The Blindboy Podcast - Kylie Minogue gave me a loan of her mirror and it made me think about Attachment theory

Episode Date: August 21, 2024

Kylie Minogue gave me a loan of her mirror and it made me think about attachment theory  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Ben the heavenly tenor you long-legged Lenards. Welcome to the Blind By podcast. If this is your first episode maybe consider going back to an earlier episode of this podcast to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. I'm a busy boy this week. I just came back from Electric Picnic. I had a wonderful live podcast at Electric Picnic there at the weekend. Electric Picnic is like, it's like Ireland's Glastonbury. It's a big, huge festival full of people. And I'd been booked to play my biggest ever gig

at Electric Picnic. They'd put me into a tent that holds 7,000 people. And I was a bit worried that the tent would look empty. But no, the tent was fucking full. 7,000 people showed up and I spoke to a magnificent guest, a fella by the name of Garren Noon. He's an Irish comedian that just exploded in popularity in the past year because of TikTok. He's got like a million followers. He's very funny and unique and I enjoy his videos so I asked him to be my guest

and we'd wander for crack and he's a really a really kind and gentle person and before the gig you don't really have dressing rooms at festivals you get a barren cabin with a table in it and I needed I needed a mirror in my dressing room so that I could put my plastic bag on so that I could make sure that my plastic bag looked right. I needed a mirror. And generally you don't get mirrors. You don't get mirrors backstage at festivals. So when I got to the gig I was like,

I need a fucking mirror. I can't trust my camera phone. I need an actual mirror to make sure that my bag is on correctly. So they had to do a big search all around Electric Picnic to see if anybody had a mirror. And Kylie Minogue had a mirror. So Kylie Minogue donated her mirror to me so that I could put my plastic bag on. So fair play to Kylie Minogue. I didn't get to meet her or speak to her. But if I did get to meet Kylie Minogue and thank her for giving me a lawn of her

mirror, because she didn't have to do that, like, there's no reason for Kylie Minogue to be giving me her mirror, other than she's helping out a person who needs a mirror. But if I did meet Kylie Minogue to thank her for the mirror, actually I'm glad I didn't meet her because what I'd have told her is... When I was a fucking child, tiny little toddler, but old enough to have my first memories, Kylie Minogue was like... my first crush, if you could call it that.

I was besotted with her, I liked her. But there was a program on TV called Neighbours. It was an Australian drama. And Kylie Minogue was in it before she was famous as Kylie Minogue. And she played a character called Charlene, who was a mechanic. A singer called Jason Donovan was her boyfriend on Neighbours. I hated him. And I had this big yellow teddy bear. These are some of my first memories. I had this giant yellow teddy bear that was larger than me and I started to call the teddy bear Charlene after Kylie Minogue's character in

Neighbours. This teddy bear was Kylie Minogue to me. It was full fantasy. This was Kylie Minogue. And Charlene the teddy bear used to sleep with me in bed. And I can remember the intense feeling of comfort and calmness and happiness I would feel when this teddy bear Charlene was sleeping with me in bed. I was so young that this was probably when I first started, like sleeping in my cot. And anyone with a baby will tell you that's a very difficult period when the very young toddler is separated from their mother and is suddenly sleeping in their own bed for the first time it's very very stressful for the baby. Now you might be thinking Plainboy you can't remember things from when you were that young, from when you were a little baby. I can. I can remember crawling around on all fours and very very early childhood memories

that you can recollect as an adult. That's a common facet of being neurodivergent. Some people on the spectrum can just remember earlier in their childhoods than neurotypical people can and I'm definitely one of those people. And this giant yellow teddy bear, which represented Kylie Minogue's character in Neighbours, that provided me with the sense of comfort to sleep on my own. But this teddy was gigantic. It was a novelty sized big yellow teddy and what I didn't know is that I was falling to sleep while cuddling the teddy. But as soon as I would fall asleep my ma would take the teddy. But as soon as I would fall asleep,

my ma would take the teddy away because it was too big, she was probably worried about it smothering me or something. But I vividly remember waking up in the middle of the night and Charlene was gone. I remember searching, feeling around in the dark for the giant teddy and it wasn't there. And the feeling of abandonment and loneliness

and disappointment, anxiety, terror, danger that I experienced, I remember that feeling. It was the moment that I learned that life contains pain. Probably the worst feeling for me as an adult is when I'm experiencing creative block. When I'm trying to write or create, doing this thing that I utterly adore, and then I can't get to that place of inspiration and I'm stuck.

