Nazi Yoghurt Folklore

A hot take about the healing soil on a priests grave and probiotic yoghurt in an 11th century vision poem Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 1:04Blindboy Boatclub?

  Dust up the husky trumpet, you rusty gobnets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I'm delivering this podcast a day late. I usually deliver podcasts on Wednesdays, but for the first time ever, this is, this is coming out on a Thursday because I needed an extra 24 hours. So thank you, everybody, for your patience and understanding. I've just come back off a very intense tour of Scotland and England. I did 10 gigs in 13 days and the days off were used for travel. I got back to Ireland last night. I'd say about eight hours later than I'd scheduled, just because shit happens.

• 1:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Flights, transport, all these little things added up and it added up to eight hours. So when I got to my studio, it was about one in the morning and I was like, fuck it, let's do it. Drink some coffee, put an all-nighter, get the podcast out on a Wednesday. I've done that before. If you work in the creative industry and deadlines are part of your job, then you know that sometimes you're going to have to do an all-nighter. That's the job. That's what happens. So I was ready to do it. And I tell you my decision around deciding not to and to saying fuck it. I'm gonna ask ye to give me 24 hours.

• 2:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  A skill that I've kind of fostered over the years and a piece of advice I'd give to any artist is to develop a mindful emotional awareness around why you're saying no to things, okay? If you're an independent artist, every single offer that comes in, every single offer for work that comes in is a potential opportunity. I've written three bestselling books. That started with one email, one email from a curious publisher. Like 10 years ago, one email came in and that publisher asked me, "Blind by have you ever thought about writing books? Would you like to have a chat?"

• 3:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  My gut reaction when I read that email 10 years ago, gut reaction, no, turn down this offer. All my insecurity from school came right up. I don't have a leaving cert, I'm stupid, I'm thick, I was terrible at school, I'm not smart enough to write books. The trauma of being an autistic kid in school rose up in me as an adult and told me to say no, to say no to this opportunity. But feelings aren't facts, feelings aren't facts, no matter how real those feelings feel. And I mindfully, I had an emotional awareness around why I wanted to say no. I wanted to say no to that opportunity because I was scared and frightened and insecure.

• 3:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I said, fuck that, what's the worst that can happen? The worst that can happen, you write a shit book. So I said yes to that, to that one little email, I said yes. And now 10 years later. I've got three collections of short stories and they're on, they're on the curriculums of creative writing courses in college. And I'm only saying that not to be cocky or anything, but to prove that my insecurity was wrong. I'm really glad I didn't listen to that insecure voice inside myself that wanted me to say no. I'm glad I didn't listen to fear and insecurity and instead I said yes. I was able to say yes because I consistently

• 4:43Blindboy Boatclub?

  and mindfully work on emotional literacy. When I feel myself saying no, I ask myself why and I analyse that emotion critically and calmly and I breathe. So last night when I got in late and I'm like, I need to record this podcast. I want to fucking put it out and I want to stick to, this goes out on Wednesday mornings. Drink some coffee, do an all nighter. We've done this before. This isn't a problem. But a voice came up inside me and said, no, no, put it off for 24 hours. And I mindfully sat with that part of myself that was saying no. And I critically analysed it and I searched it for fear and insecurity.

• 5:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  Am I taking this podcast for granted? Do I just want to go to bed instead? And am I taking this for granted? That wasn't it. Am I afraid of failing? No, that's not it. Am I having difficulty with the tolerating the frustration, the frustration of having to do hard work when I feel like I need a rest? That's not it. What came up was, I've actually put the research into this week's podcast. I spent three days on tour, looking at my laptop between gigs, writing this podcast, coming up with hot takes. I was really excited about delivering this week's podcast.

• 6:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I genuinely knew, if I fucking put an all nighter and try and do this podcast, I won't deliver the best results because I'll be too tired. It was 1am, but I've been travelling since 7am, so that's about 18 hours on my feet. I don't think I'd have been able to muster that adrenaline, the adrenaline to pull off an all-nighter after that. I'm saying no and asking for an extra 24 hours because it's in the interest of the work. I'll put out a better piece of work if I go to bed and go back into my studio after a night's sleep. This isn't insecurity, it's not fear. What's more important, meeting a strict deadline or putting out a podcast that I can stand

• 6:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  over and that ye can enjoy? So that's why this week's podcast is a day late and thank you all for being so patient. And now here I am in my studio after having a sleep, ready to do a podcast, ready to deliver some delicious hot takes. Before I get into the theme of this week's podcast, I want to address some controversy. You might have noticed over the past few years, I don't do as many radio interviews, TV interviews, or fucking newspaper interviews. Since the pandemic, that stuff has become risky. It's not fun anymore.

• 7:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  As the traditional media landscape kind of collapses, media sites, whether it's TV, radio, newspapers, they have to compete for attention on social media feeds. Now, this has always been the case, but since the pandemic and since TikTok has taken over, it's gotten worse. And this is all media. It's not tabloids, it's broadsheet newspapers. So what I mean is, I shy away from media interviews now because, let's just say, if I do a, an interview with a newspaper, I might sit down and have a wonderful chat with a journalist that I respect, have great crack, have a lovely interview, but then I

• 8:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  have to think.

• 8:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Which of my words are they gonna take out of context and present as a thesis statement in the headline and then put the article behind a paywall? So how is this newspaper gonna make me look like a fucking dickhead? So that the headline stands out on social media and encourages angry people to comment? This is where we're at right now with the attention economy and with algorithms. Just a half an hour ago, I saw an Instagram reels video and it was a cook and she was cooking Mexican food. Excellent video. She clearly cared about cooking. She was deliberately mispronouncing the word fajita. She was calling it fajita and she was doing this deliberately just so people would get really pissed off.

• 9:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  Comment under her video, "It's not pronounced fajita." And then all of those thousands of comments under her video saying, "You're pronouncing fajita wrong." All of those comments are interactions and that means that her video will be seen in more feeds and that's probably why I saw it. Cause someone who was following me commented under the video, "It's fucking fajita, you stupid woman." So that's where we're at in the algorithm. People are, like, music too. There's a rapper called Machine Gun Kelly, MGK. I'm not a huge fan of Machine Gun Kelly. It's not my vibe, nothing against him.

• 9:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  Go to his Instagram or TikTok and look at his most recent, the clip of his most recent music video. The music video is called Cliche. It's just him singing and dancing at a car wash. Look at his bootcut jeans. He is wearing bootcut jeans. The camera focuses in on them at pints and the bootcut jeans are literally, they're soaking up water. They're soaking up water and the entire bottom of his jeans are wet and it's creeping up to his shins. If you've been listening to this podcast for a long time, you'll know that this is a social phenomenon of capillary action on jeans. I've been following it for a long

• 10:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  time. But MGK, Machine Gun Kelly, he has a music video where the bottom of his pants are wet, just for rage bait comments. That's why the ba- it's a fucking music video. In a music video where there's a budget, you don't allow the person's jeans to get wet. The costume department comes in and says, whoa, the jeans are wet, we need new ones. No, no, no, no. In MGK's new video for the song Cliche, as it appears on TikTok and on reels, the bottoms of his jeans are wet, just so people will comment and point it out. The comments then push the video up in the algorithm and more people see it. This, this technique is also being used as a tool of propaganda. Israel do this. Israel

• 11:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  consistently publishes fake videos. There's too many to count, but one that I can think of is, I think it was like last year, Israel was being heavily criticised for attacking hospitals. And Israel claimed, this isn't a hospital, this is a Hamas control centre. And then to back this claim up, Israel releases video footage, which is clearly fake, clearly fake. You can tell that the, the arms cache that they're showing, here are the weapons we found in this hospital. You can tell that they're planted there. You can tell that

• 11:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  the video is awkwardly edited in places. It, it's a clearly fake video. Israeli intelligence and intelligence agencies like Mossad, some of the best funded, most advanced intelligence agencies in the world. If they wanna fake a video, they'll fucking fake a video. And it'd be very difficult to spot that it's fake. So why would this incredibly advanced-

• 12:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Why would these advanced intelligence agencies release videos that anybody can tell, "This is fake. This isn't real. You're faking it." Because that's the point. That's the point. It's the same as that, that woman on Instagram mispronouncing fajita. Within the rules of social media platforms, it's very difficult to resist the opportunity to type that comment and say, "This is wrong. This is fake." Your attention is a resource. Your critical thinking skills are a resource. Your capacity to comment under a video is a resource. Your capacity to critique a video is a resource. Your capacity to criticize genocide online is a resource.

