The Blindboy Podcast - Custard Creams and The CIA

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

Boiling Hot Take.An exploration that links Victorian Fern fanciers with Custard Creams and the CIA interrogation of houseplants Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Shut the front door, you jaundiced paulas. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I might have a slightly scratchy voice this week because last night I was doing a gig in Vicar Street and I had as my guest the magnificent singer-songwriter Damien Dempsey. We had a wonderful night of chatting and singing so my voice might be a small bit scratchy in this week's podcast now I'm not

putting out the podcast with Damien this week but I do want to give him a little plug because he came on to the podcast to plug a movie that he has out now so damien's a singer damien dempsey and he's made a documentary about a documentary about the relationships that his fans have with his music and in particular the impact that his music can have on their mental health and the name of the film is called love yourself today and it's out I think it's out tomorrow so get a look at that film I've heard it's fantastic and it's Damien Dempsey's film called Love Yourself Today

and it's going to be in cinemas all over Ireland so as promised I've got a hot take for you this week I've got a hot take podcast a kind of a deep dive into into some ideas that have been intriguing me some things I've been thinking about that I've been doing quite a bit of research on

that I'd really love to explore witchy actually before I go straight into that just a little reminder I'm doing a gig this Saturday in Drogheda in the TLT theatre, Saturday the 6th of November it was a gig that was put on in fucking 2019 then it got postponed for obvious reasons and now it's suddenly back on, so if you're in Drogheda and you want to come along

to a live podcast this Saturday TLT theatre, look up the tickets online so if you're new to this podcast and you don't know what a hot take is, a hot take for me is, it's like a thesis idea. It's like an interesting theory that I might have about history or culture. And a hot take for me is always something that I'm genuinely very passionate about. That's the key really for a hot take for me is always something that I'm genuinely very passionate about that's the key really for a hot take what am I actually thinking about a lot

genuinely researching genuinely expressing fascination and excitement about and whatever the fuck that is I put that out as a hot take and it's very because it's very enjoyable for me and it's very enjoyable for me to share that with you so this week's hot take came about after I was listening to a piece of music so I'm going to play a piece of music now not going to tell you what it, just play a little excerpt and I want you to listen to it. So that song there is called Ode to an African Violet by an artist called Mart Garson, and it's from 1976. And it's a nice little relaxing, listenable, ambient song. Nothing too special about it, but I found

it by accident. I was looking for ambient music to listen to while I write, and I came across that song by accident on YouTube. And because it was electronic music, and it was 1976, that of course piqued my interest, because you know I'm passionate about the roots of electronic music. so I went and googled it which is something I'd usually do if I come across a piece of music that's interesting and I'm not familiar with it and what I found was something I really wasn't expecting. That piece of music you just heard there was not made for humans to listen to it was made for humans to listen to. It was made for plants to listen to. And that's not a joke.

The composer, Mark Garson, he was dead serious. He made an album and you were supposed to play this to your plants because he believed that they could listen to it and it would help them grow and be healthy. And it came out in 1976. Now the thing is, you couldn't even buy this album it was so radical and so experimental that the only way you could have gotten this album in 1976 was to to have gone to one fucking house plant shop

in Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles called Mother Arts and if you bought a plant called an asparagus fern you got a free copy of this album Mother Arts Plantasia by Mark Garson which was an ambient electronic album made for houseplants to listen to and it's actually very listenable as an album it's since been rediscovered and now it's on Spotify and everything because fair fucks to him you know messing around with electronic music

in 1976 making it for plants in 2021 we can now see that that's revolutionary thinking that's really creative but with me I can't just come across an album that's made for plants and then walk away from it.

