Pod Insights The Blindboy Podcast This is a Mental Health episode about being Autistic. If you are not Autistic, you might not like it and should listen to Diary of a CEO instead About this episode An exciting new non pathologising paper has been published into autistic flow states. I discuss this Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript 10,395 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 Hot flashes, rage crying, forgetting words mid-senten. Yeah, we know. Menopause is a lot. Midi Health gets it. That's why Midi offers virtual healthcare specially tailored to women's needs. Built for women by women. Every symptom, every stage, every question. Visit joinmidi.com to get started today. That's join M I D I dot com. Individual results and coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.
0:30 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market. Home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings and sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
1:00 Blindboy Boatclub? Shed your helmets, you sweltering Emmets. Welcome to the Blind By Podcast. If you're a brand new listener, consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. At the beginning of last week's podcast, I read out a poem by Daniel Day-Lewis called, "Is This a Priest or a Seagull?" And it was ironically prophetic because I've been tortured all week by the screams of gulls. Seagulls are nesting on the roof of my office, just above my head on my tin roof. And it hasn't rained in days, but the fucking seagulls are persistently walking around, slamming their massive orange feet and screaming.
1:45 Blindboy Boatclub? So if at any point throughout this podcast a seagull screams, we're just gonna have to sit with the anxiety of that and let it pass. I was allowing the seagulls to... Entroude on my mental wellbeing during the week. I was catastrophising a little bit. Every time they screamed, I was thinking, fuck. How am I gonna record next week's podcast with this noise? It'll be a disaster. It'll be terrible, impossible. I'm gonna have to abandon next week's podcast. And put out no podcast because the seagulls will get in my way. And then I identified these thoughts as irrational and negative and unhelpful.
2:28 Blindboy Boatclub? And then I reminded myself, I have a choice here. I can choose to view the seagulls' behaviour as something terrible and awful. Or I can identify it as an opportunity, an opportunity to fail. To embrace the seagulls, just like we do with the rain. Bring the fucking seagulls on as a guest and name it and move past it. And that's what we're gonna do. And when I engage that, that rational thinking part of my brain.
3:01 Blindboy Boatclub? Then my curiosity opened up.
3:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Oh, there we go. Do you hear that?
3:09 Blindboy Boatclub? Do you know what that seagull is saying there? What that seagull is screaming? The seagull is saying, I don't want to interrupt your podcast, blind boy. I'm a seagull, I don't give a fuck about podcasts. To be honest with you, I'd rather not be on the roof of your office. You don't wanna be on the roof of my office, Mr. Seagull? Or Mrs. Seagull? Or non-binary seagull? I'll just go with Mr. Seagull. There's a reason I can't put a gender to that seagull that just screamed. But why don't you want to be on the roof of my office? Mr. Seagull, with your nest up there? Well, I'd much rather be nesting on, on one of the, the many islands. On the Shannon estuary, I'd much rather be there.
3:53 Blindboy Boatclub? It's closer to my source of food. They're called herring gulls, you see. They wanna be hanging around the mouth of the fucking ocean or on the rivers, but they're not. The natural nesting habitat of those seagulls on my roof are the islands of the Shannon estuary are in some of the wetlands. But those habitats have become overrun with rats and mink. And these are invasive predators that they eat the eggs in the nests of the seagulls. So the safest place for seagulls to nest is high up in urban areas. And they don't wanna be there. It's not their natural habitat. They're going ape shit on my roof now. See if I can open the window and you can hear them.
4:45 Blindboy Boatclub? County's gone quiet now.
4:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Gone fucking quiet as soon as I opened the window. Probably freaked out.
5:04 Blindboy Boatclub? Anyway, look, they're defending their nests. That's what they're doing. So both the male and female herring gull, they're incredibly loud right now because they're defending their nests. I'm looking at one right now, standing on a lot of solar panels. Absolutely stunning white plumage. Just flew off there, very large. And also they're starving. This is, I think I might have mentioned this last year, but. So those seagulls of Limerick City, Limerick City Centre, where my office is. Two seemingly unrelated things are impacting the seagulls' behaviour.
5:46 Blindboy Boatclub? One of them is the bottle return scheme. And the other thing is the crack cocaine epidemic that's been in Limerick City for about three years. And I'll explain why. So in 2024, Ireland introduced the deposit return scheme for bottles and cans.
6:07 Blindboy Boatclub? Just let the seagull speak. If you buy a plastic bottle in Ireland now, there's a 15 cent tax on that plastic bottle, but you can bring it back to a type of vending machine where it's recycled and that will give you money, that'll give you 15 cents. So that's been happening in Ireland now for two years. What does that have to do with the crack cocaine epidemic? In Limerick City, there are, there's drug addicts and they're addicted to crack cocaine. That's quite an expensive addiction. But crack cocaine in Limerick City specifically is very cheap. I'm not putting that out of my arse. The Analiffy Drug Project, who help people who are in addiction.
6:52 Blindboy Boatclub? Now, they do fantastic work. Analiffy do amazing work, but they have an unfortunate name because anytime I read Analiffy, it reads as A-N-A-I-F-Y. So that reads as an organisation for people who are iffy about anal sex. It's not, it's a brilliant community-based drug outreach programme and you can donate to them at aldp.ie. They've stated that the price of crack in Limerick City is 15 euro. A major gang targeted Limerick City as an emerging market for crack cocaine and basically, more seagulls, basically flooded the place with cheap crack and people travelled to Limerick for crack cocaine. So 15 euros.
7:35 Blindboy Boatclub? I saw this with my own eyes when the deposit return scheme came about in 2024. The people who were addicted to crack started to collect plastic bottles and bring them to the vending machines for money because there was also a shoplifting problem. So this was a way for people who are in crack cocaine addiction to get money without breaking the law.
7:59 Blindboy Boatclub? One hundred plastic bottles will get you fifteen euros. So for about six months in 2024, the city centre of Limerick was full of people with big black sacks full of plastic bottles, bringing them to vending machines. But eventually, the people who were in crack cocaine addiction, instead of just picking the bottles up off the street, started to open up the bins of restaurants down alleyways. And they were tearing everything out to get at the bottles. So then what happened? The restaurants started padlocking all the bins down the alleyways to keep humans from getting at the bins.
8:40 Blindboy Boatclub? But then that impacted the food supply of the urban seagulls, the fucking herring gulls. I then witnessed an uptick in aggressive and loud seagull behaviour, because it started to affect how I record my podcast. So that's what we're dealing with right now. Loud, hungry herring gulls on my roof, who are not only defending their nests, but are very pissed off because it's difficult to find food. And if you're wondering where I got my information about Irish seagull behaviour there, I read an article written by an expert from Birdwatch Ireland, whose name is Owen Hatch. Wonderful nominative determinism there. This week's podcast is not about seagulls.
9:24 Blindboy Boatclub? I'd like to do a mental health podcast this week. Last week, I spoke to a neuroscientist by the name of Michael Keane. He spoke about the mental health impacts of dome scrolling. And he had a lot to say about that podcast. I got a lot of, got a huge response from people who were identifying unhelpful behaviours in themselves around dome scrolling. And it just reminded me that I haven't done, I haven't checked in with a mental health podcast in a long time. When I speak about emotional wellbeing in this podcast, I'm not a fucking expert. I'm just a person navigating my own emotions. And I have certain tools that I use to do this.
10:08 Blindboy Boatclub? And I like to share these things and to be vulnerable as a form of personal journaling. I want to mention a beautiful study that came out this month. A study that...
10:22 Blindboy Boatclub? It made me feel really fucking good about myself. It's a study about the experience of flow states in autistic people. If you're a long-term listener of this podcast, like I think my first ever episodes, eight years ago, I spoke about flow when I was describing my first collection of short stories, The Gospel According to Blind Boy, from 2017. I spoke about what I loved about that book isn't necessarily completing the work, having the stories, it was the act of doing it, the process, the fact that I got to engage in the feeling of flow while writing the entire book.
11:05 Blindboy Boatclub? And flow feels a bit like daydreaming, but very, very intense. When I enter flow state, I experience complete and total bliss. My thoughts become like a laser beam of extreme clarity and I'm overwhelmed with a feeling of belonging, love, purpose, and above all, meaning. When I'm in flow, I feel unbelievably happy to just be alive. I feel that I have worth, purpose. It feels like being a little baby and my mother is cradling me and all I have is love and safety. That's what flow state feels like to me.
11:50 Blindboy Boatclub? And when I'm in that state, my creativity unlocks. I write entire books. Stories arrive to me like I'm in the cinema watching them. And then I exit flow state and I'm back in the real world, we'll call it. And I've no idea how I just wrote what I wrote. And that can be scary because I can, I can read, I can read fucking stories that I wrote myself and go, who the fuck wrote this? How did I do this? I could never do this again. Holy fuck. But that's flow state. And I need to enter flow state to do my job, to do this podcast, to write books. So this new study, which was published in the Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy
12:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Research, is called Towards Autistic Flow Theory: A Non-Pathologising Conceptual Approach. And what makes it so groundbreaking and so validating is...
12:43 Blindboy Boatclub? It looks at flow specifically in autistic people because flow in autistic people is reported as being particularly intense. When you hear people talking about autism as a superpower, which most people disagree with, I don't like that term superpower, but when people say that, what they're referring to is autistic flow states. I don't experience it as a superpower, but at times it has felt magical. It's not fucking magical, but because time and space can fade away effectively, and I'm in this weird laser beam universe, the best language I can use to describe it is magical.
13:22 Blindboy Boatclub? The most accurate visual representation of flow that I've ever seen depicted is, there's a film from 2004 called A Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe. It's about a schizophrenic mathematician, but there's moments in it where Russell Crowe's character is solving problems and patterns emerge before his eyes and the whole world shuts out as he's locked in deep concentration. And I used to watch that film when it came out. I don't even like the fucking film. It's not even that good a film, but I used to watch those scenes on repeat because something about it made me feel normal.
14:03 Blindboy Boatclub? And now I understand why, because it was flow state, autistic pattern recognition. You know, earlier on there with the fucking seagulls, most people, if there's seagulls on the roof, they just go, oh, there's seagulls on my roof. That's very annoying. Whereas I don't move on from it. I focus on it until patterns emerge. And that's how I connected the seagull behavior with the crack cocaine epidemic and the deposit return scheme, which I think is highly plausible. It might be true, it might not be true. I think it's plausible. What we can all agree on is that it's fucking mental. It's a highly eccentric theory that I keep to myself. I say it here on this fucking podcast, on the Blind by Podcast, but you think I'm walking around my office?
14:49 Blindboy Boatclub? Saying to people, "You know what's going on with those seagulls upstairs, don't you? You know it has to do with the crack, don't you? You know that, don't you?" I'm not fucking doing that. Because that's the type of eccentric behaviour that brings social rejection to autistic people. Not here on this podcast. If you're listening to this podcast, you want to hear why the seagulls are connected to crack cocaine. That's why you're here. This new study, I cried when I read it. I cried when I read it. It reframes autistic people, not as defective, as wrong, as broken, but as human beings that are uniquely attuned to states of flow.
15:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Also, what makes the study unique is it's not non-autistic people watching autistic people and writing about them. It's phenomenological research where autistic accounts from autistic people are central to the concept of what autism is. So they've really listened. Instead of studying the autistic people, they ask the autistic people questions about what it's like to be alive. So the big, big finding of this study, autistic people need flow state in order to manage our mental health, in order to regulate our emotions, to feel safe.
16:14 Blindboy Boatclub? We must have regular access to flow state. Now, I've known this for years. I've known this because I'm fucking autistic. That's my lived experience. Three weeks ago, I told you, you know, I got my analog synthesizers and I started making music again. And then I was posting it online and the music was doing really well. I just posted another track last night on Instagram, a piece of jungle music that I made over the weekend, and it's gone, "Seagulls." It's gone massively viral and I got offered three gigs today. Three gigs at drum and bass nights, two in Ireland, one in Berlin. I'm not doing it to get gigs. I don't want the gigs.
16:58 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't want to be a professional musician. I don't even want to release music. If I just get to enjoy the process of making music and entering flow state, my mental health improves. The next day, I'm less irritable. I'm much more literate in my emotional experience. What I mean by that is I can name and feel and notice my emotions as opposed to react to them. And I knew this to be true, but I would still say to myself, that's fucking ridiculous. How can playing with synthesizers for two hours improve your mental health? The fuck is that? Don't be silly, because I've been conditioned to believe that it is silly.
17:42 Blindboy Boatclub? Adults don't play with fucking synthesizers. And if you are to play with synthesizers, then you better capitalize on it. You better turn it into gigs. You better turn it into revenue. Then it has real value. But the real value is it allows me to be, it allows me to feel safe, to feel safe and to feel happy. This study confirms this. Autistic people need flow. Also, this study challenges certain language which autistic people don't like, special interests. I fucking hate the term special interests. It's another way of saying it's not that deep or you think too much.
18:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Autistic people are focused on these silly things, these silly interests, instead of being serious about life like the rest of us. Well, this study gets rid of special interests altogether and goes, fuck that. Autistic people enter flow states. And what you see as special interests, that's flow state. And that might look silly to you as a neurotypical person. But to autistic people, this is actually an essential part of how they regulate and manage their emotions, the way that neurotypical people socialize.
19:01 Blindboy Boatclub? I mean, that's the huge, huge difference between me and neurotypical people is I don't really have friends. I have a small circle of people, my family, who I'm very close with and who I can be myself around. But outside of that, I don't really have friends. And it's not a dislike of people. I love being around people. I like to be, I like to be in, I like to be alone in the presence of humans. I love that. That's why I like going to the gym. I find the gym to be a very artistic friendly space because I can wear headphones, I can be around loads of people, and there's no expectation for me to have small talk.
19:43 Blindboy Boatclub? I can be by myself in a crowd, and that's normal. But I suppose the reason I don't have friends is I don't really experience loneliness. I don't miss people, like something that used to make me feel like an alien when I was younger, in my twenties, when your twenties is a more social time. But someone might say, oh, I called over to this person's house last night to hang out. And I'd go, you did what? Just called over just to hang out. And be like, why? Were you doing something? Were you, were you, were you making something together? Did you have something to talk about? No, no, we just hung out, just hung
20:25 Blindboy Boatclub? out and watched TV together. And I could never relate to it. I could never relate to someone needing to be in the presence, company. I don't understand that, needing a person's company just because during the pandemic, a lot of people's mental health went to shit because they couldn't experience company, the company of other humans. And that's very neurotypical. So neurotypical people require company.
20:59 Blindboy Boatclub? They just like to be around other people and to spend time with other people. And this nourishes and heals and regenerates. I'm just gonna meet this, I'm gonna go and meet this person for a coffee. And when I meet this person, I'm gonna feel better about myself, I'm gonna feel good. I, I have no context for that whatsoever. So because of this, I don't really have close friends. I'm in no WhatsApp groups, none. I don't know what it is to text a person and say, hey, man, what's up? If I'm texting someone, it's because of a specific piece of information, because of a fact, or to send them a piece of music. Do I socialize?
21:44 Blindboy Boatclub? Yes, but it's always work. My co-writer, James, who I write all my TV shows with, who's probably neurodivergent, otherwise I wouldn't get on with him so well. But we socialize, but it's to write television. We go to pubs, we have crack, but always the conversation is about the act of creativity. But autistic people need flow for their mental health, the way that neurotypical people need company. That's one of the positions in this, this new research, in this paper. Long before I knew I was autistic, I always said, I don't have friends, I have ideas.
22:27 Blindboy Boatclub? Which sounds fucking harsh, but it's the truth. Most of the happiest moments of my life are by myself, on my own. Writing or going for runs and listening to music, with the exception of the core group, who are my family. And my family are the people who I get to be autistic around, the people who I can stim around, the people who I can wear big stupid baggy clothes around, the people who I can speak about my pigeon theories around in real life, not on a podcast. Cause another thing I experienced, and I'd love to know if other autistic people have experienced this, but I didn't predict this, but
23:09 Blindboy Boatclub? when I announced that I was autistic four years ago, a lot of people who would have been friends just stopped contacting me. And I think.
23:24 Blindboy Boatclub? So when you're autistic, especially if you're in a friends group, now this is, you're autistic your whole life, whether you're diagnosed or not, you're autistic your entire life. So I've always been autistic, but I was in my fucking mid 30s before I found out I was autistic, but I was still autistic before that. So if you're the autistic person in a group, you are the eccentric person. This is always represented very well in sitcoms. Sitcoms, they don't say it's the autistic person, but the autistic person is always present in sitcoms, the weird character, the crazy character. In Friends, it's Phoebe. In Seinfeld, it's Kramer. In Father Ted, it's Dougal.
24:09 Blindboy Boatclub? In Faulty Towers, it's Manuel, even though the thing with Manuel, it's more of a racism thing with Manuel, or a xenophobia thing with Manuel, because he's foreign, he doesn't speak English, but he's the eccentric outcast. But when you're the autistic person in a group, you're the eccentric one. You're not fully taken seriously. You're seen as a bit of a lunatic. People like you, people keep you around, but you know they do impressions of you when your back is turned, when you're not there. And you find this out, you find it out when you're not invited to things. When people all gather together and you see it on Facebook and it's like, no one told
24:54 Blindboy Boatclub? me about that, or I've been uninvited to things before, long before I knew I was autistic, maybe late 20s, but I remember someone just going, do you know what, this thing here, turns out there's gonna be a lot of aunts and uncles at this thing, so they're just not gonna get you. They're not gonna get you. It might be best if you sit this one out. But it's like, but all my other friends are going. They're the same age as me. All my other friends are going. And then you realise, oh, fuck. They're actually embarrassed of me because I'm gonna do some crazy monologue. And that's the experience of being autistic. Every autistic person has that story. It's not a very inclusive world.
25:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Social rejection is a huge part of being autistic. And we learn to be by ourselves, to, to, it's safer to be by ourselves. Or when weddings, I always give weddings as the example. When you get invited to a wedding and you think you're gonna be sitting with all your friends at the reception and you're not, and all of a sudden you're on this other table. The lunatic table where you're sitting with, it's like, who the fuck are these people around me? I thought I was supposed to be up there at the front with all my friends. But I'm back here at this other table and I'm sitting beside people I don't know. And then you look around and you notice that the people at your table
26:22 Blindboy Boatclub? are all strange or eccentric in their own ways. And this happens when the bride and groom, they're picking guests. And they're going, where did this person sit? Where does that person sit? And then it comes around to the autistic person and it's like, we can't have them sitting beside that aunt. We can't have them sitting beside that uncle because what might they say? They're eccentric, they're a lunatic, they could say anything. They might start talking about the, the seagull and crack cocaine theory. We can't, not around my aunt. My aunt won't understand that person. And every wedding has about five or six of these misfits. And we all end up at the same fucking table at the back, near the emergency exit.
27:04 Blindboy Boatclub? And this happened to me three or four times and I just stopped going to weddings. The last time, probably 15 years ago, I found myself sitting beside, to my left was a dissident Republican and to my right was a man who had brought a ferret to the wedding. No judgement on either of those people, but like, and before I knew I was autistic, this would turn into a self fulfilling prophecy. It would bring me straight back to, you gotta remember too in fucking school, up until I was 16, I wasn't in the normal class. I wa- I was in a class called 3B3. There was about fifteen of us and it was the class full of people who couldn't be put in any other class.
27:45 Blindboy Boatclub? It was lads with behavioural issues, neurodivergent and lads who grew up with the trauma of poverty and domestic abuse. So when I'd get thrown at the lunatic table at weddings, I'd go self fulfilling prophecy. I'd notice that little pain of rejection. I'd try and keep it down because I want to enjoy myself and then I'm drinking too much because that's the other fucking thing.
28:12 Blindboy Boatclub? If you're autistic, especially in your twenties, alcohol is the leveler. You're severely overstimulated by just social interaction. So you're the first person to get drunk because when everybody's drunk, there's no autistic people, there's no neurotypical people, there's just drunk people. But I'd like to know if other autistic people have experienced, when you announced, when you found out, got diagnosed and said that you were autistic, did it cause some people to just disappear? And I think what it is, once you have a diagnosis, the way that they previously treated you now becomes bullying.
28:55 Blindboy Boatclub? It's now, oh shit, you mean we can't do impressions of them? We can't do impressions of them anymore? Ah, fuck. If I make fun of that crazy thing they said, now I think I'm being ableist. Now I'm bullying that person. Am I? Because they're autistic now, so this completely changes how I treat them. Shit, I thought they were just like Phoebe or Kramer, you know, just a bit kooky and a bit crazy, but now if they're autistic, this changes everything. I'm gonna have to change the way that I treat them now, is it? Now what I'm doing. Is taking the piss out of someone who has a, who's legally considered disabled. Or maybe they have a guilt for having done it in the past.
29:39 Blindboy Boatclub? I've heard gay people speak about that. I've heard people, I don't like to use the word coming out when it comes to being autistic. Tom Hardy announced that he was autistic there a couple of weeks ago. And a lot of headlines were saying, Tom Hardy comes out as autistic. I don't think gay people should have to come out either. There's no fucking coming out. You are gay. You are autistic. You are trans. But I know that gay people, when they've announced, I'm actually gay. Certain people who they thought were fucking friends just become distant. It's too difficult to deal with. So this new research, this new paper, the flow theory approach to autism. It's a non-pathologising approach.
30:23 Blindboy Boatclub? Instead of, so to, to pathologise autism is to view it as a deficit or an impairment. Whereas this approach is, no, hold on a minute. This is a different way of functioning and it makes sense in its context. And that's non-pathologising. And remember, like other things were pathologised. Being gay was pathologised. Being gay was in the DSM manual as a mental fucking illness. Up until the 1970s, being left-handed was pathologised. There's people listening to this podcast who were left-handed in school and the teachers fucking forced it out of you. Instead of going, actually, no, this is just different.
31:05 Blindboy Boatclub? It's not a deficit and I might, I might have to use some empathy to contextualise this. Okay, let's have an Ocarina pause because there's other really juicy stuff in this new study about autistic people and our supposed lack of empathy that gets challenged beautifully. And I want to talk about that uninterrupted. So let's Ocarina pause now. I have a lovely big stone Ocarina that I found in my office that I'd forgotten that I had. Let's have a crack at this and you're going to hear some adverts for bullshit.
31:48 Speaker 00 Bit disappointing. Hot flashes, rage crying, forgetting words mid-sent-ten. Yeah, we know. Menopause is a lot. Midi Health gets it. That's why Midi offers virtual healthcare specially tailored to women's needs. Built for women by women. Every symptom, every stage, every question. Visit joinmidi.com to get started today. That's join M I D I dot com. Individual results and coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.
32:19 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a berry chantilly cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
32:46 Speaker 03 The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver. Kids are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, often unsupervised, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. That's where Gab comes in. Gab offers safer phones and watches for kids with no social media, tailored to every age, offering the right tech at the right time. Or Tech in Steps. From GPS-tracking-enabled watches for younger kids to phones with parent-enabled apps for teens, each device allows kids to more safely grow their independence. Visit gab.com/getgab and use code GETGAB for an exclusive offer.
33:27 Speaker 03 That's G A B B dot com forward slash get gab. Gab: Tech in Steps. Independence for them, peace of mind for parents.
33:40 Blindboy Boatclub? No, that's my fault. I can't play it.
33:45 Speaker 01 Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies, made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.
34:12 Speaker 00 Seventy-five percent of women who seek menopause care don't receive it. The lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering what's happening to your body ends now. Midi is virtual care built for women in perimenopause and menopause with clinicians who specialize in women's health. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. Midlife needs Midi. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. That's join M I D I dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.
34:43 Speaker 03 The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver. Kids are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, often unsupervised, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. That's where Gab comes in. Gab offers safer phones and watches for kids with no social media, tailored to every age, offering the right tech at the right time, or Tech in Steps. From GPS tracking-enabled watches for younger kids to phones with parent-enabled apps for teens, each device allows kids to more safely grow their independence. Visit gab.com/getgab and use code GETGAB for an exclusive offer. That's G A B B dot com forward slash get gab.
35:28 Speaker 03 Gab: Tech in Steps. Independence for them, peace of mind for parents.
35:37 Blindboy Boatclub? This is the most complicated ocarina. I believe this came from New Zealand. It has about 24 halls.
35:55 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm gonna need to get better at playing that. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, distraction, joy, whatever, please consider contributing directly to this podcast. This is a listener-funded podcast. It's only possible because you, the listener, funds it directly. This is my full-time job. It's how I earn a living. I mention each week about the joy and the meaning that this podcast brings me.
36:35 Blindboy Boatclub? The fact that it gives me the time and space to just to research and to come up with hot takes and to then deliver them as a monologue podcast and to focus on my curiosity as much as I do when I deliver these episodes. I'm at it so long now that some people think that I'm insane. I've done it every single week for eight years. The only time I kind of have to take a break is when I put out a live podcast. And I usually do that when I need a fucking break because touring and meeting people causes me to have artistic burnout.
37:17 Blindboy Boatclub? And artistic burnout is when I'm having to mask, socially interact and be away from states of flow. Everything about making this podcast is flow state for me. And that's why it brings me such purpose and meaning and happiness. And that new study, it's causing me to see everything in a new light. Of course, I'm delivering a monologue podcast each week that takes days of research. Of course, I'm doing that. That's very important to how I feel safe and exist in the world. The only non-creative, we'll say, neurotypical job I've ever had is I worked in a call centre
38:00 Blindboy Boatclub? for six weeks in my early twenties and I was fired for printing out 93 pages about CIA crack cocaine smuggling on the office printer. Now I've managed to make that my job. The thing that got me fired is now my job. So if you do enjoy this podcast, please consider supporting it directly. It's how I pay all my bills, so I rent out my office, so I purchase my equipment for making the podcast. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it. Listen for free, all right? Because I want everybody to get the exact same podcast, whether you pay or not. And the people who are paying are paying for you to listen for free.
38:44 Blindboy Boatclub? So everybody gets a podcast, I get to earn a living. Patreon.com forward slash theblindbypodcast. Follow me on Instagram at Blind by Boat Club. You can hear my, my new jungle track that I made at the weekend while in an intense state of flow. Upcoming gigs, there's not many left. This Saturday, I have two gigs on the same day. At 1.30, is it fucking 1.30? At 1.30 in the afternoon on Saturday, the 9th of May, I'm in Maynuth at the Arts and Minds Festival. There's a few tickets left for that, that's going to be wonderful craic. Come along to that if you're doing fuck all at 1.30 in the day in Maynuth. And that's in the university in Maynuth.
39:28 Blindboy Boatclub? Then later on that afternoon, I'm at Wellfest at the Royal Hospital Kilmainham in Dublin. Then I'm not gigging again until the middle of June, the 19th, I'm in Berlin at the Babylon Theatre. The 19th is sold out and the 20th may also be sold out. I don't know because I haven't gotten updates, but fuck it, give it a go. Can't wait to go to Berlin. I'm gonna take a day or two to do fuck all over in Berlin because the last time I was there, I just did the gig and then got onto the fucking plane and I didn't get to enjoy the place really, to be honest. I ate in a Turkish restaurant and stared at a fella because I thought it was Rod Stewart. Then in July, I'm in Sheffield at the Crosswires Festival.
40:13 Blindboy Boatclub? That's on the 5th of July in Sheffield, which is in Sheffield City Hall. And that gig is gonna be great crack. Wonderful, lovely Sheffield. I can't wait to drink some local piss and smoke some hash. Then have we any festivals? I wasn't asked back to Altogether No Festival this year and I believe it's because I did a podcast last year where I revealed that there was a generational curse on the land that the festival was on and I don't think that went down very well and I haven't been asked back. If that is the reason I haven't been asked back, I'm okay with that. I mean, again, lots and lots of acts booked at the festival.
40:56 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm the one act where I get booked at the festival and then I end up doing deep research into the land that the festival is on and unearthing a generational curse that goes back 200 years. That was autistic flow. No one told me I shouldn't have done that. I'll probably be doing electric picnic, we'll see what the fucking crack is. And then what have I got? October 2026, my big massive tour of England, Scotland and Wales kicking off in Brighton on the 18th of October. Then I'm onto Cardiff, Coventry, Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead and Nottingham.
41:36 Blindboy Boatclub? You get your tickets for that at fein.co.uk forward slash blindby. And then all the other tickets should be at theblindbypodcast.ie, assuming my website is working. So this beautiful new piece of research about autism towards autistic flow theory and non-pathologising conceptual approach. One of the beautiful things about this paper too is it challenges. Simon Baron Cohen's theory of mind approach to autism, right? So Simon Baron Cohen, I think he's Sasha Baron Cohen, his cousin. But a lot of modern autistic literature, especially what's in the DSM,
42:19 Blindboy Boatclub? comes from the work of Simon Baron Cohen, and a lot of autistic people outright reject it. Baron Cohen said that autistic people have a theory of mind deficit, right? So autistic people have difficulty understanding other people's thoughts and emotions, or understanding what it's like to be in another person's shoes. This is where you get this autistic people don't have empathy bullshit, like fucking horseshit. This paper takes a completely different approach, which is that autistic people's relationship with flow is very different, that we are consistently seeking flow states, are in-flow states quite a lot.
43:04 Blindboy Boatclub? And when we're in-flow states, we're distracted. We have less capacity left for social processing. That aligns, that aligns with my lived experience right there. Why don't I have friends? Because I'm too busy thinking about seagulls. I am at all times engulfed in curiosity. When I'm doing that, I feel safe, I feel happy. Unfortunately, maintaining friendships means engaging in the ritual of, "Hey, man, what's up?", consistent small talk. In 2026, when you're over the age of 30, it means being in WhatsApp groups,
43:49 Blindboy Boatclub? being in WhatsApp groups with friends, with conversation and banter and small talk and slagging. I'm too absorbed in my interests for that stuff to enter my head. Asking me to just text someone for the crack, "What's up?", "Wanna go for a coffee?", going for a coffee just for the sake of talking over a coffee. Asking me to do that would be as difficult as asking someone else. Can you read about seagulls for eight hours? For eight hours straight? Can you just read about seagulls and seagull related topics?
44:29 Blindboy Boatclub? This study posits that flow states are so important to the autistic person's feeling of safety and, and mental health that we're just, we're not cognitively and emotionally available for the social connections that bring a feeling of safety and joy and happiness to neurotypical people. That's not a deficit there, that's a difference. Another thing it challenges is executive dysfunction, that autistic people struggle with executive control and planning, memory, organisation and decision making. Whereas this study says, it's not really a deficit like that. The autistic person's cognitive capacity is consumed by intense focus involved in flow
45:14 Blindboy Boatclub? state and therefore has limited resources available for executive skills. It also speaks about autistic interpersonal flow.
45:26 Blindboy Boatclub? This was called double empathy. I've mentioned this before, this paper suggests that when two autistic people are speaking, that that conversation can be a joint flow state. Again, something that I agree with because it's my lived experience. You listened to my podcast about a month ago with Sean Ronaine, who's the, the ornithologist, also autistic. When me and him had a chat, it was wonderful. We're both interrupting each other, we're both going off on tangents, we're coming back, but it's a conversation full of humour and empathy and compassion.
46:06 Blindboy Boatclub? Things that autistic people are not supposed to possess during interpersonal interactions. I fucking have it with other neurodivergent people. Callie Ennis, who I had on a few weeks back, and two or three other guests on this podcast who I've had amazing conversations with, who I know are neurodivergent, they just haven't said it publicly yet. This research shows that autistic people.
46:31 Blindboy Boatclub? Not only do we need flow in order to feel safe, to regulate our emotions, to have good mental health, but we access flow more readily, more intensely, and more frequently. And our states of flow, they don't match traditional definitions of flow. Traditional definitions of flow, you think of as just when someone's making art, just when someone is playing music or involved in a sport, you know, intense focus and task. For autistic people, the flow is much more of a part of everyday life.
47:15 Blindboy Boatclub? 90% of what I do when I'm by myself on my own is flow. When I research this podcast, when I'm on Wikipedia, when I'm reading articles, that's flow state for me. I know it's also work, but as an accommodation in this world, I've had to make flow my work. When I cook dinner, I'm in flow. And another beautiful thing in this study, it offers a new way to look at stimming. And again, this new way of looking at stimming is, this is what stimming is for me, and I've said it before. So this paper suggests that stimming is a way for autistic people to enter flow state, that this is a unique autistic thing of how to get into flow state is through stimming.
48:01 Blindboy Boatclub? When I'm in my office, when I'm in my studio and the door is locked, I pace back and forth and rub my hands together for hours. I've got calluses on my hands, tick, tick calluses that I've had since I'm a kid because I rub my hands together so much when I'm on my own and I pace back and forth for hours. I can measure how productive a day has been by my Fitbit because I clock fucking 20,000 steps without leaving a six foot space. That's stimming. And it's something, I only do it in private. I only do that in private because to do it in public around people who are not my family, it's very intimidating. It's quote unquote crazy person behaviour.
48:45 Blindboy Boatclub? Stimming on the outside looks like someone who's very distressed, very nervous, pacing, rubbing hands together.
48:56 Blindboy Boatclub? These do not look like positive things. That looks like the physical behaviour of a person who's stressed or worried. But when I'm doing that, I'm in another world. I'm in complete and utter flow. And I write, I write this podcast, pacing back and forth. I've written books, pacing back and forth. Before I knew I was autistic, I used to say to myself, well, this is just a thing I have to do, because if I don't do this, I'll get distracted by something. So if I keep walking back and forth in this rhythm, then I can disappear inside my own mind. What it feels like when I stim is, do you know when you ask your computer to do a particularly difficult task, and then the fan gets really
49:40 Blindboy Boatclub? loud, and the computer itself starts to get loud, and it gets hot? But you know that when your computer is doing that, it's, it's, it's working on a particularly intensive task. That's what stimming does for me. It allows me to enter flow state. I've always known this in my heart. I just haven't had the words for it. This paper now confirms it. They spoke to loads of autistic people, and they're reporting the same thing. That stimming is how we induce flow state, because flow state is so important to our mental health and feeling of safety. We flow just to live, rather than specifically to engage
50:24 Blindboy Boatclub? in tasks. Now, I also enter flow to engage in creative tasks. I'm trying to think of a good metaphor for how this, the new way that this paper is looking at autism. It's like autistic people are a spotlight, and non-autistic people are a floodlight. A spotlight is very bright, very focused on one point.
50:52 Blindboy Boatclub? With excellent detail around, like a laser. Whereas a floodlight, again, very bright but less intense. And it allows you to see everything. So the autistic person, the spotlight sees one thing extremely well. But then everything outside of that spotlight fades away. So we're thinking about seagulls. But then nothing else is allowed in. It's just fucking seagulls. And when I'm thinking about seagulls on my roof and researching, then I'm in flow and then patterns emerge. And then my brain gets so relaxed that I'm able to connect things that don't seem connected at all.
51:37 Blindboy Boatclub? But at the expense of experiencing the passage of time. The expense of noticing that I'm hungry. The expense of maintaining friendships, unfortunately. The non-autistic person, they don't have that spotlight. They have the floodlight. Seagulls are on their roof. They notice it, they're annoyed, but they don't give it that much thought. There are seagulls up on my fucking roof. Huh. Better text someone and tell them, that'd be an interesting story, wouldn't it? Gonna text my friend Joseph and say, how are you getting on, man? Ah, not too bad. I've got fucking seagulls up on my roof. Oh, really? No way. What are you doing tomorrow night? I'm looking at Man United. Fuck it, let's go to the pub together. Alright, see you then. See you too, man.
52:22 Blindboy Boatclub? Hope there's no seagulls. Actually, the non-autistic person would not have signed off with hope there's no seagulls because they'd have forgotten about them by then. That's me being autistic. I'd have had to sign off with a seagull mention. And I wouldn't have gone to the pub because I'd have needed to read about seagulls on Wikipedia. But the non-autistic person has the floodlight. Okay? And this sensory shit as well.
52:49 Blindboy Boatclub? You know, when I was in school and I'd get in so much trouble because I wouldn't wear my fucking school jumpers. Other people are wearing the same school jumper. Like, school jumpers aren't, aren't supposed to be comfortable. They're a little bit itchy. But non-autistic people just get on with it. They just get, it's, it's a small bit itchy. Fuck it, who cares? What are we doing? Maths? Not me. I can only focus on this fucking itchy school jumper until it feels painful and it's driving me crazy and now I'm taking it off, even though the teacher has told me to put it back on six times and now I'm out in the hallway. Blind boy, where's your economics homework? Economics homework? I was listening to Cypress Hill last night. Have you heard of Cypress Hill?
53:33 Blindboy Boatclub? Why didn't you do your economics homework? Because I can't think about anything other than Cypress Hill. That's all I'm able to think about is Cypress Hill. Nothing else. And when I listen to the music of Cypress Hill, and when I think about Cypress Hill, I feel like I'm in heaven. I feel calm, I feel happy, I, I feel okay to exist and to be alive. I feel like the exact opposite of standing in a room full of people where they all have competing conversations. Cypress Hill saves me from that, but I'm afraid it's not possible at all for me to be interested in economics when I'm interested in Cypress Hill right now. I might be interested in something else next month. It might be economics, I don't know, but if I'm fucking interested in something and
54:18 Blindboy Boatclub? I'm focused on something, I learn everything about it, but I can't learn anything else. And that was my experience at school, which I was heavily punished for. But that's the spotlight. That's the flow state autistic spotlight versus the neurotypical floodlight. The world is designed for floodlights. It's not designed for spotlights. What would it be like trying to walk home in the dark? Two separate torches. You give one person a very intense spotlight and then you give another person a floodlight. The person walking home in the dark with the spotlight, they can focus that intensely on details.
55:00 Blindboy Boatclub? They can shine it on a fucking hedge and identify in two seconds what that hedge is, what colour it is, the, the structure of the leaves. And then they can move it over and they see a cat and they get a good look at that cat's face because it's a fucking spotlight. But then the journey home, the journey is going to be a lot more difficult. You're going to fall over, you'll get disoriented and confused. But if you've got a floodlight, your journey will be easier. You'd be able to see a little bit of everything at once. You can take it all in. You won't trip over things. The journey will be simplified, but you might miss out on moments of complete and total
55:43 Blindboy Boatclub? focus and clarity on one spot. And when you try to do it, you might just get bored and move on. I mean, are you going to read about the history of door handles for four hours? Or after 10 minutes, would you get bored and go, why the fuck am I reading about the history of door handles? This isn't that interesting. Well, I'll read about the history of door handles for four hours and love every second of it. This is a bit of a selfish podcast, but I finally found research and a theory of autism
56:13 Blindboy Boatclub? that really aligns with my lived experience. Before I was, before I was diagnosed, I used to just say, I'm a mad artist. I'm one of those mad artists.
56:24 Blindboy Boatclub? And when I used to try to explain, because obviously I knew I'm eccentric, I'm, I'm seen as strange. I was aware of these things. But before I was diagnosed, I thought that this was a choice. I genuinely believed, and I, I'd base this belief on research that I'd done into flow state, because I always knew flow state was my thing. But the original flow state research, which was by a psychologist called Chicks and Mihaly, he spoke about in order to engage in flow, in creativity, you have to exit the closed mode of thinking to enter the open mode of thinking.
57:05 Blindboy Boatclub? And he described the closed mode of thinking as the way that we are in our everyday lives. The closed mode of thinking is where you're self-conscious, you're thinking about other people, how you appear to other people, you're thinking about the clothes that you're wearing, how you present yourself, you're thinking about what you're gonna eat for dinner later on, what your grocery list is, an appointment next week. The closed mode of thinking, it's executive fucking functioning skills, that's what it is. It's all of the tools that you need to exist as a human being in society to just get the fuck on with your life. That's the closed mode of thinking.
57:50 Blindboy Boatclub? It's rational and sensible and solemn. But if you're to be an artist and you're to create a piece of work, whether it's music, a piece of writing, whatever, if you want to engage in actual creativity and reach your inner voice, then you have to exit the closed mode of thinking and you have to leave yourself available to the open mode of thinking. And the open mode of thinking is flow state. The open mode is where you can connect two ideas that are seen miles apart, where you can be silly, where you can have fun, where you can be playful, where there's no judgment whatsoever. Your goal is utter and absolute silliness, humour, humour and playfulness.
58:34 Blindboy Boatclub? And failure doesn't exist in the open mode. There's no such thing as failure because there's only process and playing. Failure is for the closed mode. In the closed mode, you've got right and wrong. In the open mode, there's no such thing as right or wrong. There's only process and doing and playing. And that's the research that the psychologist Chicks and Mihaly did on creative people who enter flow states. And he did this research in the seventies. And that research was hugely influential on me in becoming a professional artist, sitting down and engaging the part of my brain where flow exists. But the thing that Chicks and Mihaly stressed was... You need to be able to exit that open, the open mode.
59:20 Blindboy Boatclub? You can't, the open mode is great for flow, but you can't bring that into everyday life. You cannot bring the open mode, the lateral thinking, the silliness, the playfulness into everyday life, because then you start saying silly things to people. And you won't be worried about how you're dressed and you won't be conscious of other people's opinions. You can't bring the open mode into everyday life. It needs to just be for creativity. By about the age of 23, when I first started writing for television, when I became a professional creative person, my fucking job now was to write comedy sketches. That's what I was doing when I was 23. I was writing comedy sketches and RTE.
1:00:05 Blindboy Boatclub? I'd basically said to myself, I have surrendered myself completely to being an artist, to being creative. I've surrendered myself entirely to being open to creativity at all times. And because of this, I'm a lunatic. Because of this, that's why I always say mad things to people and they look at me strange. That's why I sometimes might walk out of the house with two different shoes on. That's why I'm forgetful. That's why my room is messy. That's why I forget to pay bills. Because I'm so open to creativity all the time that I actually can't operate in the closed mode, but I could turn it off tomorrow if I just got a normal job.
1:00:50 Blindboy Boatclub? If I just went back and worked in, in the call centre that I worked in before I became an artist. If I just went back to that, I can turn all this shit off and I go back to being a normal human being. This eccentricity, this madness that I have, this is a choice. It's a choice because I've chosen consistent creativity as a career. And that's what I used to say to myself before I was diagnosed as autistic. That's how I used to square it with myself. This was a fucking choice. And then I get diagnosed and you realise, no, it's not a fucking choice. And if you had tried to switch it off. And left your career in creativity and went back to a regular office job.
1:01:30 Blindboy Boatclub? You'd soon find that you would not be able to function at all and would be quite miserable. So this new study, this new paper, which I'll share the link on Instagram when I put this podcast out. And the name of the study is Towards Autistic Flow Theory, a Non-Pathologizing Conceptual Approach. Right. And it was first published in 2024, but I believe it was released publicly like a month ago. It's the first time I've, I've seen a definition of autism.
1:02:04 Blindboy Boatclub? That doesn't make me feel wrong or deficient in any way. And that aligns fully with how I experience being alive. Everything about my autism journey, it's, it's been mostly about language. I've been autistic my whole life.
1:02:22 Blindboy Boatclub? But you find words, you find new words that describe how you've been. And certain words are better than others. Special interest is, does not fucking suit me at all. It's really condescending because it implies, you know what it's like? It's like, you know, you see a dog sniffing another dog's arse.
1:02:48 Blindboy Boatclub? And we as humans, we as humans often look at a dog sniffing another dog's arse and go, look at that stupid cunt. We project, like if, if, if you as a human were to walk up to another, a stranger on the street and start sniffing their arsehole, it's strange, it's odd, it's socially unacceptable. It would be seen as a dumb, stupid thing to do. We're always doing that with dogs. Look at those two stupid, look at the dogs sniffing each other's fucking arses for, for, give it a rest. You'd even see some owners going, stop and they tug at, tug at the fucking lead. Because one dog sticks his nose in another dog's anus. And you know what's going on when a dog sniffs another dog's hole?
1:03:30 Blindboy Boatclub? We as humans only have about six million scent receptors in our noses. Dogs have 220 million scent receptors in their fucking nose. Dogs can smell time. Dogs can smell the passage of time. Dogs use their noses to experience things that you and I can't even fathom. And when a dog sniffs another dog's arse, it's the social equivalent of spending three hours stalking that dog's Facebook page. If you go to a person's Facebook page and they don't have any privacy and you spend three hours at it, you can learn everything about them.
1:04:12 Blindboy Boatclub? Their opinions, who they're related to, their fucking, what college they went to, their political beliefs, their social status. You can learn everything about another human being through the data of their Facebook page with just three hours of a good stalk. A dog does that in six seconds with just their nose in another dog's arse. That's what it is. That's what they're doing. But what do we do? Look at those stupid cunts. Get away from this whole fucking stupid idiot dog. I should have gotten a cat, they're smarter. Ugh. We use arse sniffing as evidence of dog stupidity. That's, that's what special interest is. It's acknowledging that the, that this is clearly very important to the autistic person.
1:04:56 Blindboy Boatclub? But this thing that's important to them is actually fucking stupid. You know, they just have a special interest in, in the way that that dog has a special interest in sniffing that other dog's arse. It's kind of ridiculous, but leave them off. There's nothing we can do about it. It's a special interest. We hate that term, special interest. This paper redefines it. It's not special interest. It's actually fucking flow state. And it doesn't matter if they're reading about the history of ketchup for six hours. If you think that's ridiculous, that there's no point in it, it doesn't fucking matter because the process there is flow state. And for that autistic person, that is essential to their mental health. What do you mean?
1:05:38 Blindboy Boatclub? Yeah, just like the way that you have to go and hang out with a load of your friends. So you don't have to be alone with your thoughts. Just the way you have to do that with all your mates on the weekend. The autistic person needs to do that with the Wikipedia page about ketchup. All right, for six fucking hours. It's not special interest. It's flow state and it's hugely important for this human being to exist alongside you in the same fucking world. It's just a different way of being. It's like assuming that bees have a special interest in flowers because they think they look nice as opposed to understanding the process of pollination. So that's all I have time for this week.
1:06:19 Blindboy Boatclub? I don't know if you enjoyed that or not, but it's something I needed to speak about and to process and to get off my chest. And I hope there might be some autistic people out there or relatives or friends of autistic people. I hope that was helpful to you. It was very helpful to me to learn that shit and to speak about it. I'll catch you next week with a hot take. In the meantime, rub a dog, wink at a swan, genuflect to a butterfly. Dog bless.
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