Why everything feels so Chaotic now

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I adore the Cork Podcast Festival.

I love the lads who run it.

It's one of my favourite festivals in the country.

But I can't fucking for the life of me pronounce the name correctly.

I keep calling it the Park Cod Past Festival.

It's not, it's the Cork Podcast Festival.

Just whatever way the consonants, whatever way the consonants are arranged, it's very easy to call it the Park Cod Past Festival.

One problem too, I think, is

Cork Podcast.

Like I know what Cork is, it's a city.

I know what a pod cast is, I'm making one right now.

But cork, cork is also a type of wood,

a very buoyant wood that floats easily.

So you have a car, a pod, a pod made from cork, and you're casting it, you're casting it into the water for it to bob.

So the imagery of that throws me off.

And then I'm like, why the fuck would you have a festival for that?

Why would you have a festival for casting pods made out of cork?

So that creates confusion and to the point that

I haven't been plugging this fucking podcast festival enough because the name is so confusing.

And then I try to say it and what comes out is the Pork Cod Past Festival.

Pork Cod Past.

And then I start thinking, that's actually more worthy of a festival.

Why would you want to go to a festival about casting pods made out of cork into the ocean when you could go to the pork cod past festival, which would be

well, you see, here's the thing I've thought about: this

pork and cod

two

foodstuffs which historically were salted, salted very heavily to preserve them before refrigeration.

So, the pork cod past festival, it'd be a festival about salt.

I'd go to a festival about salt, absolutely, salt is fascinating.

Salt Salt was so important

in Persia, right, about 2500 years ago.

Salt was so important that it was strictly controlled by the king.

And because you had this substance that was controlled and produced by the state effectively, salt was used as money.

Even the word salary to be paid your salary.

That has its etymological roots in salt as a source of money or a source of payment.

In fact, salt is considered so important that it potentially led to the development of human civilization.

Like there's a

there's a tribe of people called the Kaligadi people.

They live in the in the Kalahari Desert in Africa and the Kaligadi tribe they live a hunter-gatherer lifestyle and where they live in the Kalahari Desert.

Water is very difficult to come by.

There's not a lot of water and they have significant periods of drought.

So the way that this tribe

find water traditionally is fucking fascinating, right?

So they're there in the middle of the Kalahari Desert and there's a drought.

They can't find water.

But there's also these packs of baboons, right?

And baboons always have a source of water.

That baboons always know where there's water.

So what a tribesman does when he's trying to find water is

he'll find like like a termite mound or an anthill

a natural structure that contains lots of insects okay now this is the kalahari desert now so just picture it

dry arid yellow sand the odd little tree and this crystal clear blue sky nothing If you heard someone laughing there, there's a pharmaceutical company having a meeting next door to my office.

But anyway, back to the Kalahari Desert, the tribesman who's seeking out a source of water.

He'll go to a termite mount and he'll take out a stick and he'll start poking a little hole in the termite mount.

But he'll make sure that a baboon is watching when he does it, because baboons are mad curious.

So the man pokes this little hole in the termite mount, and then into the hole he puts like seeds.

Now he's fucking blatant about this like he he's theatrically placing seeds into this hole that he's just made making sure that the baboon is watching and knows what's happening meanwhile mr.

babone is up on a rock with his long blue nose

and those

those giant swollen pink arses that look like a car crash that they have Mr.

Babone is up in his rock anyway, watching, watching the man putting shit into the termite mount and he's going, what the fuck is he doing?

That human just poked a hole and put food in there.

Those humans are clever.

What food has the human hidden in that termite mount?

Because I'm going to go over and get it.

And then the baboon waits and the human, the tribesman, he fucks off and hides.

So then the baboon walks over.

with his big Ross Kemp looking anus,

walks over to the termite mount and then he inserts inserts his his arm into the hole that the human made.

But here's the thing, the hole that the human made, it's just the right size for a baboon's arm to get in.

And then at the very end is a chamber where the food is.

It's a trap.

So the baboon has his his hand down the hole, his arm down the hole.

He's up to his shoulders.

And he searches around with his hand and then he finds the little food, the seeds that the human has left in there.

So, the babone then he feels the food, he grabs it, he makes a fist around the food inside the hole.

But then, like fucking Homer Simpson, when he put his hand in the vending machine to grab the can of cork, the babone won't leave go of the food, and his hand is stuck inside the termite mound, and he's not smart enough to let go.

So, now he's fucked, he's stuck, he's too greedy.

All he's got to do is let go, but he won't.

Now, the tribesman reappears, he's been hiding, and the babone is stuck in the tarmite mound, and the man goes over to the baboon, wraps a rope around him, and basically captures the baboon.

He doesn't harm him, he doesn't hurt him, but he has the baboon prisoner now.

And he ties the baboon to a tree,

and then the man takes out lumps of salt, rock salt, that he's been hanging on to,

and he puts them in front of the baboon.

Now the other thing that's quite rare in the desert is salt, So the baboon can't resist this and he starts the baboon who's tied against the tree starts licking the salt, licking the salt like a madfucker and can't stop, can't stop until all the salt is gone and meanwhile the man is just standing back waiting looking at this baboon and then after about 10 minutes the salt is gone and the baboon is dying of thirst, absolutely ravenous for water.

So then the man lets him go, and the baboon legs it, legs it as fast as he can, and the man follows, and the baboon is scarpering through the desert, over mounds, underneath ditches, alongside trees, taking a left, taking a right, until he eventually arrives at this this rocky area.

And the baboon climbs up and climbs up and then goes down and the man's following him.

And right inside the rocks is this naturally occurring spring, this naturally occurring spring of water and then the man goes there you go that's where the baboons get their water the baboon had revealed the baboon water location to the man and I love that just

the human ingenuity of it the humans thinking so many steps ahead to find water by following the baboon but the use of salt

salt there is the thing that breaks the baboon

there's even a theory about

the world's first roads.

That the first ever roads that humans had and I'm talking back in the hunter-gatherer days.

So the wild animals that humans ate, okay, I'm talking the ancestors of cows, wild ox, 30,000 years ago, 40,000 years ago, okay?

The animals that humans used to hunt relied upon naturally occurring salt licks, right?

Salt licks in order to get all of their nutrients and minerals.

Think of like an ancient cow, right?

Domestication hasn't even happened yet, so like a fucking wildebeest thing 30,000 years ago.

This animal isn't getting all of its nutrients from eating grass.

So the herds of these animals, they have to go to naturally occurring rocks that are made out of salt, not just salt, fucking calcium, zinc.

So ancient cows would travel for miles and miles to find these salt rocks to lick them.

Humans would follow the paths that these herbivores would make to their salt licks and then choose to settle down in areas near these salt licks and these well-worn salt paths became the first roads.

But the theory that salt possibly led to the development of human civilization.

So if you have all these human beings and they're following their prey, cattle effectively, early cattle, they're following cattle to these salt licks.

And then once the cattle are there licking salt, that's when you fucking attack.

So live near where the naturally occurring salt is and you'll have access to cattle, right?

That's probably where humans also figured.

Oh fuck it.

