The Blindboy Podcast
Hosted by Blindboy Boatclub
Why everything feels so Chaotic now Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
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Lick the queasy cream from the queen's kneecaps, you chap, Lip Patrick. Welcome to the Blind Eye Podcast. It's a Wednesday morning here in Limerick City. Tomorrow I'm down in Cork. I'm down in Cork and I'm playing at the Cork Podcast Festival, which I fucking I despise saying the name of the festival. I adore the Cork Podcast Festival. I love the lads who run it. It's one of my favourite festivals in the country, but I can't fucking for the life of me pronounce the name correctly. I keep calling it the Pork Cod Past Festival. It's not. It's the Cork Podcast Festival.
Just whatever way the consonants, whatever way the consonants are arranged, it's very easy to call it the Pork Cod Past Festival. One problem too, I think, is... Cork Podcast. Like, I know what cork is. It's a city. I know what a podcast is. I'm making one right now. But cork, cork is also a type of wood, a very buoyant wood that floats easily. So you have a car, a pod, a pod made from cork and you're casting it, you're casting it into the water for it to bob. So the imagery of that throws me off. And then I'm like, why the fuck would you have a festival for that?
Why would you have a festival for casting pods made out of cork? So that creates confusion and to the point that I haven't been plugging this, this fucking podcast festival enough. Because the name is so confusing. And then I try to say it and what comes out is the Pork Cod Past Festival. Pork Cod Past. And then I start thinking, that's actually more worthy of a festival. Why would you want to go to a festival about casting pods made out of cork into the ocean? When you could go to the Pork Cod Past Festival, which would be. Well, you see, here's the thing I've thought about this. Pork and cod.
Two, two foodstuffs which historically were salted, salted very heavily to preserve them before refrigeration. So the Pork Cod Past Festival, it'd be a festival about salt. I'd go to a festival about salt. Absolutely. Salt is fascinating. Salt was so, salt was so important. In Persia, right about 2,500 years ago, salt was so important that it was strictly controlled by the king. And because you had this, this substance that was controlled and produced by the state effectively. Salt was used as money, even the word salary, to be paid your salary.
That has its etymological roots in salt as a source of money or a source of payment. In fact, salt is considered so important that it potentially led to the, the development of human civilization. Like, there's a. There's a tribe of people called the Kalagadi people, they live in the, in the Kalahari desert in Africa, and the Kalagadi tribe, they live a hunter gatherer lifestyle. And where they live in the Kalahari desert, water is very difficult to come by. There's not a lot of water and they have significant periods of drought.
So the way that this tribe find water traditionally is fucking fascinating, right? So that they're in the middle of the Kalahari desert and there's a drought. They can't find water, but there's also these packs of baboons, right? And baboons always have a source of water, that baboons always know where there's water. So what a tribesman does when he's trying to find water is he'll find like, like a termite mound or an anthill, a natural structure that contains lots of insects, okay? Now, this is the Kalahari desert now, so just picture it.
Dry, arid, yellow sand, the odd little tree and this crystal clear blue sky. Notting, if you heard someone laugh in there that there's a pharmaceutical company having a meeting next door to my office. But anyway, back to the Kalahari desert, the tribesman who's seeking out a source of water. He'd go to a termite mound and he'd take out a stick and he'll start poking a little hole in the termite mound. But he'll make sure that a baboon is watching when he does it, because baboons are mad curious. So the man pokes this little hole in the termite mound and then into the hole he puts like seeds.
Now, he's fucking blatant about this, like he, he's theatrically placing seeds into this hole that he's just made. Making sure that the baboon is watching and knows what's happening. Meanwhile, Mr. Baboon is up on a rock with his long blue nose.
And those, those giant swollen, pink arses that look like a car crash that they have. Mister Baboon is up in his rock anyway, watching, watching the man putting shit into the termite mound. And he's going, what the fuck is he doing? That human just poked a hole and put food in there. Those humans are clever. What, what food has the, has the human hidden in that termite mound? Because I'm gonna go over and get it. And then the, the baboon waits and the human, the tribesman, he fucks off and hides. So then the baboon walks over with, with his big Ross Kemp looking anus, walks over to the, to the termite mound.
And then he inserts, inserts his, his arm into the hole that the human made. But here's the thing, the hole that the human made, it's just the right size for a baboon's arm to get in. And then at the very end is a chamber where the food is. It's a trap. So the baboon has his, his hand down the hole, his arm down the hole. He's up to his shoulders and he searches around with his hand. And then he finds the little food, the seeds that the human has left in there. So the baboon then, he feels the food, he grabs it. He makes a fist around the food inside the hole. But then, like fucking Homer Simpson, when he put his hand in the vending machine to grab the can of coke.
The baboon won't leave go of the food and his hand is stuck inside the termite mound. And he's not smart enough to let go. So now he's fucked, he's stuck, he's too greedy. All he's gotta do is let go, but he won't. Now the tribesman reappears, he's been hiding. And the baboon is stuck in the termite mound. And the man goes over to the baboon, wraps a rope around him and basically captures the baboon. He doesn't harm him, he doesn't hurt them, but he has the baboon prisoner now. And he ties the baboon to a tree. And then the man takes out lumps of salt, rock salt, that he's been hanging on to. And he puts them in front of the baboon.
Now, the other thing that's quite rare in the desert is salt. So the baboon can't resist this. And he starts, the baboon, who's tied against the tree, starts licking the salt, licking the salt like a mad fucker. And can't stop, can't stop until all the salt is gone. And meanwhile, the man is just standing back waiting, looking at this baboon. And then after about ten minutes, the salt is gone and the baboon is dying a thirst. Absolutely ravenous for water. So then the man lets him go and the baboon legs it, legs it as fast as he can. And the man follows and the baboon is scarpering through the desert.
Over mounds, underneath ditches, alongside trees, taking a left, taking a right. Until he eventually arrives at this, this rocky area. And the baboon climbs up and climbs up and then goes down. And the man's following him and right inside the rocks is this naturally occurring spring. This naturally occurring spring of water. And then the man goes, there you go. That's where the baboons get their water. The baboon had revealed the baboon water location to the man. And I love that, just the human ingenuity of it. The humans thinking so many steps ahead to, to find water by following the baboon.
But the use of salt, salt there is the thing that breaks the baboon. There's even a theory about the world's first roads.
That the first ever roads that humans had, and I'm talking back in the hunter gatherer days, so the, the wild animals that humans ate, okay, I'm talking the ancestors of cows, wild ox, thirty thousand years ago, forty thousand years ago, okay? The animals that humans used to hunt relied upon naturally occurring salt licks, right? Salt licks in order to get all of their nutrients and minerals. Think of like an, an ancient cow, right? Domestication hasn't even happened yet, so like a fucking a wildebeest thing, thirty thousand years ago, this animal isn't getting all of its nutrients from eating grass, so
the herds of these animals, they have to go to naturally occurring rocks that are made out of salt, not just salt, fucking calcium, zinc. So ancient cows would travel for miles and miles to find these salt rocks to lick them. Humans would follow the, the paths that these herbivores would make to their salt licks and then choose to settle down in areas near these salt licks. And these well-worn salt paths became the first roads. But the theory that salt possibly led to the development of human civilization.
