alcohol is involved. When alcohol is involved, people don't need to deploy there.

• 14:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Proper, mannered, I'm meeting someone for the first time personality. When drink is present, you get to be a little bit more flamboyant or silly or whatever you want. When drink is there, all you gotta worry about is being a decent person, being a nice person and not being mean. That's not difficult. I'm a kind person, I'm a nice, kind person. And when I meet new people, I want to approach them with compassion and openness. That has fuck all to do with autism. The difficult bit is the appearing normal. The expectation and pressure of appearing normal, it's not as present when drink is flowing and music is playing.

• 15:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I used to go to Edinburgh years ago, I'd do thirty fucking gigs. And that would be in August, I'd come home in September. And then experience a type of depression until about January. I'd come away from Edinburgh feeling hopeless, useless. I'd be unbelievably forgetful, I'd forget to pay bills. I wasn't as diligent at responding to emails, doing my job. And I'd just get into this, this, this deep depression that would take six months to get out of. And I used to blame it on drink. I used to say to myself, of course you're like that. You, you drank alcohol every single night for thirty days when you were in Edinburgh.

• 16:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of course you're gonna have depression for six months. It was autistic burnout, it was autistic burnout and I didn't know, that's what it was. I'm speaking about this because I have a huge amount of neurodivergent listeners. Forty percent of the population is neurodivergent in some way, that's what they reckon. One in eight people in Ireland, I think, is autistic.

• 16:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think it's useful. It's useful for, for me, for me to be able to come on this podcast and, and to say these things that I'm feeling, almost like a journal, that's really helpful for me. And also, I'm hoping people who are fucking experiencing this are listening and then they feel a little bit more normal. Like, people have mailed me, people who are neurodivergent, and they'll hear me talking about burnout and they'll say, "Blind by, I'm so glad you put words onto that thing that I, I experience." And then that makes me feel normal, because I, I'm like, "Oh, fuck, someone else is going through this too. So what am I gonna do to try and protect myself from burnout?" So, neurodivergent people are different. It's not a fucking disease.

• 17:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's not a disease, it's brain pathways. So I can be quite different to another person who's autistic or ADHD, I can be quite different. Another person might get, what we're talking about here is overstimulation. I am highly stimulated by social interaction. I'm so stimulated by social interaction that it's quite overwhelming. And I need to limit how much I do of it. Some people are overstimulated by loud noises, by fabrics on their clothes, by bright lights. Not me, because I'm actually sensory seeking. I'm not, I'm not sensory avoidant, I'm sensory seeking.

• 18:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  I actually love bright lights and I love music and I love these, these type of things soothe me. And these things, they recharge my social battery. I'm like an iPhone that hasn't been charged. I'm an iPhone and I've been so busy for the past seven days that I haven't had time to charge myself. And now I'm at the bottom fucking bit of my battery. That's what's going on here. So I have to find a plug socket. I have to find a plug socket to plug myself into. And I know right now, I'm in fucking Edinburgh. And three minutes up the road from my hotel is the National Gallery of Scotland. This is one of the best art museums in the fucking world.

• 18:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I'm gonna put my headphones on and I'm gonna put them on noise cancelling and I'm gonna go up to that gallery for about an hour. And I know I get to stand and stare at fucking Titian and Velázquez and the paintings of fucking Paul Cezanne is up there. I get to stand inches away from paintings I've been looking at in books my whole life. I'm gonna silently go up to that gallery and I'm not gonna talk to fucking anybody. I'm not gonna look at anybody and I'm gonna walk around it for an hour. Just me and the paintings and music. And I'm gonna look at the paintings and go off into imagination land,

• 19:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  where my stories come from and where my hot takes come from and where my writing comes from. And that's my protection from burnout. That's the exact opposite, that's the exact opposite of having small talk with a stranger. It's being by myself in my own world, listening to music, looking at paintings, imagining things, thinking about things and not speaking to other people and being around people. The gallery's gonna be full of people, no problem at all, but I won't have to speak to anybody. And I'm gonna have to pick those moments in my week coming up. Like I've got a, I've got a six hour drive to York on Monday

• 20:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  and I'm just gonna have to really politely ask my tour manager, I'm gonna just have to ask and say, is it okay for this journey that I have my headphones in and I read Wikipedia? Because I have to preserve my voice. And that's the thing with, with neurodivergence.

• 20:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm not preserving my physical voice box. I have to preserve the part of my brain where social interaction comes from. That's what I have, I have to preserve so that, so that I can, I can pick and choose the moments where I'm deploying it and engaging it. I'm chatting about this just to, so for me to understand more what it means to be autistic. Cause I found out three fucking years ago, remember, even though I've been dealing with this my whole life. I'm putting words on language and shit that I've been experiencing my whole life. So I'm understanding myself better and then hopefully if you're neurodivergent, this helps you to understand yourself better.

• 21:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then if you're a family member or a friend of someone who's neurodivergent, then you can understand them better. Cause I don't have friends, like I don't, I've got plenty of people I could ring up and have a pint with, but I don't have any friends. I'm, I'm not, I'm not in any WhatsApp groups. So in your twenties, you've got friends groups, that's actually a bit easier. You've got groups of friends and you can go along to a gathering and have little chats here and there. Or you can go to the corner and say nothing, you can, you can sample conversations like they're tapas. But then in your thirties, that changes and friends groups disappear.

• 22:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you want friends then, you have to really work at it, you have to stick at it, you have to put in effort. I've got family, but like, I don't have.

• 22:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  The closest thing that I have to friendship are people who I work closely with, but I have no friends. I don't have a person that I socialize with and hang out with for the sake of socializing. And I don't think I've ever really had that, like just listening to people over the years. Oh yeah, I called around to this, this person's house. Why'd you do that? Ah, just to hang out, you know? What do you mean just to hang out? Ah, you know, just, just company. I don't understand that. I'm, I'm like, why would I possibly do that when I could be by myself reading Wikipedia? And also. You have to stay in contact with people to maintain friendships.

• 22:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  You have to stay in contact with people and just talk for the sake of talking. And none of that is, I don't like people, I don't wanna be around people. It's nothing like that. It is nothing like that. Also, what I wanna point out is, under neurotypical roles, to say something like, I don't have friends, that's usually like a type of a covertly narcissistic way to ask for attention. It's a way to, to ask people to feel sorry for you. No, like, I don't have close friendships because it doesn't particularly, it doesn't interest me. And if, if someone said to me, will you meet me for coffee on Tuesday?

• 23:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm most likely gonna cancel. I'm most likely gonna cancel that. Because as soon as I have to meet someone on Tuesday for the specific purpose of socializing, it becomes this, this massive task that I have to do next Tuesday and nothing gets done in between. It would fuck up my concept of timekeeping. It would massively get in the way of my routine and the things I want to do. And it's not, it's not social anxiety. I'm not afraid of going for a coffee. It's, it's task paralysis. It's related to that word I don't like, executive functioning skills. And it's, it's a neurodivergent trait, artistic people and ADHD people.

• 24:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Will you meet me next week for a cup of coffee? Meet another human being for a cup of coffee? Now, if it's, will you meet me next week to discuss a script for television? To discuss a new book that you might be writing, to edit some work? Can you meet me next week for work, for creativity? Not a fucking bother. We can meet next week. Can we meet next week for a cup of coffee? Just to shoot the breeze, just to socialize, to catch up? The emotional lord of that. Will, will, becomes like a blocking task. It becomes this giant task in the week and then nothing else gets done.

• 25:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause I've got this coffee that I have to have with a person where they wanna catch up and shoot the breeze. I'm gonna end up cancelling that cup of coffee. I'm gonna end up cancelling that cup of coffee. But my buddy James, who I write TV shows with, we gotta meet next week. We gotta discuss this script. We gotta go through this fucking done. It's happening. I'm there already. I can't wait for that creativity, ideas, fucking bring it on. I'd love to not be this way. It's a pain in the fucking hole. Similarly, can you come to a gig tonight and speak to a stranger on stage in front of 2,000 other strangers? Yeah, no bother, I can do that. If, if I had a friend, I'd be like, I might see you once a year. Is that okay? Maybe once a year.

• 25:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that's not how it works. That's not the social contract. You're expected to stay in contact with a person frequently. Go for coffee. Why? To, to discuss your day. The fuck could I do that for? I need to read about the Cambrian extinction event. So a, a quite a lot of autistic people, they choose not to pursue friendships. And I'm saying that because if, if you've got friends who are neurodivergent and you're neurotypical, don't take it personally if they don't show up to the party. If you're having a fucking party, even if it's your, if it's an important birthday and it means the world to you and your neurotip, neurodivergent friend doesn't show up. It's not that they don't care about you.

• 26:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  They probably are not, don't fully understand the gravity, the social gravity of what it means to not show up to a birthday party that you were invited to. Like I just stopped going to weddings like 10 years ago. I just stopped going to weddings, even if I was invited, cause I, I couldn't do it. A wedding, a wedding is, is an enjoyable, fun thing for some people. For me, it's, it's like holding in 90 farts. I'm trying to catch, I'm trying to catch the autistic experience in the moment and, and journal it in the hopes that that might be useful here on this space as opposed to.

• 27:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking radio stations. Blind Boy, we can tell it, what's it like being autistic? Blind Boy, we can tell it. Blind Boy's here to talk about being autistic. What's it like, Blind Boy? What's it like being autistic? And the fucking corporate media want to bring you on as an autistic person to describe the experience in ninety seconds and then take your words out of context and put it as a headline of an article that's behind a paywall just to piss off a lot of dads. That's why you'll very rarely hear me. Like, I get fucking called, I'd say, once every two weeks by the radio stations in Ireland to come and talk about being autistic. Anytime it's in the fucking news.

• 27:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  No, no, I won't do that because the platform that you're providing isn't safe. It's not safe and I don't think it helps autistic people. I only notice this shit when I'm on tour. When I'm on tour and I'm thrust into the sea of people and the sea of conversations and social interactions. When that happens, then I'm like, oh, fuck, yeah, I'm autistic. Most of my life, I'm just happily going about my day by myself with my thoughts and my interests, loving life, absolutely fucking loving life. I really, really love being alive. I'm a very happy person and above all, I adore this job.