I can experience this deep, lonely sense of emptiness. Like if you read the Bible, and you look for the definition of hell in the Bible, the Bible doesn't mention fire or devils or punishment. That was created after the Bible, but the Bible itself, the Bible's definition of hell is that feeling of emptiness, abandonment and separation from God, from God's love. And now I'm not into Christ or any of that shit, but I do admire the Bible's definition of hell as the feeling of emptiness and absence from God, because it's true to human psychology,

and an attachment and abandonment. Hell is separation from your source of love. Hell is separation from your source of love. And my first memory of that feeling was waking up in the middle of the night to see that my teddy Charlene was gone. And I remember crying for the teddy and my mother coming in and telling me, no, you can't sleep with the teddy. And I remember not having the words to let my man know of the opiate-like, calming feeling, the safety, the joy, the comfort that this teddy would give me when I'd hug it and go to sleep.

I remember not being able to explain that to my ma because I didn't have the words. I wanted to convince her, no, it's a good idea to let Charlene stay with me. It's a good idea. You have it wrong, ma. Taking the teddy away, that's the bad idea. And I recall that the angry, frustrated feeling of not being able to get that across. And just the extreme empty feeling that the real dark emptiness of learning that painful, bad, disappointing things happen in life. I can even remember the color of the light bulb in the room. A very dim, warm yellow.

So I'm quite glad I didn't get to meet Kylie Minogue at Electric Picnic and thank her for giving me a loan of her fucking mirror because chances are she'd have gotten that story. I don't think she needed that fucking... ... Imagine saying to her, Oh, I had a childhood teddy named after you, and when this teddy was taken away, I experienced emptiness for the first time.

And you know what, Kylie, because I've thought about this. It wasn't even about you. It wasn't about you. It wasn't about the character you played in Neighbours. It's just at the exact age where my ma decided that it's time for me to start sleeping in my own cot. This would have been deeply frightening for me, deeply threatening. And when these threatening abandonment feelings emerged, I latched onto your image on the television as a surrogate for my mother,

who I was terrified of being separated from. And then I further projected you into a fucking teddy bear, a big giant novelty teddy bear that was three times the size of me, called Charlene, to become my childhood surrogate mother. At a time when I was first experiencing the terror of separation from my mother. It was a defense mechanism. You see, Kylie, there was a scientist in America in the 1950s by the name of Harry Harlow. Harry Harlow, he was one of the first psychologists to scientifically investigate the nature of human love and affection and attachment and the importance of these things in the development of the human brain. Before Harry Harlow, psychologists thought that the relationship between a baby and its mother

primarily came down to the baby obtaining food, relieving its thirst, and avoiding pain. Harry Harlow was the first to ask. Maybe love and affection are very important too. And in the late 1950s he developed quite a cruel experiment known as the Monkey Mother Experiment. He got these rhesus monkeys, little tiny baby monkeys, and he took them from their mothers when they were a few days old and put them in cages. And in this cage, he built two fake mothers. One monkey mother was just made from wire, metal wire, but the wire mother

provided food and milk. And then the second fake monkey in the cage, the fake monkey mother, was made out of really soft cushiony fur. But the soft, cuddly fake mother, it didn't provide any food or any drink. And what Harlow quickly found was that, so these tiny baby monkeys, separated from their birth mother, they would immediately latch on to the cuddly furry fake mother. They'd spend all day finding warmth and cuddles from a ball of fur. But then the other wire mother that provided food and drink, the baby monkeys would only visit that mother when they needed food and drink, the baby monkeys would only visit that mother when they needed food and

