Behind the Bastards - Part Two: That Time Britain Did A Genocide in Ireland

Episode Date: April 14, 2022

Robert is joined again by Prop to for two of three on the Great Hunger.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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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. That's my terrible English accent. Boy, we are both, neither of us are very good at this. I'm now being reminded how much better Gareth from the dollop is at doing an English accent. Gareth is an Irish name.

I think his mom is actually English. If I'm remembering the dollop episode that his mom came on, or at least ethnically. I have a friend who's ethnically British. It's a weird situation. You don't meet any of those. He has never been outside of the United States, was born and raised here, but his parents are both English who came here in their late 20s. That's crazy. I don't know many people like that. It's weird because he grew up in Texas, so he talks like most other Texans.

Except for every now and then, he doesn't say bathroom, he says ballroom. There's these little bits where it's like, oh, I can tell that you were raised by somebody who didn't speak like a Texan. Also, he exclusively drove sobs most of the time that I knew him when we were younger, because his dad had 30 of them taken apart on his lawn. That's amazing. My homeboy, Gareth Wilkerson, I think that's his last name, but he's very northern Irish. He would say stuff like ball bag.

I love it. I love ball bag. I was like, dude, I love your slang. I got a lot of shit rightfully so for the last time I did an Irish accent on this show, but I will say some of my favorite moments in Ireland, and I had another version of this in England, is you get drunk with your friends, and you try each other's accents on. And the particular thing, one of my buddies who is Irish,

but grew up in England for reasons that we will be talking about in this episode, because that happens to a lot of people in this period. But the thing that he couldn't get over was the differences in how we pronounced banana. So there was like a long drunken conversation that was just me saying banana, and then him being like banana, because we were making fun of how the others said it. Yes, that is so great. Could not get over the banana. That is so great.

Why did I say banana? One of the real joys of hanging out with people who speak English but are not from the United States is making fun of how you each pronounce the same words differently. Yeah, I remember I was trying to tell one of my friends who was born and raised in London, but they're Punjabi Indian, and so obviously that's quite a ride in accent situations. Yes, who boy? Yeah. But I kept saying, why y'all spell stuff like that?

What's this you for? What's this you for? And he was like, he goes just as calm in the most British way possible. He was just like, yo, it's interesting how you keep telling me that we're spelling things wrong, but the language is called English because it's from England. And I was like, Touche. Touche. Touche.

That's hilarious. I have no comeback. He just said in the most British just as a matter of factly, well, it's called English because it's from England. And one of the things that was always really interesting to me is where I grew up for a decent chunk of my adolescence, the school that I went to in North Texas had a really high population of people from the Indian subcontinent because like their parents worked for Texas Instruments or for Raytheon or something. And so there were people, most of them had been born in India, but had come over here pretty young and they had learned English from Americans.

And then I went over to India where the people that I was talking to who spoke English had learned English from British people generally. And it's interesting how differently people, especially since as an American, like most of your contact with people who speak English as a second language is people who learned it from an American. And it really is like a different beast. And there's different types of different idioms that people pick up and stuff as a second language speaker when they get taught by one or the other. Yeah. When he picked me up, when he picked us up from the airport, he was like, hey, I hadn't seen him. He was like, hey, you know, look, look where two brothers were Asian dudes.

I was like, all right, I'll walk by them dudes three times because I'm like, hey, maybe you said you was Asian. Well, yeah, because we, yeah, we use it differently than they do over there. Yeah, he was like, oh, yeah, he goes, he goes, yeah, Americans for some reason don't think India is a part of Asia. Yeah, which is weird. And the most, again, you look at a map and it's like, well, yeah, it's right in there. It's just the most British, just like condescending, but nice way to say, yeah, well, because India is a part of Asia. Yeah. Because it's like, you know how they share that giant land border with China?

Yeah. It's a part of Asia. And I was like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I guess, I guess, I guess you're right. Yeah. It's like, whatever you guys are saying that wrong. Okay.

So, yeah, anyway, let's talk about this horrible crime against humanity. Yes. The coming of the blight, this, this potato mold, and it's airborne, like this is a nasty fucker to hit you. And now there's ways to deal with these now. Like, I think it's a copper sulfate solution that you can spray on your tubers and stuff. There's people have like developed ways since. And obviously, one of the better ways to deal with it is to grow more than one kind of potato because There's that one kind of potato may be vulnerable, but another kind won't.

And if you know, you know, you can cross for whatever there's, there's options, but we didn't have a lot of that. They are, they do start to figure them out. And in fact, there's some very smart people when the blight hits who are starting to figure out that like, oh, there's different things you could spray on these. So it hits Ireland and it's, it's obviously, it's not great, but 1846, it doesn't hit that hard yet. There's only six counties in Ireland that lose more than a third of their crop, which is significant. It is devastating in a lot of ways, but it's not as bad as it's going to get. Now, what this does mean, though, and it all kind of compounds. One of the things about potatoes, I've been growing potatoes for a couple of years.

I'm not an expert at it, but one of the things that you do if you're growing potatoes and you're not somebody who can just go to a gardening store and pick up seed potatoes every year is when you harvest potatoes. You set aside a chunk of your harvest as seed for the next planting season and you don't eat them. You like keep them and let them kind of chill in a cool, dry place so that they, you can plant them next year. And generally, the broad least, a lot of factors can affect this. But broadly speaking, per one pound of potatoes you plant, you can get between five and 10 pounds of yield, right? It depends on a lot of factors, but that's kind of back of the envelope math. So usually you might set aside like a third, a quarter of your harvest, something like that as seed potatoes. Well, if people are losing a third of the harvest and as we have established, Irish farmers do not have extra of anything.

So you lose... And as a side note, City Boy here, checking in, first-time caller, all-time listener. What's a potato seed? It's like a potato. You could just like, if you were to... It's just a potato, right? If you were to have a bag, you've had a bag of potatoes and like... Yeah, and then they start rotting on the bottom of the... Yeah, if they start rotting and get all like goopy, then that's not good.