• 28:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I fucking love this podcast. So I wasn't actually expecting to talk there for twenty minutes. I thought I was gonna give a tiny little intro to this week's podcast because this week's podcast is, it's a chat I had a few days ago with Professor Bruce Hood, who is a phenomenal individual, a wonderfully sound person, and I had great crack with him. He's a professor of developmental psychology at Bristol University. And usually with academics, with professors, sometimes I'm a little bit...

• 29:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  A little bit worried because sometimes academics who are in a very specific field, they tend not to deviate from that topic. They stay on topic all the time. But Professor Bruce Hood, Jesus Christ, I could bring up anything and he was quite happy to have a chat with me. His work is fascinating because he's a professor of psychology with a background in neuroscience and he's written a book about the science of happiness. He's really interested in magical thinking, in adults, the psychology of magical thinking, the psychology of what the self is, what the voice inside you that you consider to be you.

• 29:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  So me and... Check out his books. Check out Professor Bruce Hood's books because they're really phenomenal. And we had a banging conversation. I had this chat, I think it was last Saturday, and I've been editing the interview on my laptop while I've been travelling between gigs. And if you're a new listener, if you just stumbled across this podcast because you like the topic of it or you want to hear from Professor Bruce Hood, just be aware that I don't interview guests. I have conversations with guests.

• 30:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm not into the interview format where I sit back and just ask someone questions. There's plenty of that. I prefer to have unique conversations, unique conversations where both me and my guest are chatting and figuring things out. So anyway, here's the chat I had with Professor Bruce Hood in Bristol last... a few days ago, you glorious cunts. My guest is a philosopher and a psychologist called Professor Bruce Hood. Come on out, Bruce.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  How do you follow that?

• 31:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your work is absolutely fascinating.

• 31:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  The first thing I want to look at is, so you're a professor of psychology, background in neuroscience as well. And one area you're looking at is the science of happiness. What is happiness?

• 31:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  What I love about the areas that you look at is you also started off as a philosopher. So it's like you're using psychology to answer the big philosophical questions about the human condition.

• 32:00Speaker 03

  Indeed, indeed, because those are the questions which motivate me and get me out of bed in the morning or mean I can't get to sleep at night. The questions which are, were relevant, you know, 10,000 years ago and hopefully they'll still be relevant in 10,000 years from now. So I'm motivated by the kind of the big questions.

• 32:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Just a quick one about human beings, because you said 10,000 years ago. How long back can you go where people were walking around with the same brains as me and you?

• 32:28Speaker 03

  I would reckon at least, probably about 100,000 years.

• 32:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fuck.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, certainly the earliest records of the burials and that's where we can get a measure of their kind of, the artifacts that they left. The first jewellery, for example, is around about 90,000 years ago. So jewellery is a measure of aesthetics, if you like, it was used for purposes. I mean, there were, there were certainly humans doing, hunting much earlier than that. And they were working together and they're bringing down mammoths and stuff like that. But the aesthetics, the first jewellery and body adornments appear to be about AD 90,000 years.

• 33:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that when you start going, these are Homo sapiens, these, these, like, what does jewellery say to you? Is it, these people have a sense of self, these people have identity?

• 33:19Speaker 03

  Well, the translation of Homo sapiens is thinking man.

• 33:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  But I think that, I mean, they clearly were thinking and that they were cooperating. And they must have been communicating in order to sort of bring down a huge mammoth. But in terms of jewelry and aesthetics and art, I think that represents a different level of thinking, and that's the earliest that we can find. And then when you hit about 50,000 years ago, this is where you get an explosion in the record of artifacts that they were buried with. And you see symbolism, you see those booby dolls, you know, the Venus figurines with the enlarged, which must have been something to do with fertility. So they were obviously practicing ritual, they were practicing belief systems. And that to me is a kind of exponential level of understanding, as opposed to just hunting

• 34:07Speaker 03

  together. You know, chimpanzees can hunt together, but humans, by the time we get to about 60,000 years ago, are doing really complex things.

• 34:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's interesting too that we'd say so jewelry, figurines, like, that's art.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Art.

• 34:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one thing, because when we spoke backstage and this, you said that one of the, with all the work you were doing on happiness, that one of the things you found was that like Buddhism was one of the schools that kind of got it right, that you're finding with psychology that it agrees with that.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  And just there with the art, one of my favorite stories from mythology is, it's the one with Prometheus and Zeus and the creation of humanity. And I'm gonna fuck it up a little bit, but this is how we tell stories in Ireland.

• 35:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Prometheus and Zeus were like bored.

• 35:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Up in Mount Olympus, right? And they're like, "Why don't we make like a video game full of creatures like us for the crack? Why don't we do that for the crack?" And Prometheus is like, "Yeah, let's do it." And then Zeus is like, "I wanna do it, but I'm kinda scared." "What are you scared of, Zeus? What if they get smarter than us? What if we make this little world, this plaything of creatures that are like us, but they like get smarter than me and you and try to kill us?" So then they go and do it. Prometheus gives them fire, and giving them fire was the thing that made them make art. And when they made art, that's when Zeus freaks the fuck out. And he's like, "Now we gotta stop them." When he sees the little civilization,

• 35:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  the human beings, me and you, when he sees them making art, he's like, "No, we gotta stop it there." As soon as they make art, then they can kill us. And then, what did Zeus do? He gave a box to a woman called Pandora. There was a little woman living amongst the side he called Pandora, and Zeus gave her a box, knowing that these little creatures, this artificial intelligence that they've made, were mad smart. And he goes, "There's a box in there, you can't open it." And then she's like, "Well, I'm a fucking human, I have to open it." So she does open it. But when she opens it, what comes out is like, mental health problems. What comes out of Pandora's... But that's it. What comes out of Pandora's box is misery,

• 36:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  jealousy, fucking pestilence. Everything about the human condition that gives us pain is what comes out of Pandora's box. And that was like Zeus's code to limit these creatures from becoming powerful enough to kill him. So like, we're gonna... Because I'm just thinking, one day, because I'm freaking out about AI. Someone's gonna have to figure out how to give AI a panic attack. Seriously, though, that's what we're gonna be doing. The AI is gonna get really smart. And we're gonna be like, "Let's give it body issues." Yeah. Low self-esteem. It's true, though. But like...

• 37:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Different cultures, like how do you know what happiness is? How do you measure happiness? Is one culture unhappier than the other? Or who's the happiest and why?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  Well, we actually do, well, not I personally, but the World Happiness Report comes out every year. And I think just about every country contributes to it. And it's a very simple measure. And what they ask people to do is to imagine a ladder with 10 steps on that ladder. And the top of the ladder is a 10. And that's the best possible life you could live. And at the bottom is zero, which is the worst possible life you could live or imagine. And so they ask them where you think you are on that ladder. And every year, the same five countries come out on top. And it's the Nordic countries. It's Finland, you know, all of those areas.

• 38:10Speaker 03

  And they keep kind of switching for the top position. Norway's there occasionally, but at the moment, it's Finland. Now, the question is, what can you say is the best possible life? For some, that might be happiness or the emotional content of it. You see, it can mean different things to different people. And that's, I suppose, one of the reasons that they use that wording. Because happiness means different things to different people. For some, indeed, the word happiness and the way we research it is actually a broad spectrum of things. It means your emotions, but it also means a feeling of contentment, a feeling of moving forward, a feeling of progress. These are all captured in that. I actually, I remember getting an infom, you know, one of these graphs

• 38:54Speaker 03

  with all the words which we use for happiness. And it was ridiculous. It was something like 50 odd words, which all had this sort of positive valence, as it were. But in general, it's the emotional component. And that's sort of what we call a cognitive component, which is a sense of everything being okay. And that's what happiness is. But the way you measure it, you can't stick an electrode in the brain. You can't take a biopsy. You can't measure it with anything. It's basically to ask someone, how do you feel? So all happiness research is based on that sort of self-report.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  And that's the problem. Because the trouble with self-reports are is they're incredibly biased. That self-report you generate based on who you're comparing yourself to or where you think you should be. And therein lies the problem, because if you have unrealistic expectations about where you should be or you're drawing the wrong comparisons, then you're going to feel inadequate. And I think that unfortunately is part of the problem with the happiness research, that people are drawing the wrong comparisons, making the wrong sort of expectations. And you were talking earlier on about the fear of failure. I actually teach a whole lecture on that. It's an incredibly important point. A lot of my students avoid putting themselves in situations because of the fear of failure and they don't learn. They don't progress.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  And a lot of that is driven by this sort of inadequate or inappropriate comparisons of where they think they should be. So it's a major issue. I mean, I only really got into this research about six years ago because we were having a crisis at Bristol. And I changed my research. I normally work on, you know, deeper issues and child development and neuroscience kind of questions. But I turned it around entirely just to focus on happiness. Because really trying to teach unhappy students is painful. They don't learn. It's a really, really hard thing to do.

• 40:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm trying to avoid with the type of questions that you'd get asked if you went on TV, right? Because I know, but there's one I do want to know about, which is when I was a kid, I didn't have social media. And I'm so glad that I didn't have social media because it's the comparison thing.

• 41:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, obviously, I compared myself to my peers, but I didn't have a box that I could look into where I could see a few million peers from around the world. Do you know what I mean?

• 41:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Remember, like, there used to be this website called Bebo.

• 41:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  But social media was like a year old. And I had a Bebo page. And I started to notice what you had at the time was page views. So if you had a lot of page views and then your friend had more page views, they were a more popular person because it meant that more people were interested in their page views. And suddenly I found myself thinking all the time about why do they have more page views than me? What's this? And comparing myself and becoming really, really miserable. I'm old enough to remember not having that and then suddenly having it. And then all of a sudden having a comparison machine and being inescapably miserable because of it.

• 42:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, social media, it's something that's designed by billionaires. And they do want us to be, I don't want to say unhappy, but we do know that social media is about high arousal emotions, anger, fear, and that billions can be made from data because of this. So we do have machines that are not there to make us unhappy, but I don't know they're doing any good.

• 42:35Speaker 03

  It's really, it's a complex issue. It's a contentious issue. And I go backwards and forwards on it because I talk about the compare and despair phenomenon you're mentioning. When you ask the kids, and the recent survey came out just from the Pew Center, which do these big surveys. Half of teenagers find social media actually helps their relationships, they think. But half of them also think that it's toxic for others. But only one in eight thinks it's difficult for themselves. So it's kind of interesting. They can see that everyone else, or they're perpetuating this idea that it's really problematic. But they don't think that applies to them.

