Don’t Go Spelunking!

Speaker 1 Here Comes the Guillotine contains offensive language, mature content, and adult themes.

Speaker 2 It is not suitable for a younger audience.

Speaker 3 This is a Global Player Original podcast.

Speaker 2 Hello, and welcome to Here Comes the Guillotine. I'm Frankie Boyle, and I'm going to be talking to Christopher MacArthur Boyd.

Speaker 2 Here comes a mailbike.

Speaker 2 My father was a mail,

Speaker 2 my mother was a bike.

Speaker 2 They made love to one another and they gave birth to me, the mailbag.

Speaker 2 Hi, Christopher. Oh, this is a mailbag.
Can you give me the mailbag song, please?

Speaker 2 Here comes the mailbag.

Speaker 2 Why don't you climb in?

Speaker 2 Here comes the mailbag. Who's claiming it? Let me tie it under your chin.

Speaker 2 Here comes the mailbag. We're posting you and you're never coming back.

Speaker 2 It's the mailbag.

Speaker 2 Who was that song to? The mail? That must be someone who's about to jump. Yeah, it was to the mail.

Speaker 2 My father was a male, my mother was a bag, and now I'm the male bike.

Speaker 2 Hi, Christopher Frankie, and Susie. Susie's not here this week, as you can probably tell from the fact that she didn't have

Speaker 2 Pod has been great. Been looking like a nut job, giggling on the bus or train to work, but it's all worth it for a laugh.

Speaker 2 I've been trying dating and recently went on my first, first date as I've been trying to do things to get me out of my comfort zone as I recently turned 18 and fear.

Speaker 2 I have had a fairly sheltered upbringing and I'm attempting to grow up a bit more before I

Speaker 2 they've said love out for uni. Before I love out for uni.

Speaker 2 What would that leave for uni maybe is what they meant? I'm not sure. Auto-correct.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Or Freud. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Wondering if you guys have any advice for coping with things like working on your social skills and coming out of your comfort zone socially. Most of which make my introverted brain want to explode.

Speaker 2 Thanks a lot and hope to hear from you on the podcast. See ya.

Speaker 2 It's often that thing with the mailbag isn't it where the fact they've written into the mailbag is already a disastrous indicator.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 I think what do you think about that? Did you feel like you had a fairly shouted upbringing or did you feel like when you left to go to uni uni that you were kind of

Speaker 2 ready to be an adult? I was extremely introverted to the extent that people, I guess, would now call autism.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 alcohol really opened me up. This is not advice.

Speaker 2 But, you know.

Speaker 2 See, consider alcohol. But without alcohol, I kind of wonder what would have happened in my life because I found it very, very difficult to communicate

Speaker 2 or to have the confidence to express anything really

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 and uh yeah I got loaded and I had a really bad time but I don't know there's got to be

Speaker 2 there's got to be I you know I think

Speaker 2 join some clubs

Speaker 2 join some clubs uni and go along go along to your D ⁇ D society or whatever introverted

Speaker 2 thing you can get involved in

Speaker 2 fencing spelunking

Speaker 2 don't go spelunking. That's a recipe for disaster.
Yeah. You will end up with your head trapped in a molehill

Speaker 2 three miles underneath the crust of the earth. Drowning in three inches of rainwater.

Speaker 2 In a muddy burrow. See when you see the videos and you're like,

Speaker 2 this is how you die? Starving to death, upside down

Speaker 2 in a crack.

Speaker 2 That gives me, I'm getting, my stomach's rumbling and like rolling thinking about

Speaker 2 you just trying to swallow your tongue rather than

Speaker 2 put up with the three days it would take you to die. Some family of bats tunneling up your spelunking themselves and your intestinal tract.
Well soon some worms will be spelunking in your body.

Speaker 2 So don't don't get into spelunking

Speaker 2 is the advice.

Speaker 2 I saw a video of this and there was a guy who

Speaker 2 got stuck in some so there's some famous hard to back out of hole but you can go around it and he thought he was in that but he wasn't he was in some wormhole at the end and he just ended up head down feet towards the sky as people desperately tried to rescue him I think in the end they

Speaker 2 just blew up that bit of the thing and went well that's your grave then they blew it up or they closed it down and just went yeah

Speaker 2 we're not we're not getting that guy out of there oh god

Speaker 2 that's yeah you you know how you can get a marble stuck up your nose? Yeah. Spelunkin is basically your attempt to become that marble for the earth.

Speaker 2 It's like people who show up in AE with a tomato sauce bottle up their rectum. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You need a flared base. Your body doesn't have a flared base

Speaker 2 to be inserted in the rectum of the world.

Speaker 2 And if you ask a public surgeon to flare your arshole, you get some really strange looks.

Speaker 2 Just find it look better. Yeah, like a pair of jeans.
Flare on the zone. I want flared jeans and I went and flared ring piece.

Speaker 2 That you could raise like a crest? Like a low. When I'm in danger, yeah.
Yeah, if you're threatened.

Speaker 2 If I'm face first in the crest of the earth and a family of moles is tunnelling up behind me, I want my arsehole to flare up like one of those lizards from Jurassic Park. Really?

Speaker 2 I'd rather Marshall was sewn tight.

Speaker 2 I would have it sewn up before I went, Spelunking. But then even if you survive it, you can't take a shite when you get out.
I would unpick the stitches. You know, I'd have a...
Just a fire.

Speaker 2 I'd have a travel kit. Right.

Speaker 2 So those are good advantages on how you come out of your social.

Speaker 2 I think maybe when I left, I was a wee bit. I was really.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 2 I felt really confident socially when I was drunk and stuff like that.

Speaker 2 But I would just say, I remember reading a thing. I remember being really like,

Speaker 2 maybe I've said this in the mailbag before because it's kind of advice that I got from there was this love column by a guy called what's his name? It's called Savage Love.

Speaker 2 It was this sex advice thing that I read when I was a teenager. Dan Savage, maybe was the name of the guy who wrote it.

Speaker 2 And every week people would go, Hey,

Speaker 2 you know, I'm in a thrupple and the other two found evidence that they're threatening to kill me or something like that. So it really really.

Speaker 2 But then one time somebody was just like, man, I'm 18 and nobody wants to have sex with me. And I'm wondering, like, what can I do to make people find me attractive?

Speaker 2 And he was like, don't try and get... Or maybe he was 16.
And it's like, when you're 16, don't try and get 16-year-old you, you're whole. Try and get 21-year-old you, you're whole.

Speaker 2 Try and build a life and try and build a personality and have things about you and have experience and have knowledge and

Speaker 2 and then later on once you are a cool person people will not once you're cool but like once you have something about you people will find you attractive. What's your five year fuck programme?

Speaker 2 Well it's wrong as good advice. I was great for you.
Fucking staring of fucking

Speaker 2 teen sex. The starling of young love? That's what they call me.

Speaker 2 You know we've all we all all need a five-year plan.

Speaker 2 It's like, man, if no one's...

Speaker 2 You can either become a fucking intel and say, oh, it's the male loneliness epidemic or whatever, and nobody wants to fuck me because of woke, or you can go, maybe I should do some push-ups.

Speaker 2 Here's something. Maybe I should get an interest that I'm passionate about.
As a positive note, if you're 18.

Speaker 2 You've been through primary. Primaries are pretty small, probably sub 400 people, right? You've been through secondary, secondary school,

Speaker 2 generally under a thousand people in Scotland, maybe 800, 900 people talks.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 your love of averages of finding people like you there are so much lower. Do you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 When you go to uni and you're talking like 20,000 people, and the whole kind of extended thing where you know you go to their

Speaker 2 board game club or you go to their book club or whatever, and you know, they've got their pals in, and all that kind of stuff.

Speaker 2 I mean, you're so much more likely to meet people that you have stuff in common with. And the most common experience for people is going away and finally finding people that they relate to.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 There you go, a rare moment of positivity.

Speaker 2 This is not really connected, but in fact, it's not connected anyway. Have you seen those things that are like AIs,

Speaker 2 but they're telling a story

Speaker 2 and they're like an AI animation, but sometimes stills, and they get loads of views. But they're sort of middle-aged people exacting financial revenge.

Speaker 2 This is a thing, and obviously, they doctor their comments, they delete people going, This is an AI, this is fucking weird.

Speaker 2 But there's millions of people watching these things and just commenting, I can't believe,

Speaker 2 and it's like not even good, AI. It's not even good.
So, there's one, and they're all like

Speaker 2 my my daughter-in-law

Speaker 2 said that she was taking my house.

Speaker 2 Well, I went to the bank and fucking told them such and such. And then there's often a bit in them that's like my phone lit up and I had 50 phone calls in an hour or something.

Speaker 2 It's because you signed away the deeds to your kids' house, or they were going to take a holiday on your money and you cancelled the credit cards or something.

Speaker 2 It's always a middle-aged person exerting their authority in a financial revenge move but one of them that's got loads of views is an old woman right saying this and it's in a kind of ai intonation um and they like short stories as well so like i always wake as the sun clears the pines in the morning right

Speaker 2 and uh one of them she's indoors but it's snowing indoors and you're like you think that would be a fucking clue you think that would be a tip

Speaker 2 I didn't know that. Do some houses have indoor snow? Oh, we should get that.
We should get a boiling tap and an indoor snow roof. But fucking Facebook encourages that stuff.

Speaker 2 Someone did an article about it where they were like, we looked into how does so much AI slop end up and Facebook has actually prioritised in the algorithm.

Speaker 2 Get a thing where Jesus is made out of shrimps. Have you seen that? That's a really common one.
Jesus made it shrimps for some reason, right?

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there's Hannah's other kind of thing. I was reading about one the day and it was saying it's really popular of like

Speaker 2 plane will be on fire and the mother will throw her baby out the plane, like throw loads of babies out of planes and they'll land on an island and they'll be raised by pugs on a beach.

Speaker 2 Yes, yes, pugs is a big one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's a thing that

Speaker 2 the machine is keen on. And people are like, I can't believe that hand today babies.
And you're like, come on. But people are, you know, people are thick.
Possibly the most common one is.

Speaker 2 How did you get from you'll find the people for you? I didn't bother, I just

Speaker 2 we need content. We'll eventually hit on a link, right?

Speaker 2 There was one that was like well, it's the algorithm, isn't it? You know, you're freeing your algorithm up to meet more people, your social algorithm.

Speaker 2 You're gonna hit more people. Does that make any sense?

Speaker 2 It does in a hideous dystopian way.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 one of the most popular ones on Facebook is I fucking baked this elaborate cake or I painted this thing mate I'm a homeless veteran or I'm a it was my 50th birthday and I did this thing and nobody came so it's like someone did a thing

Speaker 2 they have a sad story

Speaker 2 and nobody took interest in the thing people go that's what life's like that's how I feel when they like it and they share it and they go oh fuck I can't believe nobody liked your painting that obviously isn't fucking real and you're cartoon face

Speaker 2 and there's hundreds of versions of that same thing so they just tweak one week thing of it and so you can see it kind of run through hundreds of iterations.

Speaker 2 I wonder how many people who are responding to it are also AI.

Speaker 2 It's interesting, dead internet thing.

Speaker 2 Remember that one you sent of like Tom and Jerry?

Speaker 2 It's like Tom is in a hospital. It's an AI patent, and it's like there's a few of them, but one is Tom is in a hospital, and Jerry's turning up, and Jerry's got like a baby or something like that.

Speaker 2 Yeah, or Jerry's pregnant, or something. And people like poor Tom I can't believe I know he's pregnant you're like well even if it was real like real it would be a cartoon never mind

Speaker 2 never mind not real cartoon

Speaker 2 it's um yeah I mean it's

Speaker 2 so much

Speaker 2 you can just feel it invade every aspect of your life or your internet life anyway you know every

Speaker 2 the amount of people who are doing kind AI fringe posters stuff this year,'cause they don't wanna I mean, if you're a comedian, the margins are already pretty slim.

Speaker 2 Um

Speaker 2 so a lot of people are turning to like and you see their faces and stuff and I just find it slightly

Speaker 2 grim. And maybe I'm a Luddite, do you know what I mean? Maybe I'm saying I

Speaker 2 I don't want this new technology in my life and maybe that's as stupid as uh not wanting the printing press as a writer or something.

Speaker 2 But the Luddites were right, do you know the Liddites just wanted to protect jobs, they weren't actually opposed to technology per se.

Speaker 2 So, I'm literally a Liddite then, but like, what's it cost to get a poster done without AI? Not much, not much

Speaker 2 if you know a graphic designer and everybody does. Well, everybody who works in

Speaker 2 comedy would know somebody who can do it.

Speaker 2 I mean, Andy learned how to video edit for this. I mean, you could probably learn how to put Chris MacArthur Boyd on a picture of my face.

Speaker 2 it's not expensive at all, and it's like you just make you just

Speaker 2 I was a I think you like to fuck about the first few weeks, I think he's right.

Speaker 2 I really do, and the whole sort of thing of going, oh my god, I can't believe people didn't fucking boycott the same as you're like.

Speaker 2 I'm like, you go and you fuck about, you go and you fucking go, what would it look like if fucking James Sunish was a giant robot or something, right?

Speaker 2 Of course, people are, we're curious creatures, but it's just

Speaker 2 so pervasive, it's like obviously not a good thing.

Speaker 2 And then, also, I think, as well, you don't quite understand until you see examples how much it is just theft.

Speaker 2 So, people go, This face is totally designed by AI, and some are going, This is a real face.

Speaker 2 And what they mean by design by AI is they've put a fucking extra hair on this, and you're like, Oh, okay, yeah, it is just a plagiarism machine.

Speaker 2 Yeah,

Speaker 2 and it's like, do you know what? That's what art is. Art is a plagiarism machine.
Art is copying the things you love and tweaking it slightly so as it's you.

Speaker 2 That's a long, long debate, though, isn't it? That's a difficult debate. I think it's clear as day.

Speaker 2 Clear as the, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 everything's that. Everything you make is just here's some stuff I liked when I was wee that fucking scarred my brain and now I I'm gonna put it back out the other way.

Speaker 2 Is it though, or is some original? I don't think

Speaker 2 what would you mean by original? Well, original. So, like

Speaker 2 ideas that

Speaker 2 diverge from or are distinct from the things that you

Speaker 2 read as a kid. Do you know what I mean? Or that you grew up with?

Speaker 2 Is everything a kind of iteration of something else? I think originality is just

Speaker 2 stealing and hiding it really well,

Speaker 2 personally. That seems to me like a kind of almost a post-capitalist attitude of like, yeah, this is all that can happen.
Do you know what I mean? Oh, is it any news?

Speaker 2 Is Van Gogh drawing on

Speaker 2 a tradition? Is that or is that even mainly what his work is? I mean, he was kind of.

Speaker 2 I think he had problems with his eyes. Well, maybe you need to be mad to be original.
I don't know. Maybe you need to have problems with your eyes.
Or something.

Speaker 2 I think genuinely anything that's original is just someone who is absolutely fucked, misrepresenting the way they literally see things.

Speaker 2 Before Richard Pryor in comedy,

Speaker 2 is there anything like Richard Pryor?

Speaker 2 There was dirty black comedians, wasn't there? There's people like what was his name, Red

Speaker 2 Red Fox. Yeah, there was people.

Speaker 2 Who was that guy then? It's not Richard Pryor. No, of course it's not.
It's not it's not really much influenced by except like life.

Speaker 2 Do you know what I mean? So that's how he speaks.

Speaker 2 You know, and all of the Greg means is really close to how they are on stage, it's very close to how they are offstage. And you're like, well, is there anything particularly like that?

Speaker 2 But you don't even need to, you know, could you go to Richard Pratt? Is there anything particularly like Dylan Moran before him?

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 maybe a little bit of Dave Allen and maybe a little bit of, but not much. That's just like someone speaking in an almost literary

Speaker 2 meter.

Speaker 2 I'm not going to accuse Dylan Morana of plagiarism, but I'm just going to say cunts have been like that before.

Speaker 2 See that, Tim? That's how you should introduce yourself. What's your setup? Cunts have been like that before.

Speaker 2 You want my laugh in island?

Speaker 2 I know.

Speaker 2 Who are you again?

Speaker 2 Cunts have been like you before.

Speaker 2 Cunts have been like you before.

Speaker 2 More cunts.

Speaker 2 And more like.

Speaker 2 Quite right.

Speaker 2 Particularly in Japan. Particularly in Japan.
The Shenzhou Abe, the Scottish Comedy scene over here. Someone please shoot me in the body.

Speaker 2 Wondering if you guys have any advice for coping, like things like working on your social skills.

Speaker 2 I would say, honestly,

Speaker 2 like

Speaker 2 fuck man.

Speaker 2 I would say I'm fairly limited in terms of

Speaker 2 you know, small talk and things like that. I find it really difficult to

Speaker 2 working in a hairdresser when I was a teenager who kind of taught me how to do small talk because I would have to wash old ladies' hair and like

Speaker 2 just figure I'm fucking washing this old woman's hair.

Speaker 2 What have you been up to recently? Oh, well, you know,

Speaker 2 my grandson just went to uni. Oh, was he stuck? You know, and then you just go, okay, we can kind of,

Speaker 2 you know, figure it out.

Speaker 2 I would suggest getting shit off hairdressers as a hair washer if you want to learn how to do that. But, like, see if you can't do small talk, people will just go, oh, they're interested, aren't they?

Speaker 2 And then either like that, or they don't like that.

Speaker 2 So, you're going to find your people. That thing you said about your

Speaker 2 speed open-up, you'll meet more people. I mean, definitely.
And if you get a hobby, you'll meet people who've got stuff in common with you.

Speaker 2 You're in a club. You just get off your fucking phone, I would say, if you're struggling with

Speaker 2 social stuff.

Speaker 2 I just want to say, like, to be a person. I think it's really good advice small talk

Speaker 2 is work people it's civility yeah and people don't just have it naturally do you know what i mean and so i think sometimes when you when you feel isolated you're like oh everybody else seems to be happy to fucking sit and talk about love island for five minutes and you're just like well

Speaker 2 it's nobody's loving it they just accept that that's part of how humans interact and maybe if you're struggling with small talk you just need to look on it as a bit more of a a civil thing, a thing you're doing to help the other person relax so that you can, you know, perhaps have a more fulfilling conversation later on.

Speaker 2 Small talk is like when two combatants enter the squared circle and they circle each other and they look at each other's movements and they go, kinda, you know, you're not actually making any big conversational lunges, you're not going for the death blow, you're not gonna

Speaker 2 you're just kinda feeling the other person out, the feeling out process.

Speaker 2 Conversational foreplay:

Speaker 2 are you just gonna run into a meeting and fucking ram it into someone? No,

Speaker 2 you're not gonna sprint up somebody's fanny. Let's have dinner,

Speaker 2 you know,

Speaker 2 let's hold hands, let's chat about stuff, yeah. Let's go for a walk in the moonlight and then you can run up the fanny, then ram it up.

Speaker 2 Best luck at your name.

Speaker 2 Oh, well, Susie?

Speaker 2 Wondering.

Speaker 2 It's when the listener is screaming, where is she? Getting in here, please. And I think coming out of your comfort zone socially, which makes your introverted brain want to explode.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think just.

Speaker 2 Comfort zone is a misnomer. A lot of people feel very uncomfortable in their so-called comfort zone.
Do you know what I mean? And actually, you might feel more comfortable if you interact more.

Speaker 2 And if you're going to date, Smith, I mean, your first, first date, and that's like you're 18.

Speaker 2 See the guy I was when I was. It's not just based on the Savage Loves advice, but see the guy I was when I was 21.
He wasn't much like who I was when I was 18.

Speaker 2 18, when you're 18, feels like this is me. I've finished the course.
Christopher's just saying this because he killed a guy in Sexia and took over his identity.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I stole his clothes and his family and his life. You know, I'm the Don Draper and the Shinzoabe, the Scottish Comedy scene.

Speaker 2 A Don Draper, the Christmas Crother Blade. I mean, does my personality seem like I'd be called Chris McCrothered Blood? It doesn't at all, no? No, not in the slightest.
But you tell that to

Speaker 2 the plum dumpling I was before, you know.

Speaker 2 I would say kill someone and assume their personality if you want a new lease in life. Joseph McGill,

Speaker 2 heir to the McGill Empire. I seek to flee my father's bus-based economy.
Buses and pocket knives, what the McGill

Speaker 2 fortune was built on. Yeah, look at me now.
A hairdresser's son. Interesting.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but it's like, I think when you're 18, you feel like, oh, that's me, completed it, and now I get to live the rest of my life as me.

Speaker 2 But then when you look back, you go, no, that was like the last bit of that. And then, you know, then you grew up a wee bit.

Speaker 2 Try being a bit nicer, I think, is often good advice. Yeah, try being a bit

Speaker 2 try looking at things from other people's point of view

Speaker 2 and try to empathise more is a good way of

Speaker 2 interacting better with people. You know what I mean? And sometimes, if you have friends,

Speaker 2 they can help you empathise. You know, if you don't understand, why was that person like that about that situation? You know, maybe you know.

Speaker 2 You can tell someone and they'll go, oh, it's completely get another set of eyes on it. Yeah, you know, I know we're explaining very basic human interactions here, but some people don't have it.

Speaker 2 Some people don't have it.

Speaker 2 Listen, C.

Speaker 2 Um,

Speaker 2 I hope I'm glad you've been enjoying the podcast. And thanks for listening, and thanks for your letter.
And listen, your life's going to be absolutely fantastic, or it won't. But regardless,

Speaker 2 someone's going to run in there.

Speaker 2 Someone's putting their running shoes on. They're hookers.

Speaker 2 They're lacing up.

Speaker 2 They're Nikes.

Speaker 2 They've been in the Achilles Hill and Great Western Road.

Speaker 2 They've went on a wee treadmill to see what their gate is and now they are. They've been on a five-year fuck plan.

Speaker 2 Well that makes me sound mental, but

Speaker 2 you know, start a band, you know, do a stand-up, do slam poetry, learn how to paint collectibles, go to the collectible shop, fall in love with the tattooed goth behind the counter.

Speaker 2 I hope you've enjoyed our wide-ranging and often conflicting advice.

Speaker 2 Okay, okay. Sure, we could round that one up there and we could get my daughter for lunch.

Speaker 2 Oh, that's right. Okay, thanks very much.
Hope you have a lovely mailbag and we'll come back in this morning.

Speaker 2 Fairly well. See ya.

Speaker 2 Hey, Bruce Randy here. Thank you for listening to another episode of Here Comes the Guillotine.
Make sure you check out Christopher and Susie on tour next year.

Speaker 2 Yeah, have a great time and we'll speak to you next week.

Speaker 3 This is a Global Player Original Podcast.