Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Wanna say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know. Because after listening to stuff you should know you will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. You know, ideas second. Wait for 10 behind the ********. England. No diversion the horn would be. My ball bag. That's my terrible English accent. Boy, we are both. Neither of us are very good at this. I remember I'm now being reminded Island, calling somebody a ball bag. How much better Gareth from the dollop is at doing an English accent. Ohsaa Gareth is an Irish name. Hmm. I think his mom is actually English if I'm remembering the dollop episode that his mom came on. Or at least ethnically. I have a friend who's ethnically British. It's a weird situation. His parents you don't meet any many of those. No his. But yeah he he has never been outside of the United States. Was born and raised here. But his parents are both English who came here and like their late 20s. So he it's not many people like that. It's weird because he doesn't have like he he he grew up in Texas. So he like talks like most other Texans. Well, except for every now and then he'll say like he doesn't say bathroom. He says bathroom like there's there's all, there's these little bits where it's like, oh, I. I can tell that you, like, were raised by somebody who didn't speak like a Texan. Yeah. Also, it's amazing he exclusively drove Saabs most of the time that I knew him when we were younger. This is. Dad had like 30 of them taken apart on his lawn. Amazing. He's got a Jeep now. Last time I joined Gareth Wilkerson. I think that's his last name, but he's very Northern Irish so he would say stuff like ball bag and was like, I love it, I have ball, bag, a ball. I was like, dude, I love your slang. I I got a lot of **** rightfully so, for for by the last time I did an Irish accent on this show. But I will say some of my favorite moments in Ireland and I had another version of this in England is like you get drunk with your friends. And you try each other's accents on. And the the particular thing, one of my buddies who is Irish but grew up in England for reasons that we will be talking about in this episode because that happens to a lot of people in this. There's a. But the thing that he couldn't get over was the differences in how we pronounced banana. So there was like a long drunken conversation that was just being me saying banana to and then him being like banana because we were making fun of how the others yes. Could not get over the banana. So it's one, let's say banana. One of the real joys of hanging out with people who speak English but are not from the United States is is making fun of how you each pronounce the same words differently. Yeah, I remember I was trying to like tell one of my, like my, my friend who's like, you know, born and raised in London, but they're Punjabi Indian, you know. And so obviously that's quite a quite a ride accent situation boy, right. Yeah. Yeah. But I kept saying like. Why? You spell stuff like that? Like, what's this you for? Like, why y'all? Like, what's wrong with this? Yeah. And he was like, he goes just as calm in the most British way possible. He was just like, yo, it's interesting how, like, you keep telling me that we're spelling things wrong, but the language is called English because it's from English. And I was like touché touché touché. It's hilarious. I have no comeback. And he just said in the most British just. As a matter of factly, like what's called English because it's from England. And one of the things that was always really interesting to me is, yeah, where where I grew up for a decent chunk of my, like, adolescence, the school that I went to in North Texas had a a really high population of people from the Indian subcontinent because, like their parents worked for Texas Instruments or for Raytheon or something. And so there were people, most of them had been born in India but had come over here pretty young and they had learned English from Americans. And then I went over to India, where the people that I was talking to who spoke English had learned English from British people generally. And so, and it's really, it's interesting like how the how, how differently people say, especially since as an American, like most of your contact with people who speak English as a second language is people who learned it from an American. And it really is like a different beast. And there's different types of like different idioms that people pick up and stuff as, as as a second language speaker when they get taught, you know, by one of the other when he picked me up. When he picked us up from the airport, he was like, hey, I hadn't seen him. He was like, hey, you know, look, look, look, we're, we're, we're two brothers were Asian dudes. I was like, alright, I'll walk by them dudes three times because I'm like. Hey, man, you said you was Asian. Well, yeah, because we. Yeah, we use it differently than they do. Over. Yeah. He was like, Oh yeah. He goes, he goes, yeah. Americans, for some reason don't think India is a part of Asia. Yeah. Which is weird again. Yeah. You look at a map and it's like, well, yeah, it's right. It's right in there. It's just that's the most British, just, like, condescending but nice way to say, yeah. Well, because India is a part of Asia. Yeah. Because it's like, you know, they share that giant land border with China. Yeah. Asia. And I'm like, Oh yeah, yeah, I guess, I guess, I guess you're right. Yeah, yeah, right. Whatever. You guys are saying that wrong. Like, OK. So yeah. Anyway, let's talk about this horrible crime against humanity, the coming of the blight, this, this potato mold. And it's airborne. Like, this is a nasty ****** to hit you. And now there's ways to deal with these. Now, like, I think it's a copper sulfate solution that you can spray on your tubers and stuff. There's people have, like, developed. Is sense. And obviously one of the better ways to deal with it is to grow more than one kind of potato because there's that one kind of potato may be vulnerable but another kind won't. And if you look you know, you can cross, but whatever, there's there's options. But we didn't have a lot of that. They are, they do start to figure them out. And in fact there's some very smart people in the blight hits who are starting to figure out that like, oh, there's different things you could spray on these. So it it it hits Ireland and it's it's obviously it's not great, but 1846, it doesn't hit that hard yet. There's only 6 counties in Ireland. Lose more than 1/3 of their crop, which is significant. It is devastating in a lot of ways, but it's not as bad as it's going to get now. What this does mean, though, and it all kind of compounds. So one of the things about potatoes, I've been growing potatoes for a couple of years, I'm not an expert at it, but one of the things that you do if you're growing potatoes and you're not somebody you can just go to a gardening store and pick up seed potatoes every year, is when you harvest potatoes. You set aside a chunk of your harvest as seed for the next planting season, and you don't eat them you like. Eat them, yeah. And let them kind of chill in a a cool dry place so that they you can plant them next year and generally the the broadly a lot of factors can affect this. But broadly speaking per one pound of potatoes you plant, you can get between 5:00 and £10 of yield, right. It depends on a lot of factors, but that that's kind of back of the envelope math. So usually you might set aside like a third quarter of your harvest, something like that as seed potatoes. Well if people are losing. 1/3 of the harvest and we as we have established Irish farmers do not have extra of anything so you lose. And as a side note city boy here checking in first time caller, long time listener, what's a potato seed? It's like a potato. You could just like if you were to potato right. If you were to have a bad you've had a bag of potatoes and like yeah you leave rotting on the bottom of the yeah if they start rotting and get all like goopy then that's not good but if they just. Part 2 usually first what they'll do, and it kind of depends on how you store them, but they'll they'll sprout, right. You'll see like little ear if you plant those under like an inch or two or so of dirt with like, you know, four or five inches underneath it, it'll grow into more potatoes now an incredible crop. It's pretty cool. Now the one the potatoes you do buy in the grocery stores, they don't tend to. You're best off buying generally buying seed potatoes because they're meant to actually grow whereas like and there's a bunch of. But as a general rule, yeah you plant that if you, if your potatoes start. Sprout, and you throw him in the dirt. You'll get some more potatoes. But so part of part of how they people survive in Ireland is, you know, you set aside this chunk of your crop for seed for the next harvest season or for the next planting season. But when they lose a third of their crop to this plague, they have the same caloric needs they had the year before, but they have less potatoes. And at some point when you start to get hungry, you're going to dip into those seed potatoes, which are just as they're fine. If they're normal potatoes, you can eat them. But when you eat your seed potatoes, what are you going to do next year? You have no exactly. Or at least you have. It's. Yeah, and is another problem. Some of these seed potatoes get infected with the blight and people don't realize it. Until they let go like unseal it to go plant and they realize that like they don't have as much to plant or they don't have anything to plant. But as a result of all this, like the first year of the, the so-called of the, the, the so-called potato famine, right, yeah, the first year of it is the least devastating, right, because it hasn't killed as much of the crop yet and people have because of their these kind of seed potato stocks, they have a little bit of like a little bit of like wiggle room. The other thing they have is the English Government at this point is headed by a guy named Robert Peel. Umm. And peel is? Not the worst guy, that there's going to be OK running the English Government in this. There's a lot of criticism of what he did to, but he's he's we'll talk about him in a second here. He works. It is important that I reiterate here as we talk about this famine, as we talk about what's happening to these farmers and the desperation they're entering in Ireland has plenty of food to feed everyone living in Ireland. The famine is not caused by a lack of things that to eat that are being grown on the island. It is caused by the failure of a crop that causes a surge in food prices. Which puts avoiding starvation outside of the budget of most Irish families. It is not that there isn't food, it's that they can't afford not to starve. That is an important distinction. At the time the famine started, 1/4 of all Irish grain crops were being exported. 3/5 of the island's total agricultural output is being sold outside of Ireland. So 60% of the food produced in Ireland does not stay there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. During the years of the famine, the population of Ireland at the start is about 9,000,000 and Ireland is growing enough food to fill an estimate to feed an estimated 18 million people. So again, when people say you shouldn't call it a potato famine. That's because there shouldn't have been a famine. Shouldn't have been a famine. There's plenty of food. There's ample food. Yeah, there's plenty of food. Yeah. When, like so I'm working on, I just did recorded two of them sort of like for hood politics, kind of like an economic version of hood politics. Kind of just calling it like how much a dollar cost and really just this idea of how inflation and commodities. Goods and services like how that stuff kind of works like. In in in what you're explaining right now to where it's like essentially like my caloric intake, which is the equivalent of like my cost of living, like it hasn't changed, there's just not enough stuff anymore that is available for me to consume because. All this stuff that I have, I don't really own, I gotta give it to somebody else. So it it makes for a situation where it's like if I can only if I only have 30% of what I'm producing to work with, but my 30% just became 15%. I don't. I don't end up being less hungry. Nope. You know, I'm saying I just have to make less last longer, but that's impossible because it costs more than it did when I had more. Yep. And just. Yeah, yeah. That's that's what's happening here. Kind of in in broad yeah. And and most of the food that is being grown in Ireland. Then while there is this famine developing, most of the food being produced in Ireland is being shipped out of the island as soon as it's harvested. 1 observer at the time noted a ship sailing into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo. So, like ships bringing in food aid are seeing larger amounts of food leave the island for export? It's got to be maddeningly yes, it is. It is maddeningly this will become part of the justification for decades of insurgency and rebellion, and it really does **** some people off. So the obvious question you're probably asking here is, couldn't they have just stopped or reduced exports and thus kept food prices low enough that people wouldn't have starved to death? And the answer to that question is yes, it would have been extremely easy to do that. It had been fine, it would have been very easy. But food exports were how Irish farmers paid their rent. So if you stop food from being exported, you would have to stop evictions too, because otherwise you would have people who could not pay their rent and landlords. We weren't allowed to kick them off their land, and that would be violating the rights of the landlords. Ohh man, so it's nothing new. There's nothing new, bro. Since the English Government's not willing to do that, they decide the next best option is to bring more food into the country, which is producing enough food, but bring in worse food, cheaper and lower quality food, and put enough of it onto the market. Again. They're not trying to. They don't when they're importing food aid, it's not that they need to bring in enough food to feed people, it's that they need to bring in enough. To reduce the price of food that people can afford it, you know, and that aid organization stuff could afford it and whatnot. Like a lot of, a lot of the way people get aid food is like the Catholic organizations will, like, buy up a bunch and then distribute it and stuff. And like, one of the things, we're not really going to get into it a lot. But like the Catholic clergy in Ireland, and there's a lot of criticisms to make of the church in Rome, but in Ireland, the Catholic Church clergy is supported by the people who live there, and they do. The Catholic clergy in Ireland do a tremendous amount of aid. To try to deal with it this whereas the Protestant clergy who are paid for by like Irish taxes essentially right, the Irish are supposed to be paying for the Protestant faith to an extent, are not doing that. Not to say that none of them do because there are in fact Protestant ministers who do quite a bit. But like in broad this is one of the things that seems happened. It contributes to like a lot of the anger and hatred that's building in this. Between Catholic and Protestant, right. So the the Peel government decides, all right, we can't forgive rent and stop. Sports. So let's just bring in ****** food, right? Kind of. That's the idea. It just seems like, yeah, like, OK, if this. You're you're purposefully choosing the hardest way to do this. Yep. Like just well, but not even efficient guys like they are. It's the hardest way for the people who have to live on the island. It is the easiest way for British politicians, who then do not have to fight a politically powerful class of landlords as much as much as much. So the thing that the food that they specifically the people government brings in is what they call Indian corn. And this is corn grown in the United States. Obviously the Irish are growing corn too. The Indian corn they're importing is a course, is a coarser and a harsher grade of corn. Then the Irish are used to it has to be milled. In order to make it edible. You have to mill it in ways that they had not been. They didn't need to mill the court. The corn that was grown on the island that they couldn't easily do with the existing equipment. A lot of workarounds have to be found in order to make this corn they're importing edible. For Irish people, they have to soak it for like days to make it soft enough. Like. One of the problems is that when people start really starving, they won't soak this stuff enough and it'll tear up their stomach. Some people die because like the their bodies. Can't handle how how coarse and harsh this corn is while they're starving, right? But still importing this Indian corn. When the people government does this and they sell it cheap, they don't give it away, but they sell it very cheap and fairly small quantities. This does enough to lower prices that a lot. It stops mass death in the first like year or so of famine. This is, broadly speaking, Tim Pat Coogan. And there's some historians that disagree with him. There are people who are a lot more critical of peel. Coogan's attitude is that by doing this, peel stops a lot of people from dying right away, that this is a broadly effective aid strategy. And I, I yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But yeah, this starts this is not popular within English politics. And in fact, it kicks off what is maybe at the time, the most vicious political fight in, like, modern English parliamentary history. It was perfectly legal for government for the government to buy corn and sell it in Ireland. But selling it cheaply enough that the Irish could afford to consume it could be seen as a violation of what are called the Corn Laws now. These are first put in place in 1815. There are a set of tariffs meant to protect English farmers from being ruined by cheap foreign grain. And the effect of these laws, it's not just about corn, it's about the price of corn, barley, wheat and other grains. But the purpose is to so it it ensures that grain. Only gets more expensive in Ireland in order to protect English farmers from being ruined by imports of cheap Irish grain right? Or cheap foreign grain right? Like that's the purpose of these corn laws. They are they keep food very expensive in Ireland, but they ensure profits for the English are kept at a certain level. To me, this again, this goes back to being like you choosing the most complicated way to solve this problem because I'm like, you just, oh, now I can't get. OK, so we got it. OK, so you won't let me. You won't let them eat what they grow, so I'm going to have to take what they grow. And then give them worse versions that yeah, they gonna have to do all this other stuff to eat, but then you mad that I'm lowering the price because you can't sell yours like this is. So listen. When? When my daughter was younger, she did not want her. Door to be shut. It to her bedroom. But she also didn't want. Our door to be shut to our bedroom. But she didn't like the light coming out of our bedroom, nor did she like the temperature from the living room changing. So her solution was. Everyone's like the temperature in her room wasn't happy. She wasn't happy with temperature in the room. So her solution was everyone else shut their door. And I can leave mine open where I'm like. Here's the simple solution, baby. Shut your door and all the problems are solved. You don't have to see our light. You don't have to experience the temperature in the living room, you don't have to hear the sounds coming from outside. Just shut your door. And her solution was, well, how about everybody shut up? Everybody else shut their doors and and I'm like, well, baby. We're not gonna all we're not going to do that just because you won't shut your just shut your door it'll be fine. So to me I'm like this is what I this is what I'm picturing. I'm just like fam, lower your rent. Just lower your rent and the problem is solved. We'll talk about we're about to talk about why they don't do that. But it is worth noting that like one of the reasons why they opt for this coarser kind of scene as like worst grade of corn is that maze is not being which is like kind of corn that like they're they're bringing because there's types of corn. Like the the kind of corn that they call Indian corn is not being sold by English farmers. And so it's not, it doesn't fall under these corn laws. That's why peels. Yeah, that's why Peel is able to get away with it. But again, he also wants to peel, wants to get rid of these corn laws in order to make it easier to bring food aid into Ireland, which ****** is is drives people insane. There is vicious resistance to him. And to understand the resistance to this plan, we have to talk about lazi. Fair capitalism, you do because, yeah, people that are mad that you can't sell at a certain price. But hey, numb nuts, you're selling to your no one can afford your price point. Well, so I don't understand. What the hell? Why? What are you talking about anyway? Well, yeah, we're about to get into that. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family and at Mint. Then we start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobile. Com slash behind now a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals, no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great. Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. So the most foundational mind of this school of thought is an economist named Adam Smith. And Smith believed that, in short, that healthy economies are made-up of individuals who are working for their own self-interest, and that this benefits society by creating competition in the free market. Right. We're all broadly familiar with these ideas. Keynesian? Yeah, this is what we all live on. Smith's most influential work, the wealth of nations, is published in 1776. His work is very influential to the people. Minority Leader generally referred to as the founding fathers of the United States and he was very much beloved by English politicians. In 1821, a group of them formed the Political Economy Club to discuss his ideas and to try to come to more conclusions about the principles of political economy. Right. People are in this. Starting to think about economics in kind of a more scientific sense. And the political economy club it's actually today is the oldest economics association in the world. So this is one of the first places where people are really trying to like. Put together organized theories of how economic life and policy works. Yeah, in 1845, when all this starts to happen, this is where some of the most influential parliamentarians and government officials in the British Empire would go to, like, shoot the **** out of what should be done in terms of economic policy. And these guys are all in very strong agreement that England should not intervene directly in the famine in a way that would allow people to get Irish people to get food without paying, right? You cannot ****. The free market, that's their attitude. You cannot make any do anything that you do that interferes with the free market. It would be worse than just letting people starve to death. That's the I. That is the conclusion, broadly speaking, that these folks all come to. As club member Jeremy Bentham wrote, quote, Lasee Faire, in short, should be the general practice. Every departure, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil. Now, you might take from that like, well, stopping a lot of people from starving is a great good, but he does not feel that way. And that's what we're about to get into. Tim Pat Coogan writes a central figure in the debate was a classical economist. Nassau William Senior, the first professor of political Economy at Oxford University, preached, among other things, that it was not the duty of the state to alleviate poverty that came through the fault of the individual. English poor law owed a great deal to his theories, and during the famine Whig apologists would see to it that the idea of Irish culpability for Irish poverty would become widespread among the British public. Lazy beds was used as a term of derision to indicate that the Irish even brought their laziness to bear on their potato cultivation. Nassau Senior criticized Irish landlords for neglecting the duty for the performance of which Providence created them, the keeping down population. So NASA is like this, number one. We can't do anything. We shouldn't do anything here. But also this is only a problem because these landlords did not do enough to make it impossible for Irish people to breed. Yes. Yeah. So listen like I I am like. When we started the first episode of this, I was like, I'm ready to be triggered. And now I'm at this trigger because we're still, to this day, trying to explain to people how dumb they sound when they say this. Because. I like I say it all the time in my credentialing program as becoming a California high school teacher. The third part was you have to take, you have to pass this test on economics, be able to teach high school. And I failed it 3 * 1 three times because I understood the principles but I didn't understand the the vocabulary. Like I just didn't know the words you know I'm saying, which is again some of the the genesis of politics where it's like I know what I'm talking about, I just don't know how to talk about what I'm talking about but. But some of it was because. Your theory is absurd to me, and I'm like the idea that because because look at in what you just read the the founding principle is. The government shouldn't solve a problem created by the individual. The but the individual didn't create the problem, the government did. And that's and that's that's why I'm like I don't understand your principle you made the problem so how are you your free market ain't all is already not free in the 1st place you created like so I'm just like I don't understand how this is a how is this a 400 year 300 year old principle when the foundation axiom of it don't exist. So I'm always like I don't that's so I think whenever I had to like answer questions about this in school I would be like but it don't make no. What you're saying don't make sense. And you know, like, yeah, I just but he don't. Here's the thing though. Like, yes, we can say obviously the problems that people are saying or is the fault of the Irish people are like problems as the result of the policies this state has enacted and this imperial government has enacted. And it's not their fault that they are suffering. That is not the attitude of these intellectuals who are this is way prior to the development of like prosperity gospel and that kind of stuff, but the same. Ideas feed into it. This idea that it's the same if you have money, if you're doing well, it's because God wants you to be. And if you're impoverished and you're suffering, it's because you have done something immoral that has caused God to. Which is like, yeah, even even with the prosperity **** it's like, I mean the the oldest manuscript in the in the in the Bible is job. And job is shooting down that. The whole point of that that book is to shoot down that idea. I mean, I can't think of anything that matters less in terms of public religion than what's actually in the Bible. Why would that matter? Yeah. Are y'all reading what I'm reading? Because it seemed like this book is is basically saying the principle you just said is wrong. Seems like, seems like Jesus of Nazareth probably would not have been a big lazi faire economics. I don't think you would just like seem like back into the past. But I'm saying it just it just and it's like this I you you feel like. I mean I always felt like even in discussing this stuff, it's this. Like, you made the comparison to like the plight of black and brown people and indigenous people in the in the in America, saying that like, well, y'all lazy y'all can't get this stuff to you got the same opportunities where and it's like are y'all serious? Do y'all remember the laws y'all made like, what do you like? You understand you, you understand? You made those laws. So how are you saying like, I don't God made the economic principle, you know, and and if I if I know one thing about Jesus of Nazareth. It's that he would never have given free food to people. Apparently that's not a thing he did repeatedly in the Bible. That's not a big part of the Bible Gospels that didn't. Yeah, Jesus. Jesus set up of a fish stand where he sold fish and chips for, you know, a tidy profit, make sure that everybody there was legal citizens. And then he reinvested the profits into purchasing apartment houses, which he he used in order to fund the startup of a blood testing company called I Don't know why it took this to the Theranos direction. There are no that's an amazing spin. Anyway, it's fun. So, Nassau senior, this this guy who is this major proponent of laissez-faire economics in this in this economics club. Was in agreement. Like one of the other dudes who was prominent in this club is a fellow you've probably heard of named Thomas Malthus. We should probably talk about Malthus someday. He deserves an episode of his own, but but Malthus is the first intellectual who really expounds upon the idea that overpopulation causes famine, right? Thus, if a famine occurs anywhere, it is because of overpopulation. And if you take steps to alleviate that famine, all you will be doing is ensuring that overpopulation. Gets worse. And so you should not take steps. You should let the famine run its course, right? Otherwise you just kind of make the problem worse. Now, as we have established the famine, this is not the result of overpopulation, right at all. Because again, as the Irish population does triple over the course of about a century, but economic they're they're there the the the amount of food they are producing also increases pretty massively, right? They are growing plenty of food. But Malthus's idea is that the work, it is the responsibility, the moral responsibility of the working class to not breed too quickly. And if they breed too quickly, it's nobody's job to take care of them. Right mouth is famously said this when discussing the plight of poor men. Quote, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents, on whom he has a just demand, has no claim of right. He has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and in fact has no business to be where he is. And what mouth is is saying here is that like the only people who owe you anything to your parents, right? And you can ask them for food, and they got to give it to you, but you have no right to exist inherently, and you certainly have no right to food. Yeah. Now, now, now go hand medium cucumbers. You just grew for me. Not that. Yeah, exactly. And this is part of what makes it so messed up. Like, it would be messed up if he was just saying this to like starving refugees, but he is saying this to the people growing the food. There's much as he's munching, yeah. As he's eating the ship they make him. Trying to tell you, bro, like you should have had all them kids. Let me get that tomato. Oh, that looks good. Yeah. Yeah. That the tomato you just grew for? Yeah. But that's my land though. So like, I mean and Malthus, there's this other because he's he's also very specifically anti Irish. He argues that because of how close Ireland and England are, England is always a threat of poor Irish people like flooding into England and. Draining the economy by driving down wages and ******* up trade, right. Just yeah. History as so many historical experts are just the same kind of sociopath, right? Yeah. Like you've got a million people saying the same thing today about different groups of people, but it's always the same attitude. Welfare about yeah. Yeah, it's the same argument. And Malthus maintained quote the land in Ireland is infinitely more people than in England. And to give full effect to the natural resources of the. Country. A great part of the population should be swept from the soil, so you you see these people there. It's not just that, like they've built a system that is leading to famine, there's a conscious understanding that they want to depopulate Ireland through policy. Another big advocate of this, uh, is a fellow named Edmund Burke. And and and Edmund Burke is an Irish man now. He's a he's a wealthy Irish person, but he he he's also against government intervention in this, this growing famine. And he his basic attitude is that like you shouldn't intervene to have the government intervene when there's a problem. Quote, it is not by breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God, that we are to place our hope of softening the divine. His pleasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer. So Burke's attitude is if there's a famine, if there's any kind of problem that a population is suffering under our economy, that is the will of God. And if the government steps in to help people, that is a violation of like, you are, you are sinning against God, you're sinning against the God of the universe. I just. I just don't understand what God wanted them to eat. They'd be eating, you know? I just don't. Yeah. I'm just like, what? What page is what page y'all on? I you know, I'm saying, yeah. Where'd you find that one? Where you where, what page we are. I know. I thought we was all. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. What chapter is this? So Edmund Burke, by the way, is the dude commonly credited with the quote. You'll you'll see this on, like, every Holocaust movie or something that came out in, like, the 90s. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Now, he never said that. It was probably from John Stewart Mill, although he never said exactly those words. It's one of those, you know, how like, 90% of the things that Thomas Jefferson gets quoted. Saying we're never set by Thomas Jefferson, right? Whatever, it's one of those. It's one of those quotes. But anyway, he kind of sucked. Not a not a cool dude in my opinion. Edmund Burke, another guy who sucked and loved himself some lazi faire economics, was Charles Trevallion now. OK, this is probably the single most famous name associated with the great hunger. In Ireland. There is a song called The Fields of Athen Rye. That is today. It's for whatever reason it's become like popular with a couple of different football teams. But it's a song about the great hunger. It's a song about like a dude who tries to steal food, basically, that's owned by the government in order to feed a starving, starving family, and he gets forced into transportation. He gets shipped away to Australia. It's very sad song, but it mentions Trevallion specifically, and he is kind of he is the face of the English causes of the famine in Ireland in a lot of ways. Now, this is not entirely fair. Not because Trevallion deserves less **** than he gets, but. Because a lot more people had to come together to make this, but like, he's all, he's absolutely a monster here, don't get me wrong. So again, Umm, he's a central enough figure that I think we should peel back a little bit and I'm going to give you an overview of his life before we continue. So Sir Charles Edward Trevallion, first Baronet, was born on April 2nd, 1807 in Taunton, England, which is probably pronounced something like Terry or whatever, but like, **** it, his father was a clergy man and his family had ancient noble origins in Cornwall. His mother was also from a fancy family. They were very, very rich. They did not get this because his dad was in the clergy. My family money comes from slave dealing in Grenada. There it is. Yeah. Good stuff. Good stuff. Chuckie. Chuckie, T. So he was educated locally before his family used some of them slave dollars to send his *** to Charterhouse School in central London. He did well enough there that he gets admission to Haileybury, which is the East India Company's training college. So the British East India Company has like a college, which I think Amazon.com is like four months away from doing that. Yeah, and and while Trevallion is at Haileybury learning how to work for the East India Company, one of his teachers is Thomas Malthus. So he graduates, or, I don't know if he's graduated, but he leaves Haley Berry at 18 and he gets sent to India to study at another company college where he learns. And this is one of those things that's interesting about him, as, as British administrators in India go, he's actually like, pretty plugged into the culture. He learns several. He's fluent in several dialects of Hindi, which is impressive. Not an easy thing to do. And he's given a post in Delhi. In 1827. I found a write up on him for the Irish news agency RTE, which notes Trevallion had a very successful career in India, including famously denouncing one of his superiors for bribery, a case which was upheld and led to the subsequent dismissal of Sir Edward Colbrook in 1829. This event established his credentials as a fearless and opinionated public servant who was not afraid to challenge his masters. He was later appointed to the political department of the Government of India, working closely with the reformist Lord Bentwick. Governor General of India, who later said of him that man is almost always on the right side in every question and it is well that he is so, for he gives the most confounded deal of trouble when he happens to take the wrong one. So he is a principled man. He is very anti corruption, but he is also kind of incapable of seeing himself as being wrong. Yeah, I was like, what did what did? Interesting quote about a person. You want him to be more of like a goblin than he is in his earlier life, but he's not. Yeah, there's he's actually probably more understanding of Indian people. And like injustices being done to them than he is to. What's going to happen to the Irish, which is not a unique story? Weirdly enough. It happens sometimes. It's bizarre. I just yeah. It's like it's it's so, yeah, it's like there's racism in both cases, right? There's the course they're racist against Indians, but they're different kinds of racism. And there's kind of more of a a like the the the Indians are like are are kind of like our children and like we have to, you know, take care of them and they're they're like our beloved. Little like kids, basically. Yeah. White man's burden type thing where it's like whereas the Irish are these like violent, quarrel, quarrelsome, like. Monsters, kind of. At least that's not entirely accurate. But like y'all should know better the the there, there's like there's different kinds of racism at work. Totally, right? And so a guy like Travelion is probably a lot more understanding of of problems that that Indian people are encountering, right? That's why he's so anti corruption within the company that he will be about what's happening in Ireland. But you know who's not racist? No, I don't actually know who at all. Who's not racist. I mean, you mean you 2? I mean, I think that's a good, safe, safe bet. I I would say really, if you want to be safe, the products and services that support this podcast because as as as products, they have no minds of their own and are thus incapable of the intentionality necessary for racism. You know, they do not have the institutional power to, that's right, act any forces upon based upon their prejudices. It's fair to say that a mattress cannot be racist, but the Washington State Patrol? The Washington now that said, if it is a Washington State Highway Patrol and the authority to enact on their discrimination theory thoughts, yeah. But if it's a mattress, you can feel confident knowing that that mattress will never commit a hate crime, right? Probably safe. Maybe I'm not going to say the same about. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint mobilcom slash behind. Now, a word from our sponsor better help. If you're having trouble stuck in your own head, focusing on problems dealing with depression, or just you know can't seem to get yourself out of a rut, you may want to try therapy, and better help makes it very easy to get therapy that works with your lifestyle and your schedule. A therapist can help you become a better problem solver, which can make it easier to accomplish your goals no matter how big or small they happen to be. So if you're thinking of giving therapy a try, better help is a great option. It's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com/behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com. Slash behind better helcom behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them you can create change to be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREAK. R.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Ohh, we're back. So trevallion. Yeah, the, the perfect example of like how two things, two opposing things can be true about a person. You know, I'm saying like that which I'm finding so much more, the more that I understand, like grow up and just become a more mature adult. Just like this idea of like you can in, in one part of your life be understanding, welcoming, you know what I mean and kind and at the same time a vicious monster. And it's like, it's not, it's not. That you're protecting it, hiding one side of you. It's just you're both. And it's like, like you say like this, the type of like racism that shows up in a person like that, which is difficult when you want to do, when you want to make history, be like comic books where you're no guys. And one of the best examples of this is if you look at like if you, you can find quotes from some of the Americans. And I'm I'm assuming the same thing exists in some other Russian sources, people who liberated concentration camps and were also pretty anti-Semitic, at least prior to that point and like that. There was like a period like Patton wrote some, like, weird because he was like, had some real regressive attitudes towards Jewish people. Yeah, but it also that people could be capable of being racist and also look at Auschwitz and go, what the ****? But. But that right, like, yeah, exactly. Because human beings contain multitudes anyway. Yes. So Charles Travillian, broadly speaking, one of the better employees of the British East India Company, probably from the perspective of a lot of people who are indigenous Indians, not to. Again, we're summing up a lot of history here. But but broadly speaking, not, like, not corrupt or anything like that, certainly. So he marries this, this broad Hannah McCauley, who is the daughter of one of the men who had helped to abolish slavery in the British Empire, which is like, if your family money comes from slave money, that's a nice way of of morally divvying up your inheritance, right? You know, marry somebody who helped end slavery. That's good. And the two seemed to love living on the subcontinent. So I if you get the feeling they probably would have been happy staying there for the rest of their careers. But in 1838, they go back to have a vacation in England. And like, when you do that working for the company, it's like you're you're gone for a couple of years, right? Because it ain't. It's not easy to get to England in the 1840s. You don't, like, pop back for a holiday. So they go back in 1838 and actually in 1840, rather than go back to India, he gets a job as the assistant secretary to the Treasury. So again, 1840, not long before the potato blight's going to hit. So he does a bunch of stuff while he's in that job and those first kind of like five years, he reduces corruption. One of the things he does is he he creates some reforms. Government, civil service jobs before trevallion are heavily based on like, who knows who and who your family is and who your friends are. And he's a big part of actually changing that so that there's legitimate competition for civil service jobs, which is probably good. And the civil service in this case is administering the British Empire, so you could argue he's just making this horrible engine of blood work a bit better, which is fair to say too. But the thing obviously that he's gonna go down in history for doing is the fact that because he's the assistant Treasury Secretary or whatever, he is effectively the management, the guy in charge of the government's purse strings for any kind of relief efforts in Ireland, he's going to be the dude in charge of of of that. He he he's going to basically be the point man for Irish relief, even though there is like there's a relief agency and he's not heading that, but he's like, you know, he's he's the money man, essentially his primary concerns then. When it came when this when this when the potato crop start to fail and people start to go hungry. His primary concern when he's looking at aid is to limit British financial exposure and funding relief for starving people. He also wants to the fact that he's anti corruption. He's really obsessed with the fact that people might get aid that they don't deserve that like government funds might go to people who are like conning the government out of it. Which is like not a non issue right? Like a lot of COVID money like got conned out of people like yeah. Yeah, yeah, you should care about that. But him carrying it is part of what leads him to adopt this really lazzi faire economic policy towards famine relief. Because the safest way to make sure nobody, you know, scams aid money is for there to not be aid money. Yeah. Yeah, it's the. It's the same, Robert. It's all the same. That's the. Yeah. Yeah. And like, we're not going to get into this a lot, but like one of the characteristics of this. Is like they pass work schemes because you can't just give people money to take care of themselves. They have to work for it. And so they have. But for a variety of complex reasons, having people do things that would actually have improved life or infrastructure in Ireland is not popular. So a lot of the aid schemes. Take the form of paying people to build roads to nowhere. What is the most illogical? Yeah, it's a lot of **** **** gets done. Yeah, do that. Yeah, let's build a road we don't need a road no one needs. In the middle of nowhere, a bunch of **** **** happens like that. So because of men like these, like all of these guys we've gone over, peel again, this Prime Minister who does the Indian corn deal. He has to be really careful with all this stuff. So, again, he's able to avoid running afoul of the corn laws with this initial. Imports 100,000 pound sterling worth of corn, and he's able to avoid running afoul of the corn laws. And it's worth noting in terms of how easy it would have been to stop massive starvation and death. The loss of the potato crop in 1845 is estimated at three and a half million pounds. £100,000 worth of imported corn is able to stop mass famine that year. It does not take a lot like it does not take a ton. But peels actions cause outrage among his fellow conservatives. He attempts to repeal the Corn laws because he, again, he's like, this isn't going to stop after a year. We we have to like, take some more proactive steps. And the resistance to this is so Titanic that he retires in December of 1845. He's like, I can't, I can't get anywhere with this. Like, this is nuts, the Duke of Wellington, who's the guy who beats Napoleon and is his friend, says. I have never witnessed such agony as what he sees people go through trying to get these corn laws repealed. He is sort of successful. They do kind of repeal these laws, but it's debatable as to how much it helps because a bunch of other **** gets done that like kind of minimizes whatever, you know, it doesn't work as well as it should have worked. Yeah. So when Peel quits, he's like, **** this **** I'm, I'm out. Queen. Queen Victoria brings in a member of the opposition Lord John Russell, and she asks him to form an administration. And yeah, I'm not going to English parliamentary politics are always very frustrating. It doesn't work and Peele gets brought in for six months. So before Russell finally does succeed in forming a government, for most of the famine that follows, Russell's government is the one that's in charge. And so guys like Coogan will generally say that, like Peel did all right at famine relief, but Russell is where things really got nasty. Now other analogies I found will point out that like a lot of the economic policies that were that were used with such disaster in responding to the famine were things that people had helped to set up prior to the famine and that he actually deserves a lot of blame. Or why it it's just that once it started, he was more reasonable. But he did lay a lot of the groundwork for why it got so bad. So I don't want to be like, yeah, pretending he was just purely a positive figure. And it's not to the past, you know? But I'm yeah. This was a solvable problem, yeah, like every time I hear stuff I'm like. It really was. It was not beyond their means. Would not have. This would not have been a blip in history like it. Yeah. It's an easy problem. You hear about stuff like the bubonic plague, right, which kills just this nightmarish chunk of the population. And it's like, yeah, looking back in history, we can say, well, if this had been under that, it wouldn't have been as bad. But based on their knowledge at the time and the level of resources, it's like, I can't. I'm not like, you can't really be like, well, someone engineered this to be so bad. Like, no, it was just like a thing. It was a. It was a thing that hit that they were not they they were not ever going to deal with. Well, you know, because there just was not possible. It's just a play. The plagues happened, you know, and there have been in the past. But again, part of why a lot of Irish people get really angry at calling it the potato Famine is that, like, there have been real famines in the past. There's just no food, you know, this is not that. There was plenty of food being made, you know. So yeah, so during this kind of interregnum. Almost where Peel quits but then he's back because Russell can't form a government during this like period of time, how to deal with the famine becomes the chief question acts of English leaders, because from like 1845 to 1846, the plague, the the blight only gets worse. And it becomes clear that, like we have to figure out a longer term solution to this, like we're we're this is not going to get better anytime soon. So Travelion travels to Ireland. Himself during this period to like see what's going on. And he kind of, you know, he does this thing that you see ****** journalists do where he like goes to the place where the bad thing is happening. And then he only hangs around rich people and just kind of writes down whatever they say about what's happening to poor people in Ireland. And he's very pleased that when he goes to Ireland he does not encounter anything that makes him feel differently about the plague or about the the the famine. So his conclusion is that. We shouldn't do anything. Right? That there's, there's, there's this is like the Irish people's fault and you've just got to kind of let this run its course. Yeah. And while this is happening, that Guy O'Connell we talked about, right, O'Connell still in Parliament. He is old and kind of sick at this point. He's past his prime. He's not capable of, like, really working to the same extent that he had. But he is desperately trying to get Parliament to do something right. It is not the case that everyone in Parliament is just, like, asleep at the wheel. And he's part of like a coalition in Parliament. He's like, we've got to do something and. Travelion writes this basically open letter type thing where he's like. O'Connell is a demagogue who's trying to stir up trouble, and it's going to be fine. Just just don't we don't get to deal with this ****. Near the end of 1845, O'Connell gets together a group of nobles and parliamentarians to suggest that the government adopt emergency measures. These included stopping the export of food and allowing food to be imported to Ireland free of taxes, right? Pretty reasonable seeming solution. O'Connell also wants a tax on landlords to fund a public works program that will give people. Jobs, so they can afford food, right? He's he's like, OK, you don't want people getting **** for free. What if we tax landlords to fund the public works program and then they can buy food and pay their rent? This ****** off an awful lot of people. So the guy they have to go to, for whatever reason, the parliamentary **** there's a dude they have to bring this proposal to, to try to get him to introduce it in Parliament. He's a he's a ************ named Lord Hasbury. OK. I was going to say like her. Yeah, it's YT. Yeah, but like hates Berry, I'm assuming. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, this is yeah. Lord racism. Racism has done. You've got this moment prop where you the, this this guy O'Connell, you know, this, this kind of near the end of his life when he's sort of fading in his powers as a politician, but he's still got, like, all of this. He's kind of the, he's the one. He's really like the only Catholic Irish person with any kind of power. Right. OK. And he gets together this group of nobles and parliamentarians to try to push this raft of emergency measures, including like, stopping the export of food, allowing food to be imported Ireland free of taxes. Like, really basic **** right? Yeah. Again, he's. If you wanted to kind of put this in modern terms, he's not like uh, a far left revolutionary. He's like one of those like progressive kinds of, of Democrat type dudes where he's like, he doesn't want to end. He's not trying to end. The system of landlord, I mean in O'Connell is personally more radical than that. But these moves are not super radical. Like he's not saying we should up into the landlording system and give everyone the land that they live on and like change this. He's saying like what if we did these very basic things to stop them from starving to death? Right. Like, this is these are not radical changes, real minimum progressive. That's there needs to be a term called that bare minimum. And I I think, honestly, O'Connell is more of one, OK. But but he's he's also very pragmatic, right. And he's old too. He has tried the more radical ****. He did try to like separate Ireland from England. Yeah. That **** failed. So now he's just like, can we tax the landlords to fund a public works program so people can afford to buy food? Right. Yeah. Like, you know, which is fair enough. Like what? Like. It's not like anything did work in this period of time or tax of the rich. Yeah. I'm not gonna blame the guy for trying a more moderate. There's a fun moment with this dude O'Connell fund. My not the right word. But if I'm remembering correctly, this is just something I read. It's not in the script. But, like, there's a moment when he's talking about trying to end the act of union and separate Ireland and the UK. And some some, like, poor peasant farmer sees him and, like, calls him the Liberator. And he's like, is this what you do for a living? And the guy's like, yeah. And he's like, then why do you care? Like, your life's not going to change at all. Wow, there's still gonna be rich people lording over you and stuff. Oh my God. So I think he is. He is personally, like, he's pretty aware of things, but he's also very much a let's see what we can do within the confines of this system kind of dude. So for whatever reason I British parliamentary **** neither of us are experts on that. And it's not really important. The guy who has to make the suggestions in Parliament or whatever to try and get this this series of emergency measures together is a dude named Lord hates. Yeah, yeah. And I know that. Yeah. HEYTES. But it is it is funny because he's pretty hateful, my Lord. So he. Yeah. They send this, like, very modest list of requests to him. And he's like, the absolutely the **** not yes. Yeah, of course. And his justification is, and this will sound familiar to anyone who's lived through a plague in the last couple of years. I don't know who that applies to, but I'm sure a couple of people he's like, look. Yeah, some of the information about this. Famine sounds really bad, but some people like Trevallion are saying it's fine, so we can't know whether or not it's a problem, and we shouldn't do anything until we get more information. Listen, listen. I can see out my window cause Ireland is a mile and 1/2 away. Yeah, it is 30 feet to the left. Yes. Yeah, but this fool saying is not that. So there's no way of knowing. It's not like any of us could just go to Ireland. Yeah, we couldn't. I mean. Well no. Trevallion went to Ireland. He says it's alright but yeah, the homie went. He said it was cool. Yeah, this. Oh my Lord, it's very. It's not funny but it's you know. Yeah, we can't. No, we gotta, we gotta, we gotta hold up. We gotta hold up. Wait for some more info. Is Ron Burgundy. So in 18 the well, the, the direct translation has been lost in time. No, no, it means St Diego. Yeah. So 1846, you know, you have 1845, the, you lose like 1/3 of the crop thereabouts. And then people have to eat a lot of their seed potatoes and stuff. And so 1846, they plant what little they have, but the, the, the, the the potato bug moves in again, right. That or it's not really a bug, it's a fungus. But like, yeah, it it hits again and it hits really hard this time and that year the harvest fails pretty much entirely, basically a lot of people. Get nothing, right? Yeah. A lot of folks get absolutely meaningfully nothing and a lot of because they're starving. So one of the ****** ** things about this, if you've ever seen like potatoes that have gotten affected by this, they often you'll you could like pull them out of the ground and they'll look fine, like they look like a normal potato and then you like grab them and they'll just like mush apart in your hands. And I think it's this reeking, filthy, rotting goop soup of potato stuff. It's nasty and it it's no nutritional value. In this, but people are so desperate that they eat them ohgod that they're. And of course that gets people sick when some people die as a result of that and stuff. But, like, that's the level of desperation they are where, like, there's this rotting mass of potato and you're like, **** it, let's try. Or maybe we can try and cut a piece off, and maybe that'll be a little bit. You know, people are very desperate. And of course, this is so bad that, like, last year, people have to eat their seed potatoes, right, in order to, like, make ends meet and and get something in their bellies. This year, so little gets harvested at all that there's just not seed potatoes for a lot of people, right? So there's not only did the crop fail, but people are like, what the **** are we going to plant next year? You know, Even so, even as desperate as the situation is, the government holds against the idea of of stopping the export of food, right? And their justification is that the Irish grain, so the grain that these people who are starving grew is, is more expensive than they can afford. They can't afford to pay for the grain. That they do. They just grew. That they grew. They can't afford that. So if it's kept in country, the government's going to have to have to subsidize its purchase in order for people, the Irish people, to afford the grain that again they grew, that we had like the pretzel, like this, just the. Oh my gosh, this is again. This is why Irish people get so ****** when it is referred to as a potato famine. Yes, because there's no ******* famine, real, like, there's a famine. And like, yes, people are starving to death, but like, there shouldn't have been like, it wasn't that all of the food failed, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It just yeah. How are you? Yeah, man, just the getting, the I getting the, the words out of your brain with the straight face to be like, well. I mean, they can't afford. They can't afford it. So we can't get with, like, yeah, what are we what are we gonna do? We gonna do, dog. They can't afford it. And there's, like, can't afford what? What they just gave us. What are we gonna do? Pay people to stay home so the plague doesn't spread? Absolutely not. You know, it's not. It doesn't. You know, Elite logic is similar in all times. Aim and again, I'm like you're this is the longest, most horrible route to a very simple solution. Yeah, just you you would think so over why you can't just be like, hey, look, tell you what. Next month, just keep just just keep the grain, OK? Just keep the grain. And yeah, we'll we'll we'll build back next month, OK? Just keep the grain this month will be cool. Well, that that's the thing. Like O'Connell suggesting there's a way to deal with this that keeps the elites in power. If that's your concern or you're like, hey, you know what? Government's gonna pay your rent till this thing's over, you know? Yeah, we we got you that way. Your landlords are still in charge. We're not ******* up the system. They get to stay rich or no work. You'll be good, but that would be too much, you know? So stupid. Because I'm just like. What the hell? You care whose name on the check? Don't you just want your check? One of the people who really cares is Charles Trevallion, and he is firm that you cannot subsidy, you can't prohibit exports, and you can't subsidize the purchase of the grain that was grown in Ireland. He, he writes, do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports. Perfect free trade is the right course. I'm just like, OK, why? Like, why? Just like tell tell me why. So just OK. It's because anytime you hear people talking about lazi. Their economics. Free market ****. Adam Smith. It's a religion, you know, it is a religion. It's a religion. Everything is. But when you get, when you say, OK when you look at I I like this is another reason why, like I had, I had such a hard time like like passing these exams because when you say when you build an economic model, you build it on, you know that the mythical average man. Yeah. So this is the average man. So who is the average man? He's. 32.1 years old. He's got 2.5 children and 3 1/2. Like pets? And and I'm like the person you're modeling your whole model off. Doesn't exist. That's not no one has 2.5 kids. So I'm like, how are you setting? How is this? I I don't understand how you could think any of this makes any sense if you build in your model off a person. That will never be. But you're but you're setting everybody. And I'm like, I get what you're saying. Wait, well, when you average all this stuff out, but I'm but listen to yourself. Like you. What do you mean average? That your model is for, it is for a made-up person that could never exist in real life because nobody, again, I can't stress this and this is nobody got 2 1/2 kids. This is the thing where it it is it it gets to it's it's not rational, right? These people are very obsessed with the idea of like rationality and that this is a science, but it's not because when problems of reality can conflict with what they believe about economics, they are incapable of adapting to that. You can't change your model. Yeah. Not everyone is the same thing with like any like with a normal religion, there are some people who like are raised believing something and then like they reach something that conflicts and they managed to, without losing their faith, adapt it peel might be a good example that first Prime Minister who is very much in in with this lazi faire stuff, but when the disaster hits, he makes alterations because he sees that, like, not everyone is this way, but a lot of these guys like travillian are they cannot countenance violating some of these. Economic principles that they believe in. And maybe you could argue that they just really hate Irish people and want to get rid of them. And that's the justification, right? You know, I'm like, yo, you pretzel and all this ridiculous stuff just to say what we already know about you. Yeah. And I'm just like you, OK? You just hate them. You don't think they humans and you frustrated that they actually need food to give you what you need, and you ain't trying to help them or you just you hate them. Yeah, I just you doing all this stuff that you and I both know sitting across here. What the hell you saying? Don't make no sense? You know it, don't. You know adult so just but you won't keep making it makes sense rather than just saying ohh yeah. Yeah, and that's that's where we're gonna leave for Part 2 and right when part three starts up things are gonna get real unpleasant real quick. But. Prop. Yes, before we hit that that moment, you want to plug some puggles? I do, man. I am. All my all my socials I am prop hip hop although I've been called before Prof E Hop and I'm like what they're putting the P with the H so they're prop. Because you're the professor of of of of hip hop. Apparently dull. It was like, I don't know how y'all don't know how y'all what or whatever prop hiphop.com and again at. There's a music and books and the hood politics pod. Yeah, that's all the I saw the things. Alright, we'll check that out and check out Ireland when it's possible to go places, you know, without the plague. It's it's pretty nice. Pretty nice spot IMO. Galway, good Town, Antrim coast, lovely. Lot of good stuff in Ireland. Though I do like Belfast, it is. It is the city. I've been there twice and both times I have been to Belfast. There just happened to be riots for different, unrelated reasons. I love it is. It is a thing that happens a lot in Belfast. You never met nobody. Yes, we supposed to be closing this show, but I I tell you this like the way I've always felt, like it's very simple, like. Belfast remind me of Long Beach in the sense that I've never met somebody from that city that I didn't like where I was. Just like, I don't know what it is about your city, but you just make very likable people. You're dangerous. You gotta say it like you you are. I know that you could. Somewhere in that smile and sense of humor is a cold blooded murder. Yeah, I know that there's a town. As a town you are good at making Molotov cocktails. That's what I'm trying to say. People. A lot of people with experience melting British armored vehicles. Anyway. Podcast. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break our handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Want to say I don't know less? Listen to stuff you should know more. Join host Josh and Chuck on the podcast packed with fascinating discussions about science, history, pop culture, and more episodes. Dive into topics like was the lost, city of Atlantis Real? And how does pizza work? Say goodbye to I don't know, because after listening to stuff you should know. You will listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. In wildlife, on the iHeartRadio app, or wherever you get your podcasts.