So if you have all these, these human beings and they're following their prey, cattle effectively, early cattle, they're following cattle to these salt licks. And then once the cattle are there licking salt, that's when you fucking attack. So live near where the naturally occurring salt is and you'll have access to cattle, right? That's probably where humans also figured, oh, fuck it, this same salt, if you put it on the meat, it preserves it.
So they're killing the animals near where the naturally occurring salt is. And now they're putting the salt on the meat and noticing that it's a very powerful preservative that keeps bacteria away. And now you don't have to rely upon fresh meat. You can kill a cow and keep it all fucking year. That ability to preserve your meat using salt, that might have been a catalyst. A catalyst that allowed our ancestors to go from being hunter gatherers that move with animals to suddenly being able to, to stop and to settle down and say, no, we've got a little village now. We don't have to move because we can preserve this meat all year round, you see.
So now we have a surplus of meat to eat at all times. That ability to stay put leads to the development of tools. It leads to humans going, ah, that wild fucking ox over there who's travelling to eat the salt. I wonder if I can turn that wild ox into a cow through selective breeding and herd them. Then the development of farming, towns, cities. Salt may have started all of that. Even more fascinating.
So cows, right? Cows as you and I know them today. First off, cows aren't real. Cows aren't real in the same way that dogs aren't real. Cows, cows were invented by humans. The cow as you know it today, that was bred and invented by humans to serve humans. Cows don't exist in nature. There was a wild animal known as an auroch somewhere around Iran or Persia, right? And the auroch is the ancestor of the cow. The auroch is to the cow what the wolf is to the dog. But the auroch is completely extinct. Why? Because we turned the guns into cows.
Early humans probably followed the auroch. Like I said, the herds of them followed them to where they were licking salt. Killed them and then figured out which are the most obedient ones, which ones have the best milk, which ones have the best meat, and then bred these slowly but surely into what we call a cow. So now ten, fifteen thousand years later, there's no more aurochs, they're extinct, but we have cows, cows everywhere. Cows are unsustainable, they're destroying the planet. How can an animal destroy the planet? Because they're not fucking real. Cows aren't part of nature, they're not part of a system of biodiversity. Cows are our industry, they're industrial animals.
But anyway, cows, herds of cattle sometimes, when they live near, there's that, I guess the pharmaceutical meeting is over and now they're banging fucking doors. I hope that's a passive aggressive door bang. I hope the, I hope the pharmaceutical meeting was interrupted by me talking about the history of cattle. But anyway, cows, right? Sometimes when, when cows are near an area where mining occurs, so if humans are mining, digging into the earth, right, for whatever, rare earth minerals, whatever. So trucks, when trucks are transporting minerals from the mine, some of it falls along the road along the way, you know?
And these minerals can contain salt, cobalt, selenium, zinc, and when this is, when this falls on the fucking road and there's cows nearby, it awakens the ancient wolf in them. They sense the minerals on the road and it awakens their ancient auroch past. And the cows, their evolutionary memory thinks that they're heading towards the old ancient salt lick again in search of those minerals that they need. And the cows will go fucking ape shit, they'll break down fences, electric fences, whatever's there, and the cows will herd onto the middle of a road if there's a mine nearby and just start licking, licking minerals off the road.
And, and cows die this way. Truckers who work on roads near, near, near mineral mining are aware that there could be lunatic cows in the middle of the road licking minerals off the road and that they could collide with them at any point and it's really dangerous. But what's going on, it's, it's, it's the cow. It's the genetic memory of its ancestors, fifteen thousand years ago, travelling for a salt lick. And isn't there a strange little synchronicity there? You know, tens of thousands of years ago, the first ever roads that humans followed was in pursuit of these aurochs when they went to their fucking salt licks. And now the descendants of these animals can fuse
our roads for salt licks. Why am I talking about this? Yeah, the Cork Podcast Festival, the Pork Cod Past Festival would be a festival about salt. I would go to that. I would go to the festival about our pork and cod past and how we salted these things. You could even have it in Cork if you wanted to. The salting of cod, that was mainly done in Portugal, that's a real Portuguese thing. But in Cork, the salting of pork was a pretty big deal. Cork has a, Cork has a pretty serious food culture, more than any Irish city. Galway doesn't count. Galway, Galway's just Ennis on a boner. Galway does have a food culture, but it's a response to
tourism. And we're jealous of that in Limerick. But Cork, Cork is different. Cork, see Cork had a lot of rich Protestants, you see. There's a food, a food and wealth lineage going on in Cork that's a couple of hundred years old. And in Ireland, we're not really known for food culture in Ireland because of the famine and all that. That's not entirely true. The famine, the famine, obviously, that wouldn't have helped our food culture. But one reason, I was speaking to a historian, I don't know who it was, but this historian said that one reason that Ireland doesn't have a huge food culture like other countries is because we had consistent access
to fresh ingredients. And because of that, we didn't need to preserve food as much. And cultures that have a, a long history of preservation, they tend to have the richest food cultures. But down in Cork, there was a history of preservation. Cork still has a place called the, the English Market, where meat is sold and delicacies. And there's loads of posh Protestants, I suppose you'd call them, making food down in Cork. And there has been for fucking years. But the English Market in Cork. It was controlled by the English. It was a very Protestant market and it serviced the British Empire. It serviced the British Empire and the English market was famous for
salted beef and salted pork to be exported to the West Indies while the Brits were down there doing their slavery shit. I'm going through all this stuff in my head so I can start calling the Cork Podcast Festival by its proper fucking name and just get this, need to get this pork cod past business out of my head. But technically, if Cork did want to have a festival that celebrated salt, you could put it off down in Cork. You could put it off down in Cork. You could do that down in the Marina Market or something. You could dress Killian Murphy up as a baboon and get him to recreate. Dress Killian Murphy up as a baboon and get him to recreate the Caligadi salt experiment. Just have Killian
Murphy dressed up as a baboon, thirsty, thirsty, leading people to a watering hole after licking a lot of salt. And there's your, there's your pork cod past festival. So it's the Cork Podcast Festival. It's this, it's tomorrow. It's Thursday. If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I'm shit at promoting gigs. All right. I'm always getting dates wrong. Oh, fuck me. After the, after the pandemic, after the pandemic, where I, I imagined, I don't know how it happened. I thought I was gigging in Bristol and interviewing Maxim from The Prodigy. And I like promoted it. I said it like four times. Fantasy gig.
Like I, I literally, I was like, I'm gonna be in Bristol and I'm gonna be interviewing Maxim from The Prodigy in Bristol. I said it in like three episodes. I wasn't lying. It's just whatever conversations I'd had with my book or whatever the fuck had happened, I'd gotten into my, I'd gotten into my head that that was a thing that was gonna happen. I'm not even, I think I might have just imagined it and then said that it was true. I'm not gigging in Bristol and actually I fucking am, am I? I actually am gigging in Bristol this June. I don't think I'm interviewing Maxim from The Prodigy, but I'm just saying about three years ago, I invented a gig in Bristol. Post pandemic, I was under a lot of stress. But, but this time I am actually gigging in Bristol in.
