The Blindboy Podcast - Sweat Pension

Episode Date: May 1, 2019

How China has created God. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Boatrice, Boatrice, Gally, where is my garlic bread? Your outstretched palms are throttling the oven like the neck of an enemy. Boatrice, Boatrice, Gally, can I have chips with my garlic bread? Will they be golden and long, crispy and soft? I've heard you grow spuds above in your loft, with chocolate for sile and Fanta for aisle and pound shop lighters instead of the sun. Boatress, boatress, galley, where is my garlic bread and my chips?

Can I also have a side of cod? You're taking your time and my taxi's outside. The driver is staring with knives in his eyes oh boatress, boatress galley do you do cashback that was a poem from fan of the podcast Susan Sarandon thank you Susan

thank you very much for that lovely poem what's the crack it is podcast number 82 you gorgeous pricks how are you getting on are you having a magnificent lovely time yeah yurt um there's a lot of brand new listeners to this podcast because acast have been running advertisements for this podcast for the past two weeks across loads of different podcasts around the world. So if you're one of the brand new listeners to this podcast, the international listeners, and you're like,

I like the sound of this advert, what's this podcast about? If you're one of these people, I would recommend that you go back to the start, go back to the very first episode and begin from there because the podcasts are not sequential. And in order to fully grasp what the podcast is about because i was asked to do a fucking advert for the podcast i didn't know how to advertise it i didn't know i didn't know what to say what the podcast was about in order to get new listeners i just gave it a lash for 30 seconds but if you're a new listener

go back to the start all right um it will serve you well so i hope you enjoyed uh last week's podcast it was a live podcast with connor habib and i got a great response hold on my microphone's being a prick it was a live podcast with connor habib and it was very good crack got a great response and I liked listening to it it was a lot of fun my ma didn't like it she she found it a bit a bit too challenging to be listening to a gay porn star talking about gay porn for that amount of time but fuck it you know she's in her 80s it's grand um so yeah I did a live podcast last week because as you know I went to Spain for six days to write my book so that I could fully and 100% have zero distractions and sit down in cafes and literally write and I did that, I am very,

very happy with the writing that I did in Spain, I came back with several thousand words, not the 20,000 that I'd hoped for, I came back with 15,000 words but if they're 15,000 good words, they're 15,000 very, very, I'm very happy with what I wrote, basically, lads, I wrote three separate stories, and I'm thrilled with them, very happy, and I entered the flow state, you'll know that I speak about, I speak a lot about the state of flow, which is, when you're creating, if you're an artist, and you want to write, or make music, or whatever, what you're chasing is the state of flow, which is, it's a daydream state, it's, it feels like you're daydreaming when you're a kid, but it's incredibly focused as well, so, like, when I was,

there was one, one story I wrote, and and I literally I felt like I left my body for four hours I swear to fuck I was sitting down in a cafe and the handy thing about that is you're sitting down in Spain as well one thing I realized you know why do I like writing in Spain so much it's because they have table service with drinks in Ireland you don't really get table service with drinks if I'm sitting down at my laptop in Ireland and I want to have a couple of pints, I'm writing, then I have to get up off my seat, go to the, like fold up my laptop, get a pint and come back and that interrupts my writing. But in Spain I can sit down in a bar for hours and they will just come over and they'll continually bring me

glasses of beer or wine when that one is gone. So that, that massively assisted my, my flow state. But yeah, I, it was fantastic. It was fucking lovely. The good thing about entering flow as well is that not only is it's like intense meditation do you know it's it cleanses the it cleanses my brain or something I don't know but if I do a good few hours of flow

I'm the happiest I can possibly be I feel like spiritually cleansed I suppose you'd call it you know what I mean so a very successful week and but it the week ended quite stressfully so I was flying back on the Friday night and I got a late flight was leaving Spain at nine to fly into Shannon airport in Ireland and then that morning I find out that Ireland is being hit by this fucking incredibly aggressive storm, Storm Hannah, right, so I'm all chilled out going right okay my flight is later on, 9 o'clock on the Friday, I can relax in Spain,

I can do a bit of editing we'll say in the morning and then I find out there's this fucking storm the next day on Saturday I have a sold out gig in Cork something like 1500 people in the Cork Opera House so I need to get back to fucking Ireland so as you can imagine I was shitting fucking bricks I was terrified I was legitimately facing the reality that like cause Shannon Airport the fucking the storm was going to hit Shannon harder than anywhere else

so I was pretty sure that my flight was going to be cancelled so what I did just so I wouldn't let down the people of Cork I booked a spare flight for the next day which would have gotten me into Dublin at two o'clock in the day which would have meant I would have had to boot down to Cork immediately basically to just get on stage and I also booked myself a hotel in Malaga to be safe so I had two flights so as you can imagine this is already

getting incredibly expensive if you book a fucking flight to from Spain to Ireland on the day before you're looking at a lot of money same with the hotel so anyway the flight to Shannon it was it went ahead it went ahead so I got on the plane at nine o'clock going fucking brilliant I'm gonna be back in Limerick tonight and I didn't know why because it's like the storm is still raging back home. So as I'm on the plane, the three hours are over, and the fucking pilot says to us, we're diverting to Dublin.

So I arrived in Dublin very, very late on Friday night at about one in the morning. Because it's Ryanair who are the worst pricks going. They're terrible. They couldn't give a shit about their customers. The plane fucking lands right tells everyone by the way you're not in in shannon you're in dublin and the pilot says right he's an irish pilot and i can understand this because i'm irish but god help anyone on that plane who is not Irish the pilot says sorry we're landing you in Dublin, we're going to provide

you with buses that will take you to Shannon, you'll find these in the departures lounge or the departures lounge in Dublin airport I don't know where it is, it's either upstairs or downstairs the fucking pilot

said that, your coach to Shannon is either upstairs or downstairs the fucking pilot said that your coach to Shannon is either upstairs or downstairs so that's a very complex Hiberno English linguistic thing right there

that's pure and utter Irishness where are you going? I don't know it's either upstairs or downstairs an irish person hears that and you kind of go what it means is don't worry you'll find it i'm not sure it's it's another way of saying it'll be grand because that's a big irish thing whenever irish people are presented with a problem, we will say, don't worry, it'll be grand. And it'll be grand means,