drink. They didn't cuddle that mother, they didn't even recognise it as a possible surrogate mother. They'd go over to that, they'd get the food and the drink and then return immediately back to the soft, furry, cuddly mother. And then Harlow would, he'd like play loud noises or flashing lights. He'd try and frighten the baby monkeys, or he'd try and put them in situations, take them outside of the cage that were threatening. And he found that the monkeys would just return to the cuddly ball of fur, the cuddly mother, every time for that sense of security and safety. But this experiment on the monkeys, as cruel as it was,

it led to the development of what we'd call attachment theory. Harlow found that these baby monkeys, that humans were the same, that comfort and love and emotional security are more important to the baby than nutrition. That babies will place comfort and cuddles and security with their baby than nutrition. The babies will place comfort and cuddles and security with their caregiver over nutrition. Now it just so happens that the cuddliest most comforting place for a tiny baby is snuggled in to the boobies where the food comes from. Evil Ocean has sorted that one out for us. But when a baby is looking for cuddles with its mother, the caregiver doesn't have to be the mother. What a baby is looking for when it cuddles its caregiver is a sense of emotional security.

The base feeling of safety that then allows that baby to explore, to play and to experience happiness. A comfort object does the same thing for the baby. Just like the monkeys who don't have their actual mothers present, but they're latching on to this fake fire monkey, the fire monkey becomes a comfort object, a secure base. This secure base allows the baby to emotionally regulate, to experience a feeling of calmness, a feeling of safety and to manage stress. Being placed in your cot for the first time, sleeping on your own for the first time,

that's very stressful for a tiny little baby. So for me, I'd successfully created a comfort object with this big giant teddy called Charlene. Not only that, but this was probably a very early act of creative thinking on my part. Because I'd taken the image of Charlene Kylie Minogue from the television and this teddy bear and I'd combined the two of them together into this fantasy. I'd written a little story and the simple story was this teddy is Kylie Minogue and whatever it is about this Kylie Minogue Charlene teddy bear when I'm put into my cot by myself, I feel okay. I remember it.

I remember the feeling. I feel okay cuddling Charlene. I have a comfort object. I have a secure base. I'm calm enough to drift off to sleep. This comfort object worked to protect me from the feelings of abandonment and detachment from my mother but when Charlene was taken away

when my ma took Charlene away because she was too big or she might have smothered me or whatever when fucking Charlene was taken away I didn't sleep I did not sleep and I don't remember this but I was obviously so distressed

that it ended with me sleeping in my mother's bed until I was about five or six, and also being terrified of the dark and the permanent removal of Charlene the Teddy Bear. That was the start of all that. My ma is listening now, and she now is remembering Charlene the Teddy Bear, who was actually Kylie Minogue. is listening now and she now is remembering Charlene the teddy bear who was actually Kylie Minogue and there's a reason these things are important in human development. The comfort blanket or the comfort teddy bear, like all of us had these things. In attachment psychology they're what's known as transitional objects. A tiny little baby can't physically latch on to its mother forever.

There comes a time when a child needs to sleep on its own and spend more time on its own. Like I guarantee you now if if there's any mothers listening to this podcast and you're sleep training your baby at the moment and you're putting your baby down in its cot and leaving the room, you're advised to leave a little teddy or a blanket in the cot with the baby and to rub this blanket or teddy on your boobs before you put it down with the baby to literally create a transitional object for the smell and the familiarity, an object that helps to bridge the gap and the familiarity, an object that helps to bridge the gap between a child's dependency on their primary caregiver and their ability to self-soothe and explore the world independently. Self-soothing, that's the earliest point in a child's development. when we learn to regulate our emotions. We learn to be calm and to feel safe in ourselves.

When my ma took Charlene away from me, I experienced emotional dysregulation. I remember great feelings of terror, emptiness, anxiety, which most likely express themselves as uncontrollable, crying and screaming until my ma eventually had to put me into her own bed. And I stayed there till I was five or six, because I was so emotionally dysregulated when I wasn't there. Now in my case, you can throw a bit of neurodivergence in there as well. Neurodivergent kids just have a more difficult time learning to self-regulate.

And as I got older, like four years of age, and I'm sleeping in my ma's bed, I would've had great shame around that. I wasn't telling any of my fucking friends that in school. Four years of age and you're sleeping with your ma, you'd be murdered on the playground. So I had to internalize that as a very shameful and embarrassing secret. I was not able to sleep on my own without bad anxiety. And even then when I started sleeping on my own

at about five years of age, I kept the light on until I was a teenager, I'd say. And now as an adult, when I meditate, when I go for mindful walks, I'm self-soothing. I'm searching for emotional, I'm searching for the capacity to regulate my own emotions, to be calm, to have the capacity to observe and choose not to respond to anger or anxiety. And when I meditate in particular, and I have a successful meditation, and I experienced that deep, soothing feeling of calmness, that's the exact feeling that I had as a tiny baby

when I would have been cuddling Charlene the teddy bear in my bed and drifting off to sleep. That feeling of safety. That's not just me, that's you too. There was a point in our early childhood where we learned to self-soothe, where we learned to regulate our own emotions, and how we attached to our caregiver. And according to attachment theory, this school of psychology I'm speaking about,

the ideal situation is for a little baby to develop what's called a secure sense of attachment. They are healthily given the space to learn how to self-soothe. They basically learn, mommy's gonna leave, but she's definitely coming back, and I know she's coming back. So I'm okay to feel calm and happy. So the securely attached child, they're comfortable to play, to explore, to be creative. The securely attached child has a huge advantage to the rest of us, in how they grow and develop and learn and explore and find out who they are. And they manage stress and stressful feelings confidently.

Now only a small amount of us are lucky enough to have grown up in that environment. Because the reality is, people's parents are stressed out, people's parents are working, some people's parents are having relationship issues, some people's parents might have addiction issues, mental health issues, class plays a part in it. How is a parent to provide an environment for secure attachment when all they're thinking about is being evicted next month? What about the tiny babies in Gaza, cuddling their teddy bears when all their parents are thinking about us whether a bomb is gonna come in the roof that night. In my ma's case, she was afraid the teddy was gonna choke me, it was too big. She was thinking about my physical safety. I'm sure she tried to offer me other, safer, smaller teddy

bears or blankets. But I developed an attachment to Charlene, it was too late. It was Kylie Minogue. I loved, I experienced love for this teddy. From my point of view there was no replacement for this. So she took it away and didn't think anything of it. But when Charlene was taken away from me, I started to show signs, I developed signs of an insecure attachment style. Couldn't sleep on my own, couldn't sleep in the dark, couldn't self-regulate. And that emotional insecurity followed me

into adulthood with a feeling of anxiety, feeling insecure, comparing myself to other people, needing the approval of other people in order to feel comfortable and attached with who I am. I'm not saying it's as simple as that. And integrative psychotherapy would say it's definitely not as simple as that. I've just chosen to...I've read that early childhood experience using attachment theory only. But something I do find very interesting is, I'd never gone in depth with myself there about Charlene the teddy bear, about those early memories

of Charlene the teddy bear. I'd never analyzed it using attachment theory and it's so fucking obvious. My transitional comfort object was suddenly taken away and I was distraught. I'd never self-reflected on that specific aspect of my childhood with that depth until this weekend. And the beautiful piece of metaphorical, youngie and synchronicity in all of this is. Charlene was Kylie Minogue.

My fucking childhood teddy bear that I took to bed. In my mind, as a tiny little toddler or a baby or whatever I was, in my mind that teddy bear was Kylie Minogue. And this weekend Kylie Minogue gifts me with a mirror, an object of self-reflection. Within Jungian psychology, the psychology of Carl Jung, I've mentioned Carl Jung loads, Jung's psychology, it's the field of psychology where half of it is taken very seriously and then the other half blends into esoteric mysticism. But in Jungian psychoanalysis,

if a mirror appears in a dream, or not in a dream, where a mirror appears through synchronicity, meaningful coincidences in reality, mirrors provide us with the opportunity to confront our shadow self, the parts of self that we deny or repress. When I was a baby and my man decided you're sleeping in your cot now,

I denied that feeling of abandonment. And my brain protected me from that pain as a defense mechanism by giving me a comfort object. I chose Kylie Minogue the teddy bear and then as a middle-aged man out of fucking nowhere, through bizarre coincidence, through bizarre synchronicity, Kylie Minogue gives me the gift of a mirror which I then use to self-reflect and explore my shadow side. And the thing is with Witt Youngian synchronicity, that doesn't have to mean that something supernatural happened. I'm not interested in supernatural connections. What I'm interested in is the stories that I

create around something to give myself personal meaning, and there's wonderful meaning in that story. And I don't know why Kylie Minogue gave me that mirror. I don't even know if Kylie Minogue knows who the fuck I am. I'm pretty sure that she would have had to personally sign off on it. That's how festivals work. Like if I'm gigging a festival and I've got something that another act needs, a piece of equipment, like no one who's working with me is going to give a loan of my piece of equipment to another act without clearing it by me. It's just not how it works. So Kylie had to sign off on that.

So maybe Kylie doesn't know who the fuck I am. And she was like, Oh there's an act. An act at the same festival. Needs a mirror. And I have one. Sure, of course they can use it. I don't need it until tomorrow night when I'm headlining.

Or maybe she was aware of me. Maybe she listens to the podcast. It's pretty big in Australia. Maybe she listens to the podcast and she was like, yeah, blind by can have my fucking, my mirror. Either way, I'm glad I didn't get to meet her because if I did, if I did, she'd have gotten that fucking story. And that story is fine for a podcast, but it's utterly mental in real life. Okay, I better do an Ocarina Pause soon. I'm up very early in the morning, I have a flight to Edinburgh.

I've got two gigs over in Edinburgh as part of the Edinburgh Book Festival. So I'm up early for a flight to Edinburgh. I was supposed to be answering your fucking questions this week. That was an intro. Right, let's play the Puerto Rican Guero and you're rogers.com for details. We got you, Rogers. This is an ad by BetterHelp. What are your self-care non-negotiables?

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Support for this podcast comes from you the listener via the Patreon page, Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast. This podcast is how I rent out my office. This podcast is how I earn a living. This is my full-time job. I fucking adore making this podcast. I love it. That's why I deliver one every single week.

Even between gigs, between flights, when I've got the perfect excuse to say there's no podcast this week, I'm still delivering a podcast. Because I adore making it and I refuse to take for granted, I will not take for granted that I'm able to earn a living doing what I genuinely love. And that's only possible because this podcast is supported by patrons, supported by listeners. So if it brings you marth, merriment, distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please become a patron. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month. That's it.

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 so everybody gets the exact same podcast and I get to earn a living it's a wonderful model based on kindness and soundness patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast and I am not beholden to the whims of advertisers. No advertiser can dictate my content, no advertiser can force me to get a certain amount of listens to make this podcast more popular than it is. Advertisers can go fuck themselves.

And if they want to advertise on this podcast, they have to do so on my terms. And because of that, I get to deliver what I'm genuinely passionate about each week, rather than what I think people want to hear. Advertisers, when they get involved in TV, radio, any type of creativity, because advertisers want success, because they force you towards the most amount of listeners or viewers. When you force someone creative towards that, what you get is consistent mediocrity. But when that pressure is taken away and instead you have a space to explore and be playful and to fail, then you get occasional excellence. And occasional excellence with sprinklings of failure.

I'll take that over fucking consistent mediocrity any day. Okay, gigs. My Australian tour 2025. Almost very nearly sold out. Part I think is fully sold out. I'm not sure the rest of them. There's fuck all tickets left anyway for Australia and New Zealand in 2025 in what month is the third? That March? No most of it's fucking ages away right? It's in like

April in 2025. So there's Sky City Auckland, Powerhouse Brisbane, Enmore Theatre Sydney, Palais Theatre Melbourne, State Theatre Parth. I think that's the lot. Go to the websites of those venues if there are tickets left. September, which is very close, couple of weeks away. I'm in the Cork Opera House for the Cork Podcast Festival. Check out that entire festival. The lads who run it are lovely. I have a class guest for the Cork Opera House who I cannot

wait to chat to. And then there's a gig in Mayo, Claire Morris, that they're on to me to promote all the time. Look it up on the internet. Okay, I'm going gonna answer some of your questions. I haven't answered questions from you. I'd say in 10 weeks or something like that. I asked on Instagram the other day, have you any questions? And I got thousands of questions. So I'm going to go through a couple. Danny asks, what music from 2024 do you like? There's an artist called Chapel Rohn who I fucking adore. She's after getting massive this summer. Now I'm gonna have to be an insufferable hipster and say I was listening to Chapel Rohn before she got big. I'm not saying that for cool points. I'm saying it. I need to say it because Chapel Rhone, she's the first ever artist that I discovered on TikTok About a year and a half or two years ago, and I found her on TikTok

She just appeared. She appeared on my FYP. It wasn't even music It was just this girl of about 21 or 22 and the video It was just her taking the piss out of male musicians She was just saying to camera what the fuck have you got to write about what do men have to write about? You're gonna write about smoking cigarettes What have you got to write about and I found it so so funny She was so funny in her delivery, but also the sheer confidence, the confidence of her statement. Basically saying men have nothing important to write

about. That statement was so confident that it made me go, okay, I gotta check out this, I gotta check out her music. That's a very confident statement. I gotta check her music out to see if it matches up to that level of confidence. So I went to Spotify and I listened to her song. I think it was Pink Pony Club. And it was just... incredibly good pop music. Just really, really well written written brilliantly performed

earworm fucking pop music so I fathered her since then last year she released an album called the The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess It's just a brilliant album multiple earworms no filler just multiple really really strong pop songs. And someone else asked me a question actually. Can I define the difference between craft and art? Well, very simply.

Craft is a beautiful flower that pokes out of the soil. Art is the root network that bubbles underneath the soil that you don't see. And the connection that that root network that bubbles underneath the soil that you don't see, and the connection that that root network has with other pieces of art and other ideas. And that's what I love about Chapel Rowan's art. Her album, not only is it banging pop music that you can just throw on the radio and it sounds like right now, That's the beautiful flower that pokes up, but you can go under the surface to the root network. And her writing has all these references.

Like even the rise and fall of a Midwest princess. That's a reference to David Bowie. The rise and fall of Ziggy Stardust. Which is another album, 1973, which is just banger after banger loads of radio pop but also intelligent art and the makeup that she wears it's it's a reference to David Bowie's life on Mars video it's the exact same makeup so you can enjoy her album as just straight bubblegum pop and you can hum along or you can go deeper under the surface and search for the influences, the intertextuality. There's Fleetwood Mac in there, there's Cyndi Lauper, Kate Bush. I fucking love, I love good pop. I adore pop music and when I say pop,

I don't necessarily mean music that's popular. I mean the specific discipline of making pop songs and pop music. It's not trying to be challenging. It's not trying to be difficult. Like I adore heavy metal. Heavy metal is not pop. Heavy metal is deliberately antagonistic and noisy and it challenges what music can be. But then you can have heavy metal that is pop. Like Slipknot. Slipknot is pure pop music. I'd argue that Slipknot are a by-band like NSYNC. But pop music for me, modern pop, it's

anything that follows the ABBA tradition of songwriting. And what ABBA did, ABBA were the first really to cram their songs with multiple earworms. If you listen to an ABBA song, no part of it is filler. There's no boring bit in an ABBA song. Each section, fucking verse, pre-chorus, chorus, chorus, bridge, outro, Every single segment of an ABBA's song has an earworm that you can walk away whistling. And that's modern pop. That's everything after that is modern pop. Chaplin Rohn is like that.

There's no fucking filler. Like I love Kylie Minogue from fucking the stock-ecking waterman stuff she was doing in the 80s. I Should Be So Lucky, right up to the 2000s when she was working with Calvin Harris, I Love Mariah Carey, I adore pop music.

The best... The best pop music that was ever written, in my opinion, anything by Diana Ross and the Supremes in the 1960s, the stuff that was written by Holland, Dozy or Holland, that songwriting team. But even then, that's pre-Abba. So even with the Supremes music, you might have a verse,

and the verse is a little bit boring. You're kind of, you're just waiting until you get to that unbelievably catchy chorus. But Abba changed all that by cramming all of it with earworms. Of course the ultimate definition of pop, you can go back to the 1920s. A place in, I think it was fucking New York, called the Brill Building. Tin Pan Alley. An alley that was called Tin Pan Alley because there were so many songwriters writing songs on pianos at once in all

these buildings that it sounded like people banging tin pans. But Tin Pan Alley in the 1920s or 30s, they came up with the phrase the old gray whistle test. And what that meant was the songwriters would write a song during the day, then cut it to a record that night, leave the record playing all night long in the building, and when everyone's gone home, the cleaners would come in and they'd call the cleaners the old greys because they were older women. And if those cleaners were whistling the song that had been played the night before, then that meant it was a hit. That's a pop song. So pop isn't... Pop doesn't mean popular.

It's a specific way of writing songs where the goal is catchiness. Earworms. Like, horse outside the rubber bandit's song. I deliberately wrote the music of that for months as a pop song, just for the laugh,

because I'd been mainly writing hip hop and a bit of rave, more challenging types of music where catchiness isn't the goal. But with Horse Outside, I was like, this thing here is pop. Every single aspect of this, the fucking intro, the pre-chorus, every synthesizer note, every drum sound, every single aspect of this is composed to be as catchy as possible. Because I love pop music and I want to explore pop music. But unfortunately then it became too fucking popular, turned into an actual popular song that haunted me and brought an audience That I wanted nothing to do with the problem with something going popular

Is that you become disposable you become like a McDonald's rapper and people show up? Who don't respect you even right now actually, Chapel Rowan, who's the artist they began speaking about, like I said I've been listening to her for about two years. I watched her for about two years before she became popular and I was just waiting. I'm like there's this this she's gonna be huge. There's no way she's not gonna be huge and she's just become huge this summer. And she has a really viral TikTok today that's been spoken about on the news. Where she is now...she's got people being fucking horrible to her. People being awful to her because

she's gone popular. She's gone gigantic. She's gone massive. And she's a real artist. She's gone gigantic. She's gone massive and she's a real artist. She's in this for the music, for the creativity and she had this video today where she's just pleading with people for basic respect. Please respect me as a human being, respect my boundaries, understand that I am a human being. So when you have something that goes popular, so I had that in Ireland, in fucking Ireland for like two months in 2010. It was fucking horrible.

So I can't imagine what she's going through because she's gone globally. She'll be one of the biggest artists in the world in six months. Her name will be as household as Taylor Swift or fucking Billie Eilish. So if you love music, if you love songwriting, listen to Chappell Rowan's album. Listen to a song like My Kink is Karma. The melodies, the chord progressions, like so fucking clever, like Elton John levels of clever and you won't be able to get it out of your head and the most wonderful thing about her album is one of her songs will get stuck in your head and you can't get it out and as soon as you get it out another one pops in. Gonna take one last question.

PainRaw asks, what do I think of CRISPR glow in the dark dogs? So glow in the dark dogs, they're dogs that glow in the dark. So there's this thing called CRISPR. C-R-I-S-P-R. Now I haven't a fucking clue how it works, but it's a kit that allows people to do gene editing at home. Like what a chemistry set. And when you think of something like gene editing, you imagine a big giant fancy laboratory with experts and scientists. Well, whatever the fuck CRISPR is, it allows anyone to do it at home, quite simply. So there's people making dogs that glow in the dark. They're able to take the genes from jellyfish that are bioluminescent,

jellyfish that already glow in the dark, and they can implant these into the eggs of a dog and get their dog pregnant at home and then the puppies glow in the dark. And this is a real thing that's happening. How do I feel about it? It freaks the living shit out of me. The idea that people can edit genes at home, it just sounds frightening. It just increases the possibility of a mutation happening. I mean is it a good idea that dogs can glow in the dark? I don't think so. Although it does remind me of long term nuclear waste messaging.

So when we store nuclear waste, nuclear waste is incredibly dangerous. You know, waste from nuclear reactors. Unbelievably dangerous. And nuclear waste remains dangerous for a hundred thousand years, even longer. And we have to take nuclear waste and basically bury it in the ground. There's nothing you could do with it

So all this nuclear waste is getting buried in the ground because it's still going to be dangerous in a hundred thousand years Scientists have to have to consider How do we like first off? What's the earth gonna look like in a hundred thousand years? Will humans even be alive? But if we're putting all this nuclear waste into the ground and storing it, how do we protect the person or the alien who finds the nuclear waste in a hundred thousand years? Or even four thousand years? Humans are curious. We dig shit up. Like we dig up ancient Egyptian pyramids that are 4,000 years old.

When the Victorians first found mummies that were 2,000 years old, they started eating the mummies from medicinal properties. So humans are very curious. What happens if civilization collapses? And then in 4,000 years, everyone's forgotten what nuclear waste is, and then humans start digging and digging, and then they find all these barrels. Well, humans are going to want to open them. So there's this big debate among scientists. How would we warn a future civilization that this thing they've dug up is incredibly dangerous? English might not exist. Memory might not exist.

Civilization could be gone. How do you communicate with someone 10,000 years in the future? Because one thing we do know is that the nuclear waste will still be dangerous if someone digs it up. But one theory that was put forward was to create glow-in-the-dark cats. Scientists were suggesting, why don't we genetically engineer cats? Because they reckon, no matter what happens to civilization, cats will figure a way to survive.

So they're confident that societal collapse, a fucking asteroid, whatever, cats will probably still be here in 10,000 years. So scientists wanted to genetically engineer cats so that they glow in the dark in the presence of nuclear waste. But not only genetically engineer the cats, to try and create folklore, mythology, songs about how dangerous glow-in-the-dark cats are, so that this will survive somehow in an oral culture, in the cultural memory. So that if you genetically engineer cats to glow in the dark

in the presence of nuclear waste now, and then introduce songs and mythology now, even if society collapses, that in 2,000 years, in 3,000 years, whoever's here might remember something about glow in the dark cats being bad. So you don't dig up wherever the cats glow in the dark. I know this sounds insane, but look it up. Long term nuclear waste warning messages and glow in the dark cats. Look it up. And is it that absurd?

We've got flood mythology. I'm always thinking about this. I can go to the Epic of Gilgamesh, which was a story written in ancient Babylon. The Epic of Gilgamesh is probably 5,000 years old. It was written down 5,000 years ago. It could be older itself. Every culture has got flood mythology. Between 7,000 and 15,000 years ago, the ice caps melted.

Some of it happened real suddenly. Human beings the exact same as me and you, exact same, 10,000 years ago, witnessed sudden catastrophic floods as a result of the ice caps melting and this was so significant that I reckon I just think it's plain as day. The reason we've got you know the story of Noah's Ark from the Bible which is 4,000 years old, the Epic of Gilgamesh, you go all around the world there's these old stories about a sudden flood happening, a deluge. I guarantee you that's an actual memory that humans 10,000 years ago had of the Ice Age ending. And we still have those stories today.

And they're still fucking relevant because of climate collapse, because the sea levels are rising. It's very relevant. So that's what those scientists were thinking when they're considering. Let's genetically engineer cats to glow in the dark whenever they're close to nuclear radiation and then create stories and folklores that can survive orally. 15,000 years in the future. I've definitely done an entire podcast on that probably four years ago. I can't fucking remember anymore.

Look, I've answered two questions. That's pretty good for me. I've got a flight to catch in a couple of hours. I can't wait to go to Edinburgh and eat some delicious Edinburgh chip sauce that they have over there. That mixture of brown sauce and vinegar. That I know I can make it myself if I want to.

I could probably even buy a couple of bottles of it in Edinburgh and take it back to Limerick. I won't. I want to maintain the cultural scarcity of it, and I want to have that specific delicious flavour in the city of Edinburgh as something I can taste once every couple of years. I think I did an entire podcast on the history of Edinburgh chip sauce too, maybe two years ago. Alright, dog bless. Rub a swan, fillet a rat, edit the genes of a cocker spaniel in your attic. Hey, listeners, want to diversify your portfolio easily? The All-in-One ETFs from Fidelity Investments Canada lets you do just that. Each ETF provides exposure to stocks, bonds, and crypto so you can potentially maximize

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