But if they just start to usually first what they'll do, and it kind of depends on how you store them, but they'll sprout, right? You'll see like... Yeah, a little ear. If you plant those under like an inch or two or so of dirt with like, you know, four or five inches underneath it, it'll grow into more potatoes. Not an incredible crop. It's pretty cool. Now, the potatoes you do buy in the grocery store, they don't tend to your best off buying, generally buying seed potatoes because they're meant to actually grow, whereas like, there's a bunch of...

But as a general rule, yeah, you plant the... If your potatoes start to sprout and you throw them in the dirt, you'll get some more potatoes. But so part of how they people survive in Ireland is, you know, you set aside this chunk of your crop for seed for the next harvest season or for the next planting season. But when they lose a third of their crop to this plague, they have the same caloric needs they had the year before. But they have less potatoes. And at some point, when you start to get hungry, you're going to dip into those seed potatoes, which are just as... They're fine.

If they're normal potatoes, you can eat them. But when you eat your seed potatoes, what are you going to do next year? You have no seed potatoes. Exactly. Or at least you have... Yeah. And there's another problem. Some of these seed potatoes get infected with the blight and people don't realize it until they like unseal it to go plant

and they realize that like they don't have as much to plant or they don't have anything to plant. But as a result of all this, like the first year of the so-called potato famine, right? Yeah. The first year of it is the least devastating, right? Because it hasn't killed as much of the crop yet. And people have, because of these kind of seed potato stocks, they have a little bit of like wiggle room. The other thing that they have is the English government at this point is headed by a guy named Robert Peel. And Peel is not the worst guy that there's going to be running the English government in this period.

There's a lot of criticisms of what he did too, but we'll talk about him in a second here. Could be worse. It is important that I reiterate here, as we talk about this famine, as we talk about what's happening to these farmers and the desperation they're entering in, Ireland has plenty of food to feed everyone living in Ireland. The famine is not caused by a lack of things to eat that are being grown on the island. Wow. It is caused by the failure of a crop that causes a surge in food prices, which puts avoiding starvation outside of the budget of most Irish families.

It is not that there isn't food, it's that they can't afford not to starve. That is an important distinction. Yeah. At the time the famine started, one quarter of all Irish grain crops were being exported. Three-fifths of the island's total agricultural output is being sold outside of Ireland. So 60% of the food produced in Ireland does not stay there. Yeah. During the years of the famine, the population of Ireland at the start is about 9 million,

and Ireland is growing enough food to feed an estimated 18 million people. So again, when people say you shouldn't call it a potato famine, it's because there shouldn't have been a famine. There shouldn't have been a famine. There's plenty of food. There's ample food. There's plenty of food. So I'm working on, I just recorded two of them,

sort of like for hood politics, kind of like an economic version of hood politics. I'm kind of just calling it like how much a dollar costs. And really just this idea of how inflation and commodities, goods and service, like how that stuff kind of works. And what you're explaining right now to where it's essentially like my caloric intake, which is the equivalent of like my cost of living. Yes. Like it hasn't changed.

There's just not enough stuff anymore that is available for me to consume. Yeah. Because all the stuff that I have, I don't really own. I got to give it to somebody else. So it makes for a situation to where it's like, if I can only have 30% of what I'm producing to work with, but my 30% just became 15%, I don't end up being less hungry. Nope.

You know what I'm saying? I just have to make less last longer. But that's impossible because it costs more than it did when I had more. Yep. Yeah. That's what's happening here kind of in broad. And most of the food that is being grown in Ireland then, while there is this famine developing,

most of the food being produced in Ireland is being shipped out of the island as soon as it's harvested. One observer at the time noted, a ship sailing into an Irish port during the famine years with a cargo of grain was sure to meet six ships sailing out with a similar cargo. So like ships bringing in food aid are seeing larger amounts of food leave the island for export. It's got to be maddening. Yes, it is. It's maddening.

This will become part of the justification for decades of insurgency and rebellion. It really does piss some people off. So the obvious question you're probably asking here is, couldn't they have just stopped or reduced exports and thus kept food prices low enough that people wouldn't have starved to death? And the answer to that question is yes, it would have been extremely easy to do that. It would have been fine. It would have been very easy.

But food exports were how Irish farmers paid their rent. So if you stop food from being exported, you would have to stop evictions too. Because otherwise, you would have people who could not pay their rent and landlords who weren't allowed to kick them off their land. And that would be violating the rights of the landlords. Oh man. There's nothing new, bro.

Since the English government's not willing to do that, they decide the next best option is to bring more food into the country, which is producing enough food, but bringing worse food, cheaper and lower quality food, and put enough of it onto the market. Again, they're not trying to... When they're importing food aid, it's not that they need to bring in enough food to feed people. It's that they need to bring in enough food to reduce the price of food

that people can afford it. And that aid organization stuff can afford it and whatnot. A lot of the way people get aid food is like, the Catholic organizations will buy up a bunch and then distribute it and stuff. One of the things... We're not really going to get into it a lot, but the Catholic clergy in Ireland, and there's a lot of criticisms to make of the church in Rome,

but in Ireland, the Catholic clergy is supported by the people who live there. And the Catholic clergy in Ireland do a tremendous amount of aid work to try to deal with this. Whereas the Protestant clergy, who are paid for by like Irish taxes essentially, the Irish are supposed to are paying for the Protestant faith to an extent, are not doing that. Not to say that none of them do,

because there are in fact Protestant ministers who do quite a bit, but in broad, this is one of the things that's seen as happening. It contributes to a lot of the anger and hatred that's building in this period between Catholic and Protestant. So the Peel government decides, all right, we can't forgive rent and stop exports, so let's just bring in shitty food, right? Kind of, that's the idea.

It just seems like... Yeah. Like, okay, if this... You're purposefully choosing the hardest way to do this. Yep. Like, just... Well, but... It's not even efficient, guys.

It's the hardest way for the people who have to live on the island. It is the easiest way for British politicians who then do not have to fight a politically powerful class of landlords as much. As much. As much. So the thing, the food that they specifically, the Peel government brings in is what they call Indian corn. And this is corn grown in the United States.