• 43:14Speaker 03

  So I, when you look at the big studies, the influence of social media is not as dramatic as everyone assumes.

• 43:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  So it has become a whipping boy. I think what's going on is that when you're immersed in a story about the problems of social media and mental health, people are just retelling that story again and again. So I think the court is out, to be honest, and that might be against popular opinion. Because at the moment, we're hearing this big thing about social media creating an anxious generation. That I don't think is proven to the extent that most scientists would accept. That said. We do know that teenagers are spending up to eight hours a day on this at least. So whatever they're doing on that, they're not doing normal interactions. So I think that that in itself is startling. And that means that they're not having the normal things that we evolved to do.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  There's communications, there's kicking a ball around the playground. So I think that's really the problem with social media. Not necessarily it's creating it.

• 44:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's what it's taken us away from.

• 44:17Speaker 03

  It's what it's taking us away from, which is the social connection. And for me, social connection is the secret to becoming a happier person. You asked me earlier about that. My own take on it is that we start off as very self-centered little children. We have to become cooperative. We have to become socialized. We have to learn the rules of engagement and how to communicate and the theory of mind and all these abilities to become socialized. And that's why we have one of the longest childhoods of any animal. If you think about proportionally, we spend, you know.

• 44:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 44:49Speaker 03

  It's an enormous amount of time in childhood. Why? It's not education. Education is recent in our evolution. It must have been something else. And I think it's about being socialized and becoming a member of the tribe. And so we spend all that time doing that. And when you take that away, because you've introduced, you know, a device which is designed and is designed to capture your attention, then that really is a problem, in my opinion, because it's moving faster than our capacity to adapt it. That said, I'm optimistic. Humans are incredibly, you know, flexible, we're adaptive. I think we'll get through it. AI, on the other hand, that has me really worried.

• 45:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's freaking you? Because I wanted to ask you about AI. Like, what is it that has you worried?

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know if you've used it, but it is.

• 45:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, the fact that AI can become your friend really quickly?

• 45:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, so AI, you know the history of AI.

• 45:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't know the history of it, no.

• 45:46Speaker 03

  Well, interesting, the first chatbot was a Regerian therapist. It was a guy.

• 45:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, yeah, Adam Curtis did that in his last documentary.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  Right, so back in 1967, he wrote a little program. Called Eliza. Which was a program which in Rogerian psychotherapy, all you do is just ask the question back. You say, so blind boy, tell me, why do you feel this? And you just, you repeatedly ask a question back to the, to the client. And that process of reiteration, they open up and they go deeper and deeper into what the basis of their problem is. So it's really quite straightforward. All he did was he wrote a simple program which just repeated your question back to you. And they all knew it was a program, but the, the guy invented, came in one night to find that his secretary was on the chatbot. Undergoing her own psychotherapy using the, the program. So it was originally designed as a, as a psychotherapist. Now, of course, it is used as a psychotherapist.

• 46:37Speaker 03

  You go into chat G P T, you can actually have a kind of in-depth conversation with A I.

• 46:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you seen so very recently, the past six months? They're caught in it. Chat G P T induced spiritual psychosis. Have you heard of that?

• 46:51Speaker 03

  No, but it seems alarming.

• 46:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  So. People with a tendency towards psychosis.

• 46:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 46:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Are asking, so they're.

• 47:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  They're not in the right frame of mind. So they might ask a question such as.

• 47:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think the fella who was on the radio was talking about me specifically. And then chat G P T says, yeah, I think so too.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But Pete, it's, it's people who are experiencing psychosis and, and delusions. The chat G P T is there as a friend who's reinforcing it. And it's something that's emerged that no one predicted and they're very worried about it.

• 47:31Speaker 03

  It's pernicious. I don't know how many of you have had this experience where you've been talking to someone. And then you go on to your, or you've been talking out loud and your Alexa has been listening in. And then you go on to do a search and suddenly you find that what you were talking about has been thrown up as, as in your algorithms. So they are, that you're, that is being processed and sent back to you. So that is not entirely psychosis. It's actually quite accurate. We are being monitored. So I am, I'm worried about that. I, I'm worried about the kind of existential issue about what happens if you suddenly have a technology which takes away the need to learn. Because that's what's happening in higher education.

• 48:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's why I've, so. I stopped using chat G P T. I used it a little bit at the start. Because I could feel it taking over a very important part of my brain. And what, what I mean by that is. When I'm writing a podcast. What I'm always looking for is connections, connections. I'm handy at seeing connections that don't exist. And when I was passing research on the Chat G P T, asking it questions that I should. I'm asking Chat G P T questions that I should be asking my own, myself. It's just, it's like the link stops. My creativity, where ideas come from, stop because I've offloaded it to Chat G P T.

• 48:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I went and get the fuck away from me. But like I could tell in the same way that I can feel. I don't know as my memory as good as it was because I don't need it to be that good. I've got everything in my fucking phone. I don't have to, I used to be the person who, people used to ring me up, up on the phone wanting to know facts. Seriously, before the fucking internet, I was that guy when I was a teenager. Someone would be having a conversation about volcanoes and what are you going to do? There's no fucking internet and they give me a shout going, yeah, really useful part of society. And then the fucking internet comes in and I'm not that guy anymore. What I am, I suppose, I've got this podcast, but like, that, that was my, I'm autistic, by the way.

• 49:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that was my, actually, that's what I wanted to fucking ask you about. I saw you mention, you mentioned it there and you mentioned it before when I was looking at you on the internet about. When it comes to happiness, the importance of social connection, right? And for me as an autistic person, that was the one where I was wondering, where do autistic people fit in there? Because me specifically, if I speak to too many people, I get, I get burnout.

• 50:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  So like this tour, I'm going to be speaking to a new guest every night. I'm going to be speaking to a bunch of people backstage. When this tour is finished in 14 days, I'm going to have to really, really mind my mental health. Because if I don't, I lose executive functioning skills. And that for me is my experience of autism. Lots and lots of communication and socializing for me as an autistic person, it's kind of exhausting. It's strange.

• 50:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I find meaning and happiness in isolation, but I do need it. I definitely need people.

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because Covid was no crack. I can't go full hermit.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 50:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  I need a little bit of people. But actually, this is a strange one. So this is my experience of, of.

• 50:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  As an autistic person, and the social contract doesn't allow for this, do you know what I actually need? I want to go to a party or a pub and to be around people but not have to speak to anyone.

• 51:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Seriously.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  No.

• 51:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  I fucking love it. I go to the gym frequently and I've been doing it since I'm 14. And I'm like, what is it I love about this place? Okay, I like the exercising. What I love about the gym is it's socially acceptable to be in a room full of people, speak to nobody and wear headphones all the time. And it's actually weird if you talk to a stranger.

• 51:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  So the gym is actually a brilliant space for autistic people. It's the rules are reversed.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I went, holy fuck, that's why I like the gym. Today in the art gallery, I fucking loved it. I'm around art, I'm looking at art, headphones on, don't talk to people. That's actually considered weird. So I find all these spaces where I get to be around people.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  But not have to do the small talk which scares the living shit out of me.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean?

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm not that different, by the way. And actually, if you look at academics, very often they're on what I used to call the spectrum. They haven't gone necessary for a formal diagnosis, but it's very common. I, for example, and I know there's some colleagues in here because they text me earlier that they're coming along. So this is a little awkward, but I mean, I am.

• 52:18Speaker 03

  Just public disclosure, I'm well recognised as someone who's pathologically awkward. It's actually in my first book, I described my inability to do that. I'm fine in front of a couple of thousand people, but you put me in front of a couple of.

• 52:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking hell, I'm the exact same.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I find that, so I don't have two Ts necessarily because I can't stand the pregnant silence or the pause when nothing's being said. So I always kept talking too much and they never got to say anything. So.

• 52:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  And have you ever.

• 52:48Speaker 03

  They never got to tell me their problems because I'm just talking all the time.

• 52:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Have you ever pondered your possible spectrum-ness?

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I have, yeah, yeah, I have. And, uh, yeah, I'm up there, but, um.

• 52:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  And why haven't you gone for diagnosis? You just don't think it's, it's?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  I, I don't think it's useful for me.

• 53:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm hmm.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Um, I, I'm somewhat, I, I'm concerned about the over diagnosis that's going on at the moment.

• 53:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 53:12Speaker 03

  Um, I think that if it's something that's important to you and it provides comfort for you and it, that's fine. But there are, in my opinion, unforeseen consequences of the explosion in neurodiversity.

• 53:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  So for, for me, so that, here's the only reason for me that, like, I would have loved it in school.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 53:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause I, in, in Ireland, I don't have, um, what's called a leave insert. And the leave insert is like, your A levels are GC, GCSE.

• 53:39Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 53:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was a smart kid who loved knowledge and didn't get to complete school. And, and that was fucking shit because then I couldn't go on to third level. I had to wait till I was a mature student.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 53:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I would have loved it then. Like, I'm trying to figure out how useful it was for me now to get the diagnosis. I, I, I got the diagnosis so that people would be nicer to me.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's literally that's it because my job is in, also to, to, to, I, I was just like getting into my late thirties. And people were going, what the fuck are you doing with a bag in your head, man? And I needed, do you know what I mean? And it was like, great, I can justify, cause the thing is with the bag, like, I've been wearing this for years, but, but after getting the di, it was actually a huge part of my diagnosis because when, when I went to the psychologist, the psychologist was like, what's your job? And I'm like, well, you know, I go up and do gigs and, uh, I'm on TV and shit like that. But I wear a plastic bag on my head so no one recognizes me in the street. Sorry, what? I'm sorry, what?

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that was a huge part of diagnosis, uh, not wanting any type of recognition or fame or going through that level of trouble.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  To be like, no, literally, I wear the fucking bag because I wanna be on TV and write books and do things I like. But I definitely don't want anyone to speak to me the next day in the coffee shop. So I wear the bag because of that. And he goes, that's fairly artistic, sir. So that was one of the things for my diagnosis, but. The other thing that I find with my autism is eccentric behaviour.

• 55:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 55:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  I am quite eccentric and I don't know when I am and I'm not being eccentric. And it really causes a lot of shameful situations, public embarrassment, publicly embarrassing things. Like, I speak about it a lot on the podcast, like, fucking hell, I was dying my hair. So I work in an, I work in an office, right? Well, I work in this giant fucking office building with accountants and solicitors and liars. But like, that's where I write my books and record my podcast, but I don't tell them that. I tell them I'm a fruit seller. It gets more autistic as it goes on, doesn't it?

