How I found a bag of Heroin on the ground because I thought it was a dead Bird

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Speaker 4 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 6 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 7 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 8 Hey, Dave, here's a tip. Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 9 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 10 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 5 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 11 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 14 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 12 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 15 Please play responsibly.

Speaker 16 Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 3 Eyeball the Pieball toilet, you joyful Kinselis. Welcome to the Blind Buy Podcast.

Speaker 3 If this is your first episode, consider consider going back to an earlier episode to familiarize yourself with the lore of this podcast. As I record this,

Speaker 3 it's Sunday morning.

Speaker 3 I usually don't come into my office on Sundays. I'd stay at home.

Speaker 3 But this week I've one less day to work because

Speaker 3 this Tuesday I'm in London. I'm in London at the Grierson Awards.

Speaker 3 A documentary I made has been nominated for an award, which if you're listening to this on Wednesday, that means that was last night, so I don't know whether I won the award or not.

Speaker 3 But realistically, that doesn't really matter.

Speaker 3 I absolutely wasn't expecting to get nominated, and just being nominated, that's enough for me. And I'm really excited about going to the award ceremony.

Speaker 3 Not necessarily to win the award, what I'm looking forward to is...

Speaker 3 I know that I'm going to meet loads of people in the documentary industry, in the television industry, and I might have a conversation that will lead to a new piece of work.

Speaker 3 I mean, that's why I do it. That's why I do anything.

Speaker 3 You know, why do I write books? Why do I make documentaries? Why do I do any of it? Because I love the doing. I love doing it.
I love the bit in the middle, the process.

Speaker 3 It's not necessarily about the end result. It's nice to have books that are written and documentaries that are made, but that's not the goal.

Speaker 3 The goal is the bit in the middle the experience of meaning and purpose that comes from waking up every morning and doing the thing that I love doing so I make documentaries and write books so that I can have the opportunity to write another book or make another documentary until such time as I'm ready to die Also, I managed to pick out an outfit for the awards ceremony.

Speaker 3 Thank you to everybody who was mailing me with advice.

Speaker 3 I had a quite enjoyable few days operating outside of my comfort zone, challenging assumptions about myself. You know, I have an assumption about myself that I can't dress myself.

Speaker 3 Now, what's true is I don't think about clothes, I don't think about fashion, I don't really notice what other people are wearing. The language of fashion isn't a sea that I swim in.

Speaker 3 It's not a skill set that comes easily to me and it's not a comfort zone. So these things are true.

Speaker 3 But a statement such as, I can't dress myself, it's impossible, I'm shit at dressing myself, I'll only fuck it up. Those are negative assumptions, and I can challenge those flexibly.

Speaker 3 So that's what I did for the past couple of days, and it was really enjoyable. And I got myself a lovely kind of powder blue fucking single-breast blazer and bluish-looking chinos.

Speaker 3 I started to view outfits not just as clothes that I put on my body to communicate things to other people. See that's the bit that was freaking me out and that's my own insecurity.

Speaker 3 Probably, probably from just being autistic my entire life. But that was what was freaking me out.
Fuck it. Wearing clothes is about communicating with other people in a system.

Speaker 3 What happens if I fuck it up? But I started to look at an outfit as an internal conversation. Like the shoes that I wear.

Speaker 3 Like my shirt is white with little blue dots so if my shoes have just a little hint of blue even around the the holes where my laces are now my shoes are having a conversation with my shirt and learning about

Speaker 3 how a belt a belt can mediate a conversation between your jacket and your pants so if I've got like a blue blazer and then bluish trousers and I throw a black belt into the middle of that

Speaker 3 that black belt is like going you can't have a chat with each other, get fucked. No, no, no, you're not friends.

Speaker 3 A black belt there is like a passive-aggressive prick that doesn't want two people to become friends with each other like a toxic individual. Why? Well, just color theory, but black.

Speaker 3 Black isn't a colour. Black is a shade.
Black in...

Speaker 3 Black doesn't exist in the color spectrum because black is the absence of light. So when you put a black belt down the middle, you're creating a hard boundary there.

Speaker 3 Black belts tend tend to work when you're dealing with shades, a grey suit, charcoal, shades.

Speaker 3 But if I bring in a brown or a tan belt, then that's a very friendly person who does want my jacket and my trousers to have a conversation with each other.

Speaker 3 A brown belt is like, not only are ye gonna have a chat, I'm gonna point out what ye have in common because

Speaker 3 Brown is in the same kind of color temperature as blue.

Speaker 3 And even you look at the sky, the sky is blue, then you've got a little brown strip of earth in the middle and then underneath that you can have the ocean which is also blue this conversation is already happening in nature and i really enjoyed that

Speaker 3 i enjoyed looking at an outfit as a conversation between multiple garments i started to view an outfit the way that i'd view a meal or a pit or a piece of music Like I'm a music producer.

Speaker 3 I mix and arrange songs.

Speaker 3 And I know when I'm mixing a song,

Speaker 3 let's just say you've got your guitar and then you've got your drums. Now the guitar, that's...

Speaker 3 that's harmonic. That's about harmony, that's making the sweet sounds that you hear.
It's rhythmic as well, but it's got chords and you've got your drums.

Speaker 3 Now your drums, that's the rhythm, that's the percussion.

Speaker 3 But very rarely, almost never, I actually can't even think of it off the top of my head, you'd rarely hear a song that's just drums and guitar. Because usually in the middle there you have the bass.

Speaker 3 And the bass, it's both rhythm and melody. The bass makes the drums and guitar talk to each other.
It mediates.

Speaker 3 It mediates between drums and guitar and then you have something now that's sounding like a song. And then I started to view belts as a bass guitar.
I'm like, holy fuck.

Speaker 3 I've got a blazer and a set of trousers and this fucking fucking belt here that's the bass guitar my pants are ringo star on drums walking and my shoes of course that's setting the rhythm right my fucking jacket that's george harrison playing guitar the belt that's paul mccartney on bass mediating everything that's happening above the belt and below the belt and then john lennon the singing that's

Speaker 3 Maybe the accessories or the tie or possibly just the colours. I couldn't fully figure out what part of the outfit was John Lennon.
It's something possibly intangible.

Speaker 3 Maybe he's the hat if I wore a hat. The point is, I started to view putting on an outfit and dressing myself as a song.
I said, this is no different to a fucking song. This is a song.

Speaker 3 And thank you very much to the very helpful lady in Dunn Stores

Speaker 3 who listened to me as I told her about how my outfit was a song. I didn't.
I didn't fucking do that. I kept it inside my head.
I did not do that. But reframing the mechanics of fashion as a song

Speaker 3 that made it very accessible and not and less intimidating and enjoyable and fun because I'd reframed it in a language that I do understand. And then it got me thinking.

Speaker 3 Because you don't hear a lot of songs that are just guitar and drums. You don't hear a lot of that.
And then I thought, the fucking white stripes. The fucking white stripes.
The white stripes.

Speaker 3 It was Meg White on drums and then Jack White on guitar and there's no bass. But yet it works.
The music works. The white stripes music is fucking banging.
However,

Speaker 3 yes, there's no bass guitar in the white stripes music. But what Jack White does,

Speaker 3 he plays his guitar through a bass amp. So his guitar has lower bass tones.
So that's why when you listen to the white stripes, you're not like, something's missing here.

Speaker 3 It's like, no, he's playing his guitar through a bass amp very very clever it works and then I started thinking what's the fucking fashion equivalent it's dungarees dungarees

Speaker 3 dungarees it's pants and a top all as one with no belt but it still works it'll give you a weird looking arse but still it's it's works it's dungarees so the white stripes music is dungarees

Speaker 3 And also too, if someone's listening to this, I know from the messages I got on Instagram, I got messages from people who listen to this podcast, who are fashion designers, professional stylists, who this is their bread and butter, this is the art form that they are skilled at and fluent in.