That's not how I operate. So I couldn't stop thinking about it and I had to go on a deep dive. A deep dive to try and figure out what was happening in culture that gave this artist the idea or gave him permission to think that it was okay to release an album

for plants to listen to. And my research took me on fairly unexpected and bizarre turns from fern collecting Victorian lesbians to bizarre CIA experiments in the 1950s to see if houseplants could witness a murder. So let's begin. First I want you to consider there's a type of biscuit called a custard cream. Now these biscuits are very popular

in Ireland and in England and you can't go wrong with a custard cream. It tastes custardy, short, breadish, with a little bit of lemon. You're never overly excited if someone gives you a custard cream but you're not disappointed either it's like a default biscuit it also has a very modest level of satiation you don't get the Jaffa Cake problem Jaffa Cakes for instance you can't just eat one Jaffa Cake if someone presents you with a Jaffa Cake

there's a serious threat of eating the entire tube. You know, you get a sugar rush, then you get a sugar crash, and you're lethargic for a few hours, which you don't want to do to yourself. You don't want your day to go that way. But if you get a custard cream, you'll have one, maybe two,

and then you can comfortably say, that's enough. And that's what the custard cream is to me. Now you might be thinking, the fuck is he doing talking about custard creams? How are custard creams relevant to this conversation? Well, here's the crack. Custard creams are so ubiquitous they're always present they've just been there for as long as you can remember a custard cream has been present so because of that

you never actually look at the custard cream you never examine it unless you've just smoked a load of Baldy you're eating a custard cream for the munchies and then you become truly present with it you truly inquire into the visual aesthetics of the custard cream and when you really look at the custard cream the design on it is quite intricate it's a rectangle biscuit It has a lozenge diamond shape in the middle that says

custard cream. The style of the typography is done almost like wrought iron. Like something you'd see on a manhole cover. On an old manhole cover. And the general design of the custard cream. It's reminiscent of iron work. So I went

investigating this fucking design right? That's on the custard cream. So I went investigating this fucking design, right, that's on the custard cream, because it looks really old as well. I'm there looking at this biscuit going, fucking hell, this custard cream, why does it look like it's like 100 years old? What's that about?

And I wasn't wrong. So the design of a custard cream hasn't changed since 1900 right and the foundations for that design go back even further to the 1830s and it's rooted in a victorian obsession with ferns you know what ferns are they're those green frondy plants that are long and magnificent so the fucking Victorians went apeshit for ferns

I did a podcast a few weeks back about the Victorian obsession with pineapples so Victorians become so obsessed with pineapples that because they were mad expensive a pineapple cost about 700 quid and people were renting them out

to each other. So, pineapple designs on railings, on buildings, there was fucking pineapples everywhere because it symbolised wealth. Well, they did the same shit with ferns but ferns weren't as bougie.

Ferns were a little bit more middle class. Ferns didn't cost that type of fucking money. A pineapple is 700 quid, that's a lot of money. So the Victorians had a serious fern obsession. And this found its way onto the custard cream biscuit. So that's what the custard cream design is. It's ferns. So what's going on with cream design is. It's ferns. So what's going on with the Victorians?

Why the fern obsession? What's going on with them? Well, quite interestingly, it starts in 1828. So in cities like London, Birmingham, the larger, more industrial cities, what you have in... The Victorian period starts in 1830 I think

I think that's the actual Queen Victoria gets in in 1830 but the industrial revolution is in full fucking swing if you live in London there's factories there's incredibly thick smog all this coal smoke pollution was terrible and what you also had was a healthy and emerging middle class who were now living in townhouses and suburbs and they had work days and they had leisure time and they had rooms in their house just for socializing these were all new things to humanity so what you had in 1828 pollution was so fucking bad in parts of london smog and coal was so thick that a lot of people couldn't grow house plants so in 182828 this fella Nathaniel Ward started to realise he just couldn't grow plants in his house and then one day he put a couple of little ferns into glass jars that he

had and he realised wow these ferns do quite well in the glass jars and then he said why don't I build like a little mini greenhouse I don't have I'm like I'm not I'm comfortably middle class in this little townhouse I don't have like space for a giant greenhouse or an orangearium like the posh people have but what can I do in my living room What can I do in my living room? So he builds a greenhouse about the size of a fish tank. And this is known as a Wardian case after himself. Really beautiful looking thing. Like a tiny little greenhouse the size of a fish tank.