• 55:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  So that's my life. I don't wear a bag in my head. I pretend to be a fruit exporter in a giant office. And that's where I write my podcast. But I'm going grey, so I dye my hair right underneath the bag. And one day, I dyed my hair, right? But then got distracted by a very interesting article and then forgot that my hair was dyed. But then I was thinking about the article so much and I started rubbing my face and rubbing my hands together. And fucking accidentally walked into a full canteen, like, blackface, like. And this was only like a month ago. Do you know what I mean? And people were just like, what the fuck is this?

• 56:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then everyone's like, it's the fellow who sells the fruit exporter.

• 56:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like, I know it's funny, but like, that's my life. I fucking, and I had to come out of that like, oh my God, how embarrassing. That was so embarrassing. And the hair dye, it took about two days to get off my face, couldn't leave my gaff.

• 56:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't want to do shit like that. But like, the, like, what had happened there was, I'm dying my hair, that's fine. Then the special interest kicked in. The article was so interesting, so engaging, that just 100%, this is what I'm doing. And now I'm forgetting about everything and going back into normal life, covered in black dye. And I want people to know I'm autistic because of that shit. That's a little get out of jail. If someone comes to me and goes, why did you walk into the canteen in fucking blackface? I can go, I am autistic and here is exactly how it happened. And I'm really sorry about that. Something like that happens once a month.

• 57:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fucking, three weeks ago, I got a, I got a chest infection, right? And they gave me this antibiotic. And the antibiotic, it was during a heatwave in Ireland. And the antibiotic was the one antibiotic where you could not go out in the sun. So there's a heatwave, so I'm like, fuck, what am I gonna do? In Ireland, you don't have like flowing shirts like you have in fucking Panama. I'd never had to think of what do you do when it's too sunny and you have to go out? So I had a kimono that I bought during the pandemic. So I put on a fucking kimono and these mad sunglasses and was then running between shadows in the middle of Limerick City, like a vampire in a kimono.

• 58:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then people stare at me and then I go, oh yeah, that's what, yeah, this is mad. This is fucking insane. But that's the shit that I get into those situations with autism. So that's why I came out and said it. But regarding the appropriateness of diagnosis, I know exactly what you're saying in that here's the struggle I've had since getting diagnosed. Now that I'm autistic, my fucking algorithm knows that I'm autistic. So I can't go near Instagram or TikTok without getting all these autistic people. And now I'm going, oh, should I do that?

• 58:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what I mean? So now instead of being, the biggest challenge of my autism was that it changed my identity and my sense of self. And trying to maintain who I am without going, now I'm autistic and going, should I be that way? Should I be that, do I need to be more autistic? And the thing is, is that it's a spectrum and I can meet an autistic person who is completely different to me and their expression of autism is completely different to mine.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  And that's it. And that's, that's the point, that we are all peculiar and we all have our oddities. And I think the diagnosis is very helpful in your case and for many others, where it makes.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  It makes, it provides, it's not just an excuse, it actually provides meaning. It kind of explains things. And I think that's, I've got no problem with that. It's when it's used and exploited. You know, if I go on Facebook, I'm getting sold all sorts of things to try and change my brain stimulation.

• 59:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 59:50Speaker 03

  And I don't know why, and it's because I've been looking at things intensely. So yeah, it's somewhat concerning. The waiting list now is three years. There's 200,000 people on the NHS trying to get a diagnosis. So the sudden explosion has caused problems.

• 1:00:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we went over our little interval time. You people need a pint and a piss. And we're going to be back out in about 10 minutes, all right? Doug, bless.

• 1:00:16Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:00:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, let's have a little, let's have an Ocarina pause here. Let's have an, I really enjoyed that chat with Bruce. Let's have an Ocarina pause before we get to the second half of this chat. I don't have an Ocarina with me. I didn't bring an Ocarina with me on tour. What I do have is this hotel, this hotel pen that I'm going to click. I'm going to click this pen, you're going to hear an advert for something, okay?

• 1:00:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  Terrible acoustics in this room, very poor. Postman, postman, postman.

• 1:01:02Speaker 00

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• 1:01:59Speaker 05

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• 1:03:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Pause, man.

• 1:03:10Speaker 07

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• 1:03:37Speaker 08

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• 1:04:08Speaker 05

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• 1:04:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Awful, awful acoustics here. I've got a duvet over my head as I record this to improve the terrible acoustics in this hotel room. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page. Patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. If you like this podcast, if you listen to it every week, if it brings you mirth, meri ment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly via the Patreon page. This podcast is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. It's how I pay my rent. It's how I can go on tour. It's how I can go off on tour.

• 1:05:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's how I can, I can be a full-time artist. I can be a full-time artist as my full-time job. The thing that I love, the thing that I'm good at is my full-time job because this podcast is directly supported by my listeners. 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 that, don't worry about it. You listen to the podcast for free. You listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. I don't have any, any tiers on Patreon.

• 1:06:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you go onto the Patreon, you don't get any special treatment. Everyone gets the exact same podcast. It's a model based on kindness and soundness and it's been working for me for the past eight years. So thank you to all my patrons. Patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. And try and, if you're joining up, don't do it through the app on the Apple iPhone because Apple will take 30%. Do it on a browser, please. Also. It just means I'm not beholden to advertisers. Advertisers come into podcasts and all of a sudden they want more listeners. They want it to be viral, they want it to be shareable, they want the podcast to be controversial.

• 1:06:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  They want you to, they want your podcast to end up in the newspaper. They want you to platform guests just because the guest is famous. Fuck all that. I wanna make the podcast that I'm genuinely passionate about each week. That's what I wanna do. That's the only thing I wanna do. That's because of, that's because this podcast is listener funded. A listener funded podcast can do whatever the fuck it wants. It makes content for the listeners. Any gigs? I suppose tonight, this is going out on Wednesday morning. Tonight, I'm in London at the Troxy. That's sold out. But this week, I'm in, I'm in Bexhill on Friday and I'm in Norwich on Sunday.

• 1:07:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there might be a few tickets left for those, maybe. They're almost sold out. There might be maybe five or six tickets left for both of those gigs. Chance it, fuck it. And then I've no gigs until September. I'm gonna be in Derry and I'm gonna be in Vicker Street. And I get July and August to be a big autistic cunt by myself. Just drop my pen on the floor there with the awful fucking acoustics. Terrible acoustics. Postman. Um, no listeners there. I'm not, I'm not sporadically shouting the word postman into the ether.

• 1:08:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, the word postman is, it's a word that I use to test the acoustics of microphones and rooms. Because it's got a P, an S and a T. And it's got an O in there, so you get your lungs behind the O. Postman is, it's just, it's a good word for testing microphones and the acoustics of a room. It's better than one, two, one, two. No. Postman. Much better. So just so you know that there's, there's a reason I'm doing that. All right, let's get back to the chat there with Professor Bruce Hood of Bristol University.

• 1:08:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Another area that aside from happiness, right, is you look at magical thinking, especially in adults. How do we define, like, what is magical thinking?

• 1:09:03Speaker 03

  Okay, so I used to believe that you could bend things with your mind. I watched Yuri Geller back in the seventies and eighties, and I wanted to go to university to learn how to use my mind to control other people and bend things and time travel. I was a complete believer in all of that stuff.

• 1:09:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wow.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Well, who wasn't then? I mean, he was all over the place and you could see him doing it with keys and it was incredible. And I discovered his whole bullshit, which was unfortunate. But then I discovered the power of the mind and I got really interested in, you know, consciousness and all the sorts of things we take for granted. And that's why I became a psychologist.

• 1:09:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  What do you mean, like, did you look at those, the CIA experiments they did with?

• 1:09:52Speaker 03

  The STAR program, yeah.

• 1:09:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. A menace there at Goats was the other one that John was.

• 1:09:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  That's right, they did. They invested twenty million dollars in teaching people to use their psychic powers.

• 1:10:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  To astral plane.

• 1:10:03Speaker 03

  To astral plane, to kill people at a distance and all that sort of thing.

• 1:10:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you ever do one of those meditations, the hemisync meditations, though?

• 1:10:08Speaker 03

  No, what's that?

• 1:10:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, the CIA did this, so they did this program where basically, they'd heard the Russians were doing it. So because they heard the Russians were doing it, the CIA were like, well, if we heard they're doing it, we have to try and do it at least. Can you give us like twenty million dollars to do it? So they'd developed a type of meditation which can induce an outer body experience, and then the person astral planes to Russia and then looks at nuclear bombs.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:10:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  Right?

• 1:10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  But what was interesting about, like, that was all bullshit, but what was interesting about it is that the CIA had a team of scientists and their job was basically, can you do a report and tell us what reality is?

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:10:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  And that was really cool.

• 1:10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because it was about human consciousness and things like that. But they did also develop a meditation called the hemisync meditation, which you can do on YouTube, and it uses certain sounds. And I'm like, oh, fuck it, I'll give it a go. And I gave it a go, and then I got that feeling you get when you're on a roller coaster, and it was literally like my body went to the jump out of it and I went, fuck this. So whatever it does, it does. I'm not saying something supernatural happened.

• 1:11:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  But it freaked the fuck out of me and I got, I got out of it and went back to my regular breathing meditation.

• 1:11:26Speaker 03

  I did, I did the Gansfeldt State.

• 1:11:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's that?

• 1:11:29Speaker 03

  Oh, the Gansfeldt State is where you play white noise and you have diffuse light. It's like altered, you remove all sensory input.

• 1:11:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  LSD for people who are scared of taking LSD.

• 1:11:39Speaker 03

  That's right. Yeah, yeah. And that really does actually create altered states of consciousness. They made a film about it, but yeah, it's called the Gansfeldt State. So I did that.

• 1:11:48Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you're not deprived of oxygen there or anything?

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  No, no, it's just if you take the, the interesting thing about the brain is it's always seeking out stimulation. And that's why we see patterns all the time and random noise. If you listen to random noise, you'll soon hear voices and anything.

