The Blindboy Podcast - Gaslit Jam Packed Banister Gamble

Episode Date: December 19, 2018

How to achieve personal meaning, Stan Culture, Bruce Springsteens Son Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, you magnificent boys and girls. What's the crack with you this week? How are you getting on? Um, hold on, I'm going to have to turn this up in my ears a little bit. Two seconds. I couldn't hear myself in my earphone monitors. Welcome to the blind buy podcast week number 63 I am still over here in London in uh

staying in a hotel room driving me slightly fucking mad but tonight's my last night in the hotel room. Because I'm going back to Ireland tomorrow for a couple of days. To do three gigs in Cork. Three podcast gigs that are now sold out, thankfully. One thing I wanted to say

I've been getting tagged loads getting tagged on Instagram and on Twitter and whatever coming up to Christmas you know and people are tagging me with merchandise

with blind boy merchandise that they have bought as presents for people for Christmas or that they have received themselves for Christmas as presents and just to let you know I don't sell any merchandise there's no merchandise for this podcast it's not something I've done yet so there is a huge amount of counterfeit blind buy podcast merchandise out there. Posters and mugs, t-shirts. I walked into a shop in Dublin. They were selling blind buy badges.

So there's clearly a massive demand for this. But I'm a terrible capitalist. I'm a bad businessman. So I don't have any merch to sell. Which I know I'm kind of being forced into doing it now so just to let you know if you're if you buy blind by podcast merch I didn't make it I didn't consent to it being made and I don't make any money from it and if you're making blind buy podcast merch,

please stop. Because that's a bit dishonest. And I'm not the type of person to go suing people. That's not my vibe. Um, so I'm now going to have to look at fucking making my own merch.

If there's so much of a demand for it, as I can see on the internet if you do want to buy something Blind By Podcast related for Christmas as a gift and you want to actually support me and for me to receive some money

from it you can buy tickets to upcoming gigs I don't know any upcoming gigs at hand there's three nights in the Sugar Club

in February they're almost sold out there's a gig in the Eye Neck Killarney coming up in February I think again there's definitely

another Vicar Street gig I'm not sure when but the tickets are on sale or if you want to buy something Christmas related that's Blind Buy related also my book of short stories The Gospel According to Blind Buy

it's available in all shops so buy a copy of that just be careful be careful buying blind by merch it's it's a rose it's a rose

that's made by clever scam artists who are capitalising on my own inability to make merchandise and my poor business acumen

so I'm very much looking forward to getting back to Limerick for a few days over Christmas. As you know from last week, I'm in London and I have been staying in a hotel for two weeks. Now it's a fucking lovely hotel in the West End of London and I don't know how much BBC are paying for it but it's probably incredibly expensive so it's nice and I'm very gracious but the experience I'm sorry I'm not happy put it that way um I'm like in previous podcasts when I speak about my mental health and my my state of happiness

I'd always say that my happiness is quite high being in the hotel for two weeks chips away at my happiness and I know you're probably thinking oh poor old blind boy in a lovely hotel isn't feeling as happy and I get you but that's the illusion

that nice things make us happy that's not true in this hotel what I'm kind of meditating on and kind of trying to realise from an internal perspective is like, you know, why is staying in a nice hotel making me feel unhappy? Now, I know why it is because I've done this shit before.

It's removing my sense of autonomy. I can't prepare my own food right and that's very important I find it's preparing my own food is a genuine part of my mental health journey and I'll tell you why, well first where am I getting my food

I'm going into shops, I'm buying sandwiches I'm getting my breakfast in either downstairs in the hotel or on the way into work I'm getting my dinners either downstairs in the hotel or on the way into work I'm getting my dinners sitting down in restaurants getting my dinners and it's loads of nice lovely food and whatever but you're essentially it's immediate it's immediate satisfaction okay parts of the journey are removed from that i essentially i part with money and a fully prepared meal arrives in front of me which is fine for a treat but when that's three meals a day

i'm left with a feeling of incompleteness and meaninglessness all right now in previous podcasts uh you know where i explored the theories of victor frankl we explored how happiness comes from having a sense of meaning a sense of personal meaning okay in another podcast i described to you the the work of joseph campbell and the hero's journey and storytelling and how we search for stories and mythology in our lives to derive a sense of meaning the most basic story is set up, conflict, resolution

okay the act of like making a dinner has got a narrative to it okay um by which i mean if you want to make yourself a dinner you first of all you have to equip yourself with the knowledge of how to cook

so you have to decide what is my dinner going to be this evening so midweek i'd have something something a treat for me would be like chili con carne right because it's healthy and you can make it from scratch so in my head I have to go I'm gonna make chili con carne what do I need lean beef tin of tomatoes some cumin paprika bit of smoked paprika small bit of oregano or marjoram as we call it fresh garlic fresh chillies so that's the set up

I have already now set up the narrative of what I need to buy then I have to go to the shop and I have to purchase these individual ingredients, I have to go and look at the fresh chilies and look at them and interact with them

and feel the chilies in my hand and decipher which ones are the healthiest. Same with the tomatoes. Same with the garlic. When I go to buy the lean beef from my chili, I choose it based upon the date and the color of the meat. And if I'm getting a tin of kidney beans for it. These are all little processes of a journey which require me to interact with my environment in a very here and now mindful way and make decisions

so that journey of getting food has got like set up the set up is what do I need, what's the recipe then you want conflict the conflict is going into Aldi or going into Dunn's

and the slight anxiety of not knowing if there's going to be garlic there or not knowing if they're going to have good fresh mince, do you know? Or if I was to make myself a potato and aubergine curry, not knowing if they're going to have enough aubergines because sometimes they run out. That's a little sense of conflict and anxiety, but it's meaningful anxiety that you get in simply just going to the shop. And then once I take all these ingredients home, prepare them and start cooking them, then I'm getting near the end of that journey. That's the resolution. The final conclusion and resolution is eating it and going wow that was

yummy i know i sound like a mad bastard who's gone into extreme detail there about making a chili con carne but from a mindful point of view that shit is important to your mental health that shit is important to your mental health. Because from that journey of preparing food and getting the food and buying it and making all these choices, these are the type of things that build your self-esteem and build your happiness. Someone who would be in recovery

from severe depression, severe anxiety, like a good therapist would be in recovery from severe depression, severe anxiety. Like a good therapist would be asking them to map their journey in simply doing something like that, you know. There's also a sense of achievement. So living mindfully, right, living mindfully with the goal of improving your own mental health means being aware of the small little journeys and the small little stories that happen throughout your day

that's just one of them the other one is like going to the gym going for a run hoovering the fucking house all of these things are little stories that give us a sense of personal individual meaning that generally amounts to a sense of self-esteem, a sense of accomplishment and ultimately a sense of happiness. And my awareness around all these things are what keeps me happy all the time.

And staying in a hotel room, no matter how luxurious it is or no matter how nice it is I don't have access to these little journeys in my day these small things now like I am fucking going into BBC every day and being in a writer's room and getting the joy of that and interacting with other people that's all fine but I'm not getting the small senses of meaning and as a result of that and as well like where the meaningful journey of preparing my own food existed it's now replaced like I said with meaningless transactions where I part with money and food arrives and it's not just about satiating hunger it's not just about I am hungry I have a need I must satiate it buying purchasing three meals a day is a meaningless experience it's it's meaningless transactions and all it does is satiate

a physical hunger but it does not satiate the spiritual desire for meaning so I'm experiencing this like over a continual period as it affecting my happiness you know it's it's I won't say I'm unhappy, but I am irritable and not feeling very mindful or fulfilled. Do you know what I mean? Also, I can't wash my own clothes, which is another important journey. Like, I could wash my clothes in the hotel, but I brought over like seven t-shirts and seven pairs of jocks and seven socks sets of socks but it's like 50 quid

if I wanted to wash them in the hotel and I just won't do that on principle it's a waste of money it's a stupid that's exploitative to seven t-shirts for fucking 50 quid so i'm washing my own t-shirts and jocks in the sink and then hanging them up on chairs so that's not particularly meaningful either i'm fully aware of how highly fucking privileged this sounds but I needed to appreciate it

that I'm not going at it from a Mariah Carey angle it's not a diva thing it is a it's a mindfulness thing it's little journeys to have little bits of achievement in the day as part of my mental

health process and this sure this is why as well you know if you ever get a bad dose of depression the first shit that goes out the window are these little journeys do you know but when when you have a good bout of depression you're not preparing your own food you don't want to go to the shop and prepare for and buy your ingredients you don't want to wash the dishes you don't want to look after your own personal hygiene because these things leave you and the cycle of not doing them feeds the cycle of depression as well so whatever about me in my lovely fucking lovely lovely hotel for two weeks in London imagine what it's like long term for the many families in Ireland that are in emergency accommodation like if I'm experiencing this from living from staying in a nice hotel for two weeks there are

families in Ireland who don't have access to social housing or are on a social housing list and the housing doesn't exist so the government has put them into entire families into hotel rooms for long periods of time and often moving around from hotel room to hotel room or being asked to leave and only have access to the hotel room at night time and for people to not have a sense of space to not have a sense of something being their own to not be able to prepare their own food to not be able to prepare to wash clothes to not have a space to be able to clean, to maintain. Like these are huge things for meaning, self-esteem, mental health and simply living your life. And they're taken from many families up and down the country

because of the housing crisis in Ireland. And I am absolutely not comparing my situation to a family living in emergency accommodation for one second I have no possible concept of what that's like um what I'm talking about is it's it's a mixture of what I know from psychotherapy and what I know from like mindfulness and a bit of Buddhism you know hotels are nice you know people go to hotels for a weekend to get away and have a good time absolutely that's great for a weekend eating in a restaurant is fantastic as a treat but they're all kind of part of attachment commodities remove meaning

they remove a sense of meaning and they can consistently rely upon buying meals or buying clothes or buying cars or buying fucking whatever the fuck, it will ultimately just fuel the divide inside of us. Even something as simple as having a car versus having a bicycle.

Now, again, cars are great to get people places in a fast way. But there is a sense of meaninglessness in simply using a car compared to a bicycle, we'll say. When you get on a bicycle and you do your journey, you have to think about what you're wearing. You have to get on the bike. You have to experience the elements. You have to physically move on the bicycle. You might get rain in your face. You really have to mindfully feel and experience the journey. And then when you get off the bike at the end of the journey, your blood is pumping quicker. Your heart is racing,

you feel as if you've moved. So that is a set up conflict and resolution. And it might be a bit of physical hardship in the act of cycling, but there is beautiful meaning in it. Getting into a car, turning the key, right? And then arriving at your destination, because that's what happens to be honest like how many drive cars right and you think about your a commute that you do let's say you drive to work in the morning like how often in a car have you ever experienced getting into the car could take an hour of a journey then arriving at the journey as if it never happened like you can zone out in a

car and go into autopilot even though your brain is making these tiny little transactions where you're obeying the rules of the road using roundabouts obeying traffic lights but it's happening in an autonomous fashion where you're not really making conscious choices and that then also leads to a sense of meaninglessness as opposed to being on a bicycle or walking where it just it requires more uh mindful awareness and from that comes meaning and from meaning comes happiness contentment self-esteem accomplishment all these good things I might be in danger of talking out of my hope lads I'm not sure um but I just thought I'd be

honest with you that's where my head's at that's where my thoughts are at right now honest with you that's where my head's at that's where my thoughts are at right now so what am I going to do with this week's podcast on I was thinking because I've never ever done it before and there's been a lot of requests I'm going to do a podcast where I just answer your fucking questions because what's been happening a lot recently is I'll do a big long hot take rant then look at the clock and go oh fucking hour has passed I'm not really taking many questions and a lot of you I'm getting hundreds of questions every week of so many that need to be answered um so I'm going to answer your questions this week on a variety of topics. Yart, actually before I take questions, just a quick ocarina pause, get it out of the way. I'm going to play my South American clay whistle, the ocarina,

because you might be advertised to by some digital adverts, so this is just a little warning. just a little warning. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. people across Canada will rise together and show those living with mental illness and addiction that they're not alone. Help CAMH build a future where no one is left behind. So, who will you rise for? Register today at sunrisechallenge.ca. That's sunrisechallenge.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth.

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The first omen. Only in theaters April 5th. That was the ocarina pause. Also, my weekly begging. This podcast, also my weekly begging this podcast um it's supported by you the listener you can become a patron of this podcast via the patreon or patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy but how could i fuck up the patreon patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and if you like this podcast and you enjoy it and you would like to buy me the equivalent of a cup

of coffee or a pint once a month you can do this by going to the Patreon page please do this the Patreon is what keeps this podcast going it gives me a regular source of income it changes my fucking life in kind of an economy for artists where having a regular a regular fucking bit of money is not possible anymore it just isn't so I'm eternally grateful if you become a patron of this podcast but you don't have to because everyone gets the same podcast it's like a suggested patronage if you can afford it please do if you can't afford it it's grand just keep on going you're going to get the same fucking podcast as everybody else it's a model that's based on soundness. Alright? I'm fucking up all my words this week.

I've got awful chapped lips. I don't know why that London cold and breeze. So let's see what we have here. Question wise. Sandra asks On Twitter you commented on Pete Davidson's troubling mental health posts and urged people not to say hateful things to celebrities. Can you talk more about this? just a little gentle heads up I can't answer this question

without speaking about suicide so just to let you know I'm going to be talking about that but I won't go into too much detail just a heads up because there's no harm so yeah what that person is asking there is

Pete Davidson is Ariana Grande's ex-boyfriend alright Ariana Grande is a pop music star who makes class fucking music I like Ariana Grande

her first album is amazing that one in 2012 where it's kind of a Mariah Carey vibe about it so Ariana Grande anyway she's got an ex-boyfriend called Pete Davidson

and Pete Davidson this week he went onto Instagram and posted what appeared to be a suicide note. Even more troubling was it was written using his notes app and screen grabbed as opposed to just as a comment under a photograph he posted. And something about the act of screen grabbing a note made it that little bit more serious and troubling.

So the internet freaked out, obviously. Everyone who knew him freaked out, tried to contact him, and turns out he was grand. He posted this thing, he just felt like posting it, but he was in, Pete Davidson is a comedian, and he was in Saturday Night Live doing his job an hour later.

So he wasn't in immediate harm but pete davidson has suffered from severe mental health issues all his life he's actually mentally ill he has um manic depression um manic depression is a very complicated illness where someone can have bouts of extreme depression and then bouts of mania and mania can express itself in many different ways it can express itself in impulsive behavior and enthusiastic behavior you know someone with mania could fucking max out their credit card um you know p Davidson met Ariana Grande and within a day had proposed to her

you know I don't know if that wasn't through an episode of Mania but that's quite extreme behaviour you know proposing to someone after a day is a bit manic we'll say so anyway Pete Davidson posts this status

or sorry this Instagram post and the comments underneath were fucking disgusting. Grown adults basically telling him, oh, you want to kill yourself? Okay, do it. And that's a common thing on the fucking internet that breaks my heart. There was loads and loads of comments from Ariana Grande's fans telling Pete Davidson to, underneath his suicide note, telling him to kill himself in public view.

And that's been a big problem on the internet for a while. And what I was pleading for on Twitter was to just to say to anyone who's reading it stop being horrible to fucking celebrities stop doing things like that to celebrities because celebrities are human beings and like Pete Davidson had mentioned before how he finds great difficulty in reading criticism about himself or being attacked online and how this affects his mental health, you know. But in particular, one of the big problems here is it's a thing called Stan culture. Okay, and Stan culture is, it's relatively new.

It's about two years old. it's relatively new it's about two years old and Stan culture is a particular way of being an obsessive fan of a musician or a sports star or whatever the fuck online, okay

so Ariana Stans as they are known were saying these horrible things to Pete Davis underneath his note, but also for quite a while. When Ariana and Pete Davidson broke up, and she released a song as well called Thank You Next. And Thank You Next is quite kind of an honest biographical song where she mentions also as well with Ariana

her boyfriend that she had her long term boyfriend of two years who she had before Pete Davidson a rapper called Mac Miller

he died of a drug overdose about two months ago and then her and Pete Davidson broke up almost immediately after that Ariana's had a

fucking tough year, lads. Or a tough couple of years. Remember the Manchester bombing? Like, she had a gig where fucking ISIS bombed her bloody gig and killed her fans. And she's just had an ex-boyfriend of two years die of a drug overdose. And on top of that then, she had some of her own fans and just other people on the internet then blaming her for her ex-boyfriend's death in codeine and cocaine addiction obviously has nothing to do with fucking ariana grande she can't accept responsibility for

that but it's all in all a very messed up fucked up toxic intensely private situation that is unfortunately playing out in the public eye because of our relationship with celebrity culture so ariana grande's song thank you next is explicitly names her boyfriends it's basically it's like a diary entry it's like a it's like a podcast where she honestly says what is it one taught me love one taught me patience one taught me pain uh and now I feel amazing thank you next I don't know I'm paraphrasing it but the kind of the whole the vibe of her song is I've had complicated meaningful relationships with these three men you know they each taught me separate things about myself but ultimately I've learned to love me because that's all I can do I can't place my meaning in another person and thank you but next so it's it's like a sassy empowerment like I don't fully believe her. That's what I like about the song, actually, to be honest.

Like, saying thank you next to someone like Mac Miller, who she went for two years and who died, you get the sense that thank you next is just, it's a shield that she has to say to keep herself going throughout the day. Because there's quite a coldness in that, you know? Two years of a relationship thank you next it's just she's going through a lot and the lyrics

of that song are what she just kind of has to say to protect herself so anyway her fans hear the song and then start utterly lacerating Pete Davidson, really saying nasty, horrible things to him for the past, since him and Ariana broke up, just really being horrible. And this continual environment of extreme bullying culminated in Pete Davidson posting a suicide note this week and thankfully he's now safe so it comes from Stan culture and what Stan culture is is it it's an online culture that takes it it takes its name from Eminem's song Stan um you probably remember that song it was about 2002

and Stan is about an obsessive fan who writes notes to Eminem and Eminem doesn't respond and then at the end Stan like fucking copies one of Eminem's songs throws his girlfriend in the boot of his car

and drives off a bridge or something fucked up song about obsessive fandoms. So with stan culture, it's not like the people are proper fans of music. Like, 20 years ago, if someone was a fan of an artist, there was more privacy to it, do you know? They would sit at home listening to the music all day you know getting great personal meaning from it identifying heavily with the artist they'd have posters of the

artist all over the world all over the wall it was a personal thing the difference between that type of fandom and stan culture is that stan culture is performative. It happens online and it's very ironic. So someone who's like an Ariana Grande, Stan, it's like they ironically take on the persona of someone who's in a, like a Soviet style cult of personality. They will, like an Ariana Stan or, you know, Nicki Minaj's Stan or a Beyonce Stan,

they portray their hero as being unrealistically perfect. They are unquestionably perfect. They are goddesses or they are gods. And it's like a cult of personality. gods and it's like a cult of personality but the people in the stan community they're aware that they're ironically doing this there's a tongue-in-cheek nature to it and unfortunately it does express itself as incredibly toxic behavior whereby within the cult of personality of the Stan, Ariana Grande in this case, if Ariana appears to be attacked or disrespected in any way,

members of the culture, in a very trolling fashion, certain members, not all, some of them, will go after the object that is insulting Ariana and they'll do it in the most vicious way possible now this is known online as dragging somebody now dragging dragon comes from drag culture and it's probably I would RuPaul's Drag Race would have made it quite popular and mainstream now proper dragging is like just roasting someone. It's taking the piss, being clever, you know? A little bit below the belt, but ultimately it's good nature, do you know what I mean?

But stan culture has taken dragging to a very unsavoury level where it's okay now to give a lot of death threats or to tell someone they have an eating disorder really horrible nasty shit and what makes it so dodgy is like I said the performative element of stan culture so like someone old school fan culture you are a fan of an artist you love their music you absorb yourself in it you identify with the artist you identify with the work stan culture differs in that yes you can be a massive fan of this artist and you can identify with their work and genuinely love their work and love that artist, but there's an extra level, the performative element of,

ironically, wearing your obsessiveness so that that becomes your identity. So a stan of an artist wears their obsessiveness. Do you know what I mean? Their obsessiveness becomes the t-shirt and it's an ironic joke and your personality is

a lot of hyperbole. Hyperbole. Hyperbole, I mean. Hyperbole is how it's written down. You hyperbolically take on a very exaggerated, unrealistic devotion and obsession to a particular celebrity or a particular singer. It's, I would imagine it has its roots in diva culture.

Do you know, again, it's the obsession with divas and divas being utterly infallible and completely fabulous and everything they do is amazing and they must be treated like queens. And when a diva exhibits diva behaviour, this is very much applauded and rewarded as utterly hilarious. There's nothing wrong with that. That's brilliant. That's just one aspect of culture and that's absolutely fine. There's nothing wrong with stand culture.

Stand culture is fantastic. It's a beautiful online culture. But unfortunately, 10% of any group is going to be absolute dickheads 10% of model rail enthusiasts are probably dickheads so they're also the 10% of group that of a group that behave like dickheads tend to be the loudest and most obvious so that's where the toxic elements of stan culture express themselves online. Someone in a stan will say, saying to Pete Davidson, under his suicide note,

you should kill yourself. They're not doing it to hurt Pete Davidson as such. They're doing it because they know the other stands are watching and they want to be able to drag in the most savage fashion because the person with the most savage drag will get the most approval from the members of the stand culture so that person who was posting that shit they had like 150 likes on this horrible comment. And they've completely detached from reality. And this isn't just a problem of stan culture. This is just this specific example happens in stan culture.

Years ago, it used to happen with One Direction. One Direction had a community known as Directioners, which they weren't really stans. They were more, it was a mixture of old school fan culture with a little bit of stan culture, but One Direction fans genuinely kind of worshipped and loved One Direction and obeyed their music and were obsessive.

Whereas stans, it's far more performative. They are fans, but they are all competing to be the most extra as they would say or the most extreme fan that's the goal within Stan culture it's a tongue-in-cheek thing it's ironic and you've other sides of the internet the alt-right are fucking pricks

they have their own way of doing their shit um you'll see extreme toxicity amongst like stan culture it tends to be people in their early 20s um mostly female in fairness a high representation of gay men second and you wouldn't really see a lot of kind of straight lads in stan culture it's just not it's not that's not the thing they'll express their toxicity in a similar way by they'd have stan culture around maybe soccer players so they'll tell soccer players to self-harm or to hurt themselves then you'd have them about political ideologies. Or there'd be other cultures online where they're equally as toxic with directing it towards women.

You know, Gamergate, look at that, you know, misogynistic expressions of violent hatred online towards targets. I mean, Jordan Peterson's fans online, now they would never identify as Jordan Peterson's stans, nor would they consider their support of Jordan Peterson to be in any way ironic. They, that's more of a, I don't want to say cult, it's almost cultish, but they would hang on his every word, defend it, accept it as the truth. But they would hang on his every word, defend it, accept it as the truth.

And Jordan Peterson's fans are known for being incredibly vicious and will attack anyone who criticizes him with either what they consider to be measured debate or 10% of them being horribly toxic and saying disgusting things disgusting harmful things to people so it's not just stand culture it's a problem across online in all different types of communities but the pete davidson thing is specifically stand culture so like what do i think about it where does it come from well I like I often try and scratch my head and understand like what the fuck is this and the two things I can kind of do to understand it like from a psychological point of view um there's a psychologist called is it Charles Milgram? His second name is Milgram anyway, for sure, right?

I think it's Charles Milgram. Stanley Milgram. Stanley. That's what it is. But Milgram's most famous experiment within social psychology was known as the Milgram experiment. And what Milgram did, it was in the 1960 the 1960s no it was earlier but but the 50s and it was social psychology really exploded after the holocaust because the holocaust left humanity kind of going how the fuck did that happen how did all of Germany get behind the Nazis because they did and social psychologists wanted to go what's going on here what's in the

human being that this level of evil is um can be expressed across large groups of people so milgram did this experiment to try and explore obedience and it's called the Milgram experiment. So what he did is he got a subject and he sat the subject down in a room. And the subject could see on a monitor, like a prisoner who was sitting down in like an electric chair. Okay. And the subject of the experiment had a button in front of them. Then the person who's running the experiment goes to the subject and says to the subject do you see that man on the monitor but he's hooked up to an electric chair and that button that's in front of you if you press that button you can give him an electric

shock but depending on how hard you press the button, like the more hard you press it, the more electric shock it will give the prisoner sitting in the electric chair, okay? So the subject goes, okay, grand. Then the experimenter says, there's a chart here depending on how hard you press the button. So if you press it lightly, that's like a mild shock, but you start pressing it really hard

and it's going to get quite dangerous and there's a risk that the subject could actually die so the subject is aware of this before they begin to initiate the electric shocks to the prisoner now the prisoner is an actor he's not he's not actually going to receive any electric shocks so the subject begins and the instructor says to the subject I'd like you to give the prisoner a mild electric shock just touch it lightly so the subject does and they can see in the monitor that the prisoner has experienced a mild electric shock discomfort and they keep these mild shocks going for a while and then the experimenter says I want you to hit it kind of medium now so you know there's a bit of reluctance

from the fucking subject but they do it anyway now the prisoner is in quite a bit of pain very uncomfortable, quite a bit of pain so the subject goes I'm not liking this. Is he okay? Are you sure he's okay? Because he seems like he's in a lot of pain. But the instructor says,

he's grand, he's grand, don't worry about him. That's a very mild shock, he's kind of showing off. Now I want you to press it really hard. And the subject's like, no, I don't really want to. No, it'll be grand press it really really hard just do it I'm telling you it'll be fine don't worry about it just press it really really hard you'll make me very happy if you do this so after some reluctance the subject is now pressing the

incredibly hard and the prisoner is in excruciating pain screaming but the subject keeps pressing the button the subject is going against their own moral compass to inflict extreme pain on this prisoner and then the subject is like but I'm gone past the level that you told me where he'd be harmed. Is he not being harmed? And then the instructor says, don't worry about it. Just keep doing it, okay? You're in a safe environment. Just keep doing it. I'm telling you to do it. It's fine.

Now press it as hard as you can. But he might die. Don't worry about it. It's fine. Press it as hard as you can. So the subject does. as he can so the subject does and what Milgram discovered from that experiment is humans are capable of extreme levels of evil and cruelty so long as there is a something or somebody in power that makes it okay.

That humans will kill out of obedience. That our obedience will trump our personal morals if we put faith in the person that is telling us to do it. And that's the frightening thing that Milgram's experiment unearthed. And his theory within kind of an evolutionary reason as to why why would this be the case he argued that it was beneficial for human survival you know in paleolithic times for us to be obedient to a source of power rather than us to be fully autonomous and living in smaller groups

so it was beneficial for our safety as a species to have some fucking charismatic psychopathic leader tell us to harm others because it meant more for the community that was kind of Milgram's hot take from that so that's one thing that I definitely see in like online death threats like like I said on under Pete Davidson's note this this person who made this comment like they had like a thousand followers you know their their name in their face this girl her name in her face was on her profile she had friends she was going to college other people who I saw liking her her comment telling him to commit suicide or other people who are making similar comments on their profiles they were sharing like black lives matter

stuff they were quote-unquote woke they were into social justice and they'd be the type of people who would like to be seen to care about mental health but yet here they are telling someone underneath their suicide note to kill themselves the other now you're asking there like who told them to do it my kind of hot take is that in the Milgram experiment you know you have one figure of authority asking the subject to obey as they harm the prisoner within Stan culture the obedience comes from the group because remember this this girl who wrote this horrible comment she was doing it for likes she was doing it for approval from the group because within the culture of standing this type of behavior is sometimes but not always rewarded this kind of

toxic behavior so the system of reward became the instructor saying press the button harder it will be ok, we will give you recognition and support which is what humans crave the other thing with this toxic culture online is

a thing in social psychology called de-individualization de-individuation a thing in social psychology called the the individual in the individuation and the individuation is it's a theory that when humans are in large groups we are kind of social norms or our sense of ethics break down if we're in a group the most simple example of this is like if you're up in Dublin on the day of the all-ireland for all-ireland final hurling match you've got huge swathes of people going to a match who all of a sudden feel comfortable walking in the middle of the road even though there's traffic even though the road isn't closed off like you'd never walk in the middle of a road you just wouldn't do it but when there's enough of

these people they now break the rules and they walk in the middle of the road that's the lowest end of the spectrum when there's a riot people who would never shoplift would all of a sudden think it's okay to kick a window down and steal a television. Football hooliganism. When there is a crowd, we de-individuate. We disassociate from our personal identity and we become part of a larger group where all rules no longer count

and we can become savage that's the other thing that happens that that this is social media so people within a stan culture or people who are i don't know within online soccer culture or people in the alt-right are your da and other da das writing underneath the journal. They de-individuate from themselves to become part of a group and within this group the rules say that hatred, horrible comments, harmful behaviour is okay within this group. So it's a complex interaction I think between

the Milgram experiment and the phenomenon of de-individuation which leads to this type of horrible crack em I mean what other fucking examples I mean as well like look

we can only really look at this as well as a continuation of the long-standing human desire for shaming right shaming's been a thing like stoning people to death public lashings putting people in stocks these are present in all human cultures for a long time. Like, people are still getting stoned to death in Saudi Arabia. But up to nearly 200 years ago, like in cities in Britain and in the US, when the US was being founded and being colonized, you had public lashings and public floggings became a thing. But the interesting thing is,

public lashings and public floggings, they stopped being effective in Western culture when cities became a thing. So in the small colonies of America or smaller villages in Britain, if you had a population of maybe 1,000 people, 200, 2,000 people, a population where everyone knew each other, then shaming, such as putting someone in the stocks or public floggings,

these things worked because everyone knew everybody else's business. And that's how you maintain a culture of shame because if everyone knows everybody else's business then you can turn someone into into a pariah all of this type of shit you know that's how shaming works when people started to move to larger cities and larger city the cities developed you stop seeing public floggings you stop seeing the stocks things like that because people could blend into a crowd and become anonymous shaming doesn't work in a big city because not everybody knows each other with the internet we can see a return to even though though it's massive, it's the global village. So shaming is starting to work again as a technique.

Another awful example that happened this year, there was a porn star called August Ames. She was 23 years of age. And she was publicly shamed. She ended up committing suicide actually I shouldn't say committing suicide because it suggests it's a sin or it's wrong she ended up dying by suicide

because of intense vicious shaming that she experienced now what August Ames did she she was due, I think, to shoot a porn scene. And she found out that one of the actors, one of the male actors that she was due to have sex with, had also worked in gay porn. So she put out a tweet that said, it was something like like I found out that this guy that I'm going to be working with tomorrow also works in gay porn and please research your actors you need

to be careful what she was insinuating there is that gay men have a higher that are more she was insinuating gay men are more likely to have AIDS and HIV which is false and problematic and a very outdated view and she was wrong she was wrong to say that she should have known better like she didn't have knowledge of that there's prophylactic medication for HIV and the idea that gay men have higher rates of HIV is I mean it's basically because because gay men in the 80s were less likely to wear condoms because why would they? No one's getting pregnant. And they were more likely to have anal sex, which involves tearing of fissures within the anus, which produces blood and blood carries HIV easier. which produces blood and blood carries HIV easier.

So it's an unfair myth to kind of stigmatise gay men as having more AIDS, if you get me, or more HIV. Like gay men for ages weren't allowed to donate blood, which is ridiculous. Now thankfully now in a lot of countries, I think Ireland has won. Yeah, Ireland has won. Gay men are now allowed to donate blood because it was unfair and incorrect for this stigma to exist around gay men having more likelihood of having AIDS. So August Ames was, she was wrong. She was incorrect. She was ignorant. And, you know, she should have corrected herself.

You know, she should have corrected herself. You know, she should have apologised. That's fair enough. But she was eaten alive. She was eaten alive within her own community of porn stars. A lot of porn stars kind of, it has been argued, performatively took it upon themselves to shame her as a way to show how woke they were um and august ames herself had it she had a tough life she's someone who experienced abuse she had mental health issues um

i believe she definitely had multiple personality disorders and I think she might have been bipolar as well. Apologies if I, either bipolar or borderline personality disorders. Apologies for getting the two of them mixed up. But she was vulnerable. So, one person, a lot of people were giving her kind of, telling her to commit suicide, but one in particular who was another porn star

he just basically said to her on Twitter either apologise or take cyanide so she tweeted fuck y'all publicly and then she she died by suicide very unfortunate very shameful but

that's that's just what happens nowadays people, back to the original point and the reason I was asked the question we have to be incredibly fucking aware like online can feel like a video game sometimes essentially what Twitter is

Twitter is a fucking video game it's like a role playing game where you upload and create an avatar of yourself but it's not really yourself it's a fake video game persona of how you would like to be seen like the way i break down different social media apps because all social media is a video game where we create an avatar of ourselves to represent ourselves online but each separate social media app we fragment a different version of ourselves so in instagram we will create an avatar which is the most perfect most beautiful version of ourselves you know people will

edit their faces they'll only take photographs from the best angle they will only post instagram when they're at a nice restaurant it's it's about creating a a fake life on instagram the game is to create your avatar character yourself to be the perfect you in social situations. Okay, Facebook, different story. Facebook, that's where your grandmother might be on your Facebook. Your mother might be on your Facebook, your dad, your family, your aunts. With Facebook, the goal is to create the version of yourself that you would like to present at Christmas dinner or Sunday dinner. Facebook is where people post photographs of themselves graduating, post

photographs of themselves being functioning members of society. It's where you show your immediate family that you're doing okay and you are successful underneath the rules that they have set. But then Twitter, Twitter's different. Often people on Twitter, they don't want people who actually know them in real life seeing their Twitter accounts. Twitter is where we create a version of ourself that is intelligent, impervious to criticism, someone who has the best, you know, on Twitter you want to create a version of yourself that is a fabulous debater,

someone with, you know, your best ideas, the ability to respond to criticism and to clap back at people in a way that you would love to be able to do in real life. But you can't because you don't have that. You know, you can't edit. With Twitter, you have time to think about responding to somebody. It's how we would like to be in those social situations where we're required to use words like the part

of yourself that you know if you have an argument with somebody in real life and then later on you might fantasize about what you wish you could have said twitter allows you to create that version of yourself the person who can say the best thing at all times because you have the opportunity to think and also to be divide of the other person's physical presence and in a sense divide of empathy you will see a lot of savagery on twitter and twitter is incredibly emotional and binary and it doesn't allow for nuance and you can read things into other people's words that don't exist because it doesn't contain tone. And we can say things and react in highly emotional, reactive ways. And say things to people that we would not say in real life.

These people that were commented under Pete Davidson's statusson's status are these evil people i don't i don't think so they have normal fucking lives they probably love people they probably want to be loved are they psychopaths are they sociopaths i don't know but a lot of people are doing this who appear to be perfectly normal are they exhibiting behavior which is sociopathic yes online would they walk up to someone in real life who is suicidal and tell them to kill themselves i highly doubt it i think the social media environment creates a a way for us to completely distance ourselves and desensitize and then like i said the combined factors of like the milgram experiment and also the uh de-individuation can allow toxic behavior to happen in this environment when we're not connecting with any degree of empathy whatsoever

so keep an eye of it in yourself i keep an eye on it myself I'm there's nothing wrong with criticizing somebody's words there's nothing wrong with calling somebody out when they're you know exhibiting shitty behavior that's good things come from that but to be aware I think of the fashion and tone in how you do it and one thing I ask myself as well am I calling a person out or am I correcting someone because I want to chain I want to inform them I want to let them know that what they're doing isn't okay am I doing it for those reasons or am I simply doing it because I want other people to see me chastising them in an environment where being good at chastising people is rewarded so sometimes I get caught some sometimes sometimes if I'm being honest I fuck up and I'm calling someone out because I

want retweets so I want to stop that behavior in myself if I'm calling someone out or if I'm calling someone out because I want retweets. So I want to stop that behavior in myself. If I'm calling someone out or if I'm letting someone know that what they're doing isn't okay, I want it to be for the right reasons. Not so that I can... It's like a public stoning. I'm wanting to be the one who throws the rock the hardest at the person's face. And that's often what it is.

Like to take August Ames as the example. She made a poorly informed comment that follows a narrative of homophobia because homophobic people say this thing about gay people. But she made this uninformed comment. homophobic people say this thing about gay people but she made this uninformed comment and like like if if you if if in isis's community if you're if you're in in syria and you commit adultery the crime is to have your be buried up to the neck and have the the village throw rocks at your head now throwing a rock at someone's face I don't think is a fair punishment for you know cheating on your spouse I don't think those things match up throwing a rock at someone's head I certainly don't think it matches up when there's 20 people throwing 20 rocks at someone's

head until their head explodes that's what's happening online. Lots of people are throwing lots of rocks at people for crimes and slights that don't deserve a rock into the fucking head. And we have to be very careful that we're not throwing a rock because we want other people to see how good we are at throwing rocks at people's heads to have that awareness

and if everyone had that awareness and was conscious of the toxicity that goes on online we'd have a better fucking society I think a better society for people with mental health issues anyway right so I promised you this was going to be a podcast where I answer

your fucking questions and I appear to have gone I'd say 40 minutes there answering one question I enjoyed it though I do enjoy doing that because it's pure off the cuff I unfortunately have time

to only answer one more question I have a question here from Darren Darren asks what is your favourite celebrity story? which is who the fuck is texting me? hold on my phone is vibrating

so Darren asks what's your favourite celebrity story? em I don't know if Darren means one that I've experienced myself or one that I've heard. One that comes to mind, which I think is gas, is, I don't know where I heard it or if I read it, it's a Bruce Springsteen story.

