Yeet the Rich

This week we continue our story of the gilded age grifter, Cassie Chadwick. She's got herself a wealthy husband and as many gems as a person could want, but she still wanted more. Inventing a new story for herself as the illegitimate daughter of tycoon Andrew Carnegie, she weaves an incredibly complicated web of lies and manages to borrow hundreds of thousands of dollars before the walls start closing in. 

And she gets ...

This week we start our story with Cassie Chadwick! Aka Madame Devere, aka Lydia Hoover, aka a fraudster who stole money because people couldn't believe women could commit complicated crimes! She forged promissory notes, threw other people under the bus, and told fortunes? 

This is a nice silly mess around, without too much righteous indignation! Enjoy! 

Sources: The Imposter Heiress- Cassie Chadwick The Greatest Grifter of ...

This week we are wrapping up the hot coffee case and the crazy push for tort reform starting in the mid 80s. Last week we talked specifically about one case but this week we get into the insidious and ultimately successful plan to make it as hard as possible for the everyday American to use the US Court system. 

We discussed the formation of ATRA, the American Tort Reform Association, a collection of likeminded business interes...

This week we are talking about Stella Liebeck and the Mcdonald's Hot Coffee Lawsuit. Almost everyone in America knows about the woman who received Millions after she was burned by a cup of Mcdonalds Coffee. But much of what we think is true about the case is exaggerated and misleading. 

In this episode we talk about the actual circumstances of Stella's injury and her recovery after receiving third degree burns from the spilt co...

We are finally wrapping up our series on the Irish Potato Famine! We get into the third year of crop failures and the mass exodus of the Irish to ports unknown. People were desperate enough to leave on ships without shoes, without food or water sometimes, to Liverpool, North America and beyond. 

The famine didn't end with a big resolution or solution, it unfortunately faded out over time and many people continued to suffer for ...

This week we continue our series on the Irish Potato Famine. And it's getting rough here folks. We're coping with the subject matter with a Irish whiskey tasting along with some rough information!

We're into a second year of crop failure, and the British government is finally realizing it might be helpful to just feed people? They replace their commissioner and decide to close the public worksites and open a network of soup kitchens...

This week we continue our series on the Irish Potato Famine. We are really getting into the thick of it. This episode starts in 1846, when the harsh reality of a second year with so much crop failure catches up to everyone. 

The new prime minister John Russell has a tough time filling his predecessor's shoes and Trevelyan is still there, mailing people books about scarcity and talking about the plans in generalities while ignor...

This week we continue our series on the Irish Potato Famine of 1845. We start to dive into the committee relief programs that Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel instated. He wanted the Irish to work for wages to buy subsidized food, instead of bartering or getting food donated to them.  London also expected the middle class of Ireland to donate to the cause, but they were very hesitant because they feared for their own prosperity....

This week we start our series on the potato famine that struck Ireland in 1845. Between 1845-1855 Ireland would lose a third of its population, 1.1 million to death and 2 million leaving the country because of the dire situation. 

In this episode we discuss how the Irish had become incredibly dependent on the potato in the years leading up to the famine and the UK's government inability to organize any real strategy to help.&nb...

This week we are wrapping up the Henrietta Lacks Story! We will talk about the increased attention on the Lacks family including a BBC Documentary team, A con artist who called himself Doctor Sir Lord Keenan Kester Cofield, and Rebecca Skloot, the author of our source material. 

We will actually get into the trail of breadcrumbs that Skloot used to meet Deborah Lacks for the first time and then talk about there relationship as ...

This episode we get a bit more into how the family was effected by the news that part of their mother was still alive. 

We talk about the founding of John Hopkins and the pretty warranted fears that the black community had for night doctors and scientists looking to use black bodies for experiments. 

Then we get into the beginning of a legal debate determining whether we should retain property rights to parts of our body on...

This week we get into how doctors at John Hopkins purposefully gave misleading information to the public about the HeLa strain. They gave a false name to obscure Henrietta Lack's true name, successfully hiding her identity for about 20 years. 

We also talk about Chester Southam and some incredibly unethical uses of the Hela cells. He injected over 600 patients with live cancer cells to see if cancer was communicable. Other than...

This week we talk about the darker side of cell culturing history including a man named Alexis Carrell and his not so "Immortal Chicken Heart". Also unfortunately more about eugenics...

We also get into the final months of Henrietta's life. Her cancer was incredibly aggressive and in the end there was nothing that doctors could do to stop it. However they also could have treated her with much more kindness and dignity in her final d...

This week we are talking about Henrietta Lacks, a young black woman born in the 1920’s and her cells that would change the face of modern medicine. Scientists would call Henrietta's cells HeLa cells. 

The First HeLa cells were removed from her cervix in 1951 at Johns Hopkins hospital only a few months before her death caused by cervical cancer. Henrietta was 31 when she died. These cells however would live on long after t...

This week we are wrapping up the Jay Gould story! After tanking the Gold exchange, Jay got right back to work messing up the train industry. 

He had a dream of connecting a transcontinental rail path, and he got to work purchasing any train companies he could get his rascally little hands on. By WHATEVER means necessary. 

All the while, perpetrating some stunning examples of price fixing, insider trading, and pump and dump ...

We are back with another installment of the Jay Gould story. This week we have moved on from leather and firmly landed in the world of trains.

Gould thought he saw a prime opportunity in the Erie Railroad. however he wasn't the only one. In order to gain control of these tracks and trains, Gould would have to pick a fight with the already infamous Cornelius Vanderbilt. Both men were willing to stop at no cost to get control includin...

We are back with another installment of the Jay Gould story. This week we have moved on from leather and firmly landed in the world of trains.

Gould thought he saw a prime opportunity in the Erie Railroad, however he wasn't the only one. In order to gain control of these tracks and trains, Gould would have to pick a fight with the already infamous Cornelius Vanderbilt. Both men were willing to stop at no cost to get control includin...

This week we start a new series on Jay Gould, one of the richest men in America in the 1800s. He isn't one of the most well known titans of the time, but he was one of the richest men in America and was one of the pioneers of taking advantage of the stock market. 

He manipulated the money markets in innovative, possibly criminal ways, and was the catalyst for a lot of market regulation on Wall Street and the railroads. 

For...