And in this he puts some ferns with some soil. And this is a precursor to what's known as a terrarium but all of a sudden now this ward cunt is growing beautiful green ferns in this tiny greenhouse in his living room and he loves it and ferns

are perfect for this and it's doing two things first off it ties in with a kind of a dominant ideological theme at the time the industrial revolution came out of the enlightenment which was

the birth of modern science we'll say right and it would be a modernist way of thinking the modernist way of thinking. The modernist way of thinking is we're humans, we've discovered science, science is brilliant, fuck nature,

nature is something we control. So by having this little greenhouse, this Wardian box in his living room with ferns inside it. And it looking like a little forest. A little forest that he has in his own little. In his own living room. Even though it's so polluted outside in London.

He's controlling nature. He feels like he can control nature. Which is a dominant theme at the time. Like the really wealthy people. Who had estates. They were controlling nature in different ways they were they were um building giant lawns and building their own lakes and they were making the gardens of their estates look like the paintings of john constable but there was this

sense of nature is something for us as humans to tame because we have science and anything that's seen as wild or nature-like is there for us to control and this also is used as you know racism comes from that the justification to colonize people comes from that this idea that if you identify a culture as being savage or uncivilized then it's okay to control take them over and eradicate it's the same ideology i can control these ferns in this little box in my room when the reality is it's quite fucking sad like the enlightenment okay it gave us fucking sad. Like the Enlightenment, okay, it gave us a lot of modern medicine and quite a lot of advances

and our quality of life today is as a result of the Enlightenment. But the Enlightenment is also why we're facing climate change right now. Because when you have this concept of we're humans and we're better than nature and we dominate nature. That's what gives you permission to extract resources from the ground. Like in a lot of indigenous cultures.

Cultures that the Victorians would have considered savage or primitive. People would have been living on the land for a long time and they understood that humans don't control or fight nature, humans are part of a system, so if you're going to take from nature, you have to do it in moderation so that you maintain

the system and the cycle and the biodiversity, but the Victorians weren't like that they were like fuck that. That's how savages think. That's how wild people think. Coal is there in the ground for us to take out and burn. Petrol is there for us to take out and burn. Forests are there for us to knock down and use the wood. An ideology in the service of capitalism. So this Ward fella in his living room, that's what he should have been thinking about.

He shouldn't have been thinking, wow, isn't it so lovely that I can grow these ferns inside this little greenhouse and control this little... I can play God with my little greenhouse and my ferns. He should have been saying, Jesus, it's pretty shit that I can't grow houseplants because London's so polluted. That doesn't seem right. But anyway, these Wardian cases, these tiny little greenhouses with ferns in them, they spread like mad all over London. Every middle class house in London and in Birmingham and in Bristol,

in the 1830s, they needed to have this tiny little greenhouse in their living room full of ferns and it started a craze and an obsession and a fetishisation of ferns so there's your primary reason

why when you pick up a custard cream the design is based on ferns just hasn't changed since 1900 but ferns also on an unconscious level they start to play with victorian ideas of sexual morality at the time english victorian culture was very protestant sex was a shameful thing as sex was something to be hidden away, not to be spoken about. Quite a lot of shame around it.

And also, very patriarchal, and this idea of needing to protect women from the idea of sex to maintain their purity. purity so even flowers in victorian culture might have been considered rude or caused someone to blush flowers produce sexually flowers fuck each other flowers have got pollen and that pollen is the same as sperm and that sperm finds its way into a female flower and then seeds get born and to the Victorians that might have just been a little bit too close to human sex but ferns don't do that ferns evolved before seeds and pollen ferns kind of fuck themselves it's hard to explain how so ferns kind of fuck themselves it's hard to explain how

so ferns have spores a little spore will arrive underneath a fern's frong and then the spore will be carried off by the wind or water or whatever and then another fern just grows that's it

and if you're in the presence of a fern you never have to discuss sex you don't have to discuss sex when you're around a fern just other ferns grow from ferns and that's it don't have to talk about pollen don't have to talk about fertilization it's a fucking fern shut up so collecting ferns going out into the woods or into a forest and collecting ferns to bring home and to put into your wardian box. This became an almost exclusively female activity. And this was at a time where if women were outside the house in the Victorian period, they kind of weren't allowed to do it by themselves. A chaperone, a man needed to be present to protect the woman.