• 1:12:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  You think you hear ghosts and things, yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that's actually an interesting phenomenon that people see faces and hear voices and all that. When, when the, when the sensory information is ambiguous or very distributed, you start to put patterns there. So that's what's going on in the, in the Gansfeldt State. But anyway, getting back to the, the consciousness thing, I kind of was really interested. But I'd never lost my fascination with why we want to believe in supernatural things. So for me, I was really, I knew there was no evidence for it anymore because it had been studied very thoroughly. And, and there's still people who still study this stuff, but you know, the, the consensus of opinion from conventional sciences, unfortunately, there isn't anything there at the moment.

• 1:12:44Speaker 03

  But that doesn't remove for me the fascination about why do we believe in all these things? And why are they so universal? And why is it good?

• 1:12:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  So do you mean ghosts?

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so for me it's.

• 1:12:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  What about aliens? Cause they could be real.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  They could be real. So I don't count them as supernatural. I put them in the same category as conspiracy theories, which are plausible or possible, but not, not unnatural.

• 1:13:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then it's like, what if, cause there's a lot of conspiracy theorists who are like, the world is actually run by interdimensional shape shifting lizards.

• 1:13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I meant.

• 1:13:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  We know who we're talking about there. The ex goalkeeper.

• 1:13:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. David, yeah.

• 1:13:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like, that's a li- that now is magic of thinking, I would reckon.

• 1:13:27Speaker 03

  Well, you've actually made a really interesting point, because what we consider supernatural now may not be in 10 years' time. So I was speaking to David Eagleman, who's another neuroscientist. And he's interested-

• 1:13:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  Not that one. It just happens to be a neuroscientist, and it sounds like David Icke. It sure is not David Icke in a wig.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  No, it's David Eagleman. Sure. I don't know if my lawyer's listening. But basically, he, I mean, there is a field of research looking at brain-computer interface. And it's entirely plausible that you could build sophisticated analysis systems which could read brainwave activity, and they could be transmitted to you at a distance. So in a sense, telepathy could be possible. But at the moment, without all that interfacing, if you think you have telepathy, that falls into the category supernatural.

• 1:14:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  But like, yeah, if you showed an iPhone to an Anglo-Saxon, they'd get a heart attack.

• 1:14:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true.

• 1:14:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you remember a cartoon called Inspector Gadget?

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  Yes, of course.

• 1:14:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  In Inspector Gadget, the girl in it, she had a book with a screen, and it had all the information in the world in it.

• 1:14:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wikipedia on a phone.

• 1:14:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I used to look at that as a kid going, "Oh, my God," and now it's real.

• 1:14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, Arthur C. Clarke said that any sophisticated technology is indistinguishable from magic. And so that's the point, that it could be possible.

• 1:14:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, sure. Actually, yeah. The Brits did that when they were colonized in Africa. Seriously, do you know about the use of magicians for colonization?

• 1:14:54Speaker 03

  No, tell me about it.

• 1:14:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when, I don't know, so it was the Brits.

• 1:15:01Speaker 03

  Again.

• 1:15:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  When Africa was being colonized, right, it was like, we're talking maybe 1860. So they were going around in- into the middle of Africa. And they only had so many soldiers, and they were meeting tribes of people who were not as technologically advanced as the British. But there was lots of them. So the British were going, "How do we conquer this village?" So they actually hired, I don't think it was Houdini, but that they hired famous magicians to come down to Africa. And one thing they would do would be- The British would come in, there's maybe sixteen of them, they're the redcoats. And they go into the village, there's a couple of thousand people. And they do the Excalibur thing.

• 1:15:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  So they would get a stone, and in the stone is a sword. First they'd go to the village, give me your strongest man and get him to pull this sword out. And the strongest man from the village would come, and not a hope. Then they'd get the weakest British soldier, he'd go up and just put it out. But there was a magician there with a magnet. So they would use literal magic tricks as a way to colonize. And then the people in, who are in the village go, well, we're not fucking with these guys because they're space aliens. They have, they have magic. What they've just done there is clearly magic and we don't know what that is. So we're terrified to resist. And that's an example there of technology being perceived as magic if no one has seen it, you know?

• 1:16:34Speaker 03

  Well, indeed, the conquistadors as well is another example that they brought over.

• 1:16:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  The Mayans used to think that a conquistador on a horse was one animal.

• 1:16:43Speaker 03

  Oh, right.

• 1:16:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  They, yeah, if they, because horses did an existence in South America. So when they saw a human being on a horse, which is fair enough, you just went, what the fuck is that entire thing? Yeah, so they're like, I'm not touching that, I don't know what the fuck that is. Why would they assume it's a man on the back of a horse? They just, they didn't ride the back of animals there, they'd llamas. Go on. What? That's, that's true, I didn't pull that out of my arse. That's in a book called Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 1:17:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Great book. So magical thinking. It's not conspiracy theories because that's plausible. So it's like ghosts or fairies.

• 1:17:31Speaker 03

  Ghosts, spirits, energies, fairies. I mean, energies is another hard one as well because obviously there are many parts of the universe we can't perceive directly. But when you evoke an explanation which would require a new kind of energy, then that would be falling into, which is not recognized by conventional science. That starts to get into the realms of. But I think, I think premonitions is the one I like the most. This is where you think your great auntie's gonna, you know, gonna die and then you wake up the next morning. She has died, so you say, well, I definitely had a premonition. But premonitions, of course. Are coincidences.

• 1:18:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we tend to, so I would not consider myself to be someone who's prone to magical thinking. I tend to challenge it.

• 1:18:13Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:18:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  But around when my dad died.

• 1:18:16Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:18:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Then around when I was experiencing grief, then I was having a little bit of magical thinking. Like.

• 1:18:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Um, when his coffin went down, the sun shined.

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I'm just convinced that's my dad doing that. And now I go, probably not, it might have been a cloud.

• 1:18:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  But at the time.

• 1:18:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Full on, when I'm experiencing grief.

• 1:18:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  I believed that and I wanted to believe it, you know what I mean?

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, a personal anecdote here, my, my father-in-law, my late father-in-law was a brain surgeon.

• 1:18:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:18:46Speaker 03

  And his wife died very early and he had many years' experience working on the brain and all sorts of states of mind. And he swore that he would still see his dead wife, uh, months after she'd gone. So, and that's actually a really, really common phenomenon. The explanation is, is partly that you have such a strong representation or memory for someone that it's, it's the brain tricks itself into sort of re- recreating that experience. So I, I'm not, I don't, I don't mock anyone who has these things. I think it's really important to recognize that these are just manifestations of an interesting kind of mind, as it were.

• 1:19:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Cause that was, I was afraid of asking you these questions because, like, e- even people who are into horoscopes, right?

• 1:19:33Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:19:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's not my bag, but if someone's into that and it's working for them, I'm not gonna be like, I'm not gonna shit on their, you know what I mean?

• 1:19:41Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah.

• 1:19:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Do you know what I mean? I, and the other thing as well, I speak loads about Irish mythology on my podcast. And, and the reason I do it and my, my interest in not only Irish mythology, but folklore and belief around fairies. Uh, cause we have a lot of that in Ireland. We, we call it pish oags, but it means superstition about fairy mounds, about fairy trees, certain things you don't interfere with. Like, I don't believe any of that, but I have huge interest and respect for it because I think it's important for biodiversity. Like, in Irish mythology, we've loads of, insects are sacred.

• 1:20:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, up until the 1600s in Ireland, it was illegal to kill white butterflies because so many people believed that a white butterfly was the soul of a dead child. Horse shit.

• 1:20:29Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:20:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  But. A scientist will turn around and say, "Pretty good idea not to fuck with butterflies. They're pollinators, yeah."

• 1:20:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I find that so many superstitious magical thinking within folklore and mythology is actually really useful when it comes to living in line with systems of biodiversity. And with, since the Enlightenment and with things like colonization, you lose that in favor of extractive capitalism. That forest, that mountain means fucking nothing other than money. Let's take it away and look where we are now.

• 1:21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:21:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  We're fucked.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  No, I totally agree and I think that society.

• 1:21:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  Good point.

• 1:21:11Speaker 03

  We need sacred values. If you reduce everything to a bottom line, to a monetary value, then that undermines the cohesion of a group. We're a social animal and we need to have a convention, something that brings us together and that requires faith. Now, I'm not religious, but I totally understand why people feel faith and experience it. And I can see it can play a very valuable role in coalescing people around a belief system. So belief systems are really important to us as a species, I think, and that's why we shouldn't denigrate them. We just need to recognize when they get out of control and when they're trying to impose their belief systems and, you know. So I can see that, I can see why people are anti-religious.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  I'm not anti-religious, I just think it's really interesting that it's so common. And I go back to William Golding's story, Lord of the Flies. I mean, I think the thought experiment, because you'd never get the ethics word, is to put a bunch of kids on an island without any culture and I bet my bottom dollar, they would generate their own gods, their own belief systems, their own explanations.

• 1:22:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  You mean kids that haven't been raised, like just bare humans?

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, because the, yeah.

• 1:22:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so I think the.

• 1:22:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, do you ever get excited around AI for that? Because with AI, you might be able to do something like that.

• 1:22:30Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I mean, there's some issues about how much energy and water it uses.

• 1:22:33Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's fucking terrible.

• 1:22:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:36Speaker 03

  But I think for me, my concern, my worries, and by the way, it's not going away. So we've got to just recognize what it is. But when it comes to the use of AI in higher education, I think we're facing a real kind of problem. Because we can't tell the difference between, you know, machine and human essays or assessments.

• 1:22:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:54Speaker 03

  So that means that's going to become, you know, really difficult. But then it starts, if you've got a virtual tutor who's even better than the person in real, you know, it starts to question. And then a lot of us in higher education are seriously worried about what's going to happen to our institutions.

• 1:23:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. I mean, the people, we got to start putting billionaires are allowed to get away with an awful lot of shit.

• 1:23:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  And there needs to be some type of checks and balances and it's a strange thing. It's when you hear these billionaires who own the AI companies, they're speaking about it as if it's this inevitable thing.

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:23:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's a strange thing with humans and curiosity, like,

• 1:23:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  do you ever hear of long term nuclear message warning, no?

• 1:23:41Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:23:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, you love this. So it's a whole field within semiotics, which is, you've got all this nuclear waste, right? Which we have. And if you bury this nuclear waste, it's still going to be dangerous in a hundred thousand years. And we're putting it under the ground. And there's people now going, fuck, what if like someone digs it up in 30,000 years? What if civilization has collapsed? We can't predict what 30,000 years will be like, but we do know if someone digs this up, it's still going to be dangerous. And they know that if it's human beings, they're going to still dig it up.