• 12:53Blindboy Boatclub?

  Your capacity to show solidarity with the people of Palestine online is a resource. Are you feeling overwhelmed by everything that's happening? Are you feeling like you just want to switch off your social media for a day because it's too much? Yes, your resources have been depleted. If you comment under an Instagram video of clearly fake Israeli propaganda, and you say, "This is fake. This is Israeli propaganda." Then an Israeli bot comes in and, and challenges you. Now you're, you're spending a half an hour arguing with a bot. And then you're exhausted. That's the fucking point. That is the point. This is incredibly well-funded information warfare.

• 13:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  Clearly fake videos that everyone obsesses over in the comments, and this need to be right to point out that it's fake, that wastes resources. It wastes resources and it wastes energy. Information warfare during World War II, the US government would fund teams of artists to make tons of fake tanks, fake tanks out of cardboard. And they'd put them on beaches just for the Japanese to bomb. Why? To waste their bombs. Where did I hear that? In 2014, Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks leaked the actual training manuals

• 14:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  that modern intelligence services were using for online information warfare. And the first page on that slide is how the US used fake tanks in World War II for the Japanese to bomb cardboard. And then the training manual goes on. I think it was GCHQ. I think it was British Intelligence. But the training manual goes on to show. This is how you do the equivalent online. Distract, create decoys, waste resources. Social media propaganda, such as a clearly fake video that Israel puts out, is the same thing. It's wasting our attention, our capacity to think critically.

• 14:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a decoy, it's a distraction from thinking and talking about genocide. What I'm trying to do here is I'm trying to describe an ecosystem. The post pandemic attention economy ecosystem as it exists on social media. And it's why, it's why I don't do a lot of media appearances anymore. Because like I said, I'm going to sit down and do a wonderful interview with a lovely journalist and have great crack. And then that interview goes to the social media team of the newspaper, whose job is to get as many eyes on the article as possible. And then I have to worry, which one of my words or which one of my sentences will they take out of context and present as a thesis statement

• 15:41Blindboy Boatclub?

  just to make people angry enough to comment so that post survives in the algorithm? That's where we're at. I'm aware that I've gone on a big tangent there, but... So anyway, look, I did an interview. I did an interview last week with Novara Media. Novara Media are, they're a left leaning, genuinely independent online media group. They're funded by their readers, they're funded by their readers. I like Novara Media because from where I'm standing, we have an ecosystem where the vast majority of information is very well funded, right wing information.

• 16:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's what's happening. And you're not seeing a lot of content challenging those narratives from the left because billionaires aren't funding the left. So I like Novara because they're funded by their own readers and they're competing in the algorithm. But they're still, they have to compete in the algorithm. So I, I sat down and had a chat with Ash Sarkar for her podcast that's on Novara Media. I was on this podcast before. I like chatting with Ash, brilliant commentator, really fucking smart. I learn a lot from her and she comes across as just, she's a kind person and she's good crack to chat with.

• 17:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  So I went back on Ash's podcast and we spoke for about an hour, completely fucking free form, about absolutely everything and anything. And I had great crack. And I think that full podcast, it's gonna go out in about maybe two weeks or a week. But here's what I want to address, because there was a bit of controversy. So Novara did put out a small clip of me, and this clip contained a quote of words that I never said, and I got quite a backlash and I want to address it. Ash asked me during this one hour podcast, my opinions on the rise of far right narratives

• 17:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  in Ireland, and also the riots that are happening in Balimena right now. Now, I deflected away from the Balimena issue and spoke about the rise of the far right in Ireland, mostly the South. The rise of the far right in Ireland, it's a multifaceted ecosystem, but the fertile soil, in my opinion, in the South is neoliberalism. Years of neoliberal policies create a sense of confusion and hopelessness that allows simple narratives like fascism to emerge, far right narratives to emerge. If you want to hear me speak about that in detail, go back to a podcast I released about two months ago called Why Everything Feels So Chaotic Right Now.

• 18:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  I did, I covered neoliberalism, I think in two or three podcasts, a few months back. But anyway, look, Novara Media, they released like a 40 second clip of me speaking about neoliberalism. As fertile grounds for the far right, but they put on it the headline, blind by Ballymena riots are happening because of neoliberalism. I would never say that, that's a terrible take. Anyone from the north of Ireland who saw that, and it was disappointed in me because I received a lot of messages, please note that I didn't say those words, I did not say those words, someone put it up as a headline. I immediately brought it to Novara's attention.

• 19:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  The videos were deleted, they apologized to me. It wasn't done with malicious intent, it wasn't done deliberately to make me look bad. I mean, I reckon what happened, the thing is, when you've got, when you have independent media, which means a small team of people, and not a hugely funded thing, when you've got genuine independent media, you've got human fallibility. I'm independent media, I'm delivering a podcast a day late. I'm a day late with the podcast, that's human fallibility. I'm not a radio station, I do every bit of this podcast myself, from research to recording to engineering, everything, myself. If this was a radio station, I'd just, the radio station would just get someone in to

• 20:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  fill in for me, and you wouldn't give a shit, you wouldn't know the difference. But no, this is independent media. Novara is also independent media. So what happened was, whoever put up that video and put that quote there, the Ballymena riots are in the news, they want to put out a video that relates to it so that it does well in the algorithm, and I reckon the probably English person who misquoted me didn't understand the gravity of that misquote and how wrong it is. There's some sirens in the background there.

• 20:39Blindboy Boatclub?

  Shit's kicking off in Limerick again unfortunately.

• 20:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  There's gang wars back that we haven't seen in about fucking 20 years. There's been a lot of drive-by shootings and shit like that. I haven't seen that in about 20 years, so there's a lot of sirens. There's been two pretty serious drive-by shootings and also a petrol bombing in the past week in Limerick City, and Limerick City's small, so when shit like that kicks off, you're just gonna get sirens all the time. So here's the thing, currently there are riots in Ballymena in the north of Ireland. These are racist pogroms being directed at immigrants, happening within loyalist communities.

• 21:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  What you're seeing is a culture of settler colonialism, okay? I'm not qualified to speak about this because I'm from the Irish Free State. I'm a Free Stater, I'm from the 26 counties. I grew up with the privilege of the period known as the troubles to be something I witnessed on television as a hyper-real spectacle. I have no lived experience of it. I'm a Free Stater whose granddad was in the IRA and I have folk stories handed down to me from my dad about sectarian oppression that my granddad experienced in the 1920s.

• 22:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Listeners from the north of Ireland right now, listening right now, have got lived experience in their lifetime of sectarian violence, colonial oppression. So I want to make it clear to ye, if an English media organisation rang me up and said, "Blind boy, will you come on and speak about the Ballymena riots?", I would flat out say, "Absolutely not, I will not speak about that, please speak to someone from the north of Ireland." When I was on Novara Media and Ash's podcast, we spoke about loads of different things. When the question about Ballymena came up, I deflected it a bit to be more about the rise of far-right narratives in the south, which is something I can speak on. See, here's what's happening in Ballymena.

• 22:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  Last week, I believe, someone was arrested for sexual assault in the community. This person happened to be an immigrant. The community is a loyalist Protestant community. A mob emerged and this mob began to attack all the immigrants in that community. Everybody in that community who was an immigrant, everybody who had brown skin, black skin, a pogrom, a pogrom emerged. Collective punishment based on racism, emboldened by a culture of settler colonialism. That's not neoliberalism. That's a long, long history of settler colonial racism.

• 23:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  The north of Ireland is colonized, colonized by Britain. Some people in the loyalist community have a history of pogroms against Catholics, against Catholics and against Protestants too, who were sympathetic to Catholics. There's a history of pogroms, violence, intimidation, orange marches. You know, orange marches every 12th of July. I've spoken to Protestant people up north. I know that there's Protestant people who grew up and orange marches were things in their community and for them it was like, the orange men are out, go out and wave your British flag and eat some tray of bakes and it's all a lot of fun.

• 24:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  But the context and intent of an orange march, it's an act of colonial aggression. It's a celebration of a battle that was won several hundred years ago. It's a very deliberate attempt to intimidate the Catholic community, to let the Catholic community know who's in charge, who rules. It's accompanied by huge bonfire nights where effigies of Catholic people are burned on bonfires, where it says, "Kill all tigues", tigues being a slur for Catholics. And this is the ritualistic celebration of sectarian violence.

• 25:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And orange marches, they carry the threat of pogroms. So an orange march, where the orange men bang their drums and play their flutes and dress in their orange men clothes. That's the solemn face. It's the threat of violence. This is just a march, but if you step out of line, there's gonna be a pogrom, which means a mob of people are gonna petrol bomb your house and kick you out of your community and the police and the British Army are gonna stand by and they're gonna support us. They're gonna support us in doing this. That is racist settler colonial violence.

• 25:44Blindboy Boatclub?

  What's happening in Bellamina right now with the riots is a continuation of that exact same settler colonial violence, except now some new targets have been added. It's not just about the Catholics anymore. It's about brown people, black people, immigrants. Some more effigies have been added to the bonfire. And I need to say as well, obviously not everybody in these communities is a racist or even loyalist. I saw an interview this morning with a woman from the community who's a Protestant. And what's happening is that the people in the community are hanging British flags out of their windows so that their houses do not become petrol bombed.

• 26:26Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's a way of letting the mob know, I'm one of you. She said, I'm, I'm not hanging out a British flag out of my window. I'm not gonna put up a tribal effigy to guarantee my safety in my own community. And then she contextualized the sectarianism in the north as we have been fighting people from another community, referring to Catholics, who've been suffering the same socioeconomic deprivation that we have, instead of focusing on the people in power, which was a way of transcending sectarianism by bringing class consciousness into it. Why do I know this shit? Just from reading things online, from speaking to people who live in those communities, from listening?

• 27:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  I have no lived experience of that whatsoever. I'm not sectarian, okay? If you are a Protestant from the north or south of Ireland, I do not give a shit. You're a human being, you're my sister, you're my brother. But I'm very much against racist pogroms, very much against racist pogroms and solemn marches that carry the threat of a racist pogrom. I'm against that stuff. So if you're from the north of Ireland, I want you to understand, I would never, ever go on a media organisation and say, "The Ballymena riots are caused by neoliberalism." I did not say those words. I would not say those words.

• 27:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  Those are words designed for the click economy and it fucking worked and the videos went very viral and that statement, which I never said, is perfect at pissing off everybody. Everybody. It pisses off the racists and it pisses off the people who are clued in because it's like, "Look at this fucking idiotic free state wanker, speaking out of turn, talking out of his arse about something he doesn't understand and feeding into a cosy British narrative." I got a lot of pushback from this. I wouldn't, that's a very cosy narrative. That's a lovely little cosy narrative and what it does is, it's a cosy narrative that

• 28:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  allows English people to feel comfortable. The north of Ireland has always been portrayed in English media as the troubles, the Irish problem, the Irish question. "Oh my god, isn't it awful? What's happening over there in Northern Ireland? Isn't it terrible? All the violence. Oh my god, we can't control it, there's nothing we can do. Better put some British soldiers there to keep the peace." To say that the riots in Ballymena are caused by neoliberalism, it lets colonialism off the hook, it lets racism off the hook. Like the journalist Alison Morris up in the Belfast Telegraph, like she reported that.

• 29:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  Some of the people involved in the mobs that are doing the pogroms in Ballymena right now against immigrants, some of these people are members of the UDA, the Ulster Defence Association. There's been long time, there's been collusion between the British government and loyalist paramilitaries against the Catholic community. The British government has used sectarian conflict to justify British military presence in the north of Ireland. I've done loads of podcasts on this, but the military reaction force in the 1970s are covert British military organisation that would shoot people in Protestant and

• 29:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Catholic communities in plain clothes, just to stoke sectarian conflict, to create chaos. The culture of violent pogroms against Catholic communities in the north of Ireland, which goes back to the 1920s, they were enabled by, supported by the police in the north of Ireland and the British military. A very clear message from the top down. This is a colony of the British fucking empire. And if you want to do pogroms against the colonised, if you want to murder and kill and burn the colonised out of their houses, you have the full support of the state. Just don't tell anybody what you have the full support of the state.

• 30:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's evidence based, that's called history, okay? What that does is it emboldens, it emboldens a culture of pogroms. And that's what you're seeing now, it's settler colonialism. That's exactly, it's settler colonial violence, that's what you're seeing. And if you're thinking, ah, the fucking, the north of Ireland was colonised nearly 600 years ago. It was. And now 600 years later, you're seeing settler colonial violence. And what I mean there, 400 years ago, sorry, what I'm referring to is the plantation of Ulster, the very deliberate, beginning in 1606, the very deliberate colonisation of Ulster by the British Crown to ethnically cleanse the people living in Ulster and to

• 31:27Blindboy Boatclub?

  replace them with Protestant people from...

• 31:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  The lowlands of Scotland to create a more a loyal colony. That's what I'm referring to. And the architects of which called the the West Country men. Right, these were lads from mostly Devon. I'm talking about Josiah Badley, William Parsons, Walter Raleigh. The architects of of the plantations of Ireland. These same in they practiced, they practice in Ireland. These same men were the ones who went down to colonize indigenous people in America in the Caribbean. The same men, they practiced it in Ireland first. And if you're thinking, why the fuck are you talking about shit from 400 years ago? Jesus Christ, wouldn't it be great if it was history?

• 32:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  Wouldn't that be great if it was something in the past? No, colonialism is it's an intergenerational legacy that's upheld by systems of power. Working class Catholics couldn't vote, couldn't vote in the north of Ireland up until 1972. The innocent civilians who were massacred at the peaceful protest of Bloody Sunday massacred by British soldiers. These were working class Catholics who were looking for the right to vote and they were massacred. 1972, you know, David Bowie was releasing the album Ziggy Stardust. Bowie was making songs. It's not a long time ago. You're talking about an apartheid state where civilians are shot dead in cold blood by British soldiers.

• 32:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  Because they had the audacity to march peacefully for the vote. And those soldiers still haven't been brought to justice. Those systems of power still reverberate today, not just in the north of Ireland. And in the other places that I mentioned there were the the West Country men colonized. Speak to some indigenous American people on their reservation and see how their community is getting on in 2025. That colonization has survived in culture and ritual. And that's what you're seeing now. So any conversation about the riots in the north of Ireland right now in Ballymena. That doesn't also bring in colonization into that discussion. That's not an argument you should be listening to. I need to clear that up. I didn't want to speak about this this week.

• 33:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Again, it's, it's not something I'd go into too deep about something that's happening right now, because like I said, I'm from the fucking Free State. I'm from Limerick. So to anyone who saw a fucking video clip of me, it went very viral, man. It was on TikTok, it was on Instagram, hundreds of thousands of views, okay? And there was big backlash. I would be disappointed in me too. So to anyone who saw a video where, where the headline said, "Blind by: The Ballymena Riots Are Caused By Neoliberalism", I did not say those words. It was human error by somebody who didn't fully understand the gravity of misquoting me. The videos were deleted, I received an apology, it was a genuine mistake, and I still

• 34:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  support Novara Media, because like I said, they're, they're independent, left-leaning media in a sea of right-wing media that's very well-funded, very, very well-funded. And you have to give independent media that's run by a small team and that is funded by its own listeners or viewers, you have to cut a bit of slack there and allow for a margin of human error, because that's what happened here. No one was trying to stitch me up or deliberately misrepresent me. And the full podcast I did with Ash Sarkar probably be out in about two weeks, I'd say, or in a week. This week's podcast was supposed to be about yogurt. I've been fascinated by yogurt recently. I've been researching it

• 35:12Blindboy Boatclub?

  deeply, going down many a yogurt rabbit hole, but I couldn't go straight into yogurt lore because I was placed in a position there where I had to defend myself and speak about the legacy of the Ulster plantation. I mentioned last week that I was experiencing the beginning stages of autistic burnout. And what I've been doing to protect myself from autistic burnout is, number one, having an acute, mindful, emotional awareness around tasks, noticing the feeling of procrastination. What I mean is, when emails come in, when text messages come in. I answer them immediately. If I can, I answer them immediately.