Speaker 3 And I know some of you are listening. And I'm saying something like,

Speaker 3 you can't wear a black belt

Speaker 3 with a blue blazer and blue trousers. And you're probably saying, well, you can, you could do it this way, you could do it that way, but you I could fucking do that.
And I'm sure you can.

Speaker 3 and that there is talent

Speaker 3 like if anyone's anyone who's speaking about any art form

Speaker 3 as a guideline for myself as soon as i hear a person say you can't do that there's a rule here as soon as someone says

Speaker 3 you can't have a song with no bass guitar an exceptionally talented person will step up and say Hold on a fucking minute. Don't be telling me I can't.
I'll figure it out. Don't be telling me I can't.

Speaker 3 That's a challenge. And that talented person will make it work.
The white stripes being a perfect example of that. You can't have a band and it's just guitar and drums.
You can't do that.

Speaker 3 Want a fucking bet?

Speaker 3 Same with Gary Noman. Gary Noman.
Late 70s. He was a punk musician.
And Gary Noman, who was autistic. which is relevant because of his capacity to think outside of the box.

Speaker 3 But Gary Norman was like, I want a punk band, but there's no guitars. And I was like, you can't fucking do that.
You can't fucking do that. And it's like, yeah, I'm going to use a synthesizer.

Speaker 3 Instead of guitars, I'm going to use a synthesizer. You can't fucking do that.
And what does Gary Newman do?

Speaker 3 He goes, I'm going to get synthesizers and I'm going to put them into the type of effects that you put guitars into. And then he makes a song like Cars or Our Friends Electric.

Speaker 3 and literally changes how we think about what music can be. So don't listen to me if I say you can't wear a black belt with a blue suit.
What the fuck do I know?

Speaker 3 I'm following guidelines, but I'm sure there's an incredibly talented person out there who'll make it work. Like fucking hip-hop music.
Hip-hop music.

Speaker 3 Like in the 1980s,

Speaker 3 you can't make songs out of bits of other people's songs. You can't do that.
You can't make a piece of music and your music.

Speaker 3 The music that you're putting out is made from little bits of other people's music? That's unthinkable. That's preposterous.
A rule exists that you can't do that. That wouldn't be art.

Speaker 3 That wouldn't be creative. And then hip-hop musicians come along and go, I'm sorry, what? And you get sampling.
You get fucking public enemy. Making beautiful, chaotic noise.

Speaker 3 out of 20 bits of someone else's music making something you've never heard before that completely redefines how we think about what music can be.

Speaker 3 But then to take it back to fashion, at the same time in New York,

Speaker 3 when hip-hop was being born and sampling music was becoming a thing for hip-hop music at the same time,

Speaker 3 there was a fella up in Harlem, a fashion designer in Harlem called Dapper Dan.

Speaker 3 Now, Dapper Dan, he used to own a shop in Harlem, probably

Speaker 3 1979, 1980, 81.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 in the 80s, you had your labels like Versace and Gochi. And these were luxury brands.
We now take these brands for granted. Like, we now associate these brands with hip-hop fashion.

Speaker 3 But Gochi and Versace and fucking Louis Vuitton or whatever the fuck you have, this was posh people clothes. This was for very, very, very rich people.
in the 70s and early 80s.

Speaker 3 And also, luxury designer brands at the time, let's just say Gochi, it was rich white people who were buying Gochi bags. And the Gucci label, that wouldn't have been on like the outside of the bag.

Speaker 3 If someone had a Gochi handbag in 1979, only another rich person might be able to spot that that's Gochi or know what Gucci is. And that's...

Speaker 3 It's a classist. It's a classist

Speaker 3 code system. And in the American context, it's racist.
It's referred to as old money taste or quiet luxury.

Speaker 3 So, if you had a Gucci bag in 1979, only another person who's rich enough is going to know that that's a Gucci bag. Because the Gucci logo, that's on the inside of the bag, in the lining of the bag.

Speaker 3 There's your Gucci logo everywhere, but not on the fucking outside. And it's a form of hoarding, hoarding of cultural capital, hoarding of knowledge.
It's exclusionary. It excludes no money.

Speaker 3 It excludes working class people, middle class people. In this specific context, it intersects with the exclusion of black and brown people who might have made money through their work.

Speaker 3 And it's a way of going, you might have the money, but you don't know what this brand is. You don't know what this is.
These are secrets that we share amongst ourselves in a little elite club.

Speaker 3 We all know what Gucci and Prada is today. The cultural value of those brands has changed.
But Tuesday night at the awards ceremony,

Speaker 3 I might find myself in conversation with like a proper posh English cunt, because it's the awards television documentary you tend to find, especially over in England.

Speaker 3 You will find some profoundly posh people in those circles. And when I say posh, I mean

Speaker 3 someone whose great-grandfather owns an eighth of Scotland posh. Someone whose ancestors brutalized and evicted my ancestors posh.

Speaker 3 But they're probably they'll be wearing a jacket or a set of shoes or a pants. And I don't even know what the fuck, I've never even heard what the label is, I don't even know.

Speaker 3 So, anyway, New York, Harlem, 1980, hip-hop started a few years previously, just up a bit in the Bronx. And the Gucci Fendi, these labels, they would have been on the inside of handbags in the lining.

Speaker 3 But what happened with this dapper dan fella in Harlem?

Speaker 3 So, all the

Speaker 3 local, the drug dealers and pimps who were making a lot of money and wanted to show off and I'm basing this on information that the Dapper Dan himself has said.

Speaker 3 You had hustlers, pimps, drug dealers, the beginning of the crack epidemic, starting to make a lot of money. They went to Dapper Dan and what Dapper Dan used to do is he'd get like a gocci handbag

Speaker 3 and on the inside of the handbag in the lining the bit you're not supposed to see in that lining there it says gocci gocci gocci Apper Dan would then take the lining of about 20 handbags and make a track suit out of it.

Speaker 3 He'd make a custom track suit out of the inside of gocci bags and then the local drug dealers wearing it.

Speaker 3 The local drug dealers wearing a track suit made out of the inside of gochi bags and his entire body is gochi gocci and then fucking versace all over his pants.

Speaker 3 and he's walking around in i'm walking around in 50 handbags stitched together together and each one of them costs 10 grand so I'm walking around in 200 grand worth of a track suit what the fuck do you think of that and look at these gold chains that this was real this is the early 1980s up in Harlem but then what starts happening rappers the likes of LL Coolje Eric B and Rakim uh the boxer Mike Tyson start making a bit of money and now LL Coolje is wearing these dapper dan tracksuits here's a nice example that that if you're not a fan of hip-hop, that you'll definitely understand.

Speaker 3 If you're a millennial or older Gen Z, we all grew up watching The Fresh Prince of Bel Air.

Speaker 3 If you were a kid in the 90s or the repeats of the show up until the mid-2000s, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air defined your fucking childhood. It did in Ireland anyway, and probably over in the UK.

Speaker 3 So in this TV show, The Fresh Prince, played by Will Smith, He's from West Philadelphia, which is East Coast, hard working class African-American area in Philadelphia.

Speaker 3 He ends up living with his aunt in Bel Air, which is a posh part of fucking Los Angeles, right?

Speaker 3 But anyways, remember, Will Smith used to have to go to private school, posh private school, but when he was in private school, he would get his blazer, his posh private school blazer, and then he'd turn it inside out so that the lining of his blazer is now on the outside.

Speaker 3 And within the context of the TV show, that was his individualism and his bit of street culture. His bit of street culture in this posh, white person environment.

Speaker 3 I'm gonna wear the fucking inside of my jacket and the outside. Because he's going, the outside of this jacket is boring.
Look at the inside, it's class. Whether intentional or not,

Speaker 3 that's a reference to what Dapper Dan was doing in Harlem in the 80s with clothes. Probably intentional because people forget about fucking Will Smith.

Speaker 3 We grew up watching the Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which was early 90s. Will Smith is there at the foundation of hip-hop.

Speaker 3 He was the fresh prince with Jazzy Jeff before that TV show, releasing albums in 1984, I think. So, without a doubt, he was swimming in that sea.
He'd have been hanging around with El Colje.

Speaker 3 And the modern fashion culture of like

Speaker 3 a tracksuit or a hoodie that has the label all over it, like now it's just been absorbed into mainstream culture. You don't take any notice of it.

Speaker 3 You can trace that right back to Dapper Dan and what Dapper Dan was doing, and this is what's so fucking beautiful about it just that analogy about music and fashion dapper dan at the same neighborhoods and at the same time that hip-hop artists were sampling other people's music and making something new making a new piece of art dapper dan was sampling fucking handbags he was hip-hop sampling but with fashion And someone said, you can't do that.

Speaker 3 You can't make a fucking tracksuit out of fucking handbags. Out of luxury, You wanna bet? Yes, I can.
And now that's just mainstream. Because it's been appropriated into the mainstream and

Speaker 3 the African-American roots of it are

Speaker 3 forgotten through that appropriation. And if there's a part of you that's thinking, sure hip-hop music,

Speaker 3 sampling other people's music and making it your own, or dapper dan.

Speaker 3 Taking handbags that aren't his and making it his own. Is that not just stealing? No, that's revolutionary.
It's revolutionary.

Speaker 3 It's a revolution against the system of racism. America is a racist country.
Now race, race isn't real. Human beings are human beings.
We're all human beings. But racism is real.

Speaker 3 It's an exclusionary system of power based upon the pseudoscience of race being real. And a lot of 20th century music

Speaker 3 has its roots in African art. But the vast majority of successful 20th century musicians weren't African American, they were white people.

Speaker 3 And they became successful because the system of racism, which went hand in hand with capitalism, didn't work against them.

Speaker 3 So sampling was like a revolutionary way of remixing a stolen past to create a future using art. And with Dapper Dan effectively sampling Gucci handbags,

Speaker 3 like African American people in the late 70s in New New York, no matter how much money they had, they weren't getting into the Gucci shop. They weren't allowed in there.
Stapperdan goes, fuck that.

Speaker 3 So I'm going to sample your handbags and I'm going to make a tracksuit out of it. And we're going to do it in Harlem.
And that's a way there of

Speaker 3 recontextualizing the dominant culture and taking power away from it. You think Gucci were happy at the time? No, they spent years.
So in Dapper Dan.

Speaker 3 The power of that little hidden code, the hidden code that operates on classism and racism, the quiet luxury, the old money taste of only one rich white person can spot a Gucci bag.

Speaker 3 And if you want to prove that it's a Gucci bag, you just have to show the inside very subtly.

Speaker 3 Dapperdan ripped all that apart and said, no, the inside is now on the outside and the labels are everywhere. That's revolutionary.
because it strips power away. That takes the power away.

Speaker 3 There's no difference between that and the IRA in the 1920s waiting until all the British soldiers are asleep in their barracks, arriving at night time, burning them out, stealing their guns, and then shooting more British soldiers with stolen British guns.

Speaker 3 Now that there is violent revolution. There's a violent system in power, a military power.

Speaker 3 So we're going to take their guns because we don't have any because we're poor, and then we're going to shoot them with their guns. Cultural revolution, it's the same dynamics.

Speaker 3 It's, there's a power structure. I'm going to strip that power away and make it work for me.
And then the Dapper Dan style, it stopped becoming revolutionary.

Speaker 3 It then became absorbed into the mainstream.

Speaker 3 And now if you saw a Dapper Dan tracksuit from the 1980s with the Gucci labels on the outside or the Fendi labels, it doesn't look as shocking now because it's been absorbed into the mainstream.

Speaker 3 And I think eventually Gucci stopped suing Dapper Dan and he ended up As a board member in the 2000s. They had to give up and just go, look,

Speaker 3 come on board, you'll make us look cool. Anyway, look, I'm happy with my fucking outfit for the award ceremony.

Speaker 3 I don't look fantastic, it's just it'll help me blend in nicely and I won't look like an absolute prick. But these are some of the thoughts that helped me to get over my anxiety of dressing myself.

Speaker 3 I'll have a plastic bag in my head anyway. Before I begin the second part of this podcast, because I have a story that I don't want to interrupt,

Speaker 3 let's have a little ocarina pause. I'm gonna blow into an empty bottle of sparkling water, and you're gonna hear an advert for some bullshit.
Alright?

Speaker 5 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 6 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 7 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 8 Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 9 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 10 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 5 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 11 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 13 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 12 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 15 Please play responsibly.

Speaker 16 Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 17 Group health plans are limited to a single carrier and a few plan options, but that doesn't fit everyone's needs.

Speaker 17 Now, a new form of employer coverage called an ICRA allows employees to choose any plan from any carrier. Learn more at ambetterhealth.com slash ICRA.

Speaker 18 Hey guys, it's Paige from Giggly Squad. And if you're anything like me, holiday shopping has officially started.
And you know where I'm going? Ulta Beauty.

Speaker 18 They have the cutest gift sets right now, like the Sol de Janeiro Shea Rosa and Cheer Perfume Mist Trio. It smells so good.
I've been missing it everywhere. On me, on the street, on my pillow.

Speaker 18 It's a whole vibe. I'm obsessed with the Tarte Kindness Cafe collector set.
It's packed with everyday makeup must-haves, and it's honestly too cute to wrap.

Speaker 18 And if you need a cozy little self-care moment, the Moroccan Oil Hand Care Essentials kit is luxe, hydrating, and smells delicious. Don't worry if you can't decide right now.

Speaker 18 An Ulta Beauty gift card is the perfect gift for everyone. So, whether you're gifting your bestie or yourself, make the season yours and head to Ulta Beauty today.
Ulta Beauty gifting happens here.

Speaker 5 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 6 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 7 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 8 Hey, Dave, here's a tip: put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 9 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 10 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 5 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 11 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 14 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 12 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 15 Please play responsibly.

Speaker 16 Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 19 This holiday season, connection with the kids we love is the best gift of all.

Speaker 19 Right now, kids on average are spending between five to nine hours a day on screens, and studies link heavy use to rising anxiety and depression, with social media being at the center of it all.

Speaker 19 That's why Gab makes kids safe phones and watches. No internet, no social media, just the right features for their age.
With Gab's Tech and Steps approach, kids get the right tech at the right time.

Speaker 19 So if a phone is on your child's wish list, make it a Gab, the gift of safe connection. For an exclusive holiday offer, visit gab.com/slash get gab and use code get gab.
That's gabb.com slash get gab.

Speaker 19 Gab. Tech insteps.
Independence for them. Peace of mind for you.

Speaker 20 November is all about gathering. Friends giving feasts, Thanksgiving dinners, and football weekends.

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Speaker 20 See TotalWine.com for details. Spirits not sold in Virginia and North Carolina.
Drink responsibly.

Speaker 18 Be 21.

Speaker 3 It's not working for me this week.

Speaker 3 Support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

Speaker 3 If you enjoy this podcast, if it brings you mirth, merriment, entertainment, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider paying me for the work that I'm doing because this is my full-time job.

Speaker 3 This is how I earn a living, it's how I rent out my office, it's how I pay all my bills, this is what I do for a living. And by being listener funded, it's how I have the time and space.

Speaker 3 to research and show up and make this podcast each week and to fail. I don't deliver a podcast each week without several failed attempts beforehand until I find the right groove.

Speaker 3 So all I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford it, don't worry about it, you can listen for free.

Speaker 3 Listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. So that's patreon.com forward slash the blind by podcast.

Speaker 3 And also by staying listener funded,

Speaker 3 it means I'm not beholden to advertisers. If advertisers step into the space they can, but they can fuck off if they try and change the content in any way.

Speaker 3 Let's very quickly fulfill my contractual obligations and plug some gigs. Don't have any gigs left in 2025 but I do have a few gigs there in 2026.

Speaker 3 Beginning in the end of January with the Waterford Theatre Royal.

Speaker 3 Then on the 31st of January, I'm at the Spirit of Kildare Festival there in Nais, good old Nais.

Speaker 3 Then February, up in Vicar Street, which is it's a Wednesday gig, wonderful Wednesday gig.

Speaker 3 I like to do mid-week Vicar Street gigs, the gigs that no one else wants, because I like lovely, quiet, relaxed doubling gigs. Come along to Vicar Street there in February.

Speaker 3 Belfast, of course, that's nearly sold out on the 12th of February. Then we've got Galway, Leisureland, fucking Killarnium up in the Ineck in February,

Speaker 3 March, Carlo, Cork. And then I've Limerick there in April, is it?

Speaker 3 Limerick University Concert Hall in April. Come along to that.

Speaker 3 And then finally, my big giant massive tour of England, Scotland and Wales in October 26th, which is ages away, but these gigs are setting out.

Speaker 3 Brighton. Cardiff, Coventry, fucking Bristol, Guildford, London, Glasgow, Gateshead, Nottingham.
Cannot wait for that tour.

Speaker 3 You'll get those tickets at feign.co.uk forward slash the blindby podcast and then the Irish dates.

Speaker 3 My own website theblindbypodcast.ie assuming it's working. Alright? If not, just go on to Google.
Consider getting those tickets as Christmas presents. Christmas presents for a loved one.
Alright?

Speaker 3 And then what else?

Speaker 3 Recommend this podcast to a friend because social media is collapsing. Alright, social media has gone to shit.
So if you love this podcast

Speaker 3 and you have a friend who you think might like it, just recommend it to him. From what I can tell, that's mostly how this podcast spreads.
It's a real word of mouth podcast.

Speaker 3 So this week's podcast

Speaker 3 I'd planned on speaking about

Speaker 3 mental health, not just my mental health, but to speak about emotional well-being in a way that would benefit everybody.

Speaker 3 As you know, because I mentioned it about

Speaker 3 three weeks ago, a month ago,

Speaker 3 I got an EEG scan, which is

Speaker 3 a scan of my brain activity. It's like a little snapshot of my brain activity.
And it was done for me by a

Speaker 3 a very kind neuroscientist called Dr. Michael Kean who just wanted he wanted to do a scan a scan of my brain activity to see what the crack was

Speaker 3 the scan showed a very stressed out brain

Speaker 3 a brain that is quite hypervigilant

Speaker 3 and doesn't experience the feeling of safety and that also aligns with with how I feel that aligns with how I feel I am I'm fairly stressed out. I spend a lot of my day

Speaker 3 worrying about the future or ruminating about the past and not experiencing a feeling of calm, joyful safety in the present moment.

Speaker 3 Now that has fuck all to do with autism because I didn't always feel that way. I wasn't always like this.

Speaker 3 I can remember a time when I was not like that.

Speaker 3 And that time was before the pandemic, before lockdown. We're coming into 2026 now, but

Speaker 3 the pandemic and fucking lockdown, that was what, three years ago.

Speaker 3 We don't talk about it.

Speaker 3 We don't talk about it.

Speaker 3 A lot of us don't remember a lot of it, even though some of it was deeply intense.

Speaker 3 I'm talking about pre-vaccine.

Speaker 3 The daily terror, the daily terror of waiting for

Speaker 3 the figures, how many cases, how many deaths. We did that every day for months and it was legitimately terrifying.
Those first months were

Speaker 3 we were disinfecting our groceries because we just didn't know. The uncertainty we did not know.
How dangerous was this? Was it gonna kill us? Trucks full of dead bodies on the nose in Italy.

Speaker 3 Every facet of our lived experience, the proximity that we must have towards other human beings. Am I standing too close? Am I standing too far?

Speaker 3 Will being close to a stranger kill me or someone I love?

Speaker 3 We all experienced like terror. I experienced terror.
I had a number of.

Speaker 3 There was a number of times, especially the early pandemic, where

Speaker 3 I had a fear response that would have been.

Speaker 3 If you're rating fear between 1 and 10,

Speaker 3 I had a couple of tens.

Speaker 3 I had a couple of tens where I was living in a reality where somebody that I love or myself was going to die.

Speaker 3 And to think that way was not irrational or it wasn't overreacting because this is the information we had at the time. The sudden change of wearing masks.
Then there was the financial aspect of it.

Speaker 3 I mean speaking for myself, I work in the entertainment industry, so for a while, I was like, oh, my career is over.

Speaker 3 I don't have a job. My career is over.
How will I survive? Now I'm only speaking about my experience because I'm an expert in my own experience, not someone else's. There's people listening, and

Speaker 3 you literally lost someone very close to you, they're dead. It was awful, okay? That whole pandemic, lockdown, it was awful.

Speaker 3 I genuinely

Speaker 3 haven't felt

Speaker 3 calm and safe since. I've been happy, I've been having crack, I've been getting on my life, but I do remember a different type of calm happiness before the pandemic.
I remember that.

Speaker 3 And even as I speak about the pandemic and lockdown now, I'm kind of half tiptoeing around it because

Speaker 3 of the utterly insane messages, direct messages that I'm gonna get on Instagram from the few people that are left that are listening to this podcast that when I bring up lockdown or masks or vaccine, it's so triggering for some people that I'm actually gonna get abusive messages.

Speaker 3 I'm gonna get, you pushed that vaccine, you told people to wear masks. Because another section of the population retreated into

Speaker 3 conspiracy beliefs. into conspiracy beliefs.

Speaker 3 There are people who were just regular everyday people and then the pandemic hit and they the uncertainty the feeling of uncertainty and terror they found certainty within conspiracy beliefs and now you have people who think the the earth is fucking flat or that airplanes have have chemtrails

Speaker 3 and I would argue that these people are

Speaker 3 They're also they're traumatized. These people are traumatized.
The thing that gives it away is

Speaker 3 whenever I'm contacted by by these people, it's pure and utter rage.

Speaker 3 It's not measured argument. It's rage.

Speaker 3 If I get a fact wrong in this podcast, if I say something and I fuck up and get a fact wrong about whatever, I don't know, earlier on I'm speaking about the history of hip-hop.

Speaker 3 If I get a little fact wrong there, someone will mail me and go, you're blind by that thing you said earlier. That was actually wrong.
I'm going to correct you on that.

Speaker 3 And they're very nice about it and there's no emotion because a they're right b they're not hurt by me being wrong and c they genuinely just want to help me but the conspiracy belief people the anti-vax people anti-science anti-mask they fly into a rage because their sense of identity their their self-esteem and identity has become become tied up with this new belief system that gives them a feeling of safety and certainty.

Speaker 3 So when I contradict that, it's experienced as an attack. And that's not...
that's not rational and that's why I have a level of compassion for these people. I view them as they're traumatized.

Speaker 3 I'm also traumatized in a different way. Now when you use the word trauma as well, you have to be careful about using that word because not everybody's trauma is the same.

Speaker 3 And when I'm mentioning trauma, generally

Speaker 3 I've had on this podcast before Dr. Sharon Lambert, and she's an expert in trauma.
And something she uses is big T's and little T's.

Speaker 3 So you've got your big T trauma that might be experienced by someone who's endured profound abuse or has been in an accident or experienced some huge level of violence or grief.

Speaker 3 That's your big T trauma. Then you've got your little T trauma, which is, that's me.

Speaker 3 I'm still able to get on with my life,

Speaker 3 but I'm on edge. I'm on edge all the time since the pandemic.
And that EEG scan that I got of my brain waves, it showed it to me. It showed it to me.

Speaker 3 It went, all right, that is the brain activity of a person who isn't switching off, who is not returning to a state of calm and safety.

Speaker 3 Though I'd been living with it for so long that it just became normal.

Speaker 3 And I'd have this vague memory of,

Speaker 3 geez, I remember before the pandemic,

Speaker 3 I used to just listen to music and go for walks and

Speaker 3 feel euphoria just being alive.

Speaker 3 I haven't felt that in a while. I haven't felt that since about 2019 to be honest.
I wonder is it because I'm getting older? What's this about?

Speaker 3 My hunch, my own personal hunch, speaking for myself and my own lived experience, my hunch is that during the pandemic I just had too many very big frights. My anxiety was up at 10

Speaker 3 quite a lot

Speaker 3 for weeks on end, sometimes months, like during lockdown.

Speaker 3 I used to just wake up. I used to wake up in the morning sweating with heart palpitations as if my door was being kicked in.
That's just how I used to wake up every morning, every single morning in

Speaker 3 for a lot of 2020.

Speaker 3 That's how I would wake up, sheer and utter terror, and then having to go, it's okay, it's okay.

Speaker 3 Sheer and utter terror because of

Speaker 3 it's the uncertainty, the not knowing.

Speaker 3 How dangerous is this? How worse is it gonna get? When is it gonna end? And I've been on a slow curve since then. I'm still jumpy.

Speaker 3 There's still an underlying hum of terror. Now I know you might be saying, look the fucking Russia-Ukraine war, climate collapse.
There's all these things bubbling away too.

Speaker 3 But there was shit like that before the pandemic as well. It was ISIS, there was the consistent fear of terror attacks.
The world has always been unsafe. But my lived reality,

Speaker 3 I'm fucking...

Speaker 3 I'm fortunate enough to be healthy. I have a roof over my head.

Speaker 3 My belly is full. My actual reality is one of safety.
I'm actually safe.

Speaker 3 But most of my life is spent living in my head, worrying or trying to predict or create certainty in the future or ruminating about the past. I'm not doing a hell of a lot of

Speaker 3 enjoying the right now. And I don't like that because that feels hazy.
Feels like going around on autopilot.

Speaker 3 I don't like getting on my bicycle and cycling into work and I don't really remember the journey because I was worrying about the future or ruminating about the past or walking into a shop to get my groceries.

Speaker 3 And somehow I've just left the shop, gotten all my groceries, paid for them, but I don't really remember any of it. Because I was ruminating about the past or worrying about the future.

Speaker 3 And my brain scan showed that the snapshot of my brain activity was like, yeah, that's the lived experience that type of lived experience that's the type of brain activity you'd expect to see out of a person with that lived experience and that's not just me

Speaker 3 i could pull you up a study a 2025 study in the european journal of psychotraumatology and there's a study that they did this april and it's called mental health during after the covert 19 pandemic a longitudinal study over 42 months in five European countries.

Speaker 3 And what did it show?

Speaker 3 And like this is a systematic review, this is a huge study, it just showed that the rates of anxiety, depression, cognitive impairment remain elevated globally in the post-pandemic era.

Speaker 3 And loads of people reporting persistent symptoms of stress, rumination, poor attention and slowed down presence. So it's not just me, it's a lot of people.

Speaker 3 And I'm guessing a lot of ye who are listening. Now as I mentioned, I'm lucky enough and privileged enough to be able to say, I'm actually safe.

Speaker 3 My lived reality. My belly's full.
There's a roof over my head. I'm healthy.
That's all I need. It's all I want as a human being.
I could get hit by a car tomorrow. That's always been the case.

Speaker 3 But that means that

Speaker 3 the suffering and pain that I'm experiencing on a daily basis and the stress,

Speaker 3 it's not actually rooted in any objective reality. Now, during the pandemic, different story, because the news is telling me my ma's gonna die if I give her a hug.
Legitimate cause for misery and

Speaker 3 severe anxiety. But now, no, I can live my life the way I could in 2019 before the pandemic.

Speaker 3 So, my brain was corping for too long,

Speaker 3 was in protective mode for too long,

Speaker 3 and some shit just didn't switch off.

Speaker 3 My brain is still scanning for threat, which means, you know, I receive a piece of bad news and instead of looking at it flexibly, I'll jump to the worst case scenario as by default.

Speaker 3 And being that way consistently throughout my day,

Speaker 3 the bit about it that pisses me off the most is that it robs me of the present moment

Speaker 3 and it it narrows my emotional palate.

Speaker 3 Feel a lot of anger, feel a lot of anxiety, a lot of irritation.

Speaker 3 What I experience as happiness is when I have a rest from that, I'm not getting a lot of calm moments of joy. Joy.

Speaker 3 Joy being

Speaker 3 whatever the I love being alive right now, this is fucking brilliant. That's joy.
Many things bring different people joy. Music used to bring me

Speaker 3 daily

Speaker 3 latherings of joy. I used to go for a run and listen to tunes and experience euphoria, euphoric feelings of

Speaker 3 my god this song is incredible. I love this and isn't it so wonderful to be listening to it while I'm out having a run.

Speaker 3 I still go for the runs and I still listen to the music, but I don't get that explosion of joy. The thing is, that's actually completely reversible.
It's reversible. And the first

Speaker 3 radical way

Speaker 3 to reverse that, and this, this is, there's a huge body of evidence in neuroscience that shows the

Speaker 3 mindfulness and meditation, regular daily mindfulness and meditation, can retrain. the brain, using neuroplasticity, can retrain the brain

Speaker 3 to experience that slow calmness where joy is allowed in. I mean why isn't joy coming in?

Speaker 3 Joy isn't allowed into the experience when you're scanning for threat.

Speaker 3 When you're consistently scanning for threat, worrying about the future, trying to control it or thinking about the past, that's threat scanning and joy isn't allowed in. Because joy is playfulness.

Speaker 3 Just think of a little fucking kid. No child is going to pick up the Lego and sit down and play while there's an adult shouting in the room.
So long story short, over the past three weeks,

Speaker 3 I've been meditating daily.

Speaker 3 Now I've always chatted about meditation. If you listen to this podcast, I've always mentioned meditation.

Speaker 3 But I do it every so often, once a week, or when I felt like it, or when I was particularly anxious.

Speaker 3 Now what I've been doing is I've been meditating every single day as practice like I'm going to the gym. Nothing fancy.
15 minute mindfulness meditations where I'm checking in with my body

Speaker 3 and most importantly I'm focused on my breathing and making sure that my breathing is full and diaphragmatic. That means when I breathe in through my nose my stomach expands.

Speaker 3 And I do that daily as practice. I make sure I don't don't allow any excuse because, of course, what happens is my brain says, stop wasting time.

Speaker 3 You can't waste time and take 15 minutes just to sit down. You need to work.
There's a podcast that needs to get done. You need to work.
But sure, of course, that's hyper-vigilant.

Speaker 3 That thinking is hyper-vigilant because I'm afraid. But I stop that.
I don't allow it in. I get my 15 minutes.
every single day to do a basic mindfulness body check breathing meditation that's it

Speaker 3 and the first five or six days were difficult i was getting distracted my body didn't want to do it my brain didn't want to do it and then after about five or six days

Speaker 3 it starts coming back to me and i'm experiencing

Speaker 3 the level of calm that a level of calm that i didn't think was possible

Speaker 3 and my breathing slows down to a level where

Speaker 3 i'm wondering how i'm even alive and breathing so slowly, and that happened after about six days.

Speaker 3 And then, what started happening last week, and this was fucking fantastic because this is like neuroscience says

Speaker 3 it only takes like about maybe six weeks or eight weeks of this to really start for the brain to start changing pathways.

Speaker 3 But I was cycling home last week

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 lovely little winter sunset clear sky

Speaker 3 and it was just that beautiful moment like the Sun is weak in winter but whatever it was at this particular

Speaker 3 time of the evening

Speaker 3 the sky just illuminated in this dark orange and it made the blue of the sky look green and then it made all the trees look the most beautiful brilliant green.

Speaker 3 And it was one of those fleeting moments of sunset that lasts maybe 30 seconds. And in those 30 seconds, the world as I was cycling home was just stunningly visually beautiful.

Speaker 3 And I experienced what's called a glimmer. I didn't just visually notice

Speaker 3 the beauty of the world around me. I didn't just look at it like I just described there and was like, fuck, look at the color of the sky.
wow that's beautiful

Speaker 3 this wasn't just a cognitive process I felt a little tingle go through my body a euphoric tingle for I was excited about

Speaker 3 being here now and seeing this and I felt

Speaker 3 just thrilled to be alive

Speaker 3 I felt a little spark of joy that was enough for me to go fuck

Speaker 3 haven't felt that in a while fuck me i missed that. Wow.

Speaker 3 And that's called a glimmer.

Speaker 3 And it's not esoteric, it's not spiritual. It's.

Speaker 3 My brain felt safe.

Speaker 3 My brain experienced that

Speaker 3 calm feeling of...

Speaker 3 Do you know what? Nothing about your environment is threatening. So chill the fuck out.
It's okay. You're allowed to feel safe.
This is safe. You're cycling home and the sunset is beautiful.

Speaker 3 Yeah, this is safe. You're alive.
Enjoy it. I felt it.
I felt that.

Speaker 3 And I haven't felt one since, but it doesn't matter.

Speaker 3 I felt that like, I think a week ago.

Speaker 3 It let me know

Speaker 3 the work, the daily meditation, the daily meditation, it's fucking working.

Speaker 3 The neurons in the brain that fired together wire together.

Speaker 3 And during the pandemic, the terror neurons were firing. That's a terrible way to describe whatever the fuck the neuroscience is.
I don't, I'm not a neuroscientist.

Speaker 3 Anxiety was flying all over the gap during the fucking pandemic. And it was happening for so long that the neurons that were firing together decided to wire together.

Speaker 3 Let's stick with a permanent state here of scanning the environment for threat because threat is all around you. Now I'm rewiring that.
I'm rewiring that through daily fucking meditation

Speaker 3 and that glimmer it's no different to

Speaker 3 if if you go to the fucking gym if you go to the gym and you lift weights or if you start running right but let's just say the gym you go to the gym and you lift fucking weights right and it's shit at the start and it's sore and you're like what's the fucking point of this i'm just lifting heavy shit and i'm in agony the next day Why the fuck am I doing this?

Speaker 3 And then after two weeks, you just notice, shit, my arms are way stronger than they used to be.

Speaker 3 or you see evidence of a muscle that didn't exist before or an awakening an awakening of a part of your body which you weren't aware of before but now you are because of the muscle where there wasn't one and that little moment of ah progress i see it that's hugely motivational and that's what i had last week with my glimmer it's like it's working it's working So the next day then I said, okay, I'm going to keep sticking with this fucking meditating once a day and I'm going to be very self-compassionate and make my time to do it.

Speaker 3 But then what I also did is I decided So I'm gonna have one meditation non-negotiable that's happening every single day one meditation.

Speaker 3 But then what I'm also gonna do is I'm gonna have two moments in my day where I'm making the conscious decision for this to be mindful and what that means is

Speaker 3 empty in my head, having an empty head. So what I decided was

Speaker 3 my cycle into work and my cycle home to work. That both of those spaces, it's not just to cycle home, but those are my mindful moments of the day.
And that means I'm not listening to headphones.

Speaker 3 I'm not going to listen to music or listen to an audiobook. None of that.
When I get on my bicycle, by the way, I got my bicycle fixed. Alright, I no longer slam my testicles on the crossbar.

Speaker 3 When I cycle anymore, I got the gears replaced, everything fully fixed. I have to go to the black market.

Speaker 3 I have to get a black market bicycle repair person who's operating the way that drug dealers operate through a covert network

Speaker 3 on the text messages like he's selling crack. But I have to go, and that's a whole different lore.
You have to go to an earlier podcast to understand this lore. It brings neoliberalism into it.

Speaker 3 The bike is fixed. I got it fixed on the black market.
So anyway, cycling mindfully. I get on the bicycle, put my foot on the pedals.
The first thing I do is I ground myself.

Speaker 3 I notice my feet are on the pedals.

Speaker 3 I notice the feeling of my hands on the handlebar. Then I begin pedaling, focusing only on what I'm doing.
And then I start to breathe. And the breathing that I do is,

Speaker 3 we'll say three seconds in

Speaker 3 and then six seconds out.

Speaker 3 And I do that throughout the whole journey. And that gets my...

Speaker 3 if you do that if you do the breathing properly that just calms the brain down so then as i'm cycling when any thoughts come in

Speaker 3 thinking about the future worrying about the past because the breath has me in that state of calm

Speaker 3 i can go oh there's a there's a rumination loop there oh i'm thinking about that opportunity i missed there from six months ago or that argument that I had there from three months ago or I should have replied differently.

Speaker 3 That's a rumination loop and I'm not going to go into that loop. I'm not going to arouse the emotion of anger and irritation by going into that loop.

Speaker 3 Instead I'm just going to notice, oh there's that rumination loop.

Speaker 3 Let's start thinking about my pedals, my feet on the pedals again and let's start opening up my ears and listening to the sounds of the city.

Speaker 3 and noticing every sound that's there and noticing what's in front of me, the colour of the sky and just clocking all of this stuff and bringing it into my present experience.

Speaker 3 And that's my exercise, that's how I fucking cycle. And I do it until I get home, and I do that twice a day.
And I'm gonna do that until,

Speaker 3 and it'll take a few more weeks, maybe a month.

Speaker 3 I'm gonna keep at that until I return to the base level of calm.

Speaker 3 And then, once I start

Speaker 3 experiencing this calmness as a default, the way I used to be in 2019, I was here before, you see. The way I used to be before the pandemic.
Once I start experiencing that base level of calm,

Speaker 3 then I'm going to start revisiting my thoughts,

Speaker 3 negative beliefs that I have about myself, other people, or the world.

Speaker 3 Because why?

Speaker 3 I mean, what do I want out of life?

Speaker 3 All I fucking want. All I want out of life.
Like I was mentioning there, look, I'm off to London because I've been nominated for a giant award. That doesn't bring me happiness.

Speaker 3 That doesn't bring me a shred of happiness. It makes me feel strange.
And I appreciate it, and it's wonderful. This doesn't bring me fucking happiness.
No award nomination

Speaker 3 is

Speaker 3 even comparable

Speaker 3 to the little glimmer of joy. that I experienced because the sunset looked beautiful in that way and I'm not being pretentious legitimately.
So,

Speaker 3 awards are fucking nice. All I want, I want to be able to earn a living doing what I love, okay? Fair enough.

Speaker 3 All I want from life is to be able to feel joy in the present moment. That's it.
Sunsets are beautiful. Cats are beautiful.
Rivers are beautiful. We're surrounded by beauty.

Speaker 3 And I just want to be able to notice that and then experience the joy of it, the joy joy of the present moment.

Speaker 3 That's all I want, to be calm enough, to experience the joy of the present moment and to be calm enough so that when emotions pop up and when suffering comes into my life, that I can respond to it and not react to it.

Speaker 3 I don't really want much more than that. And you're thinking, do you not want food and clothes? and fucking a roof over your head.

Speaker 3 These things look after themselves when I have that sense of calm, but I don't want them as goals that shit will look after itself the goal is the calm so this morning because as you know I came into my office today it's a Sunday came in very very early

Speaker 3 I cycled in this morning

Speaker 3 just after 7 a.m. on a fucking Sunday and it was beautiful because I was the only person around

Speaker 3 and I was having my mindful cycle. Wasn't listening to music.
I was in the present moment on my bicycle.

Speaker 3 Just thrilled, thrilled to have a beautiful crisp, clear blue November morning where I'm looking at my breath, one of them mornings, freezing fucking cold, looking at my breath.

Speaker 3 And I get into town and I lock away my bike

Speaker 3 and I start walking through town and I turn a right into the bardshit district.

Speaker 3 Which is Bedford Row in Limerick city centre.

Speaker 3 And you know the bardshit district from listening to this podcast you know about the drama of the birdshit district

Speaker 3 where

Speaker 3 it's a pedestrian street full of trees but there's thousands of starlings living in the trees and they shit all over the street.

Speaker 3 But starlings aren't there now because it's winter and there's no bird shit. There's no bird shit on the ground so it's clear pavement.

Speaker 3 And because I'd just done the mindful cycle, I was quite calm and I was in a mindful state, which means that I'm observing my surroundings, I'm looking, I'm not on autopilot.

Speaker 3 I'm connecting with my environment, noticing the smell in the air, the colour of my breath as it floats up towards the sky, the temperature, all of this crack.

Speaker 3 And I noticed in the birdshit district,

Speaker 3 the council have pruned the trees, the cunts. Their solution to the starlings which are going to return in the summertime is to chop down their fucking trees.

Speaker 3 So they butchered the trees of Bedford Row and pruned the bollocks off them.

Speaker 3 Now, if you know anything about trees, if you prune the bollocks off a tree, it's going to grow back twice as strong and more dense.

Speaker 3 The council decided the best thing to do is, let's chop the bollocks off these trees, and then the birds will show up and go, uh-oh, better move on. That's not going to happen.

Speaker 3 The birds are just going to pack themselves tighter in a smaller space and have a more concentrated waterfall of shit. That's all that's gonna happen.

Speaker 3 But anyway, as I'm walking along the bird shit district in a very mindful state,

Speaker 3 I look on the pavement and I see a little black dot.

Speaker 3 And my initial thought was negative. I thought, oh fuck.
That's not a little dead starling, is it? Because starlings are tiny. They're about the size of a golf ball.

Speaker 3 That's not a little dead starling, is it?

Speaker 3 And I walk closer. Now the streets are empty.
This is seven in the morning on a fucking Sunday. I'm the only person around.

Speaker 3 Sunday morning in town.

Speaker 3 And I walk towards the dead bird.

Speaker 3 Little black ball. And as I get closer, it's like, oh, fuck, great, it's not a dead bird.
What is it? And I get closer. I went, oh, it's a bag of heroin.

Speaker 3 So I'm standing now staring at a

Speaker 3 a little brown bag of heroin on the pavement of the birdship district.

Speaker 3 And the first thing I say to myself is I'm thankful, I'm like.

Speaker 3 I only noticed that now. Because I was in a state of mindfulness, because I was living in the present moment and experiencing my environment.

Speaker 3 If I'd have been ruminating about the past or worrying about the future, I'd have walked past that. I probably wouldn't even have noticed that the trees had been pruned.

Speaker 3 I'd have just walked past an autopilot with my negative thoughts. But no, today I was present enough to think that it was a dead bird, and now I'm looking at a small bag of heroin.

Speaker 3 It wasn't that small, it looked

Speaker 3 about half the size of a golf ball, big enough.

Speaker 3 The little corner of a baggie was

Speaker 3 plump,

Speaker 3 browny tan color. I knew it was heroin.

Speaker 3 A little elastic band tied around its neck.

Speaker 3 And I'm just there staring at the bag of heroin.

Speaker 3 Nobody around.

Speaker 3 Thinking what'll I do?

Speaker 3 Because I started to feel bad, you see.

Speaker 3 There's a lot of addiction in Nimerick city center, alright? And the Bardshit district in particular. Drugs are sold there and I know a lot of the addicts.

Speaker 3 I know them because I work in the city center, I see them every day and I regularly

Speaker 3 approach the addicts and I say to them, do you want something to eat? Do you want something to drink?

Speaker 3 I don't offer them money because if If you offer someone who's in active heroin addiction money, they'll spend it on heroin.

Speaker 3 But if you offer to get them them food they might eat the food and the addicts of Limerick City Centre they're familiar faces to me now I've been buying them food for fucking years

Speaker 3 and I can tell at this point

Speaker 3 I know who's addicted to heroin because when I ask them what they want they want a milkshake or a hot chocolate and I can tell who's addicted to crack because they want chocolate or fizzy drinks.

Speaker 3 When I was staring down at the bag of heroin, I thought to myself, fucking hell, that's one of theirs now. And I thought about what they must have.
Because it was a...

Speaker 3 It wasn't massive, but it was a decent-sized bag of heroin. It wasn't the tiny ones.
It was, like I said, about three-quarters of the size of a golf ball.

Speaker 3 I just thought to myself,

Speaker 3 what did the person have to do to get the money to afford it? Because they're a street addict.

Speaker 3 And imagine them actually managing to get that on a Sunday freezing fucking cold and now they've lost it and also knowing that someone who's addicted to heroin

Speaker 3 when they don't have their fucking heroin it it's like an illness it's like a sickness

Speaker 3 they are

Speaker 3 they're not just taking heroin because it feels nice for the fucking laugh Their body now depends on the fucking heroin. So I'm thinking,

Speaker 3 fuck it, maybe I can find the person who owns the heroin. So I pick the heroin up and put it into my pocket and start walking around, going.

Speaker 3 I'll have a look around the spots now where the lads usually are and if I see one of them, one of the lads who I know is on heroin, I'm going to walk up and say, did you lose your heroin?

Speaker 3 So I do that and then as I walk around I'm like

Speaker 3 I'm walking around with heroin now.

Speaker 3 I've now got heroin in my pocket. So this is...
alright, okay. This is enough heroin that I'd probably go to jail if I got caught with this heroin.
I'm walking around with heroin.

Speaker 3 What the fuck am I doing walking around with heroin? Shit, I gotta throw it in a bin. Fuck it.

Speaker 3 But I've seen how the dealers around here do this.

Speaker 3 Sometimes one dealer will leave something there and then another one is there because the dealer with the cash is never the dealer with the drugs.

Speaker 3 What if I put this heroin into a bin, but the guards are secretly watching and now it looks like I'm like a runner, a heroin water runner for one of the gangs of the dealers.

Speaker 3 So now I'm kind of freaking out a bit going what the fuck do I do with this heroin that's in my pocket now?

Speaker 3 I'm fucked if I'm caught with this and now getting rid of it might be difficult because I don't know if someone's watching.

Speaker 3 There could be guards up in the buildings with cameras and they're surveilling the area.

Speaker 3 What if I just walk around and if I see one of the addicts I'll just drop it in front of them and then they'll see it.

Speaker 3 But then that's dealing.

Speaker 3 Even though now I've given it to a person and even though I haven't received money for it, that's legally dealing. I'm not giving someone heroin.
So then I think, do you know what?

Speaker 3 I'm going to give the heroin to the police. I'm going to walk down to Henry Street Garda Station.
It's about five or ten minutes down the road. I'm going to walk down there, go in the door.

Speaker 3 I'm going to ask to see a policeman and I'm going to say, I found this heroin, please take it. And I go, no, that's not going to end well.
That's just mad. That's too mental.

Speaker 3 The guards aren't going to take that very well.

Speaker 3 They're going to question me. Don't just show up to the Garda station with a bag of heroin and ask him to take it.
That's not going to go well.

Speaker 3 I could end up in

Speaker 3 court.

Speaker 3 In the newspaper with that.

Speaker 3 Blind by Ball Club in court. defending why he arrived at the Garda station with a bag of heroin.
We don't need that. And then I start to think farther and I go,

Speaker 3 How do I know this is safe heroin?

Speaker 3 How do I know this isn't laced with fentanyl? How do I know that this bag of heroin isn't the one that's going to give the person who's addicted the overdose that kills him?

Speaker 3 So I make the decision that the smartest, most ethical thing to do

Speaker 3 is to get rid of it, to dispose of it safely.

Speaker 3 So I walk down to the bottom of Bedford Roll.