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  So they're trying to figure out, how do you communicate 10, 20,000 years in the future? And one thing they're looking at is superstition and folk belief.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:24:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. Now, one mad, really fucking exceptionally eccentric solution was called glow cats.

• 1:24:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  They wanted to genetically engineer cats so that the cats glow in the presence of nuclear waste. Wow. But then create songs and folklore around glowing cats in the hope that like religion, they would last 10,000 years in the future and people would understand that if a cat glows, don't dig underneath. Brilliant. I'm serious. Brilliant. Because it ties in with, you like this because I know you were saying backstage, you like to fuck around with metal detectors. I'm a detectorist, yeah, yeah. Yeah, so. Any other detectorists out there? You know, um. I knew there wouldn't be any. I did say I was having the spectrum. You'd be messing around with mounds and barrows, I'm guessing.

• 1:25:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So in Ireland, we've got mounds and barrows in Ireland as well, but in Ireland, when we find a mound, we tend to refer to it as a fairy fort. So in Ireland, you do not fuck with it. It's a superstition that even still exists in our culture. Most people, even me to be honest, and I consider myself to be a rational person, I'm not fucking with a fairy fort and I'm not fucking with a fairy tree. I'm just not doing it. And so you have these mounds and it's just there in our culture. Never ever interfere with these things. Now, what the mounds were is, pre-Christian Ireland, we didn't have towns or monasteries. We had a society that was based on pastoralism.

• 1:26:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  So there was a lot of cows and people moved with cows and cows were the most important currency. And what these mounds actually were, were they were a wooden fort and most likely people kept cows inside there. Okay. But there's a theory. A very, very common disease with cattle is anthrax. Anthrax kills entire fucking herd of cows and then it'll kill every human that's around the cow. Anthrax is fucking deadly. So a theory is, is that cattle would die of anthrax in one of these wooden mounds 2,000 years ago. All the humans would die too. Their bodies rot, they go down into the ground. The wood rots away on the fort and you're left with a mound.

• 1:26:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  And you've loads of these all over Ireland. Couple of hundred years later, some person goes, I'm gonna dig that mound. And they do, but what you dig up is anthrax spores. Wow. Yeah, so there's a, it's a plausible theory that some people actually died many, many years ago when digging up one of these mounds and killed their whole community with anthrax. And then the fairy folk superstition. There are people under the earth and they also believe too that when we see a mound and there's a white thorn tree there, that's one you especially don't fuck with because that's a fairy tree. They reckon it's possible people put the fairy trees on the ones where the anthrax was.

• 1:27:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  So it's a theory, 2019, an archaeologist put it forward in 2019 and at the end of his paper, he basically says, can someone please try and test this? Can someone dig up a few of these mounds? Because it's a lovely theory, isn't it? Yeah, I like it, yeah. Because, and what it reminds me of is it's that nuclear waste thing. Right. We are burying something deadly in the ground. It is gonna be dangerous in a hundred thousand years. How do you tell those people then? Because humans, like when, when they found the pyramids, it's like, stay away from this place. No, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the, they used to eat the mummies. Yeah, they used to get mummies and dip it in honey. Or there's another one, they used to make the colour brown out of mummies as well. It's like, leave them the fuck alone, will you?

• 1:28:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Malaria, yeah. We've gone ferociously off topic and I think you might also be autistic.

• 1:28:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because I'm like, I'm gonna bring the professor out tonight for some rigorous discussion in your area and now we're talking about anthrax fairy forts. And eating mummies. And eating mummies.

• 1:28:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  So. Yeah, let's, let's try again. Do you, what I want to know is, is.

• 1:28:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  The value that that magical thinking and superstition has to the human condition.

• 1:28:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I think at a very basic level, it provides a sense of meaning, but it also provides a sense of control. And I think that's very obvious if you watch certain sportsmen, tennis players in particular, will have their little superstitious rituals. And that's interesting because you might argue, well, that's ridiculous. But actually, that provides them with a sense of control over this. It becomes part of their habit, part of their pre-game routines. And so if you try and take it away or thwart them, then they don't feel they play as well.

• 1:29:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  What do sports psychologists say about that?

• 1:29:28Speaker 03

  I don't know. I imagine associated learning would be the answer, which is basically you learn in association, it becomes strengthened through repetition or the lack of counteraction, and then that just becomes a kind of routine. So, you know, you'll see them. I mean, I love what, that's the only reason I watch Wimbledon. I don't care about the tennis. I'm looking out for all the sort of superstitious routines. They're bouncing the ball three times. Yeah, yeah, just about everyone does it. It's a very familiar kind of thing.

• 1:29:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And do you think Tiger Woods would only ever wear a red cardigan when he was playing? Do you think he's aware of that? Do you think some of them are not aware of their little rituals?

• 1:30:02Speaker 03

  No, I think they know about them. I don't know, actually. Beckham, of course, well, he has a bit of OCD as well, so that would explain it. But yeah, it's about regaining control over the environment. I do it. I think everyone does it, don't they? I mean, a little bit of little rituals.

• 1:30:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  Well, it's, it's, when it comes to magical thinking, what I'm guessing is there's healthy and then problematic.

• 1:30:27Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:30:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  So is this thing helping me in my life? Or, fuck, I was agoraphobic for a year. I wouldn't have called that magical thinking. But, no, it wasn't magical. It was irrational. It wasn't helpful. I was afraid of getting panic attacks in public.

• 1:30:45Speaker 03

  No, that's, that's, that's, yeah, that's fine. Yeah.

• 1:30:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was, it was, it's an interesting one because there was an element of magic. So magical thinking is the wrong word because there was nothing supernatural. Yeah, no theories. But I did start to, so the way that agoraphobia was working for me was I'd go to Tesco and then panic attacking Tesco. So now Tesco's, that's off the list. And then it happens in a pub, pubs are off the list. And I start creating a map of where I'm, the panic attack is an awful thing when you don't know what they are. Because when no, when I, I got a panic attack before I'd heard a label for it. So I'm like, oh, sometimes I just feel like I'm literally dying. I'm in the act of dying. Like, that's what a panic attack is, if you get a good one.

• 1:31:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  If you, if you get a good one, like, it's like, oh, I'm dying, I'm, I'm doing a death. That's what this is, I'm in the process of dying, dying is happening to me. Like, that's a good panic attack, you know? So I was getting them in Tesco for no reason. Right. So I'm like, well, I'm not fucking going back to Tesco. And then eventually I couldn't leave my room because that's the only space where I couldn't get panic attacks. So when I found CBT, we'll say, that was kind of referred to as magical thinking, even though it wasn't supernatural thinking. It's profoundly irrational and Tesco is not the reason for my panic attacks, you know? And then I'd challenge it by going into Tesco like that. Right. Um, not literally, that's what I did, I, I. Gradated exposure. Gradual exposure.

• 1:32:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one thing that really was a breakthrough for me, and it was the power of fucking art. So I'd eventually gotten to the point where I'm going to nightclubs because I was like 19 and I wanted to do things that are normal. So I was going to nightclubs, but it's like staying beside the emergency exit. So I was comfortable with that much, but there's no fucking way I'm going into the crowd. And. It was before smartphones. So I'm there in the nightclub and then the DJ plays a song that I'd never heard before. And it was the most fucking, I was like, oh my God, what is this? Cause it sounded like hip hop music, but it was clearly the seventies. So I'm like, there's no Shazam. This is pre-internet.

• 1:33:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I have to find out what that fucking song is. And if I do not find out what that song is, I may never hear it again for the rest of my life. So that, I ran through the crowd. I got through all of my fears, didn't matter. I had a purpose and I went to the fucking DJ and I said, what's that song? And it was, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" by Gil Scott-Heron. And I rolled it on my hand in biro and then protected my hand and went home. Cause there was no Shazam, there was, this is what you had to do. This is what you had to do. But like, I came home from that and I got, cause I said to you before I met you backstage, like I don't, I try not to use the word happiness, I use the word meaning. I pursue meaning.

• 1:33:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  I know that if I pursue happiness, I'll end up disappointed. Happiness isn't a state I can reach, but I can have a lot of meaning. And that there, I had meaning that transcended my anxiety. And the meaning was music, art. I fucking love this so much. I will run through this crowd just to find out that song and forgot that I was someone who had agoraphobia. And it, it was, again, I don't wanna say spiritual, it was massively transformational.

• 1:34:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:34:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  It showed me, ah, art, that's what gives me meaning. If I can pursue the thing that gives me meaning, I can become a person who doesn't get panic attacks. You know what I mean?

• 1:34:23Speaker 03

  Indeed, yeah. I mean, like happiness isn't a state, it's a, it's a, it's a kind of process. I know it's a cliched to say it's a journey, but it is true that. If you try and get it, it'll evaporate. It's elusive because you adapt to everything. And in many ways, you have to be unhappy to know what unhappy is. So you can never be permanently happy all the time. And don't seek it in yourself necessarily. I think that part of the problem, certainly amongst a lot of our students, and what I wrote about in The Science of Happiness, is that we've got to learn to stop focusing inward and being so self-critical and not reaching our expectations and the fear of failure and so on, and start to kind of reach out and become, what I say, allocentric, which means other-focused.

• 1:35:07Speaker 03

  Now, I know that for an autistic person, it's hard, but you can still enjoy the experience of other people without necessarily having to have a very intimate conversation.

• 1:35:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I love other people's happiness.

• 1:35:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:35:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, something I find incredibly self-esteem building is... Like, I'm a human, so I'm prone to jealousy. I'm prone to comparing myself to other people. And when I find myself being jealous of another person, especially of their achievements, I catch myself in the moment and go, actually, let's try being happy for him.

• 1:35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  You know what I mean? And it's really transformational. I love doing it. And that brings me... Again, what you're saying, like, I know that happiness isn't a state, but there's great meaning in pain as well. Like, I spoke there about, like, my dad died when I was, like, 20, and it wasn't nice at all. But at the same time, there's fucking huge meaning in that pain. All that pain I experienced, I grew from it as a person. You know? So I... Yeah, that's... I don't call that unhappy. My dad's death, it's unhappy... True unhappiness for me is when I'm stuck in my head.

• 1:36:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I'm worried about the past or trying to predict what the future is, and I'm in this washing machine of worries, and I'm not in the present moment, that's the shit I don't like.

• 1:36:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:36:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's very hard to find meaning in that. But if I'm in the present moment, even if I'm present with sadness... That's kind of happy.