• 35:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if a little feeling comes up of procrastination, I'm gonna put this email off, I'm gonna put this text off. I don't do it. I deal with the task immediately. This gives me a little feeling of accomplishment and that feeling of accomplishment, it fuels me and it protects me from autistic burnout. What I'm trying to avoid is, I don't wanna answer this email, I don't wanna answer this text message. I don't wanna pick that piece of rubbish off the ground. I don't wanna do anything. I wanna zone out because I'm overwhelmed. When I do that, unanswered text messages, unanswered emails, unpicked up pieces of rubbish, spiral out of control and then in a week's time, I'm frozen. I've got real problems and I completely freeze.

• 36:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  And many a time on this podcast, I've spoken about my studio getting so messy that I can't even move and I don't know how to clean it. Complete paralysis of executive functioning, the capacity to execute tasks and complete them. That's autistic burnout. I'm trying to avoid that. So I notice feelings of procrastination and I deal with small tasks as they happen. That awareness is also, it's why I delivered the podcast a day late this week. I'm in that mindful space where I'm critically analysing my task initiation. I was able to say to myself, no, I'm not procrastinating this podcast. I actually don't think I'm gonna be able to deliver it.

• 37:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  And something that would really impact, something that might spiral me into burnout this week would be

• 37:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  the feeling of shame, the feeling of shame and disappointment of delivering a podcast that I can't stand over. That would spiral nicely into autistic burnout and I'd find myself using some very self-shaming language. The other thing I do to protect myself from burnout, and this is really important, is to spend time by myself with fucking noise cancelling earphones on, focusing on research. I currently have an intense curiosity about yogurt. By paying attention to that curiosity, by following it, by going down research rabbit holes.

• 38:07Blindboy Boatclub?

  That brings me real joy. That brings me real joy and it recharges my social battery. But the issue I was having this week was, I wanna learn everything about fucking yogurt. I wanna learn about the history of yogurt, but I had this problem of, oh fuck. There's a video online where I look like a free state prick. But as you know or not, I love, I love making connections where they seemingly don't exist. So I set myself the challenge of, can I do a podcast about the history of yogurt? And is it anywhere connected to the ulster plantations? I wonder what would happen if I set myself that challenge. So that's what I wanna do with this week's podcast. And before we do that, I think let's have a little Ocarina pause. Cause I want an uninterrupted hot take.

• 38:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  I don't have an Ocarina this week. What I do have, I have a little book, it's a copy of an essay called The Problem That Has No Name by Betty Friedan. It's a very interesting essay. I believe it was written in the 1950s. It's a piece, it's, it's second wave feminist literature, but what it's about is the sense of meaninglessness and hopelessness that housewives began to feel in America in the 1950s. When their lives became increasingly domesticated. And how this feeling of meaninglessness and emptiness

• 39:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  that came about in suburban American housewives, how this was pathologized and medicalized to sell Valium or amphetamines. So I don't, I don't have an Ocarina, so I'm gonna, ironically, there's a pharmaceutical company next door to my office. And yet they're banging doors and shouting. As, as the economy shows signs of faltering, right? This is just something interesting. I'm knowing, I'm on a very quiet floor in my office. As the economy starts to show signs of faltering in specific Trump's threats of tariffs. Right? Because the pharmaceutical industry is big here in Ireland. As that happens, my office floor is actually becoming more chaotic.

• 40:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  And the pharmaceutical workers around me are becoming more stressed and, and they're banging more doors and doing a lot more shouting in the past couple of months. It's just something I've noticed. So I'm gonna hit myself into the head with this copy of The Problem That Has No Name by Betty Friedan. It's a very, very slim book, tiny little slim book. Probably gonna sting when I hit myself into the head with it. And actually, I like this as a piece of performance art.

• 40:42Blindboy Boatclub?

  And we let those pharmaceutical people on my floor just guess. They're gonna hear, they're in there having arguments and slamming doors and they're just gonna hear me hitting myself into the head with a piece of second wave feminist literature that itself critiques the emerging pharmaceutical industry that would intersect with capitalism.

• 41:09Speaker 03

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• 41:37Speaker 04

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• 42:05Speaker 05

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• 42:42Speaker 03

  Cheers to fall savings at Whole Foods Market, home of higher ingredient standards. This Halloween, share chocolates and candies, made without that spooky high fructose corn syrup. Throwing a party? Make it easy with a Berry Chantilly Cake. Ready to cook pizza? No antibiotics ever chicken wings. And sushi made fresh daily. Fall gatherings never tasted better. Save through November 3rd at Whole Foods Market.

• 43:11Speaker 06

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• 43:40Speaker 05

  Hey, it's Hannah Berner from Giggly Squad and the holidays are around the corner, which means I'm officially entering my Hostess Hannah era with Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. You guys know I love cats and fostering, but when I'm hosting, I do not want my house smelling like cats. I want people focusing on my hosting skills. That's why I love Arm & Hammer Hardball Cat Litter. It delivers long-lasting odor control and forms compact clumps that make cleanup easy so that's one less thing I need to worry about when people come over. Be guest-ready with Arm & Hammer Cat Litter. Find it now at Walmart or Amazon.

• 44:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  Not pleasant at all. That wasn't nice at all. There was a sting on that. Wow. Little slim book. Fuck me. All right, support for this podcast comes from you, the listener, via the Patreon page, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. This is a fully independent podcast. This is how I rent out my office. This is my full-time job. This is how I earn a living. The podcast is supported by you, the listener. So if this podcast brings you joy or mirth or merriment or distraction, whatever has you listening to this podcast, please consider becoming a patron. All I'm looking for is the price of a pint or a cup of coffee, once a month, that's it. And if you can't afford that, don't worry about it, you can listen for free.

• 45:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  You can listen for free because the person who's paying is paying for you to listen for free. Everybody gets a podcast, the exact same podcast. I get to earn a living, patreon.com/theblindbypodcast. Also, what this model does is not only can I tell advertisers to fuck off, like, there are adverts on this podcast, but I'm not beholden to those advertisers in any way. None of them can come in here and tell me what to speak about. They can't tell me to be more popular, to try and get more listeners. None of that shit. And then the other thing as well, that click economy, the click economy that I spoke about on this

• 45:47Blindboy Boatclub?

  podcast, I'm not really beholden to that anymore either. I don't really have to compete for eyes and attention because all I want is can people support this podcast directly? And then what I do is I put out a podcast that I'm genuinely passionate about. And I'm not thinking about figures or whether it's popular or how many eyes are on it. That's not my focus. My focus is, can I make something that I would listen to if I wasn't me? So, thank you to all my patrons. Thank you very much to all my patrons. And that's the reason too, why, it's why I won't miss a week. It's why even if I'm on fucking tour, I'm not taking a week off because I refuse

• 46:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  to take this for granted. I don't really have many gigs to promote. I'm gonna take some time off from gigging now over the summer. There's one or two little festivals, two, I believe. Um, gig wise, I'm gigging in Derry in September, and I'm also doing a gig in Vicker Street in September. You know the crack of my Vicker Street gigs. Dublin, Vicker Street. Quiet midweek gig. This gig's gonna be on a Tuesday, the 23rd of September, right, in Vicker Street. Please come along to that. They're always wonderful crack. And then my Derry gig gets up in the Millennium Theatre that's happening on the 19th of September. Thank you to everybody who came along to my

• 47:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  UK tour. Well, my, sorry, my tour of England and Scotland.

• 47:23Blindboy Boatclub?

  That was really fucking intense. I loved doing it. I loved coming to all the different cities and gigging for people who are showing up and listening to this podcast. I really adored it, but I won't be doing another tour like that for, I'd say, a year and a half. There was a lot more cities I didn't gig in. They wanted me to do twice that tour, to do nearly 23 dates. What I'm gonna do instead, I'll be doing another year, another tour in about a year and a half, and I'll visit some different places, some different places in England, Scotland and Wales that I haven't been to before. And I announced those tickets short enough, but it's not gonna be for a fucking year and a half, because I'm bushed.

• 48:05Blindboy Boatclub?

  Okay, why do I want to do a podcast about yogurt? I've become very interested in the gut microbiome recently, since I spoke to Professor Ted Dinan from Cork, who's an expert, who's an expert on the gut microbiome. If you want to hear that podcast, it's called The Gut Brain Connection. But Ted Dinan is a world renowned expert who has dedicated his life to studying probiotics, the gut biome and the human body, and the relationship between gut health and mental health, and all over bodily health. So I've been, I've been eating a lot of fibre recently from fresh vegetables, because that's a prebiotic,

• 48:50Blindboy Boatclub?

  and I've been making sure that I've been getting probiotics daily, and that's coming from kombucha, or coming from sauerkraut, but also coming from kefir, from kefir and fermented yogurts. And what fascinates me about it is dairy products, yogurt, soured yogurt. Here's this product that we've had for thousands of years, that humans have probably always known is hugely beneficial to our wellbeing, and science is really only catching up now. I want to begin by speaking about a very strange graveyard up in Fermanagh.

• 49:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  Fermanagh is just above Sligo. It's on the border. It's one of the six counties in the north of Ireland. And there's a graveyard in Fermanagh, in a little village called Boho. There's a Catholic church called the Sacred Heart Church, and there's a graveyard attached to it. And there's one particular grave.

• 49:52Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's weird looking. It's dirty looking. The soil around it is perpetually disturbed. And then when you get closer to the grave, there's notices on the grave that say, "Please only remove a small amount of soil from this grave, a teaspoonful, and the soil must be returned to this plat on the fourth day." The notification, it's like medical instructions. It says prayers to be said while using the blessed clay. So this grave, this grave, up in this church in Boho, in County Fermanagh, this Catholic fucking church,

• 50:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  the soil on this grave is blessed. It's holy, right? And the instructions on the grave say, "Take the soil a teaspoonful. You have to return it to the grave in four days. And while you have the soil, these are the prayers that you have to say while using the soil. Five Our Fathers, five Hail Marys, five glory be to the Fathers, and one creed. And you have to say a prayer for the soul of the person whose grave it is, who's a priest. It's the grave of a priest from the 17th century called Father McGar. And you have to say a prayer for the soul of all his deceased relatives and friends. And also you have to say a prayer for why you've taken, borrowed,

• 51:20Blindboy Boatclub?

  the soil from his grave." So this grave in County Fermanagh, in Boho, it's one of these rare little sites that we have left, where it's halfway between Catholic devotion and then an older, stranger Irish paganism, something that seems more similar to magic. And it's taken very seriously, and people visit this grave frequently, and they take teaspoons of the blessed clay, and they return it on the fourth day, return it to the grave. So that's why the grave looks so dirty and disturbed. So who's buried in this grave? Who is this priest, Father James McGar?

• 52:03Blindboy Boatclub?

  He existed in, he served as a priest in that parish in the year eighteen hundred, okay, but again, in the context of of canonization, the canonization of Ireland, from the sixteen nineties up into the mid seventeen hundreds, the penal laws existed. So Irish Catholics, Catholics couldn't practice their religion. Catholicism was pretty much outlawed and priests were made illegal. So Irish Catholics, they didn't have churches to practice in. So they reverted to a kind of a weird, a pre-Christian type of Catholicism.

• 52:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  People started returning again to holy wells, to bullion stones, to stone circles, sites that were holy long before Christianity. Irish Catholicism became kind of half pagan during the the colonial penal laws because it was illegal. Priests, priests would give mass on mass rocks, okay? They'd do this secretly, hidden away on a mass rock, which could have been an ancient stone, pre-Christian stone. Priests also became teachers, priests were were schoolmasters.

• 53:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  Education was outlawed for Catholics too, so a lot of education occurred in what we call hedge schools, in secret schools where mythology stories, the Irish language, were kept alive in secret, hidden away. And Father James McGar, in eighteen hundred, he was a healing priest. So he was a priest, but he was said to have healing powers. He could heal people of illnesses. So again, that's that mixture of of pagan, pre-Christian and Christian.

• 53:58Blindboy Boatclub?

  So Father Magar, the stories say that Father Magar used to heal people if they were fucking sick, right? And then he said, "When I die, the clay that covers my body will be able to cure everything that I was able to cure while I was alive." So a tradition emerged where locals, everything from fucking sore throats to flesh wounds,

• 54:24Blindboy Boatclub?

  people who were sick would, would take a teaspoon of soil from this priest's fucking grave, and they'd use it to heal themselves. And it's still happening. And you can go and visit the grave now. If you do go and visit it, especially if you're American, please respect this. Don't take the soil. Just leave it be. If, if you wanna visit it, just don't, because this is, it's an important site. And I don't give a fuck about Catholicism, but this is more than that. This is that strange, crazy Irish pagan folk Christianity. Now, the site where this church is, there's, there's a cross there from, from the sixth century,

• 55:09Blindboy Boatclub?

  and it's associated with an early Irish saint called Saint Faber. So most likely this church was there in, in the sixth century. That's a hundred years after Christianity arrives in Ireland. If it was there in the sixth century, most likely it was a pre-Christian site of pagan worship. So then you could be going back thousands of years. Here's my hunch. My hunch is that, that site has been a place of medicinal cures for way longer than the eighteen hundreds. We have this story of a priest who was a healer, but I, I reckon people were using the soil for a lot longer than that. Here's why this is interesting, right?

• 55:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  This isn't just a story about healing soil.

• 55:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  A local, there's a microbiologist called Gerry Quinn, grew up in the area. And Gerry Quinn, just out of sheer curiosity, figured, what if there's something to this? Why don't we test the soil? If people have been visiting, if people are taking this soil away and have been using it for cures for many years, why not test it for the laugh? Lo and behold, this grave is now a site of international importance. The area of Boho in Farmanah,

• 56:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  it has these limestone caves underneath. It's a very unique environment. And it turns out the soil on this grave in Boho contains a never before seen bacteria called streptomyces. And it's unique to this area because of the limestone caves that are there. One of the biggest issues the world is facing right now is antibiotic resistant bacteria. That's a big problem. MRSA, for instance, is antibiotic resistance. And experts around the world are very concerned about a pandemic, some disease that's resistant to antibiotics.

• 57:16Blindboy Boatclub?

  So, long story short, they tested the soil and it contains several incredibly unique strains of these streptomyces, which can produce antibiotics. And it was found to kill the top three pathogens, right? Identified by the World Health Organization that are a major threat, the human health. So the folklore is correct. The folklore is telling a story that science is catching up on. Utterly bizarre tradition of take a teaspoon of soil from the grave, say a bunch of fucking Hail Marys, put the soil underneath your pillow, and then people reporting themselves cured and calling it a miracle.

• 57:59Blindboy Boatclub?

  Science listened to the folklore, listened to the stories. And now this fucking area in Farmanah, the soil is being studied as something that could prevent the next giant pandemic, the next pandemic that's resistant to antibiotics. And that's called ethnopharmacology.

• 58:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, it's kind of, it's almost a, an anti-colonial way to do science. Because, modern science, which stems from the Enlightenment, is also a product of colonialism. Under colonialism, indigenous customs, folklore, systems of knowledge are rubbished and called savage in favour of evidence-based science. But now with ethnopharmacology, you have scientific experts studying folk traditions, folk medicine, mythology, cures, magic. Studying these things, no matter how bizarre the ritual, might genuinely have value.

• 59:01Blindboy Boatclub?

  Maybe the people and the stories that are thousands of years old, maybe there's, there's something here, there's something there, even though it doesn't look scientific. And there you have it, this, people fucking digging up bits of, of soil from, from an old priest's grave and putting it under their pillows and bringing it back after four days and saying the rosary, this strange pagan Christian shit might prevent the next pandemic. I, I find that fascinating. And, and another example is, I don't know if you're a kid and you had a little injury and then your ma made you a poultice, bit of bread soaked in milk and you put it on your cut, if there's no plasters.

• 59:46Blindboy Boatclub?

  And most of us received this as, as a kid, as a bit of a joke. But poultices were, not just in Ireland, they were used in folk medicine. A piece of bread dipped in milk or whatever, put on a wound. And you might think, oh, it's a placebo, that's bullshit, what is bread gonna do? Penicillin, penicillin comes from bread mould, penicillium mould. So when people were making poultices from bread and putting them on wounds, yeah, it's folk medicine, but they were probably also producing penicillin and that was fighting the bacteria. But what this all got me thinking about was, in 1908, there was a fella by the name of Eli Mechnikoff.

• 1:00:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  He was Ukrainian and he won the Nobel Prize in 1908 for his pioneering work on immunology. But also what he did is he noticed, he noticed that people from Bulgaria lived very, very long lives because they consumed a lot of yogurt, particularly sour fermented yogurt. And this created a global craze for yogurt in the Western diet. Like when you go to the shop now, there's several types of yogurt available anywhere in the world. This all started with, with this lecture that this fellow gave about Bulgarian folk yogurt and people living very long lives.

• 1:01:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  Yogurt went from being a folk food that was present in some cultures to being completely ubiquitous, everyday item. And this led to science understanding probiotics, understanding that there are certain fermented foods that use lactic acid and that when these are consumed regularly, they can help us to have a really healthy range of bacteria in our guts. And this results in overall health. And science, of course, has since proven this to be completely true. And just listened to the podcast I did a few, a few months back with Ted Dunan, called The Gut Brain Connection. So this is undisputed now.

• 1:01:56Blindboy Boatclub?

  But again, what you have there is this scientist looking to Bulgarian folk tradition, where yogurt, the making of yogurt and sour yogurt was a huge part of the culture. And looking at this, this folk tradition and then going, maybe there's value there. Maybe there's value in that. And that led me to start looking for Bulgarian folklore. I was thinking, if there's a long tradition of yogurt making and it's a huge part of Bulgarian folk culture, then there has to then be folklore mythology, stories relating to the making of yogurt. But I couldn't find anything. Probably because just in English language limitations.

• 1:02:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  When I go online to look up Bulgarian folklore, a lot of it probably isn't translated into English. So I couldn't find any folklore, Bulgarian folklore about the making of yogurts. But it has to exist, it has to exist because the tradition is too old. I managed to find one story. It wasn't a Bulgarian story, but I found a story of Francis the First of France, who was a king in the fourteen hundreds and he had incurable diarrhea. He had terrible stomach problems and it's the fourteen hundreds and no medicine in France would work.

• 1:03:18Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then finally, his ally, who was a Sultan in Turkey, where they did have a yogurt tradition. This Sultan sent a load of yogurt to the King of France and this sorted out his incurable diarrhea. So most likely what happened is it improved his gut biome. It gave him a healthier gut and healthier gut bacteria because he was consuming fermented yogurt. But then I started thinking, fucking hell. I know that Ireland, like pre-Christian Ireland, we had an entire economy based solely around cattle. Cattle was a massive deal, which meant that dairy was a big deal.

• 1:04:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  People were drinking milk, like for instance, we've got bog butter. Bog butter is butter that was placed in bogs like two thousand years ago to be preserved. And now we dig it up now. So we know from archaeology that dairy products were a large part of the Irish diet going back a few thousand years. So there has to have been yogurt, there has to have been probiotic, fermented yogurt drinks. Things like kefir, it has to have existed in Irish culture. But we were colonized for eight hundred years. And when you're colonized for eight hundred years, you you lose a lot. You lose food culture, you lose so stories.

• 1:04:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then the famine comes along in the eighteen hundreds. You lose half the fucking population. But there's one particular piece of literature. This is from the eleventh century. Okay, written down in the eleventh century by monks, meaning it could be older. Okay. And it's a genre known as an ashling. I love the name ashling. I know it's a common Irish name, but I think it's my favorite Irish name. Ashling means dream or vision. But it's also, an ashling is is an ancient form of Irish storytelling. It's vision literature. It's dream literature.

• 1:05:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  Ashling literature, of which there's loads. It usually tells a story of a character who has a fantastic dream. And in this fantastic dream, things are revealed to them. And there's one ashling from the eleven hundreds called the Ashling Mac Con Glin, which means the vision poem of the son of Con Glin. And it speaks a lot about the Irish diet and the Irish food. Pre-colonization. Here's my hot take. I think I I can read this eleventh century poem. And I think this eleventh century poem, this vision literature, I think it's actually about probiotics.

• 1:06:11Blindboy Boatclub?

  I think it's about the benefits of fermented milk, fermented yogurt, and the health of the human body. I think this is about the gut biome. I haven't heard anyone else read the poem in this way. So I'm I'm very, I'm very excited about this. So here's the story. Here's the story of of the Ashling Mac Con Glin, this this dream vision poem that was written down in the eleven hundreds. But if it was written down, it means it could be orally, it could be oral culture, and you can't tell how old that is. So there's this poet, right? There's this poet called Ainear Mac Con Glin, son of Glin. And he lives up in Armagh, Armagh, again, up north in the six counties.

• 1:06:54Blindboy Boatclub?

  But this poet who lives and works in a monastery, because the monks were poets, you know? He lives and works in a monastery and he's like, I want to go travelling around Ireland. I don't like being stuck in this monastery. I want to travel around Ireland and I want to go to a different monastery. Now, monasteries in early Christian Ireland, like first off, this fellow, Ainear Mac Con Glin, right? He's not poor, okay? If, if in early Christian Ireland, you're a poet, you're living and working in a monastery, you're the son of Con Glin, you might be the son of a king, related to someone royal in Ireland.

• 1:07:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you have the power to travel from one monastery to another and want to stay there and expect hospitality, you were probably posh. I covered this in the documentary I made about monasteries last year. Monasteries in early Christian Ireland, they kind of acted as five-star hotels for the very rich. You could travel between monasteries, there was no towns. You could travel and stay in a monastery and be fed there and get lots of food and stay as long as you liked, if you were related to a powerful king. So this fellow, Ainear, the poet, he goes, fuck that, I'm sick of Armagh. I want to go down to the bottom of Ireland, I want to go down to Cork and I want to stay there in a monastery when I'm in Cork.

• 1:08:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  So when he travels to Cork and arrives at a monastery, he knocks on the door and he goes, what's the crack? I'm Ainear Mac Con Glin. I'm a poet and a writer from up north and I'm here for some hospitality. I'm here, I'm gonna chill out here in Cork in your monastery and I'm here for hospitality. Give me some food and give me some drink. Now the monks in the monastery, they're supposed to do this for him. They're supposed to give him hospitality, but they don't, for whatever reason. Tight fuckers down in Cork, they don't give him hospitality. They say, fuck you, you prick from Armagh. Who the fuck are you thinking you can come down here to Cork and demand food? You're getting nothing, fuck you.

• 1:09:02Blindboy Boatclub?

  And he says, unto doom, I would not eat unless famine befell them, the oaten ration of Cork. So whatever shitty bit of oats they gave him in Cork, he's like, this is disgusting. I'm not eating this. I'm used to much better up, up in Armagh, i- i- in the monastery up there. And because he's a poet, he begins to write a poem. He starts writing a poem about how shit the food is in Cork. He's like a TikTok food reviewer. He's writing a poem, the food down here in the monastery in Cork is fucking shit. You don't know what food is. You don't know what hospitality is, ye selfish Cork pricks. But then the monks in Cork, in the monastery are like, who the fuck do you think you are, writing satirical verses about us?

• 1:09:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  Who the fuck do you think you are, you northern cunt? So they kick the shit out of an air. And they tie him up in chains and beat him unconscious. And then while the poet is unconscious in the dungeon of this Cork monastery, and he's starving as well, he's starving because they've fed him fuck all. He's beaten to a pulp and he's starving and he has his vision. He has his ashling and his vision is of a land of food. And he says, the fort we reached was beautiful with works of custard thick beyond the loch. New butter was the bridge in front. The rubble dyke was wheaten white, baking the palisade.

• 1:10:28Blindboy Boatclub?

  Stately pleasantly it sat, a compact house and strong. And then I went in and the door was made of dry meat and the threshold was bare bread, cheese cards the side, smooth pillars of old cheese and sappy bacon, fine beams of mellow cream, white rafters, real cards. And then he describes a well, a magical well of bubbling sour milk. Bagna clavare. Bagna clavare is our clavare.

• 1:11:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  It's, it's milk, it's thick and sour milk. And in this vision poem, in this ashling, this well of sour, bubbling, thick milk is very important. It's a life-giving substance in his dream, in his ashling, his vision. But then while he's having this vision, this vision of a land of cream and bubbling milk, a spirit comes along in the dream and tells him about King Khal of Munster. And King Khal of Munster has a terrible affliction. There's a demon living in his throat. And what this demon does to him is any time King Khal tries to eat food, the demon in

• 1:11:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  his throat eats the food too. So he has this insatiable appetite, but nothing will stay down. A demon has eaten it. So Inar Macanglin, he learns in his vision that he now has a mission. And the mission is, he has to travel to King Khal of Munster and try and free him from this demon that lives in his throat. So when, when, when he arrives in the king's court, he meets the king and he says, I'm a poet, I'm from up north, all right? I had a vision and the vision told me I'm to come here and I'm to free the demon that lives in your throat.

• 1:12:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then the king goes, please do, I'm fucked, I'm fucked, I can't keep anything down. This thing lives in my throat. Anytime I try to eat food, it eats food for me. So the first thing that Inar does is he dangles some meat over the throat of the king, right? And the demon sticks its head up a bit. Now that to me suggests that the king might have worms, because that's, that's a folk kind of remedy. It doesn't work, but it's a folk remedy for, if, if, if someone has a tapeworm or a worm or a parasite in their body. People used to dangle food in front of the person's mouth in the hope that the worm

• 1:13:10Blindboy Boatclub?

  would come out and be enticed by the food and then you pull the worm out. So that to me suggests that the demon that's in the king's throat, they're referring to a parasite as some description, because it's eaten all the king's food, you see, when the king is trying to eat. So back in the king of Munster's court, this fella, Inar Macanglin. That's not working.

• 1:13:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  So what the poet does is he goes, do you know what?

• 1:13:37Blindboy Boatclub?

  I'm gonna tell you the vision that I had in detail. Right, I had this vision in the monastery in Cork where I visited a land of eternal fucking food and cream and cheese and milk. And I am going to describe in the most beautiful words, everything I saw. So he begins reciting his poem about the land of milk and cream and cheese. Finally, he gets to the bit about the well, the life giving well of sour bubbling Bagna Clavar. And when that happens, the demon that lives in the king's throat can't fucking resist. The demon is living in the throat going, you fucking prick, this sounds delicious.

• 1:14:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  What you're describing sounds amazing. I gotta jump out of his throat now and try and see if I can eat these things that you're describing. Cause I can't see it from in here. So suddenly the demon pops out of the king's throat and leaves his body and he's tricked. The demon's out of the king's body now and goes, you fucking prick. What are you talking about all this food for? Why are you talking about all this delicious cream and bubbling milk? Why are you talking about this stuff and it's not here, you fucking bastard? The demon is angry now. And then the poet starts reciting the gospels to the demon and then the demon fucks off. That's the bit that tells me that the story is older than the 11th century. Cause remember, a Christian monk had to write it down.

• 1:15:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  But Irish Christian monks preserved all our oral folklore and mythology. And they'd throw little bits of Christ in there. They'd throw little bits of Christ in there to clean up the stories. But it's an unnecessary addition. The demon came out and he frightened him off with the gospels. No, there's no fucking gospels because this story is older than Christianity. That story.

• 1:15:30Blindboy Boatclub?

  That story, to me, that's about the benefit of probiotics. That's telling me that Irish people a thousand years ago had their own several types of fermented yogurt, fermented drink, and they understood that this was good for the gut biome, this was good for health. The king has some type of gastrointestinal disorder, whether it be worms, parasites, like a healthy gut biome, if you are eating fermented foods, like parasites aren't really a thing we have to worry about anymore. But if you have a healthy gut biome, that's not, that's not a fertile environment for worms and parasites. Your own healthy bacteria will kill them.

• 1:16:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  So this, to me, it's an anti, it's an ashling, it's vision literature. But it's describing the barna clavar, the bubbling fermented milk, the life-giving bubbling fermented milk. The description of that is what banishes the demon from the king's throat. That, to me, that's medicinal knowledge, that's medicinal folk knowledge, that's speaking about the benefit of probiotic, fermented yogurt, and how it will help gastrointestinal problems. And in a time before writing, you'd hold on to that knowledge with a really good fucking story. And that's a, that's a really good story. That's a story from the 1100s.

• 1:16:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  And it's still entertaining today. Like, I, I was reading that, and I'm like, what happened next? What happened next? That there is the real reason that I, I needed to give myself 24 hours for this podcast. Because I, I, I've looked online, I think I'm the only person who has interpreted that, that poem in that way. And I was very excited to get that hot take, really, really excited. And I wanted to make sure I delivered it to you properly, to deliver it properly and not thinking about my fucking bed. So that's the reason I, I left this podcast for an extra day.

• 1:17:35Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, I told you, I wanted to, I want to do something about yogurts and see, is there a connection with the ulster plantation? Well, strangely fucking enough, there is, right? So that, that's...

• 1:17:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  Bagna claver, this thick, carded, bubbling sour milk. This ancient Irish foodstuff. I went looking for that, seeing what happened to it, right? Effectively, what it is, it's a type of buttermilk that was eaten. It was a type of buttermilk that came from raw milk. It would have been highly probiotic with tons of beneficial bacteria in it. It was tangy and sour, naturally fermenting. And it was part of the Irish diet right up until the famine. Before the potato famine, right? Irish people used to eat a lot of fucking potatoes every day.

• 1:18:34Blindboy Boatclub?

  And they would mix the potatoes with buttermilk, with this stuff, this bagna claver. They'd mix it with that. And before the potato famine, when Irish people were doing well, eating just potatoes, because you have to remember the Brits are exporting all the food, all right? So potatoes were growing really well, they were simple to grow. People were eating a couple of kilograms of potatoes a day, mixing it with this buttermilk substance. Before the famine, the Irish were known for being incredibly healthy and tall. Because you can live on a diet of just potatoes. Potatoes are a whole food, they've got protein, carbohydrates, and you're mixing it with this probiotic buttermilk? That's quite a nutritious diet for the 1700s.

• 1:19:19Blindboy Boatclub?

  And then the famine happens and this bagna claver disappears.

• 1:19:25Blindboy Boatclub?

  But then, in the south of America, around Appalachia, a new substance shows up called bany claver. Bany claver. And where you start to see it first is so racist minstrel shows in America. I've done podcasts before about the minstrel tradition in America. I won't call it a tradition, flat out fucking racist, where... African American people were portrayed in stereotypes on stage for entertainment in America. People used to put on blackface. In the earliest minstrel shows, it wasn't just black people that had the piss taken out of them in minstrel shows. In the really

• 1:20:06Blindboy Boatclub?

  early ones, late 1700s, it was also Irish people. There was characters known as the stage Irish. Irish people are emigrating to America, right? From about the 1830s onwards, Irish people are emigrating to America, escaping famine. Loads, hundreds of thousands a year, okay? And the Irish arrive in America and we're not liked. We're really at the bottom of society and we were seen as disease carriers. We were subject to racism, okay? And in the earliest blackface minstrel shows, they weren't just taking the piss out of

• 1:20:49Blindboy Boatclub?

  black people, they were also taking the piss out of Irish people. There were stage Irish characters. African American people were portrayed as eating watermelon. Irish people were portrayed as eating bony clabber and potatoes. My source for this is, it's an academic journal article about, called the development of a stock character, the stage Irishman. So the 1800s stereotype of Irish people in these minstrel shows in the early 1800s was, they were called Bridget or Paddy, they were stupid, they were drunk all the time, and when they ate food, the food that they ate were potatoes and bony clabber. So

• 1:21:31Blindboy Boatclub?

  they're then going, what the fuck is bony clabber? What the fuck is bony clabber? Well, so the Protestant settlers in the north of Ireland that came over with the Ulster plantation, Ulster Scots, people from the lowland areas of Scotland who were Protestants, who as part of the British colonial project were to replace and ethnically cleanse the Irish people that were living in the north of Ireland. I began this podcast by speaking about the riots that are happening up north at the moment and that colonial tradition. So those people's ancestors, the Ulster Scots.

• 1:22:13Blindboy Boatclub?