Obviously, the Irish are growing corn, too. The Indian corn they're importing is a coarser and a harsher grade of corn than the Irish are used to. It has to be milled in order to make it edible. You have to mill it in ways that they had not been... They didn't need to mill the corn that was grown on the island. But they couldn't easily do with the existing equipment. A lot of workarounds have to be found in order to make this corn

they're importing edible for Irish people. They have to soak it for, like, days to make it soft enough. Like, one of the problems is that when people start really starving, they won't soak this stuff enough and it'll tear up their stomach. Some people die because, like, their bodies can't handle how coarse and harsh this corn is while they're starving, right? But still, importing this Indian corn, when the Peel government does this and they sell it cheap, they don't give it away,

but they sell it very cheap in fairly small quantities, this does enough to lower prices that a lot... It stops mass death in the first year or so of famine. This is, broadly speaking, Tim Pat Cougan... And there's some historians that disagree with him. There are people who are a lot more critical of Peel. Cougan's attitude is that by doing this Peel stops a lot of people from dying right away. That this is a broadly effective aid strategy.

And I... Yeah, we'll talk a little bit more about that later. But yeah, this starts... This is not popular within English politics. And in fact, it kicks off what is maybe at the time the most vicious political fight in, like, modern English parliamentary history. It was perfectly legal for the government to buy corn and sell it in Ireland. But selling it cheaply enough that the Irish could afford to consume it could be seen as a violation of what are called the corn laws. Now, these are first put in place in 1815.

They're a set of tariffs meant to protect English farmers from being ruined by cheap foreign grain. And the effect of these laws, it's not just about corn, it's about the price of corn, barley, wheat, and other grains. But the purpose is to... So it ensures that grain only gets more expensive in Ireland in order to protect English farmers from being ruined by imports of cheap Irish grain, right? Or cheap foreign grain, right? Like, that's the purpose of these corn laws. They keep food very expensive in Ireland,

but they ensure profits for the English are kept at a certain level. To me, this again, this goes back to being like, you choosing the most complicated way to solve this problem. Because I'm like, you just... Oh, now I can't get... Okay, so we got to... Okay, so you won't let me... You won't let them eat what they grow. So I'm gonna have to take what they grow and then give them worse versions

that they're gonna have to do all this other stuff to eat. But then you mad that I'm lower in the price because you can't sell yours. Like, this is so... Listen. When... Well, my daughter was younger. She did not want her door to be shut into her bedroom. But she also didn't want

our door to be shut to our bedroom, but she didn't like the light coming out of our bedroom, nor did she like the temperature from the living room changing. So her solution was everyone... The temperature in her room wasn't happy. She wasn't happy with the temperature in her room. So her solution was everyone else shut their door. And I can leave mine open where I'm like,

here's the simple solution, baby. Shut your door and all the problems are solved. You don't have to see our light. You don't have to experience the temperature in the living room. You don't have to hear the sounds coming from outside. And her solution was, well, how about everybody else shut their doors? And I'm like, well, baby, we're not going to do that just because you won't shut your...

Just shut your door. It'll be fine. So to me, I'm like, this is what I'm picturing. I'm just like, fam, lower your rent. Just lower your rent and the problem is solved. We'll talk about... We're about to talk about why they don't do that. But it is worth noting that one of the reasons why they opt for this coarser kind of scene as worst grade of corn is that maize is not being...

Which is the kind of corn that they're bringing because there's types of corn. But the kind of corn that they call Indian corn is not being sold by English farmers. And so it doesn't fall under these corn laws. That's why Peel is able to get away with it. But again, he also wants to get rid of these corn laws in order to make it easier to bring food aid into Ireland,

which drives people insane. There is vicious resistance to them. And to understand the resistance to this plan, we have to talk about laissez-faire capitalism. You do because you're talking about people that are mad that you can't sell at a certain price, but hey, numb nuts, you're selling to... No one can afford your price point.

So I don't understand what the hell... Why? What are you talking about? Well, yeah, we're about to get into that. 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 goods. He's a shark. And not on the good-bad-ass way. He's a nasty shark. 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

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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.

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Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the most foundational mind of this school of thought is an economist named Adam Smith. And Smith believed that, in short, that healthy economies are made up of individuals who are working for their own self-interest and that this benefits society by creating competition in the free market, right?

We're all broadly familiar with these ideas. Smith's most influential work, The Wealth of Nations, is published in 1776. His work is very influential to the people generally referred to as the Founding Fathers of the United States. And he was very much beloved by English politicians. In 1821, a group of them formed the Political Economy Club

to discuss his ideas and to try to come to more conclusions about the principles of political economy, right? People are in this period starting to think about economics in kind of a more scientific sense in the Political Economy Club. It's actually today, in 1821, that actually today is the oldest economics association in the world.

So this is one of the first places where people are really trying to put together organized theories of how economic life and policy works. In 1845, when all this starts to happen, this is where some of the most influential parliamentarians and government officials in the British Empire would go to shoot the shit out of what should be done in terms of economic policy.

And these guys are all in very strong agreement that in England should not intervene directly in the famine in a way that would allow people to get, Irish people to get food without paying, right? You cannot fuck with the free market. That's their attitude. You cannot do anything that you do that interferes with the free market.

It would be worse than just letting people starve to death. That is the conclusion broadly speaking that these folks all come to. As club member Jeremy Bentham wrote, quote, every affair in short should be the general practice. Every departure, unless required by some great good, is a certain evil.

Now, you might take from that that, like, well, stopping a lot of people from starving is a great good, but he does not feel that way. And that's what we're about to get into. Tim Pat Coogan writes, a central figure in the debate was a classical economist, Nassau Williams Sr., the first professor of political economy

at Oxford University, preached, among other things, that it was not the duty of the state of the individual. English poor law owed a great deal to his theories, and during the famine, Whig apologists would see to it that the idea of Irish culpability for Irish poverty

would become widespread among the British public. Lazy beds was used as a term of derision to indicate that the Irish even brought their laziness to bear on their potato cultivation. Nassau Sr. criticized Irish landlords for neglecting the duty for the performance of which Providence created them, the keeping down population.

