The Blindboy Podcast - Dunphys Bunting

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

How getting consistent electric shocks from a tin of beans lead to a hot take about big data. Also contains a hidden recipe for a delicious vegan curry Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Good morning you shiny shinbone, displayed aloft over a nevin man's mental piece, waiting all white and bony, hanging with no purpose, until one day you are torn from the mental piece and you are being used to bludgeon someone during a drunken argument about snooker. Welcome to the blind buy podcast what's the fucking crack thank you for the lovely uh

fucking the lovely feedback regarding last week's podcast where I read out a short story called Mara from my brand new book Boulevard Rain which I'm still plugging because

it's Christmas you cunts Christmas is coming up so you can buy the book and my ma told me that she saw it in the catalogue for Lidl so they're going to be selling it in Lidl possibly on special

offer. Don't quote me on that. I don't want to get in hassle over that. My ma said your book is going to be on special offer in Lidl. I saw it in the catalogue. But I have no other confirmation for this particular piece of information other than my 80 year old mother telling me she saw it. So if I tell ye my books on fucking sale in Lidl based on my ma's information and it's not true then that'll start a lot of shit so I don't know

I've no reason to think that she'd lie to me but there you go you don't, if your ma says your book is in Lidl don't go standing on your podcast basically that's one thing I've learned over the years. So, this week,

the thing I wanted to talk about this week corresponds perfectly with my BBC series called Blind Boy Undestries. I didn't pick that name. My BBC series called Blind Boy Undestries didn't pick that name my BBC series fingers crossed is 99.9% coming out this week on the BBC iPlayer

which if you live in the UK or the occupied north of Ireland then you'll be able to see it on the iPlayer if you live in occupied north of Ireland. Then you'll be able to see it on the iPlayer. If you live in the Republic of Ireland or beyond. You'll have to find more devious ways. To watch my BBC series. Using em.

What do you call those fucking things? A VPN. Alright. Using a VPN. My a VPN my personal experience with VPNs is get one that you that you subscribe to

and spend 4 quid a month on because the free VPNs I've used free VPNs before and you're using it and your fucking laptop gets all hot and it's cause some prick in China

is using your laptop to mine some bitcoin so I recommend pay for your own VPN that's just a bit of sage advice from the internet so yeah 99.9%

my BBC series is coming out it's called Blind by Understrides be out this week and it's it covers four broad fucking broad kind of themes hot takes

one of them is anxiety not anxiety as in panic attacks but the general anxiety of the internet in today's life life another one is work where i look at how the definition of work is be is changing today and how our rights are slowly being stripped away when it comes to work the other one is is slavery um looking at as looking at slavery basically historical slavery and also the slavery that happens in plain sight for you and i to consume goods and then the other episode

we preliminarily we called it chaos and and that one's harder to pin down it's just about it's about the you know you have to call them these fucking names because when you go to a TV station and actually say to them this is what it's about they kind of go that's too arty farty

let's think of something simpler so really if I had to say to ye, what is chaos about? The kind of central thesis, I think, it's about... Postmodernism has ended. The postmodern era has ended. And we're in a new era. Some people call it metamodern. Which is defined by how we live our...

We live in a fucking era lads, where for the first time in history, we genuinely spend a huge proportion of our life in a virtual fucking space, okay, we have compartmentalised elements of our personality, parts of ourselves to exist in a virtual space space and that has never existed before and I'm talking about social media I'm talking about you know you're you're you have you have your personality for Instagram you have your personality for Facebook you have your personality for Twitter and we've compartmentalized psychologically ourselves to exist in these spaces so it's about the chaos of that and kind of post post-modern but you know i'm just saying this on this podcast i think the bbc

were like fuck off back to college you nerd we're trying to entertain cunts here so i want to speak about one of the central theses and hot takes on one of the episodes and the reason I want to do it is because something has been happening to me the past couple of weeks which is highly relevant to the episode and I've only really noticed it today when I was writing out what the episode is about so here's the crack as you know about two weeks ago, I was over in America doing some work, right? I was in San Francisco and Los Angeles. So

I had to take two very large flights, 10 come back and it's it's a strange little thing I'm generating quite a lot of static electricity okay you know every so often you're just minding your own business and then you touch something okay you touch a fucking usually something metal and then all of a sudden you, you touch a fucking, usually something metal, and then all of a sudden you get this tiny little shock on the end of your finger, and you're like, what the fuck was that, or you touch off another person, and you go, what the fuck was that, you get this tiny little shock, the same shock you'd get off a 9 volt battery, or the shock you'd get off off when we were kids and we were exceptionally

bored before any fucking social media if we were really bored what we used to do is do you know those lighters right that you press down and they make the click well we used to take the top off the lighter so that the flint was gone and you'd press the button down and it would click and you'd see a little electric spark and what you could do is you could go to your friend and click this lighter against their hand or their face and it would give a tiny tiny little shock which would be entertaining when there was no such thing as social media so that type of shock so whatever happened on this fucking plane this long plane journey i've been doing it's after building up a bunch of electricity or something in my body and i've been getting about six shocks a day and they're not necessarily unpleasant it's grand

it's just a little shock but they're surprising and it's happening enough for me to notice it right now for some reason it's not happening in my house at all okay it's not happening in my gaff but when i go to the shop right and this has been every day the first few days i'd start to notice if i were to reach up let's just say i want to buy a tin of butter beans i want to make like one of my favorite uh vegan dishes that I'd eat during the week. Because as you know, I'm mostly plant-based during the week and then I eat meat at the weekends. So I make quite a delicious butter bean and spinach curry. Which is very tasty and yummy. It's basically, how do I describe it

chop up a lot of scallions fuck them into a pan chop up a lot of mushrooms fuck them into a pan saute them gently fuck in a bit of cumin powder bit of curry powder