But with the collection of ferns, the men were just like, yeah, that's grand, go on up there now and get your ferns. There's six of you, six women together. No bother, go off into the forest there and get your asexual ferns. There's six women together. No bother. Go off into the forest there and get your asexual ferns. Nothing bad about that. Nothing dirty about that.

So collecting ferns became this wonderful activity and this rare moment of liberation for women in Victorian society to be like we can go off now together to the woods with no men around, and we can talk to each other, and we can have crack, and we can collect ferns.

And it became huge. It swept society. Now, also, a theory about that time is that if women were gay, they got to be gay with each other out in the woods collecting ferns and ferns became a symbol of in a very covert secretive way ferns became a symbol of female sexuality within the culture of the time and we know this too because around that time when people were out finding ferns and taking an interest in ferns, they were also naming ferns. And one of the ferns got named the maidenhair fern, which literally meant a woman's pubic hair. It was the fanny fern. And you also had ideas emerging of ferns having a sense of feeling, like ferns having a sentience to them, or ferns being able to think and feel. And this started to emerge at the time around ferns.

ferns but ferns became so popular and there was such a a frenzy for ferns in the Victorian period that then it started to take its toll on nature because you'd have groups of middle to upper class women going off out into the forest into the woods all over Britain all over Ireland and just taking up as many ferns as possible to the point that we now have species of fern that are almost extinct in particular a type of fern known as the calarney fern which is a fern that is particularly beautiful and it's indigenous to ireland but so many victorian women from england went on expeditions all over ireland collecting ferns during the middle of a fucking famine that they've they've caused this fern now it's it's it used to be all over Ireland and now you can only find it wild in certain parts of Kerry and certain parts of Cork and that's it

so the Victorian fern craze basically wiped out the Killarney fern. It's one of the rarest ferns in Europe now, unfortunately, and it used not be. So what happened? Because this space of collecting ferns and naming ferns, because this space had become female dominant, it had become a female space, the men didn't like this. So you can see a concerted effort at the time in the emergence of the field of botany, where all this work that women had done

to collect ferns, to name ferns, to learn about ferns, men stepped in and said, there's a new science called botany and women aren't allowed in because this is now serious. What you were doing wasn't serious, you're just silly women playing with plants. Now it's serious and the men are involved and it's called botany so that kind of was one of the things that led to the decline of that behavior and that area there is particularly interesting the uh i got that from uh an academic journal women gender and science 1997 and an article in that called

Gender and Modern Botany in Victorian England by Anne B. Steer and she basically she maps out the effort to defeminise that Victorian space of

horticulture and to name it as this new science of botany which then became exclusively male but what what that period left us was a okay the fern ended up on the on the front of custard creams but also the idea and concept of plants having feelings that plants might be able to sense touch sense smell like in 1848 there was a psychologist called gustav fechner gustav fechner yeah that was his name and he was interested in trying to see if plants could think if plants could respond to talk then you had a fella called chandra bows and chandra bows he was interested in playing music to plants and he was interested in hooking plants up to electrical devices to measure if they had electrical responses do plants feel

like the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw got invited to Bose's lab and George Bernard Shaw had a panic attack because Bose hooked a cabbage up

to some electrical impulses and then when he boiled the cabbage he convinced George Bernard Shaw that the cabbage was screaming in pain so George Bernard Shaw had a panic attack so that's what came out of that this concept and idea of

plants being sentient and then it found its way into the 20th century and then it gets weirder, it gets even more strange, and we'll get into that, after the ocarina pause, I don't have the ocarina with me today,

I don't know where the fuck it is, so I have a different instrument, for the pause, I have the flexin tone, we've had the flexin tone before, it's a lat Latin percussive instrument quite an interesting sound off it you'll know it from early 90s

G-Funk albums so we're going to have a flexing tone pause and you're going to hear an advert in the middle of this so here we go Thank you. life-saving progress in mental health care. From May 27th to 31st, people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind.

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Interesting little instrument there. Very difficult to control. interesting little instrument there very difficult difficult to control but a nice a nice choir sound off that that was the flexing tone pause you would have heard an advert for something I don't know what you were

just advertised it's algorithmically generated to target you specifically based on your searches support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast.

This podcast is my full time job. It's how I earn a living. An episode like this requires huge amounts of time and research to find that hot take. To find that hot take and find the little connections and all of that carry on and I love every second of it I adore it I fucking adore it but if you enjoy

listening to it and you find yourself listening to my podcast regularly just please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it. If you met me in real life and you're like, fuck it, I'd buy him a pint. Well, then you can. You can do it via the Patreon page. It's not a donation.

It's paying me for the work I'm doing. But however, if you can't afford that, if you're out of work, if you don't have any money, don't worry about it. Because someone else is paying for you to listen. So if you can't afford it, you're actually paying for the person who can't afford it. Everybody gets a podcast. I earn a living. It's a model that's based on kindness and soundness.

And it makes this podcast a real fucking community effort. And it also keeps the content completely independent an advertiser can't come to me and say we have shares in a rival biscuit company shut the fuck up about custard creams because that's what they do that's what they do if they're if you're beholden to them that's what they do i get to make the podcast that i want to make about shit that I'm genuinely passionate about. And that's what keeps the quality consistent. Advertisers fuck things up. That's why so much TV is shit.

That's why so much radio is shit. Advertising comes in and it stifles the capacity to be free and to create and to fail that's the most important thing my patreon gives me the capacity to fail i need to fail every day all the time in order to achieve an end result that i'm actually genuinely happy with so thank you to all my patrons thank you very much and don't just support my independent podcast support any independent podcast that you're enjoying if you're listening to any podcast that has a small team of people making it support that podcast not just monetarily but subscribe to it like it leave a review tell

people about it that stuff's really important in this new environment of corporate podcasts that we're all up against. Follow me on Instagram, Blind By Boat Club. Catch me on Twitch on Thursday nights at 8.30, twitch.tv forward slash theblindbypodcast, where I'm doing my live, never-ending musicals to the events of a video game. So at the beginning of this podcast, I played you a piece of music, which was from an album called Plantasia 1976 which was an album, an electronic album that was in all sincerity made for plants to listen to.

And what this podcast is about is I'm trying to unravel the cultural conditions that existed whereby someone felt it appropriate to release a fucking album for plants because that doesn't exist in isolation. So from Victorian fern fetishisation and the emergence of botany you get this concept and idea floating around that plants may be sentient or plants may respond to pain or music or the human voice or whatever and a person who really absorbs these ideas and takes them to some very extreme ends is an odd chap by the name of Cleve Baxter

he was a scientist who worked for the CIA and he wasn't a botanist, he was an expert in interrogation and the polygraph test which is the lie detector test

he began working with the CIA in lie detection just after World War 2 but like if you're in the CIA now or the FBI or if you're in the police in America and you're learning, you want to learn how to use lie detectors, you go to

the Cleve Baxter school of lie detection in San Diego so this fellow was the real deal but it's his work with fucking plants of lie detection in San Diego. So, this fellow was the real deal. But it's his work with fucking plants is where things get absolutely bonkers. I managed to find some interviews they did with him in the 70s.

So I'll play you an excerpt now of Cleve Baxter talking about the work that he did with the CIA. Well, as of February 2nd, 1966, I'd been in the polygraph field full time for 18 years and had decided to water a plant in the lab. My thought was that as the moisture arrived to the leaf of the plant, the plant should be a better conductor and I should get a reading on the chart.

It went into sort of a wild excitation, very similar to the first part of a human taking a polygraph test but then it occurred to me just about 14 minutes along what would be the real optimum threat to the well-being of a plant in fact the imagery of fire entered my mind and i not only thought but i fully intended to burn the very leaf that was being tested with a match. Now, I had no matches in the room at the time, and I don't smoke, and I had to go next door to my secretary's area to get a match. But the interesting thing is that right at the split second that that imagery of fire entered my mind, the tracing reflecting the changes in the plant

just went right off the top of the page. And the only thing that occurred at that time, no lighting of a match, nothing else, merely the imagery of fire. And I must say that as of 14 minutes along in that initial observation on the morning of February 2nd, 1966, my life just hasn't been the same. So that's a CIA scientist saying that he just

decided to hook a plant up to a fucking lie detector test to measure a stress response and not only did the plant respond to stress but the plant was able to read his mind that all he had to do was think about harming the plant and he could measure a response in the plant that suggested some type of reaction to his fucking thoughts. So he went to the CIA with it and that became his research from then on. The CIA at that point in the 60s,

they would have been in the height of the Cold War, they were very much interested in mind control, interrogation techniques. They were interested to see if they could do a thing called remote viewing, which is where someone, if I'm sitting in this room that I can get a vision of what's happening in the other room when I'm not there. They had done experiments with LSD. All this shit. So in the 60s the CIA. Were pumping loads of research into. Mad shit.

And this. Cleve Baxter stuff with plants. Is some of the maddest shit I've ever heard. So one of the next experiments that Cleve Baxter set up. And this was his main one is so he set up a machine and there was a pot of boiling water and this water was on the boil and above it was a little cup that contained some live shrimp and he randomized the machine completely randomized it so he had no control in a 24-hour period

when the machine decided to dip the shrimp into the boiling water and kill them instantly. So what he did was he set up this mechanism with the shrimp and the boiling water, and then in the other room, he put a house plant hooked up to the polygraph test to measure its fucking stress response and then he'd leave his office for a day because he didn't want his consciousness to be

present in the room because he the plant would read his consciousness and what he was trying to test was if the machine dips the shrimp into the boiling water at a completely random point will the plant in the other room know that they have died will the plant exhibit a stress response when shrimp in the

next room have died and he did the test and it did according to him the fucking plant exhibited a stress response when some shrimp in a different room died and he referred to this as primary perception he believed that plants had some type of first of all that they are sentient that they're aware and they have some type of telepathic awareness and that this awareness can also be altered and influenced by the presence of human consciousness

as he said there earlier that simply thinking about burning the plant was enough for the plant to know that it was in danger and for the needle to flick on the polygraph machine. And that plants are particularly sensitive to the death of life around it. Now, what are one of the big issues here with Cleve Baxter's experiment? Any scientist will tell you that a scientific experiment needs to be repeatable. You need to be able to follow a set of steps

and someone on the other side of the world needs to be able to repeat that experiment and get the same result. And it needs to be done over and over again. They couldn't do that with Cleve Baxter's experiment. It was inconclusive. But still a lot of people maintain an open mind about it because it's fascinating and it can make sense. Like, think about it because it's fascinating and it can make sense like think about it if if a plant was in the wild and an animal dies near that plant then the death of that animal is is food that benefits that

plant it's in a plant's interest to know when something is dead. That decaying matter feeds it. Now we're fine with understanding that in terms of, you know, the body of the animal begins to decompose and the nutrients leak into the soil and then we understand that the roots of the plant then can sense this. And today as well, science does know that there's a network of fungus that operates with plants and trees like an internet like this is what we know now now it's fairly established that forests trees plants they use mushrooms as an internet to communicate with each other that's happening right now and it's a really exciting thing in science that's being investigated but that's accepted

but your man in the 60s he's talking about telekinesis there he's talking about a plant being able to read his thoughts and for him to measure a response on paper on a polygraph test if a plant feels threatened by thoughts. Now you're getting into the role of consciousness. What is the role of consciousness in the fabric of reality? Or you're getting into quantum shit, quantum probability, quantum physics saying that reality is nothing but a series of probabilities. And Cleve Baxter's experiment, where he has the boiling water and the live shrimp,

and whether or not the shrimp die is not under his conscious control. It's randomized by a machine, and he leaves the building for 24 hours so that his consciousness isn't present so it's just the plant and the probability of the shrimp dying like that's like the Schrodinger's cat

experiment in quantum physics where you place a live cat in a box within the box is a vial of poison that may or may not go off if it does go off it kills the cat if it doesn't go off the cat

remains alive but with quantum physics says that if no one is there to observe the vial going off or not going off then the cat in the box is in a state of being both dead and alive at the same time