• 1:36:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the danger of being inside your head is it's not often a very pleasant place. Because if you're very self critical and you're drawing comparisons, you can easily find flaws. But if you can try and draw the energy and enrich the lives of others around you. I mean, there are studies showing that the happiness you get by directing it towards others is more authentic and longer lasting. If you're trying to make yourself happy, if you're the instigator, purveyor and recipient of the happiness, you know when it ceases to deliver. And so it evaporates much more quickly because we naturally adapt. But if you're kind of, you know, if I go out and buy you drinks and everyone's saying, oh, he's a great guy, you know, that's the kind of extension of your your efforts, as it were, and by virtue, you you become more appreciated. I think that's part of it.

• 1:37:29Speaker 03

  But you don't want to be selfless. You don't want to kind of give everything over to everyone else and absorb all their miseries and be super empathic. I think there is a danger of losing yourself, but it's striking the balance between the kind of self care, if you want, and the care you direct towards others.

• 1:37:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Abraham Maslow.

• 1:37:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  So he was the psychologist that his work, he had the, what the fuck's it called? His pyramid, actuation, the self actuation pyramid, right? If you look at Maslow's work, he was a Canadian psychologist and he had this pyramid of the needs that humans.

• 1:38:11Speaker 03

  Basic needs at the bottom, yeah.

• 1:38:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then at the top is self actualization. But if you actually look into the history of Maslow and what happened, Maslow had spent a huge amount of time with indigenous people in Canada, the Blackfoot people. And when he was with these people, he found that these people had high levels of self actualization in their community. I mean, self actualization is a nice word for, again, I don't want to say happiness, but these people are content. They have great meaning in life. Purpose. And he found that there's a huge amount of purpose in this community. And what he also found that is these people, their value system wasn't based on how much you had, but how much you could give away, your generosity.

• 1:38:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  But Maslow's Pyramid as we know it, this thing, that's not actually Maslow's original work. That got changed through the years in textbooks in order to align with individualistic capitalism. Are you, did you kind of find that, what I was trying to get at there is, is, because you also did a book about, what was it called? Why we want things?

• 1:39:16Speaker 03

  Possessed.

• 1:39:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Possessed.

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, why do we want, why do we want more than we need?

• 1:39:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why do we want more than we need?

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:39:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  And to be generous and to give things away to the people around you within limits is a better way to be happy than to be selfish and continually want.

• 1:39:32Speaker 03

  True, because if you are, I mean, it's called the hedonic treadmill. I mean, indeed, yeah, hedonism is joy, and if you're trying to chase joys like on a treadmill, you never actually, you never get there.

• 1:39:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  King Midas.

• 1:39:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. So the problem of pursuing riches and wealth materialism, apart from the, the impact on the planet, is that you get used to your stuff, you get used to your shit, you know, because, you know, it's like you buy the car and then suddenly you're comparing it, oh, I didn't get the best model, and then you're starting to compare yourself to someone else again. And so, material things by their nature, you get used to them. So that's one of the reasons experiences tend to show less adaptation.

• 1:40:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  So does external praise count as well, because?

• 1:40:17Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:40:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:19Speaker 03

  So external praise, I mean, part of the, I mean, there are lots of reasons why people have possessions, and I think they're really fascinating. Some of them to do with our sense of identity is what we can control, and so our possessions are an extension of self. But also, signaling theory from Darwin suggests that, you know, we buy things to show off our status.

• 1:40:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  And there's a long history of research showing that as well. So that's, and that's quite clearly, designer goods, luxury goods are all interpreted because of what they say about us as a person. But ultimately, I think that it's, it's a foolish task. I make the point, you can't take it when you go, and if you consider all the effort you go into trying to accumulate these things, you never really feel fully, well, I would argue, really feel fully sustained, as it were. So it's a, it's a folly. And yeah, I think it's, you know, something that we've got to, considering the impact on the, the planet, I think we've really got to try and curtail it. I mean, I make an, there's a point I just like to make, that Most parents would readily die for their children. You know, most parents feel so strongly about it.

• 1:41:25Speaker 03

  But when it comes to thinking about the consequences of our actions for our children's children's children, we forget it. And that's ludicrous when you think about it. It just seems so silly.

• 1:41:40Blindboy Boatclub?

  I wanna hark back to when we were speaking about Buddhism. And you found that in your research in happiness, you found that Buddhism kinda got it right.

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it relates to my interest in the self, which I think is a construct. So, you know.

• 1:41:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, that's your other fucking book.

• 1:42:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'd be busy.

• 1:42:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're hitting all the big topics. So your other book is that.

• 1:42:04Speaker 03

  The self illusion.

• 1:42:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  The illusion that the sense of me, I, is like, fuck that, it doesn't exist.

• 1:42:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a completely, it's a story. You're a story inside your head.

• 1:42:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  You prick.

• 1:42:16Speaker 03

  Well, it's an interesting story. It's a constantly changing story, but you never know because you are the narrator and the narrative. You're one of the same.

• 1:42:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  Did you get a lot of pushback for that?

• 1:42:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I did.

• 1:42:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's very challenging information. Like, but like, I was joking there when I called you a prick, I apologize. But what I mean there is.

• 1:42:32Speaker 03

  I didn't even hear it.

• 1:42:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's really challenging. It's really like to say that, that's, I don't wanna hear that at all.

• 1:42:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, people hate that. They hate the idea they don't have free will. They hate the idea that they're not in control. I mean, free will is, we could argue about that, but the idea.

• 1:42:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  How do you mean the I doesn't exist? Like, I talk to him all the time.

• 1:42:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's, that's the, that's the voice you're hearing. You're hearing, so for me, the mind is a series of complex unconscious processes. And then you have consciousness, which is the thing you can articulate and think about. But there's a.

• 1:43:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that the awakeness, the I am?

• 1:43:07Speaker 03

  The awareness, yeah. So William James talked about the I and the me. The I is the sense of, in the present moment, conscious awareness. The me is the autobiography of who Blind Boy is.

• 1:43:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:18Speaker 03

  Which is everything which feeds into the I. So whenever I ask you a question, if I say to you, Blind Boy, which kinda ice cream do you prefer? Vanilla or chocolate?

• 1:43:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Vanilla.

• 1:43:27Speaker 03

  Right, okay, so you had a thing there for a while.

• 1:43:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  I did, but I had to go into the biography, yeah.

• 1:43:32Speaker 03

  That's right, you were checking the library.

• 1:43:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  I went to the library and I was like, there was that chocolate phase for a while and then I went, ah. Like, I was going there, you know?

• 1:43:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:43:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  I was kind of going to the point where I was, remember when you thought chocolate was better? And then you realised that it was actually the simplicity of vanilla that you liked. And then there was, and then it was also Madagascar and there's a more interesting. I'm not gonna go in there. That'd be a crazy tangent, go on.

• 1:43:57Speaker 03

  No, but, so, so, so, hearing the question, formulating an answer is I. But getting to the information, the database, is the me, that's the autobiography.

• 1:44:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I definitely had to go to a different place in the brain, like, my eyes looked off there, yeah.

• 1:44:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, so you didn't create the autobiography, that's all the experiences that have imposed themselves upon you. So, in a sense, in answering the question, you're, you're really constructing a coherent story on the basis of the data that you have stored away. Now, you hear that as an internal voice, but in many senses, that's after the fact. I don't know if you ever have this experience, but sometimes I don't know what I'm gonna say until I've said it.

• 1:44:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:36Speaker 03

  So, that's, there's a whole of unconscious information bubbling up. And we only ever really need to be aware of the things which are really important when we're making decisions. A lot of it is done offline, you're on autopilot most of the time, because you haven't simply got the capacity, the bandwidth, to process all the unconscious processes. But that's what I mean by the self being a construct. It's a, it's a story which makes sense of all of these unconscious things. Because when you were arguing in your library about the chocolate, you weren't there having the library discussion, it was, it was coming out of the, and then it popped into your head and that's why you said, oh, yeah.

• 1:45:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Is that useful, what I mean there is, is when we were speaking about happiness, right?

• 1:45:17Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:45:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And one thing we were chatting about is, is the removal of the self.

• 1:45:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:45:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  The ego, that, like, getting rid of that is a handy way to contentment.

• 1:45:31Speaker 03

  I believe so, and that's the bottom line, the science of happiness from my perspective. It's the only thing I think I've contributed, there are so many books on happiness, but the one thing I've said, which I don't think anyone else has really said, apart from the Buddha, is that.

• 1:45:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on.

• 1:45:52Speaker 03

  We do actually start off as very egocentric children. I mean, there's a whole lot of research and, you know, that was my earlier career studying egocentrism in children. And what I mean by that term egocentrism is that they literally see the world from their perspective. They find it very difficult to understand what other people may be thinking. Basically, children have to learn to become more integrated by understanding other people's perspectives. They need to lose that egocentric view of the world. And if you look at child development research and studies, it shows that children start off very egocentric and then they become less so. Now, many adults, I think we're always egocentric because of the flow of consciousness, because we're always got that first-person perspective. But if you are so egocentric that you fail to take into consideration other people's situations,

• 1:46:37Speaker 03

  then that means there's a danger that you're going to be so self-absorbed that you're blowing your own problems off, getting them out of proportion. And also, by the way, everyone's thinking you're a prick because you're not actually caring about them. You're being ostracized. So I think that when you can start to integrate and direct your energies to flourishing, to helping other people, that's a much better balance to achieve. But getting back to the self, there is research, for example, psychedelics has shown to be very effective for people with profound depression. And part of the common experience is dissolution or delusion of, you know, dissolving, a diffusion.

• 1:47:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ego death.

• 1:47:15Speaker 03

  Ego death, yeah. But you don't have to take psychedelics to get that experience. You can get that on other situations, which are also very positive. So trance states, movement states, going into outer space.

• 1:47:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Flow states.

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  Flow states.

• 1:47:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:31Speaker 03

  Flow is really interesting because flow is where you're directing all your attention towards an activity. And one of the common reports is the sense of time disappears and the sense of self disappears.

• 1:47:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  So if I was to rate my happiest experiences ever, it's when I can enter flow state.

• 1:47:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Literally, that is, it's what heaven feels like.

• 1:47:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:47:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  If I'm writing a story and I can go there for an hour, that's heaven.

• 1:47:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, for me, writing.

