Behind the Bastards - Part One: The Man Who Invented Fascism

Episode Date: January 21, 2020

Robert is joined by Shereen Lani Younes to discuss the creator of Fascism, Gabriele D’Annunzio.FOOTNOTES: The Writer, Seducer, Aviator, Proto-Fascist, Megalomaniac Prince Who Shaped Modern Italy Gabriele d'Annunzio: Poet, Seducer, and Preacher of War A MAN OF MANY PARTS: GABRIELE D’ANNUNZIO The Randy Dandy Inventor of Fascism An Irishman’s Diary on Gabriele D’Annunzio – the ‘John the Baptist of Fascism’ and would-be IRA quartermaster Trump Before Trump The Pike: Gabriele D'Annunzio – Poet, Seducer & Preacher of War by Lucy Hughes-Hallett – review Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's back to my old introduction style? My podcast host who's out of ideas! I'm Robert Evans, host of Behind the Bastards, the podcast where we talk about terrible people. And more importantly, I completely botch the introduction every time. And after a hundred Samad podcasts, I shouldn't be doing that anymore. But I'm not a professional. I am a hack and a fraud. But you know who isn't a hack and a fraud?

Shireen Laniunas! Air horn, air horn, air horn. I've never felt more like a hack and a fraud than I am when I'm on this podcast. Why is that? I don't think I'm smart enough for this. No, I am. Well, the point of this podcast is nobody's very smart, or none of these people would be getting away with all the shit they get away with. True, true, true.

No, I'm very happy to be here. Thanks for having me back. I'm excited to know what fucker is out there fucking up the world. Well, Shireen, I'll tell you who we're talking about today. Okay. But I want to ask a question of you first. Okay. What in your mind qualifies someone as a ladies man? A ladies man?

Well, someone that's like a charismatic, smooth talker, you know? Maybe gets away with a lot of like things that a less capable person would get away with. Yeah. That's a really interesting one. He's popular, but I don't know. Like, you know, like if someone's a creep and they're good looking, you give them a pass because they're good looking, like not like you, but like I was saying like the general society,

I kind of think of that as like a ladies man. But also, you can be a good kind of ladies man and be nice to ladies and treat them well, right? It is a double-edged sword. Yeah, I've known some guys that I would describe as ladies men who were very respectful. I've known some guys who are ladies men who were like absolute sociopaths. Right. But it always is one of the two.

They're either like the best person you know, and they're just incredibly charming because they're really decent people, or they're utter like soulless monsters. Yeah, I think there's definitely a dichotomy there where there's like one side, where they're like charismatic, the life of the party, everyone that's like attracted to them like a magnet, and the other side where it's like a dark brooding, they just got all the girls because they're just like rude.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, today, Shareen, we are talking about the quintessential ladies man, one of the men in fact for whom that term was coined. Wow. And the guy we're talking about today is also the inventor of the concept of fascism. Oh! That's a nice little blend of attributes.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a hell of a tale. So I'm curious for a woman's perspective on this guy's, I don't fully understand this guy's appeal, but it was undeniable like in his lifetime, but I find him baffling. So maybe you can help me make sense of this.

I will try my best. Have you ever heard of Gabriel de Nunzio? Nope. All right. Well, neither had I really until I started digging into him a little bit back. So he's not very well known today outside of Italy, but he is an important figure. So Gabriel de Nunzio was born on March 12th, 1863, in the city of Pescara, Italy.

Now, the nation of Italy itself was only about two years old when he was born, because it had just, you know, like after the Roman Empire fell, it had mostly been a collection of city-states and big chunks of it had been ruled by other countries and kingdoms and shit. So like Italy had just started being a thing, like in the modern sense when this guy's born. And Pescara, his hometown, was a small coastal city buttressed by mountains and pine trees. It was not a particularly like hustle and bustle-y place,

and Gabriel's father, Francisco Paolo, was the mayor. Today, we'd probably consider Gabriel's family to have been upper-middle class. His dad was a small-time landowner and a wine merchant with a terrible habit of spending much more money than he could actually afford. So they made a good living, but they were always kind of like on the edge of their means. Now, as the biggest man in town, because Francisco Paolo was, you know, the mayor, he needed to be seen displaying conspicuous wealth. So some of Gabriel's earliest memories during Carnival

were of his father standing on the balcony and tossing gold and silver coins down into a crowd of partying poor people, which was like not just his dad did that in any town, the guy who occupies his position. That's like a tradition. Okay. That's how you show off your largesse, right? Okay. So he was like a good guy.

He was perceived as... No. No? Well, I mean, I think he was very popular. Yes, he was perceived as a good guy, but this was also like what you do if you're there. Okay. If you're the richest man in town, you throw money into crowds on Carnival. It's just what happens.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah. There's worse traditions. Yeah. You prefer other forms of income redistributed, but that one's not the worst. But throwing money at me, that can work, I guess. Yeah.

Yeah. It's better than what we have now where they don't do that at all. Yeah. Just hoard it all. Yeah. So I guess you could say that... I can imagine if that happened now, it would be very riotous, just clamoring for that $1 or whatever scent is on the ground.

Yes. If you really let them in, you know, because times are rough. Times are rough. I do think if... I wonder, because I think part of why so many rich people are against both Warren and Sanders, who both have wealth redistribution platforms, is that they... While they're in favor of charity and stuff, is number one, they spend less money on charity. But number two, then it's them, then everybody gets to see, oh, this great rich person bought this hospital, as opposed to, well, this guy paid his taxes.

Right. He could feed your ego more. Maybe for like, look, you have to give up X amount of money, but you can toss it into a crowd of partying people, like let's compromise. Yeah. That's a good question. Yeah. I don't know.

So Francisco Polo, like, you know, Gabriel's dad, he grows up like seeing him doing all this stuff. It's very ostentations and displays of wealth are a big part of his childhood. His dad also had a hobby of dyeing doves and a variety of colors using like new high-tech dyes at the time and letting them fly around inside the house, which is weird. That's an interesting hobby. They didn't have TV or radio, so you know... They had to entertain themselves by...

Yeah, torturing animals is about all you got. Wow. That's quite the... quite the activity. I don't want to keep, like, leading back to my pro dogfighting agenda, but, you know, in a time with less entertainment. You have a pro dogfighting agenda? I've been out of the loop. I'm sorry.

I'm not a pro dogfighter. Oh, okay, okay. Some dog... Legal dog. No, I'm making a horrible... Let's never talk about this. So as a young boy, Gabriel was the beloved center of his family's world. He had a brother and three sisters, but Gabriel's family immediately recognized that he was

special and treated him that way. And generally, when we say someone was a child genius on this podcast, we're repeating the lies of a narcissist. Yeah. This is not the case with Gabriel. Okay. Basically, everyone who's ever covered this guy, ever written about him, agrees that he was like everyone kind of knew he was a genius from a very early age.

His most prominent biographer, Lucy Hughes Hallett, absolutely despises him and thinks he was a monster, but repeatedly emphasizes that just everyone who knew him as a kid recognized that this kid's brilliant, right? So he's not lying about that. Now, Gabriel was a mama's boy, later writing of his mother that her glances made my heaven. He was surrounded by women from an early age, maids, sisters, and aunts, and his grandmother. He was the center of their world, and he, in turn, learned how to manipulate and to please women.

Ladies, man. Yeah, exactly. That is something like all the guys I know who I would describe that way, most of them grew up with either a single mom, but usually they grew up raised primarily by women. I think they definitely have to have a female influence so they can understand how a female brain can work, not that it works so radically different, but it does in some circumstances with intimacy and bonding. Yeah, I mean, it's kind of like, it's just like you grow up wanting, because they're

like the center of your world, like really wanting to please the women around you, and then as you go out into the world, that remains like one of the centers of your being. And I do think that's, sorry. No, go ahead. Sorry. I just keep saying, yeah, and agreeing, and then it sounds like I'm about to say something more. But I have nothing profound to say.

But I will say that I think having being raised around women and understanding women in the real world that leads you to almost speak their language, and you're able to establish a bond with someone immediately better than someone else that doesn't have sisters, that wasn't raised by a single mom, because there's already this understanding there, and I think it gets you in their bubble. Yeah. You break that barrier so much easier. Because if you raise mostly around men like I was, you grow up starting every conversation

with just a series of fistfights, and that only works in certain situations. Yeah. It's very helpful at like the Taco Bell, but outside of that, not so good. The Taco Bell, really. You're going to get into a fascinating Taco Bell. Oh, yeah. I can navigate a Taco Bell like nobody else. It's just a bunch of right crosses, but yeah.

Yeah. Good to know. Good to know. So Pescara, the city he was born in, is located in a region of Italy called the Abruzzi. And there was vanishing, and it was kind of like a rural area. So there was vanishingly little to do there outside of religion. And basically any monuments around him were either churches or these perilously carved caves that had once been occupied by monks and been turned into like sites of worship.

