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Feb. 17, 2019 - David Icke
57:17
NBE talks of the makers of 'Plugged In' About Social Media Links To Suicide & Depression
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I'm a non-binary elephant.
Podcast.
BOOM!
Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the non-binary elephant podcast.
I'm in bed. You might be able to see that.
I'm not very well, but the show must go on.
I'm doing it on my own today because my brother is in Mexico in the sunshine, which he desperately needs because he's the palest man on the planet.
I'm joined by the two riches, the guys that made the plugged-in documentary.
It's a documentary about social media and the toxicity of that, how it links into teen suicide, Depression, anxiety and various other things.
It's a really, really good documentary.
I'm not just sort of kissing ass here.
It really is really good. I really enjoyed it.
When I say good, it's good in the sense that it's freaking terrifying and alarming, but it's brilliantly well made and it really makes you think.
What got you guys into making it?
What made you go, you know what, I want to make a documentary about social media?
We started chatting a couple of years ago, didn't we, Rich?
Yeah, yeah. Maybe a year and a half.
I did a podcast for you on your channel and that started the conversation, didn't it?
So my background is a self-defense instructor and as a nightclub doorman first before I was ever a life coach.
And then I started talking about personality disorders and Richard had an experience What did you say you thought she was?
She told me that she was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder.
But then again, you're getting it from someone with borderline personality disorder.
So what do you believe? She showed all the traits of it, put it that way.
It's probably true. Borderlines would usually just say, I got this diagnosis.
So yeah, we started that conversation.
We thought about doing a documentary together and we wanted to look at Originally childhood trauma, particularly complex post-traumatic stress.
And that was the original concept.
Because we particularly wanted to look at why are there spiraling rates of suicide amongst adolescents?
And why is there so many mental health issues?
We thought that would be the road to go down.
And then as we started to talk about it and explore it, we opened the door to looking at the possibility that social media could be a cause, which when we came across that, I actually thought that that was bullshit.
I didn't think that was a real problem at all.
No, I was going to say then, in the trailer, you actually say that you went in with a certain mindset, which was, it was probably fear-mongering.
Yeah. Just older generation saying, you know, yeah, it's bad because in my day, but actually it is pretty toxic.
Terence McKenna talked about it, and so did Robert Anton Wilson.
There's definitely a trait, like a personality trait, In people, where they become neophobic.
So you'll get older generation people who love the new.
They're into new technology.
They're into new things. And then you get people who are neophobic.
And it sounded like intergenerational neophobia.
The way it's being spoken about was similar to the way in which people used to talk about punk music.
And before that, the way they'd talk about rock music.
And before that, the way they'd talk about jazz music.
It's corrupting the minds of a generation and You know, you just think, is it though?
I mean, it's just for saying hello and sharing funny pictures of cats, isn't it?
And then when we actually started to get a little bit deeper into the mechanics of social media, then I realized there actually is a problem there, mainly because the people who create social media have openly admitted that they've added elements to it that exploit the vulnerabilities of human psychology and they know full well have a destructive impact on the personality individually and the culture of Collectively.
They know that it polarises people politically and segregates people into little tribes and makes them all full of conflict and rage with each other.
That's psychotic, isn't it?
If you're knowingly doing something like that, that would come under the description of psychotic, wouldn't it?
I think if you start...
I mean, the guys we're talking about are guys our age.
They're a similar sort of age to us, you know, between 45 and 30.
And I think...
They rode the crest of a wave, and they really didn't know what it was going to do, and they wanted to make money, and they wanted it to be successful.
I think once you've realized, though, that you've created a monster, you'd start to think, okay, it's very nice being extremely wealthy, but it's also nice to not make children kill themselves because they feel bad in their self-image.
So yeah, the psychopathic element comes in when they're presented with the The data, the research, the statistics saying, look, this is definitely having a negative impact on people.
We should do something about it.
And they either do nothing or the effort they make to do something about it is very symbolic and very flaccid.
Is it a case of the government isn't doing anything about it in terms of putting things in place to protect people, safeguard kids and whatever?
Is it that or is it the case that the social media giants are just so big They're untouchable.
I think it's the problem is we're in totally new territory and large organizations usually take an unforgivably long time to catch up with what the hell is going on at the street level, at the frontline level.
And I think the government doesn't know what to do and the social media giants are making their money.
So the big Titanic ship that they're sailing is sailing in the right direction as far as the shareholders are concerned and as far as the game of capitalism is concerned because the game of capitalism is won by points and the points are called money and they're making tons of money so why stop?
Government doesn't know what to do and nobody's sort of taking control of it and saying okay this is bad.
If the three of us started selling a new made-at-home drug on the streets of Derby We're good to go.
If you as a governmental body want to lay claim to the right to have the power to arrest people for crime, it behooves you to apply that rule of law to the little fish as you would to the big fish.
Otherwise, you lose the right to apply that rule of law to me.
So if I'm selling drugs on the streets of Derby and you lock me up and I go, hang on, You know this Facebook that you allow to operate within your national borders that's causing kids to commit suicide.
Have you arrested anyone?
Have you begun the process of looking at the possibility of arresting anybody?
And the answer, of course, would be no.
The point I'm making is a little facetious, but I think you can say it in that way.
If there is law, there is law.
I think also, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, in terms of people that you spoke to whilst making the documentary, Is there almost like a bit of, yeah, it's bad, isn't it?
Anyway, what's on telly attitude towards that?
Because I speak to people and I don't think I've ever had a conversation with anyone, whether it be in the pub or at the football or wherever, where you talk about social media and you say, you know, I think it's pretty bad and it's pretty dangerous.
I've never had someone go, rubbish, I think it's brilliant.
They all kind of agree and know that actually there is a real negative part of it.
Yeah. What are you going to do about it?
Is sort of the attitude. Is that something you come across as well?
I think that is the inculcated apathy that actually social media fosters.
But you'll notice they don't have that lackadaisical attitude on the key subjects that have been encoded into the current agenda that people should get upset about.