• 1:47:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Nothing compares to it. You get that with writing.

• 1:48:00Speaker 03

  Writing for me, yeah, yeah. And detecting, so.

• 1:48:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Oh, metal detecting too. You get flow while you're detecting.

• 1:48:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can get into that.

• 1:48:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  And what is it about the metal detecting that induces flow?

• 1:48:11Speaker 03

  Well, because you're studying, you're paying attention to the sensory signals. You're listening for little signals all the time. And so suddenly, time is starting to disappear with you because you're focused your attention externally. When you focus your attention internally, that's when you start to get into rumination, which is why meditation works. Because in meditation, what you're doing is you're monitoring either your breathing or you're directing your attention externally or being mindful. But if you go back into your inner space and just examine the content of your thoughts again, that's when you start to get sort of rumination.

• 1:48:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  Here's an interesting one for you, actually, around the magical thinking and that point you're making. One of the last, we'll say, socially acceptable pieces of magical thinking that we have in Ireland, you might have it here. Does anyone pray to Saint Anthony when you lose something? So like, in Ireland, that's a huge thing, right? If you lose a thing, your wallet, whatever, last resort, you pray to Saint Anthony. I fucking do it. The reason is, is it tends to work.

• 1:49:10Speaker 03

  All right.

• 1:49:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  Like, how many people have prayed to Saint Anthony and they've found the thing?

• 1:49:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. And this has rattled me for years, going, come on, there's no fucking Saint Anthony to help me to find my iPhone, come on. Do you know what I mean? There's better things going on. And then I thought about it, and I reckon what it is, is, like, if I lose my fucking, it's usually something important, so it's a wallet or phone, so that's high fucking arousal emotion, I'm really anxious, and in that state, I'm not great at looking for my wallet.

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:49:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm really not great. Then, because I kind of believe in the Saint Anthony thing, because it's happened so many times before, I go, I'm gonna pray to Saint Anthony and I'm gonna find it, because it's worked all those times before.

• 1:49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:49:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I go, Saint Anthony, come on, you haven't heard from me in a while, but fuck it, I need that wallet. Come on. And then, there's the wallet.

• 1:50:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:50:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I go, thank you, Saint Anthony. But what's happened is, I did a little mindfulness exercise.

• 1:50:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's not Saint Anthony, I got my... I got down to a state where I'm calm enough to actually see around me and go, oh, there it was. And it was always right in front of me all along.

• 1:50:20Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's the thing. It was there all along. I couldn't see it because I was so anxious. But the Saint Anthony thing brought me back.

• 1:50:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:50:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I, I reckon I'm right with that. I reckon.

• 1:50:29Speaker 03

  I think you're totally right. It happened to me, um, uh, two days ago. I was trying to find my iPod. I, I was doing a, a very important podcast, not yours, by the way. And, um, I'm kidding. Uh, I couldn't find my AirPods. They said you have to have AirPods. And, uh, my wife is sitting on this, you'll confirm this. I ran around like a headless chicken and I was so stressed. I couldn't see anything. And of course, after the show was over, uh, I was more relaxed. And then I just remembered, oh, that's where you put them. So my memory system, but because I was so stressed at the time, I was unable to kind of reconstruct where they were last were. So, yeah, I totally get that. So now the next time I'll, I'll call Saint Anthony.

• 1:51:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I, I don't pray to Saint Anthony anymore because I got an app called Tile.

• 1:51:12Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:51:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yeah. So he's replaced Saint Anthony. It's, it's fucking brilliant, especially if, if you're nowhere divergent. This isn't an advertisement, but basically it's my, my wallet and my keys. Anything that's fucking crazy important that I frequently lose.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:51:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's a thing in it called a Tile now, and I can never lose it because I just go to my phone. So if I, if my wallet falls, falls behind the couch, I just go, okay. And I ring it on Tile and it goes beep, beep, beep.

• 1:51:39Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:51:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then if I lose my phone, I can go to one of my keys and I can press a button and then it finds my phone. So Saint Anthony can go fuck himself.

• 1:51:46Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:51:48Speaker 03

  Sounds good.

• 1:51:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  But again, that's another example of 10 years ago, that was magic.

• 1:51:54Speaker 03

  That is magic. Yeah.

• 1:51:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  Absolute magic. It's like, I, I can whistle for it if I want. I won't because it'll make a noise. My wallet will start beeping. But I can whistle at it and I'll find it, you know?

• 1:52:03Speaker 03

  Ah, okay. I gotta get that.

• 1:52:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  You're a, a Mr. Losing Things?

• 1:52:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:52:08Blindboy Boatclub?

  Of course you are because you're a metal detector.

• 1:52:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Hold on, we better take audience questions. We've got 10 fucking minutes. I could talk to you for hours, man.

• 1:52:19Speaker 03

  Oh, that's good. Thank you.

• 1:52:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Let's bring up the house lights a little bit.

• 1:52:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  I get another photograph from my ma. 2000s R&B singer Usher has kindly come along tonight to hand out the microphone.

• 1:52:34Speaker 09

  I've got it.

• 1:52:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go on, yeah.

• 1:52:36Speaker 09

  My question is about critical thinking, and it's kind of a big question, but I thought it's a good opportunity. I'd love to hear from either of you or both of you about it.

• 1:52:46Speaker 09

  There's lots of different reasons I want to ask this question, but we were kind of, you guys were talking about AI and conspiracy theories came up as well. And in a time of really dangerous political rhetoric, in a time of AI being like an information source, there's so many reasons for it, but I wonder what you think about ways to encourage critical thinking generally on a societal level. It's one of the things that I think is most important right now.

• 1:53:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a big problem right now.

• 1:53:13Speaker 03

  Wow, that's a good question.

• 1:53:18Speaker 03

  It's, without doubt, it's what's going to be undermined by AI unless we pay attention to it. I think that's at the heart of what I think you're asking is, critical thinking is being eroded by the rapid accessibility of narratives and stories. And whoever's controlling those narratives or stories is removing the capacity for critical thinking. So it's an existential question you've asked, and I don't have a simple solution to it, but you're absolutely right that these systems of their left unfettered are going to really cause problems.

• 1:53:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  One thing, I don't have a solution, right, but one thing. So most of our, like, around this problem that we're all seeing.

• 1:54:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  One thing we need to look at, and I mentioned it before, a huge amount of our discourse is now on a platform owned by a billionaire where they have set the rules of that discourse. And the rules are, all discourse has to be turn and response combat. That's mad. Imagine, right, social media didn't exist and instead a billionaire came along and said, "Both ye have an argument about racism, except you're both on a tightrope and you have to hit yourselves into the head as well while you're doing it." Do you know what I mean? So much of our conversation is in this forum that's designed by billionaires.

• 1:54:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  So you can't, you can't have critical thinking in the Instagram comments or the Facebook comments. Has anyone ever had a decent argument in the Facebook comments? You can't, it's impossible, it's impossible. But it's that thing where, what I think about a lot is, do you know when you're walking on the street and you almost bump into a person in physical space? You have this lovely little dance and a smile. Yeah, yeah. But then if you're in a car and you almost bump into someone, "You fucking prick, you..." Yeah, yeah. The same thing has happened, but there's that thing, you might know the name of it. What's it called when you're in a car and inhibition? Disinhibition. Disinhibition. Yeah.

• 1:55:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, because I was speaking to a cyber psychologist about this. The disinhibition happens when you're sitting in a car, because I've often sat in a car on the main street of my city and picked my nose, no problem at all, because I'm in a car, no one's looking. They are, man. I'm not going to walk down the road picking my fucking nose, but I'll do it in the car. That's the disinhibition of being in a car. The same disinhibition happens in social media. Yeah, you're not accountable. We're not accountable. So, your question is scary, but it becomes less scary when I think about it that way. When I think about it, "Yeah, that's really scary, there's a lack of critical thinking. Maybe we should stop conversing in the billionaire machine where they make money out of our arguments."

• 1:56:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  I mean, that's, and that's the thing. Data is the new fucking Isle. Like, where are these people getting their money from? Our behaviour. That's the, they're mining our behaviour like Isle. That's how they're becoming fucking, it's, ah, fuck me. I think we're gonna get booted out, right? Because it's, it's five minutes past 10 and Edward Colston is like, get the fuck out, everybody. Um, no, we are past car few and I, I want to be nice to the people working here. Listen, the reason we're past car few is because you're such a fabulously interesting person and I could have spoken to you all night.

• 1:56:47Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 1:56:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Professor Bruce Hood, everybody. Buy his books. Thank you, everybody, for coming out Bristol. You were wonderful. What a wonderful crowd. Uh, this was the Blind Boy Podcast. Dog bless.

• 1:57:00Speaker 03

  Bye-bye.

• 1:57:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Thank you, thank you. Thank you to Professor Bruce Hood there. Thank you to Professor Bruce Hood for that magnificent, wonderful conversation. He was a gentleman, I'll have him on again. Absolute cracking fella. Um, I'm, I'm gonna fuck off now to the art gallery. I'm gonna go to the art gallery in Edinburgh to chill out and to look after my social battery. And then tonight, I'm gonna gig in Usher Hall in Edinburgh, which, never thought that was possible. Usher Hall is, I believe the gig is sold out. It's massive. I used to, I used to flyer.

• 1:57:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  I, I used to stand outside Usher Hall and hand out flyers for my gigs that 70 people would show up to. So I never, ever thought that I'd be headlining Usher Hall. I don't wanna say like in my wildest dreams. I never dreamt that far. I never thought it was possible, never entertained it. So, my absolute gratitude to the people of Edinburgh who are coming to this gig tonight and for everybody on this tour who's coming to my shows. Thank you so much. I'm unbelievably grateful and I remind myself of that every single day. Every morning I wake up, I remind myself how fortunate and lucky I am to be able to do this as my job. Rub a swan.

• 1:58:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Don't, don't, I always say, rub a swan. Don't rub a swan. Geniaphlect to a swan. Wink at a mouse. And marvel, marvel at us. It's probably raining back in Ireland. I'm missing the rain back in Limerick. I'm missing that Limerick rain. It's probably raining back in Limerick. Marvel at a little. A big fat snail. Marvel at a summer snail. And the smell of rain. All right, dog bless. I'll catch you next week, hopefully with a hot take, back in my studio.

• 1:59:57Speaker 00

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• 2:00:41Speaker 00

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• 2:02:26Speaker 00

  You