  A load of them also went over to the southern states of America before the Irish Catholics. If you hear of anyone over there referring to themselves as Scotch Irish, like a load of American presidents, it's a huge amount. I think that's like 18 American presidents can trace their ancestry to Antrim in the north of Ireland. They were Scotch Irish. Ulster Scots, planters, the grandchildren of them, who were part of the colonial project in the north of Ireland and then said, fuck it, there's another colony over there in America and they're kicking out all the indigenous people. Let's go over there. A lot of them

• 1:22:55Blindboy Boatclub?

  found their way to Appalachia, Virginia. Not all of them were wealthy, some of them were poor. There's a whole separate podcast that I don't have time for today about Ulster Scots and Lowland Scottish immigration to the south of America and the foundation of the Cluglucks clan. I'll do that in a different podcast because that's a big one. But anyway, the Ulster Scots in Appalachia had this new milk substance that they called Bonny Claber. Bonny Claber, which is quite clearly, it's, it's, it's, it's a Lowland Scots person who doesn't speak the Irish language, hearing the word banya, milk, hearing banya and instead

• 1:23:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  saying Bonnie. Bonnie is a Scots English word that means beautiful. So they hear banya clavar or clabar and they go Bonnie Claber, Bonnie Claber. So we're to assume that Ulster Scots planters learned about this fermented raw milk substance from the people living in Ireland and that's cultural appropriation. That's, I'm not calling these people out. They're welcome to the fucking fermented milk, but I'm just saying that, that there is, that is literal, that is the definition of cultural appropriation, that, that is.

• 1:24:17Blindboy Boatclub?

  That's a colonizer taking a foodstuff that, or a culture, or a story, or anything that belongs to the culture that they're colonizing, then taking it, changing the name of it, anglicizing it, and then making it their own. So the Ulster Scots brought Bonnie Claber to Appalachia, and it was used in baking. It's raw milk buttermilk. It was used in baking in the absence of yeast. And then Bonnie Claber, the Ulster Scotch appropriated Bonny Clavar in Appalachia. It ends up becoming what we now call baking powder.

• 1:25:00Blindboy Boatclub?

  And if you live in America now, there's a brand of baking powder, right? That's called Claber Gair. And you can literally trace Claber Gair baking powder, which is a popular baking powder in America. You can trace that to Ulster Scots people in the plantation of Ulster, who heard the phrase Bonny Clavar wrong and made it Bonnie Claber. So that's, that's my hot take this week, and that's, that's up your shit. That helps me with burnout. That's fucking mad. I said to myself, I want to do a podcast on yogurt. As a challenge, I wonder can I find a connection between this and Ulster Scots?

• 1:25:45Blindboy Boatclub?

  I wonder can I do that, just for the crack? And through deep research and pattern recognition and just this, almost this sixth sense, I've spoken about that before, and a lot of autistic people speak about that, that they feel that they can see into the fucking future sometimes. I know that's ridiculous. I know that's absolutely ridiculous. But sometimes if I get that little tingle, if I get that little tingle, I had no evidence whatsoever. I knew I wanted to do a yogurt podcast. And then that business happened where I had to speak about the protests in Ballymena. And just this little tingle came to me that said, Ulster Protestants and yogurt, Ulster Protestants and yogurt, there's something there, there's something there, look for it, search for it.

• 1:26:29Blindboy Boatclub?

  And I just became obsessed and researched and researched and researched and the pattern emerged and that's a fairly strong collection there, that's a pretty strong connection. I, I managed to read an 11th century Irish poem. I think it's a fairly, a fairly plausible theory that it might be about an ancient type of probiotic yogurt called Bagna Klebar. And then it turns out that becomes Bonnie Clapper. So I loved that, I really enjoyed that. And, and the bizarre thing is Bonnie, Bonnie Clapper's making a comeback. Raw milk is racist now. So most milk that we drink is, is pasteurized, it's been heated to remove a huge amount of pathogens, okay?

• 1:27:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  Now, in Ireland, you can still buy raw milk. I don't know enough about it. Some people say it's unsafe, like raw milk cheese is especially if people are pregnant. It, it, I believe it does carry a higher risk of food poisoning, okay? But over the last year, raw milk has become politicized, especially in America, with people who are right wing conservative. Now firstly, racists, white supremacists love milk. So here's the thing. The, the capacity to digest lactose, so to digest lactose into adulthood, which is

• 1:27:57Blindboy Boatclub?

  the enzyme lactase that we have in our bodies, that is, is a genetic trait that evolved in traditionally people whose, whose home was Northern Europe. So some East Asian people, indigenous American people, and some African populations, right, are lactose intolerant. Because cows and cattle maybe wasn't present where they were living, you tend to see a higher amount of lactose intolerance, right?

• 1:28:32Blindboy Boatclub?

  So racists, white supremacists, performatively drink milk to basically, to show off their racial purity. That's bullshit. Racism, racism is bullshit, okay? Racism is real, but race, that's a social construct. All humans are the exact same. But racists, American racists in particular, will performatively drink milk to show how tolerant they are of lactose, and they particularly like raw milk, milk that isn't pasteurized, straight from the cow, and they digest this to show, look how white I am, look how northern

• 1:29:14Blindboy Boatclub?

  European my genetics are, look at all this raw milk that I can drink. So in 2025, raw milk is politicized for that reason, and also dairy isn't great for the climate, okay? Meat isn't great for the climate. Racists believe that there's a global conspiracy, right? A global conspiracy to make us stop eating milk, to stop eating meat, that they want us to start eating insects, and this is a form of global control, and particularly,

• 1:29:51Blindboy Boatclub?

  you've heard the term si by online. Racists believe that si milk is a conspiracy to reduce testosterone in men, right? That if you drink si, that this, this increases your estrogen levels, and that si is, si is a way to make men less masculine, so that we can be conquered by, I think, either interdimensional shapeshifting lizards or Jewish people. So that's a big conspiracy. That's a big conspiracy amongst racists. They're trying to take our meat away, they're trying to take our dairy away,

• 1:30:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  and they're trying to push soy milk on us to reduce our testosterone and conquer us. So, to drink raw milk, straight from the cow, means that you are genetically pure, white, northern European, and you're masculine. You refuse this soy milk, you wanna keep your testosterone. And what's also making a comeback is Bonnie Klaber. Buttermilk that's made from raw milk. The racists, the conservative tradwives, they're making Bonnie Klaber again, from raw milk. So it's a very strange thing, it's a very strange thing.

• 1:31:15Blindboy Boatclub?

  I adored making that podcast. I loved all that research, I loved those hot takes. I would love, I would love someone who knows more than me to give me feedback on my theory about that 11th century ashling, that it might actually be a probiotic vision.

• 1:31:36Blindboy Boatclub?

  I loved making that, I loved, I loved doing that. I could not have done that last night with no sleep. I'd have made a big fucking bollocks of that. I'd have left out loads of details, I wouldn't have been able to farm the argument that I farmed, I wouldn't have had fun with it. I'd have put it out, half arsed, and I'd have really regretted it, and I'd have felt like a piece of shit. I only get one shot at a good hot take, and nothing pisses me off more than putting out a podcast episode with a hot take, and then the episode is out, and then like a day later, something jumps at me, some glaring thing that I could have included in the episode

• 1:32:21Blindboy Boatclub?

  jumps at me, and I'm going, oh fuck, I wish I had that in there. So that's why, that's why this podcast was late. I wanted to, I wanted to do that properly, and I wanted to enjoy it, and I wanted to make it something that ye would enjoy, alright?

• 1:32:38Blindboy Boatclub?

  What am I gonna do now? I need to fucking rest. I really need to rest my brain. I've been working nonstop for, for, for two weeks. And I've been speaking to people. I need silence. I need silence and I need to not think for maybe two days. What I really wanna do is, there's a video game that I play called Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, which is an early medieval video game. And I just wanna walk around the forests and forage for mushrooms. It's a peaceful game. That's what I wanna do. I wanna do that and I wanna think about fucking nothing and recharge my battery. I'll be back next week. I don't know what I'll be back with.

• 1:33:22Blindboy Boatclub?

  Uh, in the meantime, the bar, the starlings have returned to the bird shit district in Limerick. The centre of Limerick does smell like bird shit again. A welcome smell. Uh, so I'll catch you next week. In the meantime, rub a dog, genuflect to a swan. Drink or eat some, some fermented dairy products for the benefit of your gut health. God bless.

• 1:33:51Speaker 00

  Hi, this is Dr. Shoshana from TED Health and today's episode is sponsored by Kashi. Say hi to new Kashi Gut Health Granola. A straightforward, delicious way to fuel your gut. Made with prebiotics, fibre and cultures. My favourite flavour, blueberry almond, has perfectly crispy clusters, delicious almonds and bursts of whole blueberries. It's an easy fit for a daily routine, whether that's for breakfast or a snack. In a world of overwhelm, it's a straightforward, delicious choice. Try new Kashi Gut Health Granola.

• 1:34:24Speaker 06

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• 1:36:38Speaker 06

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