because reality is nothing but probabilities. Maybe there's something within plants where they have a quantum sensitivity towards that probabilities. And when we already know that there's a type of sparrow that has a quantum slit experiment like that in its eyeball to navigate around the globe cleve baxter also did another experiment where he murdered a plant in front of another plant so he got a plant hooked it up to the

polygraph test and then stomped on a plant in front of it. Then he got a line-up of six people. One of the people was the one who had stomped the plant. And the plant that was observing was able to pick out the murderer from the line-up. And this is all... This guy was funded by the CIA. He was a legitimate scientist

the US government was paying for this research it's fucking mad but then you go devil's advocate like there is that problem of scientists aren't reproducing his studies so if you want to go devil's

advocate and you go fucking hell what the fuck are the CIA doing with this mad bastard claiming that plants can read his mind the fuck are they at and then you can look at it from this point of view which is less exciting and more believable

like the CIA were open with this research and this was the 60s and here's a guy who's like his whole shtick is lying he studies lying what if it was just propaganda the CIA were at war

with the Russians and if the CIA all of a sudden come out and say we've got a scientist and we're pumping all of a sudden come out and say, we've got a scientist and we're pumping all these fucking resources so this scientist can try and get a plant to read his mind, if the Russians see that, then they're just going to go, fuck, I don't know if they're telling the truth or not.

Do we need to start getting plants to read our minds? So if the CIA say that, then the Russians have to copy it and now they're wasting time and resources on trying to get a dandelion to read their thoughts. While the CIA are going, that was actually fucking fake and now we're using our resources

to figure out how to bomb ye. So there's that angle too, that the CIA would deliberately put out these stories that they're researching bizarre shit because the Russians just wouldn't know. They'd have to waste resources trying to replicate it just in case it is legit. So that's the more believable option of the story.

But Steve Baxter's work got out there and it got out into the American public and fascinated people. And it inspired a book called The Secret Life of Plants which was released in 1973, I believe. And The Secret Life of Plants. Was a best selling American book. All about. Plants having intelligence.

And plants being able to feel. And plants having consciousness. And it referenced a lot of Steve Baxter's work. To back it up. And this was a hugely popular book. And it also suggested that you should play music for your plants to help them grow it was so popular

that the Secret Life of Plants got made into a documentary which was presented by Leonard Nimoy who played Spock on Star Trek and Stevie Wonder made the soundtrack so this was a big deal now scientists look back at the Secret Life of Plants and say this is a big deal now scientists look back at the secret life of plants and say this is a big load of horse shit but

the research is still ongoing there's still serious scientists curious about plants and what they feel if they do feel like I said there's that business with the mushroom internet which is legit and scientists today they're really pissed off with the work that cleve baxter did

and they're pissed off with the secret like life of plants because it was so ridiculous it delegitimized the work that they were doing and now this serious field that they're trying to investigate they still have difficulty being taken seriously and getting funding because it became a really popular meme in the 1970s became a best-selling book which eventually people went this is a bit ridiculous but to take it all back to the very start of this podcast, when I played you that song from the album Mother Earth's Plantasia by Mort Garson.

That's why that exists. That's why there's an album that was made not for humans to listen to, but for plants to listen to. And it's called Plantasia. And whether or not fucking plants can hear it, but for plants to listen to and it's called Plantasia and whether or not fucking plants can hear it it's just a really good

ambient album that's very listenable with some pioneering electronic music and I'm glad it still survives even though when it first came out it was just some mad album that you got free with a fern when you bought it in one shop in California

so that's that's the hot take that's the research that led me on I heard that track heard it was made for plants and said to myself well I'm not going to fucking sleep until I know exactly where that

fucking exists so that's this week's podcast I spoke in quite a flippant fashion there about quantum physics which is a desperately complicated area and if you didn't understand any of that quantum physics stuff I actually have an earlier podcast from about a year ago I think it's called

I think I called it Quantum Tarantino but basically I sit down with Michael Brooks was his name Professor Michael Brooks I sat down with an expert on quantum theory and quantum physics and it's very entertaining and he basically explains that shit

if you're interested in quantum mechanics, quantum theory, he's an expert in it, he explains it beautifully and simply and if that shit was confusing you, go and listen to that, that's good crack so I'm going to sign off now

and you're going to hear an advert and after the advert I'm going to do the new thing I do on the podcast which is I play a piece of music that was written

on my live stream so if you're not into that you can just say goodbye now and if you are into it come back after the break let's do a little flexing tone just in case give it a pause And if you are into it, come back after the break. Let's do a flexing tone just in case. Give it a pause.

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Okay, you would have heard an advert there so i i do a live stream once a week on twitch twitch.tv forward slash the blind by podcast it's an ongoing art project that i'm doing there's not what i do basically is i write songs live an audience watches me online online live i have several live instruments recording equipment a looping pedal and i also play a video game and what what I literally do is I record, make and produce songs in the moment, completely improvised. Because I'm trying to challenge the way that art is made. I like art to be participatory. I like art to be participatory. I'm not necessarily a huge fan of you have an audience

and then you have the artist or the piece of art and you have the thing being observed and the people observing it and you have no in-between. Like at a gallery or at a gig, you're the audience, they're the performer. You're the observer, there's the painting. That's a very binary way to appreciate art

and a very binary way for art to exist and it exists to service capitalism, commodifies the art. But what I do on Twitch is, it's process based. It's not about the finished piece. It's about being present in the process of the art being made. And also having the capacity, if you're watching, to even participate in the process by making a suggestion.

So now it's no longer about art and observer. It's a communal participatory experience which is much richer. Also it's a space where I fail publicly. It's kind of like a professional athlete goes to train in seven days a week, like a rugby player will go to train in seven days a week and kick the ball and miss the fucking crossbar loads of times and do loads of fuck ups because they're training they're honing their skill so when I do my live twitch stream that's me at play I'm training for when I need to use my creativity and how an artist trains is they need to eradicate the fear of failing because if you're afraid of failure you can't achieve creative flow you can't actually create so the best way for me to confront the fear of failure is to fail publicly while people are

watching a bit like pulling my pants around my ankles. In a public space. But not in a. Like indecent exposure way. In a non-consensual way. In a. A consensual. I might pull my pants down. At some point lads.

Just to let you know. And everyone goes. Okay. And then I do it. And I experience the shame of it. Actually. Technically that would be. If no one was there to watch it, my pants would be both up and down at the same time, using the rules of quantum physics.

But anyway, yeah, I do this Twitch thing to fail publicly, to fuck things up publicly with people watching, so that then helps me to not be afraid of failure when I need to create privately. So I'm going to, I made a song. That then helps me to not be afraid of failure when I need to create privately. So I made a song. I'll do about five songs in an hour. Four of them are shit and usually one of them I achieve flow and I'm like, wow, I'm quite happy with that. So this song is called Christy Moore Has Been Stealing The Wheelie Bins From Outside Of Your Mother's House. Christy Moore has been stealing the wheelie bins from outside of your mother's house.

And the lyrical content, the suggestions actually came from people commenting in the moment. So I usually ask people, give me some nouns. So people give me a big long list of nouns. And two that I picked out were Christy Moore and wheelie bin. So I said, right, let's do a song about Christy Moore robbing wheelie bins from your mother's house and I just fucking went straight into it and what you're about to hear like I edited afterwards for this podcast so it was made completely live improv in the moment would have been about 10 minutes long because I'm playing all the fucking instruments that takes time to layer them so I edit it down now to like two and a half minutes and i was fucking really happy with this incredibly happy i achieved like 100 flow when i was doing it and so i was quite happy with this so here you go christy moore's

been stealing wheelie bins from outside your mother's house. I love your mother's voice I take the wheelie bin I take the wheelie bin and set it on fire I take the wheelie bin and I set it on fire And I inhale the fumes I inhale the fumes from the wheelie bin It goes to my head and I inhale the fumes I inhale the fumes from the wheelie bin I let it go to my head and I do a little dance I do a little dance up the wheelie bin

I let it go to my head My name is Christy Moore and I am mad for the wheelie bin It's for your mothers or so say My name is Christy Moore It's for your mothers or so say I'm out. He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby

He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby He's gonna follow it in his bed, baby We're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, we're dealing, Bye. I'm out.