Speaker 3 Down to the the fucking Terry Wogan statue, the Terry Wogan statue by the river.

Speaker 3 Beautiful, nobody around.

Speaker 3 Seven in the morning, fucking crystal, freezing ice in the air.

Speaker 3 Seagulls sleeping, seagulls sleeping on the rooftops. and little ghostly bits of fog whispin'.

Speaker 3 I'm just on the surface of the Shannon River and I walk past Terry Wogan and reach into my pocket

Speaker 3 and I get the ball of heroin and I fuck it into the Shannon. I fuck it into the Shannon River and watched it float off down towards the Atlantic.

Speaker 3 For a small it nearly went towards a swan and I was thinking oh for fuck's sake.

Speaker 3 I hope the swan doesn't think that that's bread and then the swan eats heroin, but it doesn't. The heroin just floated off, floated off down down the fucking uh down the Shannon.

Speaker 3 So that's the morning that I've had.

Speaker 3 That's the

Speaker 3 that's the that's the queer, the queer,

Speaker 3 the queer morning that I've had. And it made me

Speaker 3 what struck me is

Speaker 3 that there was a psychologist called Lawrence Kohlberg. Kohlberg

Speaker 3 he studied morality, moral development in human beings.

Speaker 3 And he came about with a model of moral development, a three-stage

Speaker 3 model of how humans develop a sense of morality starting in childhood. And my heroin journey there, I'd gone through all three stages of Kohlberg's moral development.

Speaker 3 The first stage, the first level, is

Speaker 3 the pre-conventional morality.

Speaker 3 When a human is faced with a dilemma, this tends tends to be the morality that little tiny kids have.

Speaker 3 Will I get in trouble? Will I get hurt?

Speaker 3 So I find the heroine and I go, oh fuck it, how is this going to impact me?

Speaker 3 How is this going to impact me?

Speaker 3 Am I going to get arrested? Am I being a bad boy? Will I get in trouble? Self-preservation.

Speaker 3 And then I moved on to level two.

Speaker 3 And level two in Kohlberg's model is conventional morality. It's slightly more mature than pre-conventional morality.
Conventional morality are the rules that we absorb from society, laws.

Speaker 3 I start thinking,

Speaker 3 do you know what? The right thing to do here is to bring it to the Garda station.

Speaker 3 To be a...

Speaker 3 That's the rule. I've found an illegal thing and the people who deal with illegal things are the police.
So I'm going to bring the heroine heroine to the police station. What would people think?

Speaker 3 What's the rule here? What does society expect me to do? That's level two of Kohlberg's model, that's conventional morality.

Speaker 3 And then, beyond that, you have your post-conventional morality, and post-conventional morality is where

Speaker 3 it's level three of the moral development where the person uses

Speaker 3 empathy, imagination, critical thinking skills to arrive at a moral decision.

Speaker 3 And level three is very important because it's how you arrive at deciding what justice is and what propriety is and proportionality around justice.

Speaker 3 So when I start using empathy and thinking this is somebody's heroine,

Speaker 3 I'm thinking, using imagination and empathy to think about the addict who has lost their heroin, to think about, see even though society, the rules of society would like me to label that person a junkie, to label them as a criminal, as bad as doing wrong.

Speaker 3 See, that's level two, that's can that's your conventional morality. Level two wants me to go, those people there are junkies, they're breaking the law, they're bad, they're doing a bad thing.

Speaker 3 So, what I should do is give the heroin to the police and while I'm down there, actually rat a few people out. But I don't view drugs that way, I view drugs as being a

Speaker 3 health issue. And

Speaker 3 people who are using heroin and who are addicted to it, that's a form of self-medication for pain and trauma. And a system, a system that has failed that person.

Speaker 3 And I don't think that the criminalization model, where drugs are bad and everyone who uses drugs is a criminal, so lock them up. I don't like that level two.

Speaker 3 morality thinking that's more about that's about control and efficiency

Speaker 3 so when you move to level three which is post-conventional morality in Kohlberg's model now you're thinking you're using critical thinking, imagination, empathy, asking questions like is this just?

Speaker 3 Is this rule just? What reduces harm? What protects dignity? What is ethically right even if it's not socially approved? And that's when I start to think

Speaker 3 someone's after losing their heroin. But then I go, hold on a fucking second.

Speaker 3 Because we live in a

Speaker 3 an in a society where drugs are criminalized and it's in the hands of the black market

Speaker 3 there's no such thing as safe drugs whether it be heroin or fucking cannabis because it's criminalized and in the hands of drug dealers you don't know if any drug is is actually safe

Speaker 3 so the ethical thing for me to do there was just dispose of it fucking dispose of it throw it into the river and i was reflecting on i was happy with myself

Speaker 3 because

Speaker 3 that was farther evidence for me that my brain was healing

Speaker 3 if I'd have been in an anxiety loop by that I wouldn't have left level two there

Speaker 3 I'd have obeyed the rules anxiety would have taken over and I'd have been down at the Garda station with the heroin but instead I had the mindful calmness to engage empathy critical thinking skills to actually arrive at a solution that was safe for everybody.

Speaker 3 And I think too, that's what got me thinking about hip-hop sampling and Dapper Dan.

Speaker 3 When I was speaking earlier about why what Dapper Dan was doing wasn't stealing and why

Speaker 3 hip-hop artists, when they sample music that wasn't theirs, why that's not stealing?

Speaker 3 It's operating at a level 3 of Kohlberg's morality. You see at level 2

Speaker 3 don't sample music, don't steal someone else's music because stealing is wrong. Don't steal Gucci's brand identity and

Speaker 3 make your own clothes and sell them because that's illegal and wrong.

Speaker 3 Instead, dapper down and hip-hop artists are thinking, Actually, no, there's a very unjust system at play and this system is called racism and classism. And this is actually...

Speaker 3 this should be illegal but it's not. It's how the world operates.
So because that system is unjust,

Speaker 3 this system of racism works against people like Dapper Dan and African-American hip-hop artists because it works against those people. They're going.

Speaker 3 No, I can float above that level 2 into level 3 and now

Speaker 3 making clothes out of Gucci handbags and selling them, it's actually reclaiming power. It's actually a moral act.
It's a fight against something that's a deep injustice within society.

Speaker 3 I'm going to end it with a quote from James Baldwin,

Speaker 3 who was

Speaker 3 an African-American writer who really

Speaker 3 that revolutionary, that revolutionary way of thinking is all through his writing. And he's got a book called Native Sons Collection of Essays.
There's a quote in it where he says,

Speaker 3 the place in which I'll fit will not exist until I make it. And it's just beautiful because that it predicts what would happen with hip-hop and the likes of Dapper Dan.

Speaker 3 Like, if the system is fucking racist and the rules work against you, and the laws work against you, well, who says you have to obey those fucking laws?

Speaker 3 Rip them up and make something new that works for you. Alright, I'll catch you next week.

Speaker 3 With another hot take, I don't know. I'll catch you next week.
In the meantime,

Speaker 3 rub a dog, throw a bag of heroin at a swan, wink at a pig, dog bless.

Speaker 5 Dashing through the store, Dave's looking for a gift.

Speaker 6 One you can't ignore, but not the socks he picks.

Speaker 7 I know, I'm putting them back.

Speaker 8 Hey, Dave, here's a tip. Put scratchers on your list.

Speaker 9 Oh, scratchers, good idea.

Speaker 10 It's an easy shopping trip.

Speaker 5 We're glad we could assist.

Speaker 11 Thanks, random singing people.

Speaker 13 So be like Dave this holiday and give the gift of play.

Speaker 12 Scratchers from the California lottery. A little play can make your day.

Speaker 15 Please play responsibly.

Speaker 16 Must be 18 years or older to purchase play or claim.

Speaker 3 Parliament Francais.

Speaker 20 Abola español.

Speaker 21 Parli Italiano.

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