right then a cumin powder, bit of curry powder, right, then in goes your spinach, saute that so the spinach shrinks, fucking spinach is a prick lads isn't it, you buy a big bag of spinach, big huge bag of spinach and then you cook it down and it's the size of a euro, so you fuck your spinach in, that's sautéing in the pan with curry powder, cumin, green onions and a few mushrooms, you've got that all shrank down, the important thing you want to, when you're cooking fucking powders like curry powders, put the heat down real low because you need to toast the spices to get them fragrant before you put anything wet in

so once that's all toasted fuck in your tin of tomatoes fuck in half a tin of coconut milk and then fuck in your butter beans lash it around in the pan put on the cover on the pan leave it there on a very low heat

for as long as you like and you've got a beautiful butter bean and spinach curry with mushrooms and fucking all the crack in it and you eat that with a bit of rice and you you won't you'll be like i don't give a fuck if i have meat this is delicious so that'd be uh and i'll get two days out of it so i'll have that every week on like a monday and tuesday so what I noticed is that when I was, the reason I went specific on that recipe as well is I put out a tweet about two weeks ago where I said, I'd love to do a podcast where I speak about really basic cooking

that's affordable, really cheap cooking. Because I used to live on like 50 quid a week and when you're living on 50 quid a week you better know how to cook because if you know how to cook you can easily live on 50 quid a week and have a ton of delicious meals but if you don't and you're going to the takeaway that 50 quid will disappear very quickly so i suggested doing a fucking some cooking podcasts where i just may teach you how to make affordable delicious meals directed mainly at young lads i learned to cook when i was about 21 or 22 maybe 20 um because there's young lads out there who don't have any money and they're eating in takeaways i'm sure they'd love to be able to cook but they can't they don't have the

skills so that i i've i've diverted from the topic lads so anyway the dish is important to this story so on a monday i'd be going into duns and going right i need a tin of fucking butter beans and i need a tin of coconut milk i buy the small tin and i need a tin of tomatoes so that's three tins so i'd go up to the aisle to buy them and it's in duns and i reach up for the fucking butter beans, and then I get an electric shock. And when it happened, I let out a yelp. Like, it was packed, it was busy in fucking Dunn's. Now, ye know as well, I have a history of panic attacks being related specifically to shopping centres and places like Dunn's and Aldi.

specifically to shopping centres and places like Duns and Aldi. Anyone who's listened to this podcast knows about my stories of anxiety. These are places that I was not able to go. I would get a panic attack. Now that doesn't happen. I love being there. I get strength from chilling out in a place that once used to be terrifying. So I walk into a supermarket with a great sense of confidence and triumph. Every time I do it. And I get great meaning from choosing my ingredients. And building the narrative of the meal I'm going to make. I get a lot of meaning from that. So I'm there anyway.

In fucking Dunn's. And I reach for the chickpeas. And I get an electric shock. And then I yelp. Kind of like em. Like that. A rat then I yelp kind of like like that a rat-ish yelp

and when a grown adult man does that in Duns when he tries to touch a tin of chickpeas quite appropriately it draws attention to people, from people around me, so now I'm in the fucking canned goods aisle

having just got an electric shock from a tin of chickpeas and i've yelped i have now become the center of attention now that for me is that's challenging it's quite triggering because as you know when i spoke about my my anxiety around supermarkets when I was like 19 and getting serious panic attacks and staying in my bedroom and not going out the fear for me was what if I go to a supermarket what if I go to a shopping center and I do something that makes me the center of attention what if I puke up on the ground what if I go crazy and everyone stares and looks at me and I become a spectacle wouldn't that be terrible and the fear of that would give me anxiety attacks 10 years ago so now I'm fucking getting shocks off the

chickpea I'm drawing attention to myself so it's it's not in like panic attack territory and i don't think i'm going to go back there but it's certainly uncomfortable and it made me immediately leave the canned goods aisle then i went over to the fridges the fridge section to get my uh i like to have a smoothie in the morning so I'll buy frozen berries you know and then I put my hand towards the fridge with the fucking frozen berries same thing happens I'm getting an electric shock from the frozen berries

what bastard is texting me Erlingus is that is that is that some Freudian shit now or is that the uh Jungian synchronicity that I should be talking about getting static electricity shit from airplanes and then I get an email from Aer Lingus?

Or do I just do a lot of flights for my job? We'll never know. Holy fuck. Why are Aer Lingus? So I just got a mail from Aer Lingus there about my flight to Los Angeles on the 4th of November

which was a month ago for some reason they're deciding to email me now a month later and it's December and I'm now getting an email about my confirmation and booking reference now about a flight that happened a month ago not for the good customer service

Aer Lingus, while I tell ye about the static fucking electricity that is existent in my body because of this very flight so maybe it is youngie in synchronicity so I'm getting electric shocks all over the gaff lads, in the supermarket and I'm aware of it but I'm not really it's just unpleasant and then I kept getting electric

shocks from this static in my body from being in the airplane and slowly what started to happen and it's like I'm not really aware of it because if I was fully aware of it I'd have stopped it in the moment I naturally started to avoid visiting the section with canned goods and visiting the fridge because

my unconscious knew if I reach for a tin of beans I'm going to get an electric shock if I reach for the fridge I'm going to get an electric shock if I reach for the fridge I'm going to get an electric shock because of the static in my body so on the second week when I went to make my fucking spinach and butter bean curry I naturally instead of buying a tin of tomatoes I went and bought fresh tomatoes I didn't get any fucking coconut milk at all i didn't get any frozen berries i was naturally avoiding the aisles in the shopping center

that were giving me electric shocks without being fully conscious of it it just it had internalized as a fear and it was partly the fear of electric shocks but mostly i'd say what it was it was the fear of getting an electric shock and then becoming a center of attention in the middle of the supermarket which i don't like so my actual purchasing habits changed and i was going home eating sub sub par fucking curries that was just spinach which is grand because you buy the spinach in a bag in the veg section that's not going to electrocute me uh tomatoes aren't going to electrocute me the only thing that's electrocute me in the meal butter beans the tin uh tin of tomatoes and coconut milk so i was having disappointing curries

that weren't the whole joy of that curry to be honest it's the coconut milk mixed with the tin tomato it's creamy and citrusy and tomatoey at the same time so i was having subpar curries then after about two weeks the electricity just leaves your body and i'm not really getting electrocuted by things anymore but it did leave me with this apprehensive fear about reaching for things that electrocute me because it is static in my body and then i started to think holy fuck this is what's happening to me goes back exactly to the work of a psychologist called BF Skinner and one of my episodes in the BBC series is based on the work of BF Skinner and I'll tell you the crack now this sounds like I know this sounds like I've perfectly concocted a fucking

story about getting electrocuted in duns to suit the narrative of the podcast but i assure you that is not the case honest to fuck i'd tell you if it was so who was bf skinner and why is he important to this podcast so my experience there in the in Dunn's and getting electric shocks from tins of beans and then slowly as a result of those electric shocks no longer purchasing tins of beans or anything metal for two weeks that's kind of on the lines of what BF Skinner discovered now what what makes it so BF Skinner was a behavioral psychologist and he was interested in in behavior in general not just human behavior but animal behaviour too. So Skinner's major breakthrough is he invented this thing called a Skinner box, okay? So, taking it back to my experience in Duns, right?

So, every time I touched a metallic object like a tin of beans I received an electric shock. And this without me knowing changed my behaviour. I stopped purchasing or touching things in Dunn's that were metal. I don't know why I only received electric shocks in shopping centres. I haven't a clue why that is because it wasn't happening at home. But it was happening in Dunn's or in Aldi. And I changed my consumer behavior. So what Skinner did in the 50s, because he was a behavioral psychologist, he was interested in the behavior of animals and the behavior of humans.

Skinner came up with this thing called a Skinner box. So it's basically a cage, an animal, a cage for a rat. So it's a cage with a rat in it. an animal like a cage for a rat so it's a cage with a rat in it and on one side of the cage there's a lever a little simple like a little pedal and on the floor of the cage there's an electric grid that can deliver shocks so rats are very curious animals when you put a rat in a cage it will investigate all corners of the cage so Skinner puts the rat into the cage. It's investigating all around, smelling everything.

And then eventually it finds the little pedal, puts its paw on the pedal by accident, out of curiosity. And then all of a sudden a pellet of food appears. So the rat eats the pellet, is like yum yum, and slowly but surely realizes that every time the rat every time the rat puts its paw on the lever a pellet appears so the rat now starts to consistently and continually start pressing this pedal because every time it does it food appears and this is what Skinner called a reinforcing behavior

so what happens when when the rat receives food the rat's brain releases a chemical called dopamine dopamine is it's it's it's what it's a pleasurable chemical rats have it humans have it when you eat nice food the feeling in your brain that translates to emotions that makes you go that was lovely that's dopamine being released rewarding you for eating the nice nice tasty food when you have sex same thing dopamine loads of dopamine is released to tell you sex is good have more of it when person, when you make a successful social interaction and someone gives you praise or smiles at you or recognises you, dopamine is released.

So Skinner figured that this rat getting the fucking food every time it touched a pedal and then continuing the behaviour, that through the release of dopamine in the rat's brain it reinforced the behavior so the rat was becoming operant conditioned an operator skinner was conditioning and changing the behavior of the rat whether the rat knew it or not then he introduced something else into the cage. Above the pedal. There was a red light. And what would happen is that the rat would press the pedal.

And receive food. But every so often. The rat would. Press the pedal. A red light would appear. And when the red light appeared. the electric grid on the ground would give the rat a little shock, which the rat then experienced as painful and anxious and frightening and the exact opposite of a dopamine hit. This is what I was experiencing when I was touching the fucking tins of beans

and getting my electric shock and making a show of myself in duns i it was a punishment it wasn't reinforcing i was being punished by tins of beans so the rat in the cage presses the pedal and then soon realizes that he can stop the electric shock if he presses the pedal again. So presses it, food is released. Presses it, food is released. Presses it, red light appears. The rat goes, oh fuck, there's going to be a shock. Then starts pressing it loads of times to stop the shock from happening.

loads of times to stop the shock from happening so Skinner had basically managed to completely change how a rat he managed to manipulate how a rat behaves based purely on reward and punishment okay and what I explore in my bbc episode about anxiety is exactly this but in a much larger kind of freakier scale in terms of what's happening right now in the world but before i get on to that we have to get the little ocarina pause out of the way and because you know I don't like being interrupted when I'm on a roll with something so it's not the ocarina pause it's the Brazilian nose whistle pause

this Brazilian nose whistle was given to me by Brian Cross in Los Angeles so here we go Rock City you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on Saturday April 13th when the Toronto Rock Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none.

Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil.

It's all for you. No, don't. The first omen, I believe, girl, is to be the mother. Mother of what? is the most terrifying six six six it's the mark of the devil hey movie of the year it's not real it's not real it's not real who said that the first omen only in theaters april 5th That was the Brazilian nose pause. You probably received an advert that either told you good or bad things about yourself in order to operant condition you into buying their bullshit product.

