The Blindboy Podcast - Furry Curry

Episode Date: December 1, 2021

I answer yere questions about creating art online and what differences there are now from 10 years ago Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Have a worry in the furry curry you deckling murries. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I hope you've all been enjoying the winter weather. Although it's getting a bit more difficult to enjoy the winter weather because it's getting more difficult to enjoy any type of weather. Because at the back of your head you're always thinking should it be like this or is it climate change? Because like i quite like it's november now late november i quite like this time of year i quite like the

the crispness and the coldness like i love a freezing cold morning when there's no clouds and the sky is that real piercing blue the sky is the colour of blue that you normally only see when you're high up in an airplane but you get to see that you can see the fucking ice crystals in the air I love those freezing cold mornings but I haven't seen a lot of them

it's just slightly warmer than it should be it's like the weather doesn't know whether it should wear a jacket or not. And I then find it hard to accept that weather. Now why am I talking about accepting the weather? Well I often start a podcast or end a podcast by speaking about the weather. And the reason I do that is as part of my mindfulness practice that I use as part of my overall mental health practice,

the weather can influence our moods, right? If it's a lovely sunny day, it's easier to feel good, okay? And there's good reason for that. And if the weather is kind of shitty and it's dark and you don't want to go outside, that can have a negative impact on our moods.

I try not to live like that because I don't want to wake up in the morning look out the window, see that it's a shitty day and then have a bad day as a result to feel low because the weather isn't how I want it to be or how I expect it to be if I live my life like that it's more likely If I live my life like that. It's more likely that I'll.

Be unhappy. So what I try to do is accept the weather. So whatever way the weather is. I simply go. That's where the weather's at at this time. And I have to search for the beauty within it. So at this time of year. I search for the beauty and truth

within the ugliness of winter. Because winter is about death. You know? The leaves are falling off the trees. The leaves are all wrinkly and brown and they're falling off the trees and they're going into piles on the ground and they're decaying. And there's no birds anymore.

And there's no animals out. This time of year is death and I've got two choices I can either allow that to really depress me and say oh this is so depressing everything is death everything is bleak everything is dark

or what I can do is I can accept that things are bleak and dark and leaves are decaying and I can smell them decaying I can accept that and recognize it as an essential part of the cycle of life because yes the leaves are falling off but what are those leaves doing they're feeding the earth they're feeding the ground that all the nutrients of that decay that's going to come back in the spring and create new life so it's actually part of this beautiful cycle and even though yes it's ugly there's a beauty in that ugliness if you were to take it away you wouldn't have life and also if i'm if i'm walking around or going for my run looking at nature decaying around

me because of the time of year I'm using that as an opportunity to go I'm gonna die someday death is certain death is absolutely certain that's the thing that's going to happen and I'm uncomfortable because nature is reminding me of that I don't like thinking about that but I'm gonna think now about the inevitability of death and use that opportunity to try and make the most of the time that I have now while I'm alive and that's something I do I borrowed that from religious practices

like I'm always fascinated by Buddhist monks in Tibet when someone dies in Tibet, up in the mountains where they live, there's not a lot of soil to bury people, so they do what's known as a Tibetan sky burial. So when someone dies, they put their body on a mountain and then vultures come down and they pick apart the body

and they scatter the bones and body pieces of that dead person all over a valley but then young buddhist monks go and meditate amongst the valley of the bones and skulls of human skulls and they do this so that they're confronting and accepting the inevitability of death so that they can appreciate life more also catholic monks used to do this in france about three four hundred years ago i can't think of the exact monastery but it's a monastery in france and they would basically prop the bodies of dead nuns up on these things that look like stone toilets and the body would be left there to decay. And young trainee nuns.

Would spend time praying. Amongst the decaying bodies of the other nuns. As a way to. Accept death. And to. Appreciate life. Now I don't want to do that. I don't want to be hanging around big smelly corpses.

So instead. Instead. life. Now I don't want to do that I don't want to be hanging around big smelly corpses so instead instead I do the diet version which is I reflect upon the death of leaves I walk amongst the graveyard of crumbling leaves and inhale their fragrant decay. So these are just

the things I think of so that I don't allow the weather to get me down I don't react to the death of winter I accept it and reflect on it and that's just something I do but it's getting more and more difficult as we enter the Anthropocene which is the geological era we currently live in whereby for the first time ever nature and the earth is not dictated by the chaotic forces of nature but by the behavior of an animal man and that's it we live in the Anthropocene so because of climate change

I find it more difficult now to accept nature because now I'm questioning it all the time so while I'm

trying to have my lovely mindful walk amongst the decaying leaves I'm there looking up at a branch

going that fucking leaf up there is a bit green for November isn't it leaves should be dead what the fuck you doing up there or I'm wondering is it cold or should it be colder or in the summer I can't enjoy a hot day

because I'm like should it be this hot so now nature is in this zombie state where you can't trust it. Like, you know that weather between winter and summer where you don't know whether you need a jacket or not? Like, I just get the feeling recently that, like, the weather doesn't know if it needs a jacket or not. And I do find that a challenge to my mindfulness because that's not something you accept. to my mindfulness because that's not something you accept

that's not something you can accept as a chaotic force of the universe because it's being created by man and I am one of man so before I continue tiny bit of housekeeping I've got gigs, live podcasts

in Cork St Luke's in Cork at the very end of December and I have some Vicar Street dates in Dublin in like March so check them out online if you want to come to those gigs. Those are the only two new gigs I've booked for like the next for the next six or seven months. Any other gigs I'm going to be doing are like gigs I booked before the pandemic that have been rescheduled. But regarding new gigs,