And Bruce Springsteen was talking about raising his son, you know. So Bruce Springsteen's son was, I'd say 14, 15 at the time, maybe a bit older. Yeah, 14, 15. And he was having kind of a, that strange da-son teenage relationship

where the teenage son, in order to find his own identity has to think that his da is totally uncool we all do that you know that's is it Maslow who had the stages of development a psychologist called Erickson Erickson had the stages of development that we must go through in order to live kind of a healthy life. And when you're a teenager, one facet of that stage of development is to find your own identity by very much distancing yourself

from what your parents approve of. That's why teenagers fucking get shit pierced and listen to loud music and dye their hair mad colours. It's a way to find themselves by doing the opposite and testing boundaries with the parents. So Bruce Springsteen's son was going through this period and his da to his son was incredibly uncool. Now, Bruce Springsteen's a cool fucker. He's a legend. So, Bruce Springsteen is like a bit concerned that this distance

is occurring between him and his son, his teenage son. So he decides to say to his son, you know, as an act of bonding, let me take you to a concert, what bands are you listening to? So the son was listening to a band called Rise Against, who I think they were like a, kind of a hard rock metal type band, that's what the son was into, Rise Against, this was his band,

and probably Bruce Springsteen going in and even expressing interest in his son's band, probably made his son mortified with a red face. But Bruce says, let's go to the Rise Against concert. So they do. So Bruce Springsteen takes his son to the Rise Against concert. His son and his friend. The son and his friend are being like total typical teenagers the son is kind of not being

appreciative of the fact that his dad's trying to bond with him because he's awkward and shit like that, kind of quiet in the car so Bruce takes him to the concert, the son is like, okay dad we're here at the concert, now stay here, I'm going to go into the mosh pit fuck off, leave me alone

don't embarrass me, so Bruce is like grand, okay, I'll going to go into the mosh pit, fuck off, leave me alone, don't embarrass me. So Bruce is like, grand, okay, I'll chill out here at the back. So the son and his buddy go into the mosh pit at Rise Against, have an amazing time, great crack. They come back at the end of the gig to Bruce at the back and says, okay, that's time to drive us home sulky teenagers and as they're leaving a member of security approaches Bruce Springsteen and goes excuse me Mr. Springsteen but we've noticed that you're here

and the band would like to bring you and your son backstage so Bruce goes to the son how would you like to fucking meet rise against cuz the son's like okay cool so the son's like, okay, cool. So the son's pure nervous. Bruce brings him backstage.

Now, Bruce doesn't really have a clue who Rise Against are. All he knows is that the son listens to him. So they go backstage, and then it turns out, like, that everybody in Rise Against are utter Bruce Springsteen fanatics. So this band that Bruce Springsteen's son worships and thinks are the coolest fuckers in the world

and he thinks his dad's a total nerd they worship his dad which I can only imagine as a teenager is fucking torture, right? So eventually like all the fucking band members are going oh we love you so much Bruce we love you

and the son's kind of getting mortified doesn't know how to feel about this his dreams are being shattered and then the bass player I think it is pulls up his t-shirt to reveal a tattoo a large tattoo of Bruce Springsteen

on his back. So imagine how mortifying that is for the teenage son. Do you know what I mean? My uncool dad, he doesn't understand my music, he doesn't understand Rise Against. Ah, for fuck's sake, they want to meet him. Oh my God. My favourite musician has got a tattoo of my dad's head on his back.

So that for me, that's one of my favourite celebrity stories. Okay, God bless. Have a lovely, lovely, have a fucking great Christmas, boys. Boys and girls, have a lovely, lovely Christmas. Enjoy yourself. Christmas isn't fun for everybody. I'm conscious of that, you know uh for some people christmas is a very happy time for other people because of shit with families or bereavement and all

this type of stuff christmas isn't too happy for some people so what i'd say to you is don't fuck having a happy christmas try and have a meaningful christmas so if you have a happy dynamic at christmas go and do that and you know have crack if your christmas is unhappy or if it's making you anxious or you're scared of meeting with the family and all this crap find meaning in there, you know? Embrace the anxiety. Embrace the darkness. But find meaning.

Make it your Christmas. I'm not sure if I'm going to be here next week with a podcast. I'm undecided. If I can find time to do it, I will. If I can't, don't kick my head in. If I get to the situation whereby it's Christmas fucking day and the podcast isn't recorded, I don't think I'll record a podcast on Christmas day.

I really want to just drink cans and take a day off because it's Christmas and not have to record a podcast to deliver on Wednesday, which is Stephen's day. So don't be harsh on me if I take a day off, but I might, I might deliver a podcast is what I'm saying.

I don't know. It'll mean I'll have taken one week off in a year. And I think that's all right. I'm allowed to have that. All right. God bless. Yart.

think that's all right i'm allowed to have that all right god bless y'all 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.