This same salt, if you put put it on the meat, it preserves it.

So they're killing the animals near where the naturally occurring salt is and now they're putting the salt on the meat and noticing that it's a very powerful preservative that keeps bacteria away and now you don't have to rely upon fresh meat.

You can kill a cow and keep it all fucking year.

That ability to preserve your meat using salt.

That might have been a catalyst.

A catalyst that allowed our ancestors to go from being hunter-gatherers that move with animals to suddenly being able to stop and to settle down and say, No, we've got a little village now.

We don't have to move because we can preserve this meat all year round, you see.

So now we have a surplus of meat to eat at all times.

That ability to stay put leads to the development of tools.

It leads to humans going, ah, that wild fucking ox over there who's traveling to eat the salt.

I wonder if I can turn that wild ox into a cow through selective breeding and hard them.

Then the development of farming, towns, cities,

salt may have started all of that.

Even more fascinating.

So cows, right?

Cows as you and I know them today.

First off, cows aren't real.

Cows aren't real in the same way that dogs aren't real.

Cows, cows were invented by humans.

The cow as you know it today, that was bred and invented by humans to serve humans.

Cows don't exist in nature.

There was a wild animal known as an auruk somewhere around Iran or Persia, right?

And the auruk

is the ancestor of the cow.

The auruk is to the cow what the wolf is to the dog, but the auruk is it's completely extinct.

Why?

Because we turned the cunts into cows early humans probably followed the auroch like i said to the herds of them followed them to where they were licking salt killed them and then figured out which are the most obedient ones which ones have the best milk which ones have the best meat and then bred these slowly but surely into what we call a cow So now 10, 15,000 years later, there's no more aurochs, they're extinct, but we have cows.

Cows everywhere.

Cows are unsustainable.

They're destroying the planet.

How can an animal destroy the planet?

Because they're not fucking real.

Cows aren't part of nature.

They're not part of a system of biodiversity.

Cows are our industry.

They're industrial animals.

But anyway, cows.

Herds of cattle, sometimes,

when they live near,

there's that.

I guess the pharmaceutical meeting is over and now they're banging fucking doors.

I hope that's a passive aggressive door bang.

I hope the

I hope the pharmaceutical meeting was interrupted by me talking about the history of cattle.

But anyway, cows, right?

Sometimes when cows

are near an area where mining occurs.

So if humans are mining, digging into the earth, right, for whatever.

Rare earth minerals, whatever.

So trucks, when trucks are transporting minerals from the mine, Some of it falls along the road, along the way, you know?

And these minerals can contain salt, cobalt, selenium, zinc.

And when this is, when this falls on the fucking road and there's cows nearby, it awakens the ancient wolf in them.

They sense the minerals on the road and it awakens their ancient Auruk past.

And the cows, their evolutionary memory, thinks that they're heading towards the old ancient salt lick.

again in search of those minerals that they need and the cows will go fucking ape shit they'll break down fences electric fences, whatever's there, and the cows will hard

onto the middle of a road if there's a mine nearby and just start licking, licking minerals off the road.

And it and cows die this way.

Truckers who work on roads

near mineral mining are aware that there could be lunatic cows in the middle of the road licking minerals off the road and that they could collide with them at any point and it's really dangerous.

But what's going on?

It's the cow.

It's the genetic memory of its ancestors 15,000 years ago traveling for a salt lake.

And isn't there a strange little synchronicity there?

You know, tens of thousands of years ago, the first ever roads that humans followed was in pursuit of these aurochs when they went to their fucking salt lakes.

And now the descendants of these animals confuse our roads for salt licks.

Why am I talking about this?

Yeah, the Cork Podcast Festival, the Pork Cod Past Festival, would be a festival about salt.

I would go to that.

I would go to the festival about our pork and cod past and how we salted these things.

You could even have it in Cork if you wanted to.

The salting of cod, that was mainly done in Portugal.

That's a real Portuguese thing.

But in Cork, the salting of pork was a pretty big deal.

Cork has a...

Cork has a pretty serious food culture.

More than any Irish city.

Galway doesn't count.

Galway.

Galway's just Ennis on a boner.

Galway does have a food culture, but it's a response to tourism.

And we're jealous of that in Limerick.

But Cork is different.

Cork.

See, Cork had a lot of rich Protestants, you see.

There's a

food and wealth lineage going on in Cork that's a couple of hundred years old.

And in Ireland, we're not really known for food culture in Ireland.

Because of the famine and all that.

That's not entirely true.

The famine, the famine, obviously, that wouldn't have helped our food culture.

But one reason, I was speaking to a historian, I don't know who it was, but this historian said that one reason that Ireland doesn't have a huge food culture like other countries is because we had consistent access to fresh ingredients.

And because of that, we didn't need to preserve food as much.

And cultures that have a long history of preservation, they tend to have the richest food cultures.

But down in Cork, there was a history of preservation.

Cork still has a place called the English market, where meat is sold and delicacies.

And there's loads of posh

Protestants, I suppose you'd call them, making food down in Cork, and there has been for fucking years.

But the English market in Cork,

it was controlled by the English.

It was a very Protestant market.

And it serviced...

the British Empire.

It serviced the British Empire.

And the English market was famous for salted beef and salted pork to be exported to the West Indies while the Brits were down there doing their slavery shit.

I'm going through all this stuff in my head so I can start calling the Cork Podcast Festival by its proper fucking name and just get this

I have to get this pork cod past business out of my head.

But technically if if Cork did want to have a festival that celebrated salt, you could put it off down in Cork.

You could put it off down in Cork, you could do that, down in the marina market or something.

You could dress Killian Murphy up as a baboon.

Get him to recreate.

Dress Killian Murphy up as a baboon and get him to recreate the Caligadi salt experiment.

Just have Killian Murphy dressed up as a baboon.

Thirsty, thirsty.

Leading people to a watering hole after licking a lot of salt.

And

there's your pork cod past festival.

So it's the Cork Podcast Festival.

It's this.

It's tomorrow.

It's Thursday.

If you're a regular listener to this podcast, you know that I'm shit at promoting gigs.

Alright?

I'm always getting dates wrong.

Oh, fuck me.

After the

pandemic.

After the pandemic, where I imagined...

I don't know how it happened.

I thought I was gigging in Bristol and interviewing Maxim from the Prodigy.

And I like promoted it.

I said it like four times.

Fantasy gig.

Like I literally, I was like, i'm gonna be in bristol and i'm gonna be interviewing maxim from the prodigy in bristol i said it in like three episodes i wasn't lying it's just whatever conversations i'd had with my book or whatever the fuck had happened i'd gotten into my i'd gotten into my head that that was a thing that was gonna happen i'm not even i think i might have just imagined it and then said that it was true I'm not gigging in Bristol and actually I fucking am am I?

I actually am gigging in Bristol this June.

I don't think I'm interviewing Maxim from the Prodigy but I'm just saying about three years ago I invented a gig in Bristol.

Post pandemic I was under a lot of stress but but this time I am actually gigging in Bristol in

6th of June I think.

That's nearly sold out actually.

But tomorrow I'm gigging in fucking Cork.

I'm gigging in the Cork Opera House tomorrow as part of the Cork Podcast Festival.

The promoters, Joe and Ed, they're sound, they're lovely fellas and they asked me to plug it this week.

But I give you the history of salt instead.

Tomorrow, Thursday the 13th, I'm in the Cork Opera House at the Cork Podcast Festival.

Come along to that, check out the rest of the Cork Podcast Festival.

I have a fucking unreal guest, a brilliant guest who's an expert in a field that I'm fascinated in.

And also,

I'm going to read out my short story, I'll give you Barcelona, which I never

read that out live because it's too absurd.

But I read it out live in Kerry

there last weekend

it's the it's the short story about the fellow who bites another man's arse in the gym I read it out live in Kerry last weekend and fuck me it was great crack I didn't think it would work live but it did

so what I'd like to speak about in this week's podcast

I want to respond to a question A question that I'm asked repeatedly and the question is

why does everything feel so chaotic?

Why does the world feel

so irrational?

There's a feeling and a sense that

maybe before the pandemic, I don't think so, I think it's pre-2016,

that we remember a time when

the world made sense.

We used to feel that if politicians stepped massively out of line, they'd lose their jobs and be held accountable.

We used to feel that if you just get an education, you get a good job, then you'll own a house and have a family and lead a normal happy life.

We used to feel that if we're not happy with the way society and politics are going, don't worry, we've got democracy.

Politicians will come along and they will promise change and then if you just vote for them, if they get empowered then you'll have that change.

We used to believe if you just save up your money, just save up your money and demonstrate that you're good at saving, then you'll get a house, you'll own a house.

The bank will give you a mortgage.

Not so long ago, we used to believe that if a country or a world leader committed genocide and war crimes and was being called out by like the International Criminal Court, then we would see justice that we would see these world leaders brought to justice.

We used to believe that if a genocide was occurring, if war crimes were happening, that we could count upon a reliable journalism or journalists, we could count upon reliable journalistic sources to call these things out and to report this genocide as it happens and also for our politicians to respond appropriately.

and condemn and call out and do sanctions and whatever on the country that's committing genocide and war crimes.

Not so long ago, we used to believe that Russia aggressively invaded Ukraine, committed war crimes, and was subjected to sanctions and ostracization from the entire international community, right?

We used to believe that two years ago.

Now in 2025, the president of America has flipped that completely and now ukraine ukraine is headed by a dictator and they are the aggressors and that is now the narrative from fucking America.

A few years ago we used to believe that

if there was a widespread disease like I'm old enough to remember foot and mouth disease.

In the early 2000s I was in school.

Foot and mouth disease was a disease that impacted cattle.

It was very serious and there was a huge government response as a result.

Herds of cattle were killed.

And also, when I was in school, sometimes school was shut down because of foot and mouth disease.

It was 2001, Patrick's Day, the St.

Patrick's Day parade in 2001 didn't happen in Ireland because of foot and mouth disease.

Parades cancelled, public buildings closed, massive inconvenience, right?

We, I remember, when that happened, nobody called foot and mouth disease fake.

I remember everybody going, oh, there's this, there's this disease, there's this disease now, and it's on cattle, and it's really serious, and it's annoying as fuck, but we're going to have to respond to this disease that's definitely happening.

I remember that.

We used to believe that when there was a widespread illness or disease or an epidemic or a pandemic, we used to believe that when that's happening, it's actually scientific evidence-based fact.

It's a thing that's actually happening because you can see it.

And if you were to question that, you're a fucking fruitcake.

We don't think like that anymore.

We don't think like that anymore.

It's now socially acceptable to say that a pandemic is fake.

We used to think that big gigantic corporations should pay tax.

That corporations that are earning billions should pay tax.

We don't we don't think that anymore.

We don't believe that anymore.

We used to think that

like if a shopping center was being built or a giant housing estate was being built, that even if there was a recession, they wouldn't just leave a gigantic, half-built shopping center lying there in the middle of your city for 17 years, or a housing estate unbuilt for 17 years, just laying there rotten.

We used to think that wasn't possible.

We used to think

that you couldn't have a box in your hand that you stare at and in this box are hundreds of thousands of people's real people's anxieties beaming into your face whenever you want are all the information in the world all at once.

We used to think that wasn't possible.

I remember it.

Used to watch a cartoon called Inspector Gadget and there was a girl in it called Lucy, I think.

And she had a book with a screen on it and she could access all the information in the world.

And this was science fiction.

Flying cars were more possible than this.

What I'm describing there,

these beliefs, these beliefs that we could rely upon.

There was a philosopher called Francois Léotard.

He was a philosopher around the 1960s and he referred to these things as grand narratives.

And during the mid-20th century, from

About the end of World War II up until the 70s, there were certain grand narratives that we had in the West.

One grand narrative is the idea of progress.

Things are just gonna keep getting better and better.

Society is gonna continually improve and just get better and better, mainly because we've got science and isn't science amazing.

Like you look at science fiction from the 1960s in particular, predictions about the future.

If you ask someone in the 1960s how we'd be living in the 2020s, there'd be no diseases, flying cars, clean air, we wouldn't have to work, robots would look after everything, even to the point that we wouldn't even be eating food anymore.

We get all our nutrients from vitamin pills.

Look at an episode of The Jetsons for a prediction of the future from the 50s and the 60s.

It's a very happy and secure society that predicts the future like that.

Another grand narrative that people had in the 20th century was economic security.

The government will protect you from homelessness.

If you get sick, the government will pay for you to get better.

If you get unemployed, there's going to be social welfare.

You're not going to be poor and destitute.

And also, if you're a fascist, if you're a Nazi, if you're a Nazi and you've committed a holocaust, then justice is going to be served.

You're going to hang at Nuremberg.

Human rights are a thing now.

People are protected just by being people.

These ideas are going to be reflected in journalism and the news that's reported.

In a lot of Western countries post-World War II, this was true.

Why were these things true?

Well, from about the 1930s onwards,

there was an economic feeling.

Like

in the late 1920s, America had a huge stock market crash.

Massive, which led to the Great Depression.

because of the failure of unfettered capitalism.

Let's just call it unfettered capitalism.

Wealth was controlled by 1% of people who could do whatever the fuck they want and there was huge inequality and then you had a massive stock market crash in 1929.

And then a response to this was known as the New Deal.

In the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt brought in a thing called the No Deal.

This was

it would look like socialism today.

If America did this today America would look like a socialist country.

So from 1933, American tax

the government set up massive public works programs that created a lot of jobs, social security, and fucking welfare for poor people.

Minimum wage was brought in.

The right to unionize.

The right to set up unions.

And the banks and Wall Street were regulated.

As in, there was rules.

You can't do this.

You can't do that.

Business was regulated.

Businesses and employers were regulated.

Your profits are not the most important thing.

You can't do this.

You You need to have a sense of responsibility.

There's laws and if you break the law you're going to be punished.

And as I mentioned, the biggest one of all fucking unions, unions.

The employees get together as a union and have power over their employer and they're protected.

The unions are protected by law.

So now employers, companies, corporations, they couldn't outright exploit their workers because those workers had a legal right to strike collective bargaining and to be protected.

So that happened in America in the 1930s.

That's the government spending massively and creating a social safety net, a social safety net to protect working class Americans from exploitation, poverty, homelessness, a social safety net.

Now I'm simplifying the fuck out of this.

and I'm not getting into racism or anything like this.

I'm synopsizing the fuck out of this.

America wasn't a perfect place in the 20th century, that's for sure.

But the New Deal of the 1930s, it would make America today look like a socialist country.

It is socialism.

That's socialism.

The New Deal was socialism.

The idea that the government has a responsibility to provide a social safety net for the people.

And that's nothing compared to what Britain did.

in the fucking 1940s after World War II.

You see, after World War II, the world had had seen the Nazis, they'd seen the rise of fascism.

They'd seen how Nazism took over fucking Germany.

Germany from the 1920s onwards after World War I was fucked.

People lost their savings.

Complete economic collapse.

The Nazis with their anti-Semitism, with their racism, with these simple narratives, they took power from that.

Again, I'm oversimplifying massively for brevity.

So after World War II, Britain and other Western countries that came out out victorious out of the fucking war, they looked at what happened in Germany and said, right, okay, well if we don't, if we don't want fascism in our country and we want democracy, right, well the best thing to do is to provide a social safety net for everybody.

And again, this is one of these things that breaks my heart because I'm speaking about shit from the 1940s and it seems like a utopian dream from the future.

Remember I said we used to have this belief that things get better and better and better and I'm going to describe here shit that Britain did in the 1940s that would make your jaw drop.

So after World War II, Britain and Britain is bombed to bits here.

Like fucked.

Britain establishes the welfare state, right?

And it was based on a thing called the Beverage Report.

And it identified what it called the five giant evils, which are want, disease, ignorance, squalor, and idleness.

Now very posh bastard words, but the sentiment is is quite compassionate.

So in 1948, only like three years after World War II, Britain introduces the NHS, National Health Service, right?

That's free health care for everybody.

Fucking everybody.

Rich, poor, everyone has free health care.

If you get sick, the government looks after you, simple as that, because you're a human being and human beings get sick.

Not to mention all the doctors and nurses that are now employed in full-time employment by the NHS and paid by the the government.

Then in 1946 there's the National Insurance Act which is basically

if you're unemployed you get benefits, pensions, sick pay, the whole shebang.

1944 the Education Act.

Secondary schools are free and compulsory.

Everyone gets an education.

Doesn't matter who the fuck you are there's free education.

Public housing.

Huge amounts of public housing are built.

You've got councils building houses.

Councils employing builders and building houses and then people who don't have houses are getting free houses.

And we think, we're led to believe that the council housing or the free housing was something for poor, for the poor people.

No, right up until the 60s in fucking Britain, look at the history of the Barbican Estate in London.

The Barbican Estate were council houses for like doctors.

And you're thinking, why the fuck?

Why would you give a council house to a doctor?

But this was the thinking.

Why should someone have to pay for housing?

Why can't everybody have a house?

Why can't that be the case?

The British post-war welfare state also had a full employment policy, right?

And this is the maddest thing of all.

So Britain nationalized its key industries.

So the coal industry, the steel industry, the railway industry.

You had all these government companies that aren't necessarily being run for profit.

they're being run because they're essential industries for the country and to provide full employment and for the goal of the employees who are government employees so that they can have houses and happy lives and families so that you have an effective country.

Like, I'm focusing on Britain and America here mostly because Ireland was a strange one, but I benefited from that.

My da.

My da worked in Aer Lingus, which was the Irish national airline.

It wasn't really run for profit.

Before Aer Lingus was privatised, it was run by the government.

My da had a very modest job working in Shannon Airport at a ticket desk in Aer Lingus and with that he was a union organizer.

He had full employment.

He wasn't afraid of getting fired.

He had job security.

He had a guaranteed pension.

He had a life and a family and a sense of certainty, something he could believe in.

So the shit that I'm describing there, America and Britain,

World War II era, the welfare state, the New Deal, right?

It sounds like science fiction.

It sounds like a utopia.

It sounds like I'm making it up.

It wasn't perfect, but you didn't have the huge inequality that you have today.

You didn't have people living in tents

on the side of the street.

You didn't have the majority of 40-year-olds renting and not able to have families.

You didn't have mass anxiety, mass panic, mass fear.

What you definitely didn't have is you didn't have a lot of billionaires.

There wasn't under that system, there was not a lot of hyper-wealthy people.

There were some wealthy people and a lot of people just doing okay.

Now I'm conscious that I'm really synopsizing huge swathes of history in a small amount of words.

And also, I'm not a fucking expert here.

I'm just, I'm a storyteller.

I'm a writer and I understand how to research and source correctly so that I can have a fairly high level of accuracy.

But mostly I'm here as a storyteller.

But what I'm describing there, like

how the fuck?

How the fuck does Britain introduce the NHS

three years after World War II?

Like

We've a booming economy in Ireland.

There's huge employment.

There's a lot of money around.

And there's people living in tents.

How can the economy look so healthy?

How can I see it and feel it?

And there'd be such huge inequality everywhere and such a sense of hopelessness.

Why is that happening now?

Have you any idea what Britain was like in 1948?

Now I'm aware in 1948 Britain had colonies, it was a colonial fucking power and it was extracting wealth from other fucking countries.

I know this.

But in 1948, Britain had just fought World War II.

Sheffield would have looked like Ukraine or Gaza.

Massive cities in England, Scotland, and Wales are in fucking rubble, in shit, like

bombed to bits by the Nazis.

And then three years later, Britain decides we're gonna make healthcare free for everybody.

I know all the cities are like literally smoldering still, but we're gonna make healthcare free for everybody.

How the fuck do you do that?

Three years after World War II and your country on fire, and then today

people can't afford houses.

What the fuck is going on?

Now, America did loan a lot of money to people.

So, America had a thing called the Marshall Plan after World War II, where it loaned fucking billions to Europe and it did loan money to Britain to physically rebuild cities, but that didn't pay for the foundation of the NHS or free education or council houses.

So in 1945 Britain was 21 billion in debt in 1945.

21 billion in 1945.

That's not adjusted for inflation.

So where did Britain get the money for this welfare state?

The first thing it did is it taxed the absolute fuck out of the wealthiest people.

The wealthiest people in Britain were taxed to fuck.

Clement Attlee and his Labour government.

The wealthiest people in Britain were taxed up to 90%.

So all the incredibly wealthy people were taxed to pay for the poor people.

Like we live in a world right now where corporations that earn billions and billions and billions pay less than 1% tax.

That's the norm.

And the other thing that funded the welfare state was the nationalization, the nationalization of coal, railways, steel, gas.

because these things weren't necessarily being run for profit.

They were being run as an essential service to create employment.

So that situation that I'm describing there,

most of ye listening would go, fuck it, I'd like that.

I just want somewhere to live.

I just want a job.

And to have the feeling that this job isn't going to disappear next month and that I have no control over that, that I'm protected in some way.

I'd like to know that if I got sick next month, I'm not going to end up in debt.

I'd love it if all my friends were also in the same situation.

I want my friends who want to have large families to have large fucking families because they're not concerned about housing, healthcare, or their jobs or employment or the future of their employment.

And why did this happen?

How did this happen?

This utopia that I'm describing from nearly 100 years ago.

How did it happen?

Because it was government policy.

Because it was fucking policy.

Why isn't it happening now?

Because it's not policy.

Because the policy now is the fucking opposite.

It's the same shit in America, in fucking England, in Ireland, wherever you go, the same shit.

How did we get to this?

Now I'm leaving out so much.

Like I'm speaking about grand narratives here.

A huge thing I'm leaving out is

all of this is occurring within the context of the Cold War.

You have the West and you have the Soviet Union and in the Soviet Union it's fully communist.

Everything is state controlled whereas in Britain just as an example that's a mixed economy.

Capitalism and free market enterprise exists.

You can own a shop if you want.

You can own a business.

These things exist but certain industries, essential industries are nationalized so you have a mixed economy.

And under the Cold War there was pressure.

on Western countries to be a little bit socialist.

Why do the people in Russia and Cuba, why do they get free health care?

Why do I have to pay for my health care?

So that pressure existed.

Pressure existed to be a little bit socialist because capitalism and communism were literally at ideological war.

That was the theme of the world.

So anyway, if you have a situation like in Britain where

Clement Attlee is charging 90% tax to some of the wealthiest people, That's that's a very hostile environment if you have a lot of money.

If you're fucking wealthy, that's quite a hostile environment.

I need to take a break.

It's time for an ocarina pause now.

But after the ocarina pause, I'm gonna tell you the story of how we got to where we are now.

I'll play my bass ocarina.

You're gonna hear some adverts for some bullshit.

Oh,

I got a jewel tone there, like Mongolian throat singing.

I hear a siren as well.

Let's throw that in.

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Coach, the energy out there felt different.

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It was the new game day scratchers from the California Lottery.

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That was the Ocarina Pause.

Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind boy podcast.

If this podcast brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, distraction, whatever the fuck has you listened to this podcast, please consider supporting it directly.

This is my full-time job.

This is how I earn a living.

This is...

the Patreon allows me to have the time to research and write my podcast each week.

The Patreon keeps us independent.

Advertisers can't come in and tell me what to speak about.

My Patreon model, to be honest, it's kind of based on the original NHS and what I mean by that is, well, that's what inspired me.

I just want to earn a living doing what I love that's it

so if you can afford if you listen to this podcast and you can afford to give me the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month if you can afford that right then please do but if you can't afford it if you don't have that money you don't have to pay you can listen for free you listen for free my patreon page is blank there's nothing there the people who pay and the people who don't pay, there's no benefit to paying.

Everyone gets the exact same podcast, the exact same.

There's a million regular listeners.

If I wanted to earn more, I'd have exclusive content that some people pay for.

I'd have more advertisers on here doing sponsored episodes.

But what I prefer is everybody gets the exact same podcast.

I get to earn a living.

I've got creative freedom, right?

And the people who can pay, who are paying, they're paying for the people who can't afford to pay.

And everybody gets the exact same podcast.

And that's the model that I like.

So if you can afford to pay and to support this podcast directly, please do.

Patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

And don't do it through the Apple app, the Apple fucking Patreon app, because Apple take 30% now, right?

On the iPhone, I mean.

If you are becoming a paid patron, do it on a web browser, on the browser on your mobile phone.

Okay, let's plug a few gigs.

Tomorrow night, the Cork Opera House.

Please come along to that, right?

If...

If you're not sure about it, it's a wonderful little quiet Thursday night gig.

It's...

If you're thinking to yourself, oh, fuck it, I don't want to go out on a Thursday.

I've a cracking guessed.

You're not going out on a Thursday.

Coming to My Life podcast is...

It's like going to the cinema or going to a play.

You don't have to have a pint.

Most people aren't drinking.

You can go to my life podcast on Thursday night and you'll be in home, you'll be at home in bed by half eleven and you'll be awake for work the next day and you won't have a fucking hangover because you're not going to be getting shit faced at a live podcast.

So come along to my gig in Cork at the Cork Opera House tomorrow as part of the Cork Podcast Festival and look up the Cork Podcast Festival, not the Pork Podcast.

Fuck's sake.

Australian New Zealand.

Sold out, right?

Can't wait to go over there.

Then what have we got?

I think that's...

Is that the lot?

Might have a gig in Cavan coming up.

I'll give you the details of that soon enough.

Before I get on to the

UK tour,

I have a gig in Derry, right?

I have a gig in Derry there in September.

Come along to that in Derry.

Derry is a wonderful place to do a gig in September.

Derry.

Derry means Oakwood.

The land of the Oakwoods.

There was obviously a lot of oak trees there at once, one time.

My tour of Scotland and England, right, which is happening in June, which is almost sold out, all right.

I'm in Bristol, Cornwall, Sheffield, Manchester, Edinburgh, Glasgow, York, London, East Sussex and Norwich.

And you can get those tickets at fan.co.uk forward slash blindbuy.

Come along to those gigs.

I love gigging for the Kraken Tans.

Most of my listeners are Kraken Tans now.

Right, let's get back to how how we ended up in this shit that we're in today.

So the British welfare state, you know, 90% tax on wealthy people.

The New Deal America, 1940s.

This wasn't a good time for multi-millionaires.

I don't think billionaires existed yet, but it wasn't a good time for multi-millionaires or people of generational wealth.

In the 1940s, a fella came up with the name of Frederick Hayek.

He was, or Friedrich Hayek, he was an economist from Austria.

And he looked at

the welfare state in Britain and the New Deal in America and said, well,

this has gone too far now.

This is too far.

This is hostile to wealthy people.

This is actually going to lead to

if

Britain and America go down this path of creating gigantic social nets for all the people that that's a type of collectivism that's gonna lead to Soviet style communism that's that's the end result of this give it 20 fucking years and Britain and America it's gonna turn into Stalin and Mao Tze Tung and anyone who has any wealth they're gonna be they're gonna be executed in the streets.

So this fellow Friedrich Hayek, he starts doing speaking tours in America in the 1940s, speaking to incredibly wealthy people, to rich people, and freaking them out.

Freaking them out saying this new deal, this welfare state, it's going to end in some French Revolution shit.

They're going to behead the wealthy people.

This big government control, the government controlling like oil industries,

airplanes, electricity, the government controlling industry, taxing people.

This is an attack on freedom.

That's what this is.

And he published a book in the 1940s called The Road to Serfdom.

And it was directed at very wealthy people in America, the very wealthy.

And it was a book that basically said to the very wealthy, you people are

freedom fighters.

You have an absolute right to earn as much money as you want for your business.

to have the government shouldn't interfere with your business at all.

If you want to own the oil industry, you should be allowed to compete and own the oil industry the coal industry you you do whatever you want for profit that's actually freedom and by you doing that you're fighting against the potential totalitarianism of this social safety net and also and here's the thing this social safety net stuff where the government is investing in in health care and housing and all that That's not how you have a healthy country.

What you want is

you want the richest richest people.

The richest people should be allowed to do what they want.

Let the really rich, intelligent, smart, successful people, that's who we are, let us do whatever the fuck we want.

And then when we earn loads of money, that's going to trickle down.

The freedom that we have in business to do whatever we want, we don't even want to pay taxes, that will create jobs and that will trickle down.

And this this is the 1940s and these are these ideas are being espoused by this economist Friedrich Hayek and and what he's creating here

it's neoliberalism

that's a word

you'll hear me using it on this podcast a lot you might hear it in the media you have to understand what neoliberalism is it's it's a shitty word because the thing is

if you don't know what neoliberalism means it's one of these words that you hear and it sounds like a word that a person uses to try and sound smart.

It's one of them.

So we kind of switch off and you hear the word neoliberalism.

If you don't know what it means, you think the person who says it is being a prick that they're showing off.

But we all have to understand what neoliberalism means.

It's how the wealthy steal.

It's how the wealthy people steal.

Giant corporations don't pay tax.

Corporations that earn billions and billions and billions each year don't pay any tax.

They do it in Ireland.

I'm from fucking Ireland.

We enable this.

We enable this.

Corporations come here to Ireland for our 12% corporation tax.

And then through a lot of dirty tricks, some of them end up paying less than 1%.

We enable it.

They're stealing.

They're stealing.

Neoliberalism.

It's how the wealthiest people steal public money.

So back in the 1940s, this fella Friedrich Hayek, right?

He's the speaking tours to the wealthiest people in America.

Every single wealthy person who hears his speech says, I fucking love this guy, this is amazing.

I hate this welfare state shit.

I hate this.

I hate that rich people are being taxed.

I hate that poor people who I think are lazy and stupid.

I hate that they're getting free housing.

I hate that I can't do whatever I want.

I hate that the call industry isn't privatized.

I hate that I can't own the call industry and make billions.

I hate that I own a tie company.

I own a toy company.

I make ties for children, but I legally can't advertise to children.

I hate that that's illegal because I could make way more money if I could advertise to children because I'm selling ties with my giant tie company.

So by the 1950s money starts pouring into this Friedrich Friedrich Hayek fella to do his speaking tours and to form organizations to promote these ideas that he has, these ideas of neoliberalism, new economic liberalism.

Let rich people do whatever the fuck they want and it'll benefit the economy.

To pursue wealth is a form of freedom and anything that isn't this is totalitarianism.

Like 1940s Jordan Peterson.

You know, listening to fucking Jordan Peterson.

If you tell me in my job that I have to call a trans student trans,

then the next step is Soviet totalitarianism.

That's Jordan Peterson shtick for years.

Hayek was like that.

So throughout the 50s, all these big, huge fucking corporations, massive corporations, they start pouring money behind fucking Hayek, General Electric, Coors Beer, Ford

giant, giant corporations start pouring money into this fella.

Then they start spending money on think tanks.

These lobbying groups to change policy

in all parts of

US public life, in political discourse, lobbying politicians, lobbying journalists, universities.

They start funding the University of Chicago.

So now you've got economists coming out of the University of Chicago in the 60s, 50s and 60s, I believe, who are now promoting this fella Hayek's

ideas of economic liberalism equals freedom.

1960, he writes another book called The Constitution of Liberty.

He equates wealth and the pursuit of wealth with democracy, freedom, heroism.

I mean, this is where we get you get some of these people licking Elon Musk's arse, portraying Elon Musk as this scientific genius, as if he himself is designing the rockets, designing the cars, instead of being a financier.

In this 1960 book that Hayek wrote, The Constitution of Liberty,

you see this positioning of the very wealthy as like genius scientists.

These are the saviors of civilization.

To be wealthy means that you're good, it means that you work hard.

To be poor means that you're a scrounger, you're lazy, you're waiting for handouts.

The years and years of backing Hayek's ideas, it eventually pays off.

It pays off because

it ends up influencing, by the 1970s,

Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.

Now I've completely skipped Chile.

The country of Chile, that's where

Chile was ground zero.

for where this neoliberalism was tested.

Now I've done a podcast on that.

I think it's called Why I Want to Fuck Donald Duck.

I think that's the name of the podcast.

If it's not that, it has something to do with Donald Duck, right?

I did it about four years ago and it's about Chile.

I hate calling it Chile.

I'm just gonna call it Chile.

I know it's called Chile.

Chile sounds better to me.

It's like the fucking pork cod pass festival.

The country of Chile.

Chile basically,

it was a socialist country under a fella called Salvador Allende.

He had this mad socialist internet thing in the 70s.

Anyway, he was shut down by a coup.

Fella called Pinochet took over big fascist fucking coup really brutal and neoliberal economists from the university of chicago basically rebuilt the entire economy of of chile under the fascist pinochet and like sold off the copper industry but that's where neoliberalism was really road tested in chile long story short right the these these ideas by this fella hayek

they make it to reagen they make it to thatcher both Thatcher and Reagan, ideologically, are like, We want to get these ideas, right?

And we want to make that happen.

We want this to be policy.

We want this to be fucking policy.

And the policy is

privatize everything, right?

So the nationalized industries where you have people with full-term employment, pensions, healthcare, fuck that.

That's completely private now.

So coal, rail, steel, whatever, private industry for profit deregulation which means

companies can do whatever they want so long as they can earn money so there's no more regulation on companies i've done huge podcasts on this before the reason i mentioned children's toys is if you're a millennial like me you grew up watching children's cartoons he-man teenage minting ninja turtles all this shit right those weren't cartoons

those were advertisement for advertisements for toys under Reagan era deregulation.

And I always use this as the best example to describe what deregulation is.

It used to be illegal to advertise to children.

It used to be considered unethical, wrong and dangerous to advertise to children.

This was informed by psychologists.

It was illegal to advertise to children.

Under Reagan, Reagan was like, that sounds anti-business.

That sounds anti-capitalism.

I think very wealthy Thai companies should be allowed to advertise to children.

So they did it via cartoons.

And your childhood, my little pony, he-man, whatever the fuck.

Those were not cartoons.

They were advertisements for Thais because advertising to children had been deregulated.

Even though the psychologist said this isn't very safe, children are too young to be advertised to.

They're too young.

Reagan was like, no, fuck that.

I think that the right of a Thai company to earn more money is more important than the mental health of children.

That's neoliberalism right there.

Reduced government intervention.

The government shouldn't be involved in the economy whatsoever.

Just hand it all over to private companies.

That's neoliberalism.

Elon Musk right now with his Dodge, the Department of Government Efficiency and Trump.

Selling this narrative to the people.

We're draining the swamp.

We're getting rid of these elites from government.

We're shutting down all these programs.

Are they?

Fuck.

They're shutting them down so you don't have government employees anymore.

And they're going to turn everything into fur-profit.

Like they've shut down the national parks.