So Nassau's like, number one, we can't do anything. We shouldn't do anything here. But also, this is only a problem because these landlords did not do enough to make it impossible for Irish people to breed. Yes. So listen, I am like,

when we started the first episode of this, I was like, I'm ready to be triggered. And now I'm at this trigger because we're still, to this day, trying to explain to people how dumb they sound when they say this. Because I say all the time

in my credentialing program, as to becoming a California high school teacher, the third part was you have to take, you have to pass this test on economics to be able to teach high school. And I failed it three times. One, three times because I understood the principles

but I didn't understand the vocabulary. I just didn't know the words, you know what I'm saying? Which was again, some of the genesis of the politics, the words like, I know what I'm talking about. I just don't know how to talk about what I'm talking about. But some of it was because your theory is absurd to me.

And I'm like, the idea that, because look it, in what you just read, the founding principle is the government shouldn't solve a problem created by the individual. But the individual didn't create the problem. The government did.

And that's why I'm like, I don't understand your principle. You made the problem. So how are you, your free market is already not free in the first place. You create like, so I'm just like, I don't understand how this is a principle. How is this a 400, your 300 year old principle when the foundation axiom of it don't exist?

So I'm always like, I don't, that's what I think whenever I had to like answer questions about this in school, like, but it don't make no, what you're saying don't make sense. I mean, like, I just, here's the thing though, like, yes,

we can say, obviously the problems that people are saying are as the fault of the Irish people are like problems as the result of the policies the state has enacted and this imperial government has enacted. And it's not their fault that they are suffering. That is not the attitude of these intellectuals who are,

this is way prior to the development of like prosperity gospel and that kind of stuff, but the same ideas feed into it, this idea that like, it's the same. If you have money, if you're doing well, it's because God wants you to be and if you're impoverished and you're suffering, it's because you have done something immoral

that has caused God to... And which is like, even with the prosperity shit, it's like, I mean, the oldest manuscript in the Bible is Job and Job is shooting down that, the whole point of that book is to shoot down that idea. I mean, I can't think of anything that matters less

in terms of public religion than what's actually in the Bible. It seems as though. Why would that matter? Are y'all reading what I'm reading? Because it seems like this book is basically saying the principle you just said is wrong. Seems like Jesus of Nazareth probably would not have been a big

lozi fair economics student. I don't think he would. He could be back into the past, but I'm saying it just, and it's like this, you feel like, I mean, I always felt like, even in discussing this stuff,

it's like you made the comparison to like, the plight of black and brown people and indigenous people in America, saying that like, we're y'all lazy, y'all can't get this stuff, you got the same opportunities. Like, are y'all serious? Do y'all remember the laws y'all made?

Like, what do you, you understand you made those laws? So how are you saying, like, I don't... God made the economic principle, you know, and if I know one thing about Jesus of Nazareth, it's that he would never have given

free food to people. That's not a thing that he did repeatedly in the Bible. That's not a big part of the Bible. Yeah. Jesus set up a fish stand where he sold fish and chips for, you know, a tidy profit.

And he made sure that everybody there was legal citizens. And then he reinvested the profits into purchasing apartment houses, which he used in order to fund the startup of a blood testing company called, I don't know why I took this to the Theranos direction.

Theranos, that's an amazing spin anyway. It's fun. The guy who is this major proponent of laissez-faire economics in this economics club was in agreement, like one of the other dudes who was prominent in this club is a fellow you've probably heard of

named Thomas Malthus. We should probably talk about Malthus someday. He deserves an episode of his own, but Malthus is the first intellectual who really expounds upon the idea that overpopulation causes famine, right? Thus, if a famine occurs

anywhere, it is because of overpopulation. And if you take steps to alleviate that famine, all you will be doing is ensuring that overpopulation gets worse, and so you should not take steps. You should let the famine run its course, right?

Otherwise, you're just going to make the problem worse. Now, as we have established, the famine, this is not the result of overpopulation, right? Because, again, as the Irish population does triple over the course of about a century, but economic,

the amount of food they are producing also increases pretty massively, right? They are growing plenty of food. But Malthus' idea is that the work, it is the responsibility, the moral responsibility of the working class to not breed too quickly. And if they breed too quickly,

it's nobody's job to take care of them, right? Malthus famously said this when discussing the plight of poor men, quote, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has a just demand, has no claim of right, he has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.

And what Malthus is saying here is that, like, the only people who owe you anything are your parents, right? And you can ask them for food and they got to give it to you, but you have no right to exist inherently and you certainly have no right to food. Yeah, now go ahead and meet him cucumbers, you just grew from me.

Yeah, exactly, and this is part of what makes it so messed up. Like, it would be messed up if he was just saying this to, like, starving refugees, but he is saying this to the people growing the food. It's the... Yeah, as he's eating the shit they make. He's like, listen, man, I'm trying to tell you, bro. You shouldn't have had all them kids.

Ooh, ooh, ooh, let me get that tomato. Oh, that looks good. Yeah. Yeah, the tomato you just grew for me. But that's my land, though, so, like, I mean... And Malthus, there's this other... Because he's also very specifically anti-Irish. He argues that because of how close Ireland

and England are, England is always at threat of poor Irish people, like, flooding into England and draining the economy by driving down wages and fucking up trade, right? Just, yeah. History, so many historical experts

are just... They're the same kind of... Clearly sociopaths. Right? Yeah. Like, you've got a million people saying the same thing today about different groups of people, but it's always the same attitude. Yeah, yeah.

And Malthus maintained, quote, the land in Ireland is infinitely more people than in England. And to give full effect to the natural resources of the country, a great part of the population should be swept from the soil. So you see these people, it's not just that, like, they've built a system

that is leading to famine. There's a conscious understanding that they want to depopulate Ireland through policy. Another big advocate of this is a fellow named Edmund Burke. And Edmund Burke is

an Irish man. Now, he's a wealthy Irish person. Clearly. But he's also against government intervention in this growing famine. And his basic attitude is that, like, you shouldn't intervene, have the government intervene when there's a problem,

quote, it is not by breaking the laws of commerce, which are the laws of nature and consequently the laws of God that we are to place our hope of softening the divine displeasure to remove any calamity under which we suffer. So Burke's attitude is, if there's a famine, if there's any kind of

problem that a population is suffering under our economy, that is the will of God. And if the government steps in to help people, that is a violation of, like, you are sinning against God. You're sinning against the God of the universe.

I just don't understand if God wanted them to eat, they'd be eaten, you know? I just don't, yeah, I'm just like, what page is, what page y'all on? You know what I'm saying? Yeah, where'd you find that one? What page were y'all? I thought we was on, yeah.

I don't know, what chapter is this? So Edmund Burke, by the way, is the dude commonly credited with the quote, you'll see this on, like, every Holocaust movie or something that came out in, like, the 90s. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. Now, he never said that.

It was probably from John Stuart Mill, although he never said exactly those words. It's one of those, you know, how, like, 90% of the things that Thomas Jefferson gets quoted for saying were never said by Thomas Jefferson. Whatever, it's one of those quotes. But anyway, he kind of sucked. Not a cool dude, in my opinion,

Edmund Burke. Another guy who sucked and loved himself some Lausae fair economics was Charles Trevalian. Now, this is probably the single most famous name associated with the Great Hunger in Ireland.

There is a song called The Fields of Athenry that is today, for whatever reason, it's become, like, popular with a couple of different football teams. But it's a song about the Great Hunger. It's a song about, like, a dude who tries to steal food, basically,

that's owned by the government in order to feed a starving family, and he gets forced into transportation, he gets shipped away to Australia. It's a very sad song, but it mentions Trevalian specifically, and he is kind of, he is the face of the English causes of the famine

in Ireland, in a lot of ways. Now, this is not entirely fair, not because Trevalian deserves less shit than he gets, but because a lot more people had to come together to make this, but, like, he's absolutely a monster here, don't get me wrong. So,

again, he's a central figure that I think we should peel back a little bit, and I'm going to give you an overview of his life before we continue. So, Sir Charles Edward Trevalian, first baronet, was born on April 2nd, 1807 in Tauntaun, England, which is probably pronounced something like terrier or whatever,

but, like, fuck it. His father was a clergyman, and his family had ancient noble origins in Cornwall. His mother was also from a fancy family. They were very, very rich. They did not get this because his dad was in the clergy. Their family money comes from slave dealing in Grenada.

There it is. Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. Chuckie T. So, he was educated locally before his family used some of them slave dollars to send his ass to Charter House School in Central London. He did well enough there that he gets admission to Haleybury, which is the

East India Company's training college. So, the British East India Company has like a college, which I think Amazon.com is like four months away from doing that. Yeah. And while Trevalian is at Haleybury learning how to work for the East India Company, one of his teachers is Thomas Malthus.

So, he graduates or I don't know if he's graduated, but he leaves Haleybury at 18 and he gets sent to India to study at another company college, where he learns, and this is one of those things that's interesting about him, as British administrators in India go, he's actually like pretty plugged into

the culture. He learns several, he's fluent in several dialects of Hindi, which is impressive, not an easy thing to do. And he's given a post in Delhi in 1827. I found a write up on him for the Irish news agency RTE, which notes, Trevalian had a very successful

career in India, including famously denouncing one of his superiors for bribery, a case which was upheld and led to the subsequent dismissal of Sir Edward Colbrook in 1829. This event established his credentials as a fearless and opinionated public servant who was not afraid to challenge his masters. He was later

appointed to the political department of the government of India, working closely with the reformist Lord Bintwick, the governor general of India, who later said of him, that man is almost always on the right side in every question, and it is well that he is so, for he gives a most confounded deal of trouble when he happens to take

the wrong one. So, he is a principled man, he is very anti-corruption, but he is also kind of incapable of seeing himself as being wrong. Yeah, I was like, what an interesting quote about a person. You want him to be more of like a goblin than he is in his earlier life, but he's not.

He's actually probably more understanding of Indian people and like injustices being done to them than he is to what's going to happen to the Irish, which is not a unique story, weirdly enough. It happens sometimes, it's bizarre. Yeah,

it's so... It is like... There's racism in both cases, right? Of course. There are races against Indians, but there are different kinds of racism, and there's kind of a... The Indians are kind of like our children, and we have to

take care of them, and they're like our beloved little kids, basically. Yeah, a white man's burden type thing. Whereas the Irish are these violent quarrelsome monsters, kind of. At least, not entirely accurate, but like... Y'all should know better.

There's different kinds of racism at work, and so a guy like Trevelyan is probably a lot more understanding of problems that Indian people are encountering, right? That's why he's so anti-corruption within the company that he will be about what's happening in Ireland. Yeah.

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So, Trevalian. Yeah, the perfect example of how two opposing things can be true about a person. You know what I'm saying? Which I'm finding so much more than more that I understand grow up and just become a more mature adult.

Just like this idea of you can in one part of your life be understanding, welcoming, you know what I mean? And kind and at the same time a vicious monster. And it's not that you're protecting, hiding one side of you, it's just you're both.

And it's like, like you say, this is the type of racism that shows up in a person like that which is difficult when you want to do when you want to make history be like comic books where you're not bad guys. No, one of the best examples of this is if you look at like, you can find quotes from some of

the Americans and I'm assuming the same thing exists in some of the Russian sources of people who liberated concentration camps and were also pretty anti-Semitic at least prior to that point. And like there was like a period like, Paton wrote some like weird because he was like, had some real regressive attitudes towards Jewish people.

But it also, people could be capable of being racist and also look at Auschwitz and go, what the fuck? But that's crazy. Yeah, exactly. Because human beings contain multitudes anyway. So Charles Travalion, broadly speaking,

one of the better employees of the British East India Company, probably from the perspective of a lot of people who are Indigenous Indians, not to, again, we're summing up a lot of history here, but broadly speaking, not like, not corrupt or anything like that, certainly. So he marries this broad, Hannah McCauley,

who is the daughter of one of the men who had helped to abolish slavery in the British Empire, which is like if your family money comes from slave money, that's a nice way of morally divvying up your inheritance, right? You know? Yeah. Marry somebody who helped in slavery, that's good.

And the two seem to love living on the subcontinent. So I, you get the feeling they probably would have been happy staying there for the rest of their careers. But in 1838, they go back to have a vacation in England and like, when you do that, working for the company, it's like, you're gone for a couple of years, right?

Because it's not easy to get to England in the 1840s. You don't like, pop back for a holiday. So they go back in 1838 and actually in 1840, rather than go back to India, he gets a job as the assistant secretary to the treasury. So again, 1840, not long

before the potato blight's kind of hit. So he does a bunch of stuff while he's in that job and those first kind of like five years, he reduces corruption. One of the things he does is he creates some reforms. Government civil service jobs before Travalion are heavily based on like who knows who and who your family is and who your friends are.

And he's a big part of actually changing that so that there's legitimate competition for civil service jobs, which is probably good. Again, the civil service in this case is administering the British empire. So you could argue he's just making this horrible engine of blood work a bit better, which is fair to say too.

But the thing obviously that he's going to go down in history for doing is the fact that because he's the assistant treasury secretary or whatever, he is effectively the management, the guy in charge of the government's purse strings for any kind of relief efforts

in Ireland. He's going to be the dude in charge of that. He's going to basically be the point man for Irish relief. Even though there is like there's a relief agency and he's not heading that, but he's like, you know, he's the moneyman essentially. His primary

concerns then when it came, when this when the potato crops start to fail and people start to go hungry, his primary concern when he's looking at aid is to limit British financial exposure and funding relief for starving people. He also wants to, the fact that he's anti

corruption, he's really obsessed with the fact that people might get aid that they don't deserve, that like government funds might go to people who are like conning the government out of it. Which is like not a non-issue, right? Like a lot of COVID money like got conned out of people. Like, yeah,

yeah, yeah, you should care about that, but him carrying it is part of what leads him to adopt this really laissez-faire economic policy towards famine relief. Because the safest way to make sure nobody scams aid money is for

there to not be aid money. Yeah. It's the same, Robert. It's all the same. That's the yeah. Yeah, and like we're not going to get into this a lot, but like one of the characteristics of this period is like they pass

work schemes because you can't just give people money to take care of themselves. They have to work for it. And so they have but for a variety of complex reasons having people do things that would actually have improved life or infrastructure in Ireland is not popular. So a lot of

the aid schemes take the form of paying people to build roads to nowhere. What is the most illogical Yeah. A lot of dumb shit gets done. Let's do that. Yeah. Let's build a road we don't need. A road no one needs in the middle of nowhere. A bunch of dumb

shit happens like that. So because of men like these, like all of these guys we've gone over, Peel, again this prime minister who does the Indian corn deal, he has to be really careful with all this stuff. So again he's able to avoid running a fowl of the corn laws with this initial, he imports

100,000 pound sterling worth of corn and he's able to avoid running a fowl of the corn laws. And it's worth noting in terms of how easy it would have been to stop massive starvation and death, the loss of the potato crop in 1845 is estimated at 3.5

million pounds. 100,000 pounds worth of imported corn is able to stop mass famine that year. It does not take a lot. Like, it does not take a ton. But Peel's actions cause outrage among his fellow conservatives. He attempts to repeal

the corn laws because, again, he's like this isn't going to stop after a year. We have to, like, take some more proactive steps. And the resistance to this is so titanic that he retires in December of 1845. He's like, I can't I can't get anywhere with this. Like, this is nuts.

The Duke of Wellington who's the guy who beats Napoleon and is his friend says, I have never witnessed such agony as what he sees Peel go through trying to get these corn laws repealed. He is sort of successful. They do kind of repeal these laws, but it's debatable

as to how much it helps because a bunch of other shit gets done that, like, kind of minimizes whatever. You know, it doesn't work as well as it should have worked. So when Peel quits, he's like, fuck this shit. I'm out. Queen Victoria brings in a member of the opposition, Lord John Russell,

and she asks him to form an administration. And, yeah, I'm not going to, English parliamentary politics are always very frustrating. It doesn't work. And Peel gets brought in for six months or so before Russell finally does succeed in forming a government for most of the famine that follows. Russell's government is the

one that's in charge. And so guys like Cougan will generally say that, like, Peel did all right at famine relief. But Russell is where things really got nasty. Now, other analyses I found will point out that, like, a lot of the economic policies that were used with

such disaster in responding to the famine were things that Peel had helped to set up prior to the famine and that he actually deserves a lot of blame for it. It's just that once it started he was more reasonable, but he did lay a lot of the groundwork for why it got so bad. So I don't want to be, like,

pretending he was just purely a positive figure. And it's not to flat the past, you know, but I'm like, this was a solvable problem. Like, every time I hear stuff, I'm like, it really was. It was not beyond their means.

This would not have been a blip in history. Like, it's an easy problem. You hear about stuff like the bubonic plague, right, which kills just this nightmarish chunk of the population. And it's like, yeah, looking back in history, we can say, well, if this had been better than that, it wouldn't have been as bad.

But based on their knowledge at the time and the level of resources, it's like, I can't, I'm not, like, you can't really be like, well, someone engineered this to be so bad. Like, no, it was just like a thing. It was a thing that hit that they were not ever going to deal with well,

you know, because it just was not possible. It's just the plagues happen, you know. And there have been in the past, again, part of why a lot of Irish people get really angry at calling it the potato famine. Is that like, there have been real famines in the past. There's just no food, you know. This is not that. There was plenty of food being

made, you know. So, yeah, during this kind of inner regnum period almost where Peele quits, but then he's back because Russell can't form a government during this, like, period of time. How to deal with the famine becomes

the chief question acts of English leaders because from, like, 1845 to 1846 the play, the blight only gets worse and it becomes clear that, like, we have to figure out a longer term solution to this. Like, we're, we're, this is not going to get better anytime soon.

So, Trevelyan travels to Ireland himself during this period to, like, see what's going on. And he kind of, you know, he does this thing that you see shitty journalists do where he, like, goes to the place where the bad thing is happening and then he only hangs around rich people and just

kind of writes down whatever they say about what's happening to poor people in Ireland. And he's very pleased that when he goes to Ireland he does not encounter anything that makes him feel differently about the plague or about the famine. So, his conclusion is that

we shouldn't do anything, right? That there's, there's, there's, this is, like, the Irish people's fault and you've just got to kind of let this run its course. And while this is happening, that guy, O'Connell we talked about, right? O'Connell's still in parliament. He is old and kind of sick at this point. He's past his prime. He's not capable of,

like, really working to the same extent that he had, but he's desperately trying to get parliament to do something, right? It is not the case that everyone in parliament is just, like, asleep at the wheel. And he's part of, like, a coalition in parliament who's like, we've got to do something. And Trevelyan writes this

basically open letter type thing where he's like O'Connell is a demagogue who's trying to stir up trouble and it's going to be fine. Just, just, we don't got to deal with this shit. Near the end of 1845, O'Connell gets together a group of nobles and parliamentarians

to suggest that the government adopt emergency measures. These included stopping the export of food and allowing food to be imported to Ireland free of taxes, right? Pretty reasonable seeming solution. O'Connell also wants a tax on landlords to fund a public works program

that will give people jobs so they can afford food, right? He's like, okay, you don't want people getting shit for free. What if we tax landlords to fund a public works program and then they can buy food and pay their rent? This pisses off an awful lot of people. So the guy

they have to go to for whatever reason of parliamentary shit, there's a dude they have to bring this proposal to, to try to get him to introduce it in parliament. He's a mother fucker named Lord Hatesbury. I was going to say, like, all right. Yeah, it's H-E-Y-T, but like Hatesbury,

I'm assuming. Yeah, Lord Racism. You've got this moment prop where you, this guy O'Connell, you know, this kind of near the end of his life when he's sort of fading and his powers as a politician

but he's still got like all of this. He's kind of the, he's the, he's really like the only Catholic Irish person with any kind of power, right? Okay. And he gets together this group of nobles and parliamentarians to try to push this raft of emergency measures, including like stopping the export of food, allowing food to be

imported to Ireland free of taxes, like really basic shit, right? Yeah. Again, he's, if you wanted to kind of put this in modern terms, he's not like a far left revolutionary. He's like one of those like progressive kinds of Democrat type dudes where he's like

he doesn't want to end, he's not trying to end the system of landlord. I mean O'Connell is personally more radical than that but these moves are not super radical. Like he's not saying we should up into the landlording system and give everyone the land that they live on and like change this. He's saying like, what if we

did these very basic things to stop them from starving to death, right? Like these are not radical changes, really. He's a bare minimum progressive. That's, there used to be a term called that, bare minimum progressive. I mean, I think honestly O'Connell is more of one. Okay. But he's also very pragmatic, right?

And he's old too. He has tried the more radical shit. He did try to like separate Ireland from England. Yeah. That shit failed. So now he's just like can we tax the landlords to fund a public works program so people can afford to buy food, right? Yeah. Like, you know, which is

fair enough. Like it's not like anything did work in this period of time. Or your tax of the rich! Yeah, I'm not gonna blame the guy for trying more moderate. There's a fun moment with this dude, O'Connell. Fun may not be the right word, but if I'm remembering correctly this is just something I read. It's not in the script, but

like there's a moment when he's talking about trying to end the act of union and separate Ireland and the UK and some, some like poor peasant farmer sees him and like calls him the liberator. And he's like, is this what you do for a living? And the guy's like, yeah. And he's like, then why do you care? Like your life's not gonna change at all if we

get there. They're still gonna be rich people living over you and stuff. Oh my god. So I think he is, he is personally like he's pretty aware of things, but he's also very much a let's see what we can do within the confines of the system kind of dude. So for whatever reason

I, British Parliamentary Shit neither of us are experts on that and it's not really important. The guy who has to make the suggestions in Parliament or whatever to try and get this this series of emergency measures together is a dude named Lord Hatesbury. Yeah. Yeah. And I know that

yeah, H-E-Y-T-E-S but it is, it is funny because he's pretty hateful. My lord. So he, yeah, they send this like very modest list of requests to him and he's like the absolutely the fuck not. Yes. Yeah.

Of course. And his justification is and this will sound familiar to anyone who's lived through a plague in the last couple of years. I don't know who that applies to but I'm sure a couple of people. He's like, look look, yeah, some of the information about this famine sounds really bad but some people like Trevalian

are saying it's fine. So we can't know whether or not it's a problem and we shouldn't do anything until we get more information. Listen, listen, I can see out my window because Ireland is a mile and a half away. Yeah. It is 30 feet to the left. Yes.

Yeah. But this fool's saying it's not that. So there's no way of knowing. It's not like any of us could just go to Ireland. Yeah, we couldn't. I mean well, no, Trevalian went to Ireland. He says it's all right. Oh, yeah. The homie went. He said it was cool. Yeah.

This. Oh, my lord. It's very it's not funny. But it's, you know, yeah, we can't know. We got it. We got it. We got to hold up. We got to hold up. Let's wait for some more info. Fool's Ron Burgundy. So in 18. Well, the

correct translation has been lost in time. No, it means St. Diego. Yeah. So 1846 you know, you have 1845, you lose like a third of the crop thereabouts and then people

have to eat a lot of their seed potatoes and stuff. And so 1846 they plant what little they have. But the the potato bug moves in again, right? Or it's not really a bug. It's a fungus, but like, yeah, it hits again and it hits really hard this time. And

that year the harvest fails pretty much entirely. Basically a lot of people get nothing, right? A lot of folks get absolutely meaningfully nothing. And a lot of because they're starving. So one of the fucked up things about this, if you've ever seen like potatoes that have gotten affected

by this, they often you could like pull them out of the ground and they'll look fine. Like they look like a normal potato and then you like grab them and they'll just like mush apart in your hands. And it's this reeking filthy, rotting goop soup of potato

stuff. It's nasty. And it's no nutritional value in this. But people are so desperate that they eat them. That they're and of course that gets people sick when some of the guys are a result of that and stuff. But like, that's the level of desperation they are where like there's

this rotting massive potato and you're like, fuck it, let's try. Or maybe we can try and cut a piece off and maybe that'll be a little bit, you know. People are very desperate. And of course this is so bad that like last year people have to eat their seed potatoes right in order to like

make ends meet and get something in their bellies. This year so little gets harvested at all that there's just not seed potatoes for a lot of people. So there's not only did the crop fail, but people are like, what the fuck are we gonna plan next year? Even so, even as desperate

as the situation is, the government holds against the idea of stopping the export of food, right? And their justification is that the Irish grain, so the grain that these people who are starving grew is more expensive than they can afford. They can't afford

to pay for the grain that they grew. They just grew. That they grew. They can't afford that. So if it's kept in country, the government's going to have to subsidize its purchase in order for people, the Irish people to afford the grain that again, they grew. That we had like

the pretzel. Like this, just the oh my gosh. And this is, again, this is why Irish people get so pissed when it is referred to as a potato famine. Yes. Because there's no fucking famine, really. Like there's a famine and like, yes, people are starving

to death, but like, there shouldn't have been. Like it wasn't that all of the food failed, you know. Dog. Yeah, it just. Yeah. And how are you? Yeah, man. Just the getting the I getting the words out of your brain with the

straight face to be like, well, I mean, they can't afford they can't afford it. So we can't get with. Yeah, what are we going to do? We're going to do that. I can't afford it. And there's like can't afford what what they just gave us. What are we going to do? Pay people to stay home so the plague

doesn't spread? Absolutely not. You know, it doesn't, you know, elite logic is similar in all times. It's just the same. And again, I'm like you're this is the longest most

horrible route to a very simple solution. Yeah, you would. Get over why you can't just be like, hey, look, tell you what next month, just keep just just keep the grain. Okay. Just keep the grain. Yeah, we'll

we'll build back next month. Okay, just keep the grain this month will be cool. Well, that's the thing like O'Connell suggesting there's a way to deal with this that keeps the elites in power. If that's your concern, we're like, hey, you know what, government's going to pay your rent till this thing's over. You know, yeah, we got you that way your landlords are still in charge. We're

not fucking up the system. They get to stay rich for no work. You're good. But that would be too much. And it's so stupid because I'm just like what the hell you care whose name on the check? Don't you just want your check? Well, one of the

people who really cares is Charles Trevalian and he is firm that you cannot you can't prohibit exports and you can't subsidize the purchase of the grain that was grown in Ireland. He writes, do not encourage the idea of prohibiting exports. Perfect free

trade is the right course. I'm just like, okay, why like why just like tell tell me why so just it's because any time you hear people talking about lasai fare economics free market shit Adam Smith it's a religion, you know, it is

a religion. It's a religion. Everything is but when you when you say, okay, when you look at I like this is another reason why like I had I had such a hard time like like passing these exams because when you say when you build an economic model

you build it on, you know that the mythical average man Yeah, so this is the average man. So who's the average man? He's 32.1 years old. He's got 2.5 children and

three and a half like pets and and I'm like the person you're modeling your whole model off doesn't exist. That's not no one has 2.5 kids.

So I'm like, how are you setting how is this I don't understand how you can think any of this makes any sense if you build in your model off a person that will never be but you're setting everybody and I'm like

I get what you're saying when you average all this stuff out but listen to yourself what do you mean average that your model is for a made up person that could never exist in real life because nobody again I can't stress this enough. Nobody

got 2.5 kids. This is the thing where it gets to it's not rational, right? These people are very obsessed with the idea of like rationality and that this is a science but it's not because when problems of reality

conflict with what they believe about economics they are incapable of adapting to that. Some of them are. Not everyone is the same thing with like any with a normal religion. There are some people who like are raised believing something and then like they reach something that conflicts and they manage to without losing their

faith, adapt it. Peel might be a good example. That first prime minister who is very much in with this laissez-faire stuff but when the disaster hits he makes alterations because he sees that like not everyone is this way but a lot of these guys like Travalion are. They cannot

countents violating some of these economic principles that they believe in. And maybe you could argue that they just really hate Irish people and want to get rid of them and that's the justification, right? I'm like you pretzeling all this ridiculous stuff just to say what we already know

about you. And I'm just like okay, you just hate them. You don't think they're humans and you frustrated that they actually need food to give you what you need. And you ain't trying to help them, you hate them. Yeah. You are all this stuff that you and I both know

sitting across here. What the hell you saying don't make no sense. You know it don't. You know it don't. So just but you gonna keep making it make sense rather than just saying odd. Oh yeah. Yeah. And that's where we're gonna leave for part two. And

when part three starts up things are gonna get real unpleasant real quick. But. Prop. Yes. Before we hit that that moment. You want to plug some plugables. I do man. I am on my all my socials

I am prop hip hop. Although I've been called before prop E hop. And I'm like what? Cause they're putting the P with the H. So they're going to prop. Cause you're the professor of of hip hop. Hip hop.

Yeah. I was like I don't know how y'all I don't know how y'all what whatever prop hip hop. Com and again. At. There's music and books politics pod.

Yeah that's all the things. All right. Well check that out and check out Ireland when it's possible to go places without the plague. It's it's pretty nice spot. I. M. O. Galway. Good town.

Antrim Coast. Lovely lot of good stuff in Ireland. Fast. Oh I do like fast. It is it is the city I've been there twice in both times I have been to Belfast. There just happened to be riots for different unrelated reasons. I love Belfast. It is it is a thing

that happens a lot in Belfast. I love it. Like I've never met nobody. Yes. We supposed to be closing this show but I tell you this like a way I've always felt like it's very simple. Like Belfast remind me a long beach in a sense that I've never met somebody from that city

that I didn't like. Hmm. Well I was just like I don't know what it is about your city but you just make very likeable people. You're dangerous. Do you know say it like you are. I know that you could somewhere in that smile and sense of humor is a cold blood and murder. Yeah. I know that there's a town

that as a town you are good at making Molotov cocktails. That's what I'm trying to say. People a lot of people with experience melting British armored vehicles. Anyway podcast. 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 was 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 the head. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast or wherever you get a podcast. 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 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 and 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 Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.