The Blindboy Podcast - I almost interviewed Cillian Murphy on this weeks Podcast

Episode Date: July 18, 2023

A ramble about art and the process of podcasting and writing Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Edge the sentient head, you bendy Evans. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast. At the end of last week's podcast, which was about the history of bird shit, I mentioned that I'd have a surprise for you this week. But I did have a surprise for you. Cillian Murphy was going to be my guest on the podcast this week. I was going to have Cillian Murphy on the podcast to speak about his new film, Oppenheimer. We were all excited to do it. Couldn't wait.

It was going to be a big exclusive proper chat with Cillian Murphy. Who I've had on this podcast before. But the Screen Actors Guild have gone on strike for the first time in 50 years I believe. So that means Cillian Murphy is on strike as well. And Cillian doesn't cross pick as well and Cillian doesn't cross picket lines obviously and I don't cross picket lines so unfortunately Cillian Murphy is not my guest on this week's podcast and I know each week I often start off the podcast with a poem from a Hollywood actor so it sounds a little bit by Who Cried Wolf but no actually Cillian Murphy was literally going to be on the

podcast this week and we were going to chat about Oppenheimer and even if I asked Cillian to submit a poem for the start of this podcast he couldn't do it he'd be breaking the terms of the strike all actors in the Screen Actors Guild have to down tools and that includes doing any promotional material except for Harvey Keitel who was kind enough to break the picket line and submit this piece of prose for this week's podcast. I want to dress up as a slice of bread and hurl myself into the mouth of a swan. I want to dress up as a slice of bread and end the hunger of the world. I want to dress up as a slice of bread and call myself Jesus Christ.

I want to dress up as a slice of bread so that your mother can soften me with milk and sprinkle me with nutmeg and sweeten me with sugar and fatten me with butter and dash my brains out with a rolling pin and then put me in the oven. And then I want your mother. To hand slices of me out. As a morsel of solidarity at the picket lines. To all my colleagues. Who are striking. With the Screen Actors Guild.

And they think they're eating bread and butter pudding. But they're not. They're eating Harvey Keitel. And I laugh inside their jowls. While they kill me. with their American teeth so thank you very much to Harvey Keitel for crossing the picket line there and submitting that piece of prose to this week's podcast but seriously yeah Cillian Murphy was supposed to be my guest on this week's podcast. He was on the podcast before. I'm not making it up. He's from Cork.

Cillian Murphy was supposed to be on this week's podcast. And I'm hugely disappointed because I love Cillian and I was looking forward to having a chat. And what I was really... I'll tell you what I was really excited about. Last week's podcast was about the history of barge shit. And I went real in depth. About the history history of bard shit as a source of nitrogen. And I demonstrated how bard shit led to the creation of explosives. Go back and listen to last week's podcast if you want to hear more detail on this.

But a scarcity of bard shit in the 19th century led to scientists discovering how to extract nitrogen from the air that led to industrial grade military explosives and bombs bombs started getting bigger and bigger and then by world war ii they were like these i think we've made the biggest bomb that we can make until a physicist called Robert Oppenheimer stepped in and said I can make a bigger bomb a nuclear bomb and Cillian Murphy is playing Robert Oppenheimer in the film Oppenheimer so I wanted my chat with Cillian Murphy to be like a part two of my history of bird shit podcast so this week I don't have a hot take prepared because the interview with Killian was cancelled at the last minute and

I'd been budgeting my time to doing the final edits on my collection of short stories. I'm at the literal end process of my book now at the moment. I mean the last final tooth comb before it goes off to be printed. And I'm so excited. I can't wait to show you the book. I'm really, really happy with it. And it's quite different to my first two collections of short stories. My last collection was 2019. And I used the entirety of the pandemic to just read and read and read

and then develop my writing style. But the end of a project, it's always sad, it reminds me of death. The most enjoyable part of a creative project is the bit in the middle, even the writer's block, even the days when I feel like giving up because I can't think of an idea. And then finally the flow hits and I can write. But the joy, the joy of writing a book for me. It's nice to finish it and to hand it over for people to read and to put it out into the world. The fun part of writing a book is the writing.'s the bit in the middle it's the process and the way I'm feeling right now I'm not sure will I take a break I don't know will I take a break once this book is published I might just go straight into writing the new one it's what

feels right when you do any project for a long time and then you finish it whatever it is it could be a book or your leaving cert or it could be a college degree or even a massive jigsaw puzzle that takes months to do or you could be saving up all your money because you're not happy in Ireland and you want to emigrate you want to move to Glasgow you want to move to Brisbane and you convince yourself along the way I will be happy then once I get there everything's going to be okay and I'll be happy and then you arrive the initial buzz is over and you're like is this it kind of feel the same way I felt back in Ireland it's just

a bit sunnier when you actually finish it you get this sad feeling of, is that it now? Is that it? Was that what it was all about? And it's an unhealthy way to view anything. It's this illusion of, I'm working towards something and at the end will be happiness. And that's not how life works. You can never aim for happiness as a goal. But what you can have is meaning in the middle. It's like going to the gym. If you go to the gym and you have a specific goal of how you'd like to look, you'd like to add an inch onto your shoulders or you'd like to get to this weight. When you get there, there's a little sadness, a feeling of, is this it? And that's not it. The it was the journey in the middle, the conflict, the days where you didn't want to go to the gym or the days where you didn't think you'd reach your goal. And the other days where you had

an amazing workout and you felt great. The end result should be a consequence of all that shit. It should just be a thing that happens when you fully enjoy the process with meaning and purpose. So that's why I kind of don't want to stop. I want to finish editing this book, send it off and while that's getting printed and doing all the stuff that's out of my hands I just slowly go back into the process, the next book. So the journey hasn't ended. I just reach a crossroads and take a new turn. Oh, I wonder what it's going to be like down here. So for this week's podcast, because I didn't have time to prepare a hot take, I'm going to answer some of your questions because there's

hundreds and I rarely get around to them all. So the first question I'm going to answer is a question from Ruth. And I'm going to answer this first because it echoes a point I made at the start of this podcast that I want to expand upon. So Ruth asks, Blind Boy, you mentioned on Instagram that a student in Trinity College had done a thesis about your podcast. Can you speak about that?

Yes. Over the summer, a student in Trinity College who's doing their master's in modern and contemporary literary studies, they did their master's thesis. The student's name was Ola Al Haj Hassan, and her thesis was called The Voice in Authorship, Speech and Writing in the Blind Boy podcast. And I'll just read a little bit from the conclusion of her thesis. It says, in this essay, I have closely looked at, or rather listened to the Blind Boy podcast to argue for its place in the contemporary literary field, using excerpts from several episodes. I investigated how Blind Boy's monologues deconstruct the binary between speaking and writing.

I also demonstrated how his approach to podcasting as a literary medium invites a return to the sound of literature, re-centres the voice in writing, and deepens our understanding of authorship as a performance in which voice and authority are implied. Now, I was thrilled and so unbelievably flattered that someone had dedicated their master's thesis to this podcast and what I was also really happy with is over the past five years of making this podcast I've started referring to it as as a novel, as a never-ending novel because I use literary means to write and deliver it.

But I was glad to see someone casting a critical eye over podcasting in general. When you hear podcasts being spoken about, they just get lumped into this one category, podcasts. This person is a podcaster, they make a podcast. Which is like saying, podcaster they make a podcast which is like saying oh they make books but like you'd immediately ask well what type of book what is the aim of the book does it have an intended audience but with podcasts like the vast majority of podcasts tend to be interview podcasts two or three people sit down and talk and they deliver it in a way that

isn't really edited and it's not planned out the way an interview is. It just unfolds like a conversation and the audience observes and the way a podcast interview unfolds it's quite different to a radio or TV interview. With a radio or TV interview the interviewer has a set of questions that they read off a sheet of paper they ask these questions to the person that's being interviewed it's very unlike natural conversation and you get a sense that the interviewer really can't wait until the person that's being interviewed is finished answering interviewer is really can't wait until the

person that's been interviewed is finished answering that question so they can move on to the next one. Everything is kind of pushed towards sound bites and none of it feels natural. So TV and radio interviews do not feel natural. Now when we didn't have any other choice, when it was the 90s we'll say, we didn't care because it was all we knew. And in 2023, radio and television interviews, they feel uncomfortable and awkward because we're used to listening to podcasts where people can have full-on conversations and there's an intimacy there. So why do radio and television interviewers still do this? there. So why do radio and television interviewers still do this? Well because radio and television are their heritage art forms. They're art forms and mediums that still exist even though they're

not really relevant. Think of it this way, where do you think that comes from? You've got six questions on your sheet of paper, you're interviewing a celebrity and you're going to stick to these six questions, wait for their response and move on. Where does that come from? It comes from a time in 1930s, 40s, 60s, right up to the late 1980s. It comes from a time when things were being recorded on tape. So if you work for a radio station in the 1970s and you're interviewing a celebrity, if the interview descends into conversation, rambling

conversation, then that's an absolute nightmare for the person who has to edit that interview because what they're editing is a huge big reel of tape and to edit it they literally have to get an eraser blade and they have to cut up that tape and stick it together so in the 1970s and the 1980s for television and radio to do an interview that turns into regular conversation could mean weeks of work it could mean weeks of literal cutting and splicing with razor blades, glue and sellotape. Is that the case anymore? Absolutely fucking not. Not since digital became a thing in the 90s. But yet TV and radio still follow a strict format that is rooted in a time when editing meant serious physical labor that took a long time.

They still do it because of tradition. Tradition, a lack of critical thinking and a business model that kind of needs to stay the same way. Podcast interview is very different. Podcasters are the first interviewers where they're like, I'm going to chat to someone interesting and if this needs to be three hours long with no edits I can fucking do that because this is digital. There's no radio slot.

There's no time that this has to be. The person who's listening to this they can choose to listen to all three hours of the interview at once or they can take it in bits at their own time throughout the week. So podcasting is a medium which is actually relevant to our lives and how we consume media. It's not a heritage art form, it's an emerging art form. And in the 20th century

and beyond, technology really dictated the boundaries of what art could be. Let's take music for example. Why are songs about three and a half minutes long? Who decided that? Why are songs three and a half minutes long? Do you think a folk musician in 1850 was writing a song that's three and a half minutes long? No. If you go to Irish folk songs from the 1850s you could have a song that's a half an hour long. Songs became three, four minutes long because that's how much song you could fit on a record. Then radio decided that's how long they want a pop song. And it kind of just stayed that way until like the 1970s, mainly prog rock bands, which are progressive rock bands like Pink Floyd or Yes they said you know what people people aren't listening to Pink Floyd songs on the radio people now are

buying stereo hi-fis at home they're consuming our art in a different way so why don't we write a song that's 30 minutes long and just put it entirely on one side of an album and that's what Pink Floyd did in the 70s like Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen which came out in 1975 like that fucked everything up because Bohemian Rhapsody was six minutes long and the radio were going what are we gonna do this is a pop song not only it a pop song, it's the catchiest song of the year. It's six minutes long. What are we going to do? No, the opposite is happening because we're in the streaming age. You'll see this in hip hop songs in particular, rap music that's coming out right now. We no longer buy music. No one's going to buy an album. No one's going to give an artist 20 quid to buy their album anymore and listen to it

for an entire year. We've gone to the streaming age where musicians don't make money from streams and we rent their music out. So now what's happening? A lot of new rap songs are maybe one minute and 20 seconds long. Why? Because they make money per play so if your song is one minute long I replay it more and the artist earns more money if you want to go Pink Floyd today and release a song that's a half an hour long and put that up on Spotify fair play to you but you're making the same amount of money for per half an hour song as you would do if that song was one minute long. So technology kind of dictates art. Painting is a heritage art form. I adore painting. I love it.

I'm not dissing painting. But what I am saying is that there was once a time in history where paintings would have caused riots. There was a time in history where people were starved of visual information. They didn't have newspapers, they didn't have magazines, they didn't have television. The visual imagery that people had were whatever an artist could paint. There was extreme cultural scarcity around visual imagery. So when a painting was produced that was exceptionally beautiful or exceptionally controversial, people had to physically go and see it. And that experience was emotionally and culturally overwhelming. That's not the case anymore. We live in a society

where we're visually bombarded with all types of images all the time. So a painting in a gallery can still be moving and beautiful or jarring but it's not deeply relevant to the lived experience of everyday people. But when photography was invented in the 1820s it took almost a hundred years for photography to be considered art. Like here's a quote from an art journal called Brush and Pencil from 1901 about photography. The fear has sometimes been expressed that photography would in time entirely supersede the art of painting. Some people seem to think that when the process of taking photographs in colour has been perfected and made common enough, the painter will have nothing more to do.

That's 1901. That person is speaking about photography the exact same way someone speaks about artificial intelligence art right now. Photography wasn't viewed as an art form in itself that could be relevant, but rather this sterile mechanical thing that simply replaced painters. The first ever art exhibition of photography was in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1858. It took 38 years from the invention of photography for the V&A Museum to put on a photography exhibition and even when they did it was deeply controversial. This is not art fuck off in America they didn't have an exhibition of photography as art

until 1924 in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that's 100 years after the invention of photography why does it take that long? fear lack of critical thinking and the fear of something being replaced and the need to diminish this new art form

that fear driving the fear of something being replaced and the need to diminish this new art form, that fear, driving the emotion of fear, which gets in the way of critical thinking. In 2023, do we consider photography to be an art form? Absolutely. Photographers are considered some of the greatest artists of the 20th century, but photography is now a heritage art form. I mean the literal. Taking photographs on film, developing them in a dark room, printing them, putting them on a wall in a gallery. It's still done. Incredible work is still being made but that specific process which was once highly radical is now kind of not really relevant to the lives of everyday people. You have to go out of your way and go into the photography exhibition and see it there on the wall and appreciate it

as a heritage art form. Stand-up comedy is a heritage art form. Am I shitting on stand-up comedy? Absolutely not. There's incredible stand-up comics but it's not full-on relevant to the everyday lives of people. In the 50s, let's say the Lenny Bruce era, people went to see stand-up comics because they were saying shit that you wouldn't hear anywhere else. It was really relevant to people's lives. Going to stand-up comedy was part of the fabric of life of everyday people. Now, less so. It's a bit like going out of your way to see some paintings in a gallery or going out of your way to see a photography exhibition. TikTok comedy, different story. TikTok comedy still uses the mechanics of standoff comedy. It's still

joke telling, but it's on your phone. It's in the algorithm. It's of a certain length. And the medium is highly relevant to the lives of people in 2023. And this is where we get to podcasts and books and literature. Books are kind of a heritage art form. I'm not shitting on books. I'm writing one at the moment. I love reading books. I adore it. But I'm a bookie person. I go out of my way to read books because I love it and I enjoy it. And I go out of my way to write books because I enjoy writing books. I enjoy writing words that are to be read on a page with your eyes. But if you're on a train or a bus, how many books have you seen in people's hands? Not as many as you saw 25 years ago. People are scrolling through

their phones or listening to podcasts. Now they might be reading books, they might be looking at a Kindle on their phone or they might have a Kindle. I mean that in itself. Like that book Fifty Shades of Grey which was huge around 2011. They say that Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't have become so popular if it wasn't for the Kindle because Fifty Shades of Grey is a sex book. It's about sex. The whole book is about riding. A lot of people up to that point weren't comfortable on a bus holding a physical copy of a sex book. They wanted to read sex books on their way to work, but they're not holding it. They're having everyone. The shame was too great. And as soon as it was on a Kindle, you could read it all you want and no one knows what the fuck you're reading.

And as soon as it was on a Kindle, you could read it all you want and no one knows what the fuck you're reading. So podcasts are the new medium that are relevant to the lives of everyday people in how they go about their lives. But we as a society, there's very few people critically reflecting on podcasts. Like I said, they're all lumped into one. People generally think of podcasts as just two people talking into a mic with no editing. Just to comment on the complete lack of critical thinking around podcasting at the moment. There's an Irish broadcaster and radio presenter, Ryan Tuberty, and he's involved in a big scandal at the moment with RT, I've spoken about it the past two podcasts. And they don't know whether Ryan Tuberty is going to keep his job on the radio or not and I saw a journalist a fucking a journalist tweet Ryan Tuberty is going

to be reduced to podcasting it took all my power not to respond it was so terrifying to see a journalist someone who's supposed to be thinking about this stuff, to have such a lack of understanding of the media that they're speaking about. They hadn't a fucking clue. Like to be reduced to podcasting. If you want to be reduced in 2023, you get reduced to radio. Radio is the heritage art form. Radio is still stuck in an era where they think you have to edit on tape.

Radio is static. It's not moving. It can't go anywhere. People aren't listening to it. It's propped up artificially. Podcasting, on the other hand, is an emerging field with infinite possibilities for creativity. You can go wherever you want with podcasting if you have the curiosity and creativity. What podcasting doesn't have is prestige and it doesn't have prestige

because it's not a heritage art form. Heritage art forms have institutions around them and tradition and history but they're rarely deeply relevant to the lived experience of everyday people. And in order for art to actually be vital, to do what art is supposed to do, it needs to be relevant to the lives of everyday people. So literature has been explored in audio formats for years. Like in the fucking 50s and 60s, they used to get people like Samuel Beckett to write radio plays and today we have

audio books so there are audio formats shit you listen to that is considered literature by the people and institutions who decide what literature is and generally for a piece of audio to be considered literature it needs to meet these criteria it needs to be written on a piece of audio to be considered literature, it needs to meet these criteria. It needs to be written on a piece of paper with the human hand and then read out verbatim. That's what a radio play is. That's what an audio book is. These things are considered literature. No one asks any questions about it. Not even literature, just simply considered writing. If it's written with the human hand, read off a piece of paper and delivered via audio,

then it fits that criteria, that heritage criteria. Now why is this? Why are radio plays written down and read out? Why are audio books written down and read out? Why is old school comedy sketches that used to be on the radio before television written down and read out? Why is old school comedy sketches that used to be on the radio before television written down and read out? Does it have anything to do with art? No, fuck all. It has to do with the limits of the technology at the time. It has to do with tape. Why would Samuel Beckett in the 1950s write a radio play and then read it out? Because of the

limitations of tape. Every fuck up, every slip up, every mistake, you have to wipe it and you have to go back and you have to do it again in a take because the alternative meant literally getting razor blades and glue and sellotape, splicing things together for days. Madness. Same with audiobooks. Write it down first on a piece of paper, read it out. What is considered literature in an audio format today is bound by technology that isn't fucking relevant anymore. So the initial question was, how did I feel that someone had done their master's thesis in the literary department up in Trinityinity asking the question is my podcast literature i was fucking thrilled i was very very happy because that's the process whereby things get

recognized as being art a scholar or a critic or whoever says oh there's an emerging new form of media here and it's quite different to what we've seen before. I wonder is anyone trying to create art with this new medium and we're going to have to look with a very cold and critical eye because usually the thing that is art that's happening right now it doesn't look like art because it's not operating within a heritage art form and my intent for this podcast has always been artistic now I'm not sucking my own flute there and saying oh this podcast is art as if that means it's somehow great or greater than anything else that's not what I mean what I mean is when I write this podcast I'm not paying respects to a heritage art form. I'm actively using my curiosity and creativity

to be playful with the possibilities of an emerging medium. And what that is, is that's artistic intent. The work asks questions of the medium itself and how it's being consumed and how it's relevant to people's lives. And I know how wanky that sounds. I know that sounds wanky and it sounds like a statement of intent that you'd see at a gallery. But I'm not bullshitting. This is what gives me genuine meaning in life. This is what makes.

I get up in the morning, I go to bed at night time and this is the bit in the middle that gives me purpose and meaning and makes me happy to be alive. And it might succeed or it might fall on its arse. For me, I just want to be like and it might succeed or it might fall on its arse. For me I just want to be

like I'm three years of age and I've just gotten my first pack of crayons and I'm finding out what they can do. So when I say I consider this podcast to be a novel I mean it. This is an auto-fiction novel but blind boy a novel has a start a beginning and an end. Says who? The heritage gatekeepers of what a book is? This physical object that exists in time and space, that has a certain amount of pages that you hold in your hands? Is that what a novel is? This novel is process based and uses the never ending medium of podcasting and it changes and evolves as it goes along and then the other thing is with blind boy if this is a novel should you not like write it out first and then read it see if i did that that would if i did that there'd be no one listening to

this it wouldn't be relevant to people's lives. That feels unnatural. You want an example of this? Listen to shit American podcasts. Not This American Life, which is amazing. Listen to the thousands of podcasts that try to copy This American Life. The presenters often write a script on a piece of paper, but they read it out as if the words are just forming in their heads in that moment as genuine conversation and it feels strange and unnatural but we don't know why. That's why. Because they're bringing the irrelevant tools of a heritage art form into an emerging media. Each one of these podcasts is about maybe 20 to 25 thousand words. Why would I write that out in prose on a page which is intended to be read with the voice in your mind?

Why the fuck would I do that? The only reason I'd do that is if I was beholden to a heritage art form. If I was existing, pretending that I was recording into a reel-to-reel and it would mean taking out razor blades to cut up all my dialogue. The mad thing is I use technology to record this podcast that would not have been available to me 10 years ago. It takes me about 3 or 4 days to record we'll say 1 hour of audio. days to record we'll say one hour of audio. A good hot take takes about three or four days of recording for one hour and I might work seven eight hours a day. The past eight years we'll say recording software has gotten to the point that I can I can use recording software with the ease

that I'd use a word processor so I write with my mouth for you to read with your ears I could start a sentence now and finish the sentence now and 24 hours will have passed in between and you'd be none the wiser I can go into a full a full block of audio that I've recorded and go right into one word rerec-record that, move it around. I use recording software like a word processor and you couldn't do that ten years ago. Not with a file that's like an hour long. My computer would have crashed. I would have had to have owned a computer that would have been miles out

of my budget. But now for the first time, everyone has access to technology where you can record your voice and cut it and edit it and move things around with the exact same ease that you can edit a Word document. So that's writing. Could you do that in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s? No fucking way. It meant razor blades and glue. So what I try to do with this podcast is like I said, auto-fiction. I use the mechanics of storytelling to take you on a journey each week and something I'm really curious about

that I enjoy doing is blurring boundaries between reality and fiction. My favourite writer of all time is Flann O'Brien. He's an Irish writer who's considered the inventor of post-modernism in literature with a book that he wrote called At Swim Two Birds which he wrote in the 1930s. In the least amount of words possible what is post-modernism? It's a piece of art that is aware that it is a piece of art and knows that someone is looking at it. So Flann O'Brien wrote this book at Swim Two Bards

in the 1930s and it's a book that has like three beginnings, a couple of middles and a few ends. It's a book about a man who's writing a book and then the characters in that book turn around and write a book about him. In one part of the book he goes into Irish mythology and he's got characters like Fionn MacCool but then in another part of the book it's an American cowboy story but what happens throughout the book is characters from the Irish mythological universe end up bleeding into the stories about American cowboys from the 1930s because the characters in the book become aware that they're in a book and someone is writing them. Now that doesn't seem very radical now but in the 1930s this was nuts.

It was insane. It was so insane and so strange that nobody took Flann O'Brien seriously and it broke his heart and fucking ruined his life. But what made that book important is that it was a novel that asked questions about what a novel could be. And when I read that book when I was about 17, that had such a huge fucking influence on me and how I think about art. And that's why I was disappointed that Cillian Murphy wasn't on the podcast this week. Because something I really wanted to explore was...

Last week's podcast was a straight example of autofiction. It started off with me, blind boy, in Limerick City in Bedford Row wondering about why there was so much bard shit on the streets and then I used storytelling, the mechanics of fiction, to gradually go into a tale about the history of bard shit and why it's important to society but also why bard shit was essential for the invention of military explosives and also the large population that we have in the world today. But then this week, I could have interviewed the real-life actor Cillian Murphy about the biographical film Oppenheimer, in which he plays the inventor of the nuclear bomb.

Because it's a podcast and not a TV or radio interview, because it's a podcast and not a TV or radio interview I could have steered the conversation with Killian towards the relevance of bird shit in the invention of the nuclear bomb. Killian would have engaged me because it's a podcast there's no rules and now Killian Murphy becomes a character in my story about bird shit. At that moment Killian Murphy is both the actual real life Cillian Murphy trying to promote his film and also fictionalized Cillian Murphy existing in the blind boy universe talking about bard shit. And in the middle of that, then you've got a poem from Harvey Keitel. That poem didn't happen. I made that up. That's 100% fiction. Harvey Keitel

didn't send the poem into this podcast. But real Cillian Murphy would have been there. And what excites me about that is that's no meta-modernism. The sincerity of modernism. How are you getting on? I'm Cillian Murphy. I'm here to talk about my new film as part of my job. The irony of post-modernism. Now I'm talking about bard shit for some reason, but fuck it, we'll see where it goes. When both of those states operate together in fluxes with each other, you have meta-modernism. And meta-modernism is what's relevant to us right now. Meta-modernism is our lived reality.

Meta-modernism is how we as humans today navigate culture, mostly via our phones and social media. We either curate our own media timelines or they're curated for us with the algorithm but we have to consistently rapidly flip-flop between emotions and positions. By which I mean you just flick through Instagram. There's a photograph of a cute cat. Scroll. Oh no, the world is burning. Oh, my friends have to get engaged.

Scroll. An advert for constipation because your phone knows what age you are. And now you're confronted with your own mortality and the terror and sadness of that. So that's the meta-modern reality that we live in. A consistent continual fluxes between irony and sincerity. Sadness and jokes. And that ultimately leaves us feeling confused and we don't really know what real or fake is anymore. So that's what I'm saying about the power of a podcast as a creative medium. Where else can I write an entire thesis,

an auto-fictional thesis about bird shit and then bring Cillian Murphy in there as a character so that the end result is an absurd type of performance art. So I know this shit sounds wanky but when I speak this way or if I say my intention with this podcast is for it to be a novel or to create art I'm not saying that that means that this this is better than anything else. I'm just saying that's my intent and that's my process and I'm autistic I don't really have a choice with this shit art is my thing and every single wake and moment of my day this is what I think about and if I'm not careful it's to the detriment of functioning as a member of fucking society so yes I was very pleased that a student in the Trinity College Contemporary

Literary Department, which would be one of the most prestigious literary departments in the world, someone whose job it is as a scholar to go, what is contemporary literature? I was very glad that that person so kindly dedicated their fucking master's thesis to this podcast and basically went, I know it's a podcast and podcasts are new and we don't really know what they are, but maybe this fella over here is doing something that's literary. Sometimes a bit of external recognition is useful because when you're on the fringes of something and you're doing something weird, sometimes I'd be asking myself, maybe I'm just mental.

Maybe I'm actually just mad and everything that I think makes sense on the outside just looks like a mental person. Like over the pandemic with my Twitch streaming, when I was writing songs to Red Dead Redemption on livestream and what I was exploring there and the question and the curiosity there was

can I use new emerging technology to write songs in a new way when I was doing that there were literal debates on Facebook amongst middle-aged men where they thought I was having a nervous breakdown and I questioned it because it was the fucking pandemic as well so my mental health was in shit but I questioned it and I said what if I'm having a public mental breakdown what what if that's what this is what if it's a public mental breakdown and to me it makes perfect sense but I'm actually having a public mental breakdown okay I think it's time for the ocarina pause so that was a bit of a rambling riff. I mean, a lot of you do say you enjoy it when I go into detail about the process.

About the process of what art is and making art and my thoughts behind it. And that was kind of unprepared because, like I said, I was supposed to be interviewing Cillian Murphy this week. So I didn't have time to do the proper long prep for a hot take. So let's have the ocarina pause. What book have I got to hit myself in the head with this week? I don't have a piece of fiction this week. It's a piece of non-fiction.

Lovely little book. Very enjoyable book. You can crack it open wherever you want. A History of the World in 100 objects by neil mcgregor um it's published by the british museum it's a history of the world in 100 objects and all of these objects are in the british museum very conflicted about the british museum one of my favorite places in the world i fucking love the british. I've probably visited it 90 times, possibly more. I've spent hours in the British Museum. The bastion of British colonial arrogance of just we own the

entire world and we're going to take shit wherever we want and put it into our museum. Every country in the world begging to have their artefacts back. And I'm presented with the dichotomy of that. Every time I go in there. You know. But I fucking love the place. Oh God. I adore it.

And this book. A history of the world in 100 objects. I think of two or three copies of it. A good day in the British Museum for me. I go in there at nine in the morning with a copy of this book and I walk all around the museum and I visit the objects. I haven't done that in a while now but 2013-2014 when I used to do a lot of gigs in London. I'd be doing a 30-day run in Soho Theatre. I'd be staying in London for maybe five weeks. I'd be haunting the British Museum. The workers knew me by name. Completely free. I'd just walk in, absorb myself in thousands

and thousands of years of history. Incredible place. But you know, colonialism. It's a strange feeling. It's like buying a hero's dose of cheap underpants in pennies. Getting all these underpants, being thrilled with yourself, but knowing that, like, it probably came from a sweatshop. So I'm going to hit myself into the head with A History of the World in 100 Objects by Neil MacGregor. That's heavy now. That's a bit heavy. It's a book about 100 objects, lads. We'll go gentle gentle imagine I knock my

knocked myself out knocked myself out with a book from the British Museum and then just silence for the last 30 minutes that's painful, now... You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishikesh Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series.

This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret.

It's a girl. the birth bad things will start to happen evil things of evil it's all for you no don't the first omen i believe the girl is to be the mother mother of what is the most terrifying 666 is 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. Right, that's sufficient there for a little advert to go in the middle so you didn't get a surprise. That was painful, that was sore. The full weight of British colonialism. Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page,

patreon.com forward slash theblindboypodcast. If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you merriment, mirth, distraction, whatever the fuck. If you like listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I put into it. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. I put into it. This podcast is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. I adore this podcast. If there's a theme for this episode, it's about the joy of process, because that's all I've been speaking about, is the sheer joy that I get, not by the end result of the podcast, but by the process, and the curiosity, and the fun, and the fact that

this podcast never ends. It's just going to keep going, and going, and the fun, and the fact that this podcast never ends. It's just going to keep going and going and going until the universe says stop. But it's only possible for me to do this if it's listener funded, if it's funded by ye the listeners via the Patreon page. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month.

That's it. For that, ye get four podcasts a month. It's how I pay my bills. It's how I buy my equipment. It's how I rent this office month it's how i pay my bills so i buy my equipment so i rent this office it's how i exist but if you can't afford it don't worry about it you can listen for free listen for free because the person who is paying is paying for you to listen for free everybody gets a podcast i get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness and I'm not beholden to advertisers

do you think an advertiser is gonna allow me to use the opportunity of an interview with Cillian Murphy to steer things towards bard shit they would cry they'd be like we're sponsoring this podcast

you've got Cillian Murphy ask him about his private life give us viral bites get him to say something that'll get mentioned in the newspapers we're sponsoring this episode and we need more listens and more attention regardless of the cost no

fuck off I'm gonna ask him some questions about bird shit and it's up to Killian how he wants to steer that. Support independent podcasters. Whatever independent podcaster you enjoy, whatever independent podcaster is doing something creative and fun that you find to be exhilarating, then support them directly. Doesn't have to be monetary. You can recommend the podcast to a friend, leave a review, leave likes, all that shit. Okay.

My book, Topography Hibernica, is out in November. You can pre-order some signed copies of that if you like. Go to my Instagram, BindbyBowClub, and look at my saved story. There's all the links for pre-ordering the book. Now let's do some gigs. Let's have some fun with gigs, okay? Oh, yes. August.

The 26th of August I'm in the Cork Opera House. That's going to be so much fun. Check out that whole Cork podcast festival. The 28th of August I'm in Vicar Street up in Dublin. Monday night. Monday night cuddles. Let's do it. then I'm in I can't say that gig the pavilions are sold out Thank You done Leary Thank You

done Leary I can't wait to visit your weather spoons then Patrick Cavanagh weekend in Inishkeen County Monaghan I can't I can't I have a good guest for that that's gonna be a lot of fun right if you're, County Monaghan. I can't, I can't, I have a good guest for that. That's going to be a lot of fun, right? If you're up in Monaghan, come to the Patrick Kavanagh weekend on September 30th, please. Then, Belfast on the 18th of the 11th. What's the 11th month? Is that November? The waterfront in Belfast, which a I don't know what it's a Saturday and then I have on the 19th of November I'm in Vicar Street for my fucking book launch

my book launch the book is gonna be out come along to that on the 18th of November it's a Sunday Sunday night book fun in Vicar Street in November the 19th. Dog bless. Okay, so as is the custom I've only answered one fucking question. Jamie asks, blind boy can you make a prediction about the future? Yes. Not about the whole future in general but just

one little thing. Something real intriguing that no one's talking about but it's happening before our eyes and it's very strange and I'm interested about, but it's happening before our eyes. And it's very strange. And I'm interested to see where it's going to go. Have you noticed recently, right, and it pops up and down in the media, where like a large artist, like Bruce Springsteen or Neil Young or Bob Dylan,

they sell their music catalogue for fucking mad money. So let's take Bruce Springsteen for example. In 2021, Bruce Springsteen sold his entire back catalogue for 500 million. Justin Bieber sold his back catalogue for 200 million. Dr. Dre sold his back catalogue for 200 million. Bob Dylan sells his back catalogue for 200 million. Dr. Dre sold his back catalog for 200 million. Bob Dylan sells his back catalog for 200 million. All these massive artists are selling the rights to their entire back catalog, selling away 100% of the rights to their music for massive sums of money. And it's really really strange. Because the thing is. One thing we're sure about right now is.

Music doesn't really make. Money anymore. Even if you buy. Bob Dylan's back catalogue. For 200 million. Where are you going to make that back. When it's all on Spotify or whatever. How is that a good investment?

What the fuck is going on? And who's buying it? Well, who's buying all these back catalogs? Now, buying a back catalog means it's all the rights. You no longer own your music. The person who buys it can do whatever the fuck they want. They can put it in adverts. They can put it in films. They can do whatever they want with your music it's no longer your property

and older artists legacy artists are selling their back catalogs for huge amounts of money most of it's being bought by this company called hypnosis songs fund hypnosis songs fund was started by nile rogers nile rogers who fucking legend i mean i'd never get my head around nile rogers like i the man has written so many number one songs like a fucking genius and he keeps coming to ireland to gig we can't fucking keep nile rogers out of ireland there'd be a tiny festival in Tarlis and Nile Rodgers is there. We even have a joke in Ireland where it's like, you need to love this country as much as Nile Rodgers does. He does not need the money. If you can think of a hit song by any artist in the past 50 years, chances are Nile Rodgers wrote it but he's probably gigging in Mullingar

next week but anyway Nile Rodgers and this fella called Mark Mercurio Das who's a music industry executive him and Nile Rodgers started this company called Hypnosis Songs Fund and they're basically

buying all these huge back catalogues of massive artists right what if i told you that the company that owns hypnosis is blackstone blackstone are the biggest landlord in ireland blackstone are a investment fund slash vulture fund, a gigantic pile of cash that buys assets, property, gold. It's an investment fund. And like I said, they're the largest landlord in Ireland. The fuck is Ireland's biggest landlord doing, buying Justin Bieber's back catalogue for 200 million?

The fuck is that about? Especially when music doesn't really make money anymore. The fuck are they doing? 200 million? They're spending billions and billions buying and owning songs. This doesn't make sense. Well, what I can tell you is the data that led them to this decision. We're about 14 years now into streaming technology and in those 14 years when you sign up to a streamer spotify can't even think of another one title whatever when you sign

up to a streamer it's odd this the streaming company is also getting your data your listening habits and what the data is showing after 14 years of streaming is that older music it never kind of goes up and down in popularity it remains steady neil young bob dylan david bowie nile rogers dr dre this music just stays popular at a steady level and it doesn't seem to go in or out. You can bank on this. So this is where Hypnosis Song Fund and Blackstone, this giant fucking vulture fund, this is where they come into it. So Blackstone, who are an investment fund, So Blackstone, who are an investment fund, they now see an asset that kind of doesn't change. Gold, for instance. Gold is always seen as a reliable investment.

Why? Gold kind of always stays the same. There's only so much gold and it kind of stays the same. So if you put your money in gold, your money is safe. It's not necessarily, you're not going to lose a lot, you're not going to gain a lot. It's gold. It's going to remain the same. So this investment fund is looking at back catalogues of music as if it's gold. People will always listen to Bob Dylan. People will always listen to Bowie.

This is effectively a type of goal that you can reliably put your money in here's my future prediction this is where I'm this is where I'm worried and skeptical because music doesn't make money even if you have Bob Dylan's catalog and it's on Spotify you're not going to make a lot of money from that. And if you decide, okay, I'm going to get all of Bob Dylan's music now, and I'm going to give it to every single film in the world to use as they please. So take all of Bob Dylan's music and just smack it on every single movie. Now what that'll do is it'll make you short-term money, but it lowers the value of Bob Dylan.

Let's contrast that with ABBA. ABBA are an incredible band. ABBA are phenomenal, astounding, some of the best songwriting you've ever heard. But ABBA made their music very commercially available in adverts, in films. ABBA became so ubiquitous that you couldn't escape it. And now to kind of listen to ABBA is difficult. You have to listen to it with fresh ears. It's hard to appreciate an ABBA song when it's been drilled into your head because it's in every advert. So what that does is that lowers the value of the music. If music is overplayed and you hear it all the time,

it doesn't matter how good it is, it lowers the value of that music. So it doesn't make sense that these vulture funds are going to buy all of Bruce Springsteen's songs and Neil Young and fucking Dylan and then just give them to every advertiser who wants it. That doesn't make sense because that will lower the value of the music.

So if you're making a sound investment, you need to increase the value of that investment. So if you're making a sound investment, you need to increase the value of that investment. How do you increase something's value? You create scarcity. Now I grew up in a time when music had cultural scarcity. If I wanted, when I was a kid, I started getting into David Bowie when I was about 14. It took me about three years to get through his whole catalogue because his CDs were 25 euros each and I didn't have that money so I

had to buy a David Bowie album, listen to it for about three months until I could afford the next CD. His music was scarce. I had to own a CD and that really upped its value and the value was 25 quid. Now for a basic Spotify subscription I can rent out all of David Bowie's music and all music in recorded history I can rent it all out

for a fee once a month. So the value of music has gone down massively. Here's what I think is going to happen. The vulture funds, Blackstone, who are a heartless, massive pile of cash, Ireland's biggest landlord, this heartless pile of cash, who don't care about creating the housing crisis,

they don't care about how they price people out of homes, a heartless investment fund is very rapidly acquiring 100% ownership of the best music in the world. Now, I don't own any music anymore. I rent it out from streaming sites. I think sometime within the next 10, 15 years, the vulture fund that owns all the music is going to create cultural scarcity whether they use the blockchain NFTs I don't know what our digital landscape

is going to be like in 15 years I don't know how much autonomy and control we will have I think right what's happening right now they're going to get the best music in the world because they're investing billions in it as an asset. They're going to get the best music in the world and possibly make it as rare as the Mona Lisa. They're going to up its value. It's

going to become very difficult and very exclusive and very expensive to hear the music of Bruce Springsteen. It's going to involve the blockchain. It's going to involve quantum computing. Whatever technology we're going to have, the people who are investing billions now, the company that's investing billions now, they're going to own some type of infrastructure where they can actually create scarcity with art and we might not be able to access it using whatever technology we have maybe someone might have an old cd player or an old vinyl and you listen to it in the old school way but why else are the biggest vulture fund in the world spending billions on owning 100% music as a an asset that they view as gold they're gonna own it they're gonna create cultural scarcity

they're gonna up the value we're still gonna want it we're always gonna want David Bowie's music and fucking Bob Dylan's that's what's gonna happen happen it'll be NFTs, it'll be blockchain I don't know but when the biggest vulture fund in the world is spending billions on something that doesn't make money now they're figuring out a way to make money and you make

money from an asset by making it scarce so that's my little future prediction right I'll catch you next week. I'll be back with a hot take most likely, okay? This was a bit of an impromptu podcast because of circumstances, but I'll be back next week. In the meantime, rub a dog, kiss a swan. Don't kiss a swan, actually. That'd be a terrible idea. Wave at a swan from a safe distance. Dog bless. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway,

the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Jimeno in conversation. Together, they dissect the mesmerizing layers of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, followed by a complete soul-stirring rendition of the famously unnerving piece, Symphony Exploder, April 5th at Roy Thompson Hall. For tickets, visit tso.ca. Thank you. you