They're going to reopen the national parks, but now they'll be owned by fucking Jeff Bezos or whatever cabal of billionaires you currently see alongside Trump, fucking Zuckerberg Bezos, fella called Peter Thiel.

He basically owns your man JD Vance, and then Elon Musk.

You see, neoliberalism creates

a feeling of powerlessness and

hopelessness.

And what I mean by that is

where if you work, you're paying taxes, right?

And you're looking around and a lot of people are working, and a lot of people are paying a lot of taxes.

Then why are people living in tents?

Why are there people living in tents?

Why is that happening?

Because your taxes.

I'm speaking for Ireland now, but this is happening in other countries.

I'm sure it's the same in the fucking UK.

In Ireland, the taxes that you pay to provide a person who's in need with housing, these taxes, that money is actually stolen by a rich cunt.

Like, I have a job and I pay taxes, right?

And I want...

I want my taxes.

To pay for the housing of a family who aren't as fortunate as me.

For whatever reason I don't give a fuck what the reasons are but I know there's there's people out there and they can't afford housing and I want those people to have houses to be warm to have food to have a quality of life and I don't mind paying that with my taxes I want that I want to do that with my taxes I want to live in that society 100% I want to live in that society where my taxes are helping people who are less fortunate than me.

Currently what's happening in Ireland is

yes, there is a certain amount of affordable housing or social housing for people, right?

So let's just say a family in Ireland want to get social housing, right?

So they can get access to this, they can get a house.

Now it's a very, very fucking scarce, right?

It's very scarce.

But if a family is lucky enough to get a house, okay?

It's through a thing called HAP, the housing assistance payment, right?

Instead of back in the day where

social housing was built and provided by local authorities, by the council, now what's happening is the government pays a landlord.

So the money that you think is a taxpayer is actually going to help a family get a house or to get a home.

It is, but the vast majority of that money that you pay is lining the pockets pockets of a landlord.

And the government pays the landlord with your taxes, the market value of the rent.

So let's just say for argument's sake,

the person in need of a house,

they pay 200 quid a month in HAP, right?

That's very affordable rent, 200 quid.

The landlord who owns that house is paid by the government 2,500 quid from tax, from tax money.

And that there is neoliberalism a public service such as providing people in need with affordable housing has been outsourced to the private market and very wealthy people are stealing i'm calling it stealing very wealthy people are stealing tax making themselves wealthy and pushing pushing rents up pushing rents up you see now there's an incentive there's an incentive for a housing crisis now now there's an industry an industry is developing whereby instead of wanting to solve the housing crisis okay

and to provide everybody with housing because housing should be a right instead of that what you have is an industry where human misery and homelessness can be milked and profited from and that's how you end up with people paying taxes to try and solve the housing crisis and still there's a lot of homeless people so you end up feeling that everything is pointless.

I'm paying taxes, everyone I know is paying taxes.

There's a high employment and all these people who are highly employed are paying fucking taxes.

Why are there people on the streets in tents?

Because the system has been set up for very rich people to steal taxes.

That's what neoliberalism is.

In America, prisons are privatized.

So when people go to prison in America, the fucking prisons are private and people can earn money from running prisons.

so now they've incentivized the prison industry the wonderful NHS that I described in fucking Britain that was set up as free healthcare for everybody that's been that's been gutted deregulation and neoliberalism has allowed the NHS to be contracted out so lots of stuff in the NHS is now contracted out for profit to private companies and then the NHS NHS itself gets underfunded to encourage this this pushing it out to the private market.

So that situation there is Wet in Ireland where I mentioned that, like,

when you pay taxes for social housing, a lot of most of that goes to landlords.

These landlords, they're not like individual people.

Sometimes they are, but mostly, you're talking about giant companies that own multiple properties.

How about this?

This is gonna sound fucking nuts.

What if I told you that social housing in Ireland is advertised to other countries?

Social housing is advertised, social housing in Ireland is advertised in China

as an investment and advertised Ireland's housing crisis, Ireland's misery is advertised to multi-millionaires in China as a secure investment.

Right?

It advertises Ireland.

Now, I'm taking this from, there's a journalist in Sunday Business Post called Killian Woods, and he does brilliant investigation.

He's a legitimate journalist.

He does brilliant investigations into this.

So Ireland was being advertised to these Chinese multi-millionaires.

The housing crisis was being advertised as the Irish people, they drink on Saturday and then drink for half the day on Sunday.

And by then, most of their weekly paycheck is spent.

So when Monday comes around and they start to work, they're lethargic.

It's basically positioning Ireland as this very safe country where we don't notice what's going on because we're so pissed all the time.

and then it says Ireland is a country that doesn't have any radical Muslim issues and what are they selling?

Social housing.

These ads were successful in my city in Limerick.

This is not a fucking joke.

In my city in Limerick, Chinese investors bought a 100 million Euro site and they're going to build 500 social homes.

Now here's the thing.

Am I anti-social housing?

No, no, build fucking social housing.

I don't want to see people on the streets in tents.

Isn't it a good thing that these Chinese investors are building 500 social houses in Limerick?

Is that not a good thing?

So yes, this means that 500 families might get 500 houses in Limerick, right?

Affordably.

That's brilliant.

Why are Chinese investors paying for it?

That's 500 houses.

that are going to be rented out at market value.

The current market value to rent out a house for a month in Limerick would be between 2,500 and 3,000 euros.

That's 1.5 million euros a month, right?

Who pays that?

The Irish taxpayer, you and me, our taxes, right?

Yes, those taxes, 500 people are getting houses or 500 families are getting houses affordably, right?

But the vast majority of that money, that 1.5 million, the vast majority of that money is being siphoned off to Chinese investors.

And they'd probably have a company in Ireland where that money goes to and they won't have to pay tax on it and then you now have an entire for-profit industry whereby this industry makes it makes more money when the housing crisis is worse you see the housing

the more scarce housing is, the more expensive it is and now the more money you can make from a housing crisis.

So money is being stolen.

What stops that?

Regulation.

It should be illegal.

It shouldn't happen because it's unconscionable.

It's unthinkable.

It's inhumane.

It perpetuates a housing crisis.

It creates a housing crisis.

It turns misery into a commodity that can be profited from and milked.

And then that whole process leaves the average person feeling utterly powerless.

The same thing is happening with

With refugees, Ukrainian refugees, with refugees from all over the world.

You might be thinking, blind boy, are you anti-refugee now?

Why are you speaking about refugees?

No, I'm not anti-refugee at all.

There's people escaping wars.

They deserve to have safety.

Ireland is a safe country.

I would like my taxes.

I would like my taxes

to give these people safety and warmth and food for as long as they need.

But this has been outsourced to the private the private market mostly by huge hotel chains earning millions and millions and how are these hotel chains earning money by providing accommodation for refugees

because they're charging the government market value so if

Travelodge are stuck into it.

I know Travelodge are one of the one of the companies for sure.

Yeah, so in 2023, Travelodge made 37 million from the Irish government by providing accommodation for refugees.

Now, to the best of my understanding,

rooms are charged at

the going price.

So if the government outsource privately contracts to hotels

to accommodate refugees, and then the hotel charges the government what the going rate would be for a hotel room that night, which could be 300, 400 quid.

So I think that my taxes are actually paying to accommodate people who are fleeing war.

And they are.

But most of the money, most of the money is going into the pockets of private corporations, right?

Giant hotel companies who are funneling tax, public money into their private coffers.

and then

paying Ireland's very low corporation tax of 12%.

So, what you're seeing really, okay,

it's stealing.

It's legal, so it's not stealing, right?

But

slowly but surely, through policy, through lobbying, and this isn't just Ireland, this is everywhere, right?

Neoliberalism, through privatization, deregulation, has made it so that the wealthiest people and entities pay the least amount of tax and can funnel tax money, public money that's supposed to be going to provide social safety nets.

This money that used to provide safety nets, it's now just been funneled.

And what do you get from that?

Huge, huge inequality.

You get a lot of billionaires and then 99% of people going, this is hopeless, this is hopeless.

There appears to be money everywhere.

There appears to be a functioning economy.

But why are people intense?

What's happening here?

Policy is what's happening.

That's a choice.

That's a choice.

Policy.

Policy is what's fucking happening there.

In the same way, it was policy.

For Britain to start the NHS free healthcare for everybody

while the place was on fire.

Neoliberalism has figured out a way to take human misery and turn it into profit.

And most of us aren't really aware that's what's happening.

Instead, we just have a a feeling of powerlessness.

And in that gulf, in that gulf, what happens?

In the confusion, the confusion and the chaos of that, and the feeling of nothing I seems to do makes a difference, we search for our narratives again.

Conspiracy theories, the pandemic, racism, fascism.

The billionaires own the social media companies.

The billionaires own the social media companies where disinformation is spread.

Not just disinformation, but any information that causes us to have high arousal emotions, anger and fear.

These platforms are owned by billionaires.

These platforms,

the public square where we have conversations,

owned by billionaires and they set the rules of how discourse must occur.

And social media is a video game where you have turn and response combat where everything must be polarized.

And they make money from that too.

Or data.

The longer you stay on whatever fucking app arguing, the more money the billionaires make.

Who's right-hand side with Trump?

Elon Musk and fucking Mark Zuckerberg.

There's no conspiracy.

It's neoliberal capitalism.

It's right there in front of you.

You don't need a conspiracy.

The wealthiest people in the world are taking ownership of everything, including public discourse.

Conspiracy theories.

Anger.

Blaming.

pointing the finger at one another, pointing the finger at fucking refugees, pointing the finger at trans people, whatever the fuck.

These are all wonderful, brilliant distractions.

While public money is funneled into private interests and we can't see it happening.

There was a psychologist by the name of Martin Seligman.

I think he was in the 1960s.

His methods were studied by the fucking CIA when they were writing up their torture manuals.

But Martin Seligman proposed a theory called learned helplessness learned helplessness in human behavior and he did studies on dogs

he got one dog and put him in a box right

and

the dog was given electric shocks and it wasn't very nice and the dog was given electric shocks but the dog could turn off the electric shocks by touching a lever but at the same time there was another dog in another box watching all this and the other dog was getting shocks too.

Except when the other dog touched the lever nothing happened.

The dog got shocks regardless.

Nothing that the dog could do would stop the shocks happening.

Animal cruelty.

But Seligman continued these experiments, right?

So the one dog was receiving shocks, but it could stop the shocks by touching a lever.

Other dog getting the same shocks, but nothing it did could stop the shocks.

Then the experiment progressed.

Seligman got both dogs and put them into a couple of new boxes right and in these boxes the dogs could avoid shocks if they just jumped over a bar.

The dog

who had been in the box whereby if he touched the lever he could stop the shocks.

This dog would jump whenever it felt the shock.

This dog would actively avoid shocks and work towards not being shocked.

The dog that was in the box, whereby nothing it did, it got shocks anyway.

This dog just gave up and whimpered and yelped and allowed itself to be shocked consistently electrocuted in utter misery.

And Seligman called this learned helplessness.

The dog had been conditioned to believe

that it was going to be hurt and harmed regardless, and that nothing it could do could have any influence over its life and environment.

Neoliberalism thrives on that.

All the

fucking mad conspiracy theories, the disinformation,

the horrifying images of genocide, the fact that nothing's done about it that no one's held to account, the removal of old belief structures, the removal of the international order, the rise of fascism, everything,

everything is preying upon our feeling of hopelessness and then adding to it as well.

It's a system designed to make you feel helpless so you don't do anything about it and you just give up and put up with it.

It's hard to find an answer, but one thing I do notice is that the system thrives upon division.

Whatever the subject, like think of it, if you go to the fucking pub, and this wasn't the case 10 years ago, if you go to the pub, right?

And you're with your friends, and there's a few other people who you don't know that well, are you really going to bring up housing or immigration?

Are you really going to do that?

You probably won't, because you don't know where the conversation is going to go.

You're afraid that someone is going to say something racist or utterly fucking mad.

Someone might legitimately turn around and say, you bring up housing.

And then they go, you know, refugees, you know, that's actually a global plot to replace white people.

And the ones that are doing it are interdimensional shape-shifting lizards.

I know people who believe that.

I didn't know people who believed that 10 fucking years ago.

Everything has become so polarized and divided.

Doesn't it?

There's people in America fighting over milk.

There's people fighting over raw milk.

You're Robert Kennedy running the healthcare system over there.

People in America, milk has become politicized.

Right-wing people want raw milk that comes straight from a cow's tit.

Left-leaning people want milk that's been pasteurized.

If I see someone who's into yoga now, I have to wonder if they're a fascist.

Oh, you're into crystals, yeah?

Do you like crystals?

Or do you think that the COVID vaccine was actually implanted in us as a tracking device for Hollywood elites so that they can

so that they can suck adrenochrome from the glands of abused children in order to have longevity.

There's people who believe that.

Some of these people are into yoga.

10 years ago, when someone was into yoga, they were just into meditating and breathing.

No matter what it is, it's being

polarized, whatever the subject, it's being polarized and people are being split into two teams.

And you know who's being split into two teams?

People who are fucked by the system.

People at the bottom of the system.

So I don't know what the answer is, but I do know.

But I do know that division is a goal.

The first thing that I do proactively, I can only give advice to people in Ireland.

Join a Community Action Tenancy Union.

CATU.

It's a volunteer-run organisation.

Community Action Tenancy Union who strive for collective bargaining against

evictions and landlords and it's it's about people power and community and I don't think it's centrally run so that's a positive thing you could do join your local Katu branch if if division is a very clear goal which we can see if division is a clear goal then community and unity and solidarity and empathy and trying to meet in real life spaces outside of online spaces that's probably a potential solution okay i didn't expect this podcast to be.

I could have done fucking longer on this.

I could have done longer, and there's so much I didn't fucking speak about.

I mean, I just focused on housing.

All right, dog bless.

I'll catch you next week.

My voice is gone.

Genu fleck to a swan, wink at a worm,

gently explain neoliberalism to a snail, to a garden snail.

Dog bless.

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