Greetings friends. Happy Monday. It's Chopped Trap House coming back again. The lineup for

a day for today is a little bit a little bit skewed. Felix is on the the injured list.

He's taking a sick note. So he's filling in for the role of Chris today who is on vacation.

But if you're not, it's Matt and I coming to you. But we are joined by a very special

guest. It's the author and podcast host Patrick Weiman. The podcast is Tides of History.

The book is The Verge. Reformation. Renaissance and 40 years that shook the world. Patrick,

welcome to the trap house. Hey, thank you so much for having me. Well, look, Patrick,

before we get into the the Renaissance and the story of how Europe went from being a

wretched backwater of civilization to one that ended up ravaging the rest of the planet

for the last few hundred years, I want to talk a little little current events. Just hopefully

get a historians perspective on this. And that is the rather astonishing story to come

out of Haiti over the last week involving the team of Colombian mercenaries, which apparently

assassinated the Haitian president, Jovenel Moise. And I like this. There's just a lot

of threads of this story that's fascinating. I mean like the history of Haiti, but also

like just the circumstances of this whole assassination plot. Very odd. Like Patrick,

what do you make of it? So I think the thing that I do aside from the basic fact that

like everything that's happening in Haiti now is downstream of like a couple of centuries

of outsiders meddling in Haitian affairs to make themselves feel good about things and

to make money for themselves. Like I think the thing that stands out to me the most is

that basically the privatized violence that killed the president that there are people who

services are available for hire on an international mercenary market who can carry out fairly

like reasonably high level assassinations of important people. And I think leaving aside

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