Other things to get out of the way. Gigs. I'm going to do it so quickly. Dublin. Sugar Club. January. other things to get out of the way, gigs, I'm going to do it so quickly, Dublin, Sugar Club, January, 3rd, 4th, 5th, tickets are left for that, look it up on Google,

Australia and New Zealand, tickets left for those gigs, look it up on the internet, troubadourmusic.com, Scotland and England tour, not a lot of tickets left for London, not a lot of tickets left for London not a lot of tickets left for Glasgow we'd be down to the

single digits on them but yes there are tickets available for Birmingham and for Liverpool there we go we got that out of the way what else fucking Patreon this podcast is supported by you the listener

ok every so often I might get a a little sponsor per episode but in general i don't want advertisers on this podcast because what that would do would mean i'd have to change i'd have to suit what some fucking brand wants the podcast to be rather than me being able to do what i feel and what gives me that freedom is that this podcast is supported by you and the listener of the podcast via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast do you enjoy the podcast do you like it are you getting something from it each week well i do this podcast essentially for free so if you're

consuming it loads and you're feeling generous, go to the Patreon, give me the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, if you can afford it. If you can't, you can listen for free. Why am I always plugging the Patreon? Because people come and people go. So I have to continually keep reminding you, I always need new patrons because the same amount of patrons patrons that

join are the same amount that leave so i have to keep pushing it and this is what i how i honor living this is what keeps me um taking over it's what gives me solace happiness and comfort in my life so please please join the patreon it makes a huge difference okay back to skinner so skinner's experiment with the rat in the cage um you know him being able to prove that he can modify and change the behavior of an animal based on the rewards and punishment that that animal receives, was groundbreaking. And he soon said, well, fucking humans must be the same. And a lot of positive things came out of Skinner's research,

in terms of therapy. We'll say, when it comes to people with phobias, gradual exposure, if you've got someone, we'll say, let's take it back to me. When I was experiencing intense anxiety and agoraphobia about going to places like supermarkets or going to places like pubs, what I would do, aside from all my cognitive behavioral therapy,

aside from building my self-esteem, all of this, there's a thing when you're trying to improve your mental health it's all well and good learning about you know why you have anxiety or learning about cognitive behavioral therapy or like listening to this podcast and listening to me talk about cognitive behavioral therapy it's grand learning about it but to truly for it to have an effect and to change who you are and for you to stop being a person who suffers from anxiety you have to move it from your head to your heart and the main way to do that really is it's it's through actively changing your actual behavior okay so cbt that i speak about a lot you know that happens at home on a page i had an i had a today i had a panic attack uh what how was i feeling during

the panic attack what were my views about the situation during the panic attack and then i'd write what are some alternative views i can take more rational approaches but when it came to me and agoraphobia and not being able to go to supermarkets we'll say when I was 19 or 20 how I actually conquered it was I had to physically gradually expose myself to these situations that were very anxiety inducing so it meant it wasn't crowds were my thing so i think for me what i started doing was going out to pubs with friends which would would have been a really difficult situation for me that would have immediately triggered a panic attack so what i'd do is i'd safely go I'd use my CBT and say look it's highly unlikely that I'm gonna get a panic attack in this place and if it does I'll cope

so I'd go there and I might do 20 minutes in the pub and it would be intensely stressful it wouldn't be enjoyable I'd be fighting off a panic attack at all times and I'd say 20 minutes is up and I'd go home and I'd feel a little bit better I'd be able to say to myself I went to the pub tonight and it was frightening and you know the feelings of agoraphobia and anxiety came up but ultimately I went to the pub and aside from that the only kind of negative shit that happened was in my own head so then the next week I'd go went to the pub. And aside from that, the only kind of negative shit that happened was in my own head. So then the next week, I'd go back to the pub. And I might do an hour there.

And then after that time, I come away. And I'm feeling a lot better than the first time. And then the third week, I'm doing two hours. And I'm changing my behavior each time. Going back to the source of anxiety. And after two months, I'm comfortably able to exist in a pub or exist in a supermarket and my anxiety is effectively under control that technique there of gradual exposure comes from the the work of Skinner because what I'm doing there is testing negative

beliefs that I have about an anxiety trigger, testing them against reality, changing my behavior and doing it. And as a result, my brain and my behavior changes to accommodate the kind of dopamine hit you get from conquering fear. Conquering fear gives a fucking dopamine hit so that's an example of one positive thing that would have come from skinner's work a lot of negative things came as well advertisers immediately jumped on skinner's work and realized that because what advertisers want to do is get you to buy shit so they started to figure out if they could advertise things based on reward and punishment then we would buy things based on that so the entire kind of 1950s onwards of advertising is heavily heavily influenced by the behavioral psychology of Skinner. So where we are today and this is where

my BBC episode about anxiety focuses on is I want to speak about operant conditioning and Skinner's work in terms of the past 10 years of social media because it's heavily present and years of social media because it's heavily present and we're not truly aware of it so the central thesis of the bbc episode is that we now walk around in our own skinner box okay and the skinner box essentially is our smartphone okay the skinner box is no longer something like when i'm in in the supermarket getting shocked by tins of beans maybe you know the duns in that moment becomes the skinner box but once i leave duns i'm not influenced by it but our smartphones are now the skinner box something something changed around i'd say around 2010 like i remember back i remember social media using bibo using myspace and early facebook before 2010 and it was it was a different world

like i remember on bibo around 2007 like people used to joke you know we'd be out having pints this is the mad thing Bebo was only something and same with Myspace it was something you had to go to your fucking laptop for at home and on Myspace if you were online you had a little green dot beside your profile that would let everyone know when you were online and if your green dot was on too much it was quite shameful you were seen as someone who didn't have a life if you were consistently online in my space and everyone could see it people would go fucking hell that's troubling that person must be at home on their laptop all day online and not leaving the gaff so it was a source of shame so because of that shame people would try and modify you know how much they're on myspace they'd never leave it signed

in for fucking ages instead you'd sign in check if you got any messages check if you got any comments leave immediately and then go back in another hour because shame had emerged around being consistently online because what it meant is that you're not cool you're a greasy nerd at home in a dark room with your laptop in front of you and you have no life that's how it was in 2006 2007 so that shame that pure shame operated and worked as a punishment you're not getting a dopamine hit from that so people aren't staying online in 2008 you're checking in checking out quickly and hoping people don't see that green light turn up on your profile every day to say this person is online.

And we used to joke, not just we, all over fucking MySpace, all over Bebo, all over Facebook in the early days, people would joke, ah fuck it, did you hear they're bringing out Bebo for your mobile phone?

And we used to be there drinking our pints at night time ah fuck it did you hear they're bringing out a Bebo for your mobile phone and we used to be there drinking our pints at night time and we'd go fucking hell wouldn't that be awful can you imagine it wouldn't that be hell imagine being able to take your phone out and you can check if you got a Bebo comment

instead what you had to do is like if you were out in the fucking nightclub, and you met someone, and I know if you met a girl or whatever, and you'd say, oh here's my Bebo page, you had to wait till he got home to see if she fucking commented on your page, or left you a message or something, and you had to, you had to postpone the dopamine hit of knowing if someone interacted with your social media. And we'd joke about the utter hellscape, landscape that would appear if we had Bebo on our phones. It was absurd to us in 2008.

And then smartphones happened. I got my first smartphone around 2011. And a smartphone for me me because we always had internet enabled phones like I had fucking a phone with internet on it in 2006 but you'd never use it because it would aid into your credit it was for emergencies you just wouldn't but in 2011 when I got my first I think it was like an iPhone 4, there was no apps on it, and I had the Facebook app, and the Twitter app, and I was now able to have Twitter 24 fucking hours a day on my phone, and there was, it wasn't like Myspace, where a green dot appears that says you're continually online

now the shame had been removed if you're on twitter all day in 2011 there's not really any shame in continually posting because no one can say uh you you stupid greasy nerd you've no friends and you're at home fucking wanking in front of a laptop can't say that anymore in 2011 because you're like no i'm out here having fun times in a nightclub and i just checked my mobile phone you dark so the whole landscape changed and being continually online was no longer a source of shame. And this was a very, very deliberate move by social media companies. So here's the kind of, why? How does that, why does that happen? So here's the crack.

The most important commodity of the last decade, right? By far, more important than oil like who are the richest companies in the fucking world the richest companies are google facebook right and you think to yourself how the fuck what's like facebook is free google is free twitter is free. Google is free. Twitter is free. How are these companies earning billions and billions and billions? How are these companies the richest companies in the world? I'm not paying them. My friends aren't paying them.

We're using it all for free. The commodity that's more valuable than fucking oil is data. Now, I've spoken about data before, but data is one of these insinuous words that's so depersonalized we don't actually place any value on it, but data is the most valuable thing in the world today. Data basically is, it's an incredibly detailed kind of track

of your online behavior. So everything you do online is tracked and kept in a little folder and that's your data. It's what you look at. It's how much you're online now with uh fucking you know it's where you move around your city because of google maps it's every single aspect of your behavior

if your smartphone is on you is recorded as data and facebook have this data because to use Facebook you don't give them money instead what you do is you give them permission to record everything you do and this is then highly valuable to advertisers because if an advertiser knows literally everything about your behavior then they have a much higher chance of recommending something to you that you will probably buy like instead of like with billboards with a billboard in the fucking 1990s you have to put an ad up and hope that most people like it now with data that's different people can target exactly what you want to buy because they've

purchased incredibly detailed intimate record of every single aspect of your behavior they've purchased this from facebook and google for a lot of money and now this company can sell you shit perfectly so that's data and it's the biggest commodity in the world so when the kind of data economy emerges obviously what what do what do google now want what do facebook want what do twitter want what they want is as much of your data right they want as much of a record of your behavior as humanly possible. How do you do that? The best way to do it is to keep you on Twitter, on Facebook, on Google for as much of your day as humanly possible. you're scrolling every second you pause your screen every picture you like every comment you write is recorded as data and it is highly highly valuable to these companies so these companies start to go well how can we get people to spend as much time as possible

using our apps so we can then take their delicious data okay uh some people refer to it as the attention economy it's the economy that that exists for your attention they want to keep you on youtube as long as possible you know why would google buy youtube because people were spending loads of time on youtube, not spending any money, watching fucking videos that are mostly illegally uploaded, but they don't care because Google are going, people are spending huge chunks of their day on YouTube. That's a load of data and behavior that we don't have

because they're visiting another website. So Google buys YouTube and now google gets all your data when you're using youtube do you get me so they're purchasing your attention and this is how things have been panning out since 2011 but it has now shaped the fucking world we live in. And this is highly influenced by Skinner. Massively influenced. We're the rat. And the cage is our fucking smartphone.

It's as simple as that. And I'd like to call that a hot take. But it's not really. It's fact fact the scientists working in facebook and google were looking at behavioral science and they want us to keep us on these phones as long as humanly possible so the other thing is is when the rat was in skinner's cage skinner is close by monitoring and recording every aspect of that rat's behaviour

you know the rat is being watched at all times what happens when we give the rat food, what happens when we shock the rat, what happens when we introduce a green light, what happens when we introduce a red light Skinner in the 1950s was consistently

recording the behaviour behavioral data of that rat and then responding to that data with different rewards and punishments to see could it could he change the rat's behavior operant conditioning an operator conditions the behavior of the rat and changes and controls it outside of the rat's knowledge because it's appealing to the most simple stimulus of a dopamine hit it's the same shit with our fucking smartphones

when we behave like the rat on Google, on Facebook we're sending our data to Google and Facebook. And they have entire teams of people to analyze this data and to test us in real time. To change their fucking new policy. To change how the timeline is. To adjust how we're fed information in real time in a fucking skinner box we live in a skinner box so long as you have a mobile phone and often they do it in plain sight do you know instagram

just did it did a trial thing there in ireland where they've removed visible likes and they're trying to say they're doing it for the for the benefit of of the user they're not it's it's a fucking it's they're doing a skinner experiment to only the people of ireland to see how will the people of ireland behave if we remove likes will they use the app less or will they use the app more and depending on the results of that study based on the data we give them they'll make a choice about what they should do worldwide so that's it out in the open right there a skinnerian experience experiment in 2016 facebook did an experiment on i think there was like 55 million people they didn't tell us they were doing this but they straight up did an experiment where whatever way facebook changed the the algorithm right the algorithm is how they do it the algorithm is is how the information

appears on your timeline depending on your behavior or depending on what they want you to see but in 2016 for about 50 million people, they managed to prompt. So I think what they did is Facebook changed your feed so that less like articles and news stuff appeared on your feed. And what appeared on your feed more was content from your actual friends. OK, so 2016 that happened facebook did it deliberately let's stop allowing you see articles from the irish times let's stop letting you see posts from the fucking rubber bandits page because i noticed it i was like fuck no one's seeing my posts anymore what's going on so what they did is they changed the

timeline so that you're using it and all of a sudden now there's no more irish times there's no more joe.ie and it's all your friends pictures that are on your timeline now you don't really notice it's happening and what they were doing was if facebook give you more of your friends and that's what you see in your timeline you're now more likely to like your friend's pictures and when you press that like button on your friend's picture that friend is the little rat in the box who presses the pedal who then gets the lump of food and what it was was that like I said earlier we receive a dopamine hit when we have a successful social interaction receiving a like on a photograph or a status our primitive brains don't know that

that's happening on a screen and our brains receive it as somebody likes me we get a dopamine hit we feel good it adjusts our behavior why did facebook do? Why would Facebook allow a fuckload of, only your friends to appear on the timeline as opposed to like advertisers and big business? Because, and it worked, if more friends appear on your timeline, therefore you're more likely to like your friends' comments and pictures, your friends then get the little dopamine hit feel good and start posting more so what it did is it caused all of us to spend a lot more time on facebook because we were receiving more positive reinforcement from our peers and then what it did for we'll say And then what it did for, we'll say, businesses like, you know, newspapers.

In order for the newspapers or my page, for instance, to be seen more on the timeline, we had to pay Facebook money in order for our posts to appear more. So that right there is a Skinner-based experiment that Facebook carried out based on the data they were receiving from us to change and modify our behaviour Facebook operant conditioned us to stay on Facebook more and to post more because

we're more likely to get more likes which we receive as a dopamine hit so that's operant conditioning right there now you might be wondering like so fucking what you know so what and to an extent i go so what you know um if going onto facebook and talking about my life or posting nice photographs of a dog or whatever if i'm doing that more who fucking cares what where's the damage where's the harm and for a lot of that stuff it isn't really that harmful it's we've been exposed to operant conditioning from advertising for years um it's not the worst but where does it get dark i'll tell you where it gets fucking dark another thing that social media companies have discovered is

what really modifies behavior it's it's not just receiving it like if you put up a nice photograph on instagram and you're happy with how you look and all your friends like it and you walk away from that feeling more attractive or whatever not great for your self-esteem you know it's still that external locus of evaluation shit that i talk about it's not the best but the dopamine hit from it from a little like what what what the social media companies wanted from about 2014 onwards, they realized that people respond better to more extreme emotions. Okay, so let's just say you're the rat in the cage, and instead of getting a food pellet, you give the rat his favorite food, like a big juicy cricket you know a live cricket and

he's thrilled with that because it's not just a shitty food pellet it's like yum yum a real life cricket and it's moving around and i get to kill it so the rat gets a big dopamine hit um alternatively the punishment is very severe electrocution so social media began to realize the best way to keep people online is to try and appeal to the most extremes of rage offense you know people being offended people getting incredibly angry people fighting i mean if you were to measure on a scale of one to ten the kind of extremity of emotion that you feel while using social media i fucking guarantee you it's close to a 10 when you're in an argument with a stranger in a comment section okay not talking dms but if you're if someone says something in the comments of an article or on twitter and what they've said is is if they're either insulting you, if their opinion is odious

and you strongly disagree with it, you then respond to their argument angrily. They respond back. I guarantee you how you experience that emotionally when you get into it. Now, the skill I've tried to learn over the year, because I've got fucking quarter of a million Twitter followers,

so Jesus Christ, if I was arguing with everyone who calls me a prick on Twitter, I wouldn't have a hope. So I've had to operant condition myself to be able to walk away from it by learning that I have a better day if I don't fucking argue with strangers online. So I've had to operant condition myself into that. But when you have a public argument with a stranger online it can it can make your blood boil and you can find yourself shaking and you can find yourself consistently refreshing the page waiting for this person to respond and you can take their words very personally and you can get very sucked in to this when you step back from it it's fucking ridiculous but you get sucked in to this deeply personal argument because first firstly empathy is removed in an online interaction with that

all you have is the other person's avatar it's words on a page so it seems much more personal you can't read that person's body language there's no room for compassion empathy you will say things in that space that you would not say in real life because it might be too hurtful in real life both of you will probably be a bit a little bit more chilled out there's no threat of physical violence so the online space it is a it's a perfect kind of ground for extreme emotions and extreme reactions also you know that other people are watching so you have this sense of i must beat this person in an argument because others are watching okay so the tech companies are aware of this so where it gets fucking dark is extreme, extreme beliefs,

like all you gotta do is look at the fucking, have you ever used, YouTube is a prime example lads okay so i'll use youtube a lot i fucking love youtube now when i use youtube what what am i looking up mainly i'm looking up videos i love videos about old synthesizers i like to watch people eating eating world war ii rations cans of beef that might be 60 years old and open them up i like to watch that i like to watch travel documentaries i like to watch a lot of cooking food things like that these are my interests on youtube and i generally don't really go onto youtube for political stuff but the past two years even if i spend the entire day watching only videos about synthesizers in the suggestions on the side the videos have nothing to do with synthesizers instead what they're suggesting to me is uh 10 feminist fails or they're suggesting a video that'd be like.

SJW's. Freak out. Or Jordan Peterson videos. Jordan Peterson calmly dismantles feminists. And I'm looking at these. I'm looking at these things being suggested going. Why the fuck. Am I being suggested videos.

Where. people who subscribe to feminism will say are being portrayed as irrational lunatics what why why why does youtube want me consistently to see these videos when i've just spent the day watching someone clean a synthesizer from 1972 what's going on and the simple reason is is that youtube knows that i'm a male between a certain age and they want me to see this type of content because it will radicalize me all right and i see it happening with so many fucking friends not just youtube but also on Facebook. I'm being targeted because of my gender and because of my age.

They want me to see videos that will make me watch them and then I'll say to myself, fucking hell, these liberals are after getting out of control. Jesus, this feminism shit is bad. Wow look at these feminists. They've all got blue hair and they're screaming and roaring and now they're taking over everything. You know and it's this real slippery fucking slope

where after six months I'm now starting to agree with this stuff then I start posting about it. I start posting all these triggered feminists need to agree with this stuff. Then I start posting about it. I start posting, all these triggered feminists need to shut the fuck up. And I slowly become radicalized. That's really deliberate shit. That's really deliberate and it's really fucking insidious.

And it's something that's been proven time and time again with these tech companies. And what happens? What happens when the tech company decides to push anti anti-feminist anti-immigration uh kind of right to far right content on the algorithm if it prioritizes this what happens why are people making youtube videos because you can monetize youtube videos and you can make money so if uh someone who isn't political video gamers conspiracy theorists if they see that the content that's shitting on feminism that's shitting on immigration that's being far right is getting the most views then they're just

gonna they're gonna see ah this is what's being rewarded operant conditioning i better start making these videos so more and more of this content gets created now there's a big pushback against this this isn't me just discovering it right now after trump people said hold on a second what's going on here so there's been a huge pushback to demonetize this type of content it's being pulled back but if you've got a friend and usually a man of a certain age and all of a sudden you're noticing that their viewpoints are getting a little bit right wing and making you go fuck where did that come from what's that post about jesus i didn't know they were racist it's because of this

so this is the crack this is what's happening on youtube and facebook and twitter that they are consciously putting into people's feeds content that is ideologically and politically extreme because people who have strong radicalized opinions about feminism about fucking immigration these people start to identify with these beliefs they start to find communities with these beliefs these communities who uphold and like their statuses when they say look at all these triggered feminists and then you get a lot of likes and it creates an extreme division and a non-stop online argument because then the other side of that is you get people who reject this kind of more right-wing conservative view and you

get people that are going left and you get people in the middle and then you get people who are straight up i'm a fucking communist and everything online about me is communism and it's polarized opinions on either direction and a non-stop continual struggle and fight that exists online but who benefits facebook google instagram youtube why because if you've now identified with an ideology and a belief and you're consistently going into social media with high emotions all day the extremity of these emotions you're being operant conditioned into spending more and more and more time on these apps, non-stop arguing. And what are the tech companies getting? All your data.

Imagine you didn't have these strong opinions. Imagine you just wanted to use Facebook. Like remember Twitter in 2010. You'd go onto Twitter just to make a funny fucking joke hope it got a few likes leave it and come back a day later there was no politics on twitter in 2010 there was no politics on facebook in 2010 lads i went to fucking art college in the 2000s political people politically minded people with strong opinions in fucking art college in the 2000s it was kind of low most people didn't really have strong i'm not i'm not saying it's good or bad but people didn't really give a fuck people cared about music but now you go to

a college campus and everyone has strong opinions left or right and we've all been operant conditioned into this because of data because of data fucking companies that want data who have figured out extreme opinions extreme emotions lead to more time online which leads to more delicious data which leads to more money and there's a good and a bad side isn't it good that especially when it comes to the left people are getting more politically engaged but how useful is that how useful is it to exist as a very highly emotive extreme avatar online non-stop arguing and if you want to know like you hear a lot about bots like Russia will say Russia, North Korea, China they have entire like intelligence agencies that are in like call

centers online with like 50 fucking 50 60 twitter accounts facebook accounts that are fake and these are bot accounts they're run by people but it could be one person running 60 accounts how do they work you see it with there's a big problem on twitter at the moment with the irish far right that are emerging slowly and emerging quite aggressively on online spaces and how bots work is if someone in this space decides to express a right-wing view bots will search out that tweet and they'll have their fake account that looks like an Irish right-wing account, but it's fake and you can't tell the difference. And they will like the tweets of the real person who is saying this far-right opinion. And then that person goes to Twitter and sees that they've gotten 16 likes for their horrible far-right opinion about direct provision or about immigrants.

And they are now reinforced to post more. And why are the bots doing it the bots are doing it because they're taking advantage of an infrastructure which was set up by the tech companies right the bots are doing it because they're from outside interests that want to see the political destabilization of western democracies now this could either be china russia places like that or it could just be very wealthy people who like recessions you know brexit happened because of this shit lads trump got elected because of this shit if you want to know now know what does the world look like when we are all operant conditioned,

you know, data is the new oil. It's the hottest commodity in the world. What does the world look like when in order for huge companies to obtain as much data as possible and become multi-billionaires and the most richest people on the planet what does that do to the world what it does is it gives us trump and it

gives us brexit and i remember the 90s i remember the 2000s it wasn't like this it wasn't this mad right now something insane is happening like you look at trump as the president of america and you go what the fuck is this he's a mad bastard what the how the fuck did this happen how and you're putting your hair out and you're looking at brexit and you're going what the fuck are they doing boris johnson what the he's a clown how is he in power how and you have to pull your hair out and go how did this happen data operant conditioning for us to have extreme online behavior to generate more data for large companies the end result is people like Trump and Boris Johnson and Brexit and the emergence of the far right and a continual extreme argument that you can't really escape because we're addicted to the phones. And that's the current kind of condition of the world.