Six to June, I think. That's nearly sold out, actually. But tomorrow, I'm gigging in fucking Cork. I'm gigging in the Cork Opera House tomorrow as part of the Cork Podcast Festival. The promoters, Joe and Ed, they're sound, they're lovely fellows, and they asked me to plug it this week. But I gave you the History of Salt instead. Tomorrow, Thursday, the thirteenth. I'm in the Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival. Come along to that. Check out the rest of the Cork Podcast Festival. I have a fucking unreal guest, a brilliant guest, who's an expert in a field that I'm fascinated in. And also, I'm gonna read out my short story.
I'll give you Barcelona, which I'd never, I'd never read that out live, because it's too absurd. But I read it out live in Kerry there last weekend. It's the, it's the short story about the fellow who bites another man's arse in the gym. I read it out live in Kerry last weekend, and fuck me, it was great crack. I didn't think it would work live, but it did.
So what I'd like to speak about in this week's podcast.
I wanna respond to a question, a question that I'm asked repeatedly, and the question is,
why does everything feel so chaotic? Why does the world feel so irrational? There's a feeling and a sense that maybe before the pandemic, I don't think so, I think it's pre 2016, that we remember a time when the world made sense. We used to feel that if politicians stepped massively out of line, they'd lose their jobs and be held accountable. We used to feel that. If you just get an education, you get a good job, then you'll own a house and have a family and lead a normal, happy life.
We used to feel that if we're not happy with the way society and politics are going, don't worry, we've got democracy. Politicians will come along and they will promise change. And then if you just vote for them, if they get empowered, then you'll have that change. We used to believe if you just save up your money, just save up your money and demonstrate that you're good at saving, then you'll get a house, you'll own a house, the bank will give you a mortgage. Not so long ago, we used to believe that if a country or a world leader committed genocide and war crimes and was being called out by like the International Criminal Court, then
we would see justice, that we would see these world leaders brought to justice. We used to believe that if a genocide was occurring, if war crimes were happening, that we could count upon a reliable journalism or journalists, we could count upon reliable journalistic sources to call these things out and to report this genocide as it happens, and also for our politicians to respond appropriately and condemn and call out and do sanctions and whatever on the country that's committing genocide and war crimes. Not so long ago, we used to believe that Russia aggressively invaded Ukraine, committed
war crimes and was subjected to to sanctions and ostracization from the entire international community, right? We used to believe that two years ago, now in twenty twenty five, the President of America has flipped that completely. And now Ukraine, Ukraine is headed by a dictator and they are the aggressors. And that is now the narrative from fucking America. A few years ago, we used to believe that.
If there was a widespread disease, like I'm old enough to remember foot and mouth disease in the early two thousands, I was in school. Foot and mouth disease was a disease that impacted cattle. It was very serious and there was a huge government response as a result. Hards of cattle were killed and also when I was in school, sometimes school was shut down because of foot and mouth disease. It was two thousand and one, Patrick's Day, the Saint Patrick's Day parade in two thousand and one didn't happen in Ireland because of foot and mouth disease. Parades cancelled, public buildings closed, massive inconvenience, right?
We, I, I remember when that happened, nobody called foot and mouth disease fake. I remember everybody going, oh, there's this, there's this disease, there's this disease now and it's on cattle and it's really serious and it's annoying as fuck, but we're gonna have to respond to this disease that's definitely happening. I remember that we used to believe that when there was a widespread illness or disease or an epidemic or a pandemic, we used to believe that when that's happening, it's actually scientific evidence-based fact. It's a thing that's actually happening because you can see it. And if you were to question that, you're a fucking fruitcake. We don't think like that anymore.
We don't think like that anymore. It's now socially acceptable to say that a pandemic is fake. We used to think that big gigantic corporations should pay tax, that corporations that are earning billions should pay tax. We don't, we don't think that anymore. We don't believe that anymore. We used to think that, like i- if a shopping centre was being built or a giant housing estate was being built, that even if there was a recession, they wouldn't just leave a gigantic half-built shopping centre, lying there in the middle of your city for seventeen years, or a housing estate unbuilt for seventeen years, just laying there rotten.
We used to think that wasn't possible. We used to think.
That you couldn't have a box in your hand that you stare at and in this box are hundreds of thousands of people's, real people's anxieties beaming into your face whenever you want, or all the information in the world all at once. We used to think that was impossible. I remember it, I used to watch a cartoon called Inspector Gadget and there was a girl in it called Lucy, I think, and she, she had a book with a screen on it and she could access all the information in the world. And this was science fiction. Flying cars were more possible than this.
What I'm describing there, these, these beliefs, these beliefs that we could rely upon. There was a philosopher called Francois Leitard. He was a philosopher around the 1960s and he referred to these things as grand narratives. And during the, the mid 20th century, from about the end of World War Two, up until the 70s, there were certain grand narratives that we had in the West. One grand narrative is the idea of progress. Things are just gonna keep getting better and better. Society is gonna continually improve and just get
better and better, mainly because we've got science and isn't science amazing? Like you look at science fiction from the 1960s in particular, predictions about the future. If you ask someone in the 1960s how we'd be living in the 2020s, there'd be no diseases, flying cars, clean air, we wouldn't have to work, robots would look after everything, even to the point that we wouldn't even be eating food anymore, we'd get all our nutrients from vitamin pills. Look at an episode of The Jetsons for a prediction of the future from the 50s and the 60s. It's a very happy and secure society that predicts the future like that. Another grand narrative that people had in the 20th century was economic
security. The government will protect you from homelessness.
If you get sick, the government will pay for you to get better. If you get unemployed, there's gonna be social welfare. You're not gonna be poor and destitute. And also, if you're a fascist, if you're a Nazi, if you're a Nazi and you've committed a Holocaust, then justice is gonna be served. You're gonna hang at Nuremberg. Human rights are a thing now. People are protected just by being people. These ideals are gonna be reflected in journalism and the news that's reported. In a lot of Western countries, post-World War II, this was true. Why were these things true? Well, from about the 1930s onwards, there was an economic feeling.
Like, in the late 1920s, America had a huge stock market crash, massive, which led to the Great Depression because of the failure of unfettered capitalism. Let's just call it unfettered capitalism. Wealth was controlled by 1% of people who could do whatever the fuck they want, and there was huge inequality, and then you had a massive stock market crash in 1929. And then a response to this was known as the No Deal. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt brought in a thing called the No Deal. This was, it would look like socialism today. If America did this today, America would look like a socialist country.
So from 1933, American tax, the government set up massive public works programs that would create a lot of jobs, social security and fucking welfare for poor people. Minimum wage was brought in, the right to unionize, the right to set up unions, and the banks and Wall Street were regulated, as in, there was rules. You can't do this, you can't do that. Business was regulated, businesses and employers were regulated.