I suppose it means it'll be alright. It's kind of like saying, look, there's no crisis, I don't have all the information, but you just kind of have to put faith in the fact that it's going to work out, and it'll be grand. And Irish people do a lot of this, it'll be grand shit and we understand it it's our culture but people who are not irish don't fucking understand it'll be grand and they certainly don't understand the complex linguistic

aerobics of we're providing you with buses it's somewhere in the airport it's either upstairs or downstairs i don't know so me hearing this i went okay grand it's either upstairs or downstairs i don't know so me hearing this i went okay grand it's either upstairs or downstairs i'll get there i'll figure it out but the fucking spanish people are on me first of all they're trying to decipher this claire accent that the fucking pilot had and they're panicking he said it was upstairs and downstairs he said it was upstairs and downstairs and then i'm trying to calm down this spanish family going no you don't get it okay don't worry it's it's it's either upstairs or downstairs so then i'm digging a fucking hole for myself because they can't understand me so i just said just just just ask someone for departures and then they said where's the partridge and i almost said i don't know it's either upstairs

or downstairs so half of it is ryanair not giving a flying fuck and the other half of it is just that's just ireland that's just ireland and i i felt like saying to the spaniards this is what happens when you're colonized for 800 years this is what happens when when the english language is forced upon you you end up saying things like the departure's lounge is either upstairs or downstairs so i had a stressful a very stressful last day in spain but i tell you what and this again it's as part of my ongoing mental health like I talk a lot about mental health I talk a lot about the coping mechanisms that I use

being put in a situation where I don't know if I can get back to Ireland and I've got a sold out gig tomorrow right, that's in terms of stress that's about an 8 out of 10 that's a potential disaster situation.

It would be, realistically, it would be very, very bad for me to not make it to Cork and for there to be 1,500 people who've bought tickets turning up to a fucking gig and I don't show up. That's terrible. that would be very very bad and it's appropriate for me to respond to it as such that that's a that's a bad situation it would be terrible for the poor people that came out wanting a gig and it would be terrible for me as a person doing the gig and it would probably It would cost a shit load of money. Because if you don't turn up to a gig. Like. People are entitled to refunds.

And the venue are entitled to go. We could have had a show on tonight. And we could have gotten our money's worth. And you didn't turn up. So give us all the money for the tickets. So it could have been mad expensive too. So I was presented with a legitimate crisis. In Spain.

And as you know. my big mental health issue is anxiety anxiety is a huge trigger for me so when I find myself and and this is something I've been doing over the years when I find myself in a situation that I know is hugely hugely triggering for my anxiety there's my anxiety, there's my learning opportunity, there's my opportunity, more than ever, for me to use the coping mechanisms such as CBT to deal with it, because I'll be honest, when I found out there's a storm in Ireland and I mightn't get home and I might miss a gig. My gut, right, my actual negative learned behaviour from childhood, what I wanted to do, what my emotions wanted me to do, was to curl up in a ball in the train station in Spain. I wanted to curl up in a ball and rock back and forth

and make whimpering noises and maybe scream that's what my body wants to do I wanted to scream and rock back and forth and probably get arrested and kicked out of the train station that's that's what my emotions were telling me to do and 12 years ago I probably would have done that, so because I felt all these triggers boiling up, going right now this is a challenging situation, all that shit you've learned with mental health and resilience and coping and dealing with things like an adult, now is when you fucking need them, not necessarily last week when you're chilled out and you're enjoying yourself, right now you're in a fucking crisis so i did and

what i did is i just used cbt i looked it out and i like i said earlier it's like okay i'm in a legitimately frightening situation i'm in a potentially catastrophic situation and then i'd say to myself yeah fuck it if i miss the gig that would be terrible however it's some of it is outside of my control at the moment I'm still healthy I'm still safe you know it'll be disappointing it'll cost a few quid but ultimately I'm not in any physical danger so I said that to myself and then I said here's the shit I can't said, here's the shit I can't control. What can I not control? I can't control whether my flight is cancelled or not. We're talking about the fucking weather.

That is outside of my control. So what can I control? What I can control is how I react to this situation. So then I do what's known as moving things from your head to your heart I'm thinking these things cognitively and then I say right how can I move it from my heart and when you move it from your head to your thoughts into your emotions then what happens is that that starts to influence your behavior so my irrational thoughts wanted me to curl up into a ball and start whimpering and crying that would be thoughts are negative emotions are then negative whimpering

and crying and then my behavior yet the behavior then of the crying and screaming that's negative as well and the consequences of that would have been probably me getting arrested like i said i'd be you can't go around screaming and crying in a train station in spain you will get arrested so instead i was like here's what i can control i can book i can see what other flights are available i can see you know i can try to get my flight tonight I can try to get my flight at nine o'clock and if it's cancelled I will have a plan b and that plan b will be to stay in a hotel in Malaga and it'll cost a few quid but fuck it the gig is more important and I'll have a flight the next day and it's going to be tight all right but i can try at the very least and

that's what i did so i had my plan b in place then i started i foolishly rang my mother and my mother is she enjoys panicking you know so she told me and i think she might have been half right that had i gone to the airport at nine o'clock and checked my luggage in and if i was in the airport waiting to see if this flight would get cancelled or if the flight stayed too long i i wouldn't be able to leave the airport and go to my hotel because a plane what is it if your luggage is on the plane you you can't really leave then, you know? You can't really fuck off and leave. I think you're treated...

Your luggage has to be accountable and they'd have to unload all the luggage in order for me to leave. And then I said to her, fuck it, I'll risk it. And then she said to me, no, no, no, they'll think you're a terrorist. They're going to think that you're a terrorist and they might shoot you. They're going to shoot you. So then I realized it was rather foolish to ring up my mother because, you know, that's where I learned some of these anxiety behaviors. So now all of a sudden I'm on the phone to my ma and I'm role playing, being in Malaga airport, wanting to leave, my luggage being on the plane I'm visualising running

I'm running towards the gate and now those Spanish police with the machine guns are shooting me and I can feel the bullets pouring through my chest so then I get off the phone and I say no, I'm not entertaining the idea right, that wanting to go to Cork means me be dying in a

hail of fucking gunfire in Malaga I'm not having that so I hung up the phone and what I do too is you know as an act of self-compassion I become aware of of epigenetic trauma which is the the theory that trauma kind of carries through your genes and i become aware of like you know i've generations of ira blood in me you know my my my grandfather literally lived on the run fucking hiding from the black and tans because he shot 17 of them my great-grandfather was involved in the same shit so i have this legitimate trauma stored somewhere either in my genes or through learned behaviors of actually entertaining the idea that you'll be shot as a terrorist you know as absurd as that sounds but that's where i needed

to go at that moment in order to calm down while getting off the phone I had to go you know what it's not that mad that you'd be thinking this um it's something again I think that Irish people have it reminds me of a situation where we were filming over in England over in London and it was with BBC and we were it was it was snowing heavily in London and we were it was it was snowing heavily in london and we were filming around the embassies in london right so you have like it was right outside the pakistani embassy so outside the outside the embassies in london you have heavily armed guards right so we're trying to film these embassies but it's mad snowing outside and as a result of this we don't want to leave the car so we're in this giant blacked out Mercedes Jeep

and we have the door open on the side our cameraman's wearing a balaclava and pointing this camera out the fucking door now he's a very posh Englishman me and my director are both Irish so we're driving around the fucking embassies balaclavas with a camera pointing out and then we the paddies start freaking out going they're going to kill you they're going to shoot you they're going to think that you're trying to shoot up the embassy and

they have guns and they're going to kill you now the posh English fella was just like don't be silly don't be ridiculous it's a camera and then going, no, no, they're going to shoot us, they're going to kill us. And that was our epigenetic trauma. I'm guessing that the posh English fella just simply didn't have. But I digress. So I got off the phone to my ma, and I calmed down, and I said, right, what's a plan B?

How do I not put my luggage on the plane so what i simply did is i took all the liquids because i didn't even have big luggage anyway i had one of those smallish uh bags but wheels but you could take it on the plane if you wanted so i just took all of my liquids out of it i i had hair gel deodorant and hand sanitizer and I said fuck it you're staying in Spain you cunts and I fucked them into a bin and what else did I throw in a bin um a nail clippers and I took everything that wouldn't be allowed through security fucked it in the bin and then I took my luggage as as if it was going on the flight now I hadn't booked it onto the flight so the reiner would probably get me for 60 quid but they didn't so I also managed to solve that problem in a rational solution focused way without entertaining my mother's hypothesis which is me being shot to death in an international incident where I'm

accused of being a terrorist so I did the gig in Cork anyway and it was very enjoyable it was good crack I had a fucking fantastic guest Dr Sharon Lambert she's a lecturer in applied psychology in UCC everything was grand you know it cost me a few quid getting that extra flight in the hotel

but fuck it I don't care I got to see all those gorgeous smiling Cork faces at the sold out gig and it was lovely so anyway two more live podcasts this weekend hopefully they won't be as traumatic all right at the 4th and 5th of May 2019 on the 4th I am in Letterkenny all right couple of tickets left for that on the 5th the Saturday, Mullingar Art Centre, for the love of fuck please come to that gig, the promoter is breaking my heart, there's about 100

tickets left, again I think it's going to be grand, I think it's going to be grand but Mullingar people, please come to the gig on Saturday, please fucking Christ, yeah I went, yeah Jesus I'm only after, that's the only

time I really thought of what I went through there at'm only after that's the only time I really thought of what I went through there at the weekend I didn't really have time to process it because as soon as I got off the flight I was straight on to Cork

you know but I had an incredibly great time in Spain except for the last day and it kind of took me out of my flow it took me

very much into the real world. But tomorrow morning, I'm straight back into writing again. And that's the other thing too. Look, when it comes to creativity and when it comes to writing, intense situations, anything that will give you a weird dream, anything that might disturb your dreams and give you a weird dream all right anything that might disturb your dreams and give you a scary dream or an odd dream those triggering situations in the real world if channeled correctly are also what inform solid creativity you know so

i'll probably channel that somehow into a story of some description. If you are actually a new listener, like at the start where I told you to go back to the first episode, if you're a new listener and you're having a fucking clue what this podcast is about, those past 23 minutes will let you know why I said to go back to episode one, because if you've just arrived new, I just, I don't know back to episode one. Because. If you've just arrived now. I just. I don't know what I sound like. Alright. I'm a lot.

I'm usually a lot more rational. Than those past three. Twenty three minutes. So as promised. This week. I do have a hot take for ye. A little idea. That I've been mulling around.

Something I want to run by ye. So. We'll do the ocarina pause now. So that I can have an uninterrupted hot take the ocarina pause is so that I don't know an advert digital advert might be inserted and I don't want to alarm ye so I'm going to play my ocarina

my Spanish clay whistle ok it's the good one it's not the original good one but it's the new good one rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation night on saturday april 13th when the Toronto Rock hosts the Rochester Nighthawks at First Ontario Centre in Hamilton at 7.30pm. You can also lock in your playoff pack right now

to guarantee the same seats for every postseason game and you'll only pay as we play. Come along for the ride and punch your ticket to Rock City at torontorock.com. On April 5th, you must be very careful, Margaret. It's a girl. Witness the birth. Bad things will start to happen.

Evil things of evil. It's all for you. No, no, don't. The first omen. I believe the girl is to be the mother. Mother of what? Is the most terrifying. Six, six, six.

It's the mark of the devil. Hey! Movie of the year. It's not real. It's of the year it's not real it's not real what's not real who said that the first omen

only in theaters April 5th that's a beauty she's a beauty isn't she little ceramic witch um so yeah this podcast is supported by you the listener via the patreon page patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast do you like this podcast are you taking something from it am i providing you with an hour of entertainment every week if this is the case you can financially support this podcast by becoming a patron. If you met me in real life, would you like to buy me a coffee? Would you like to buy me a pint once a month?

You can do it. You can do that by going to the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind buy podcast. If you can afford it, do it. If you can't afford it you don't have to if you can't afford it you're paying for someone else who can't it's a model that's based on soundness it's working out fantastically so far it is it's providing me with the fucking resources whereby i can go to spain for a week and write my book and be happy and have meaning in my life and live as a professional artist I couldn't really do that a couple of years ago

because you don't know how much money is coming and when so when you're living like that you kind of have to go I can't go to Spain next week because I don't know when the next paycheck is coming from and I've got fucking bills but currently because of the Patreon I have a regular predictable income which allows me to plan and to live and fucking thank you so much to every single person who is a patron of this podcast. Thank you so much. I cannot state the security and happiness it gives to me. So thank you so much. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes.

Rate the podcast. Leave a review. Also, if you're on Spotify, follow the podcast on Spotify. And to new people, because the biggest growth on this podcast is international. I've got listeners from all around the world now. Half the listenership is, bizarrely, half the fucking listenership is people who've never heard of me before. People who don't know who the Rubber Bandits are. I was in a i still am

a musical act called the rubber bandits for the past 10 years doing songs um so if you want to find me on social media because a lot of people searching for blind boy on social media it's at rubber bandits on twitter at rubber bandits official on Twitter, at Rubberbandits Official on Instagram, and at Rubberbandits on Facebook. But fuck Facebook, there's nothing going on there. I try and promote the podcast on Facebook, and it's just pointless. No one sees it. You know, I'd put a post up, it would have 10 likes in an hour, even though the page has 450,000 followers. 10 likes and just one comment from a man from Affily who tells me I haven't been funny

since Horse Outside so fuck Facebook so hot take I do have a hot take this week em you know the hot take it is the the sweeping a sweeping theory

that borders on borders on borders on conspiracy theory but isn't as harmful as some conspiracy theories but borders on conspiracy theory and is about 80% factually

accurate. My hot takes are just like an interesting conversation you'd have in a pub with someone that's that's what i try and do with them i want to entertain i want the hot takes to be entertaining and to be interesting to give you the podcast hug to give you that little that hour once a week where you're not certainly not looking in your phone you're not worried about instagram you're not worried about twitter you're just listening. You know, and being entertained.

So what I was thinking about was a lot of chat recently in the news about, it was a week ago, Theresa May, who is the king of England or whatever the fuck she is. Theresa May, Prime Minister of Britain. Recently, it was leaked i believe right and i don't know how 100 solid it is but theresa may has agreed a deal with a chinese company called hawaii hawaii hawaii i think they're called, but they're a huge mobile phone company. They make class mobile phones, they're not as expensive as other companies, but it's a Chinese company nonetheless,

and there's a lot of fear around Chinese technology. Now, how much of this fear is legitimate i don't know right there's something that that has always persisted in the 20th century and this is a western bias which is known as the yellow peril and the yellow peril is a term that describes a kind of a racist or xenophobic fear towards particularly in the cold war times it was mainly

towards Japan Japan America fucking dropped nuclear bombs on Japan and they were terrified that the Japanese would retaliate so as a result they introduced a thing called the Marshall Plan

I believe and this limited the amount of it limited the military that Japan could have it limited any possibility of the Japanese actually going ye fucking nuclear bomb does you pricks we're going to get you back

after World War II and throughout the Cold War America stopped Japan being able to produce arms but the Japanese as a very industrious and technologically advanced culture they put their efforts instead into electronics technology. We covered this before with, I did a podcast a few weeks ago about the influence that Japan had on electronic music. All the great synthesizers and drum machines come from Japan. But the yellow peril was this Western fear of Japanese technology and japanese advancement and you can see it in western popular

culture in a film like blade runner we'll say you know if you look at blade runner blade runner is set in 2019 and the world of blade runner is a dystopian hell in earth right now where culturally everything is asian the adverts are asian the signage is asian there's uh strangely not a lot of asian people in the fucking film which is most likely just as a result of good old hollywood racism but some apologists like to say that uh no in the world of blade runner the asians won the cold war or whatever and they live in off world they live in on mars in in this advanced civilization and all the westerners are living in a dystopian hell on earth but you see in it uh a fear of asian culture you also see this in another film that's not stanley kubrick what's his fucking name ridley scott who directed blade runner the film he made after blade runner which

is a very shit film but looks beautiful the film he made after blade runner is called black rain and it's visually very similar to blade runner i I watch Black Rain with the sound off uh just to have it as ambience in the background because it's so visually beautiful the lighting the cinematography it's gorgeous but it is a film about Michael Douglas as a cop in New York and he's fighting the Yakuza who are the Japanese mafia and. And the name Black Rain. Black Rain literally means. It's the rain. It's the nuclear fallout rain.

So the name itself actually references Japanese revenge. You know the Yakuz are there in New York restaurants. Shooting the place up with machine guns. And the name of the film means Black Rain. So they're actually consciously saying this is the japanese revenge they're getting us back for dropping atomic bombs and killing hundreds of thousands of people so the fear of chinese electronics that exists at the moment now i know china and j, two massively different fucking cultures, miles apart, completely different people. But in the Western racist lens, it doesn't matter. They're all those people over there on the East.

To quote unquote, to use the colonial term, Orientals. This is how the trope of yellow peril um operates so theresa may is after doing a deal with hawaii to provide the 5g infrastructure in the uk 5g is an upcoming technology it's going to kick in in about two or three years they already have it in china i believe it's the next phase of the internet 5g is going to change everything it's i don't know loads about it but like you'll be able to download an entire film in like a second also i think it does away with wi-fi towers and shit it's like the internet will literally be everywhere. The internet will be in things. It's, you know, right now we have fridges with a bit of internet in them

and toasters with internet. In the 5G world, fucking everything will have internet in it. My vape pen that I smoke is going to have some type of internet receiver in it because 5G will allow that to happen. And it is incredibly advanced unlike anything we've seen internet wise so far.

So the West wants to get stuck into this 5G shit. For commerce and for military and for everything. It's the future. It is the future. That's how we're going to be living in 10 years. And how life is right now will seem like the Stone Age. When 5G kicks in. But the leaders of 5g technology are the chinese okay

they are the ones who have the ability to really roll this out the main competitors nakia is one who are a swedish company i believe and i think there's an american company too so the u.s government at the moment is essentially bullying countries around the world and saying to them do not do any deals with chinese don't do any electronics deals with chinese don't allow them do your 5g interest infrastructure none of that shit and their line their threat basically is you can't trust the Chinese government. They're a totalitarian communist state. And all they want to do is to roll out a Trojan horse basically.

They want to, because I think they approached Australia. They did like Australia's broadband for fuck all. So the Yangs are saying the Chinese want to get 5g in every country and they want their infrastructure to be 5g because what it essentially means is that if if you're you know if in a 5g future all of the infrastructure everything from your kettle to the national health service to the military is 5g enabled the u.s fear is that the chinese are going to have this technology which can spy upon the west and in the event of cyber warfare can essentially cripple the west because you can turn off the lights you can you can cause chaos so this is what the US are saying.

Stay the fuck away from the Chinese. The British decision to decide to partner with Hawaii or Hawaii or whatever they're called. It's a bit strange. It's very odd. And there's two ways of looking at it. One way is that in the event you know brexit is happening therefore the brits are shitting their pants about trade and so they're basically on their knees going okay we will take we china are willing to do this with us so we're going to fucking do it

because we're out of the eu and we don't know what we're going to do. That's one reading. The other reading is that the British are deliberately saying they're going to allow the Chinese to provide their 5G infrastructure as a kind of scary, frightening thing to both the EU and the US, whereby the EU will go, OK, lads, all right, we'll give you whatever you want, just don't allow the Chinese have the infrastructure, because then that's a backdoor for the rest of europe so i don't fully know what's happening around there right so i do believe that the look we've all seen the fucking what the nsa what the what the americans are also spying on people and mining data and Trojan horsing and spying on governments and using data in a malicious fashion.

We've seen this. The Edward Snowden leaks prove this. This is what the US are doing. It's what the British are doing. It's what most Western countries are doing. The Chinese are also doing it. Okay. are also doing it okay what it's about really is do you want the quote-unquote good guys like america and britain spying on you and controlling your data or do you want the

quote-unquote bad guys china spying on your data so it comes down to that it's imperialism as such and there is elements of this yellow peril this orientalism mixed with technology this fear so i don't know fully where i stand on it it's it's digital imperialism is what i'll call it and there's some dark shit going on around it like I don't know if you remember there around December the US are taking this very seriously the daughter of the founder of

Huawei this technology mobile phone company this Chinese company in the daughter of she's the chief financial executive of hawaii she was arrested in canada and is facing extradition charges in the u.s so you have the the u.s the canadians have arrested this chinese businesswoman the u.s want her extradited and brought to the US on charges of Hawaii doing business with Iran. And there's currently an embargo,

but there's been a longstanding embargo on Iran that technology companies are not to provide technology to Iran. I always remember, you know, Dell computers used to be in Limerick and I remember getting a Dell computer about 10 years ago or whatever and when you buy the computer you had to sign an agreement and part of the agreement you had to agree that you would not allow the computer to be shipped to Iran

or to be given to an Iranian person so the daughter of Hawaii is I believe still in Canada arrested facing extradition charges which is it's very dark it's that's medieval shit you know throughout medieval times you always had princes or kings getting kidnapped and held for ransom you know as for the you know true international power of mercantilism or whatever jeez i'm talking out of my hope there went straight on to mercantilism but this was a thing in the medieval times uh princes princesses kings queens were regularly kidnapped and held for ransom and it reminds me a bit of that it's strange so where i want to go my with my hot take it's not necessarily a technological

one but more of a philosophical hot take um what i find interesting and kind of scary about China is China is a communist state okay now it might just be communist by name I'd like to know what Karl Marx would think of China as a communist state and whether it's it's what he envisioned it to be or Lenin um there's a lot of inequality there you know it's got a lot of billionaires there's a lot of poor people um very little freedom of expression next to no freedom of expression the chinese government kind of controls everything in people's lives they're highly responsive to any threat um if you've ever been you know in grafting street in dublin or in chinatown in london you'll often see these chinese protesters and what they do is they line the street and they'll be kind of sometimes they're on the ground like tied up or bound and there'll

be someone with a megaphone usually in chinese and you have to sign this petition and what it says is falun gong and falun gong is this i don't know what you even call it a movement falun gong is a mindfulness practice that's kind of like tai chi it's not religious it's not political it simply is just to reduce it to be very reductive about it it's just mindfulness it's a kind of like yoga mindfulness but the thing is in china it's very very very popular A lot of people do this Falun Gong and a lot of people were gathering in parks by the thousands to do these Tai Chi like yoga movements and to practice this mindfulness called Falun Gong. Like I said not political, not religious, not ideological and this very quickly became violently outlawed in china

practitioners of falun gong are kidnapped and like sent away to camps and there's accusations of you know one reading is that because these falun gong people are you know they're so healthy to be doing this practice their organs are harvested against their will and they're tortured and they're bound and it's a huge human rights abuse that's happening in China so in Chinatowns in like London or you'll see it in Grafton Street or in Parnell Street up in Dublin you'll see these protests for Falun Gong and you're kind of thinking, why the fuck is this outlawed in China? They're not doing anything. All they're doing is mindfulness. Why is this illegal? The reason it's illegal is the very fact that so many people in China are unified under one idea.

That is not the government state sanctioned way to be just the fact that people are gathering in this other thing is enough for it to be a threat because the chinese government are going well if all of them are getting together just to move slowly in a park well then they're a unified group and what happens if they do get political then you have a revolution in your hands so let's just shut it down now even though they're not really doing anything wrong they just happen to be doing it together so that's that's one little insight to how freedom of expression is really uh shut down in china there's's the Muslim population in China at the moment are facing severe human rights abuses and the other thing that interests me about China is that China is one of a few countries that is officially an atheist state. It's not secular. A secular state you know allows complete freedom of religion and

you know the government will not interfere with religion but in china it is an atheist state the actual state policy is one of atheism religions do exist but i think there's only like five and you have to be one of these five religions and if you're outside of those five religions then it's outlawed and how the these religions practice is controlled and watched and monitored by the government which is state atheism like in 2016 uh your man Xi Jinping I think his name is he's he's the is he the president general secretary of the chinese government like he'd straight up said that you know the communist party which is that you know the one state ruling party of china must be unyielding marxist atheists

and you know within marxism within going back to the russian revolution you know anti-religion is a thing it's it's the original communists and the leninists and the stalinists or whatever they didn't view religion quite kindly they saw religion as uh is it opium for the masses is that a marx quote or is that an oscar wilde quote but it was viewed as a very corrupt thing a very corrupt thing that would take all the money and land off the working classes and essentially control them so therefore it would be an enemy of marxism and true liberation of the people you know so China kind of takes this this stand that it is an atheist state there's no real place for God in China or the idea of a God

and I can see why this would work within Chinese culture because China is again harking back to another podcast that I did last year about collectivism versus individualism China is a collectivist country the culture is collectivism how people view their community is collectivist versus, we'll say in the West, we are individualist. Collectivism basically is, it's when the rules of society promote selflessness and it's not about you as an individual, it's about your community as a whole. It's about everyone. If you are to exist in a collectivist society there's very little room for selfishness what can i do to better the people around me and how can we

exist as a system as such and you know communism is a bit like that um working together as a group working together as a group, doing what's best for your society. In the West, we're individualist. We think about ourselves. We're interested in promoting ourselves first. We're an individualist culture, probably stemming from ideas that come from the Greeks, Greek Western traditions.

Also, like, you know, monotheistic religion tends to be quite individualistic. It's about, you know, your personal relationship with God. It's about the person, you know. Also as well, we discussed in that podcast, anthropologists have looked at societies that are collectivist versus societies that are individualist. What they found is that cultures whereby rice is the staple carbohydrate tend to be collectivist because if you're to grow rice rice is not something you can grow on your own in your back garden it's a

difficult crop to grow and it requires the input of every single person in the community if you're to have a decent rice crop everyone has to chip in to look after all the rice and then all that rice feeds the community and the theory is that cultures where rice is the main staple food these cultures tend to be collectivistic in the west where the staple carbohydrate is things like wheat uh potatoes even though i suppose potatoes are south american but we'll say wheat barley you can quite comfortably have your own little patch of barley and your own little patch of wheat and make your own barley for yourself and your family. And your neighbour can do the same. And this led to an individualistic way of addressing yourself in western societies.

Okay. So back to China. This massive country that is ruled by communist state atheism. Here's my hot take. Now you can tell me to fuck off if you want, you can tell me I'm talking out of my arse, that's grand, it's just my opinion, it's my reading of the situation.

This is what I find interesting. China, for a society, for a government that does not have a god seems to be using technology to invent god okay now let's take a look at what god is okay now i'm i'm not saying god's real or any shit like that let's let's take the spiritualism out of it and look at god purely from a sociological point of view and maybe an anthropological point of view you know what is god aside from god creating everything the tenets of what god tends to be in we'll say the abrahamic religions which is islam um fucking islam christianity judaism

right these are the i say i don't know what you call you can't really call you can't call islam a western religion but it it does have its roots in abrahamic religions and the abrahamic religions are the ones that tend tended to succeed in the west anything that's rooted in judaism both islam and christianity are rooted in judaism and these religions did very well in the west quote unquote so the three real tenets of a god on a philosophical um level is three things omnipotence omniscience and omnipresence omnipotence means that your god is all powerful that there is nothing more powerful than god you can try all you want to fight god but you can't because god controls everything from you

know it controls your future controls the the past, controls the weather, controls the animals, controls destiny, fate. An omnipotent God is all-powerful. An omniscient God means all-knowing. An omniscient God knows fucking everything. An omniscient God knows what has happened, what is going to happen. Knows all possible probabilities of what will happen. Most importantly, an omniscient God knows what you are thinking. There is no way to escape an omniscient God.

If your thoughts are sinful, an omniscient God knows that your thoughts are sinful. sinful an omniscient god knows that your thoughts are sinful and that omniscient god will use its omnipotence to reward or punish you when you die so there's no escaping an omniscient omnipotent god finally the third tenet of what a god is in the abrahamic tradition is omnipresent. God is everywhere. There is no escaping. You can't climb into a cupboard and have five minutes away from God. So these three tenets are what God has been thousands and thousands of years. And to view it purely from a sociological and anthropological point of view, it serves, you know, it serves an important, it serves an important role in terms of keeping order in society.

if and interestingly too this omnipotent omnipresent and omniscient god thing it tends to emerge in human society alongside monotheism which means one god it tends to arrive in society when farming became a thing right because the thing with farming is when humans were hunter-gatherers right humans used to just go around in little parties and gather their nuts and fruit and humans weren't necessarily territorial and it was just small bands of people trying their best to get their food and these communities used to be polytheistic. They relied upon the chaos of nature. They had many different gods. One that controlled the sun, one that controlled the crops,

one that controlled the fucking wind, one that controlled the animals. Several different gods in order to control the simple chaos of uncertainty that a hunter-gatherer faces. A hunter-gatherer has no certainty. Do we have berries? No, we ate them all. Okay, let's move and find the next berries or the next herd of deer or whatever then when humans start to discover agriculture and farming what happens is humans start to be able to grow things like wheat

and barley and now humans don't have to move because your food is something you can grow from the ground and from this came cities and towns no longer do you have a small group of people farting around the place in maybe Dunbar's number would say it's between 30 and 150 people now you have large communities of up to a thousand or even more existing together not needing to travel because they're growing food they're farming animals and what it also does too is in in this

large society it creates the problems that societies face crime you know crime and fighting some people say that things like crime and fighting they really became an issue when the concept of surplus became a thing when you're a hunter gatherer you don't really have surplus you have enough food to maybe last you a couple of weeks but that's it when you've got a huge field of wheat and you harvest it and you can store those grains in a big tower and feed the whole community for fucking six months now you have too much and when this little town has too much wheat the other hunter gatherers who haven't established communities yet are going look at those cunts with all their wheat what are we doing you know dying out here fucking looking for berries looking for deer let's go and steal their wheat so then they have to you

know create defenses and this is where large-scale war starts to happen in i'm talking 30 000 years ago lads long long time ago and this is where large societies and conflicts and inequality come from the concept of surplus having too much and other people going i want what that person has they've loads of it i'm taking it and monotheism the idea of one god tends to prop up in human communities when this shit happens right because it serves an important purpose i want i want that person's wheat and when they're asleep at night i can sneak into their silo and i can steal the wheat and there's nothing really you can do about it other than have 24-hour guards so you get these concepts such as well if you steal the wheat god will see and god can see everything you do and if you even

think about stealing the wheat god will know you're thinking about it because he's all powerful so he can punish you he's everywhere so there's no like disguise you can put on yourself to steal the wheat he's gonna fucking see you and he knows everything he knows you stole the wheat so you can't blame someone else and he knows that you're thinking about it and his omnipotence will have its wrath upon you you will be punished in the afterlife so this creates social order and it's very useful and it was very useful in all of human history but as you know technology advances in society you tend to not need the idea of god anymore because you know that it's probably bullshit so what my hot take is and what makes it so fucking interesting

with china as this atheist state that has completely done away with the concept of god they've they've gotten rid of it so now they have a society now it is collectivist and there is you know high amounts of shame if you don't pull your weight but in this atheist society how do you stop the people stealing the grain when they know there's no god when the government says there's no god when the country is big enough to go you can do a crime and you can get away with it and no one will see you so what china is doing right now is it inadvertently and i think it doesn't know it's doing this i think it's a natural cultural evolution development china is creating god with technology and this here's how china is doing this china is creating what's known as a social credit system and it'll be fully in

effect by 2020 it's all it's in most of china already it's been going they they come up at the end of 2007 now in individualistic countries uh in the west we're familiar with the credit system a credit system in in fucking ireland or america it's it tracks you know are you good at paying money back so if you take loans out and you pay them back in time then you've got a good credit so if your credit is shit and you go to apply for a loan they're going to go well we can see here from your credit history that you're really bad at paying loans back so we're not going to give you another loan you know that again that's highly individualistic it's about money it's about the person

we also have it in a lesser scale with if you use airbnb if you use airbnb and you have your airbnb profile if you go and stay with someone in spain in airbnb if you don't leave the place in a good state if you break the rules that your Airbnb host has set for you you know don't have any parties no pets if you break these rules then the Airbnb host will leave a bad review and then because you now have a bad review on your Airbnb profile when you go for more Airbnbs the host will see that you've got a bad rating and you are less likely to get another Airbnb so these are forms of credit systems that we already have very much around individualistic consumerist principles so it's not that new to us but china as a collectivist country collectivism being what can you do for your society not about you as an individual but

how well are you contributing to your community are you pulling your weight china has been rolling out what's known as the social credit system and it's doing this through is the social credit system and it's doing this through mobile phones technology data tracking the shit that you and i are used to you know your data being tracked like over here it's it's mainly being used for advertising all right that whole business with fucking brexit and the u.s election using online data to influence politics but mainly our data here is tracked so you know i like some of it my my you know i use spotify a lot so my data is tracked on spotify so if i'm listening to a new band that i like i look forward to spotifying spotify tracking my data collating that data with other users that are listening

to the same thing and then recommending to me some music that i'll probably like so i quite enjoy that but china is the government is using people's data and mobile phones and laptops to rate and create a social credit score based on how productive you are as a member of society how good or bad you are as a person so china as well as a communist state so as a result of this the tech companies in china are very heavily regulated by the government and share all of their data on all their users with the one party state communist government so how does this social credit system work well first off basically what they're trying to do is they want to make like having your mobile phone completely fucking mandatory you have to have a mobile phone if you are to be a citizen and this mobile phone tracks your data what they also have is really really complex facial recognition so there's tons and tons of security cameras all over china and they have your face scanned and if they see you in it they can

recognize your face that face is collated with your you know your identity which is logged with the government so you are completely and utterly tracked at all times now we kind of have experienced this in the west you know if you have your phone on you at all times we know our phones listen to us speak we know that our phones track our gps wherever we go this happens here in the west but we have the illusion of a certain degree of freedom around it in china within collectivism what they're looking for is whether you're a bad selfish citizen or a good contributing trustworthy citizen so things that will so you're given this social credit score this is your score right one out of ten we'll say if you do things like you know you're not your driving isn't great then this is logged via your phone and it goes into your social credit score and this is lowered

if you're smoking fags where you shouldn't be smoking fags interesting playing too many video games will lower your social credit score if you spend too much time playing video games then you're being selfish you're being individualistic you're not contributing to society you're spending too much time alone that will lower your social credit score if you and this is where it gets scary if if you are seen to be spreading rumors they call it spreading rumors or gossip which basically means you know going online and talking shit about the wrong stuff which could be talking too much about christianity talking too much about islam and this entire podcast where i'm criticizing the Chinese government this would lower your social credit score

lots of these different things can lower how you're viewed as a citizen you know, sending someone a mean message on Facebook being rude to somebody via your DMs speaking shit out of your mouth around somebody and your phone is listening to you what you have here is an omniscient device in your pocket that is able to track every single aspect of your behavior and the government judges whether this behavior is good and contributes

to your community or whether it's bad takes away from the community and is selfish so if you have a low social credit score in china there's there's proper fucking punishments for it and the punishments start off kind of low it they're very inconvenient so if you are a person who, we'll say drinks too much, do you know, I'll go to the off-license once a week. Now, my phone knows I'm going to the off-license because my phone's in my pocket so it can trace, right, he's gone up to O'Brien's off-license once a week. Now, let's just say we move towards a cashless society, which is what's going to happen.

Cash is going to be gone. And in China, they want everything to be paid for with the mobile phones so you no longer are transferring cash if you go to the fucking off license and you decide you want eight cans of beer on a friday and you have to pay for this with your mobile phone it is logged that you have bought eight cans of beer eight cans of beer might be considered acceptable if you go again on a sunday and now it's 16 cans of beer might be considered acceptable if you go again on a Sunday and now it's 16 cans of beer this is seen as alcoholism and drunkenness and you are not contributing to society so this lowers

your social credit score what is life like for a person like this? well it means that let's just say they want to get on a train and they need to go somewhere, well if your social credit score is low you might be they want to get on a train and they need to go somewhere. Well, if your social credit score is low,

you might be denied access to that train or you might be pushed back to a queue where only people with good social credit scores get on the train first and you might have to walk. They also punish you by, if your social credit score is low, then your internet is shit. You don't have good, fast internet to consume media the way you want. You're put on a really slow internet, so your life is not very enjoyable. A lot of it reminds me of the fucking Irish penal laws or the Jim Crow laws that they had in America.

Because if your social credit score is particularly low and you want your children to go to a school, if you want your children to go to a good school, we'll say, and your social credit score is particularly low and you want your children to go to go to a school if you want your children to go to a good school we'll say and your social credit score is low your children are not going to get into that school simple as that you're denied the best education that you can get um jobs how do you go for that job you know how do you go for that job, you know, how do you go for that job, when your social credit score is low, you're going to be excluded from it, they keep you out of fucking, hotels,

amenities, basically, in this, Japan, or sorry, China is a country with a lot of money, and people like to spend money, and they like to go to restaurants,

and they like to have pastimes, and to enjoy themselves when they can. If your social credit score is low, you are denied access to these things. You are actively fucking punished. If you go too far with it, then you're put on the blacklist. Then you can actually end up in prison. Then you end up severely punished. We don't know are people being sent off to camps like these Falun Gong people,

but I'm guessing they would. You know, it's a great way to shut down on Falun Gong because they know that all of a sudden all these people are all together in a public park and they know when you're practicing Falun Gong. So this is not science fiction as well, lads. This is not, this is what's going to happen. This is happening in China now.

It has been rolled out since the idea came in 2007. It's been on a pilot scheme since 2014. About 70% of the country is now in the social credit system and by 2020 it's going to be all over China as a collectivist way to control society via punishments and rewards and create the best citizens in accordance with what the totalitarian state government decides what a good citizen is now what happens if you're a good citizen you don't drink all the time you don't play video

games you're a good driver you're nice to people you obey the party line you don't talk shit on the internet you are a good contributing member of society that what happens then is your social credit score goes up people whose social credit scores are high they actively get actual fucking rewards so those rewards are i've heard one of them is you get if you're on a dating website you're most like more likely to get good matches obviously you get pushed ahead in queues like i don't know let Let's just say your fucking. Your printer breaks. And you want to fix it.

So what do you do? You ring up the printing company. To say my printer is broken. How do I fix it? If your social credit score is low. You are put to the bottom of the queue. To speak to an operator. If your social credit score is high.

You are put to the top of the queue. And you can speak to someone who'll fix your printer quicker. This is the same for plumbing services. For, you know, if you have a fucking, you know, a leak in your bloody house and you need it fixed really quickly. People with high social credit scores get the services first. Health. You know, what if you want access to a doctor? If you want access to a doctor, you want access to a doctor you better

have that social credit score high you better be a model citizen because then you will get to the doctor first if your score is low you are not getting the medical attention that you need and this is fucked up people with the highest social credit scores are given discounts on their household bills they walk into a restaurant they're given discounts on their household bills. They walk into a restaurant, they're given discounts. They might be given some free food. Serious perks. And if you behave yourself in accordance with what the totalitarian state government decides,

you are going to be treated very, very well. Essentially, people with bad social credit scores live in hell. with good social credit scores they live in heaven the social credit score will also actively discourage you from interacting with people who have a low social credit score it could even be a member of your family it could be your brother if you have a brother who is suffering from alcoholism and drinks loads and loads and loads because they have a disease when you call your brother up on the phone at this big police siren plays when you when you when you ring up your brother a police siren plays and warns you you are talking to somebody with a low social credit score if you continue to do it that can impact your social credit score so it encourages people

to treat the people with low who aren't behaving themselves quote unquote to treat these people as pariahs to treat them as outcasts this is happening in china now and what is this social credit score system it's omnipresent it's everywhere it's all powerful that means it's omnipotent and it is all knowing it's omniscient it is using technology to read your facebook cameras to track you and there's no escaping it when they move to a cashless society there truly is no way of escaping it the chinese this atheist state has created god using technology the old god where it was existed as a concept that you were afraid of i remember it myself you know i was indoctrinated as a child in catholicism up until about the age of 10 I had God in my head

God existed in my head at all times and I was conscious of sinning and I would never think about sinning or never try and sin because God was in my head because Catholicism had done that to me it's a story I told before but when I was seven years of age we were fucking around in class messing or whatever and an incident happened I went into it before but anyway we were fucking around in class messing or whatever and an incident happened I went into it before but anyway we were about to make our first confirmation and because I'd been bold in class the teacher dragged me to the top of the fucking classroom and got a jam jar filled it up with water and said this jam jar is blind by soul and then she put dirt into the jar and said this is now his dirty soul because he has sinned and he can only absolve this by going to the priest and telling

this priest his sins and by confessing to the priest that's the fucking social credit score system lads except it's not a concept anymore in China it is a technological fucking reality they have created God and that is my boiling hot roasting take for this week and I just

hope to fuck that that never happens here I just really really hope that we don't end up with that and it would be naive of us to think that our society that we live in such a free society that they won't do it of course they'll do it the thing is with China is that because it's already communist because it's already atheistic because it's already collectivist it's easier to roll these things out within it you know a government

that has so much control and a culture that already is collect collectivistic in the west you know we already give away huge amounts of our data but in order for us to do it it's you know it's true free apps it's true deception um you know it it would be true the way our rights get stripped away in the west is some big disaster happens or some big terrorist attack happens and then our rights are stripped away from us under the guise of it keeping us safe biggest Biggest example would be post 9-11. As soon as 9-11 happened. George Bush brought in a thing called the Patriot Act. And the Patriot Act basically gave. Wide kind of powers of surveillance and interrogation on American citizens.

Under the guise of it's protecting homeland security. So the issue I have with this, and if it did happen in the West, they could kind of do it in the morning. Your phone already knows how many times you go to the off-license. It already knows how fast you drive down the road. It already knows what your purchases are.

It already knows how much shit you talk about the road it already knows what your purchases are it already knows how much shit you talk about the government online it already knows these things about you your data is being collected right now just because we live in the west our data is being used instead to sell us more things the individualistic it's it's not really aggressively and explicitly being used to control but if they wanted to flick that switch in the morning the infrastructure is kind of already there to do it your phone already knows this stuff it just takes malicious intent um so best of luck anyway i'll talk to you next week all right hope you enjoyed that um have a lovely time i really enjoyed this podcast i love a good fucking hot take i really enjoy just ranting and getting it out of my head and you

know what one or two facts might have been wrong but if you're here for hardcore academic fucking facts. Then you're listening to the wrong podcast. I'm just talking off the top of my head. Based on things that I read. And things that I'm interested in. And mostly what I want it to be is entertaining and engaging. And I hope you had a lovely podcast hug. Alright I'll talk to you next week. Thank you. Thank you. rock city you're the best fans in the league bar none tickets are on sale now for fan appreciation

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