And then you say to yourself, but I thought like Google and Facebook and Twitter, they seem really woke. They seem like really progressive companies who care about gender equality and they care about racism and they care about social justice. Sure, isn't this the ethos of their companies and yeah on the fucking surface lads to pull the wool over our eyes but ultimately you have to ask the question well if Twitter give so much of a fuck about the far right why are there so many of them on Twitter why is it so hard for

look under the comments of a journal.ie article on Facebook, lads. Horrible, violent, racist comments about people living in direct provision, about people coming to Ireland for a better life. Extreme racism. And you're wondering, is this not enough to have your account deleted? Why does this still exist

if i post a photograph of my dick on instagram i'm gone in a half an hour but yet if i cleverly say a bunch of racist shit i'm allowed on that's fine i haven't violated any policies and it's why is that i tell you why the tech companies they don't give a fuck they pretend they give a fuck it earns tons and tons of money for them if there's racists online because if there's racism if there's extreme opinions online then there's people to fight with those people and then it's it's a giant video game a binary right and wrong black and white far left and right non-stop video game where we're all engaging with it for the dopamine hits of scoring a point for our team and that's what it is and i participate in it you know what i mean i can i i do put it i try i try not to i have a rule i i don't think i actually

when it comes to people with extreme far-right opinions i don't engage a block outright because i i might i've too many followers i don't like even to react. Because I. I've too many followers. I don't like. Even to react in any way. As to platform. As far as I'm concerned. So. What I prefer to do. Is elevate.

Elevate voices of fucking. Charities and shit. That are trying to help. Marginalized people. That's what I prefer to do. Rather than. Get down and dirty. With some.

Racist fucking bot account but that's what you get that's the world that you get and this is the type of shit that keeps me awake at night because I go it wasn't like this in 2006 it wasn't like this in 1996 I remember

there being bad things in the world but I don't remember there being this extremity of feeling and emotion and I don there being this extremity of feeling and emotion, and I don't remember this extremity of ideology and opinion. This is something I haven't seen before. And there's other factors. Do you know, the world, you know, the rise of the fucking 1%, there's almost a global housing crisis, you have the threat of climate change,

so all these things are helping it along but there is a power of extreme irrationality that makes you want to pull your fucking hair out right now and i firmly believe it is because of giant tech companies the richest companies in the world who are making money they make their money by having us online as much as humanly possible and like we're rats in cages we are rats in the skinner box who have been operant conditioned to stay online as long as humanly possible through the extremity of emotion and as a final point and i've said this before this is why i believe podcasts are so popular like why why are podcasts massive but we don't give a fuck about radio you've just spent 70 fucking minutes listening

to me essentially just give you my opinions as a monologue but i guarantee you you feel calm even though what i'm talking about is not calm i bet you you feel a little bit calm and nourished and relaxed because podcasts are the only space we have with our smartphones where we can escape that for a little bit. It's the podcast hug, as I call it. It's a slight meditative escape where you're not... Like, yes, by listening to this fucking podcast, you've just given your data away to whoever but you've had an hour there where you probably weren't looking through Twitter

you probably weren't going on Instagram you've had a little escape and it recharges the batteries and that's why podcasts are fucking huge it's as simple as that and radio isn't because radio is

stuck in the stone age trying to bombard you all the time with fucking loud noises and it's like lads I'm trying to escape the fucking loud noises I've enough of this

in the smartphone so I want to listen I had a fucking three hour podcast last week me and Brian or two weeks ago

me and Brian Cross in Los Angeles on a balcony talking about hip hop and drinking cans. And I had people mailing me going that's the best podcast I've ever heard. That three hours of two people conversing and not poking the heads off each other. And not calling each other cucks or fucking feminazis.

That people are getting solace and relaxation from this. It's because it's an escape. It's the only little calm escape that we have from the deliberately operant conditioned theatre of extreme emotions that is the social media space. So, that there is is the

the central thesis of just one episode of the BBC series which I hope the fuck is actually out this week it was the central thesis that kind of

shapes the episode but there's a lot of other cool stuff in it so thank you very much for listening to the rant this week I hope you enjoyed it I hope I didn't fucking miss anything because like I said it's

this is one of those podcasts now where I'll finish recording and then go fuck what about that other thing alright God bless I'll talk to you next week I enjoyed that I enjoyed talking about that other thing alright God bless I'll talk to you next week I enjoyed that I enjoyed talking about that I hope you did too

and I know I'm going to end up getting fucking comments over this where someone's going to go I listened to your whole podcast and all you did the whole time was complain about Facebook and Twitter and Instagram yet I noticed that you have a Facebook and an Instagram and Twitter account. Why don't you just delete them rather than complaining?

Well, fuck you, Noel. Because I'm trapped in the system, the same system you're trapped in. I rely upon these apps for me to fucking earn a living, to have a job. I rely upon these apps for me to fucking earn a living, to have a job. And I'm entitled to recognise and call out and ponder what's wrong about them. Even though I'm going to go straight onto these apps and use it to tell you about this fucking podcast. So call it hypocrisy if you like, if that makes you sleep better at night. But to an extent it's an element of hypocrisy, to the other extent I'm trapped in a fucking system.

We're all trapped in this system, but you can still engage with the system while wanting to improve it. Alright? God bless you and all. I love you. Rock City, you're the best fans in the league, bar none. Tickets are on sale now for Fan Appreciation Night on Saturday, April 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30 p.m. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now

to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game, and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com.