You say something about transgender or homosexuals or racism and you'll get an impassioned emotional response.
You say something about social media and you get the apathetic response.
And I just go, that's just programming.
They're programmed to respond with emotion and motivation.
I feel very strongly that white privilege is the thing that holds back minorities.
And you're like, whoa, okay, all right, so there's a lot of feeling there.
What about this thing that you use, that I use, that everybody uses, that makes kids want to kill themselves and that fractures culture?
Yeah, well, you know, we know it's not right, but I think that's pure conditioning.
On that one point, I'm an absolute conspiracy theorist.
I think that is an absolutely pre-programmed agenda.
There are things we're supposed to feel upset about, and we're allowed to spunk out our emotional energy on that, and there are things that you're supposed to feel apathetic about, and it doesn't matter.
Sorry, Richard. Spaff out the emotional energy.
I know. Because I'm looking at you, and the minute you said spunk out, I just saw him giggle, which is great.
I'm 38. I'll get there one day.
Yeah. Our professional relationship is based on making each other giggle over nothing.
Over things that 12-year-olds would think we're immature.
It's to get it out of your system, isn't it?
That's what we say. Get it out of your system and then we can go on and be adults elsewhere.
I think what you're saying there is right.
They've got the whole Cambridge Analytica part of it where the data mining and the whole point is to push people's thoughts and feelings.
And it is an abusive relationship.
Social media is abusing us.
The user. We are the commodity, we said yesterday, we are the ones who make all the content, but they're pushing us to make the content that they want us to make.
So we are, for free, being, I believe, you know I'm a conspiracy theorist, I love all that stuff, but you are being abused to make the content that they want.
And even if you didn't, they're getting the data of what works and what doesn't.
That's the point. We're in an experiment.
Well, there's a girl actually in the documentary who says, I can't remember her name now, which is dreadful of me, but she says on Instagram if she puts up a picture of herself, a selfie, she will get a certain amount of likes.
Claire, yeah. Claire, sorry, that are through the roof.
And yet if she goes out on a nice walk with her family, she puts up a picture of her and the dog or a beautiful scene or whatever, nothing.
So therefore she then subconsciously says, well, I'm going to put up pictures of myself then.
That is conditioning, isn't it?
It's conditioning for narcissism.
Because before she told me that, I ran the same experiment with my Instagram.
I've deleted my Instagram since making the documentary.
But I watched something. It was by guys who were in the red pill community, in the pickup community.
It was a YouTube video.
And they were talking about the principles of online marketing applied to getting goals.
And I was like, oh, I'll have a bit of that.
I'll watch that. So I watched that, and the guys were saying, with your social media usage, there was one guy who was an expert they brought in.
He was an online marketer. He said, be more narcissistic.
He didn't use that word. He said it.
He said he went around the houses.
Be more self-centered and just self-aggrandizing and all the rest of it.
That's what is appreciated in that medium.
So the next day or two days later, luckily enough, I managed to get myself into a business class flight from Bangkok to Dubai.
And I took a picture of it, and then I said, business class flight Bangkok to Dubai.
And I posted it, and I went, well, I'm a twat.
I was like, click, let's do this.
And then I flew. And I think it's like an eight-hour flight.
And I got off the flight, reconnected to my Wi-Fi, and lo and behold, it had 1,200 likes inside of eight hours.
My average post, if I'm posting about Recovery from complex post-traumatic stress or healing or whatever would get 400 likes over three days.
This one got 1,200 likes in eight hours.
I'm like, I'm a moron for posting it, but everybody else is a moron for fucking rewarding me for that vacant narcissism.
But then that narcissist, it's easy for you to say, that narcissism links then in to the depression itself because I know if I'm feeling shit, which we all feel shit sometimes, and I go on social media, I'm not going to see other people feeling shit.
I'm going to see other people posting pictures about their amazing lives and how, you know, their kid never cries at night.
And, you know, all these things that are absolute bollocks.
They're absolute nonsense. But then they make me feel worse because what is it about me?
You know, everyone else's life is great.
My life's shit. And then obviously the spiral is in the end, and in the end, you know, I do something silly.
I think in the end it comes out to the Stepford Wives sort of thing, that's where we're all going to be.
It's kind of this fake facade, Tim Burton little world we live in of people that aren't really people.
They're not allowed to be people.
No, I think... And I do it.
I know I do it. But I do it subconsciously.
It's not a conscious thing. But I was telling you guys yesterday, like, we just got back from North Wales.
We stayed in a little log cabin.
It was beautiful. It was amazing. But Allura was poorly, basically.
She got a cough. So she was really unsettled through the night.
And I'll be honest with you, mate, it was a freaking nightmare because we weren't sleeping in the day.
We were exhausted. She was grisly.
And it wasn't great. So I came back and I spoke to a client of mine.
He was saying, oh, you know, holiday looks amazing and stuff.
And I was like, yeah, it was all right. I said, you know, blah, blah, blah.
But it was hard work and all that.
And he was like, mate, you wouldn't know.
It looked like a freaking hello shoot from your social media.
And that wasn't me consciously doing it.
It's just I'm not going to post a picture of my daughter crying at 3 in the morning.
I'm just not going to do that. But I am going to post a picture of me and her in the hot tub.
So anyone looking at that is thinking, oh, Gareth's got a great life.
Look at him there. My life's shit.
He's there, blah, blah. And what they don't realize is actually we're all having a bit of a nightmare sometimes.
I know my wife, sorry I'm rambling, but when my daughter was first born she had colic because she was tongue-tied.
It was honestly seven weeks, it was like the end of the world.
My wife's really honest.
Brutally honest when it comes to me.
Perhaps too honest, I think.
She was posting on social media saying this is what's happening.
This is a nightmare.
I'm basically trying to get advice off of other mothers and whatever.
She got messages from people going, I don't know how you're doing that.
I couldn't be as honest as you are being.
I couldn't post that.
It's almost like we're conditioned to think, you know, I'm having a real shit time, but don't talk about it.
Don't talk about it. When all we need to do is talk about it.
Well, what you're talking about, that one key issue, when we were making the documentary, I was talking about status anxiety, which is a psychology concept I think developed in the early 2000s.
It's not quite right.
I'm using the term status anxiety, but there is this feeling, particularly among younger people, Like, everybody else's life is awesome and mine sucks.
Normal is not good enough.
Why am I not famous?
Why am I not a YouTube star millionaire?
Why don't I have a million followers?
Why don't I look this way?
Why don't I have a lifestyle like this?
Even though on another level, when you actually talk to them in interviews and go, You know most of that is bullshit, right?
They rent their fucking Ferraris.
They buy their followers.
All the pictures of them are photoshopped to death, filtered to death.
And they'll say, yes, I know that.
And you end up not just with this status anxiety that leaves them feeling depressed and anxious in the way that you've described, but split.
Like their minds are fractured.
They're going, yeah, okay, I know that it's not true.
But the false reality that's being promoted by, let's say, Richard Willett, who we know as a normal chap, but online is like the super successful gangster rapper, champagne, women in thongs.
I can see Richard in that scenario.
You can see me in thongs. Seeing you in thongs.
I mean, mix it up. I mean, we're in 2019.
Turn it round. The ladies can be fully clothed and you dance for them, Richard.
Women's rights, man. I'm actually quite a mean dancer, to be honest.
I am. You're quite a mean lap dancer.
I can believe it. But even if we all know that that's not true, you still get your credit for it and there'll be no shame.
So if I see you in the local Tesco and I know you're blagging it to death on Instagram, I won't be like...
You fucking liar.
I'll go, wow, well done, mate.
You won the game. You tripped everybody into thinking you have this respect is due.
Respect to you for doing this amazing.
So now we're not just being rewarded for narcissism.
That's 2012.
Being rewarded for narcissism, passe.
Being rewarded for psychopathy, passe.
Being rewarded for being a deceitful, living a lie type liar, the biggest lie imaginable.
That's 2019.
Be the biggest liar you can be.
Why are these kids going crazy?
Who could tell?
I mean, surely social media has nothing to do with this.
Not just making them depressed and anxious because of the false reality they're competing with.
It's splitting the ego.
So they have their real world ego and then their online fantasy persona and they both need to be fulfilled.
We didn't interview him for the documentary, but I have a cousin who's 21, and he admitted, after a couple of drinks, that if he's not regularly updating his Instagram with what he's up to, he feels anxious.
And I'm like, you've only got 312 followers.
Who are you trying to fool?
But this is the exploitation of human vulnerability.
We believe, as individual human beings, in the concept of an audience, the other.
And it's infinite because we can't count past 10.
I can think of 10 people and if you say, you know the thing with genocides?
If I killed 10 people, you'd be horrified.
If I ordered the deaths of 10 million people, you won't be 10 million times horrified.
You can't. There's a limit to human, we can't figure it out.
In fact, you probably have a more neutral feeling.
If I ordered the death of 10 million people, you'd be like, gosh, that's terrible.
But if I physically kill 10, you'd be like, you're a piece of shit.
So we don't have the software to actually conceptualize 300 humans are looking at me or 30,000 or 300,000 humans looking at me.
Someone is looking at me.
And to the brain, it's the same deal.
And that's what, you know, it further enforces the anxiety of like, I have to do something.
I have to be seen. I have to make a spectacle of myself or else I cease to exist.
Yeah. You said yesterday, Rich, about if you don't post something about something that you're doing, you don't feel like you've done a day's work.
No, not at all. It's very, very strange.
I was talking to my partner last night, and it's coming to the point where I don't exist as a filmmaker unless it's online, which is really odd.
And I remember when music turned from being a CD that you gave someone, because I used to record music, couldn't sing for help, it didn't really matter, And you give someone a physical CD. And I think, well, that's there.
That's always there. There's a record there.
But then when it was online, I'm like, well, I've done all this work, and if you put an MP3 up, someone shuts the website down, it doesn't exist anymore.
And I found that really the same sort of concept, is that it only exists in this little world through the screen now.
And if I don't do something online that day, post something, promote something, I do feel I've done no work.
But I could spend all day in a meeting that's going to lead to something quite fruitful.
But then I'll have to tell people about it online, or it won't really have mattered.
Does that make sense? Yeah, it's the same as if you've been to the gym.
If you don't post a picture of you in the gym, you haven't worked out.
I mean, like you've got literally no exercise done.
Are you a personal trainer, Gareth?
Yeah, yeah. There's a guy who's in my gym that I train at regularly, and he's about 35, and he's probably like 5 kilos overweight, but he has the shoulders and the biceps and stuff, and he just looks like a normal lad who probably eats a bit too much and then lifts a lot of weight, whatever. He can do this thing where he takes a picture of himself, and it's not just the picture, it's in real life.
He does this pose where he drops like 10 kilos.
I'm like... I've seen him do it three times.
I'm like, is he like saying magic words?
Is he like going abracadabra and then taking, he looks totally different.
He's mastered this. He's got this pose he can do where he just changes the shape of his body and then he stops and he goes, ah, and he's just back to a normal life.
That's a good point though, isn't it?
That's a good point because we all start doing that.
We all start posing in front of each other because there's possibly a photo going to be taken.
There's a point where we all become silicon versions of us.
So we're all posing, which is the Stepford Wives thing, which is the pop star thing.
We all become really odd, cyborg-y type.
And I don't think artificial intelligence, as I was saying yesterday, is really a technical thing.
I think it's a psychological thing.
And I think we're being programmed to be artificial versions of humans.
Not now, but maybe in 200 years.
No, I think with the two things, one with the fella, going back to the fella, he will almost certainly at some point have body built.
And so you actually are taught different poses and stuff that work.
Generally with women, it tends to be the carbs and they wear high heels and they do things to kind of affect the legs and whatever.
Again, it's fraudulent, do you know what I mean?
It's a trick. Yeah.
The other thing...
When you're saying about this kind of fraudulent reality, it's not real.
It's almost like a Vanilla Sky type thing, isn't it?
You've seen that film, where social media is giving you the opportunity to get the hell out of what you think is your own life, and your own life's shit.
So even those people that aren't, heaven forbid, that aren't going and doing something silly and taking their own life or whatever, other people are still getting absorbed into social media.
They're still losing their life, essentially.
Well, it's interesting you say that, because at the gym yesterday, when I was a bit spaced out in between sets, I started thinking, if I was more paranoid, say if I was properly paranoid, and I was like, what could this be the beginning of?
What could the end game be?
Actually, if you convince, see these young people, they're only young for about 10 years, then they'll be us, and then we'll be old.
So, you're actually entraining adults to think, life is shit.
Love isn't real. Families don't matter.
Religion's bollocks. Spirituality's bullshit.
Everything's being done. And you go, so you end up with a generation of humans who are massively depressed and massively disenfranchised.
Isn't that what you would do, the problem-reaction-solution model?
So you give them a problem, and you get them all going, something needs to be done.
And then you go, listen, guys, you remember the film The Matrix?
We're not going to force you into the pod.
However... If you do go in the pod, everything is amazing.
You're a rock star in there.
And we've fixed this, the virtual reality tech.
We held it back. We actually figured it out back in 1995.
We held it back from you. We've perfected it.
All of your needs will be taken care of.
Your physical needs, your emotional needs, your psychological needs.
It's amazing. Get in the fucking pod.
I think. If I was really paranoid, I would say, well, you could argue that that's what we're marching towards.
What are they being conditioned to feel?
There's no point to anything, so I'll either kill myself, and you go, I know you're thinking of killing yourself, or we have the pod.
I don't know. Maybe. No, I agree.
Video games now, especially the virtual reality ones, they're so believable now.
And like we've spoken about before, what's in the public arena isn't what the technology is.
Do you know what I mean? So, what is the technology?
I think that you're probably right.
If you've got enough money, it'll probably start off like that.
If you've got enough money, get in the pods and live the life of a rock star.
And then in the end, that will kind of almost just spread out for everyone.
Yeah, I think the technology is well above.
I think it was a few weeks ago in South Korea, somewhere like that, they put all these robot soldiers out and they look hilarious.
I mean, these things couldn't, they can't move properly.
And you think they're not going to hurt anyone, these things.
And everyone's going, wow, they've got robot soldiers.
I think they look like tin men and they move like this.
And it's like, well, yeah, if it shoots me, they're dead, but I can go around a corner.
Or downstairs. It's like Daleks.
And you think, that's not the technology.
You can put a man on the moon and you can probably time travel now.
That's not the technology.
That guy can't move in that suit if it's a man in there or if it's a robot.
The robot can't bloody move.
There's technology... Listen, there's absolutely no need for robot soldiers.
The technology for robot soldiers is flesh and blood.
It's humans. And we know that for a very long time they've been...
In test tube situations, they've been developing the right kind of DNA that would make perfect soldiers.
I think that's totally passe.
Robot soldiers is a distraction.
They'll be flesh and blood, and you will be able to get them to do Whatever you need them to do.
Any hideous genocide or any massacre, very, very easily able to get them there.
And they'll be stronger and fitter than the average human being, which is all you need.
On that point of technology not being revealed...
I personally don't believe that the machine guns we use today is the best end of weaponry that we've got.
The machine guns we use today is based on technology from 1925.
The planes that you and I fly in commercially is based on technology from 1935.
No more developments.
It just stopped. Weaponry and transport stopped in its development?
Get the fuck out of here.
There's just no way.
There's just no way. When I got the plane to you, Manchester, I went out onto the driveway and I looked at it and I thought, there's no fucking way that thing's standing in the air.
That is ridiculous.
It's got, like, sellotape round the back of it.
I was like... There must be more technology than that.
When you fly from Norwich to Liverpool, is it a 12-seater or an 18-seater?
It's like an 18-seater.
It was awful. Got a free can of Coke, though.
That's a bonus.
That's what I thought. Just going back to the film, we spoke yesterday and you mentioned the fact that you are doing a follow-up of the film.
Will you be using the same people that you spoke to the first time round and almost kind of Coming back to them, seeing how they've developed as a result of the knowledge or whether they're so in the game that nothing's changed.
We have different options for that.
We'll definitely be using the same young people again because they're nice, easy to work with, they're intelligent and they made an effort.
There's different avenues we could go down.
I could double down on the demands that we make of them.
There's a psychology experiment that was just done out of a university in America.
Sam Vaknin drew my attention to it, Richard.
They've copied the experiment.
Have you seen that? One month without any social media and then report how you feel.
But they paid them all $100 and they did it with students, which is what we did.
We did it with students. We could do that again and pay people and go, look, this time, because we did a light version where you could use social media if you needed to.
We could do a stronger version and give them more money.
Maybe we could look at doing that.
There's other different avenues that I'd like to explore and I want to keep the development of the project as organic as possible, like a conversation.
So if people are like, we want to talk about this, we'll follow that up and do that.
Sam Vaknin was a critical component in the development of the last one and I think he'll be a critical component in the development of Of the future ones because, well, he's dead clever.
He reads a lot more than either of us do and he keeps on top of these things.
So we'll be looking at where he's pointing at with that.
To the Sam Vattenham point where Richard was saying before he doesn't feel like the work has been done unless somebody acknowledges it and now these kids don't feel like they're alive unless somebody is acknowledging it online.
Sam has developed this idea around narcissism, religion and artificial intelligence, whereby social media is permitting us all to become individualized gods, like a little version of God through social media, with all of the psychopathy and narcissism of an Old Testament, Yahweh. And I've heard that, and like with a lot of things that Sam says to me, I'm like, well, that's blowing my mind.
It's probably going to take me about two months to work through that.
As a sideline thing, what I like to do, I'm very, very into religion, especially the Abrahamic religions and looking at the history of them.
So last night, I had a bit of insomnia.
So to get myself off to sleep, I'm looking at people who've studied Abrahamic religion.
And lo and behold, I fall across a line of study that looks at how obsessed the Abrahamic God was with being seen.
He's constantly demanding that people bear witness.
The word witness...
It's used again and again and again in the Bible.
The Gospels that we have are actually witness testimonies.
I saw this. He did this.
It definitely happened. The whole Abrahamic structure, especially in Christianity, is obsessed with, you must see me.
And the God who is not seen begins to die.
And so you have his paranoia like, you've been fucking, you worshiping other gods again.
I'll fucking kill you. You worship me because I shrink.
I expand when I'm worshipped and acknowledged.
That is pure narcissism.
Absolute narcissism. But it was interesting for me to see this line of reasoning because I'm like, really all we're doing is bearing witness to each other.
When Richard posts something and says, I did this today and I like it, it's like me saying, I see you.
I've borne witness to you.
And then you will literally get a dopamine release and go, oh, I was seen.
Oh, good. If I get one scene, that's good.
But 200 scenes is even better than that.
So there is this sort of sense of which the further along this line we're going...
Originally, I was like, social media, that's scaremongering.
That has nothing to do with anything.
Actually, I think we're going to get to the point where what we're seeing with the tech usage, not just social media, but the fact I have this smartphone in my pocket, so it's combined, is actually going to be about creating an evolution in consciousness.
Not necessarily a good one, but an evolution in consciousness.
Because we're hitting the concept of peak oil.
It's like we're hitting peak narcissism.
Like, what are you going to do to get your likes on social media?
And some people are already literally killing themselves to get likes.
As we know, you know, they free climb over buildings and then fall off.
Well, they stick their heads out of trains and pull them in and some of them forget to pull it in too.
And then they get... Well, they get shot.
You read about the guy whose girlfriend shot him with a.50 caliber pistol for YouTube.
These fucking...
Dummies. He put a telephone book on his chest and he's got their American.
I'm just saying they're American.
That's incidental. She takes a desert eagle with.50 caliber bullets, which are huge, heavy things, fires it at him and shoots him right in the fucking sternum and he dies instantly.
No. For YouTube.
So we're already at the point where people are literally killing themselves to get the sustenance of likes.
It's like I was saying yesterday, there's not a looming crisis on the horizon.
We're in it. We're in the maelstrom.
We're in the crisis now.
It's already passed. It's already, in some sense, it's too late.
We just have to sort of try and ameliorate the damage that's being done.
Do you see a positive in it?
I was going to ask, where do you think it goes next?
But obviously, if we're in the middle of it at the minute, only reason being, just a handful of years ago, you probably checked your phone or your social media, maybe in the morning, and you go to work, and you check it in the evening when you got back or whatever.
Now, people are just on it constantly.
Me, personally, I have to use bits and bobs in terms of work, so I'll be on it for work.
Same with you guys.
So there is no escape anymore.
It's constant, isn't it?
It's with you all the time.
Everything you talk about, everything you search is picked up and then adverts are put in place.
And, you know, like you were saying yesterday about people are searching suicide out of interest because they might be contemplating it.
And then the algorithms pick that up and then just throw at them suicidal posts.
And groups and discussions that are promoting suicide.
So you've got a suicidal person and all the algorithms going, oh yeah, you want more suicide.
Well, obviously in the end, it's going to tip them over the edge, isn't it?
Yeah. I actually ran that experiment last night after we spoke.
I won't show you the images here.
So what I did, I redownloaded Instagram.
I jumped on it.
With a fresh account, a fresh, totally beginner account, and I was like, okay, I want Instagram to show me messages about bulimia, anorexia, and suicide.
So I started following the tags.
Now, to Instagram's limited credit, with certain hashtags, they are now saying, okay, you're trying to follow hashtag depression.
Do you need help? If yes, click here for support.
If you're okay seeing these images, click through and see the images.
First of all, Instagram asked, are you 18?
And I went, yes.
There's no fucking way of knowing if I'm 18.
Then it said, are you okay with seeing these images?
And you know what effort it took?
It took my thumb going like this, eh, and then I get to see the images.
Inside of five to seven minutes, I'm faced with this collage of pictures The most disturbing, disgusting, really, really, like I felt sick.
And I've been working as a counselor since I was 22.
I started in the probation service.
I've seen and heard some nasty stuff.
This was dark, dark, dark energy.
It's like I'd opened the gateway into hell.
It was awful. And it was teenage girls talking to teenage girls about being a bulimic, about Hating yourself, about cutting yourself, and then showing.
There's tons of images of self-harm, fresh.
Like, I just cut myself self-harm.
Unblurred, uncensored.
It's just there. It took me five minutes.
So then I wake up this morning, and I go, I wonder how Instagram has learned what it is that I quote-unquote want.
And of course, my feed is just full of bone-thin girls and boys and Who are talking about how much they hate themselves, who are posting music videos about self-loathing, who are glamorizing self-harm.
And I'm like, that took me less than 20 minutes worth of work to train Instagram to just feed me hot, evil, hellish garbage.
And it has no idea.
I could be a 12-year-old.
I could be whatever. It has no idea what's happening.
For them to say, we've covered ourselves because certain hashtags are banned, When we were shooting the documentary, we interviewed a girl who had been an anorexic and she said, you can look for pro-ana, which is pro-anorexia, like anorexia tips.
That's banned on Instagram now.
Pro-ana is gone.
Okay, well done Instagram.
You took away one thing. But anorexia is not.
Bulimia is not. Anorexia tips.
You can just go and get tips on how to be a better anorexic and how to develop your eating disorder and You know, don't eat too much today.
Don't go over your 300 calories today if you really want those goals.
And then they post pictures of other kids who are stick thin, who are probably on the verge of death, who are probably so malnourished their teeth are falling out, and go, goals, goals, that goal's body, that's what I want.
I want the bones coming through.
I'm like, come on, Instagram.
Jesus, do something about this.
It's right there. You can't.
I'm an idiot. I know nothing about tech.
I can find them. So just go through the accounts and just start blocking people.
How hard is it? Exactly.
Exactly. Like we said yesterday as well, it's not even in terms of what you search.
Like a year or so ago, I was at the football with a friend of mine and a cat.
Which often scratches my car, had gone full on mental and decided to shit on top of my car.
Amazing. So I washed it off the shit and it damaged the paintwork.
I was like, oh, this is going to cost me a fortune to get it sorted, blah, blah.
So I was talking to my mate, Albino, and I was whinging.
I was saying, oh, that's a fucking cat.
I'm going to turn into a pair of gloves.
And he said, what you need is some teacup.
I've got some teacup at home.
I'll bring some teacup around tomorrow and you'll get it out.
Not a problem. I was like, job done.
Later on, I'm on the Facebook page.
And it's showing me adverts for teacup.
Now, I've not searched that.
I've not put that in a search engine on Google or anything.
It's a conversation. So it's been picked up on the microphone of my phone, which is sinister and dark and horrific.
But then I think, okay, just thinking this, what if I confided in one of you guys about real dark thoughts?
I just said, look, Rich, can I have a word, mate?
I'm really struggling. X, Y, and Z. Well, am I then going to get hashtags on Instagram?
For depression, for anorexia, for suicide or whatever, because I've opened up to tell you about it, because it's picking up my microphone as well.
It's certainly possible, because I've done coaching, and it makes me laugh every time this happens.
Sometimes I do coaching with people, and because they're Muslim, we have to coach within the Islamic faith.
So you don't want to say anything that goes outside the faith, and if I'm not sure...
I'll just go, I'm going to give you a piece of advice, but I don't know if the imam would like this, so you need to check.
Because we've got to, you know, they're not very religious, but semi-religious.
They don't want to do anything that's non-Islamic.
So we have these sessions, and because we're using Arabic terms, and we're talking about marriage and relationships and love within Islam, every time, every time, the algorithms pick up That I'm a Muslim female seeking a Muslim husband and I get hit with adverts for, are you looking for the perfect Muslim husband?
And I'm like, not at the moment.
I'll let you know if I am.
Every time that happens.
Now, these are intimate. Intimate conversation, quite sensitive material that this thing doesn't care how sensitive it is.
It just goes, oh, there's a possibility to sell you something.
Because it's selling me memberships to Islamic dating sites, marriage sites.
And that's just if it's doing that on a less intrusive level.
Because on another level, they could be listening to everything that you...
Well, they are listening to everything that you're doing, everything you're doing.
Basically, if you had access to someone's microphone on their phone, which you do, You could literally, if you wanted, you could destroy someone.
Absolutely. They've seen, we were talking about this, the Internet of Things yesterday, weren't we?
And the fact that for some reason your washing machine and your fridge have got microphones in them.
There's transmitters in them to be connected to the Internet of Things.
So when you get your smart meter, they can tell how much you're using.
Yeah. And I've had a friend do this, and he goes, yeah, well then I know how much electricity I'm using.
I go, yeah, but you don't know, because it happened to me in a different way, when the old pound ones you put in, and the guy come around and cranked it up, so the pound would only last 10% of what it used to last.
They can put that up, so they're controlling how much you use, so they can use that against you, so they'll know you use your fridge too many times, so they'll bung it up.
The fact is they know where you are all the time.
It's bizarre. But point back to that point is they can hear you through...
If this is true, and it seems to be, they can hear you through your fridge.
They can hear you through your washing machine.
All my kinky sexual roleplay has already been filed with MI5. So if I step out of line, they'll be like, we're just going to release these audio files.
You can never believe what he was doing in front of his fridge.
But that's the thing, though. You're right.
You do have absolutely access to absolutely everything.
And I think it's funny in terms of social media because if you said to someone, if you said to me, say, okay, every single day you need to send an email to MI5, say, you need to tell them where you went today, who you went there with, who you spoke to, and what you had for food, okay?
I'd go, fuck off, mate.
You don't know if I can laugh. But that's fine because they just have to have a look on your Instagram or on your Facebook or on your Twitter and Oh, he went there and he had that cream cheese bagel.
Do you know what I mean? It's bizarre.
Then you think, how do people get away with murders?
Because you're tracked everywhere.
So they must be being allowed to get away with it.
Because surely if you've got a phone on you or you're seen on CCTV everywhere, you're monitored everywhere.
There was a case recently, I was discussing this with some lads who I know from Liverpool are in the security industry.
If people do murders now, they're smart enough to leave the phone.
You don't take your phone on a murder.
But what one guy did, who's a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend.
Selfie. He took his fucking fitness monitor with him.
And it tracked on GPS. Did it?
And they were like, did you ride past this gentleman and shoot him in the head off the back of a bicycle?
No. Your fucking Fitbit says that you were right there at 10.18, which just happened to be the moment at which you got clipped.
Were you not there? He's like, no, that wasn't me.
So even your fitness stuff can monitor it.
But people who know what they're doing, they won't take smartphones with them.
But you've got... And they'll use burner phones.
They'll use the Dom phones if they're ever going to.
But you've got these in Sweden now.
They're having chips put in them, aren't they?
To get on trains. I can pay for my train fare because I've got a chip in my arm.
But that's you, Dom. It's really common there as well.
I remember when I was in Sweden a couple of years ago with my dad, a fella came up at the end in the theatre.
Real nice guy, to be fair. English guy.
And he was working in Sweden. He was like, this is what I've got.
And it was in sort of that area in there.
And so when he arrives at work, he goes, and then walks in.
My old man was like, what are you doing here?
Do you know what I mean? If you've gone and done that, what's the point in you coming and listening to this stuff?
It's a waste of time.
The technology is such that you can carry little swipers.
Are you that bothered about losing it?
You just carry a thing. There's a guy I know in America, a mate of mine in America, he's trying to develop jewellery for it so that you could do it off a bracelet or something new.
You don't need it in your skin.
That's a really weirdly...
It's a submissive and masochistic life choice to make.
Yeah, it is. It's extraordinary.
And with that kind of stuff, I think you tend to get some people come back and go, well, yeah, but if you've got nothing to hide, why would it matter if you had them?
And it's like, well, that's not the fucking point, mate.
It's not about hiding, is it?
It's about having your privacy.
It's not the same thing as hiding.
It's the same excuse. You hear it with facial recognition.
Well, if you've not got anything to hide, why are you bothered?
It's like, what? Yeah. There must be certain personality traits.
I'm not familiar with them, but the psychological profile of people who have that attitude is going to be similar.
And there must be some traits that they're high in and another trait they're very low in because they talk the same way, they tend to think the same way, and they tend to be very submissive to authority, which is nothing wrong with that.
If the authority is trustworthy.
But when in human history has localized authority ever been trustworthy, it's always been exploited and abused.
Yeah, no, that's it.
It's true. And it's funny because, like you mentioned earlier, you would say to people, you know, oh, this is what's going on, as in in terms of social media, you know, it's not real.
And they would go, yeah, I know it's not real.
Well, those people that you would have, if you had a conversation with them about, say, facial recognition, they would bring out the, well, if you've got nothing to hide...
Five minutes later, if you said, oh, you know, the local government's not trustworthy because of XYZ, they go, oh, God, I wouldn't trust them as far as I could throw them.
And you think, how have you not put those two things together?
That's a really, really good question.
There's a concept from Freudian psychoanalytic psychology.
It's called the fetishist split.
And it's where a person holds two totally disparate Concepts about the world and sorts them side by side.
They actually put them in the brain in the same place.
So you know, but you do not know.
You know it's not true.
You know very well it's completely not true.
And yet you choose to act as though it isn't.
My hypothesis is probably because the cost is too high.
And I've, you know, when it comes to that kind of thing, I've experienced a desire to not see reality in my own self.
And I've gone, huh, why am I in such weird denial about that?
And then when I actually thought it through, I was like, well, because if you actually accept the reality of this, the cost is going to be very, very high.
For me, it was 9-11 when I was really young, when I was like 22 or 23.
And I actually remember exactly where I was.
I was driving through my hometown and I'd come to a junction where it was left or right.
And it was like, I really don't want to believe that that's true.
And I'm like, okay, but here's the evidence.
And I was like, no, but if that is true, what's the consequence?
And the consequence to me personally was high.
It was very, very damaging because at that age, I wanted to join the army.
And I was like, well, I can't.
That's no longer an option.
So a whole life that I could have lived, career, money, status, whatever, boom, that's gone.
Just because... So I think for everybody who's already invested in the system, they're already paying their taxes, they're already a wage slave, the idea that it's not that way and accepting it, the cost is just way too high.
I think what you're saying now is you come straight back to social media then.
If you ask them, like Gareth was saying earlier, social media is bad, social media is bad, and then they go home and just get on it and don't really care, there is a fetish split there, isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. What's the cost of me accepting that, if truly accepting that social media is, that's why the job we have is going to be hard.
Actually getting these kids off social media when they're actually trauma bonded to it and they're fully attached to it, I think is going to be really, really difficult.
It's going to be really difficult. And it's just a new thing, isn't it?
Sorry. But it's a challenge that, you know, it's, you know, it's a powerful thing to do as well.
If you, you know, if you just help one person Do you know what I mean?
That's an achievement, isn't it?
Do you get something from that?
When you made the film and you're speaking to people, because it is really interesting how they open up, and you can see almost, with a couple of them, how they almost feel like a weight's been lifted off their shoulders.
And I know you're not doing it for the plaudits, but do you get some enjoyment out of that?
Just like, yeah, this is great.
We're going to help people. Yeah, well, I think we both feel the same way about the end of the film, which was...
The conclusion that we sort of came to was that what people are craving is connection with other humans.
And the machine is tricking you into thinking that that's where you get connection with other humans from, through a machine, which is a great trick.
The devil's played a great trick there.
Like, I want us to connect to other people.
Well, just connect to the person on the bus next to you.
No, no, no. I won't get likes that way.
I must go through the machine.
So the hope is in convincing people that actually by connecting people face-to-face in the real world in flesh with other humans is going to give them way more enjoyment than the machine which just keeps them addicted and keeps them hungry.
It does make me laugh with that.
I see it a lot in pubs and people will probably think it with me from time to time because I work on my phone quite a bit so occasionally I will be in a pub but I'll have to reply to an email so I might look the same but you see some people that have been groups of four or five lads and all five of them are on a mobile phone Pint a lager in front of them and they've gone out.
They've clearly arranged to meet each other.
They've gone like, you know what, I'd like to spend time with these four lads.
And then you sit on your mobile phone talking to other people that aren't there when you were there.
What was the point? You might as well just fucking stayed at home, bought a four-pack of lager, saved the money, and just sat at home on your phone.
I'm extremely aggressive in pubs and I usually threaten to insert phones into people's anuses if they don't put them away.
There's a lad that went to a pub last month and he took a picture of his pint of Guinness and I said, don't post that.
Don't fucking post that.
Nobody gives a fuck that you're drinking that pint of Guinness.
Even you don't give a fuck that you're drinking that pint of Guinness.
If you post it, I want to punch you in the face.
I end up using the same line every time if I'm there and I'll go,
has anyone got a mobile phone?
And you just see, yeah.
It's just bizarre isn't it, that false reality connection.
And I think what happens is that we all go out with people that we don't actually know or like
because we don't have anything in common, because we don't ask.
So we'll go out and we'll sit there with people that we maybe went to school with but now we have nothing in common with.
And I think if after three go out, we probably will sit and talk about this sort of stuff because we're interested in it.
But they're going out with people they don't actually know very well anymore because the connection is splitting and it's becoming further and further apart.
So they don't really know what to connect about.
So they'll ask you, oh, how's your kid?
But they'll only know you've got a kid because you put it on social media.
I saw you on social media with your...
It's a weird... It's almost like they put a middleman in the middle of connections.
There's someone in the middle now.
I think if I went out for a beer with you guys, I'd want to talk to you about your Mr Man mug.
Have you noticed that?
Little Miss Sunshine? Yeah.
I'd probably want to talk to that.
Do you know what? I didn't even notice what it was until then.
And then I looked at it, and I just thought, ah, shit.
I'm going to call you that from now on.
I'm looking at doing digital detox retreats for young people, and one of the things that I'm going to talk to them about on the retreat, if it ever comes off and I get them sat in front of each other, is it's worthwhile learning how to have a conversation.
And how to look at people and converse and to share with vulnerability that which you feel passionate about.
I'm passionate about religion.
It's a weird thing to be...
I'm not a religious person.
I just like studying the way it developed.
It's kind of weird.
It's weird. Or I'm passionate about martial arts.
It's kind of weird. But everything that we're passionate about is weird.
Passion is always eccentric and off the wall.
But it's compelling to talk to somebody who's in their mode of I'm really fascinated by this.
So teaching them how to do that and how to listen to each other without this half-blocking the face so they have one eye on you.
I'm going to screenshot that and that's going straight on.
Put a pyramid on it and just write, Illuminati confirmed.
Richard Grannon is a Satanist.
Mate, you can be accused of anything on the internet these days.
I'm Richard Branson's son and my old man's Richard Branson.
There's a whole website dedicated to that, man.
How does that come about? Something to do with the fact they look similar and it picked up like, it was very odd.
And then they said, well, what do you think of his kids then?
And this guy was basically saying, oh, you know, Gareth's actually Sam Branson.
I was thinking, well, I wouldn't mind some of the money.
But the best bit about it was, someone went, well, because at the time I was in a struggling little punk band.
And they were like, well, if his dad is Richard Branson and he's Sam Branson, why is he not signed to Virgin then?
Do you know what I mean? And he replied, that'd be too obvious.
That would be obvious, but the fact that you're two separate people.
It was like when everyone thought Janet Jackson and Michael Jackson were the same person, and he had to go on an awards show and say, we are not the same person for this sister.
It's really funny. It's mental.
But then you talk about possibly that they might be watching us through a phone, and then you're mental.
Do you know what I mean? That sounds more plausible than you being Richard Branson's son.
I know you're not Richard Branson's son of May.
I also think that if you live in a world like, Like we do with what's going on and how we're bombarded from social media to the food we eat to everything.
I don't trust anyone that isn't a bit mental.
Yeah, I totally agree.
If you've got your shit together like 100% and everything is perfect and everything is amazing and it's legit, I don't trust you.
I think you're a liar.
Yeah, of course. Or a psychopath.
Or a psychopath, yeah, exactly.
Because, yeah, that's the perfect term.
If you can look at what's going on here, you know...
Babies being blown up in Yemen and going, everything's fine, then you've got to be a bit scared.
That's one of the things when they are saying to me about feeling upset, feeling depressed, I would always say, look, don't feel like a freak because you're upset and depressed.
It's a sign of intelligence. It's a sign of awareness.
The world is not great.
It's got problems and they need fixing.
If you're just like, oh, everything is wonderful, then there's something not quite firing up there.
I have my hope is in the idea that people can gather in the evening, around sunset, around a campfire, metaphorically or not, and look at each other and talk to each other, that we're tapping into something that we've evolved to do.
It's something to do with connection.
It's something to do with being witnessed.
It's something to do with being heard.
And that that will actually level out the hormonal imbalance that's occurring with people who are really depressed and anxious.
And that one simple thing I can't profit from that because there's no drugs to sell.
There's no program to sell. You just sit down and chat to each other and you feel better.
That one thing could be the key that unlocks the door with this.
And I'm wondering if I can get them away from their phones for long enough And reconnect them or get them into something else which is actually just chatting to each other.
Maybe that's the hope.
Maybe that's where we can find a way out.
There's a scene for the documentary.
Someone wrote a song called Campfire, didn't they?
Yeah, plug, plug. I think, to be honest, I think that's a wicked place to end it.
You know, on a positive where you...
You know, you have a solution that I think can work.
I think, you know, it's almost like the film Grown Ups.
It's an Adam Sandler film, so it's kind of pretty unintelligent sort of film, but where, I don't know if you've seen it.
The first one's really good.
Yeah, where they go out to the lake and these kids are just, his kids are just obsessed with their phones and all this sort of stuff.
And in the end... Because they're forced to be in the countryside and there's no Wi-Fi connection.
And in the end, they're actually like, no, this is awesome.
So you just need to get people out of it and just say, look, like you said, sit around a campfire.
This is amazing. This is great.
You know, I want the same with Laura.
I mean, she's only eight months old tomorrow, but we're trying to get her already into a school not far from us, which is basically, we call it a hippie school.
It's obviously not what it is, but it's all outdoors.
And so she'll be climbing trees instead of playing on iPads, and that's what I want.
That's so important. Definitely.
But going back to the internet, you've got a website now.
What is the website for the film?
It's called PluggedInSocialMediaDocumentary.com, but if they put in Digital Detox Dude, which is easier to remember, that goes to the same website.
It's pointing at the same website, DigitalDetoxDude.com, and you can message me dude at DigitalDetoxDude.com.
Awesome. That email address was created in about 1994, 1995.
Dude! People will remember it though.
I'll put it in the chat box underneath in the description box and click on it.
Thank you. Big thanks guys.
Big thanks for this. I've really enjoyed it.
Again, I'm sorry I look like an absolute mess and I'm just in my bed.
You're alright. With a hoodie on, with kind of cold sweats, but, you know, the show must go on.
It's all right. The show must go on.
It's all good. That's fine.
Yeah, we'll start filming the next film soon, in March, so...
Well, let me know everything that you're doing, and we'll just keep plugging it as much as we can, because it's something that people need to see.
Absolutely. Cool.
Thank you very much. Thank you very much.
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