Cork and Dublin, they're the only two I've booked. Because I'm trying to focus less on the precarious world of live gigging and stick with like Patreon and writing books and making this podcast. Stuff that's more reliable and more enjoyable this week's podcast

is a question answering podcast so I'm going to try and answer multiple questions I get asked hundreds of questions from me all the time some lovely questions that I love picking a space to get around to

it's a nice change of pace if you're looking for a hot take go back to some previous podcasts there's nearly 300 podcasts in the back catalogue now and I would be shocked if you've heard them all. I know there's some people who have actually heard them all but if you haven't, go back and listen to an earlier episode or you can stick around today and listen to a question answering podcast. I'm gonna keep up the tradition of trying to answer as many questions as i possibly can but covering probably two so here's a lovely a lovely private question i got recently and i'm going to keep it anonymous because the person who sent the question is

they're an irish musical artist who are doing quite well for themselves recently fair play to them putting out some amazing work but they've requested anonymity and they asked me this this is a lovely question and i'm really happy to address it so first they said blind boy can you speak about what it was like releasing music and videos in the 2000s also recently i'm finding it increasingly difficult to want to create or make music because of the sheer scale of negative comments I get online. So this musician has recently broke through, I'd say you'd call it, like, if you're a creative person, if you're making art or if you're making music, you're doing gigs, whatever the fuck. There's that period between you do a gig in your hometown, right? You're putting out your music, you do a gig in your hometown,

and then the crowd is mostly made up of people that you know personally. So you're doing a gig and the bulk of the crowd is friends and family, right? Then the next step up from that is when you do a gig outside of your hometown and the people that are coming to your gig they don't know who the fuck you are in real life they're literal fans these are people who like the work that you've made online in a different city from where you come from and now you're gigging to strangers because they like your work and that there is often the first step from going from someone who's making art and creativity to now stepping into the professional space.

Once you're doing a gig or doing an art show or whatever the fuck, and the people who are consuming your work having a fucking clue who you are in real life, they're literally engaging in your work that's the first step into what you'd call being a professional artist in my experience about 10% of artists can get to that point and then out of that 10% 1% can make it into a viable career that lasts several years so there's a few reasons for this.

One of the main ones is money. Being a professional artist, it often doesn't pay any money at all. And you have to spend years and years and years making art for the sake of making art and not getting paid at all, which means you require quite a lot of time. So how did I navigate that particular problem? Well, I began quite early. I began creating seriously, seriously creating like the rubber bandit stuff at about the age of 15 while I was still in school. And I began learning skills in music making, comedy writing, all this shit while I was quite young.

Also throughout college. So while I was quite young. Also throughout college. So while I was in college, I was using all my spare time when I wasn't in college to learn how to produce music, to learn how to edit videos. What did I sacrifice there? A social life. Instead of having a social life and going out and partying,

I spent every minute of my available time learning the tools and skills that are now my career as such now it also helped that I had a particularly terrible mental health issues and agoraphobia because I wasn't going to leave my house anyway so when I had my agoraphobia and really bad mental health issues and anxiety I was using that time to escape through art and learning learning skills how to write comedy how to produce music how to edit videos I was learning all that stuff while I was scared to leave the house also though when I was when I was in my late teens early 20s I never ever realistically considered what I do now to be a career option. I never, I never said, oh, that's what I might end up doing or that's what I'm going to do.

It was just something I loved doing for the fun of it. But my serious, if I was to say to myself back then, what am I going to be doing in 10 years? I certainly didn't think I would be an artist as a career. I thought maybe I might be a graphic designer working in a studio or I might, I wanted to go on and study psychotherapy and become a psychotherapist. So I never ever thought of art as a career, ever. I was like, that's impossible. That just simply can't happen. It would be foolish of me to dream that big, stay realistic. And also I was working jobs that had nothing to do with creativity. So I was paying my way with work that had fucking nothing to do with art or creativity. It was just a hobby. It was just something really fun that I

like to do with my spare time because socializing wasn't really that interesting to me even after my fucking agoraphobia. Now the other thing that can lead to making a career out of something creative is luck luck is a huge part and by what I mean by luck is do you happen to be making the right art and creativity at the right time at the right moment. Now some people can call that being clever but for me it wasn't. It just happened to be luck. When I started making music in like 2007, 2008 and putting videos on YouTube that happened to be the right time for that type of content. That was the age of the viral video. You didn't have the huge competition for attention that you have now also it was novel it was new people making self-produced music videos and putting them online and them going viral was

a new thing i'm not gonna say it was more difficult but the people who had the skills the set of skills to produce a music video and also to self-produce and record music themselves, the amount of people who could do that was way smaller than it is right now. Because of accessibility to technology, because smartphones with cameras exist now, because tutorials online on how to make and produce music exist, there was less people back then who could make professional quality music and videos by themselves in their bedrooms. It was a novel thing.

Like when I was a teenager growing up, learning how to produce music with a computer or learning how to edit videos on a computer pre-YouTube, that was like a really strange niche hobby that I had as a creative person I didn't really know many people in Limerick who were doing that same thing as me when I was a teenager I knew one or two but it was seen as a a strange little niche hobby like when I was in college in the late 2000s I was studying graphic design and the course that I was on in art college

didn't really have the infrastructure to recognize or accommodate video stuff that I was editing at home or music stuff that I was editing at home like I was using all this software that I was illegally downloading on fucking pirate bay or limewireire or BearShare. And it was, because it was such a new thing, the art college couldn't like figure out how to make it relevant to the degree that I was studying. Like now, if someone is studying graphic design now in art college and they're making video, that's what the fucking course is.

The course now, they're teaching people how to cut and edit videos and all that shit that's now what the course is back then it was like a weird problem that they didn't know how to accommodate and that's it's disappointing looking back because one thing i'll say to you if you are a creative person and you're trying to be a musician or a comedian or whatever the fuck and you happen to be in college and if your course is in any way creative, try and make the professional work that you're doing part of your coursework, because you're hitting two birds with one stone then.

You're in college, but you're using that time in college as your four years to also fail as a professional artist. Like, that's what I did in 2015, years later, when I did my master's degree. I was making a documentary on RTE called The Rubber Bandit's Guide to 1916 and I incorporated that into my masters degree. And I know that sounds bizarre.

It's like what? Producing music on a computer and editing videos and making videos that was like a niche thing to do throughout the 2000s. Yeah, like before YouTube became popular in 2008. Like MySpace circa 2005 was the first time that you could actually put shit out and show it

and put music out and have people hear that. But before that, if you were making editing videos or making self-produced music, you had to do it for the love of doing it, for the curiosity of doing it

because it simply wasn't going to get heard or seen. The infrastructure didn't exist. It was still the era of, if you manage to make music by yourself at home, you have to send a CD of that to a record company and hope that they hear it. And the chances of that were fucking tiny. It was that era.

So where am I going with this? The initial question was, what was it like to release music in the 2000s and what I'm trying to what I'm trying to say is look I spent the 2000s honing skills learning how to produce music learning how to make and edit videos for the sheer fun of it and it was a little niche thing but all around the world there were other we'll say teenagers who were also doing this little niche thing and it's from that community around 2009 2010 that started to create the first big viral videos so I happened to have the right skills at the right time so when the rubber bandit stuff started going out on YouTube, 2009,

and then the likes of Horse Outside, that it was the right time for these huge viral videos that get spoken about all around the world. So that was sheer luck, time and place right there. And why did viral videos

become a thing around 2010? Couple of reasons. The digital infrastructure. Smartphones existed, but people didn't really have them. Not in 2010. Most people watched these viral YouTube videos on their laptop. Now that was positive and negative.

The positive was, is people would give your work way more time. There was less work to compete with. Also, things weren't as shareable as they were before. So if you had a viral video in 2009 or 2010, you might actually get six months of attention from that. Because if you think of it, you have this video, you might share it on Facebook in the early days of Facebook, or you might actually get the URL, copy it and send it to a friend in an email.

But when you send that viral video to a friend in 2010, they're not instantly getting that on their smartphone and looking at it while they're at a bus stop they're sitting down for their just after their dinner at six o'clock in the evening opening up their laptop and checking their emails so content moved and was shared a hell of a lot slower but you got a lot more of people's attention and passion and when something went viral like horse outside got 2 million youtube views in 2010 in the first week now that's nothing there's people in ireland uploading tiktok tiktok videos now that are getting 1.5 million views overnight but in 2010 2 million views on youtube in a week is enough to get you global press so look i happen to have the right skills at the right time to make viral videos at

a time when that mattered but when you think about it what happened in 2011 2012 the teenagers and kids that were looking at the viral videos in 2009 and 2010 were like, I want to do that. I want to make music in my bedroom. I want to make music videos. So these skills now became way more accessible. Now there was loads of tutorials online about how to edit videos, how to make your own music. Smartphone technology became way more accessible. So to make a music video now, you can actually make a half decent fucking music video on your phone, not a a bother what that does then is it affects the scarcity of the skills because they become more which is a good thing more people become digitally creative which is obviously a good thing but that then impacts scarcity also what happens with smartphones throughout the 2010s is sharing

things become a lot more easier so by about 2015 when viral videos really started to end when someone sends you a video you mightn't even look at it you're moving on to the next one and now we live in the era of tiktok where with tiktok now you just have millions of videos being uploaded every single day and you can get a million hits overnight and people what i'm saying is that if with the skills i had in 2010 if i tried to if i was a kid now and i was making a viral video i'm in the wrong place at the wrong time it would get noticed for about an hour and then people would move on to the next thing however However, if back in 2010 I decided I'm going to make a podcast instead, it would have flopped because in 2010 people weren't ready for

podcasts. Like a podcast in 2010 was for people who owned iPods and an iPod was an mp3 player and if you wanted to hear a podcast, you had to download a podcast on your fucking laptop and then transfer that to your iPod. So I could have made this exact podcast, spoken about all the things I speak about, and I could have done it back then, and it wouldn't have gotten noticed.

So you'll see there, it's not necessarily the quality of the work it's are you releasing that work at the right time in the right place in the right point in culture and then in 2017 when I released this podcast like yes of course there was a huge amount of luck but also by that time I'd been seven or eight years working professionally as an artist in the digital environment so I kind of had a it was luck and I also had a feeling of I reckon now is the time for me to do a podcast and why did podcasts become successful as a direct response to the noise that was created on our phones circa 2015-2016 so like i said there in the mid 2010s everyone got a smartphone and then you had your instagram your facebook twitter you have this

noise all the time you can never relax your phone is now a source of anxiety there's no such thing as viral videos anymore because fucking everything is viral all the time, forever changing. And this continual bombardment of information that we started to receive from about 2015, 16 onwards from our phones led to a sense of low-level anxiety. Continual bombardment, never being able to relax. Like around 2012, we all forgot the feeling of boredom because you can't be bored anymore. Low level anxiety. Continual bombardment. Never been able to relax. Like around 2012 we all forgot the feeling of boredom.

Because you can't be bored anymore. Like open up fucking TikTok. TikTok in particular is vicious for this. You fucking open up TikTok and you'll lose an hour. Like that. There's no boredom on TikTok. It's impossible. So within this new attention economy of bombardment that's where podcasts came because what podcasts do is they give us mindfulness if you have your smartphone

and you stick on your earphones and you listen to a podcast for like an hour, you're escaping the noise and terror of your fucking social media feed. So that's, I suppose, I think that answers the first part of the question. What was it like releasing content in the 2000s? It's right place and right time. What I'm also trying to answer as well is the factors that I see in my career that determine whether or not someone can make a career out of their art or not so luck is one part of it like I said the other part is having space and time to fail which means either you're lucky enough to come from a shit ton of

money and someone can pay for it or like what I did where I never put my eggs in one basket I never seriously considered my art to be a career I always considered a regular job to be the smart option I always pursued education and then I used all my spare time for art and like I said the big sacrifice the huge sacrifice there was a social life. 90% of the time that I should have been out going to pubs, meeting people, relaxing. I didn't. I used all that available time to create art and to learn skills. But that suited my particular type of personality.

That's actually my comfort zone it doesn't feel like work I thoroughly enjoyed all that time that I spent exploring art I don't regret it I don't really have regrets around it because now years later I'm now in a position where my actual job is doing all that shit my actual day-to-day time is creating making things research and doing the stuff that i love doing and that now happens to be my job but like i said it could be gone next year could disappear next year a flip a switch could flick on a social media app that just says podcasts are no more and I either hope that I can be in the right place in the right time again or I have to go look for a new career and that's the nature of this job that's what this job is and a huge part of my job as well

is trying to predict what is the next thing where is the next space to be in when because every week you hear me every week on this podcast mentioning that pod like the golden age of podcasts is over and what's happened over the pandemic is large corporate money has stepped into the podcast space and has oversaturated podcasts with large celebrity names so the end of podcast is upon us podcast as we know it in the same way that the influencer age is ending

the YouTube age is gone like mid 2010s there was a huge community on YouTube of people making vlogs people making video game videos that's all disappeared now that's moved more onto live streaming like twitch and then the more professional produced stuff is on the streaming

sites like netflix blah blah blah and where's the future i i don't know personally i have a little tingle in my belly about uh affordable electric self-driving cars. I think over the next 15 years, electric cars are going to become affordable, self-driving, and that will create a new entertainment space within a car that we haven't seen before. And the new media will be whatever is there. I think electric self-driving cars

will create a revolution in entertainment similar enough to what smartphones did in the early 2010s i could be off just a little feeling i have so the second part of that question i was asked was i'm finding it increasingly difficult to want to create or make music because of the sheer scale of negative negative comments that i get online so this is the third part of being a professional artist today luck is a factor time and and the space and resources to fail is a factor actually just a little thing on that second point where i said there in order to become a professional artist you need to have the time and space to fail which requires financial resources to do so so like i mentioned i did a lot of my groundwork

while i'm in college so i'm in college and i'm using my living at home with my fucking parents using the evening time then to create but then when i got out of college and then i'm working jobs i'm doing an actual normal job to earn a living. But at the same time, I'm also creating and putting things online and not necessarily earning money from it. One thing that helped me personally massively in that situation was the plastic bag that I wear on my head. And this is an important thing that I should say about my own career in response to that question. And this is an important thing that I should say about my own career in response to that question. So, like I know somebody, it was about five years ago.

I know a person who was making videos online, getting millions, millions of views, mainly on Facebook, right? Someone who was, they would have been really recognisable because of how many numbers their videos were doing they were going viral but this person wasn't earning any money from this views don't necessarily translate into actual money so someone like i made no money from any of the youtube views on horse outside horse outside got 20 million views i earned no money from any of the YouTube views on Horse Outside. Horse Outside got 20 million views. I earned no money from those views because it went up on RTE's page. I don't think RTE even monetized it. And RTE paid us, I think it was 500 euros. So that's 250 euros each for Horse Outside.

Any money I would have made from Horse Outside would have been from the gigs I got from Horse Outside but that was in the middle of a fucking recession so there wasn't a lot of gigs so somebody back then in the viral age could have had millions and millions and millions of views but they weren't earning any money from it but

they also that meant they had to be fucking famous while not earning money so I know someone. Who was going mad viral regularly. And they had to work in a supermarket. That was their job. Day to day.

They were working in a supermarket. While also being very very recognisable. And this person would be trying to do their job in the supermarket. To earn a living while being famous and not earning any money from all those views that they were getting. And the impact that that had on their mental health was fucking colossal. Because every single day people would see them and ask for selfies and then make a really shitty comment. Like they'd say to them, what are you doing in here?

Are you doing this for a TV thing? Is this for a video? And they're like, no, I work here. My job is I work in a supermarket. And every day people would look for selfies. People would interfere with the work that they're doing. The people doing it aren't being mean. But the people were like,

but you've got millions and millions of views online. I don't understand. Why are you in a supermarket? You're famous. And it's like fame in the digital age doesn't necessarily mean that person is earning money, especially not back then. So my plastic bag that I wear on my head also

protects me from that I had videos that were doing big numbers while also maintaining regular jobs or like I said in 2015 I went back and did a master's so I was able to maintain a normal life to maintain regular employment if I needed it while at the same time being quote unquote famous because I could separate those two things. Now the person I know who was doing very well with viral videos but was still maintaining their regular job in a supermarket it had a huge impact on their life. Very negative. They didn't want to work work became something terrifying where every day someone came up and felt sorry for them or someone came up and and made a hurtful comment that they didn't intend to be hurtful like i don't think like in 2015 when i went back to college

i didn't have to deal with people coming up to me going. What are you doing back in college? You're famous. I didn't have to deal with that. Or if I was doing a bit of work here and there in a public sphere. I didn't have someone coming up to me going. Why do you have this job? Aren't you famous? So thank fuck I didn't have to deal with that.

I was able to create that barrier. And that's unique to me because of the fucking plastic bag in my head. This also is why things like Patreon are so fucking important this is why I say to you support independent artists independent podcasters if someone is an artist and they're doing numbers

and they have loads of Spotify plays or they have loads of views it doesn't necessarily mean that person is also earning a living so if they have a patreon or a coffee page or whatever and they're looking for you to support them on it it's because they actually need it similarly i've seen like indie artists in ireland who are making class music people love them and they're really fucking cool and then all of a sudden on their Instagram. They have to do a brand partnership.

They have to do an advert. For some fizzy drink or something. And you see people under the comments. Calling them a sellout. There's no such thing as a sellout anymore. That doesn't exist. If a small indie artist. Is doing adverts on their Instagram.

For a fizzy drink. They're not selling out it's they're one of the only ways they can earn a living so that's important for us to remember because being an artist today is different we think of the spectacle of fame and we associate it with the word fortune that's often not the case social media numbers did not equate to financial numbers so support people's patreons or whatever if they're looking for it so jesus back to the original fucking question i'm finding it increasingly difficult to want to create or make music because of the sheer scale of negative comments i get online so like i said the person who asked me this question they're uh an artist doing quite

well for themselves at the moment recently started getting biggish in the past year or so so they've now gotten to the point where they're putting stuff out creative stuff and they're receiving quite a lot of negativity as a result of doing this so here's like the third part of the job of being a professional artist today which can here's another barrier here's the third barrier so if you put work out online today if you're a creative person and you put work out

especially if it does okay right if you've gone beyond that point where it's just your friends and family and now it's in the public sphere and you're stepping into professional territory if you do that you now

have to be bullied online every single day as part of your job now the reason i mentioned that is your ability to tolerate that can also influence whether or not you're able to maintain a career in the job like that artist said to me there in the question I'm finding it increasingly difficult to want to create or make music because of the scale of negative comments I get online so that's a huge barrier to the job I fucking love doing what I do I adore this job I love it I finally am in a position whereby the thing that I love doing is also the thing that pays my bills. But do I think about quitting this? I do frequently. What makes me think of quitting? Horrible comments online. That's the one thing that makes me think. I think I need to quit this

job and just get a normal fucking job that has nothing to do with the public. Because I can't be dealing with this anymore. I can't be turning on the internet every day and have multiple strangers say mean, targeted things to me just for the sake of it. But what I say to myself is that's the emotional labour of my job. That is the emotional labour of my job. If I want to have a job where I can create art and do the things I love, then I have to also accept that as an independent artist,

I need to use social media to do this. And when you use social media, people are going to be horrible on it. And that's just a given. Now, 95% of the feedback is absolutely wonderful. It's people being lovely and saying, thank you for the work you're doing. I really appreciate it.

I enjoyed this. Or even constructive criticism. I don't mind constructive critique. Or people going, I really appreciate it, I enjoyed this. Or even constructive criticism. I don't mind constructive critique. Or people going, I like that, but I prefer... That's all absolutely fine. I'm talking about... There's just a small minority of people. You've seen it.

You've seen it. Look, I don't need to explain to you that social media can be toxic. There's a small amount of people who really get off on saying mean things to people who they perceive to be above them in some way. I'm not talking about someone holding a person to account if something they said was shit. And I'm talking about random targeted meanness at a person whose videos are doing well or who has a bit of a platform I'm talking about random targeted meanness for the sake of it

and the people who do it they feel like they're taking the person down a peg it's like you need to be like every day I'll get an email from someone going you think you're so fucking smart with your podcast you think you're so intelligent well let me podcast you think you're so intelligent well let

me tell you you're fucking thick you're stupid and I get that every single day by a random stranger without fail just just because I'm putting out a podcast someone really really angry for whatever reason I've become the object of their hatred and anger and when it's like a public comment and then that comment gets a bunch of likes emotionally the experience of it is it's like being severely bullied it feels like being back in school and really badly being bullied that's what it feels like even though my adult brain can say things like this person is just angry or i understand psychology so i know if a person is that furious with me for doing something like making a podcast that anger has nothing to do with me that's all their own anger and for some reason i've become

an object of that anger and i know that cognitively but i'm just a human being I'm insecure I like it when people like me I I like to be liked by people that's a that's an okay thing to want as a human being and I experience it as painful when I'm being rejected or bullied so every day and this isn't just me I'm using me as an example because I'm trying to speak from my own experience but anyone who is creating work online and is a professional artist once you start doing a reasonable amount of numbers that's when these people step out that's when people feel they need to take you down a peg and the continual bombardment of that and the continual bombardment of that when it happens daily like i i always say i've been called a cunt every single day since 2004 the first time i put work online was through a website called geocities and geocities was like before social media it was like a google thing to make

a website and i put up a couple of sketches on it in fucking 2004 within a week i had my first experience of just a stranger being like you think you're fucking funny well let me tell you see so it wasn't like that in 2010 so as social media the more things go viral and the more things the more the toxicity increases so the more the artist is bombarded with hatred and you'd think but jesus if that's only five percent of comments and 95 percent of the comments are positive does that not cancel out the negative comments it can if you look at it that way but what it's about is the emotional labor every time i get a hateful comment it hurts me deep in my chest as if I'm being bullied in school.

That's the emotional, childish, it's the emotional child in me that needs approval. So every time I get a negative comment, I get that deep hurt. Then I have to use my adult, rational brain to talk myself out of it so that it doesn't impact my day. But the process of that is tiring. So to answer that question. If you're finding it difficult to create or make music. Because of the scale of negative comments you get online. So there's two things. Number one.

Can you limit your social media? Like a great trick is. Like for Twitter. What do I do with Twitter? I don't have Twitter on my phone. I have Twitter on a separate laptop and I go onto it once a day and that's it. Don't be checking your comments all the time if you don't fucking need to. And then as well, if the scale of negativity that you're getting because you're simply putting art out,

that you're getting because you're simply putting art out, if that scale of negativity is so constant and so consistent that you don't enjoy your job anymore, then you should really, you may have to have a think about whether it's the right fucking job for you. Like any job, if you, you're being bullied at work, you're being bullied at work you're being bullied at work that's what this is if in any job you're being harassed and bullied at work and there's not a lot you can do about it and if you have the option of leaving it it's something you might have to consider and that's the third thing that determines And that's the third thing that determines whether people, I think, can stay in a creative job like that online. And that's a sad thing to have to say, but that is a factor.

Just because a person appears to be confident enough to create work and put it out there, doesn't mean that that person then has the tools and resilience to be bullied every single day and to get on with it. Being an online artist, it's one of the few fucking jobs where being bullied in the workplace is part of it. It's not really taken seriously. I mean, you have people talking about your be kind and stuff online. It's not really taken seriously to be honest there's not a hell of a lot that can be done about it other than spreading the message to people

seriously have a think if you're going to be a shithead to someone online just because and I'm not talking about calling people out if they're behaving if a public figure is behaving terribly and you want to take them to account on it that's a different story but if you literally just feel like calling people out, if they're behaving, if a public figure is behaving terribly, and you want to take him to account on it, that's a different story,

but if you literally just feel like, I'm going to write something shitty, under this person's video, or I'm going to go onto a forum, and talk shit about this person, and say how terrible their work is, keep it to the fucking WhatsApp group, if you have to do that, keep it to your private WhatsApp group, because independent artists, are seeing it. If you have to do that, keep it to your private WhatsApp group

because independent artists are seeing it because they have to fucking monitor their own social media and it's bullying in the workplace. It is. If you did it in a fucking pub, you'd be kicked out. If a stranger walked up to me in a public space in front of loads of people watching and said,

do you see you with your podcast? You think you're so smart but you're not you're not smart at all you're just a fucking idiot with a bag on his head i hate you and i hope the holes in your bag suffocate you which that's just a regular thing i'll get every single day if someone did that in real life the entire pub together would remove that person from the pub because they're behaving like a sociopath. But that's perfectly normal online and it's what people have to deal with

simply by being in the public sphere. And if you're a woman in the public sphere, you can multiply it by about six because women get it way worse than lads get it. And another thing I've started to think about recently to reframe this, to reframe the guarantee, the guarantee of being bullied online if you do simply something as simple as put work out it's a guarantee what

I've started to reframe creativity as is in 2021 if you simply have the courage to make something right to make a piece of work and to publish it to put it out there online and you're doing this knowing that someone is probably going to be a prick to you if you do that you've already succeeded that's the success simply putting it out in an environment that you know to be hostile that's the success right there and anything that happens beyond that whether it gets views, whether it earns you money that's just a bonus the success is the fact that you've actually done it knowing that you're in such a hostile climate online

because artists before didn't have to deal with this they might have had to deal with a shitty review in a newspaper but they didn't have to go online and see loads of strangers saying deeply horrible things about him so there we go lads 50 fucking minutes in no ocarina pause because i forgot to do a fucking ocarina pause and i've spent 50 minutes answering one question and i hope that answered it i hope i'd answered it appropriately let's have an ocarina pause one of the questions i actually got this week was why do i keep losing my ocarina I don't know

it's just upstairs and once I'm finished with the podcast I don't do a lot of thinking about the ocarina so it's been upstairs for about six weeks now but I do have the shaker, here's the shaker pause, you're going to hear an advert here on April 3rd you must be very careful, Margaret. It's the girl.

Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen. Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? It's the most terrifying.

Six, six, six. It's the mark of the devil. Hey! 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. 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 host 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. City at TorontoRock.com There was an advert there for something

I don't know what it was, it's algorithmically generated advert I've covered most of the shit I usually say in the Ocarina Pause I've kind of covered throughout the podcast which is basically this podcast is my full time job, it's how I earn a fucking living, if you enjoy

it, if you're consuming it every single week and you take something from it and it means something to you, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing. That's it. All right? It's, I put out hours of content every month. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.

Patreon.com forward slash The Blind Boy Podcast. And if enough people do that i'm earning a living and this is my full-time job if you can't afford it and you're listening for free don't feel guilty about it you're absolutely fine because the way this model works is that the person who's paying for this is paying for you to listen for free so don't be worrying about it if you if you can't afford that this is a model that's based on kindness and soundness and it's a lovely little community so if you can afford if you're enjoying the podcast and you can afford to pay me for the work i'm doing please consider doing it if you can't someone else is doing it

for you and everything's going to be grand all Alright. I have an absolutely lovely gorgeous job. That I adore doing. And long may it last. And thank you so much to all my patrons. For creating that environment where I can do it. Support independent podcasts. Not just mine. Any independent podcast. Like it.

Share it. Fucking. Leave reviews. Don't be a prick online to any creator for for if you feel the need to be to say a shitty thing for the sake of saying a shitty thing just don't bother don't bother and if you need to do it say it in a private whatsapp group to your friends but that public comment underneath the video or on the social media site you don't need it if you say

a shitty comment and then you end up getting likes or retweets from that shitty comment like that feeling you get of achievement from getting approval for being a shithead you can't bank that in your self esteem

that's that's not going to make you any happier you're effectively getting patted on the back for being a bully and that happens on social media and in the short term those little likes and retweets feel good but in the long term it doesn't

because deep inside you know you've just been. Gotten thumbs up from other bullies. For being a bully. And just try not to do that. Your self esteem will grow. By not making the shit comment. About.

Whatever artist is you're pissed off with. Your self esteem will grow. And look within yourself. For the part of you. feels angry to i don't know if you want to call chris martin from wrong example chris martin is not looking at his social media a medium-sized to small fucking irish artist right who's making some tunes and you look at their video and you're, that person looks like a prick, I better tell them. Just don't bother.

Because they're going to read it, and it's going to hurt them, and the part of you that thinks, they're fucking, look at all their views, they're so famous, look at all their views, they don't care what I think.

They do. Because they're a human being. And human beings like to be accepted by other human beings. So, if you wouldn't do it in a pub to their face just don't do it online and that process that you go through in yourself of asking those questions and interrogating your own anger you'll actually grow from that if you say to yourself i could say something shitty about this person and i'll get a lot of likes if I do it but if you go no I'm

actually not I'm gonna I'm gonna instead investigate my own emotion of anger and not get those likes it will actually grow from that and why do I know this personal fucking experience what am I perfect have I never said shitty things about people online? Of course I fucking have. I know what that feels like. I know how feelings of, if I feel inadequate or if I feel I'm not working hard enough or if I look at another person's success and I feel jealous of that,

I'm aware how quickly that, rather than address and accept the pain of feeling insecure, how easy that can turn into anger that I can put outwards towards that person and project it on them I'm fully aware of that but I try and catch myself in the moment

with it because if I pursue that line I'll just end up fucking miserable like online anger comes from a place of sadness get into a fight with someone underneath a Facebook comment there for the crack get into a big long fight underneath a journal.ie article with a stranger and feel all the anger of that fight and all the different comments. I'm gonna come away from that after an hour which will feel like 10 minutes and tell me how good you feel afterwards. You don't feel good,

you feel like fucking shit because you've just had an argument with a stranger. You've engaged all the harmful parts of your brain, all those reactive parts of your brain that are miles away from any type of mindfulness or self-compassion or compassion for other people. That's a really long-winded way to say be kind. Be kind, and that doesn't necessarily mean not holding people to account if they're being pricks

because unfortunately, a phrase like be kind it gets co-opted by politicians politicians who are doing horrible things right really horrible things to people's lives through their policies and then people get very angry about this online and sometimes people go too far. And their anger turns into harassment. But sometimes politicians in particular will use... They will try and shut down legitimate critique from angry people by saying, be kind. So exercise emotional intelligence around it, is what I'd say.

What a weird unstructured podcast this week is. What a fucking strange podcast 50 minutes in and I do the ocarina pause and I don't even think that was an ocarina pause I didn't even come out of it in a relaxed way so I've managed to answer one question I think I

I did answer it in a thorough fashion I hope I hope if you're like I know a lot of artists listen to this podcast so i hope it was genuinely helpful to the lots of artists who listen to this podcast and also if you're thinking about becoming a professional artist online and i say artist i mean anyone who's creating content really to be honest anyone who's anyone who is using their own creativity to try and go professional with it. That's what I mean.

Okay. Musician. Fucking video maker. Whatever the fuck. So I hope you got something from that. Let's see if I can answer any more fucking questions. Here's one I got right. I get this quite frequently.

And this question actually seems rude. But it's not are you autistic so that's quite a direct question that I got and that's a question I get asked a lot and it's something that since I started this podcast

I get asked very frequently I get asked am I autistic am I ADHD? Am I ADHD? I've had professionals who work with people who are autistic and have ADHD. I've had them get into my DMs and in a really nice way say, I've listened to your podcast quite frequently and you strike me as someone who has what's called a spiky profile so like

I studied as a as a psychotherapist I've been through counseling um it's never been raised with me but that was a long time ago and society is moving to a place where we're we're understanding what's called neurodivergence a little bit more right so some of the reasons i get asked is the if i'm doing a hot take the way that my brain will connect my brain will see patterns in things that don't appear to have patterns so if i'm doing a hot take i'll connect two things that don't seem related and connect them together so right there I'm seeing patterns where patterns shouldn't really exist um I can get very obsessive about like my creativity and my art I'm very sensitive towards

music visual arts all these things as I mentioned earlier in the podcast I had no problem whatsoever spending my teens and early twenties kind of forgoing a social life in favour of concentrating only on activities that were made by myself I'm totally comfortable creating

on my own for hours and hours and hours without much need or interest in other people obviously I have friends and shit like that and I like socializing but it's not a huge part of my life I spend them I spend a lot of time on my own involved in activities with just me and the other thing that people were saying to me when they said you have a spiky profile like I'm very good at certain things language art music but I literally I'm barely able to count my ability with maths is so poor that I can I actually can't really count I have to take out my fingers to count from one

to five it's very very bad very bad I'm so poor with maths and numbers that people often think I'm joking then there's other stuff like if I'm concentrating on a creative project I can get so involved in that creative project that I would literally let everything around me crumble I things would fall down I would be in a room so messy that you can't walk around in it. I'd forget to feed myself. All these different type of things that, as I've mentioned them over the years on the podcast, people have approached me and said,

oh, you might be neurodivergent. You sound like you have certain aspects of autism or ADHD. So I'm not sure. I've been to years of counseling. I studied as a psychotherapist. It was never flagged with me then. But I went and did some online tests, which I know is bullshit. Not bullshit, but an online test that you do is not an authoritative fucking test, obviously. But I did one for autism and I did one for ADHD. And for ADHD, it was just like you have very strong ADHD tendencies. You might want to get tested properly.

And then for autism, it was like you may be somewhere on the autistic spectrum. So these are just online tests that I did so I'm kind of at the stage when I'm wondering should I try and seek professional testing to see what the crack is and would this improve my life in some way I mean mainly it might help me forgive and understand my experience in school because I really did not do well in school and I didn't fit in and it might help me reappraise and understand a lot of that

like another thing too was sensitivity to fabrics and stuff and I remember all the way through school like I used to get in so much fucking trouble because I wouldn't wear my school jumper and the reason I wouldn't wear my school jumper and the reason I wouldn't wear my school jumper is the the feeling of the wool of the school jumper on my skin and my back if if I felt that I couldn't concentrate on anything else I would be so upset and anxious

at the feeling of this wiry school jumper on my skin that I would simply not wear it and I'd just wear my shirt or I'd try and wear a cotton hoodie instead and I used to continually get in so much trouble for wearing this cotton hoodie instead of my school jumper over my shirt and it was interpreted as rebelliousness and it wasn. It was literally this school jumper was so uncomfortable that it would impact my mood, a capacity to concentrate, and capacity to experience anything resembling normality. And I know now that that specific sensitivity, that is the type of thing that would be common with someone who is neuro neurodivergent so i might take a look into that

i'm still i'm still undecided i might take a look into it um i would describe myself as someone who's i'm coping quite well with life i'm coping quite well i'm relatively happy the reason i say relatively happy is the pandemic was tough going pandemic was tough going so I'm still not right 100% after the pandemic which is completely understandable none of us are but like just before the pandemic I'm a happy person I understand my emotions now that's another thing I used to not understand my emotions at all like when I was in anxiety town back in my early 20s, I didn't know if I was angry, I didn't know if I was anxious. All my emotions would blend together as one general feeling of deep uncomfortableness.

And through learning about emotional intelligence and emotional literacy, through these things was I able to correctly identify and compartmentalize my emotions but i had to do it through quite an intellectual process so i don't know um a lot of people say that to me are you autistic are you nor a divergent have you checked out if you have a spiky profile and enough people have said it to me that I think I might find out final question what's my opinion on defunding the police so that's a phrase you hear a lot in America

and it's one of those it's one of those phrases that I think the phrase itself doesn't do justice to what it actually is because when people hear defund the police you mean stop you mean stop giving money

to the police and let criminality run wild and it's like no that's not what defund the police means at all defund the police means like in america not not just america in in every country we have criminality is viewed as like a moral failing and we've created police forces and incarceration to just punish what we view as criminal behaviour. And resources aren't in place to ask questions why what we view as antisocial or criminal behaviour exists or to address the trauma of communities.

So defund the police actually means do we take a carceral view of society or do we take a trauma-informed view of society? And a trauma-informed view of society would suggest that in communities whereby you have high levels of criminality, you have community violence, you have what we refer to as antisocial behaviour, you might have addiction as a result of that, criminal behaviour happening as a result of addiction. present within that community, the trauma of poverty, the trauma of racism, the intergenerational trauma of addiction or abuse that can find itself coexisting with the trauma of poverty or the trauma of racism or the trauma of classism. So all of these traumas exist within communities,

which then can result in behaviour which society refers to as antisocial, but all we seem to do is just create more police who crack down on this with violence and incarceration, and you're basically punishing people, but nothing is done to address the whys. So yes, for that reason I would support defunding the police and this is going to be a separate podcast that i'm researching at the moment so i don't want to do too much on it but if you look at the history of fucking police and the history of modern police you trace it back to an english cunt called Sir Robert Peel. Like if you ever hear of police being called Peelers or Bobbies,

it's because of Robert Peel or Robert Bobby. And Sir Robert Peel started the first modern police force. Where do you think he did it? In fucking Ireland. In 1812. As a response to huge amounts of faction fights that were happening in Ireland. But you look at the communities in Ireland, in rural Ireland around 1812,

that were faction fighting, and you take that in the context of the penal laws that had existed beforehand, and how you have an entire community that's been disenfranchised, and not allowed to vote, not allowed to own land, and addiction and violence rampant

as a product of the structural violence that the institution of colonialism is putting on that community. And then you see that's where modern policing comes from, as a way to crack down on paddy. Do you know what I mean? That's a separate podcast that I want to do and I have thoughts around it.

But yes, of course, I do support defunding the police, by which I mean all those huge amount of resources that go to police arresting people, that those resources are put into communities to ask the whys and to address community trauma and intergenerational trauma and the conditions for which community violence or antisocial behaviour arise from, if you get me. Alright, that's all for this week's podcast.

What are we at there? At over an hour? An hour of a rambling podcast there, lads, where I answer one question. Sure, fuck it. What else will we be doing? I'll catch you next week I don't have a twitch song this week because I've been incredibly busy this weekend with something else I've been very very busy and I didn't didn't get time to edit one down

so I apologize there's no twitch song this week and there may not be one next week because I'm away next week now I'm going to be doing a podcast obviously but I will be away next week because I'm away next week. Now, I'm going to be doing a podcast, obviously, but I will be away next week and away from my studio and my technical capacity will be limited. So, dog bless everyone. Have a lovely week. 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 center 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. Thank you. you