Your profits are not the most important thing. You can't do this. You need to have a sense of responsibility. There's laws, and if you break the law, you're gonna be punished. And as I mentioned, the biggest one of all, fucking unions, unions. The employees get together as a union and have power over their employer and they're protected. The unions are protected by law. So now employers, companies, corporations, they couldn't outright exploit their workers because those workers had a legal right to strike collective bargaining and to be protected. So that happened in America in the 1930s. That's the government spending massively and creating a social safety net,
a social safety net to protect working class Americans from exploitation, poverty, homelessness, a social safety net. Now, I'm simplifying the fuck out of this and I'm not getting into racism or anything like this. I'm, I'm synopsizing the fuck out of this. America wasn't a perfect place in the 20th century, that's for sure. But the New Deal of the 1930s, it would make America today look like a socialist country. It is socialism. That's socialism. The New Deal was socialism. The idea that the government has a responsibility to provide a social safety net for the people.
And that's nothing compared to what Britain did in the fucking 1940s after World War II. You see, after World War II, the world had seen the Nazis, they'd seen the rise of fascism. They'd seen how Nazism took over fucking Germany. Germany from the 1920s onwards after World War I was fucked. People lost their savings, complete economic collapse. The Nazis with their antisemitism, with their racism, with these simple narratives, they took power from that, again, I'm oversimplifying massively for brevity. So after World War II, Britain and other Western countries that came out victorious out of the fucking war, they looked at what happened in Germany and said, right, okay, well, if we don't, if we-
Don't want fascism in our country and we want democracy, right? Well, the best thing to do is to provide a social safety net for everybody. And again, this is one of these things that breaks my heart because I'm, I'm speaking about shit from the nineteen forties. And it seems like a utopian dream from the future. Remember I said we used to have this belief that things get better and better and better. And I'm just, I'm going to describe here shit that Britain did in the nineteen forties. That would make your jaw drop. So after World War Two, Britain and, and Britain is bombed to bits here, like fucked. Britain establishes the, the welfare state, right? And it was based on a thing called the Beveridge Report.
And it identified what it called the five giant evils, which are want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. They're very posh bastard words, but the sentiment is, is quite compassionate. So in nineteen forty-eight, only, only like three years after World War Two, Britain introduces the, the NHS, National Health Service, right? That's free healthcare for everybody, fucking everybody, rich, poor. Everyone has free healthcare. If you get sick, the government looks after you, simple as that. Because you're a human being and human beings get sick. Not to mention all the doctors and nurses that are now employed in full-time employment by the NHS and paid by the government.
Then in nineteen forty-six, there's the National Insurance Act, which is basically, if you're unemployed, you get benefits, pensions, sick pay, the whole shebang. Nineteen forty-four, the Education Act, secondary schools are free and compulsory. Everyone gets an education, doesn't matter who the fuck you are, there's free education. Public housing, huge amounts of public housing are built. You've got councils building houses. Councils employing builders and building houses and then people who don't have houses are getting free houses. And, and we think, we're led to believe that the council housing. Or the free housing was something for, for poor, for the poor people. No.
Right up until the sixties in fucking Britain, look at the history of the, the Barbican Estate in London. The Barbican Estate were, were council houses for like doctors. And you're thinking, why the fuck, why would you give a council house to a doctor? But this was the thinking, why should, why should someone have to pay for housing? Why can't everybody have a house? Why can't that be the case? The British post-war welfare state also had a full employment policy, right? And this is the maddest thing of all. So Britain nationalised its key industries. So the coal industry, the steel industry, the railway industry.
You had all these government companies that aren't necessarily being run for profit. They're being run because they're essential industries for the country and to provide full employment and for the goal of the, the employees who are government employees. So that they can have houses and happy lives and families so that you have an effective country. Like I'm focusing on, on, on Britain and America here mostly, cause Ireland was a strange one. But I benefited from that. My dad, my dad worked in, in Aer Lingus, which was the Irish National Airline. It wasn't really run for profit.
Before Aer Lingus was privatised, it was run by the government. My dad, a very modest job, working in Shannon Airport at a ticket desk in Aer Lingus. And with that, he was a union organiser. He had full employment. He wasn't afraid of getting fired. He had job security. He had a guaranteed pension. He had a life and a family and a sense of certainty, something he could believe in. So the shit that I'm describing there, America and Britain.
World War Two era, the welfare state, the New Deal, right? It sounds like science fiction. It sounds like a utopia. It sounds like I'm making it up. It wasn't perfect, but you didn't have the huge inequality that you have today. You didn't have people living in tents on the side of the street. You didn't have the majority of forty year olds renting and not able to have families. You didn't have mass anxiety, mass panic, mass fear. What you definitely didn't have is you didn't have a lot of billionaires. There was, under that system, there was not a lot of hype or wealthy people. There were some wealthy people and a lot of people just doing okay.
Now, I'm conscious that I'm, I'm really synopsizing huge swathes of history in a small amount of words. And also, I'm not a fucking expert here. I'm just, I'm a storyteller. I'm a writer. And I understand how to research and source correctly so that I can have a fairly high level of accuracy. But mostly, I'm here as a storyteller. But what I'm describing there, like, how the fuck? How the fuck does, does Britain introduce the NHS three years after World War Two? Like, we have a booming economy in Ireland. There's huge employment. There's a lot of money around. And there's people living in tents. How can the economy look so healthy?
How can I see it and feel it and there be such huge inequality everywhere and such a sense of hopelessness? Why is that happening now? Have you any idea what Britain was like in, in nineteen forty eight? Now, I'm aware in nineteen forty eight, Britain had colonies. It was a colonial fucking power. And it, it was extracting wealth from other fucking countries. I know this. But in nineteen forty eight, Britain had just fought World War Two. Sheffield would have looked like Ukraine or Gaza. Massive cities in England, Scotland and Wales are in fucking rubble and shit. Like bombed to bits by the Nazis.
And then three years later, Britain decides, we're gonna make healthcare free for everybody.
I know all the cities are like literally smoldering still, but we're gonna make healthcare free for everybody. How, how the fuck do you do that? Three years after World War Two and your, your country on fire and then today, people can't afford houses. What the fuck is going on? Now, America did loan a lot of money to people. So, America had a thing called the Marshall Plan after World War Two, where it loaned fucking billions to Europe and it did loan money to Britain to physically rebuild cities, but that didn't pay for the foundation of the NHS or free education or council houses. So, in 1945, Britain was 21 billion in debt
in 1945. 21 billion in 1945. That's not adjusted for inflation. So, where did Britain get the money for this welfare state? The first thing it did is it taxed the absolute fuck out of the wealthiest people. The wealthiest people in Britain were taxed to fuck. Clement Attlee and his Labour government, the wealthiest people in Britain were taxed up to 90%. So, all the incredibly wealthy people were taxed to pay for the poorer people. Like, we live in a world right now where corporations that earn billions and billions and billions pay less than 1% tax. That's the norm. And
the other thing that funded the welfare state was the nationalisation, the nationalisation of coal, railways, steel, gas, because these things weren't necessarily being run for profit. They were being run as an essential service to create employment. So, that situation that I'm describing there, most of ye listening would go, fuck it, I'd like that. I just want somewhere to live. I just want a job and to have the feeling that this job isn't gonna disappear next month and that I have no control over that, that I'm protected in some way. I'd like to know that if I got sick next month, it's not, I'm not gonna end up in debt. I'd quite, I'd, I'd love it if, if all my friends were also in the
same situation. I want my friends who want to have large families to have large fucking families because they're not concerned about housing, healthcare.