And faith there was a mix of extremely strict Catholicism and ancient Italian pagan traditions, like fortune telling, palm reading, and other manners of like what we'd call witchcraft. One of Gabrielle's earliest memories was being taken in by an aunt of his who was a, not a monk, a nun, into a part of the convent where males were not allowed to go and then breathlessly watching her perform like a pagan fortune telling ritual. So he grows up both with this intense like ritualistic pagan influence in his life and also with a lot of his earliest memories being because he's seen a special taken into place he's not allowed to be.

Those are both kind of like, you can see like the kind of person that makes like this idea that like the rules don't apply to me. Like I got bound by the same things as everyone else. And then the world proves him right by letting him like go into places not allowed. So it's like a self fulfilling prophecy. Absolutely proves it right. Gabrielle was never religious and nursed all of his life a deep contempt for priests, but he also grew up with an abiding love of ritual and the trappings of faith.

If not at any actual like belief in faith. He would later write of himself, quote, I come from an ancient breed. My ancestors were anchorites in the Maya. They flagellated themselves till the blood came. They throttled wolves. They stripped eagles of their feathers and they scratch their seals on giant rocks with the nail Helen took from the cross. So.

Damn. A lot of pagan influence. Yeah. You could say. Now Gabrielle Denunzio was an infamous liar, but the books and stories he published later in his life give us deep insight into the sort of things he would have experienced as a boy in Pescara because writers write what they know. So I'm going to quote now from the biography of Gabrielle Denunzio titled Gabrielle Denunzio

Poet seducer and preacher of war by Lucy Hughes Hallett. And this is a quote from that biography about one of his early books, quote. In Denunzio's first story set in or around Pescara, he conjures up a place where the bustle of port and barracks and market are contrasted with the frustration of women confined to small dark rooms who watch the life of the street through chinked shutters or small high windows. The church bell clangs out the hours. Priests pass in the streets carrying extreme unction to the dying.

Young people strictly segregated as a rule, furtively press up against each other in the merciful darkness when the church lamps are extinguished in holy week to mark Christ's passion. Funerals, the bear followed by a long lines of hooded mourners. Their faces covered all by but a slit for the eyes or processions of girls and sacrificial white on the way to their first communion provide the town's main spectacles. Many of the stories Denunzio related about his childhood concerned dying animals. There was the death of his little Sardinian horse, a bay with a white muzzle named Aquilino,

whom he would feed with apples and sugar lumps in the peace of the nighttime stable. There was the quail the farm manager gave him in a cage made of twigs. Half a century later, Denunzio could still recall how the tiny creature had dashed itself against its makeshift bars, gashing its head until the bone showed. On killing days, the howling of stuck pigs and their blood spurting into basins so appalled him that he would hide in a corner, face to the wall, his hand over his contorted mouth. Life scared me as though it stalked me with a pig sticking knife in hand. After the massacre, he sobbed all night.

So that's a little insight into his childhood. Fuck. He's not a bad writer. No, that's... Wait, that's... He wrote that about himself. Yeah, yeah. Like, that included a lot of quotes from him.

Yes, yeah. I mean, yeah, that's, I mean, he's called a poet and a seducer is what I remember from your description. Yeah, yeah, that's the biography title. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's very poetic. That's a very graphic way to describe everything, the bone and the fuck, fuck, Jesus Christ.

What an intense... Yeah. What an intense life. One of the things Lucy Hughes Howlett, his biographer, emphasizes is that he was really his writing at a real visceral quality, just in the way he, like both in the way he described bodies and like his romance books and like in the way he like wrote about, like it was, there's a lot of blood, a lot of, a lot of, like he was one of those like shove your hands into the meat kind of writers, which is part of why he had such an impact on people.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Anyway, back to Gabriel. He'd almost been choked by his call while he was being born and because people are dumb, this was the focus of much superstition. Babies born this way in Italy were believed to have the second sight and the call itself was supposed to protect the person from drowning. Now, the call, if you aren't aware, is the amniotic membrane that surrounds a fetus. Gabriel's parents dried his and put it in a little silk bag, which they hung around

his neck for his entire childhood. So that's cool. That's so fascinating because if he was already born with this idea that like this child, a second sight, this child is special, like how much of it is nature versus nurture? Like how much of it was like, I know I'm special because everyone's telling me I'm special and how much of it is like, you have a genius brain and it just so happens that everyone already knew that about you. Like, that's so fascinating.

How much of it was him living to the standard that everyone had of him and how much of it was just like actual intelligence? I don't know. His whole story has convinced me that my idea towards how you should raise a child is correct, which is when they're five, you put them out in the woods with a knife and you just, you leave them. And if they come back home, if they find their way back home, you know, then they get to continue to grow up.

And if not, well, you know. I don't mean this in a bad way, but I don't want you to have kids any time soon. I'm just going to say, if someone had done that to Gabriel, he's not going to grow up thinking he's special, you know? For sure. You're out in the woods with all the other five year olds and you have to form your own society if you're going to get back to your parents. And then you learn humility.

I have a question. Does he have siblings? Yes. And like, they must have had an awful life. I mean, not awful, but they must have had very much like a complex about themselves with this like special profit child around them all this time, right? I don't know much about how his siblings thought of him. He was very charming.

And you do get the impression that everybody was kind of in love with him when he was a little kid. So he got away with it. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Now, his most significant childhood memory was of one of his sisters showing him a fake

pearl and he was so taken with the object that he immediately started climbing the nearest tree to steal an egg from a bird's nest because kids are fucking stupid. His parents rescued him before he fell down and killed himself and they freaked out about the whole ordeal. And I'm going to quote from his biography again. His parents were there, his mother trembling, his father pale and threatening to beat him. He was lifted back through the window and laid faint and shaking on a bed. In retrospect, he saw them, the mother, father, child as a secular trinity.

His aunts hung over him weeping as the sorrowing Mary's wept over the dead Christ. But the family's communion was interrupted. The crowd now gathered in the street believing the child to be dead began on the chilling eulations, customary at funerals. Gabriel's father picked him up and carried him limp and white faced back out onto the balcony. The keening turned to shouts of joys describing the incident in old age. Denuncio made of this his first balcony appearance, a portent.

He was marked out from childhood. So he asserted for a public life. So this is like defining childhood memory is almost dying on a tree and like the whole town turning out because they hear his parents and aunts shouting and yeah. And this is based. This is he's recounting this from his memory. So yes, there's an element of like loftiness that's in this memory that is he was a child. There's no way there's every like every time you remember something, it becomes distorted.

So yes, by the time he's recounting this, I'm sure it's not 100% factual, but I will say that I went from like having this like Christ image of everyone like gathered around him and being sad to like the Lion King of like Simba being on like Pride Rock on this balcony. There's like lifting up this child being like this will save us. I think he sees himself a little bit that way. Yeah. He definitely sees himself as a Christ like figure and he was like, he was absolutely

a narcissist. Like there's not a doubt in my mind that this guy was a narcissist. The way he recounts his memory is very telling of that. Now his school reports from the time describe him as very unbelieving in God and as a boy, his favorite books were Paradise Lost and Cain by Byron, both of which were epics about heroes who rebel against God. In school, he got in trouble for telling his teachers who were priests that if God existed, he was a villain or an imbecile who created mankind to amuse himself by watching us suffer,

which is not an unreasonable theory. No, I kind of feel the same way a lot of the time. Yeah. I can get on board with that one. I feel like if you're at all a thoughtful person, you at least consider that possibility at some point in your childhood. It's like, what the fuck is going on in this world? Yeah.

I mean, like when I was 12, I told my mom I didn't believe in God because I just like, I thought he was so cruel and just amusing himself by making everyone suffer. And then she started crying and I was like, oh, I'm too young to speak my mind as I keep this to myself. I will say that's a very normal thing for a child to think, especially if he's being raised by God-loving, God-fearing people. Yeah. Yeah.

I think even if you wind up being very religious at some point, if you pay attention to the world, you have to wonder if there's like a spaced guy in charge of all this, is he a fucking lunatic? What the hell is happening up there? Yeah. Yeah. I think that's, he's on the money with at least that life. Yeah.

I will agree with this point so far. You got me there. Okay. One for you. Now, Gabrielle grew up in an exciting time for Italy. Giuseppe Garibaldi had conquered Sicily in 1860 with just 1,000 men, defeating the vastly superior military of the Bourbon monarchy. King Victor Emanuel had united Italy as a single polity for the first time since the

fall of the Roman Empire. Nationalism was sweeping all throughout Europe in this period, but nowhere was it stronger than Italy. And nowhere in Italy was it stronger than in the heart of young Gabrielle Denunzio. So the idea of being Italian, very new at this point. For most of history, you hadn't, nobody would have cared, like nobody thought of themselves as Italian. You thought of yourself as a Venetian, you know, I'm a Roman, I'm a whatever, a Florentian

or Florentine, whatever the fuck they call people from Florence. But there was this new found like nationalism that was like very prideful. And from an early age, he really identifies with this as an Italian and he's kind of one of the very first like major Italian thinkers in the Italian peninsula to identify as an Italian. Okay. Now, when he was 11 years old, Gabrielle's parents sent him off to a boarding school. The Cisso Genini, Cisognini, Jesus.

This is like supposed to be my ancestral tongue and I don't know anything about it. So I apologize. Really? I did not know that about you. Yeah. My whole family is very Italian. We came in like the 1890s on a boat to the to the U.S. But yeah, they come from like Transalpine Gaul, like the chunk of the Alps that's on the Italian side of the peninsula.

That's fascinating. Look at you now. Yeah. Look at me now. At the time, sending your kid off to this boarding school was like the thing to do for wealthy parents. But I think in a modern terms, we would consider this schooling experience to be profoundly abusive.

One of the school's rules was that new pupils could not return home, not for holidays, not for summer vacations, not for any reason for their first four years. Whoa. From 7 to 15, Gabrielle is just in this school totally isolated from this very loving family that he's grown up in. So he goes from this like very safe, nurturing place where he's like the center of the world to a cold boarding school run by priests who show no warmth or emotion or compassion to any of their charges.

Yeah. He describes the Cisognini and Letters home as a prison. His only escape was a daily walk around the grounds. His letters home to his parents became almost fervently loving and cloying, agonizing over bright memories of his childhood and obsessing over the pain of his absence. Lucy Hughes Hallett, Gabrielle's biographer suspects that this environment caused him to grow a shell that was at least partly responsible for the fact that he grew up into the sociopath as sociopath to ever path socies.

Whoa. That is a great line. I mean, that must have been jarring to go to a place that you weren't like revered constantly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of destroys my thesis that making children survive alone in the woods for months would stop them from becoming monsters. Well, your theory is that you would do that at a young age before they had a chance to

think that they were messiahs, but... You're right, Shireen. My theory is bulletproof. My theory of childhood. Your theory is not bulletproof. Thank you for endorsing it. I won't say it's bulletproof. I will say it's fascinating and I will say to use a condom, but continue.

Now at a certain point, Gabriel seems to have replaced the affection he once expressed for his parents with a love of Italy. At age 13, after two years in the Cisognomy, he wrote that he had two missions in life. Quote, to teach the people to love their country and to hate the enemies of Italy to the death. Now I'm obviously not a child development expert, but this does not seem like healthy behavior to me. Is a general rule, I think children shouldn't focus on hating the enemies of their country to the death.

I feel like that's led people in bad directions. That's how you make an army, a generational army. That's how you make the Nazis. Gabriel's devotion to his nation was not however selfless. He seems to have been obsessed with Italy primarily as a vessel to express his own greatness. One of his school reports from the time notes, he is entirely dedicated to making a great name for himself. He signed one of his earliest photographs, a picture that he sent home to his parents

with two glory. So yeah. Now, any other child probably would have been ribbed mercilessly for this kind of arrogance, but it must be said Gabriel backed up his words with deeds. He learned to play the violin and the flute and to sing expertly. On holidays he would translate ancient Greek literature into Italian. He wrote ceaselessly and when study time ended every evening he would collect the excess lamp oil from the other boys so he could stay up all night writing.

He was always at the very top of his class and at one point he wrote home to his mother that he was angry he'd been allowed to skip a test because, quote, I am certain I would have taken the first place. At age 16 he could speak and write fluently in Italian, Greek, Latin, English, French and Spanish. Okay. So he's not, so my theory about nature nurture, okay, there's definitely an element of him being intelligent.

I won't deny that. Yes, he's very smart. Yeah. He's a smart kid. My, but it is a very interesting idea just, I don't know, like you can be smart and not a fucking lunatic. Yes. And he definitely, I don't know, we'll tell you where this goes, but before we talk more

about Gabriel Denunzio, we're going to talk about some motherfucking products and a goddamn service or three. It's going to be great. Okay. You ready for this shit, Serene? I'm so fucking ready. Robert. Roll these ads.

I'm going to tell you something in Robert that I've just learned. Okay. Then I'm going to shut up. Pizza. That's my only, it's a me, Robert. Okay. It's okay. It's okay to be racist towards Italians.

It was a Mario reference. I guess it's Mario racist. Our people have been tied to Mario for too long. Wait, Mario is so racist. Yes. Incredibly so. But it's fine. I'm shattered.

My little self that played Mario growing up is really sad. Listeners, you can see it, but the light went out of Sherene's eyes for the whole 30 seconds. Jesus Christ. Let's go to ads. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not on the good and bad ass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful

lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all

bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories.

But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. We're back. All right. I will say that I would play Yoshi a lot of the times in Mario Kart, not Mario. Yoshi was my guy. Have you gotten all the anti-Italian bigotry out of your system now, Shireen? I didn't mean it, Robert. Mom, my knee.

Italian Robert. Roberto. Can I get... I'm gonna shut up. Sorry. I'm gonna take my own grave. I do, you should have known I was Italian by the frequency with which I gesture with my hands.

You're allowed to say that, but I'm not, am I? No, I think everyone is allowed to recognize that about Italian people. Well, they say that about Middle Eastern people, too. We're an expressive bunch. Well, actually, Italy's not super far from the Middle East. It's just literally across a stream from the... We're cousins. We're cousins.

...chunk of the world. Yeah, there's a reason why every era I've related to my big fat Greek wedding, we're all the same. We're all... That whole region, the Mediterranean, is all the same. We all show both our love and hatred with food. Very true, very true. So the month he turned 16, Gabriel's very first poem was published.

It was an ode to King Umberto. Now, Gabriel's father, Francesco Paolo, had it printed and handed out to townsfolk who showed up to take part in the King's birthday celebrations. And normally, when someone's dad helps them publish their work, it's a sure sign that that work is no good, but this was not the case with Gabriel. Less than a year later, his father helped him publish his first book of poetry called Primovera. Now, right out of the gate, it was clear that Gabriel Donanzio was an incredible poet.

He sent copies of his book out to several of the greatest Italian poets of the day, and most of them wrote him back with very positive things to say about his work. And he's, again, he's 17 at this point. Yeah, a number of them even invited him into their homes and gave him advice and counsel. Critics raved about his work. The priest at his boarding school considered banning the book because it had powerfully erotic subject matter. It contained lines like, with trembling agitation, I laid you on the water lilies and kissed

you with convulsed lips, crying, you are mine, like a viper, you writhed and groaned. So like the priest are like, this is way too much fucking to allow in our religious school. But that must have just fueled his, his, his cause. So that must have just been like, fuck yeah, this is what I wanted. They didn't ban the book. They wanted to, but they decided that his use of Italian was so perfect and his verse form was so exquisite that they couldn't ban the book. It was just too well written.

Wow. So like, yeah, they decided to allow it because like, but like fuck the dude can write. Like that's how good the, the poem is. That's crazy. That is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, especially for the time, it's must have been a very revolutionary thing to even write about. Well, you know, they are Italians. So yeah, like this, this is like, you're going, like there's always been more of this kind of like acceptance of sort of like this passion. Yeah. Yeah. It is a very Italian thing.

That's true. And I can't, I'm not going to have a lot of quotes from his poems in here just because like a big part of them is that he was such a good writer in the Italian language. So like the translations, you lose a lot, I think. But it's universally recognized that this guy is one of the greatest poets in Italian history and some people will say, including, he would say that he was the best Italian writer since Dante. I love that you said including him.

Yeah. He was, he was, he was sure of that most modern like academics will say, no, he was one of a number of people, but he's at a very high level. Like he's had a big impact on the language. I just hate that he's so, I mean, it's fine to be confident and know your worth, but to say that you're the best writer since Dante, that's like, he's such a, I don't know, that's wild. But so he was never a victor or he never suffered from criticism of nepotism, like he, even

though he had such obvious nepotism in his life, like, like, like advances and, and privileges, no one ever, no one ever saw that as any kind of issue. I think his work is just so good that like people like, well, fuck, like, I mean, yeah, he definitely comes from money. His dad is able to help him, but like his work does seem to stand on its own. Interesting. I don't think. I'll give you that.

I'll give you that. Like, like most academics who write about him now, like, agree that he was a monster in a piece of shit, but pretty much everyone agrees he was really good at writing poems. Imagine if Hitler was good at painting. Yeah. It's, it's weird. You get this mix of dictators like Saddam and Hitler, who are like, want to be artists, but suck at it.

And then you get guys like Stalin, like Stalin was a poet in his youth and was a really well regarded Georgian poet, like he gave it up after a while, but he was like considered to be very good and still is weird poetry is so powerful. And I write poetry. I think there's a, there's such a power in using the written word and it can garner so much attention and respect, especially back then because there wasn't like the internet. But, but yeah, I, it's, it's, it's a fascinating thing to, in this case, you have to separate the art from the artist and we go through it right now with filmmaking, like someone

makes a great film and you find out they're a pedophile. So it's like, it's this balance of like someone can make something so profound and so incredible, but also be a complete waste of space or like piece of shit. So there's, it's still going on now. And I think it's just fascinating to see it back then as well with poetry. I don't know. Yeah. And it's, you have to understand what poetry was back then too, because like now there

are people like people like poems. Most everybody has at least a couple of poems that they've enjoyed, but it's not like, it's not like a huge thing at the center of life for us back then. Like to be honest, at least the, the feeling I get is that like poets at this period, particularly in Europe, kind of occupy the space culturally that like an Instagram or a YouTube star like occupies now, like they have these legions of utterly devoted fans, like a pop star. Like they are like, like the closest you can, like the best poets of the day guys like Byron, like the closest modern like, like comparisons would be someone like Beyonce, like that's

the level of devotion that their fans have to them. No. It was like that in the Middle East too. There's this poet that kind of from similar roots, like he came from privilege. He was rich. His name is, he's our Cabani. He's an amazing poet in the Middle East. He's Syrian from Damascus and he was regarded as like a celebrity.

He was, his book was like banned from so many places because it was very erotic, very sexual. And it was like everyone would read it as like a, like a, like a political pamphlet that came out. Like it was like this like thing that everyone was looking forward to. Like it was this, it's poetry was like the mouthpiece of that generation for a long time. And he would use it in a political way and talk about like, I don't know, I think poetry now is not what it was back then and because the time is so different. But no, it's, it's, I believe it's, they were celebrities.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so like when, when I talk about poets in this episode, think about like a very high-level pop star when you're thinking about like the way people treat these guys. So he's, he starts reaching out to the most famous poets in Italy with his work and they love it. And one of them who is particularly taken as a fellow named Nincioni, who's one of the

biggest poets in Italy at the time. And Nincioni takes him under his wing and starts like tutoring him. And he introduces him to a book by a guy named Thomas Carlisle. The book is on heroes. And it's basically the thesis statement of the great man theory of history that like single exceptional individuals are the ones who move history, not economic forces or like the actions of like mass groups of people. Like exceptional individuals are what make history.

And Gabrielle is absolutely taken with this theory and is of course convinced that he is supposed to be one of those great men. And from a very early age, he was not just, it was not just enough, he's not just one of these people who like wants to make a living with poetry or like just has to express something. The thought of being anything but like the very best poet writing in Italy is like hateful to him. So early in their relationship, he sends Nincioni a book of his poetry with a letter asking if his work is just charming or pleasing.

Because if that's the case, he was going to give up writing immediately. He said that little artists and little poets were abhorrent to him and asks, can I cover myself in glory? So like again, he can't stand the thought of just being a good poet. Like that's not enough for this guy. He's got to be the best. By age 18, Gabrielle had published three books of poetry. One was dedicated to his recently deceased grandmother.

The other was a second edition of his first book, Primovera, with 43 new poems and revisions to his old work. His father paid the publishing costs for all these books, but Denunzio took responsibility for picking the font, the paper, the printer, and in setting up distribution deals with bookstores. Both Denunzios had a hand in promoting the work and the differing ways they went about it say a lot about their personalities. Francisco Paolo, like a normal person, threw a big banquet party in the middle of town

to drum up interest in the book. Gabrielle, being a narcissistic maniac, sent an anonymous letter to the editor of a poetry magazine in Florence, lamenting that Gabrielle Denunzio, the young poet already noted in the Republic of Letters, in his words, had died after falling off of a horse. So he sends a letter to like a big poet poetry critic and claims that like, hey, this guy Gabrielle who wrote this book, he's dead now. Oh, shit. Well, he does this because guys like Shelley and Byron, poets who died very young after

publishing, you know, a handful of books, were like the biggest poets in Europe at the time. They had these huge cults of fans because they died young. And so he knows that, like, if it's just the story of like a young poet who's pretty good and has published a new book of poetry, like he'll sell some copies, people will talk about it, but it's not going to be a huge deal. But if he's a great poet who dies tragically young, that's a huge deal. And it gets treated that way by the editor.

Like a bunch of magazines start writing articles about this this dead young poet. They like call him things like the last born of the muses. Like he suddenly like the fact that he's believed to have died young elevates his work instantly in Italy. And he develops this huge culty fan base. And eventually Gabrielle corrects the error and basically plays it off as if, oh, this must have been someone must have just gotten their wires crossed and like sent you incorrect information.

And, you know, it's the 1880s, honestly, honestly, I respect this. This is level influencer, like, like, I don't know, that's one way to get a following back in the day. There was no Instagram. You couldn't. You know what I mean? Like you fake your death. Yeah.

Yeah. He fakes his death. And then it turns what would have been kind of a modestly successful book of poems into a national news story. So as he turns 18, Gabrielle Denunzio is already famous and already like very well regarded. And of course, he was already fucking as a young teen. His teachers had noticed that on walks through town, Gabrielle constantly stared at young women.

At age 14, he spent a few days in Florence with a family friend and wound up taking that guy's 17 year old daughter to the Museum of Archaeology and making out with her in public. Shortly thereafter on a school trip to another town, he pawned his grandfather's gold watch to pay for a hooker so he could lose his virginity. Okay. Yeah. He is. He is just dives right into fucking.

You cannot stop this guy from fucking, which gets exactly as rapey as that sentence should make it seem. Yeah. Yeah. The summer after he was finally allowed to go back to Pescara at age 18, he, or at age 16, sorry, he flirted constantly with every woman in town. He found himself particularly enamored with a young peasant girl. She unfortunately was not enamored with him.

So he hunted her down, chased her into a vineyard, shoved her to the ground and raped her. Gabrielle was quite proud of this and wrote about it openly. He had a lifelong obsession with raping poor women, particularly servant girls. And it's actually hard to tell how often he did it because the act was such a fetish for him that he also fantasized about it regularly. Okay. This is a thing he's into. This is a thing he's into.

Why the fuck open? I am. Because when you read that poetry verse like before the break. Like, when she was like writhing and whatever, I was like, in my brain, I was like, that sounds rapey and this makes so much sense in the worst way. I am disgusted that I agree with some of the points that you made earlier. He's a very rapey guy. Oh, God.

That is a big part of his personality. Oh, God. I mean, we're talking about the guy you invented fascism. But that's the thing, you can be a lady's man and not be rapey. Absolutely. A rapey lady's man is the worst kind of lady's man. Oh, God. There's a lot of class issues wrapped up in this because he doesn't, at least I'm not

aware of him. I don't think he raped upper class women, wealthy women, famous women. And he had hundreds of affairs with the most famous women of the era and was considered to be a very great, like, romancer. His particular fetish was in raping poor women. That is just appalling. I mean, not really appalling, it's just disgusting. Yes.

It's horrible. Yeah, it's horrible. Because he's regarded as this womanizer, a seducer, and also this rape fantasy of poor people is just regarded as a fetish because he has all these other qualities. But the thing is, though, it's a little more complicated than that. Not that it's morally complicated, it's horrible. But at the time, number one, most men who he would have talked about that, he wouldn't have hide the fact that he was forcing himself on these poor women.

And they wouldn't have really thought it was bad. That's kind of like, it's a rapey time and place. Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, Italy in this period. And not just Italy, obviously, like everywhere in the world. Yeah, no, no. I mean, you rape and pillage, that was like how you were a bug and taught to show yourself as a man.

It's fine. We're not all the way past that now, obviously. No. So it was worse back then, and this was not like a dark secret of his, is the point. This is a thing that he was like, yeah, I'm a lady's man, I romance these women, I force myself on these women, that's just what a lady's man do. That's the attitude with which he presents himself to the world. I'm for all the classes, even if they don't want me to.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of especially if they don't want me to. At age 18, Gabriel met Giselda, the daughter of a schoolmaster in Florence. And he first met her, she was sobbing because she'd just seen the corpse of a little girl who'd frozen to death. This really turned Gabriel on. They started dating and fucking.

In his early letters to her, he would write about how much the sight of her tears turned him on. I want to make those tears fall again. Lucy Hughes Hallett writes, quote, he luxuriated in the idea of her unhappiness. He even told her how much he would like to see her corpse. He loved it that she was deathly pale, like the Blessed Damozele, the dead girl of her city's famous poem and painting. But he would have preferred her even paler.

He told her that he would go around all the florists in the city, fill a carriage with assorted flowers, to come and bury her beneath them. Yes, to bury you, I want to make you die, he wrote to Tito Zucconi, not as one might expect promising to cherish and protect Tito's daughter, but announcing, I and Elda cannot live long. Both he and Giselda were, so far as we know, in perfectly good health, yet Denunzio wrote, our cold bodies will fall to the earth to feed the flowers and we will be swept away unconscious atoms and the irresistible currents of the universal force.

I want you even pale or I want you dead. Yeah, some red flags, huh? Well, okay, unfortunately, I dated someone that told me, he thought I was attractive when I cried. And I think it's such a weird thing to say to someone, like to be like, I think girls are hot when they cry or like I'm turned on by girls crying, there's an element of something like, I mean, I guess there is a beauty to tears, I'm fucked up. I don't know, I think like.

It's complicated, like you're not a bad person if like obviously you're not a bad person if you have anything. Sorry, I don't want to get into this. I have been ghosting my therapist, I don't want to use you as a therapist, but I, he's also a necrophiliac then, like he's also into like dead thickness. You know, I don't know, I wouldn't say that because I don't think that's, I think it's more that the art of he's very much into classical and medieval art and that sort of art, there's like this death obsession because death was such a part of the Middle Ages and there's

a lot of paintings and poems and works of about like focused around dead women. Like fucking Dante is obsessed with this dead chick that he only met twice, like it's, it's a thing. And so it like now if somebody's like, yeah, I would say, yeah, that's probably what that dude's into. But um, At the time it was probably just romanticizing this, this idea of, of, of death, I don't know, losing your life.

Romantic death. Yeah. Like there's just, it's, there's so much culturally wrapped up in it that like you really honestly can't compare it to anything today because like we don't have those same sort of, they're not nearly as powerful as they, they were then. Wow. Now, you know what won't fantasize about your dead body? That's a bad way to lead into ads.

An ad break. You'll never get raided by an ad break. Oh God. Yeah. You know what won't molest peasant girls in a field? Jesus. Oh boy. I hope the ad that comes up is like, I don't know, fucking, what do you get sponsored by?

Like dog food. An ad for Gabriel to nuns you know. Oh boy. Okay. Let's just go to, go to products. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations and you know what, they were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

As the FBI sometimes you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy voiced, cigar smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse was like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And on the gun badass way, nasty sharks.

He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. And Alphabet Boys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up.

Join to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message

that down on earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. I mean, the first ad break started with me being a bigoted racist against Mario or like

realizing that Mario is tainted forever and the next one lead it up to me. Just I'm sad. Yeah, that's, that's the Denunzio effect. Okay, go continue. I'm sorry. This is not about me. Over the two years that they were together, Gabriel wrote Giselle to 500 letters. They actually spent very little time in each other's company.

Shortly after hooking up, he graduated and wound up traveling all around Italy, launching his career as a writer. He continued to write her dizzyingly passionate love letters, but ignored all of her pleading requests to visit her in Florence. Sometimes he would even pass by the city on journeys to other places without diverting himself to visit this woman he claimed to love. The fact that he wasn't all that into seeing her didn't stop him from giving her orders on what to wear, only black.

But by 1883 he was tired of the relationship and gradually his letters to her dwindled off into nothing. Gabriel was never able to actually break off things with anyone. He just sort of ghosted them after spending months and even years writing tens of thousands of passionate odes to their bodies. This would prove to be a lifelong habit for the poet and writer. By his own count, Gabriel bedded around a thousand women in his lifetime and this is probably not far from accurate.

He developed a reputation for being not just a great seducer of women, but for abandoning them and breaking their heart. His lovers would repeatedly attempt suicide and a number of them probably succeeded. One of the reasons I really love Lucy Hughes Hallett's biography of Gabriel is that she's a woman and she brings a woman's perspective to the way this guy dealt with his relationship. And I'm very interested in the way she writes about him because she's very detailed and thorough and clearly is an appreciator of his work, but is also utterly unsparing and sort of analyzing this him as a human being.

She writes at one point, quote, the more unhappy a woman was, the more interesting to him she became the more he tantalized elder with promised visits, which were repeatedly deferred, the more adorable her image seemed to him. You must be sad immensely sad. My poor angel, he wrote, you will be thinking of me with desperate desire. The idea of her disappointment denied his savage kisses was one he liked to dwell on. Seeing her so seldom, she was really in no position to report on how pale and one elder really was.

But he addressed her in a rapture of sadistic pity as my pallidophilia, my poor betrayed virgin. So he's like into ignoring and mistreating this girl. He's an emotional manipulator. He's a fundamentally abusive person. He's a very emotionally abusive person and ghosting someone and like there's a term called love bombing where you're like showering someone with all this affection and everything and then you're just like gone and it's a huge form of emotional manipulation because

you make them addicted to you because every time and it's like scientifically proven that whenever this person reaches out again, your cortisol goes up and your cortisol is like your stress hormone and it's like literally the same way an addict reacts to an addiction. So he's literally making all these women addicted to him and it's conniving and disgustingly brilliant because that's what a really good emotional abuser does. One of the things that's really hard about thinking like I most of at this point in my life just because of the way my career and my travel has gone like most of my relationships have wound up being long distance for some particular point.

And that's like a really that's one of the things that's like really tough about them is there is this like addictive sort of like nature to the relationship where you're apart and then like you're together and you get this like massive oxytocin release and then like like it's hard not to I don't know like it's one of those things that I always wonder about like because it's it's it's just it's difficult to do that and not like fuck it up and not hurt the other or get hurt yourself like both of those things happen like I guess they're hard. Yeah.

But because when the relationship is established as this like I don't know like it's it's hard to describe it as anything but an addiction because there's like this huge overwhelming release of happiness and everything when you're together and then you're not and then especially if there's someone that's constantly pulling the rug from under you or pulling away constantly that only feeds the addiction for the other person. So in this case in particular I think I mean like the my the relationship that I've kind of like the closest thing I've had to a real relationship was long distance so I could kind of relate to what you're experiencing as far as like when you're apart it's like

you're just waiting to be with them again and you're waiting for that like basically a hit and then as soon as you get it you're good even if they're just like replying to a message or whatever it's like you're constantly needing that like streamline of like or like I don't know but in his case he's it's a one side addiction he's completely fine. I don't think he ever means anything he writes. No. Yeah. He is not at all emotionally engaged which is part of what makes it abusive right if

you've got two people and you're both dealing with that thing and you're both emotionally into each other that's not abusive but if you and number one he also doesn't in no way does this need to be a long distance relationship. He is very well off and successful from an early age and absolutely could at least visit her regularly like there's times where he's like an hour away and he just doesn't give a fuck like like like he's it's honestly he probably gets turned on with having this kind of power. Yes.

He knows he has power over these women and he knows that he has emotional abuse has made them addicted to him and his presence even if he's not there and that probably turns him on more than any type of sex in my opinion. He's absolutely sitting there jacking off as he writes about how sad he thinks he is like that's that's what he's into here. And that's why he's a sociopath because you're just yeah wow. In 1921 when Gabrielle was very famous and renowned not just in Italy but all across Europe Giselle De Roteham and asked for permission to sell the letters that he'd sent her.

She needed the money to gift to her son so he could get married. Gabrielle refused her this and instead asked her to hand over the letters to his lawyer so like he just doesn't doesn't give a shit like he just stops writing this woman like and it completely cuts her off without even like talking to her about it. Just one day we're just done like and he doesn't even tell her we're done she just stops getting letters and never hears from him again. So like most great men in history Gabrielle treated the women and indeed the men in his life like trash but this did nothing to halt the meteoric growth of his career.

He went to Rome where he studied literature published more poems and started writing books. In 1882 he wrote The Innocent a book about a dandy and fuck hungry man named Tulio Hermil who cheats constantly on his saintly wife until she cheats on him and finally gets pregnant. In 1889 he published Il Piacere considered the manifesto of Italian decantismo which is more or less what it sounds like and I'm going to read you two paragraphs from Wikipedia's summary of this book. Okay. Gerard an aristocrat is in mourning over the death of his mistress Leonora.

He listens to tape recordings of them having sex and records his recollections of the day he met Leonora for the first time at the Carnival of Venice many years ago. On a day he felt sexually adventurous. In a flashback we see him meet her on the street introducing himself as Giacomo Casanova. After chasing her through the city he finds her waiting for him behind a column in a passageway where he lifts her dress and has sex with her. Later that day in an opium dim after having a smoke they are initiated by Hanani in the Cosmic Secrets of Pleasure and join in the threesome with her.

Back in the present Gerard and Fiorella dress Leonora's naked body for her funeral. When Ursula and Edmund Leonora's children from another man arrive for the funeral Gerard who has not seen either of them for ten years. At first mistakes Ursula for Leonora Gerard is now legal guardian to both until they come of age. In a sudden fit Edmund cries out that his mother was only a whore and suffers an epileptic attack. He is calmed down by his sister breastfeeding him like their mother did.

Later it is Fiorella who repeatedly breastfeeds him and with whom he has his first sex. That's just two paragraphs it goes on like that that's the kind of books this guy writes like they're the smuttiest smut to ever. I mean I'm still not over the phrase fuck hungry that you used maybe five minutes ago. He is very fuck hungry writing fundamentally fuck hungry is Gabrielle Denonzio. That is that is twisted. Yeah but they're wildly successful like I mean because because it's it's it's what's the word it's pushing that they're the horniest books ever and everyone's horny yeah everyone's

fuck hungry when you want it when you when we're honest everyone's fuck hungry everybody's fuck hungry and Gabrielle is just leaning into it like you guys want horny books I'll write the horniest fucking books anyone's ever written. People are sucking each other's milk and fucking each other fuck it yeah it's just like the most depraved decadent shit he can think of. But for his for his lesion of followers they're probably like this is like from his real experience like he probably did all this stuff because he's like this amazing womanizer. I mean he made he probably did a lot of this stuff to be honest like yeah he was he didn't

have a lot of boundaries. I asked like was he a good looking guy. I'm going to show you I'm going to show you his picture at the end of this episode Shireen. Oh my god we'll talk about that. He was not considered good looking though. Most of Gabrielle's protagonists were aristocrats though he himself was not. It's notable that his only marriage was to Maria de Galicia a duchess and probably because marrying her technically made him an aristocrat too.

He had three children with her and Christ knows how many with other random lovers. He never took care of any of these kids and I'm going to quote from the New York Times. Wildly generous he bestowed upon them custom-made gifts by Bukaledi and famous guys with flamboyant nicknames that bring him that bring them in a pantheon of Olympic goddesses. Basilisa Nike Barbarella and of course Coret the outrageous Marcesa Cassari yeah I don't know who any of these people are but he's like he's always got these loving nicknames that are like really like like like out of this world flamboyant and he gives he spends thousands of dollars essentially on fancy gifts for whoever he's fucking before he abandons

them. It's love bombing. It's love bombing. Yeah. Denenzio was wildly successful and made fortunes from his writing but he spent those fortunes even faster than he could accumulate them. I found a write up on his life on the rake a fashion and style focused magazine that makes it clear just how he managed this quote.

He could shop until he didn't drop endless trips to the tailor thousands of books and he once even acquired twenty two dogs and eight horses all in one purchase when he stayed in hotels he always traveled with his own sheets I am as he once explained with characteristic self-assuredness a better decorator and upholsterer than I am a poet or novelist indeed at the turn of the century when his marriage into aristocracy along with his journalism and plays afforded him considerable wealth. He habitually lived in rented furnished houses that at great expense he immediately refurbished in extravagant fashion or as he put it in a style gorgeous enough to be worthy of a

renaissance lord which involved filling his properties with Mach 16th century furniture of his own design. He's that guy. I mean I think it's really funny that he's like I'm an even better upholsterer and decorator that I am a poet. Yeah. Like you think I'm good at this well God I'm not good I'm not bad at anything basically. Yes.

The other people in Gabriel's life were more distractions to him than real human beings. At one point when he already had eight horses he spent the money given to him specifically to feed his kids on buying a new horse. By 1893 he was 30 years old and living in Naples to avoid his creditors because he was just in huge debt all the time. He'd long since abandoned his wife and all three children as well as Elvira Fraternali a woman he lived with and loved for eight years. He broke up with her to move in with a Sicilian princess.

He was actually charged with adultery for this and almost went to jail for fucking this princess. He'd go to jail for fucking if anyone should go to jail for fucking it's him. Yeah. Yes. If anyone I'm not normally as long as there's consent well actually there I mean he should have gone to jail. No if anyone should go to jail for any kind of fucking it's him.

Yeah it's him. When writing novels and poetry wasn't enough to cover his debts Danunzio wrote for tabloids and gossip rags. He used his media connections to do things like tip off gossip journalists about when and where he would publicly be breaking up with one of his lovers. He started telling fanciful lies that he'd been born aboard a boat that he had a glass eye that he had two bottom ribs removed so he could suck his own dick. Yes.

Gabriel Danunzio is the origin of that. Is he really? Yeah. Yeah that's where that's that's the first time I think we come across it yeah. He is a shithead but he did start so many things maybe the first coaster you don't even know all he started. Oh my god he's wow. I mean.

Yeah. He's definitely of the belief of like any press is good press so yes damn that's just. And his life kind of proves that that's true. There's actually I found a couple of articles comparing him to Donald Trump and while he's a much more talented person than Trump and did succeed on his own merits that's not completely ludicrous as we'll get to like there's actually some comparisons between the two men. Now Gabrielle's maxim was one must make one's life as one makes a work of art. As the rake notes he was quote a diehard disciple of Baldissare Castiglione the author of a

sixteenth century book the book of the courtier in which the writer posited what he referred to as the universal rule in all human affairs spresatura a facade of nonchalance that concealed the artistry required to pull off challenges with a plomb regarded even at the time as both romantic and deceptive and almost equal measure Danunzio clearly lived out Castiglione's doctrine which was described disparagingly by Henry James as beauty at any price beauty appealing alike to the sense in the mind so you would not however mistake Gabrielle Danunzio for beautiful by age 30 he was completely bald he was short he was he was to his credit very physically fit muscular but his teeth were disgusting his breath was horrible and

his voice was high-pitched and considered weird by all who heard it Leanne de Puy a famous Parisian courtesan met him once on a visit to Florence here's how she described him there before me was a frightful gnome with red-rimmed eyes and no eyelashes no hair green greenish teeth bad breath the manners of a mount a bank and the reputation nevertheless for being a lady's man you just described like a goblet like a greglet yeah this is a guy this is the guy this is the guy that no one can't bone except for the women he was actually how yeah I don't know I got I am livid I don't know why I'm so much more angrier than I would be if he was good-looking but I am I'm so angry yeah well it's it's

because in my brain I rationalize like if you're a lady's man and you're good-looking you can get away with it like you can get away with so much shit behavior if you're a good-looking person man or woman or anything if you're a good-looking get away with shit it's like scientifically proven you have an easier life whatever yeah but if you like after you're your piece of shit and you like are repulsive by this description like Jesus it's a it's remarkable and I don't really understand his breath smelled why would you ever be like I mean to be honest Shireen a big part of it just you have to understand like he's he's a great poet like that's probably a lot of why is he's like he's you can be

like we almost can't like maybe in this context of the world it's like you can be like a really talented musician right but yeah maybe like you know gross it's like you hear stories about like some famous rock stars who like just didn't shower and we're like these nasty like drug addicts but like everybody because like their music was really good and there's just like something about that they can overcome an odious other aspects of your personality you know I will say I will say talent and ambition or maybe ambition in my opinion is probably the most attractive quality but I just can't get over all the other things that description is a repulsive description of a human being like that is I would say

sorry I know I'm just mad go ahead I mean I would say you have to remember one thing that kind of helps me is think like look at pictures of like John Lennon with his shirt off and remember that there was a time when everyone in the everyone in the world basically wanted to fuck John Lennon and like just take a look at that guy shirtless like hard to get your head around it but like it's because of the the the artistic not just how his music on its own but also the cultural like like platform he stood on so elevated we revere these artists they're regarded as these really artistic beautiful souls not maybe not beautiful in the in Gabrielle's case definitely not a beautiful soul in this case he's revered

or John Lennon's case he was abusive yeah yeah wait are you gonna show me a photo oh yeah in a little bit yeah fine so I'm so excited despite his looks Gabrielle managed to sleep with many of the most beautiful women in Europe and the vast majority of the sex was consensual his habitual rape seemed to be mostly of poorer women his housekeeper was required to have sex with him three times a day whether she wanted to or not Gabrielle kept his homes bizarrely warm at tropical temperatures so he could wear only a light thin kimono style robe with the special hole in the fabric for his dick oh my god he had custom shoes shaped like penises oh you almost missed the penis shoes that are shaped like penises this gets

more absurd by the fucking second are you shitting me I you know maybe I haven't emphasized enough he's Italian does that explain the penis shoes I'm sorry do you have shoes of course okay when you when you're Italian age 18 you get your penis shoes that's just a part of being Italian I the kimono the whole the word Italy means an ancient Etruscan land of penis shoes wow yeah he he does a little bit now Gabrielle was above all else a genius at brand management he knew how to make Gabrielle Denonzo into a star and to keep himself in the headlines it was crucial to him that people believe him capable of literally anything and so in pursuit of that end he ran for the Italian parliament in 1897 as an independent

he called himself the candidate for beauty and ran on a platform of pushing the politics of poetry a big fan of Nietzsche he declared that he was beyond right and left as I am beyond good and evil in a way Gabrielle was kind of a prototype for Donald Trump as well as Adolf Hitler the first man to take his literary fame and pop culture cache a and turn it into political power but when it came to actually staying in power Denonzo decided he really hated politics he served one term and never held any kind of legitimate public office again so he's like the first guy to take like he's just a famous guy for being famous mostly yeah like his I mean he's great poet but like he's he's also really just famous

for being a celebrity and he turns that into political power and that's really hasn't been done you know yeah in the way that he did it that is fascinating also side note that I'm still thinking about the kimono I'm sorry the dick kimono the cock the cock the temperatures are so high and that it keeps them this tropical level I just I watched curb your 30s curb curb your enthusiasm I watched that yeah first time recently all I'm all caught up but there's this one episode with like Leon his roommate fucking yoga teacher a high yoga teacher apparently warmer temperatures according to this episode good for orgasms so maybe he was onto something yeah maybe yeah then again I'm sorry I'm a piece of shit and I will say like it this

was not like he was not like a one-sided sort of lover like he was he was real into kind of like this and wrote about it I mean pages sometimes he says you have to be consensual it's most of the most of the people that have sex with him want to have sex with him so yep it's yeah but yeah I mean like would you say that his use of like his brand of narcissistic politics like using his platform to become a politician like was that not like Regan did or like or oh you mean Reagan oh Reagan sorry that I say yeah I was just pretty I say how I think it's pronounced English my second language leave me alone yeah like Reagan like now since Denonzo a lot of people have done that but he's kind of like he's the first

yeah he's just really mostly famous for his fame and then takes turns that into a political career and this is not the end of his political career just his end is an elected political leader oh keep that in mind yeah yeah you haven't even stepped foot into the fascism yet fascism Jesus we there's so much about this guy oh no his debts were so outrageous by 1910 that Denonzo was forced to flee Italy for Paris where he made a film collaborated with some of the greatest artists of the day and became friends with Proust American whiskey heiress Natalie Barney wrote about this time quote he was the rage a woman who had not slept with him made herself ridiculed he even managed to bed Romaine Brooks a famous lesbian artist

who wound up painting his portrait so like again you really can't it's hard to understand like the level of fame to where like and a famous lesbian would be like yeah I gotta fuck him like it's gonna see what's going on there yeah crazy it's wild as the years in Paris what I don't yes actually you'll see it not you'll get it for the size yeah it's in like a banana hammock in the picture I'm gonna show you and it's not I will I'll say that as the years in Paris ticked along Gabriel found himself less and less enthralled with high society and more obsessed with the war clouds on the horizon the actual start of World War one came as a surprise to most but for years prior to the war every observant

person in Europe had been aware that some sort of violent conflict was very nearly like coming artists who recognize this wound up in one of two camps many dreaded it and worked to do all they could to pull Europe back from the precipice Gabrielle however wound up in another camp he saw it as his duty as a lover of beauty to push Europe into calamity this seems insane to us now and it is fucking crazy but the nunsio was not alone in this I'm gonna read again from Lucy Hughes how let's be a biography quote in the political rhetoric and poetry of the period civilian existence is great dim morally compromised and physically grubby the battlefield by contrast is bright a glitter with weapons and flashing

with joy above all it is clean when Britain declared war Rupert Brooke proclaimed his gladness to leave the sick hearts that honor could not move and half men and their dirty songs and dreary like the nunsio Brooks saw the war as a saving freshness into which he could plunge as swimmers into cleanness leaping in Germany Thomas Mann welcomed the conflict as a purging and a liberation let the storm come cried the Hungarian do so I'm not even going to try to pronounce this guy's last name and sweep out our salons so like there's this idea that like society is decadent there's all these like young like lazy like like children of privilege sitting around drinking coffee and talking about politics we need

a war to kill a bunch of them and make the the others into better people clean out these crowded cities that's like a sizable chunk of particularly like the intelligentsia in this period is into this idea yeah they're all Thanos yeah yeah they kind of are Gabrielle denunzio had become a fervent nationalist by this point an adherent of a school of Italian thought that believed the new nation needed to reabsorb or conquer a number of states that were currently its neighbors but historically they believed Italian this included much of what became Yugoslavia but Gabrielle didn't just see the coming war as a chance for Italy to regain lost territory he saw it as a beautiful aesthetic endeavor in its own right he believed

that quote a great conflict of the races would purge society of its weak elements as soon as the gun started pounding in 1914 while Gabrielle was still living in France he had a friend drive him as close to the front lines as he could possibly get they wound up in a place called reams where German artillery had just destroyed an ancient and famous cathedral taking a valet and several suitcases full of clothing with him of course Gabrielle wound up in the middle of the front line watching artillery land just a few hundred meters ahead of him and seeing the corpses of men and animals rotting in the mud he immediately grabbed souvenirs and started taking fastidious notes he used these notes to write an article about the

German vandalism of the reams cathedral he hadn't actually watched the cathedrals destruction but he had no problem lying and describing how with his own eyes he'd watched them burn it Gabrielle Denunzio despised Germans considering them a barbaric and disgusting race the goal of his article was to try and push his nation into joining with France and Great Britain in the war now Italy had entered World War one is an ally of Germany but no one in the country was particularly interested in actually entering the war on Germany's side in fact most of the country wanted to stay out of the war entirely given how World War one went this was not a bad call but Gabrielle wanted Italy to go to war more than he'd ever wanted

anything in his entire life and he's set at once to the task of dragging his country with him as soon as he got back from Italy in mid 1915 he began giving speeches and I'm going to quote from an article in the new republic about this quote Italy was no longer a pension defamilie of museum but a living nation he declared in one interventionalist demagogic speech to general acclaim the prospect of mass deaths thrilled him benedito cross was repelled by his seeming to enjoy war even to enjoy slaughter as he was how it puts it the politics of beauty was revealing itself as a politics of blood among his ardent supporters were marinetti's futurists who had recognized early on that for all his fondness for classical

art and medieval knickknacks denunzio was a fellow modern a poet who rhapsodized over warships and steelworks and who set a higher value on energy than he did on virtue genoa is where he first started haranguing the masses towards apocalypse in his first four days there he spoke seven times the italian government itself was torn over the question of war the queen mother decided to dearly but most of the elected leaders were firmly against the idea they hated that denunzio was ranting about the need to destroy germany while they carried on secret negotiations to try to plot the national course standing on balconies and shouting to increasingly large crowds he urged his countrymen to pull out of the triple alliance

and join the entente with france britain and russia he was not content just to attack germany and make the case for war gabriel denunzio made a habit of viciously attacking any politician who spoke it out against his whims he called them cowards and appeasers the enemies within he said the old order reeks and must be utterly destroyed sweep away all the filth into the sewer with all that is vile he called the current political order infected diseased corrupt and defiled and he said the only solution was cotterization the corruption must be burned out gabriel called repeatedly for a holocaust to cleanse the body politic holocaust was in fact one of his most frequently used words and in a positive sense foreign

reporters who watched him were almost as enraptured as the crowds john carer a france reporter wrote never have i seen an order advance before the public with such composure standing on his improvised tribune he was magnificently alone of a marble power with two eyes aflame and when gabriel spoke to crowds they didn't just listen they acted in may 1915 he made it to rome and gave what would become one of his most infamous tirades and i'm going to quote from lucy hughes hallowed again he attacked the advocates of peace in vitriolic terms the very air of roams stank with their treachery those who still hung back from war were traitors assassins of the patria italy's executioners geoliti one of these politicians he hated was strangling the nation

with a prussian rope denunzio was openly advocating violent attacks on the people's elected representatives he called upon the roman mob to take the law into their own hands he urged his listeners to attack the appeasers who lick the boots on sweaty prussian feet he called for stonings and arson his rhetoric was becoming ever more frenzied i tell you there is treason here in rome we were being sold like a herd of diseased cattle he urged the people to hunt down anti-war deputies form squads squadra was one of the many words the fascists would pick up from him lion weight seize them capture them an observer reports that the applause when he paused was like a storm when he resumed to denounce geoliti in ever more vituperative terms

that diabolical old blubber lipped hangman the storm was transformed into a cyclone denunzio was high on his own eloquence on the frenzy of the crowds he flattered and inflamed and on the prospect of blood 52 years old he extolled the ruthless purity of youth a poet whose life's work had been the threading together of obscure and beautiful words he invaded against verbiage and called for action swift cruel if need be and unambiguous it is not the time for speaking but for doing he ended by leading the crowd in an anthem beating time with his little white hands while the people below bellowed out through a frame let us join the cohort we are ready to die italy has called damn yeah fame is terrifying you're seeing

some of the fascists of creep in here yeah i mean fame is terrifying and he obviously used this like visceral um quality of his writing into his speeches obviously like he is he's a good word smith like that's been that's been already proven but like effective it's so terrifying when someone is already so i don't know praise and lauded for being this amazing thinker he's obviously going to have a huge lesion of people follow him what anything he does even if it's to tell people to pick up a weapon and and be violent and the fact that holocaust was worthy he used so much like that's so telling of like the kind of mentality he had even if he did despise germany like he definitely had similarities to hitler in that regard of like rounding people together and

being an amazing speech person like a speech giver um that's so disturbing because i think that's that's a huge reason why fame and influence really freaks me out is because you have all these people follow you blindly just like with trump trump has the same thing the people i hate the people in the rallies that i see i hate the people behind trump that are are clapping at every dumb bullshit thing he says i hate them more than i hate trump honestly because they're just sheep i don't know you know i actually know i don't want to say sheep sorry i i think what you see people are intelligent but they're also desperate to belong and if someone is just like rallying people together for a cause that he thinks is like well better humanity i don't know

i i think what you're getting at and i think the reality both of why denunzio was successful and why trump is is that everyone has this very deep understanding in our society as they did then that like something's wrong um things shouldn't be as fucked up and hard as they are like this shouldn't be as messed up as it is someone is responsible and if you are able to tell people who is responsible and convince them of who it is um and then invade upon that group or that person with the kind of rage that everyone has in their heart um whether or not it's directed everyone has that anger in our society because we all know shit's fucked up if you can convince people that you found the people who have fucked up the shit and then express the hatred that is in their

hearts you can give them to do anything and that's all that matters they don't care about laws they don't care about precedent they don't care about history they don't even care about their own health to a certain extent if you are able to convince them of the group that's responsible for their pain and express the hatred that's in their heart towards that group and that's what denunzio is good at that's what hitler is good at that's what trump's good at you you described what i was trying to articulate in a much better way uh because that's what's terrifying is that what you said you can get them to do anything because that's completely what's what happens and it works it works on all of us yeah it works i mean i mean to be honest like i the a lot of the

success of this podcast um which has been very successful and um has has done a lot for my career and has built up a fan base that's i'm very is very like loyal um and active is because what we focus on is is talking about like these are the assholes responsible for why shit is so fucked up right um like the most powerful thing in the world is is harnessing the anger that exists in all of us because of the damaged nature of our society and directing it it's not an inherently harmful but bernie sanders is appeal is a lot in his ability to say this is why shit's fucked up this is who you should be angry at we need to fix now he doesn't i would say in a non-toxic way in a productive way it doesn't have to be a horrible thing yeah because the anger is real

and the anger that trumps fans feel the rage they're not directing it in the right direction but that rage is utterly earned in most cases no i completely agree i think yeah directing that anger is such a powerful tool to and being able to to harness that is a terrifying quality when you use it in the wrong way which is what hillard did which is what uh did unzio's do it or did and it's what and what i'm going to do in my new cult so stay tuned um very excited we're gonna buy a compound it's gonna be like that wild wild country documentary machetes battle royale machetes as far as the eye can see yeah it's gonna be glorious now um on multiple occasions crowds rioted after denunzio's speeches several times they attempted to break into the prime

minister's home in order to murder him the violence only encouraged denunzio further and he repeatedly urged good citizens to take vengeance on lying politicians if blood flows such blood will be as blessed as that in the trenches he said drawing a direct line between political murder and the national war effort shortly after that speech some of his supporters stole a fire truck and used its ladder to try to break into the home of one of his political opponents lucy hughes hallett writes he was fast developing a brilliantly manipulative oratorical technique he allowed his public no break in his contrivances of their hysteria he played on them with rhetorical tricks borrowed from religious liturgy or from classical drama hear me he cried listen to me

understand me the crowd was urged to join him howling out responses to insistent evivas these were not speeches to be rationally appraised but acts of collective self-hypnosis denunzio's work as a dramatist had frequently been grandiose in conception spectacular in their staging and appalling for the violence of their sentiments but never before he had produced anything like the shows he put on that radiant may the sheer rage he worked these crowds into eventually made any outcome but war basically impossible most of denunzio's enemies fled the city the prime minister stepped down historian mark thompson calls what denunzio achieved a coup d'etat an all but name the leader of the socialist party felipo tirade ruefully and accurately exclaimed let the bourgeoisie have its

war there will be no winners everyone will lose well on may 23rd 11 days after gabriel denunzio entered roam italy declared war on austria-hungary there is of course significant debate over whether or not italy would have entered the war on this side without denunzio historians will note that the pact of london which set out italy's new alliance had been on a negotiation for a while by the time he arrived in italy but most historians agree he had at least a very significant impact in pushing his country into world war one by the end of that war more than 460 thousand italians would be dead more than 955 thousand would be wounded the old order of europe died and gabriel denunzio helped to kill that too his career though was just getting started

and now shireen sophie would you scroll to the bottom of the script i don't want to oh no oh but you have to he has she has to see denunzio this is the best i just i'm so sorry shireen i just can't believe i just i don't know i let's let's get like a band-aid let's rip it off let's see it come on okay bro here here he is here you go she's here and she just grabbed my computer what the fuck are you shitting me okay first of all banana hammock uh hilarious um he does look like he is packing heat but he is packing heat yeah but he is he's pretty stacked he's pretty yoked he's just skinny what do you mean yeah he's not he's not yoked he's just tiny he's yeah he's got well you gotta admit you gotta you gotta remember too like people didn't know to build

muscle then the way they do now like he's pretty i mean yeah he doesn't have that on him i'll give him that but yeah he's also like if if anyone's listening to this in the beginning was imagining this like attractive womanizing seducing whatever this is not the guy but he did it no i mean like a champion for short guys unfortunately for for you but uh yeah you already have Napoleon what award do you want i don't know um Jesus he's that's a hilarious photo by the way this photo it's amazing he's completely naked other than this banana thong and his arms are at his hips posed for this photo his mustache is curled up didn't know he had a mustache by the way um yeah bald with a curled up mustache you gotta see the picture he's a clown he's just a he looks like

if adam silver the mba commissioner and colonel sanders had a baby and that baby was a creep yeah i would i would say if you watch creep and if you look up creep that's what i imagine if you watch the um the tv show community he looks like pierce's father um like he's that exact build in size he's just this like weird little bald he's a little he's he's smeagol yeah he convinced his country to enter the dumbest war in history he humanized personified whatever yeah he does look a lot like schmeagol yeah anyway yeah how you how you feeling after part one shireen um i uh i've learned a lot i think we had a good like bonding time you and i to be honest i feel like we just verify each other a bit in parts of this episode which i feel kind of like

nice about i think we're good friends now um the nunzio effect oh god don't give him credit give him more credit power shireen i would like credit i would like credit for the friendship thank you sophie i will give you the credit i mean this episode has convinced me among other things to buy a banana hammock that seems like a good decision this episode has convinced me among other things that you should not have children but um sorry i'm kidding i'm kidding if you you would be a great dad in all seriousness um just don't give your children that seems like that seems like a long reach to make shireen no i've learned a lot uh i can't wait to learn more and uh and um really yeah just the turn of this guy's life what an eventful awful way to leave the world he's not lazy you got to

say that for the man he accomplished a lot a very productive like back in the day we're not even i mean we have that saying now like you have as many hours in the day as Beyonce does back in the day you have as many hours in the day as as as denuzio has you know what i mean what have you what country have you demolished today um yeah what what world order have you destroyed exactly what generation have you sent into machine gun nests robert do you think we can get a banana hammock sponsorship that's just my only oh i hope i want a banana hammock sponsorship and i would love it if we could get if we could like get a war to sponsor us too like that would be really good i feel like there's a lot of really good wars going on right now and one of them should sponsor this podcast

i mean lord knows they have the money so exactly yeah great yeah well shireen you want to plug your plugables oh yeah i'm shireen and uh i am a co-host of a podcast called ethnically ambiguous it's on the i heart radio network it's ethnically should look it up it's everywhere you find your podcast i am shiro hero sh eero h e r o on instagram and shiro hero six six six on twitter and uh yeah that's about it i have a poetry book if you guys want to like the poetry talk it's on amazon oh shit yeah well there you go my next one read shireen's poetry it's really depressing ego turn her into a monstrous sociopath who leads the world into a tremendous calamity honestly i'm just waiting to sell out so please let's make this a reality we all are we all are begging i would love to sell

out so make it happen and i i'm robert evans you can find me on twitter at i write okay you can find this podcast on the internet at behind the bastards dot com where you can find sources and this picture of denuncio and his banana hammock um you can find us on twitter and instagram and at bastard's pod uh and you can find me uh fully embracing the lessons of gabriel denuncio when i create my cult and uh plunge the world into a new dark age so like look forward to that uh it's gonna be a real good time free machetes for all um yeah that's the episode have a good one y'all bye alphabet boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations in the first season we're diving into an fbi investigation of the 2020 protest it involves a cigar smoking mystery

man who drives a silver hearse and inside his hearse with like a lot of guns but our federal agents catching bad guys or creating them he was just waiting for me to set the date the time and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen listen to alphabet boys on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast what if i told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like csi isn't based on actual science and the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price two death sentences in a life without parole my youngest i was incarcerated two days after her first birthday listen to csi on trial on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts did you know lance bass is a russian trained astronaut that he went through

training in a secret facility outside moscow hoping to become the youngest person to go to space well i ought to know because i'm lance bass and i'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down with the soviet union collapsing around him he orbited the earth for 313 days that changed the world listen to the last soviet on the i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts