Behind the Bastards - Part Three: Helena Blavatsky: the woman who inspired the Nazis, and Gwyneth Paltrow

Episode Date: August 30, 2022

Robert and Jamie Loftus talk about Helena Blavatsky's time in the United States, inventing the "new age" movement.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the United States told you, hey, let's start a coup? Back in the 1930s, a Marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the U.S. and fascism. I'm Ben Bullitt. I'm Alex French. And I'm Smedley Butler. Join us for this sordid tale of ambition, treason, and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands. Listen to Let's Start a Coup on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you find your favorite shows. 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 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 iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. Oh, how I wish that this was behind the bastards. We were talking about Rick Springfield, Jesse's girl. It's everyone here's favorite song. We all just learned all of us, our favorite song is Jesse's girl. Great song. Okay, speak for yourself. What is your favorite song, Robert? It's Jesse's girl by Rick Springfield. I want to tell Rick Springfield that I love him, but the point is probably Moot. That is not your favorite song. That was a Jesse's girl joke. What's your favorite song? What song are you? I don't know. I don't think you can really have a favorite song because songs are so tight. Okay, that's okay. I'm avoiding the question. I have songs like I have cats in the cradle. Different. No, I hate that song. But like for different

songs for different moments, right? Like when my mom died, the first thing we listened to was Miserere by the cat empire. And that's like a song for for that particular moment. But like, you know, I like listening to all sorts of shit. I like if I'm running, I'm going to put on some infected mushroom or some shit because I want to like get moving. If I'm sitting and writing, I'm probably going to listen to like Yonder Mountain String Band and Green Sky Bluegrass doing like live shows at Red Rocks and shit because that works good with writing. I don't know. Do you ever have a Yacht Rock moment? Yeah, I like some Yacht Rock. I like you know who I you know who I who I like, Jamie Loftus is fucking every now and then in the right moment.

Okay, there's the fucking Oh God, how am I spacing my name right? Five o'clock somewhere guy, Margaritaville guy Jimmy Buffett Jimmy Buffett. Yeah, I went to Margaritaville last night. That sounds fun. I did I got I got and it's five o'clock somewhere. And it costs $500. And then I went to see Minions Rise of Grew all buzzed up. Wow. How was the how was the drink? How was the Buffett Margarita? It was disgusting. Yeah, they are. I love going to Margaritaville because it is the trashiest place you can possibly be as a human being. There's no you can't do battery acid. It's not it's not nothing's good. You can't get drunk there. You could like can't get drunk

there and it's disgusting. You will get you will give yourself diabetes before you can get drunk at a Margaritaville. But but hey, that's why I have a fake volcano, at least the one in Vegas does. And I love showing up not the one house at a Margaritaville in Vegas. Well, you have to because you can't really make a lot of progress there. You just you just get completely sco fucked on like cheap liquor that you bought at one of the liquor stores four miles away from the strip. So it's not like completely ridiculous. You bring a flask in with you and you add shit to their terrible Margaritas and you have one of the worst hamburgers of your life while you watch a shitties floor show. It's the best. I can't I can't do the food there. Even as a joke,

I can't do the food there. It's like too bad to even eat as a funny joke. But yeah, if yeah, five o'clock somewhere at Margaritaville and then I you know, you bring like a couple of nips to put into your soda at the movies or you take some ketamine or you snort some ketamine in the bathroom of a Margaritaville off of the back of your friend's phone. Like that's okay. And then that's and some people do that. And I'm sure they did that while I was there because why not? Jamie, I've done that. What? I've done that. Probably never been less shocked in my life. Probably while you were there because I'm always at Margaritaville in some form. I feel like we would really have a good time at Margaritaville. I thought Margaritaville at an airport in

Puerto Rico. Yeah. Now we're fucking talking. Oh, fuck. Yeah. That's the good stuff. And they just called it Air Margaritaville. Hell yeah. That's exactly what I want. Okay. So Jamie, when we last left off Helena Blavatsky, Hblatt. Oh, what? Hblatt, something like that. What do we do for her nickname? What do we call her? Hblatt. Anyway. The Blatt. The Blattster. The Blattster had just made her way to Crittenden to hang out with this journalist, Henry Olcott, who was getting hard. Olcott is in this period just getting super pilled on the paranormal. Yeah. Future President of Theosophy himself. Yeah. And again, he starts off as like this upper middle class lawyer guy who had like done an administrative job so well for the Union Army

during the Civil War that he got made a colonel. But had just been waiting his whole life for something weird to make him feel special. And again, he had like, he's like abandoned his family in order to like become a seeker. He's like wife and kids. He's a cool dude, Henry Olcott. I love that for him. He meets Helena Blavatsky. She reads his articles about this farmhouse medium thing in Crittenden and goes over and just like immediately wraps this dude the fuck around her finger. Like she is, this is, and again, she has not, one of the things that's interesting about her. You talk about like Elron Hubbard. He's conning people constantly, right? Just his life is an endless series of cons that are at least successful at for a period

of time. She's been failing pretty much nonstop. Like you do not. Which I feel like takes a special kind of scammer to continue persisting in the face of only flops. She is broke. Most of her scams are flops. When she gets someone to believe in her, it doesn't usually mean much of any money. Like she's not good at this. So it says a lot about Henry that she so completely like instantly just like dominates this man's life and mind. It's very funny. He was just waiting for this. Like you get the feeling with Henry Olcott. He's just this guy who always wanted nothing, but like some occult lady to tell him there's magic. Like he just is ready to be a wizard immediately. I mean, people are like always looking for confirmation of this. And I feel like,

like figures like Helena Blavosky, even though she like could not pull off a scam for so long, like they just like live in people's brains because they like visually represent something that people want to be true. And even though they prove it, they're just so ready. I don't know. It's like an aesthetic appeal too. It's part of the thing like J.K. Rowling became a billionaire because she was able to tap into that sort of thing just within. Sure. Because they were all like how many of the people listening right now as little kids like waited to get a fucking letter from them a magic school and shit. Like that's Henry Olcott. He's like that's he's like the first of those guys. He's like a 50 year old man. He's a 50 year old man who's abandoned his

children so that he can learn to be a wizard. One of those embarrassing people who was like, where are those ugly graphic tears like still waiting for my letters? Yes, that that is Henry Olcott. God. And he yeah, he falls for her immediately. She she does some pretty basic cons. And he starts to write articles about her. And I want to quote now from an article published by the Oxford University Press titled The West Turns Eastward, quote, Olcott was impressed. He began to write about her and she therefore became a prominent figure in the spiritualist movement soon afterwards defending first the authenticity of the Chittenden phenomena against a skeptical Dr. Beard and then the authenticity of a similar of the similar manifestations of

John and Katie King in Philadelphia. So we're not going to get into Katie King often enough, but she's like this guy's dead. Yeah, you want to talk a little bit about Katie King. Oh, I know about Katie King. Katie King. I mean, I got I I also kind of opted not to go into her on ghost church because I feel like her story is like very adjacent to there's like a lot of stories like this at the time. But she she was a I feel like just sort of another example of a physical medium who I mean, her thing was like she went fucking big. She had an entire separate person that she could quote unquote conjure. There was like a lot of magic involved, like a lot of magic tricks involved. And she was able to like really get a gigantic following. And then, you know,

is eventually exposed and dies in obscurity. It's the same story, unfortunately, that happens a million times. But it but she's an interesting one. She had a lot of eyes on her at and it was also like the sexuality element to her performance as well. And she is one of the things that that Blavatsky starts by doing is backing Katie King is like like making these like writing articles and being because she she realizes very because again, she is she's not been great as a con person, but she's she's figured some stuff out. Maybe it's just that she's older. And she kind of intuitively grasps that like, OK, what I need to be doing to start is not push in immediately with my own grift, but establish myself as a credible expert on the paranormal. And then

anytime a paranormal story goes viral, I want journalists reaching out to me, Helena Blavatsky, I want to be the one she's just trying to become like a point of contact. OK, that's yes. I didn't realize that there was because yeah, the woman. So Katie, that's how she starts. Yeah. Katie King is the spirit. Florence Cook is the medium. Yes. Yeah. I'm not, you know, whatever. I'm not really anti them. And but like, yeah, Arthur Conan Doyle was really into her as well. Another guy like Henry Olcott, who was just a perfect mark from the beginning. So Dr. Beard, the skeptic mentioned earlier, describes the two of them, Olcott and Blavatsky this way, quote, HS Olcott is a rabid spiritualist. He capitalizes both of the R and the S and that and HP Blavatsky is an occultist

who la one who laughs at the supposed agency of spirits, but all the same pretends to be one herself. But the criticism so like that's like he notes that because again, Blavatsky is she's coming at this from a different angle than the actual spiritualists. She's backing that these people are channeling something, but she doesn't believe it like it's ghosts. She believes it's basically kind of like psychic imprints of people, if I'm understanding her argument correctly. And yeah, so the fact that this doctor is like attacking her and attacking Olcott, again, it's the same way shit works now. It only heightens her prominence in the weirdo spiritualist set. The fact that like skeptics are attacking her for branding herself as a paranormal expert

helps to set her career off. And right. Yeah. And and also it sounds like she's also like she's finding a way to like capitalize on the hype of spiritualism without fully backing it to like make space for her to develop her own ideology. Yeah. And part of a part of I think why she's successful is she's she's mutating it a little bit, right? It's the same way a virus works, right? You want to if you want to escape and capture, you have to like, yeah, alter it a little bit. And that's what she's doing. And that the fact that she's bringing something new to what is by 1875, it's kind of boring, right? Spiritualism is not new years new and exciting. And she is making it exciting again by changing changing the game. In 1875, she writes an article in

response to another article on Rosa Crucianism. And it was here that she first described her beliefs in a concise way, quote, a cultism or magic stands in relation to spiritualism as the infinite to the finite or as the infinite to the finite as the cause to the effect or as the unity to multifariousness. So she's like, what you're actually seeing with with these summonings isn't like the thing itself, it's just like one thing you can do with these spirits, right? And people are not people have not actually been like exploring all of the things that magic can bring you. Now, this was an interesting like flavor variation on spiritualism. Yes. Yes. And also opens up your ability to kind of like grift off of it significantly. So this was a really good

time to be spouting that particular line of bullshit, because it was spiritual and religious, but also, and this is something you alluded to earlier, it was more modern than religion itself, which was undergoing a crisis at the end of the 1800s. Scientific advances had rapidly thrown a lot of old knowledge into disarray. And many people had come to believe that like scientific progress and Christianity were in direct conflict. Geologists had pretty recently shown that the world was a lot older than people believed it was like 6000 years old, because some dude in the church like did weird Bible math and like that it was becoming clear that that was not accurate. Darwin's theory of evolution was like starting to really pick up steam in terms of like widespread

acceptance. And also for the first time, the machines people were making were like things that wildly exceeded anything found in nature, right? Up until pretty much this point, the fastest way to travel anywhere unless you've got like a train is a fucking horse, right? Now people are making like cars and shit. There's like light bulbs and stuff. Right. That's yeah. That is part of like what is kind of like so fascinating about spiritualism was like how they were able to, at least for a while, ingratiate themselves into like this is a scientifically bad religion. And they still say that every single spiritualist service that happens. And that Blavatsky starts that Blavatsky is like the primary motive force behind that switch from the Oxford University

Press quote. She described science and theology as two conflicting titans between which a bewildered public was fast losing all belief in man's personal immortality and in a deity of any kind. She thought that her contemporaries needed a religion that could meet the challenge of modern science. And she thought that occultism provided just such a religion. So when she's talking about the occult, she's thinking talking about like spirits and gods and all that stuff and kind of dealing with it technically the same way that you deal with like physics to put a fucking plane in the air. Now, as I've noted, she is unique in that she starts pushing this in a really public way. But she's not an original thinker. She is not creating anything on her own. And she does her

best work. She's a fan fiction writer, right? That's essentially what she's doing. So many like horrible, like eventually horrible spiritual leaders are fan fiction writers. And she is, she is literally pivoting not off of other spiritual texts that people are writing, but a huge amount of what she's writing is her taking fiction that other people had written and like repurposing it. Particularly the works of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who's the guy who wrote The Coming Race, which is that book about like underground super race. This is the dude, her again, her mom had translated some of these guys books when she was a kid. And Bulwer-Lytton's stories often centered on like a race or a civilization that had been kind of the font

of all human culture and science. There was also this idea of real, which is this like, basically like the spiritual equivalent of electricity is kind of the way Bulwer-Lytton describes it. Yeah. Yeah. And for Blavatsky's unfolding, she basically, she starts making the case that like, no, Bulwer-Lytton wasn't writing fiction. Bulwer-Lytton was like tapping into something very true or like, you know, hiding it a little bit or whatever, which I, to be entirely fair. Yeah, that is a fun one of like, they said they were writing fiction, but they didn't realize they were topped into a higher spiritual power. And it was a chance. That's my channel texts are my favorite shit in the world. Because we'll be talking about

that. Yeah. Jesus wrote this. You're like, okay. Okay. Okay. I have a, I have a, my favorite, I own a couple when I was researching Ghost Church. And my favorite one is channeled from someone who died on the Titanic. Oh, nice. I would like that. I may do that for my next book, but have it still be about like cyborg supermen fighting in a post civil war United States, but just be like, no, this was absolutely written by a nine year old who died on the Titanic for sure. This is what the message is for the world. This is her story. I do get all the proceeds, but yeah, this is her story. This is her story about horny cyborgs in the 20 seventies. She, this is what she wanted to teach people. It's an interesting one. Yeah.

So for Blavatsky's unfolding spiritual cosmology, India was going to be like what she gave as the center and source of ancient knowledge. She wrote that although many Westerners had seen Egypt as the source previously, quote, it has been discovered that the very same idea is expressed in almost identical language, maybe read in Buddhistic and Brahmanical literature. Now Orientalists at the time had started again, because she's not creating anything out of whole cloth. She's reading other people's work. And a lot of Orientalists had started to make the claim that Hinduism predated Christianity. Blavatsky added their work to her own ideas and to Boerlin. She mashed in real bits of actual religion that she'd encountered while traveling. And she came

up with a brand new story to tell people, quote, 6,000 years ago, India had contained a brilliant civilization that was overflowing with people. Later, a matured section of these people had immigrated to Eastern Ethiopia, where they had become known as the mighty builders. And from where they had colonized Egypt. And finally, Western culture owed much to a Judaic law that had come from these Egyptians. There was therefore an ancient wisdom that underlayed all religions. And this ancient wisdom had definite Indian roots. As Blavatsky explained, there is not one of all these sects, Kabbalism, Judaism, and our present Christianity included, but sprang from the two main branches of that mother trunk, the once universal religion, which antedated the Vedic

ages, we speak of that prehistoric Buddhism, which merged later into Brahmanism. Now, none of that's accurate historically, right? I think experts on Buddhism and Brahmanism would all be like, well, wait a second, that's not it. That's not at all what happened. And also, experts are just like, we're humans, like obviously people, like the first human beings. I mean, again, this is a contentious issue, but it's not that that's not what happened. There's no like all of the evidence we have is not that. Right. It's so like that is like one of I feel like the huge, huge issues with like all branches of spiritualism is like spiritualism has a particular issue with historically misrepresenting indigenous culture completely and just like

co-opting indigenous culture to say whatever they need them to say. And then Blavatsky is doing that in the East. She is. And she's not, again, one of the things that you might argue is positive is that kind of previously the dominant beliefs in Western culture had been like Hinduism and Buddhism where these kind of like weird, pagan, degenerate, like not advanced savage and stuff like this. These were especially the British, right? This was one of the justifications the British had for what they were doing in India was all of these, these Hindu practices that were just in their eyes horrific. And Blavatsky is fighting against that is saying Christianity and Judaism are like them are themselves kind of the degenerated offspring of like the of Brahmanism of,

you know, what people call Hinduism. So you can say that's positive, but also it's not nothing she's talking about is real Hinduism or real Buddhism. She's like using these words and bits and pieces of these stories and mixing it with like her favorite fantasy author. It's like if you, it's like if you took Zoroastrianism and like jammed it into Game of Thrones and then told people that that was like you're an actual religion. Well, that's the thing is like and, and, and, you know, knock yourself out, but like keep it to yourself. Yeah. Or like make it clear that it's fiction. Right. Like, or yeah, don't, don't start, don't start a religious cult about it. Yeah, there's nothing wrong if you're like a fiction author being like, oh, these real

world beliefs are interesting and I'm writing this fantasy book and I'm inspired by this and by that. Like obviously you can do that in fucked up ways, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that idea. She is just saying, no, this is the real Buddhism and the real Hinduism. And I'm, I'm the one who actually knows what's what these things are. That is, that is extra. Um, I mean, it's like, it's one thing to invent a religion that is all religions, but to like steal, like dishonestly steal from other religions in order to prop up your own bunk religion is just like extra shitty. Here's the cool thing. She's also kind of shit talking anyone who knows anything about these religions, including like the actual because she's the one who knows

because she's been there. So I'm going to read another quote about that quote. Blavatsky justified her selective use of contemporary occultism by using two interconnected distinctions. If anyone claimed that Indian religions were not as she said, she simply replied that this person had focused on either modern Hinduism or the exoteric meaning of the Vedic works, not on the true esoteric meaning of ancient Brahmanism. She argued that scholars often fell into the trap of taking modern Hinduism or the Vedas at face value when the true religion of India remained hidden in the esoteric Brahmanical teachings of the Vedas. Indeed, whilst Orientalists rightly had dated the Vedas as pre-Christian, we should not trust their interpretations of Vedic works since they

could not perceive the inner meanings of these works. Blavatsky wrote, our scientists do not say nay, do not nay cannot understand correctly the old Hindu literature. And so again, she is framing this as like Westerners have misinterpreted this, but she is also at the same time saying actual people in India aren't really worshiping proper Hinduism. Modern Hinduism isn't right. They don't understand the secret message of their own religion. I do. Right. Which is just like galaxy brain asshole behavior. Yeah. It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool. Yeah. She's like, oh, you think that my interpretation of an entire culture is wrong? Well, argue with the wall, I guess. Yeah. You're just like, okay. You just don't get the secret meanings of your own religious

texts. So she began meeting with prominent academics. That's like gay, cute girl boss. Yeah. Yeah. This is like the absolute highest tier of cultural appropriation. Yeah. It does not get more appropriating than this. This is the top of that particular mountain. And within spiritualist ideas, that is really saying something. Yeah. It is quite an achievement. So she begins meeting with all these academics, writers and celebrities. She starts to get very famous doing this, like pushing this line, bringing in these attitudes. She is part of why the concept of karma gets to the United States in a popular way. It is because of Blavatsky and like this social scene that she sets up in New York City. That asking people, how's your karma like becomes common in the 1890s?

Like that is, we have Helena Blavatsky to thank for that concept. Being part of American culture in the way that it is, which is not to say anything about how karma is actually treated in the religions and stuff, but like why kind of our attitudes towards it. She starts that. She popularizes it here. So she starts, again, they call them salons and stuff. She's always like hanging out with celebrities and writers and shit in these like bars and clubs and stuff, giving talks on different elements of spiritualism. And she has, she develops as she builds this following, all these different little tricks for like making people convinced that she's got the truth. Her particular favorite is she would have a mysterious person who was supposed to be

her master Koothoomi, teleporting from Tibet to like New York, deliver a letter to another person who was like, she was trying to bring on as a mark. Yeah. Sorry, I forget. Is this a real person or is this a person she's made up? Okay. This is one of her made up people. Okay. So like basically another big spiritualism thing is made up people. So like, yeah, sometimes it would be like a person in a costume handing out and we'll talk about this later. Sometimes it would just be like a letter falls out of, you know, somewhere in the building and like lands on somebody's head. And it's like, you know, this is a letter written in the handwriting of Koothoomi. This is like, my, my master wanted you to have this piece of information. And it's, it's a big part of like

why people get on the Blavatsky train is like once she meets an individual and she's like, oh, you're a popular journalist or like you're a celebrity, you've got some clout. I'm going to make sure you have this like encounter with master Koothoomi that he's like, he needs you to know this. That's why this letter operated in front of you, you know. And yeah, it's, it's, it's fascinating. It's real, real cool shit. Her biographer, Marion Meade writes that in bringing Eastern mysticism to the salons and upper class parties of New York, Madame Blavatsky quote, pave the way for contemporary transcendental meditation, Zinn, Hare Krishna's yoga and vegetarianism, karma and reincarnations, swamis, yogis and gurus. She is the first guru in the

Western world in like a proper sense. Yeah, it's, it's pretty good stuff. Wow. Really, really, really smearing the name of actual gurus. Yes. Yeah. It's cool shit. It's very cool shit. Jules Evans writes quote, she claimed that she had discovered the lost city of Shambhala in the Gobi desert and there encountered a great white brotherhood. They were led by the Lord of the world who descended from the planet Venus. Other masters included Manu, Matreya, Jesus and Buddha, Mesmer and two Indian gentlemen called master Murray and Koothoomi. These two lived in a valley in Tibet in an underground city with subterranean tunnels from which they emerged occasionally to guide humanity and

communicate with their favorite adept, Helena Blavatsky. Against this white brotherhood, there was a secret order of dark forces, black magicians seeking to gain power and harm humanity. In the words of Peter Washington, occasionally the war between the lords and brothers reaches a violent public climax in events such as the crucifixion of Jesus when the esoteric becomes exoteric and the secret struggle is briefly revealed. Okay. So this is absolutely terrifying. And I think the first time in Blavatsky speak where this is like completely outside of anything that I've studied with spiritualism like this is just like is this the the hard left moment like this is so people have been writing recently some kind of more mainstream journalists have noticed

that like the the New Age community and kind of the occult community has like a fascism problem that has been increasingly an issue. Yes. Yeah, sure. And and a lot of that has come through QAnon. There's huge New Age elements. It's very tied into like alternative medicine and like meditation like different kinds of like energy healing and stuff that's all really big in that community. And there's this attitude that they're really separate. No, they started these these conspiratorial beliefs about there being the secret order of like white hats fighting the evil black hats and the background of everything and that all exogenic like exoteric conflicts are like really the result of the secret occult conflict. That is the start of the New Age movement

that Helena Blavatsky is the start of the New Age in a modern sense in the United States. She's the one who not only is like physical health and stuff like yeah well and as it as it pertains to taking things from the east and mixing them up with like other stuff right like you can't you can't separate all of that like Blavatsky is again obviously she's not starting or creating any of this from whole cloth she's mixing up strands but she gets the mixture in its modern sense right for the first time. Right yeah and god that I'm sorry that that that passage is really sticking in my mind. Yeah it's fucked up. Incredibly fucked it's so interesting like the things that she's stealing are so like I mean she's stealing in a way that I understand why it

like resonated with her audience at the time and you can see how it just like descends into fucking madness so quickly the stuff with like the energy healing stuff is always an interesting discussion to me because there's some people now who like I think the real issue is like when it's brought as like and you cannot use medicine like medicine is not a thing you can use it can only be this and then that is like you're going to die like goodbye and that's like I think part of why like a lot of new age people are so vulnerable to like anti-vax rhetoric as well which like so many of them are and I don't know it's it's weird when I was in Florida doing research there there were some people who were like energy healing over all medicine and it's like you're in danger that's

fine and then there but there also were people who were like I I like that kind of stuff but it but I use it as a tool like almost more of a meditative tool and then I also go to doctors which I don't really give a shit about either way well she's actually I mean part of when she's there are a couple of points in her life where she has health issues and it's hard to tell what's real because a lot of her health issues are like diagnosed by doctors she channels so it's yeah like that's going on here too like it's it's it's cool although I haven't come across her saying anything in particular about vaccines although this is the 1870 so that was less of a thing yeah yeah but you know what is a thing Jamie Loftus was thing capitalism baby wow heart take thank you

here's some ads what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named Smedley Butler was all that stood between the u.s. and fascism i'm ben bullet and i'm alex french in our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century we've tracked down exclusive historical records we've interviewed the world's foremost experts we're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books i'm Smedley Butler and i got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and

mind-blowing and for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads from my heart podcast and school of humans this is let's start a coup listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows i'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync 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 sergey 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 offending 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 i heart radio app apple podcasts 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 i heart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts oh we're back you know what i liked about those ads jamie what i liked that they were ads for margaritaville god wouldn't that be amazing what if you had like the black card for margaritaville oh god were they put actual alcohol in the drinks yeah yeah they're like did you know that we don't these bottles are full of water battery acid with the with the black card you get actual alcohol and they'll go get you a burger from five of guys so you can actually consume

something that's edible or they're like no i had very least they're like hey um so the burgers still aren't good but they're not like mysteriously wet so there you go yeah wet in a way that isn't right for me so no it's not moist it's wet it's wet it's soaking wet anyway go to margaritaville we love it yeah so in his first what's blavatsky up in his first article about Helena Blavatsky Henry Olcott had described her as quote a russian lady of distinguished of distinguished birth which is accurate um he had also described her as having rare educational and natural endowments which is also probably accurate although i think he's kind of saying she's hot there uh then he listed uh what were becoming the standard cliffs notes of her life she had traveled in most lands of the orient

looked for and took tiquities at the base of the pyramids beheld the mysteries of hindu temples and traveled with armed escort far into the interior of africa um which i don't believe she ever spent time in africa other than like northern africa like egypt and stuff but like she's not in the congo and shit um god but that's popular at the time right this is the scramble for africa going on like white people can't not get enough stories of explorers in africa so she's got to throw that in the resume now at first helena played coy about her beliefs regarding spiritualism she didn't think any of the mediums who dotted the land were speaking to ghost but again basically psychic echoes she was also an occultist so she believed that magic could

be used to accomplish things um once she'd known olcott for a while and in the subject of several articles she confided to him that she had a secret purpose in the united states which was to reveal the truth about spiritualism to people so she brings olcott and she's like look hey this is all like do you want to join me in my secret quest to like pill the world about the occult um like the united states needs to know that they've been getting spiritualism wrong and like i'm trying to sneak into this community to to to get this across so in her public writings and statement she gradually becomes more and more emphatic about her true beliefs and this leads to something of an uproar in the spiritualist community some people pointed out rightly that it was dishonest

for her to hide her real feelings just to make a name for herself in a field she didn't believe in uh she would later make up lurid stories about how she'd attempted to join occult groups in Europe in the united states and been kicked out due to some nefarious plot to keep her from spreading her knowledge to the general population she would like fake death threats against herself she would also fake letters from different occult organizations to olcott um in order to like be like you have to do this we're the the order of uh the fucking i don't know some some uh osiris or some shit in egypt and like you need to do this where do you find the fucking time i do i think it's interesting that all she does seem like she like she would she would have infiltrated kind of any place that was

vulnerable to her infiltrating it and i and i because i was sort of like because her ideas divert so wildly so quickly you're like why spiritualism and you're like oh i guess that there's like only so many religious movements that were accessible to women at all so that would have been an easy one yeah i mean there's a number of reasons it makes sense so after her articles with olcott start to really get big she gets a letter from a guy named jerry brown who has a popular magazine called the spiritual scientist and he basically over time agrees to like starting with just kind of give it letting her write articles he basically turns his magazine into her personal mouthpiece which she uses to spread her beliefs even wider yeah um eventually all

the press around her earns her another interview with a mainstream publication like the first real big one focused on her it's by the daily graphic which is a sizable publication at the time meade writes quote at the newspaper office she blew smoke at the reporter and narrated a life story peppered with more falsehoods than a cookie has crumbs knocking three years from her age she presented herself as a former child bride married to a daughtering 73 year old whose habits were not agreeable to me and as i had a fortune of my own i decided to travel she mentioned having lived in england and egypt also in the sudan where she made a small fortune after cornering the ostrich feather market and at bayden-bayden where she lost a fortune at the gambling tables in fact

she declared money meant nothing because fortunately she had received a sizable legacy from princess begration goggling the reporter kept lighting helena's cigarettes and repeating that's a remarkable statement to which hbp would solemnly reply it's true name dropping constantly she reeled off stories about daniel home charles darwin whose work she claimed to have translated into russian while in africa zahra alexander and other persons likely to impress a newspaper reporter and he seems to be kind of both a little bit it's a combination of like laughing at her but also kind of dazzled by her um he again describes her as handsome and voluptuous in his article a lot of all the guys who write about her have to talk about her appearance and stuff yeah um

nasty okay yeah um it's it's it's interesting stuff um and yeah by 1875 by late 1875 she's probably the most influential occult and spiritualist like related figure in the country and she decides then that it was finally the time to form a secret society this one themed after the rosa crucian lodges that she believed had once existed so she and olcott start what they called the miracle club which sounds like a modern like yeah like everyone puts in ten dollars and you're gonna get back a million and yeah that does sound like a place that i could walk by yeah it it's it's it's pretty good uh even lachman admits nothing too miraculous happened in it but he doesn't really talk about what the miracle club is mead goes into a lot more detail she says

it was basically a private seance club for new york socialists who were forbidden to speak about what they saw during the seances um which was mainly just to like make them feel special right like if you make everyone sign a blood out i mean yeah introduce exclusionary elements exactly sure and this was like a big like especially in new york city was like middle upper class kind of yeah yeah i mean to be honest this is this is just a precursor to like the bordape yacht club and stuff like oh you get this like secret chat room with all these influencers and stuff and like nobody gets to know what goes on in there um but and it's funny because usually what happens is nothing nothing at all because yeah these are these are very boring people looking

for something to make them feel exciting um so the medium that she brought on for this is a guy named david dana whose brother was the editor of the new york son which is why she picks him right because she's she's always looking for publicity the whole thing collapses though because dana wanted to be paid for the work that he was doing and blavatsky was like oh no you're we're not gonna pay you for doing this thing that's making us a bunch of money um so he does the 19th century version of canceling her on social media um olcott later wrote quote the wretch failed utterly not only as a medium but was also reported to us as having spread calamities against the one who had done him kindness the kindness of unpaid labor um yeah no he's been paid an exposure robert

okay he is getting paid an exposure but also they can't talk about it listen that's been that's look that's how i didn't make an income for fucking six or seven years um you were famously channeling people from my miracle club um which we're not allowed to talk about everyone we're not allowed to talk about it no no no so despite her growing notoriety times were tough for an aspiring spiritual guru uh an economic recession had brought a swift end to the easy cash that some spiritual grifters had enjoyed over the last few years in a letter to a friend blavatsky wrote there is terrible panic those who have got money hide it and those who have not are dying of hunger it all does sound a lot like nfts honestly like there's a weird similarity between like that crash and like

the way they write about it at least um i know but it's like i also don't really buy how she writes about it like i just assume almost anything she says is like overblown like blown out of proportion because of her flair for the dramatique and she yeah she's she's claiming in some of these letters that her income she's making more than six thousand dollars a year which is like a lot of money in the day that's a very healthy income but she's also claiming at the same time i'm broke because i keep putting all of the money back into the movement um right so like she yeah could be true i mean it's like hard to i know at least with spiritualism there there was always an issue with like the it being like an influential movement but the numbers being like constantly like really really

really inflated to the point where everyone was like how could this religion be going broke and it's like well not as many people are a part of it as they're saying and it seems fair to say that like primarily the thing keeping her going is olcott who's good at raising funds who's good at like putting money together and stuff and he has like pre-existing clout yes yes and he he's making sure that there's always money and she's kind of working him to the bone right because she has expensive tastes including a pound a day tobacco habit now at the time the center of blavatsky social life was the lodos club a parlor where she and olcott held court with regular audiences of spiritualists mediums and quote bright clever people of occult leanings according to olcott

many of the latter were scientists lawyers doctors clergymen and other people with the kind of influence and resources that could support a growing movement one of them reverend doctor jh wigan edited a paper called the liberal christian he wrote after a visit the topics no yeah yeah yeah um liberal christian he wrote after a visit the topics discussed in the night at the salon included whether or not flowers had souls penises and religious worship gravitation something called jugglery and chemistry i think it's juggling science jugglery isn't that just physics like that's that it's so that like that sounds so silly and i'm also like yeah that's like exactly the kind of like conflations that would happen all the time of like stuff that sounds absolutely

ridiculous but like at the time you're like yeah let's not rule out the flowers have souls because there's we're about to get fucking planes and like x-rays exist like and ice cream has been invented yes it's it's it's awesome um and it's wild time yeah it's it's it's it's interesting one of the things that this guy complains about that a lot of people complain about is your chain smoking and how bad it makes everything smell and again this is the 1870s and dudes keep being like this lady smokes a lot like this lady is smoking too much it no one is never not smoking in this period and she smokes a lot to alarm someone in 1870 i mean think about think about how much a cigarette weighs and think about what a pound a day of tobacco actually means to smoke that's like

a brick of cigars i kind of blocked that out since our last recording and a pound that that's a nightmare amount of tobacco i hope that that is the only figure in this entire story that has not been inflated i don't think it is absolutely true it is one of the reasons why i think that's probably accurate is so many different kinds of people comment on it that like yeah this lady smokes like nobody i've ever seen um now it was from this poorest group of hangers on who formed bolvatsky's parlor that the theosophical society would develop mead writes on tuesday september seventh a crowd of 17 gathered in her parlor to hear george h felt an engineer and architect given unusually dense lecture on the lost canon of proportion of the egyptians this was not felt's

first appearance at medams for he had been introduced by one of the regulars charles sotherin a rare book expert who was editor at the of the american biblioth the bibliopolis helene had felt had found felt interesting and asked him to give an informal lecture which would offer her guests something out of the ordinary having brought with him some nicely done illustrations felt began somewhat ponderously by explaining his theory that the architectural proportion employed by the ancient egyptians was actually preserved in template hieroglyphics the audience proceeded to yawn but visibly perked up when felt went on to remark that the egyptians had been adepts and magical science and that some of their hieroglyphic figures were realistic drawings of

elementals the messenger spirits who pop up at seances he himself he added modestly had discovered an ancient formula for evoking elementals would it be possible for him to do a demonstration could he actually call forth an elemental he announced that he could if they were willing to finance the operation and pay for his time of course henry wrote an old diary leaves we passed on an informal vote of hearty thanks for his highly interesting lecture and an animated discussion followed while people were chatting it occurred to henry that it would be good a good thing to form a society to pursue and promote such a cult research on a scrap of paper he scribbled would it not be a good thing to form a society for this kind of study and handed

it to william judge to pass over to hpb who read it and nodded her head olcott got up and presented his idea to enthusiastic murmurs and george felt promised he would teach them to evoke and control elementals thus it was unanimously agreed that olcott society would be formed this is what becomes theosophy which it this based on that description does sound kind of par for the course with how um the the great beyond and science were kind of related at the time there's usually some sort of like scientific like intermediary so for like i mean you know because you will you would have done because we're all over on that entire episode it was like ectoplasm that was like an excreting goop that mediums could make that would connect you to the like this this all

sounds kind of par for the course yeah yeah yeah yeah um yet i feel another hard left well again because they're number one they're they're trying to like actually control this stuff which is which is different but um no it's not wildly different from the kind of things that are going to come later on and part of that part of like the fact that it isn't wildly different is why blavatsky is not that into it at first again it's olcott he's the guy who starts what becomes theosophical society um now obviously later on she would claim that the society had been formed at the at by her her master in tibet had ordered her to make a society and like that's how it had started um my imaginary friend yeah but she only starts claiming that after it gets big right um

got it like at first it's it's small there's like financial difficulties um yeah we'll talk about that in a second but when they form what becomes the theosophical society um it's with the promise to provide seekers with quote a synthesis of science religion and philosophy the society had three objectives number one to form a nucleus of the universal brotherhood of humanity without distinction of race creed sex caste or color two to encourage the study of comparative religion philosophy and science three to investigate the unexplained laws of nature and the powers latent in man now despite again her later claims blavatsky seems to have mostly sat back and let olcott do the organizing and fundraising will she like smokes a bunch

and goes on vacation i mean someone's gotta keep mommy uh full of six yeah keep mommy full of figs she's she's um and you know she uh it was the kind of thing where she would be very hands off until he did something she didn't like and then she would have like lose it well she would know she would have one of her ghost or her spirit friends send him a letter that's like oh the guys in tibet want you to do something different buddy look at that it's pretty smart yeah um yeah it's pretty cool um of course there were issues uh at once namely the fact that george felt never managed to summon an elemental um henry was hesitant to throw more of the of the society's money at the man but helena convinced him that he would do the deed eventually so henry kept

putting society money into like fun to this guy who was a grifter felt takes the money and like just disappears eventually um and this causes skeptics in new york to mock the society membership falls there's like articles about this stuff and helena herself stops attending meetings entirely um now she had a lot to worry about in her personal life at this point she'd gotten bigamously married and was struggling to hide her second husband from her first one um she'd also started to who's mr second oh there's these two fucking guys it's not important um but yeah she's definitely like illegally married to two people at the same time um she's also started to work on a book which meade writes was intended to quote salvage the ancient world from the modern

stigma of superstition and ignorance in short she wanted to write a book that would synthesize all her knockoff buddhist and hindu beliefs with american spiritualism for months henry funded her writing and trips to upstate new york to do more writing while she smoked and fucked her illegal husbands she is not getting a lot of writing done for the first like year or so that she's working on this book um but she is getting a lot of illegal marriage stuff done so that's that's good you know what else is illegal jamie what all the products that we're about that's right that's right every product supports this podcast this week is crime week and we are entirely sponsored by uh illegal explosives um crime week controlled substances uh awesome the works of

woody allen yeah um all all our sponsors this week you've lost me you've lost me well yeah you know look look you're gonna be into crimes you gotta be into crimes jamie okay well i i i renounce i renounce uh that brand of let's just cut to a break let's just cut to a break rather than discussing the the cultist vicky christina barcelona oh my god everyone go see minions yeah go see minions what would you do if a secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smedley butler was all that stood between the us and fascism i'm ben boland and i'm alex french in our newest show we take a darkly comedic and occasionally ridiculous deep dive into a story that has been buried for nearly a century we've

tracked down exclusive historical records we've interviewed the world's foremost experts we're also bringing you cinematic historical recreations of moments left out of your history books i'm smedley butler and i got a lot to say for one my personal history is raw inspiring and mind blowing and for another do we get the mattresses after we do the ads or do we just have to do the ads from i heart podcast and school of humans this is let's start a coup listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows i'm lance bass and you may know me from a little band called in sync 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

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 sergey 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 i heart 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 in 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 i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts we're back jamie do you think woody allen got minions like if they follow around i'm not talking to you about woody allen anymore can i tell you

something though no okay um i do you know how i told you earlier i was eating easy mac before the episode that'll lie yes but only because i was eating swift mac i was eating off brand easy mac called swift mac is it easier or is it harder it was harder and less good now do you think the minions had anything to do with swift mac no i don't think that no because they're they're one thing you have to know about the minions are always say love bananas and that's kind of like they're only they are yellow in food interesting yeah there's something Freudian going on there but you think the minions are gonna explore that i don't speaking of bananas speaking of the minions primarily olcott is Helena Blavatsky's minion um and so while she's while she's big

in the sleep area while she's like him she's grew his minions yeah she is definitely grew and and again she is because she's kind of abusing him during this period of time because she's she is living all right she is living well right she's not only like has these secret husbands but like she's she's living a very a life of leisure and luxury off of society money which is provided by olcott um and at the same time she has started to preach asceticism the idea that like in order to be an occultist you have to avoid all of the pleasures of the flesh you can't have sex right a good occultist isn't fucking you have to be like celibate you don't eat meat you have to be vegetarian um you can't drink alcohol and like Henry a lot of the the early culture of like

the salon and stuff that they they ran together was like based on drinking they had a bar so he changes his life on a dime when she starts preaching this and in fact he gets so obsessed with like the different rules about food that she is not abiding by herself but that she makes that he becomes anorexic like he stops eating for days at a time oh my god yeah it's she she really does a number on this guy and oh my god that's so um that makes me so sad for yeah i don't know i was like that was a twist i wasn't expecting he is such uh he is such a follower to her like it's amazing like again there's clearly just like a brainwashing situation it's either brain i you could look at it that way and maybe that's the right way to do it or maybe it's just that like

for whatever reason this guy had a hole in his life that she just figured out perfectly how to fill like you do you get the feeling with olcott that he was always waiting to be this guy well he was like kind of like sleepwalking through life successfully he was like this is the thing that he wanted was to like be this which lady wizard ladies like over yeah yeah yeah um so while while he's living this way at her orders uh thomas stowazinski describes blavatsky's lifestyle she worked on it the book every day stopping only for meal breaks her favorite food was fried eggs soaked in butter she smoked one cigarette after another olcott estimated that she could get through up to a hundred cigarettes a day madame claimed she received a lot of her materials

and telepathic messages from moria and kut humi but healthy lifestyle advice seemed to be on the master's area of expertise um and she does eventually come out with her book uh it takes her a couple of years but isis unveiled comes out in september of 1877 uh thomas writes quote it was founded on one major claim all the religions of the world both those currently followed and the ones to come derived from one common source ancient hermetic philosophy its basic premises are contained in corpus hermeticum a text of unclear origin translated into italian and popularized in the 15th century by a renaissance philosopher marcilio facino according to corpus hermeticum the universe is an intricate system of various emanations

material reality is a product of a complex evolutionary process which subtle spiritual levels of existence create new layers denser and more physical the history of the human race is subject to the same law but in fact it works in an opposite direction than proposed by charles darwin humans evolved downwards so to speak from advanced spiritual beings to more lowly forms but there is another aspect of it too the human spirit trapped inside the physical body misses the perfection of higher planes of reality the spirit can develop and protect and perfect itself through the asafi to turn to its sources as soon as possible therefore evolution is too directional now jamie does that sound like a religion that's popular in the town where you currently live

does that sound at all like Scientology to you we are spirits trapped and you can teach yourself to yeah exactly no sorry for a second i thought you were talking i thought you were you were shit talking brockton massachusetts and i was like no they're all catholics there uh no yes absolutely and and this is uh yeah it's it's fan fan like a scary fan fiction religion shit yeah and elrond hubbard is he's obviously not alive when she is doing her shit but he is is he is he into her i actually don't know yes he's hugely into blotsky he's read her a bunch when he's younger obviously like because he's he's very much into the occult shit of the 20s he he has sex magic with jack parson's the inventor of the rocket and shit right like he is absolutely into this shit

yeah um and he's clearly he is he's right i see something else yeah in the same way she's like ripping off the corpus hermetic uh the corpus hermeticum she's taking bits of elward bulwer edward bulwer liton stuff she's mixing in like eastern religion elrond hubbard is just doing a version of what she did to her stuff too right like that's and he's like mixing and in his case he's taking the new fairly new science at the time of like psychology and mixing that in with this occultist stuff um right well it's also and like at the the beginning of psychology was also like influenced by spiritualism at the time like for psychological texts involve spiritualism and then like phased it out pretty thoroughly by like the early 1900s but like early stuff which i just

like didn't didn't know yeah um but yeah all this shit's interconnected but that is that is very uh uh that's that's ringing some miscavige bells for jamey yep now before isis unveiled helene blavatsky had been again very prominent in the new york weirdo occultist spiritualist scene because of her writing there were people around the world who knew of her but after this book is a hit and after it she becomes a bona fide celebrity suddenly the theosophical society was swarmed with new potential members new york high society began to delve back into alternative religion now with a much stronger occult angle from time to time blavatsky would put on shows summoning objects from far away having letters delivered by her teleporting spectral masters etc with fame came

mo money but jamey with mo money came mo problems journalist the first time i'm hearing this i know i invented that phrase journalists began to turn their eyes to her budding empire and they start tearing apart her claims of celibacy and aestheticism because she's claiming like right i have never had sex you know i don't indulge in any of these vices of the flesh which like she's out in public doing all this stuff like everyone is like yeah she's like bigamously married everyone talks about it and like she's constantly smoking and eating all of this rich food like where it's like yeah like live your life but that's yeah you're not doing this everything you say that's uh i can't get past your use of the phrase budding empire yeah it is she's she's making an empire yeah i know

but that phrase is just really um it's like it's a horny phrase it is a horny phrase um and holina blavatsky probably a pretty horny person if you can judge by the fact that she was bigamously married yeah but but we are we're not ready to talk about that no um so it was pointed out that many of these letters seem to be written in her handwriting by these journalists to start like tearing her apart um and so it just becomes like the the fact that she gets famous also leads to a lot of negative attention um and you get the feeling it just kind of overwhelms her at a certain point and now that she's got money she has the opportunity to like maintain and build this religion that she started somewhere other than the united states where people are looking too much into

her business el ron hubbard does this too right he moves to england and he takes to the sea she goes to england first also like el ron hubbard and sets up offices there but after she's like established theosophy in england she moves to india and that is what we're going to talk about in part four along with finally a lot more information about how she accomplished a lot of these tricks because it's after india that that becomes clear and then we're going to talk about the nazis but jamie you know who's not a nazi definitely me that's right that's right why don't you plug your plugables awesome credit for me um okay uh you can uh listen to my podcast ghost church on coolzone media uh it's about the history of american spiritualism which i think we've officially

now diverged from yes yes in the story um and so you can hear about the history and then uh me going to a spiritualist camp in florida there or you can follow me on twitter at jamie lawf just help instagram jamie cry superstar go nut find jamie on the internet listen to ghost church it is the best podcast that you can listen to right now um your episode um was truly i think my favorite in the series you and paul just really it was good you know you there's a lot on the cutting room floor when you when you finally release the loftest cut um and that that full five hour conversation we had um you know i think that people are going to be upset but that yeah people will understand you know it would be controversial to release a lot of what was said

yeah and i honestly you know i've gone back and forth on this a lot but i think a lot of what we said about donald rumsfeld was legally slander um but well why do you think it didn't air robert why do you think that's right jamie loft is protecting donald rumsfeld and you the listener go home and find a way to protect donald rumsfeld in your own life until part four what would you do if the secret cabal of the most powerful folks in the united states told you hey let's start a coup back in the 1930s a marine named smidley butler was all that stood between the us and fascism i'm ben bullet i'm alex french and i'm smidley butler join us for this sordid tale of ambition treason and what happens when evil tycoons have too much time on their hands

listen to let's start a coup on the i heart radio app apple podcast or wherever you find your favorite shows 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 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