Are their jobs, or employment, or the future of their employment? And, and why did this happen? How did this happen? This utopia that I'm describing from nearly a hundred years ago? How, how did it happen? Cause it was government policy. Cause it was fucking policy. Why, why isn't it happening now? Cause it's not policy. Cause the policy now is the fucking opposite. It's the same shit in America, in, in fucking England, in Ireland. Wherever you go, the same shit. How did we get to this? Now, I'm leaving out so much. Like, I, I, I'm speaking about grand narratives here. A huge thing I'm leaving out is, all of this is occurring within the context of the Cold War. You have the West and you have the Soviet Union.
And in the Soviet Union, it's fully communist. Everything is state-controlled. Whereas in Britain, just as an example, that's a mixed economy. Capitalism and free-market enterprise exists. You can own a shop if you want, you can own a business. These things exist. But, certain industries, essential industries are nationalized. So you have a mixed economy. And under the Cold War, there was pressure on Western countries to be a little bit socialist. Why did the people in Russia and Cuba, why did they get free healthcare? Why do I have to pay for my healthcare? So that pressure existed. Pressure existed to be a little bit socialist.
Because capitalism, communism were literally at ideological war. That was the, the theme of the world. So anyway, if you have a situation like in Britain where Clement Dattley is charging 90% tax to some of the wealthiest people? That's, that's a very hostile environment if you have a lot of money. If you're fucking wealthy, that's quite a hostile environment. I need to take a break. It's, it's time for an Ocarina pause now. But after the Ocarina pause, I'm gonna tell you the story of how we got to where we are now. I play my bass Ocarina. You're gonna hear some adverts for some bullshit.
Ooh.
I got a dual tone there like Mongolian throat singing. Oh, here's a siren as well, let's throw that in.
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Welcome to 215 Maple Drive. We just put this property on the market.
Love the crown molding.
Oh, wait until you see the walk-in closets and the bathroom tile.
Does it have Verizon FiOS? You know, 100% fiber internet.
No FiOS, but it looks like it's got cable. Let's check out the kitchen.
No FiOS? Yeah, no, thank you.
Don't you want to see the rest? Okay, bye-bye. Get Verizon FiOS, because when you're moving, it's 100% or nothing.
That was the Ocarina Poss. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listening to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. This is, the Patreon allows me to have the time to research and write my podcast each week. The Patreon keeps us independent. Advertisers can't come in and tell me what to speak about. My Patreon model, to be honest, it's kind of based on the original NHS.
And what I mean by that is, well, that's what inspired me. I just want to earn a living doing what I love. That's it. So if you can afford, if you listen to this podcast and you can afford to give me the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, if you can afford that, right? Then please do. But if you can't afford it, if you don't have that money, you don't have to pay. You can listen for free. You listen for free. My Patreon page is blank. There's nothing there. The people who pay and the people who don't pay, there's no benefit to paying. Everyone gets the exact same podcast, the exact same. There's a million regular listeners.
If I wanted to earn more, I'd have exclusive content that some people pay for. I'd have more advertisers on here doing sponsored episodes. But what I'd prefer is, everybody gets the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living. I've got creative freedom, right? And the people who can pay, who are paying, they're paying for the people who can't afford to pay. And everybody gets the exact same podcast. And that's the model that I like. So if you can afford to pay and to support this podcast directly, please do, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. And don't do it through the Apple app, the Apple fucking Patreon app, because Apple take 30% now, right?
On the iPhone, I mean. If you are becoming a paid patron, Do it on a web browser, on the browser on your mobile phone. Okay, let's plug a few gigs. Tomorrow night, the Cork Opera House. Please come along to that, right? If, if you're not sure about it, it's a wonderful little quiet Thursday night gig. It's, if you're thinking to yourself, ah, fuck it, I don't want to go out on a Thursday. I have a cracking guest, you're not going out on a Thursday. Coming to my live podcast is, it's like going to the cinema or going to a play. You don't have to have a pint, most people aren't drinking. You can go to my live podcast on Thursday nights and you'll be in home, you'll be at home in bed
by half eleven and you'll be awake for work the next day. And you won't have a fucking hangover because you're not going to be getting shitfaced at a live podcast. So come along to my gig in Cork, the Cork Opera House tomorrow as part of the Cork Podcast Festival. And look up the Cork Podcast Festival, not the pork podcast. Fuck's sake. Australian, New Zealand, sold out, right? Can't wait to go over there. Dane, what have we got?
I think that's, is that the last? Might have a gig in Calvin coming up, I'll give you the details of that soon enough. Before I get on to the, the UK tour. I have a gig in Derry, right? I have a gig in Derry there in September. Come along to that in Derry, Derry's a wonderful place to do a gig in September. Derry, Derry means oak wood. The land of the oak woods. There was obviously a lot of oak trees there at once, one time.
My tour of Scotland and England, right? Which is happening in June, which is almost sold out, all right?
I'm in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich. And you can get those tickets at fain.co.uk forward slash blind by. Come along to those gigs. I love gigging for the cracking tens. Most of my listeners are cracking tens now. Right, let's get back to. How, how, how we ended up in this shit that we're in today? So the British welfare state, you know, 90% tax on wealthy people, the New Deal, America, 1940s. This wasn't a good time for multimillionaires. I don't think billionaires existed yet, but it wasn't a good time for multimillionaires or people of generational wealth.
And the 1940s, a fella came about by the name of Friedrich Hayek. He was, or Friedrich Hayek, he was an economist from Austria. And he, he looked at the welfare state in Britain and the New Deal in America and said, well, this, this is, this has gone too far now. This is too far. This is hostile to wealthy people. This is actually gonna lead to, if Britain and America go down this path of creating gigantic social nets for all the people, that, that's a type of collectivism. That's gonna lead to Soviet style communism. That's, that's the end result of this.
Give it 20 fucking years and Britain and America, it's gonna turn into Stalin and Mao Zedong. And anyone who has any wealth, they're gonna be, they're gonna be executed in the streets. So this fella Friedrich Hayek, he starts doing speaking tours in America in the 1940s, speaking to incredibly wealthy people, to rich people and freaking them out, freaking them out, saying this, this New Deal, this welfare state, it's gonna end in some French Revolution shit. They're gonna behead the wealthy people. This big government control, the government controlling like oil industries, airplanes, electricity, the government controlling industry, taxing people.
This is an attack on freedom. That's what this is. And he published a book in the 1940s called The Road to Serfdom. And it was directed at very wealthy people in America, the very wealthy. And it was a book that basically said to the very wealthy, you people are, are freedom fighters. You have an absolute right to earn as much money as you want for your business to have, the government shouldn't interfere with your business at all. If you wanna own the oil industry, you should be allowed to compete and own the oil industry, the coal industry. You do whatever you want for profit, that's actually freedom. And by you doing that, you're fighting against the potential totalitarianism of this social safety net.
And also, and here's the thing, this social safety net stuff, where the government is investing in healthcare and housing and all that, that's not how you have a healthy country. What you want is, you want the richest people. The richest people should be allowed to do what they want. Let the really rich, intelligent, smart, successful people, that's who we are. Let us do whatever the fuck we want. And then when we earn loads of money, that's gonna trickle down. The freedom that we have in business to do whatever we want, we don't even wanna pay taxes, that will create jobs and that will trickle down.
And this is the 1940s and these ideas are being exposed by this economist Friedrich Hayek. And what he's creating here, it's neoliberalism. That's a word, you'll hear me using it on this podcast a lot, you might hear it in the media. You have to understand what neoliberalism is. It's a shitty word, because the thing is, if you don't know what neoliberalism means, it's one of these words that you hear and it sounds like a word that a person uses to try and sound smart. It's one of them. So we kinda switch off. And you hear the word neoliberalism, if you don't know what it means, you think the person who says it is being a prick, that they're showing off.
But we all have to understand what neoliberalism means. It's how the wealthy steal. It's how the wealthy people steal. Giant corporations don't pay tax.
Corporations that earn billions and billions and billions each year don't pay any tax. They do it in Ireland. I'm from fucking Ireland. We enable this. We enable this. Corporations come here to Ireland for our 12% corporation tax. And then through a lot of dirty tricks, some of them end up paying less than 1%. We enable it. They're stealing. They're stealing neoliberalism. It's how the wealthiest people steal public money. So back to the 1940s, this fellow Friedrich Hayek, right? He's the speaking tours to the wealthiest people in America.
Every single wealthy person who hears his speech says, I fucking love this guy. This is amazing. I hate this welfare state shit. I hate this. I hate that rich people are being taxed. I hate that poor people who I think are lazy and stupid. I hate that they're getting free housing. I hate that I can't do whatever I want. I hate that the coal industry isn't privatized. I hate that I can't own the coal industry and make billions. I hate that I own a tie company. I own a tie company. I make ties for children, but I legally can't advertise to children.
I hate that that's illegal because I could make way more money if I could advertise to children because I'm selling ties with my giant tie company. So by the 1950s, money starts pouring into this Friedrich Hayek fellow to do his speaking tours and to form organizations to promote these ideas that he has. These ideas of neoliberalism, new economic liberalism. Let rich people do whatever the fuck they want and it'll benefit the economy. To pursue wealth is a form of freedom and anything that isn't this is totalitarianism. Like 1940s Jordan Peterson. You know, listening to fucking Jordan Peterson.
If you tell me in my job that I have to call a trans student trans, then the next step is Soviet totalitarianism. That's Jordan Peterson's shtick for years. Hayek was like that. So throughout the 50s, all these big, huge fucking corporations, massive corporations. They start pouring money behind fucking Hayek, General Electric.
Coors Beer, Ford, giant, giant corporations start pouring money into this fellow. Then they start spending money on, on think tanks. These lobbying groups to change policy in all, in all parts of, of, of US public life, in political discourse, lobbying politicians, lobbying journalists, universities. They start funding the University of Chicago. So now you've got economists coming out of the University of Chicago in the sixties, fifties and sixties, I believe, who are now promoting this fellow Hayek's, his ideas of economic liberalism equals freedom.
1960, he writes another book called The Constitution of Liberty. He equates wealth and the pursuit of wealth with democracy, freedom, heroism. I mean, this is where we get, you get some, some of these people licking Elon Musk's arse. Portraying Elon Musk as this scientific genius, as if he himself is designing the rockets, designing the cars, instead of being a financier. In this 1960 book that Hayek wrote, The Constitution of Liberty, you, you see this positioning of the very wealthy as like genius scientists. These are the, the saviors of civilization.
To be wealthy means that you're good. It means that you work hard. To be poor means that you're a scrounger, you're lazy, you're waiting for handouts. The years and years of backing Hayek's ideas, it eventually pays off. It pays off because it ends up influencing, by the 1970s, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Now I've completely skipped Chile. The country of Chile, that's where Chile was, was ground zero for where this neoliberalism was tested. Now I've done a podcast on that. I think it's called Why I Want to Fuck Donald Duck. I think that's the name of the podcast. If it's not that, it has something to do with Donald Duck, right? I did it about four years ago and it's about Chile.
I hate calling it Chile, I'm just gonna call it Chili. I know it's called Chile. Chili sounds better to me. It's like the fucking pork cod pass festival, the country of chili. Chili, basically.
It was a socialist country under a fella called Salvador Allende. He had this mad socialist internet thing in the seventies. Anyway, he was shut down by a coup. Fella called Pinochet took over. Big fascist fucking coup. Really brutal. And neoliberal economists from the University of Chicago basically rebuilt the entire economy of Chile under the fascist Pinochet and like sold off the copper industry. But that's where neoliberalism was really road tested in Chile. Long story short, right? These ideas by this fella Hayek, they make it to Reagan, they make it to Thatcher.
Both Thatcher and Reagan ideologically are like, we want to get these ideas, right? And we want to make that happen. We want this to be policy. We want this to be fucking policy. And the policy is privatize everything, right? So the nationalized industries where you have people with full term employment, pensions, healthcare, fuck that, that's completely private now. So coal, rail, steel, whatever, private industry for profit. Deregulation, which means companies can do whatever they want so long as they can earn money. So there's no more regulation on companies. I've done huge podcasts on this before.
The reason I mentioned children's ties is if you're a millennial like me, you grew up watching children's cartoons. He-Man, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, all this shit, right? Those weren't cartoons. Those were advertisements for ties under Reagan era. Deregulation. And I always use this as the best example to describe what deregulation is. It used to be illegal to advertise to children. It used to be considered unethical, wrong and dangerous to advertise to children. This was informed by psychologists. It was illegal to advertise to children. Under Reagan, Reagan was like, that sounds anti-business. That sounds anti-capitalism.
I think very wealthy Thai companies should be allowed to advertise to children. So they did it via cartoons and your childhood.
My Little Pony, He-Man, whatever the fuck. Those were not cartoons, they were advertisements for ties. Because advertising to children had been deregulated. Even though the psychologist said, "This isn't very safe. Children are too young to be advertised to. They're too young." Reagan was like, "No, fuck that. I, I think that the right of a tie company to earn more money is more important than the mental health of children. That's neoliberalism, right there. Reduced government intervention. The government shouldn't be involved in the economy whatsoever, just hand it all over to private companies, that's neoliberalism. Elon Musk, right now, with his Doge, the Department of Government Efficiency, and Trump.
Selling this narrative to the people. "We're draining the swamp. We're getting rid of these, these elites from government, we're shutting down all these programmes." Are they fuck? They're shutting them down, so you don't have government employees anymore. And they're gonna turn everything into far profits. Like they've shut down the national parks. They're gonna reopen the national parks, but now they'll be owned by fucking Jeff Bezos, or whatever cabal of billionaires you currently see alongside Trump. Fucking Zuckerberg, Bezos, fella called Peter Thiel, he basically owns your man JD Vance. And then Elon Musk. You see, neoliberalism creates
a feeling of powerlessness and hopefulness, hopelessness. And what I mean by that is, if you work, you're paying taxes, right? And you're looking around, and a lot of people are working, and a lot of people are paying a lot of taxes, then why are people living in tents? Why are there people living in tents? Why is that happening? Because you're taxes. I'm speaking for Ireland now, but this is happening in other countries, I'm sure it's the same in the fucking UK. In Ireland, the taxes that you pay to provide a person who's in need with housing, these taxes, that money's actually stolen by a rich cunt. Like, I have a job and I pay taxes, right? And I, I want, I want my taxes.
To pay for the housing of a family who aren't as fortunate as me. For whatever reason, I don't give a fuck what the reasons are. But I know there's, there's people out there and they can't afford housing. And I want those people to have houses, to be warm, to have food, to have a quality of life. And I don't mind paying that with my taxes. I want that. I want to do that with my taxes. I want to live in that society. A hundred percent. I want to live in that society where my taxes are helping people who are less fortunate than me. Currently what's happening in Ireland is, yes, there is a certain amount of affordable housing
or social housing for people, right? So let's just say a family in Ireland want to get social housing, right? So they can, they can get access to this. They can get a house. Now, it's very, very fucking scarce, right? It's very scarce. But if a family is lucky enough to get a house, okay? It's through a thing called HAP, the Housing Assistance Payment, right? Instead of back in the day where social housing was, was built and provided by local authorities, by the council, now what's happening is the government pays a landlord. So the money that you think is a taxpayer is actually going to help a family get a house
or to, to get a home. It is. But the vast majority of that money that you pay is lining the pockets of a landlord. And the government pays the landlord with your taxes, the market value of the rent. So let's just say for, for argument's sake, the person in need of, of a house, they pay.
Two hundred quid a month in HAP, right? That's very affordable rent, two hundred quid. The landlord who owns that house is paid by the government. Two thousand five hundred quid from tax, from tax money. And that there is neoliberalism. A public service such as providing people in need with affordable housing has been outsourced to the private market and very wealthy people are stealing. I'm calling it stealing. Very wealthy people are stealing tax, making themselves wealthy and pushing, pushing rents up, pushing rents up. You see, now there's an incentive, there's an incentive for a housing crisis now.
Now there's an industry, an industry is developing whereby instead of wanting to solve the housing crisis, okay? And to provide everybody with housing because housing should be a right. Instead of that, what you have is an industry where human misery and homelessness can be milked and profited from. And that's how you end up with people paying taxes to try and solve the housing crisis. And still there's a lot of homeless people. So you end up feeling that everything is pointless. I'm paying taxes, everyone I know is paying taxes. There's a high employment and all these people who are highly employed are paying fucking taxes. Why are there people on the streets in tents?
Because the system has been set up for very rich people to steal taxes. That's what neoliberalism is. In America, prisons are privatized. So when people go to prison in America, the fucking prisons are private and people can earn money from running prisons. So now they've incentivized the prison industry, the wonderful NHS that I described in fucking Britain that was set up as free healthcare for everybody. That's been, that's been gutted. Deregulation and neoliberalism has allowed the NHS to be contracted out. So lots of stuff in the NHS is now contracted out for profit to private companies.
And then the NHS itself gets underfunded to encourage this, this pushing it out to the private market. So that situation there is where in Ireland where I mentioned that like. When you pay taxes for social housing, a lot, most of that goes to landlords. These landlords, they're not like individual people. Sometimes, sometimes they are, but mostly you're talking about giant companies that own multiple properties. How about this? This is gonna sound fucking nuts. What if I told you that social housing in Ireland is advertised to other countries? Social housing is advertised, social housing in Ireland is advertised in China
as a, as an investment, an advertised, Ireland's housing crisis, Ireland's misery is advertised to multimillionaires in China as a secure investment, right? It advertises Ireland. Now, I'm, I'm taking this from, there's a journalist in Sunday Business Post called Killian Woods, and he does brilliant investigation. He's a legitimate journalist. He does brilliant investigations into this. So Ireland was being advertised to these Chinese multimillionaires. The housing crisis was being advertised as the Irish people, they drink on Saturday and then drink for half the day on Sunday. And by then, most of their weekly paycheck is spent. So when Monday comes around and they start to work, they're lethargic.
It's basically positioning Ireland as this, this very safe country where we don't notice what's going on because we're so pissed all the time. And then it says, Ireland is a country that doesn't have any radical Muslim issues. And what are they selling? Social housing. These ads were successful in my city in Limerick. This is not a fucking joke. In my city in Limerick, Chinese investors bought a 100 million euro site and they're gonna build 500 social homes. Now, here's the thing. Am I antisocial housing? No, no, build fucking social housing. I don't want to see people on the streets in tents.
Isn't it a good thing that these Chinese investors are building 500 social houses in Limerick? Is that not a good thing? So, yes, this means that 500 families might get 500 houses in Limerick, right? Affordably, that's brilliant. Why are Chinese investors paying for it? That's 500 houses that are gonna be rented out at market value. The current market value to rent out a house for a month in Limerick would be between 2,500 and 3,000 euros. That's 1.5 million euros a month, right? Who pays that? The Irish taxpayer, you and me, our taxes, right?
Yes, those taxes, 500 people are getting houses, or 500 families are getting houses affordably, right? But the vast majority of that money, that 1.5 million, the vast majority of that money is being siphoned off to Chinese investors. And they'll probably have a company in Ireland where that money goes to, and they won't have to pay tax on it. And then you now have an entire for-profit industry whereby this industry makes, it makes more money when the housing crisis is worse. You see, the housing, the more scarce housing is, the more expensive it is, and now the more money you can make from a housing crisis. So money's being stolen.
What stops that? Regulation, it should be illegal. It shouldn't happen because it's unconscionable, it's unthinkable. It's inhumane. It perpetuates a housing crisis, it creates a housing crisis. It turns misery into a commodity that can be profited from and milked. And then that whole process leaves the average person feeling utterly powerless. The same thing is happening with refugees, Ukrainian refugees, refugees from all over the world. You might be thinking, Blind Boy, are you anti-refugee now? Why are you speaking about refugees? No, I'm not anti-refugee at all.
There's people escaping wars. They deserve to have safety. Ireland is a safe country. I would like my taxes. I would like my taxes.
To give these people safety and warmth and food for as long as they need. But this has been outsourced to the private, the private market, mostly by huge hotel chains, earning millions and millions. And how would these hotel chains earning money? By providing accommodation for refugees? Because they're charging the government market value. So if Travilaj are stuck into it, I know Travilaj are one of the, one of the companies for sure. Yeah. So, so in 2023, Travilaj made 37 million from the Irish government by providing accommodation for refugees. Not to the best of my understanding.
Rooms are charged at, at the going, the going price. So, so if the government outsourced privately contracts to hotels to accommodate refugees and then the hotel charges the government what the going rate would be for a hotel room that night, which could be 300, 400 quid. So I think that my taxes are actually paying to accommodate people who are fleeing war. And they are, but most of the money, most of the money is going into the pockets of private corporations, right? Giant hotel companies
who are funneling tax, public money into their private coffers and then paying Ireland's very low corporation tax of 12%. So what you're seeing really, okay? It's, it's stealing. It's legal, so it's not stealing, right? But slowly but surely through policy, through lobbying, and this isn't just Ireland, this is everywhere. Right? Neoliberalism.
Through privatization, deregulation, has made it so that the wealthiest people and entities pay the least amount of tax and can funnel tax money, public money that's supposed to be going to to provide social safety nets. This money that used to provide safety nets, it's now just been funneled. And, and what do you get from that? Huge, huge inequality. You get a lot of billionaires and then 99% of people going, "This is hopeless. This is hopeless." There appears to be money everywhere. There appears to be a functioning economy, but why are people intense?
What's happening here? Policy is what's happening. That's a choice. That's a choice. Policy. Policy is what's fucking happening there. In the same way, it was policy
for Britain to start the NHS, free healthcare for everybody. While the place was on fire, neoliberalism has figured out a way to take human misery and turn it into profit. And most of us aren't really aware that's what's happening. Instead, we just have a feeling of powerlessness. And in that gulf, in that gulf, what happens? In the confusion, the confusion and the chaos of that, and the feeling of nothing I seems to do makes a difference. We search for our narratives again. Conspiracy theories, the plandemic, racism, fascism.
The billionaires own the social media companies. The billionaires own the social media companies where disinformation is spread. Not just disinformation, but any information that causes us to have high arousal emotions, anger and fear. These platforms are owned by billionaires. These platforms. The public square where we have conversations. Owned by billionaires and they set the rules of how discourse must occur. And, and social media is a video game where you have turn and response combat, where everything must be polarised and they make money from that too, or data. The longer you stay on whatever fucking app arguing, the more money the billionaires make.
Who's, who's right hand side with Trump? Elon Musk and fucking Mark Zuckerberg. There's no conspiracy. It's, it's neoliberal capitalism. It's right there in front of you. You don't need a conspiracy. The wealthiest people in the world are taking ownership of everything, including public discourse. Conspiracy theories, anger, blaming, pointing the finger at one another, pointing the finger at fucking refugees, pointing the finger at trans people, whatever the fuck. These are all wonderful, brilliant distractions while public money is funnelled into private interests and we can't see it happening. There was a psychologist by the name of Martin Seligman. I think he was in the 1960s.
His methods were studied by the fucking CIA when they were writing up their Tartar manuals. But Martin Seligman proposed a theory called learned helplessness, learned helplessness in human behaviour. And he did studies on dogs.
He got one dog and put him in a box, right? And the dog was given electric shocks. It wasn't very nice and the dog was given electric shocks, but the dog could turn off the electric shocks by touching a lever. But at the same time, there was another dog in another box watching all this. And the other dog was getting shocks too, except when the other dog touched the lever, nothing happened. The dog got shocks regardless. Nothing that the dog could do would stop the shocks happening. Animal cruelty. But Seligman continued these experiments, right? So the one dog was receiving shocks, but it could stop the shocks by touching a lever.
Other dog getting the same shocks, but nothing it did could stop the shocks. Then the experiment progressed. Seligman got both dogs and put them into a couple of new boxes, right? And in these boxes, the dogs could avoid shocks if they just jumped over a bar.
The dog who had been in the box whereby if he touched the lever, he could stop the shocks. This dog would jump whenever it felt the shock. This dog would actively avoid shocks and work towards not being shocked. The dog that was in the box whereby nothing it did, it got shocks anyway. This dog just gave up and whimpered and yelped and allowed itself to be shocked consistently, electrocuted in utter misery. And Seligman called this learned helplessness. The dog had been conditioned to believe
that it was going to be hurt and harmed regardless and that nothing it could do could have any influence over its life and environment. Neoliberalism thrives on that. All the fucking mad conspiracy theories, the disinformation,
the horrifying images of genocide, the fact that nothing's done about it, that no one's held to account. The removal of all belief structures, the removal of the international order, the rise of fascism. Everything, everything is preying upon our feeling of hopelessness and then adding to it as well. It's a system designed to make you feel helpless so you don't do anything about it and you just give up and put up with it. It's hard to find an answer, but one thing I do notice is that the system thrives upon division.
Whatever the subject, like think of it, if you go to the fucking pub and this wasn't the case 10 years ago. If you go to the pub, right, and you're with your friends and there's a few other people who you don't know that well. Are you really gonna bring up housing or immigration? Are you really gonna do that? You probably won't, because you don't know where the conversation is gonna go. You're afraid that someone is gonna say something racist or utterly fucking mad. Someone might legitimately turn around and say, you bring up housing. And then they go, you know refugees, you know, that's actually a global plot to replace white people. And the ones that are doing it are interdimensional, shape shifting lizards.
I know people who believe that. I didn't know people who believed that 10 fucking years ago. Everything has become so polarized and divided. Doesn't, there's people in America fighting over milk.
There's people fighting over raw milk. You've Robert Kennedy running the healthcare system over there. People in America, milk has become politicized. Right wing people want raw milk that comes straight from a cow's tit. Left, left leaning people want milk that's been pasteurized. If I see someone who's into yoga now, I have to wonder if they're a fascist. Oh, you're into crystals, yeah? Do you like crystals? Or do you think that the COVID vaccine was actually implanted in us as a tracking device for Hollywood elites? So that they can, so that they can suck adrenochrome from the glands of abused children in order to have longevity. There's people who believe that.
Some, some of these people are into yoga.
10 years ago, when someone was into yoga, they were just into meditating and breathing. No matter what it is, it's being polar, polarized, whatever the subject. It's being polarized and people are being split into two teams. And you know who's been split into two teams? People who are fucked by the system, people at the bottom of the system. So I don't know what the, what the answer is, but I do know, but I do know that division is a goal. The first thing that I do proactively, I can only give advice to people in Ireland. Join Community Action Tenants Union, CATU. It's, it's a volunteer-run organisation,
Community Action Tenants Union, who strive for collective bargaining against evictions and landlords. And it's, it's about people power and community. And I don't think it's centrally run. So that's a positive thing you could do. Join your local CATU branch. If, if division is a very clear goal, which we can see, if division is a clear goal, then community and unity and solidarity and empathy and trying to meet in, in real-life spaces outside of online spaces, that's probably a potential solution. Okay, I didn't expect this podcast to be... I could have done fucking longer on this. I could have done longer. There's so much I didn't fucking speak about. I mean, I just focused on housing.
All right, dog bless, I'll catch you next week. My voice is gone. Genuflect to a swan, wink at a worm, gently explain neoliberalism to a snail, to a garden snail. Dog bless.
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Page updated November 3, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated